of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which informs his poem of 'The Princess.' It is prominent in ' In Memoriam' and in 'The Idylls of the King.' In 'The Princess,' the Prince, speaking of the relations of the sexes, says:

"in the long years liker must they grow; The man be more of woman, she of man;

He gain in sweetness and in moral height,

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind
Till at the last she set herself to man,

Like perfect music unto noble words;

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each,

Distinct in individualities,

But like each other ev'n as those who love.

Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:

Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm:
Then springs the crowning race of humankind."

To state briefly the cardinal Tennysonian idea, man must realize a womanly manliness, and woman a manly womanliness.

Tennyson presents to us his ideal man in the 109th section of 'In Memoriam.' It is descriptive of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. All that is most characteristic of Tennyson, even his Englishness, is gathered up in this poem of six stanzas. It is interesting to meet with such a representative and comprehensive bit in a great poet.

"Heart-affluence in discursive talk

From household fountains never dry;
The critic clearness of an eye,

That saw through all the Muses' walk;

Seraphic intellect and force

To seize and throw the doubts of man;
Impassioned logic, which outran
The bearer in its fiery course;

High nature amorous of the good,
But touch'd with no ascetic gloom;
And passions pure in snowy bloom
Through all the years of April blood."

The first two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur1 of the 'Idylls of the King.' In the next stanza we have the poet's institutional Englishness:

66

"A love of freedom rarely felt,

Of freedom in her regal seat

Of England; not the school-boy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt;

And manhood fused with female grace®
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unask'd, in thine,
And find his comfort in thy face;

All these have been, and thee mine eyes
Have look'd on; if they look'd in vain,
My shame is greater who remain,

Nor let thy wisdom make me wise."

Tennyson's genius was early trained by the skeptical philosophy of the age. All his poetry shows this. The ' In Memoriam' may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism. To this scepticism he has applied an "all-subtilizing intellect,” and has translated it into the poetical "concrete," with a rare artistic skill, and more than this, has subjected it to the spiritual instincts and apperceptions of the feminine side of his nature and made it

1 See 'The Holy Grail,' the concluding thirty-two verses, beginning: “And spake I not too truly, O my Knights,” and ending "ye have seen that ye have seen."

2 The idea of 'The Princess.'

vassal to a larger faith. But it is, after all, not the vital faith which Browning's poetry exhibits, a faith proceeding directly from the spiritual man. It is rather the faith expressed by Browning's Bishop Blougram:

"With me faith means perpetual unbelief

Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,

Who stands firm just because he feels it writhe.”

And Tennyson, in picturing to us in the Idylls, the passage of the soul "from the great deep to the great deep," appears to have felt it necessary to the completion of that picture (or why did he do it?), that he should bring out that doubt at the last moment. The dying Arthur is made to say:

"I am going a long way

With these thou seëst—if indeed I go

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) —

To the island-valley of Avilion;" etc. Mite ha

Tennyson's poetry is, in fact, an expression of the highest sublimation of the scepticism which came out of the eighteenth century, which invoked the authority of the sensualistic philosophy of Locke, and has since been fostered by the science of the nineteenth; while Browning's poetry is a decided protest against, and a reactionary product of, that scepticism, that infidel philosophy (infidel as to the transcendental), and has closed with it and borne away the palm.

The key-note of his poetry is struck in Paracelsus,' published in 1835, in his twenty-third year, and, with the exception of 'Pauline' published in 1833, the earliest of his compositions : Paracelsus says (and he who knows Browning knows it to be substantially his own creed) :

"Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things, whate'er you may believe:
There is an inmost centre in us all,

Where truth abides in fulness; and around

Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,

h;

This perfect, clear perception — which is truth
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Blinds it, and makes all error: and 'to know'
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light

Supposed to be without. Watch narrowly
The demonstration of a truth, its birth,

And you trace back the effluence to its spring
And source within us, where broods radiance vast,

To be elicited ray by ray, as chance

Shall favour: chance for hitherto, your sage
Even as he knows not how those beams are born,
As little knows he what unlocks their fount;
And men have oft grown old among their books
To die, case-hardened in their ignorance,

Whose careless youth had promised what long years
Of unremitted labour ne'er performed:
While, contrary, it has chanced some idle day,
That autumn-loiterers just as fancy-free

As the midges in the sun, have oft given vent
To truth - produced mysteriously as cape
Of cloud grown out of the invisible air.
Hence, may not truth be lodged alike in all,
The lowest as the highest? some slight film
The interposing bar which binds it up,
And makes the idiot, just as makes the sage
Some film removed, the happy outlet whence
Truth issues proudly? See this soul of ours!
How it strives weakly in the child, is loosed
In manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled
By age and waste, set free at last by death:
Why is it, flesh enthralls it or enthrones?
What is this flesh we have to penetrate?
Oh, not alone when life flows still do truth
And power emerge, but also when strange chance
Ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture,
When sickness breaks the body-hunger, watching,
Excess, or languor—oftenest death's approach —

Peril, deep joy, or woe. One man shall crawl
Through life, surrounded with all stirring things,
Unmoved and he goes mad; and from the wreck
Of what he was, by his wild talk alone,

You first collect how great a spirit he hid.
Therefore set free the spirit alike in all,
Discovering the true laws by which the flesh
Bars in the spirit!...

The sacred knowledge, here and there dispersed
About the world, long lost or never found.
And why should I be sad, or lorn of hope?
Why ever make man's good distinct from God's?
Or, finding they are one, why dare mistrust?
Who shall succeed if not one pledged like me?
Mine is no mad attempt to build a world
Apart from His, like those who set themselves
To find the nature of the spirit they bore,

And, taught betimes that all their gorgeous dreams
Were only born to vanish in this life,
Refused to fit them to this narrow sphere,

But chose to figure forth another world

And other frames meet for their vast desires,

Still, all a dream! Thus was life scorned; but life

Shall yet be crowned: twine amaranth! I am priest!"

And again :

"In man's self arise

August anticipations, symbols, types

Of a dim splendour ever on before,

In that eternal circle run by life:

For men begin to pass their nature's bound,

And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant

Their proper1 joys and griefs; and outgrow all
The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade
Before the unmeasured thirst for good; while peace
Rises within them ever more and more.

1 In the sense of the Latin proprius, peculiar, private, personal.