motive power. Yet passion of this type is the right and appropriate power for the uses of certain times and seasons. It is by ventures of faith in politics that mountains are removed. The Tory member's elder son estimates the political movements of France in an insular spirit which, it may be surmised, has in it something of Mr Tennyson's own feeling :

"Whiff! there comes a sudden heat,

The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,
The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,
The little boys begin to shoot and stab."

Yet to France more than to England the enslaved nations have turned their faces when they have striven to rend their bonds. It is hardly from Mr Tennyson that we shall learn how a heroic failure may be worth as much to the world as a distinguished success. It is another

poet who has written thus:

"When liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go,

It waits for all the rest to go-it is the last.

When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,

And when all life, and all the souls of men and women are

discharged from any part of the earth,

Then only shall liberty, or the idea of liberty, be discharged from that part of the earth,

And the infidel come into full possession."

Mr Tennyson's ideal for every country is England, and that is a blunder in politics :

"A land of settled government,

A land of just and old renown,

Where Freedom slowly broadens down

From precedent to precedent."

That is an admirable verse; but it is nobler to make

than to follow precedents; and great emotions, passionate

thought, audacities of virtue quickly create a history and tradition of precedents in the lives alike of individuals and of nations. Mr Tennyson loves freedom, but she must assume an English costume before he can recognize her; the freedom which he loves is

She is

"That sober freedom out of which there springs
Our loyal passion to our temperate kings."

"Freedom in her royal seat

Of England, not the schoolboy heat—

The blind hysterics of the Celt."

He cannot squander a well-balanced British sympathy on hearts that love not wisely but too well :—

"Love thou thy land with love far brought

From out the storied Past, and used
Within the Present, but transfused

Through future time by power of thought."

"If

What Mr Tennyson has written will indeed lead persons of a certain type of character in their true direction; for those of a different type it will for ever remain futile and false. "Reason," Vauvenargues has said, "deceives us more often than does nature." passion advises more boldly than reflection, it is because passion gives greater power to carry out its advice." "To do great things, one must live as if one could never die." England can celebrate a golden wedding with Freedom, and gather children about her knees; let there be a full and deep rejoicing. But why forbid the more unmeasured joy of the lover of Freedom who has dreamed of her and has fought for her, and who now is glad because he has once seen her, and may die for her?

Mr Tennyson's political doctrine is in entire agree

ment with his ideal of human character. As the exemplar of all nations is that one in which highest wisdom is united with complete self-government, so the ideal man is he whose life is led to sovereign power by selfknowledge resulting in self-control, and self-control growing perfect in self-reverence. The golden fruit which Herè prays for, promising power, which Aphrodite prays for, promising pleasure, belongs of right to Pallas alone, who promises no other sovereignty, no other joy than those that come by the freedom of perfect service,— "To live by law,

Acting the law we live by without fear."

Mr Tennyson has had occasion to write two remarkable poetical éloges—one on the late Prince Consort, the other on the great Duke. In both, the characters are drawn with fine discrimination, but in both, the crowning virtue of the dead is declared to have been the virtue of obedience, that of self-subjugation to the law of duty. In both the same lesson is taught, that he who toils along the upward path of painful right-doing

"Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands

To which our God Himself is moon and sun."

Even Love "takes part against himself" to be at one with Duty, who is "loved of Love." Through strenuous self-mastery, through the strong holding of passion in its leash, Enoch Arden attains the sad happiness of strong heroic souls. But it is not only as fortitude and endurance that Mr Tennyson conceives the virtue of noble obedience; it flames up into a chivalric ardour in the passionate loyalty of the Six Hundred riders at Balaclava;

and Cranmer redeems his life from the dishonour of fear, of faltering and of treason, by the last gallantry of a soldierlike obedience to the death:

"He pass'd out smiling, and he walk'd upright;
His eye was like a soldier's, whom the general
He looks to, and he leans on as his God,

Hath rated for some backwardness, and bidd'n him
Charge one against a thousand, and the man
Hurls his soil'd life against the pikes and dies."

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, the recogni-
tion of a divine order and of one's own place in that
order, faithful adhesion to the law of one's highest life,
—these are the elements from which is formed the ideal
human character. What is the central point in the
ethical import of the Arthurian story as told by Mr
Tennyson? It is the assertion that the highest type of
manhood is set forth in the poet's ideal king, and that
the worthiest work of man is work such as his. And
what is Arthur? The blameless monarch, who "rever-
enced his conscience as a king;" unseduced from his
appointed path by the temptations of sense
or the
wandering fires of religious mysticism; throughout the
most passionate scene of the poem "sublime in self-
repression":-

"I wanted warmth and colour, which I found
In Lancelot,-now I see thee what thou art,
Thou art the highest, and most human too,
Not Lancelot, not another."

Arthur's task has been to drive back the heathen, to quell disorder and violence, to bind the wills of his knights to righteousness in a perfect law of liberty. is true that Arthur's task is left half done.

It

While he

rides forth to silence the riot of the Red Knight and his ruffian band, in his own court are held those "lawless jousts," and Tristram sings in the ears of that small, sad cynic, Dagonet, his licentious song:

"Free love-free field-we love but while we may."

And thus were it not that a divine order overrules our efforts, our successes, and our failures, we must needs believe that the realm is once more reeling back into the beast.

Disorder of thoughts, of feelings and of will is, with Mr Tennyson, the evil of evils, the pain of pains. The Princess would transcend, through the temptation of a false ideal, her true sphere of womanhood; even this noblest form of disobedience to law entails loss and sorrow; she is happy only when she resumes her worthier place through the wisdom of love. In "Lucretius" the man who had so highly striven for light and. calm, for "the sober majesties of settled, sweet Epicurean life," is swept by a fierce tempest in his blood back into chaos; there is but one way of deliverance, but one way of entering again under the reign of law, to surrender his being once more, to Nature, that she may anew dash together the atoms which make him man, in order that as flower, or beast, or fish, or bird, or man, they may again move through her cycles; and so Lucretius roughly wooes the passionless bride, Tranquillity. And may we not sum up the substance of Mr Tennyson's personal confessions in "In Memoriam," by saying that they are the record of the growth through sorrow of the firmer mind, which becomes one with law at length