Robert Browning, his unique gift, his subtle power. All men of taste feel the magic of Swinburne's luscious music, his thrill of passion and scorn. One need not go through the list of the sixty-two so-called 'minor poets, some are pretty enough, and some are poor indeed!' Yes! but the cool judgment brings us back to this, that though one or two men in these fifty years past have given us poems of resplendent genius, and some scores have written verses of extreme felicity and grace, and many hundreds of men and women have composed pieces 'pretty enough,' the prevalent perfume is always that of the Tennysonian flower; the lyre, whoever strikes it, gives forth the Tennysonian love-note of its own motion—ά βάρβιτος δὲ χορδαῖς ἔρωτα μοῦνον ἀκεῖ—and Alfred Tennyson holds an indisputable laureate crown as completely as ever did Victor Hugo in France.

In early life. quite faultless And in sixty

The crown has been won, partly by the fact that Tennyson embalmed in exquisite verses the current tastes, creeds, hopes, and sympathies of the larger part of the reading public in our age, but mainly it was won by the supreme perfection of his form. he formed a poetic style of his own, of precision-musical, simple, and lucid. years of poetic fecundity, his style may have gained in energy, but not in precision. It was never careless, never uncouth, never (or rarely) obscure. Every line was polished with the same unerring ear and the same infallible taste. In some sixty thousand lines it is rare to find a really false rhyme, a truly bungling verse, a crude confusion of epithets, or a vile cacophony-such ragged stuff as Byron flung off on almost every other page, such redundancies as Shelley or Keats would pour forth in some hour of delirious rapture, such rank

commonplace as too often offend us in Wordsworth, even when he is not droning of malice prepense. Verses so uniformly harmonious as those of Tennyson, with their witchery of words, yet so clear, so pure, so tender, so redolent of what is beautiful in nature, in man, in woman-all this won over the entire public that cares for poetry, and truly deserved to win it.

Even now full justice has hardly been done to Tennyson's supremacy in form; or rather, the general reader, much as he loves his poems, is not quite aware of the infallible mastery of language they possess. In the whole range of English poetry, Milton alone can be held to show an equal or even greater uniformity of polish. Perfection and continuity of polish are certainly not the same thing as the highest poetry, but they are the note of the consummate artist. English poetry, for all its splendid achievements, is not remarkable for uniform perfection of form, as compared with the best poetry of Greece, of Rome, and of Italy. Shakespeare himself (or perhaps it is his editors, his printers, or his pseudonyms) will at times break out into rant, and he is inordinately prone to indulge in conceits and quips. Nearly all our poets have their bad days-become careless, reckless, or prosy; lose complete self-control; or commit some error of taste, be it in haste, in passion, or some morbid condition of the creative fancy. Gray always writes like the scholar and critic that he was, and Pope always writes with the neatness of a French 'wit.' But neither can uniformly avoid the commonplace, and thus they cannot claim the crown of absolute poetic form. Milton, if we can forgive the prolixity of his old age, never descends in his eagle's flight from the lofty perfection of form. And more than all other poets, Tennyson, if he never soars to such heights as

Milton, maintains this wonderful equality of measured beat.

'IN MEMORIAM'

This unfaltering truth of form reaches its zenith in In Memoriam, which must always remain one of the triumphs of English poetry. It would be difficult to name any other poem of such length (some three thousand lines) where the rhythm, phrasing, and articulation are so entirely faultless, so exquisitely clear, melodious, and sure. Subtle arguments of philosophy and problems of faith are treated with a grace equal to the ease and the lucidity of the expression. There is not a poor rhyme, not a forced phrase, not a loose or harsh line in the whole series. The rhymes, the assonances, the winged epithets are often of astonishing brilliancy, and yet they seem to flow unbidden from some native well-spring of poetic speech. Such ease, certainty, and harmony of tone imply consummate mastery of the poet's instrument; for not a stanza or a line looks as if it had cost the poet any labour at all, and yet every stanza and line looks as if no labour of his could ever make it more perfect. This is indeed a quality only to be found in our best poems, of which Milton has given us the immortal type. And though In Memoriam is far from being such glorious poetry as Lycidas, it shares with Lycidas itself consummate mastery of its own form of poetic language.

One of the main feats of this mastery of form is the extraordinarily beautiful and appropriate metre in which this poem is cast. Tennyson must be considered to have founded the typical metre for this meditative and elegiac lyric. Even if it had been occasionally used before in the seventeenth century, Tennyson gave

it the development and perfection it has for us. It has become the natural mode for this reflective and mournful poetry; it is superior, no doubt, to the metre of Milton's Il Penseroso, or that of Marvell's Thoughts in a Garden, Byron's Elegy on Thyrza, or Coleridge's Geneviève. The ease, force, and music of this quatrain in Tennyson's hands are wonderful-the ease equalling the force, the music equalling the ease. As in all meditative poems on a single theme, we find stanzas which we could well spare. But the pieces which are best known and have become household words, especially the first ten elegies with the famous Introduction, are masterpieces of exquisite versification, several of them may stand beside some of the happiest stanzas in our poetry. I always think of the opening stanza in No. ii.—

'Old Yew, which graspest at the stones

That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head;
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.'-

as being a miracle of poignant music and simple power. And what descriptive rhythm there is in the subtle alliterations and harmonies of the stanza

'But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

A use in measured language lies;

The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.'

What pathos and reticence in the last lines of No. vi.—

'To her, perpetual maidenhood,

And unto me, no second friend.'

And the tender address to the ship bearing his friend's body home in No. x.

English poetry again has few stanzas which for calm beauty can compare with

"Tis well; 'tis something; we may stand

Where he in English earth is laid,

And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.'

And the famous stanzas

'When Lazarus left his charnel-cave.'

'Oh yet we trust that somehow good.'

and the other stanzas of this philosophic debate. Or again the stanzas—

'I past beside the reverend walls

In which of old I wore the gown.'
'You say, but with no touch of scorn.'
'Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.'

(xviii.)

(xxxi.)

(liv.)

(lxxxvii.)

(xcvi.)

(cvi.)

These are the household words—almost to us to-day the commonplaces of Tennyson. And the public is so far right that these, it may be hackneyed, lines are in grace, simplicity, and music amongst the best masterpieces of English lyric.

A question still remains. With all the charm and pathos of these stanzas, with all that unfailing workmanship surpassed perhaps by Milton alone, does In Memoriam, even in form, reach the topmost empyrean of lyric to which one or two of our poets have risen. Memory echoes back to our ear a passionate couplet, it may be, of Shakespeare's Sonnets, a dazzling gem from Lycidas, another from Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, another from Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality.

Listen to this

'Yet in these thoughts myself almost despairing

Haply I think on thee-and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.'