"That nothing walks with aimless feet; When God hath made the pile complete.' 'You that way and we this' is the last word in this matter of critics whose taste has been formed by Homer, Sophocles, Tennyson, and Virgil. Yet the Tennysonian may safely challenge the production from the writings of the competitors for the throne of modern poetry, of one sane and suggestive ethical or religious idea that cannot be found better expressed in Tennyson." Tennyson died in 1892, at the age of eighty-three -the age of Goethe, and a few months more. The scene offered by the closing hour of his life will long remain engraved upon the memory. The midnight time, the full harvest moon streaming in over the Surrey hills and flooding the chamber with light, the august head, the features calm save for lips that murmured—what other words so fit?— "Fear no more the heat o' the sun, the faces of the mourners stricken with grief and awe as that great soul faded "into the unknown, nothing could have been more impressive; nothing could have added to the solemn pathos of the scene. It will be remembered that "The Silent Voices," set to music by Lady Tennyson, was sung at the funeral services in Westminster Abbey. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, writing a sequence of sonnets upon this impressive occasion, makes mention of the fact in the following beautiful words: "Sweet was the sweet wife's music, and consoling: I heard when through the whin of Aldworth strolling, "And when the music ceased and pictures fled "Beyond the sun, beyond the furthest star, Shines still the land which poets still may win "Heedless of phantom Fame-heedless of all Save pity and love to light the life of Man- Bidding them join their country and their clan.'" These sonnets might fitly close the present discussion of the great poet to whose memory I have brought the tribute of what poor words were at my command. But I cannot resist the temptation to reproduce in addition the one other memorable tribute of song evoked from an English poet by the passing of Alfred Tennyson. The words that follow are taken from "Lacrymæ Musarum," Mr. William Watson's noble threnody, and are worthy of their lofty theme. "In far retreats of elemental mind Obscurely comes and goes The imperative breath of song, that as the wind Matthew Arnold MAN is a creature of many moods, and it is the function of poetry to remain unresponsive to no one of them. It would seem as though Browning and Tennyson had ranged over the whole diversified field of modern emotion and modern thought, analysed all the complex processes of the modern soul, and left nothing for other poets to interpret. Yet there has been room in our own time for other poets, despite the comprehensive vision of these two, and of those others, there is, perhaps, none whom we would spare more reluctantly than Matthew Arnold. Especially to those who cannot share the robust temperamental optimism of Browning, and whose faith in the divine order of the world, in the assured future both of individual man and collective mankind, has not, like that of Tennyson, triumphantly survived the shock of doubt, the poetry of Arnold comes as one of the most precious of gifts. For such readers, it seems to afford an even more exact and intimate reflection of their deepest experience than the imaginings of either Tennyson or Browning. It seems less specious and rhetorical; more direct and sincere. I have spoken of the sharp contrasts which Tennyson was fond of drawing between the philosophies of doubt and of faith. There is something almost theatrical in his method of portraying the agonies of the soul plunged in "the sunless gulfs of doubt," and his appeal for the acceptance of the fundamental articles of the Christian faith is made rather to the heart than to the reason. It comes near to defeating itself by its vehement intensity of emotion. It seems unwilling to admit the possibility of a secure resting-place for the soul outside the citadel of historical Christianity, and the life unfortified by these entrenchments seems a mockery of every noble aspiration. The essentials of Christian belief must be true, "Else earth is darkness at the core, But the pressure of our modern age, the widening of our modern thought with the process of the suns, has produced a type of mind which is forced to reject, sorrowfully but firmly, much of the religious teaching of the past, to readjust to new conditions the old beliefs, to find new sanctions for the conduct of the upright life. This spiritual temper, unwilling to blink what it conceives to be falsehood, yet resolute to uphold the dignity of man's moral nature when the props of dogma-when what builders call the "false work" of the structure-have been removed, may be illustrated by a passage in which Mr. Morley, speaking of the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau, contrasts the "infinite unseen which is in truth beyond |