ALFRED TENNYSON.

A STRONG, melodious, and holy voice of nature and

humanity has been hushed a few days ago. Lord Alfred Tennyson, lord of song and wisdom, has gone silent. He will add no more psalms of life to the world's psalmody, he will enrich with no more gems of thought mankind's store of higher knowledge. For sixty years and upwards, since he was a mere youth, he has stood on the watch-tower of time, and whatsoever things beautiful his eye beheld, and whatsoever things true his mind discerned, and whatsoever things good his heart perceived, he uttered forth in undying rhythmic measures. Two generations listened to his song and rejoiced in their hearts, and two great English-speaking nations received his message, and their lives became purer and wiser thereby. Tennyson was one of the world's genuine men, an original intelligence. Most men pass through life as mere shadows, flitting along paths trodden before them by real men. They are hollow forms, which simulate the features and actions of genuine men. Their thoughts are echoes of other men's thoughts, their faith is not soul-born, but something external, learned of men; their very feelings are imitated, copied. Tennyson was no Tennyson was no mere shadow, no empty form. He was a powerful human reality, that steadily grew and expanded from early youth to a high old age, bearing the golden flowers of beauty, ripening the perfect fruits of wisdom. He forced his way through the painted copies of things, through the spectres of words and traditions, to the breathing life of nature and the throbbing heart of man. He stood face to face with nature and

humanity, and gazed awe-struck upon the countenance of the world's history.

"He saw through life and death, through good and ill,

He saw through his own soul,

The marvel of his everlasting will,

An open scroll

Before him lay; with echoing feet he threaded the secretest

walks of fame."

Like all great poets, like Wordsworth and Browning, like Schiller and Goethe, Shakespeare and Dante and the poet of Job, Tennyson was a deep thinker, a profound philosopher, and, like a true poet, it was not with the dissecting knife of the logician, not with the scales, measures, and weights of the scientist, that he approached the great problems of existence, but with the riving power of poetic intuition. The logician and the scientist forever remain on the outside of things, but the poetic genius penetrates to their innermost chambers, by the magic of his universal love for all life. A mind of such penetrating, original insight was that of Alfred Tennyson. He was no warbler of idle songs, no wild poet who "worked without a purpose or a conscience." The great problems of existence pressed in upon his mind, demanding a fresh solution. His age, which is also our age, the age of great political and social revolution, the age of tremendous upheavals of thought, the age whose fire has melted old institutions, theories, creeds, traditions, like snow, required new answers to the spirit's everlasting questions, and Tennyson returned answers from the heart of his own experience. The spirit of the times formed for itself in Tennyson an inspired interpreter, to spell out its hidden meaning, to voice its desires, and to lend the beauty and sanctity of song to its ideas. In the gloomy night of his own misery, while his soul was moaning and weeping over the death of his dearest friend, Arthur Hallam, who was dearer to him than his own brothers, whom he revered as the type of perfect

manhood, whom he loved as the embodiment of what is divine and beautiful in man, in that night he wrestled with the demon of ghastliest doubts, that in his age and our age threatens to blight and blast the breathing spring of human hope and faith. In that night of woe, fear, and doubt, he struggled for us all to deliver us from the horrors of atheism, to redeem us from the terrors of the soul's annihilation, to free us from the furies of spiritual despair. In his own soul, Tennyson battled for the soul of human kind, to save it from self-slaughter. Every cry of anguish he uttered during that struggle became a melodious lament of all souls smitten with grief, the red blood which flowed from his wounded heart was turned into unfading flowers of faith.

Tennyson descended to the lowermost circle of the spirit's infernal regions, having cruel sorrow for his guide. There he saw the gigantic shades of dead worlds, the spectral corpses of extinct suns; there lay shriveled up the once blooming earth, bloodless, motionless, a monstrous mummy. No love was throbbing at the center of existence, no world-soul was bodying forth living thoughts in purposeful creation. He seemed to see the spirit of man leaving the body as a mere breath, and dissipate itself and vanish into air. And this universal death bore the pale features of his dead friend. Cruel sorrow whispered:

"The stars blindly run;

A web is woven across the sky,

From out the waste places comes a cry,

And murmurs from the dying sun;

And all the phantom, Nature, stands,

With all the music in her tone,

A hollow echo of my own

A hollow form with empty hands."

And from the vaults of death a voice murmured:

"The cheeks drop in, the body bows;

Man dies; nor is there hope in dust."

"All, then," his soul moaned, "heaven and earth, is darkness at the core. All, nature and man, is but dust and

ashes."

But his love, that was stronger than death; his love for his lost friend, whom of all creatures he deemed the fairest, whom he revered as the flower of man, did not suffer him forever to remain a bondsman to the dark, did not allow him long to be shut up with sorrow and despair and unbelief. He whom he held to be half-divine, that glorious life, the noble will, strong and pure, could not become earth's rubbish and slime. The still voice of love within him spoke: "The high intelligence, the lordliest of all powers, the reason ruling over all and reigning supreme in head and breast, can not be blown out like a light, can not vanish like a mist. Mind is the lord of all; the mind of man is a beam of the supreme intelligence." Then he gathered strength and fought his doubts.

Then new-born faith, a stronger faith of his own, born in darkness and in clouds, leapt full-armed from his soul, faced the spectres of his mind and laid them. Then he threw himself with his weight of cares on "the great world's altar-stairs, that slope through darkness up to God." And on these stairs he ascended to the sunlit heights, where Hope sits rejoicing at the foot of God's throne. And with him he brought his own strong faith, brought it to the children of his time, who dread the countenance of science and tremble at her words, because she, the allknowing, knows naught of God, of free will, of the soul's immortality. With prophetic fervor he sang to the sons of his time: "Knowledge is of things we see; God's immortal Love, whose face we can not see, by faith and faith alone we embrace, believing where we can not prove. We have but faith, we can not know." Not that he did not love knowledge, not that he 'railed against her beauty,' not that he wished to 'fix her pillars,' to set bars to her progress. Knowledge, he believed, came from God, a beam in our

darkness. "Let her grow from more to more," said he, "let her work prevail, may she mix with men and prosper." But there should be more of reverence in her. 'Let mind and heart, according well, once more make one music as before.' On the forehead of science sits a consuming fire. She submits all things to desire, to natural impulses, to instinctive forces. She knows only what is, she deals with things as they are. She knows no over-ruling moral law, no sovereign "ought." Can science fight the fear of death? Cut from love and faith, she is some wild Pallas, sprung from the brain of demons. Fiery hot, she will burst all moral barriers in her onward race. "Let her know her place; she is the second, not the first." Let wisdom guide her footsteps. "For she is earthly of the mind, But Wisdom heavenly of the soul."

The continental masters of science did not heed the warning voice of our seer. Their theories, true within their own domain, set their faces boldly forward, and leapt into the spiritual domain, where they wrought sad havoc among the European nations. Their teachings, misunderstood, misapplied, have wellnigh consumed faith with their fire, and in her stead have arisen soul-killing atheism, the despair of pessimism, all-degrading sensualism, and the fanaticism of race hatred. But the English and American nations, the spiritual mothers of the poet, were swayed by his prophetic counsel, and with them faith and knowledge dwell together in unity, making one music as before, but vaster.

Lord Tennyson was abreast with the knowledge of his times, not as a trained scientist, but as a man of highest culture, who watches with keenest interest the intellectual movements of the time, and whose mind moves and grows along with them. The great intellectual revolution of this century that goes by the name of Evolution, the far-reaching revolution set in motion by the genius of Darwin, his countryman, who was born in the same year as he, in