Tennyson celebrates the return to nature. This return "The Poet's Song" voices:

"The rain had fallen, the Poet arose; He passed by the town and out of the street; A light wind blew from the gates of the sun, And waves of shadow went over the wheat, And he sat him down in a lonely place, And chanted a melody loud and sweet, That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud, And the lark drop down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee, The snake slipt under a spray; The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak, And stared, with his foot on the prey; And the nightingale thought, 'I have sung many songs, But never a one so gay; For he sings of what the world will be When the years have died away.'"

Away from palaces to solitude; out of cities to hedgerows and the woods and wild-flowers,—there is the secret of perennial poetry. And Tennyson is the climax of this dissent from Pope and Dryden as elaborated in Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Thomson, and Wordsworth. The best of this wine was reserved for the last of the feast; for Tennyson appears to me the greatest of the nature poets. And this return to nature, as the phrase goes, means taking this earth as a whole, which we are to do more and still more. Thomson's poetry was not pastoral poetry at its best; seeing inanimate nature is not in itself sufficient theme for poetry, lacking passion, depth, power. Sunrise, and flowing stream, and tossing seas are valuable as associates of the soul and helping it to self-understanding. Tennyson took both men and nature into his interpretation of nature. His voice it is, saying,

"O would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me!"

The sea helps the soul's lack by supplying words and music. Tennyson never was at his best in a National Ode, unless one speaks from the elocutionary standpoint, because such tasks lack the poetical essential of spontaneity, and because, too, the themes seem to carry him outside of his nature-mood. Art in our century has gone out of doors. Scenery has never had lovers as now; and participative in this mood is Tennyson. He lives under the sky. He loved to be alone; and nature is loneliness as well as loveliness. Nor is his love of nature a passing passion, but is passionate, intense, endearing. He never outgrew it. "Balin and Balan" is as beautiful with nature-similes as were "Enid" and "Oenone." In Tennyson we have the odors of the country and the sea and the dewy night. He is laureate of the stars. Nature is not introduced, but his poems seem set in nature as daisies in a meadow. He was no city poet. Of the poet Blake, James Thomson writes:

"He came to the desert of London town Gray miles long. He wandered up, he wandered down, Singing a quiet hymn."

Not so Tennyson. London and he were compatriots, but not friends; for he belonged to the quiet of the country woods, and the clamor of sea-gulls and sea-waves, whose very tumult drown the voice of care. Tennyson was to express the yearning of his era, and his poems are a cry; for, like a babe, he has

"No language but a cry."

Our yearning is our glory. The superb forces of our spirits are inarticulate, and can not be put to words, but may be put to the melody of a yearning cry. Souls struggle toward expression like a dying soldier who would send a message to his beloved, but can not frame words therefor before he dies. Our pathos is—and our yearning is—

"O would that my lips could utter The thoughts that arise in me!"

But we have no words; and Holmes, in his most delicately-beautiful poem, entitled "The Voiceless," has made mention of this grief:

"We count the broken lyres that rest Where the sweet wailing singers slumber; But o'er their silent sister's breast The wild-flowers, who will stoop to number? A few can touch the magic string, And noisy Fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone, Whose song has told their heart's sad story,— Weep for the voiceless, who have known The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses, Till Death pours out his cordial wine, Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses,— If singing breath or echoing chord To every hidden pang were given, What endless melodies were poured, As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!"

Souls cry, "Give us a voice;" and nature enters into our yearning moods. The autumn and the rain grieve with us, and June makes merry with us as at a festival, and the deep sky gives room for the soaring of our aspirations, and the solemn night says, "Dream!" And for our heartache and longing, Tennyson is our voice; for he seems near neighbor to us. He lay on a bank of violets, and looked into the sky, and heard poplars pattering as with rain upon the roof. Really, in all Tennyson's poems you will be surprised at the affluence of his reference to nature. His custom was to make the moods of nature to be explanatory of the moods of the soul. Man needs nature as birds need air, and flowers, and waving trees, and the dear sun. Tennyson will make appeal to

"The flower in the crannied wall"

by way of silencing the agnostic's prating against God. Hear him:

"Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies— Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower,—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is."

Here follow a few, among many, very many, delicious references to the out-of-door world we name nature, as explanatory of the indoor world we call soul:

"Who make it seem more sweet to be The little life on bank and brier, The bird that pipes his lone desire And dies unheard within his tree."

"A thousand suns will stream on thee, A thousand moons will quiver; But not by thee my steps shall be, Forever and forever."

"Storm'd in orbs of song, a growing gale."

"I saw that every morning, far withdrawn, Beyond the darkness and the cataract, God made himself an awful rose of dawn, Unheeded."

"There let the wind sweep and the plover cry; But thou go by."

"As through the land at eve we went, And pluck'd the ripen'd ears, We fell out, my wife and I,— O we fell out, I know not why, And kiss'd again with tears.

For when we came where lies the child We lost in other years, There above the little grave,— O there above the little grave, We kiss'd again with tears."

"Set in a cataract on an island-crag, When storm is on the heights of the long hills."

"Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sand When the tide ebbs in sunshine."

"Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven, and take the shape, With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But O too fond, when have I answered thee? Ask me no more."

"And she, as one that climbs a peak to gaze O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night."

"That like a broken purpose wastes in air."

"To rest beneath the clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains, Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God."

"So be it: there no shade can last In that deep dawn behind the tomb, But clear from marge to marge shall bloom The eternal landscape of the past."

"I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray."

"But Summer on the steaming floods, And Spring that swells the narrow brooks, And Autumn, with a noise of rooks, That gather in the waning woods."

"From belt to belt of crimson seas, On leagues of odor streaming far, To where in yonder Orient star A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.'"

"There rolls the deep where grew the tree: O earth, what changes thou hast seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go."

"If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice, 'Believe no more,' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the godless deep."

"As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it."

"Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers; And high above a piece of turret stair, Worn by the feet that now were silent, would Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stems Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibered arms, And suck'd the joining of the stones, and look'd A knot, beneath, of snakes; aloft, a grove."

"For as a leaf in mid-November is To what it was in mid-October, seem'd The dress that now she look'd on to the dress She look'd on ere the coming of Geraint."

"That had a sapling growing on it, slip From the long shore-cliff's windy walls to the beach, And there lie still, and yet the sapling grew: So lay the man transfixt."

"For one That listens near a torrent mountain-brook, All thro' the crash of the near cataract hears The drumming thunder of the huger fall At distance, were the soldiers wont to hear His voice in battle, and be kindled by it."

"And in the moment after, wild Limours, Borne on a black horse, like a thunder-cloud Whose skirts are loosen'd by the breaking storm, Half ridden off with by the thing he rode, And all in passion, uttering a dry shriek, Dash'd on Geraint"

"Where, like a shoaling sea, the lovely blue Play'd into green, and thicker down the front With jewels than the sward with drops of dew, When all night long a cloud clings to the hill, And with the dawn ascending lets the day Strike where it clung: so thickly shone the gems."

"As the southwest that blowing Bala Lake Fills all the sacred Dee. So past the days."

"In the midnight and flourish of his May."

"Only you would not pass beyond the cape That has the poplar on it."

"And at the inrunning of a little brook, Sat by the river in a cove and watch'd The high reed wave, and lifted up his eyes And saw the barge that brought her moving down, Far off, a blot upon the stream, and said, Low in himself, 'Ah, simple heart and sweet, You loved me, damsel, surely with a love Far tenderer than my Queen's!'"

"Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart, As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long A little bitter pool about a stone On the bare coast."

"A carefuler in peril did not breathe For leagues along that breaker-beaten coast Than Enoch. . . . And he thrice had pluck'd a life From the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas."

"All-kindled by a still and sacred fire, That burned as on an altar."

"With kisses balmier than half-opening buds Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd, Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet, Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, While Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers."

"Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life Shoots to the fall."

"That sets at twilight in a land of reeds."

"And wearying in a land of sand and thorns."

"Pelleas and sweet smell of the fields Past, and the sunshine came along with him."

"By a mossed brookbank on a stone I smelt a wildweed flower alone; There was a ringing in my ears, And both my eyes gushed out with tears."

"Clash like the coming and retiring wave."

"Quiet as any water-sodden log Stay'd in the wandering warble of a brook."

"The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh."

From these quotations, not exhaustive, but representative, one may see in how gracious a sense Tennyson was a pastoral poet, in that he and his thought haunted the brookside and the mountainside, the shadow and the sunshine, the dark night, or dewy eve, or the glad dawn, always. Therefore is Tennyson a rest to the spirit. He takes you from your care, and ends by taking your care from you. He quiets your spirit. I go to his poems as I would go to seashore or mountain; and a quiet deep, as the gently falling night, wraps my spirit. Bless him always for the rest he knows to give and cares to give!

Tennyson's genius is lyrical rather than either dramatic or epic. What music is like his? Say of his poems, in words of James Whitcomb Riley,

"O but the sound was rainy sweet!"

Not great Milton was more master of music than he; though Milton's was the melody of wide ocean in open sea, or crash of waves upon the rugged rocks, or wrathing up the yellow sands in tumult of majestic menace. Tennyson's music is rather the voice of gentle waters, or the cadence of summer's winds in the tree-tops, or like human voices heard in some woodland. In either poet is no marred music. Mrs. Browning fell out of time; Tennyson never. His verse is like some loved voice which makes perpetual music in our heart. Read all of his poetry, and how diversified soever his meter is, music never fails; yet his lyrics are not as those of Burns, whose words sing like the brook Tennyson has sung of. Burns's melody is laughter: it babbles, it sighs for a moment, but will sing. But Tennyson's is not laughter. He is no joyous poet. Burns has tears which wet his lashes, scarcely his cheeks. Tennyson's cheeks are wet. He is the music of winds in pine-trees in a lonely land, or as a sea breaking upon a shore of rock and wreck; but how passing sweet the music is, stealing your ruggedness away, so that to be harsh in thought or diction in his presence seems a crime!

Lyric differs from epic poetry in sustainedness. One form of poetry runs into another imperceptibly, as darkness into daylight or daylight into darkness, so that the dividing line can not be certified. Lyric poetry may be dramatic in spirit, as Browning's "The Ring and the Book;" or dramatic poetry may be lyric in spirit, as Milton's "Comus." Tennyson has written drama and epic too; for such, I think, clearly he proposed the "Idyls of the King" to be. This we must say: Despite the genial leniency of Robert Browning's criticism of the dramatic success of "Harold," and "Becket," and "The Cup," we may safely refuse concurrence in judgment. Trying made the failure of the play impossible when he was character in them. There is no necessity of denying that the so-called trilogy has apt delineation of character, and that Green, the historian, was justified in saying that "Becket" had given him such a conception of the character of that courtier and ecclesiastic as all his historical research had not given; nor need we deny that these dramas are rich in noble passages. These things go without the saying, considering the author was Alfred Tennyson. In attempting a criticism of the dramatic value, however, the real question is this: Would not "Harold" and "Queen Mary" have been greater poems if thrown out of the dramatic into the narrative form, like "Guinevere" or "Enoch Arden?" "Maud" is really the most dramatic of Tennyson's poems, and in consequence the least understood. Most men at some time espouse what they can not successfully achieve. Was not this Tennyson's case? Are not the portrayal of character and the rhythm and the melody of the drama qualities inherent in Tennyson, and are they in any distinct sense dramatic? If we declare Tennyson neither epic nor dramatic, but always lyric, adverse criticism melts away like snow in summer. As lyrist, all is congruous and enthralling. "The Idyls of the King," as a series of lyric romances, is beyond blame in technique. Tennyson tells a story. Dramatic poetry takes the story out of the poet's lips and tells itself. The epic requires a strong centrality of theme, movement, and dominancy, like a ubiquitous sovereign whose power is always felt in every part of his empire. Viewing "The Idyls of the King" as singing episodes, told us by some wandering minstrel, not only do they not challenge hostile criticism, but they take rank among the noblest contributions to the poetry of any language. "Columbus," "Ulyses," "Eleanore," "Enoch Arden," "Lucretius," "The Day-Dream," "Locksley Hall," "Dora," "Aylmer's Field," "The Gardener's Daughter," have all the subdued beauty of Wordsworth's narrative poems, and are as certainly lyric as those unapproachable lyrics in "The Princess." The ocean is epic in its vast expanse; tragic in its power to crush Armadas on the rocks and let them

"Rot in ribs of wreck;"

and lyric in its songs, whether of storm outsounding cataracts, or the singing scarce above the breath of waves that silver the shores of summer seas. Commend me to the ocean, and give all the ocean to me. Dispossess me of no might nor tragedy nor melody. Let the whole ocean be mine. So, though Tennyson be not epic as Milton, nor dramatic as Browning, he is yet a mine of wealth untold. He is more melodious than Spenser (and what a praise!) Tennyson can not write the prose, but always the poetry of life. So interpreted, how perfect his execution becomes! His words distill like dews. Take unnumbered extracts from his poems, and they seem bits of melody, picked out from nature's book of melodies, and in themselves and as related they satisfy the heart. Let these songs sing themselves to us:

"Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape, With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But O too fond, when have I answer'd thee? Ask me no more.

Ask me no more: what answer should I give? I love not hollow cheek or faded eye; Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die! Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live; Ask me no more.

Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd; I strove against the stream and all in vain; Let the great river take me to the main; No more, dear Love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more."

"Thy voice is heard through rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands; Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands: A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee."

"O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river; Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying."

"Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; Rest, rest, on mother's breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the west Under the silver moon: Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep."

And "Tears, Idle Tears," is beyond all praise. Passion was never wed to music more deliriously and satisfyingly. I am entranced by this poem always, as by God's poem of the starry night:

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean; Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes In looking on the happy autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the under world; Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more."

All these lyrics are such delights as leave us silent, seeing we have no words to tell the glow of spirit we feel. The genius of lyric poetry is its power of condensation. The drama may expand, the lyric must condense, and Tennyson has the lyric power, summing up large areas of thought and feeling into a single sentence or a few verses, which presents the quintessence of the lyric method. Immense passion poured into the chalice of a solitary utterance—this is a song. Let the harpist sit and sing, nor stop to wipe his tears what time he sings,—only let him sing! Tennyson was as some rare voice which never grows husky, but always sounds sweet as music heard in the darkness, and when he speaks, it is as if

"Up the valley came a swell of music on the wind."

Tennyson is poet of love. Love is practically always the soil out of which his flowers grow. Our American bards say little of love, and we feel the lack keenly. Love is the native nobleman among soul-qualities, and we have become schooled to feel the poets must be our spokesmen here where we need them most. But Bryant, nor Whittier, nor Longfellow, nor yet Lowell, have been in a generous way erotic poets. They have lacked the pronounced passion element. Poe, however, was always lover when he wrote poetry, and Bayard Taylor has a recurring softening of the voice to a caress when his eyes look love. Tennyson, on the contrary, is scarcely less a love poet than Burns, though he tells his secret after a different fashion. Call the roll of his poems, and see how just this observation is. Love is nodal with him as with the heart. Bourdillon was right in saying:

"The night has a thousand eyes, The day has one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one; Yet the life of a whole life dies When love is done."

In many poets, love is background, not picture, or, to change a figure as is meet, love is a minor chord in song. In Shelley, I would say that love was a sort of afterglow upon the landscape, and softens his rigid anarchy into something like beauty. With Tennyson is a very different offering to love. It is omnipresent, though not obtrusively so; for he never obtrudes his main meanings. They rather steal on you as springtime does. You catch his meaning because you are not blind nor deaf. He hints at things as lovers do, and is as one who would not thrust his company upon you, so modest and reticent is he; yet we do not mistake him. Love is always close at hand, and in some form is never absent. "Mariana," "Lady of Shalott," "Locksley Hall," "Maud," "The Sisters," "The Talking Oak," "Edward Gray," "The Miller's Daughter," "Harold," "Queen Mary," "Enoch Arden," and "The Idyls of the King,"—is not love everywhere? These are poems of love between men and women as lovers; but there is other love. In Tennyson: love of country, as in his "The Revenge," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and others; love of nature, as "The Brook;" the love of Queen, as in the dedication in "The Idyls of the King;" love of a friend (and such love!) flooding "In Memoriam" like spring tide's; love to God, as "St. Agnes' Eve," "Sir Galahad," and in "King Arthur." By appeal to book do we see how his poems constitute a literature of love, for he is in essence saying continuously, "Life means love," and we shall not be those to say him nay. May we not safely say no poet has given a more beautiful and sympathetic explication of love in its entirety? Browning has expressed the sex-love more mightily in Pompilia and Caponsacchi. Tennyson has, however, given no partial landscape; he has presented the whole. Love of the lover, of the widowed heart, of the friend, of the parent, of the patriot, of the subject to sovereign, of the redeemed of God. Truly, this does impress us as a nearly-completed circle. If it is not, where lies the lack? Love is life, gladness, pathos, power. A humblest spirit, when touched with the unspeakable grace of love, becomes epic and beautiful, as is illustrated in "Enoch Arden." Herein see a sure element of immortality in Tennyson. The race will always with alacrity and sympathy read of love in tale or poem; and this poet is always translating love's thought into speech.

And may not this prevalence of love in his poetry account for Tennyson's lack of humor? In his conversation, as his son tells us, he was even jocular, loving both to hear and to tell a humorous incident, and his laughter rang out over a good jest, a thing of which we would have next to no intimation in his poetry; for save in "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue" and "The Northern Farmer," and possibly in "Amphion," his verse contains scarcely a vestige of humor. Certainly his writings can not presume to be humorous. To Cervantes, chivalry was grotesque; to Tennyson, chivalry was poetry,—there lay the difference. Our laureate caught not the jest, but the real poetry of that episode in the adventure of manhood; and this I take to be the larger and worthier lesson. Cervantes and Tennyson were both right. But Tennyson caught the vision of the surer, the more enduring truth. With love, as with chivalry, he saw not the humor, but the beauty of it; and beauty is always touched with melancholy. I have sat a day through reading all this poet's verse, and confess that all the day I was not remote from tears, but was as one walking in mists along an ocean shore, so that on my face was what might be either rain or tears. In Tennyson,

"Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in its glowing hands; Every moment lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight."

And Tennyson is the picture poet. I feel in reading him as if I were either out of doors with pictures seen at first-hand, or in a gallery with picture-crowded walls. He is painter among poets, his art being at once admirably inclusive and exclusive—including essentials, excluding the irrelevant. He is consummate artist, giving pictures of things, and, what is vastly more difficult, pictures of moods. With him, one never feels and sees, but feels because he sees. His ability to recreate moods for us is quite beyond praise, and is such subtle art as defies analysis or characterization, but wakens wonder and will not let it sleep. Poets are, as is affirmed by the lord of all the poets,

"Of imagination all compact;"

and may we be delivered from a colorless world and an unimaginative life; for such is no life at all! God would have men dream and prophesy. Because the poet is artist and dreamer, his word, in one form or another, is "like," a word patented by poets; and all who use it are become, in so far, poets. Now, with Tennyson, all things suggest pictures, as if soul were itself a landscape; wherefore, as has been shown, he riots in nature-scenes. A simile, when full, like a June day of heaven, contains a plethora, an ampleness, for which you shall seek in vain to find rules, much less to make them; which is to say that a perfect simile will betimes do something for which no reason can be assigned, yet so answering to the largest poetry of the occasion as to fill the mind with joy, as if one had discovered some new flower in the woods where he thought he knew them all. One instance shall suffice as illustrative:

"An agony Of lamentation like a wind, that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world."

Considering the comparison, we must grant that, submitted to the judgment of cold logic, the figure is superfluous and faulty; for, as a simple matter of fact, a wind blowing where no one comes or has come would be not so lonely as one blown across a habitable and inhabited land. From the standpoint of common observation, the simile might be set down as inaccurate. But who so blind as not to see that there is no untruth nor superfluity in the poet's art? He means to give the air of utter loneliness and sadness, and therefore pictures an untenanted landscape, across whose lonely wastes a lonely wind pursues its lonely way; and thus having saturated his thought with sadness, he transfers the loneliness of the landscape to the winged winds. This seems to me the very climacteric of exquisite artistic skill, and I am always delighted to the point of laughter or of tears; for moods run together in presence of such poetry. No poet of my knowledge so haunts the illustrative. In reading him, so perfect are the pictures that your fingers itch to play the artist's part, so you might shadow some beauty on every page. Some painter, working after the manner of Turner's "Rivers of France," might make himself immortal by devoting his life to the adequate illustration of Tennyson. As his verses sing themselves, so his poems picture themselves. He supplies you with painter's genius. A verse or stanza needs but a frame to be a choice painting. When told that the fool

"Danced like a withered leaf before the hall,"

we must see him, so vivid the scene, so lifelike the color.

I will hang some pictures up as in a gallery:

"Ever the weary wind went on, And took the reed-tops as it went"

"I, that whole day, Saw her no more, although I linger'd there Till every daisy slept."

"Love with knit brows went by, And with a flying finger swept my lips."

"Breathed like the covenant of a God, to hold From thence through all the worlds."

"Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind, And in her bosom bore the baby. Sleep."

"The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores."

"And in the fallow leisure of my life."

"Her voice fled always through the summer land; I spoke her name alone. Thrice-happy days! The flower of each, those moments when we met, The crown of all, we met to part no more."

"Now, now, his footsteps smite the threshold stairs Of life."

"The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit Of wisdom. Wait."

"Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sand When the tide ebbs in sunshine."

"Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears By some cold morning glacier; frail at first And feeble, all unconscious of itself, But such as gather'd color day by day."

"I could no more, but lay like one in trance, That hears his burial talk'd of by his friends, And can not speak, nor move, nor make one sign, But lies and dreads his doom."

"Behold, ye speak an idle thing: Ye never knew the sacred dust; I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing.

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'T is better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.

But brooding on the dear one dead, And all he said of things divine, (And dear to me as sacred wine To dying lips is all he said).

And look thy look, and go thy way, But blame not thou the winds that make The seeming-wanton ripple break, The tender-pencil'd shadow play.

Beneath all fancied hopes and fears, Ah me! the sorrow deepens down, Whose muffled motions blindly drown The bases of my life in tears.

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick, And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of being slow.

I can not love thee as I ought, For love reflects the thing beloved; My words are only words, and moved Upon the topmost froth of thought.

From point to point, with power and grace And music in the bounds of law, To those conclusions when we saw The God within him light his face.

And while the wind began to sweep A music out of sheet and shroud, We steer'd her toward a crimson cloud That landlike slept along the deep.

Abiding with me till I sail To seek thee on the mystic deeps, And this electric force, that keeps A thousand pulses dancing, fail.

And hear at times a sentinel, Who moves about from place to place, And whispers to the worlds of space, In the deep night, that all is well."

"Brawling, or like a clamor of the rooks At distance, ere they settle for the night."

"In words whose echo lasts, they were so sweet."

"That I could rest, a rock in ebbs and flows."

"But as a man to whom a dreadful loss Falls in a far land, and he knows it not."

"The long way smoke beneath him in his fear."

"Then, after all was done that hand could do, She rested, and her desolation came Upon her, and she wept beside the way."

"Seam'd with an ancient sword-cut on the cheek, And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes And loved him, with that love which was her doom."

"And in the meadows tremulous aspen-trees And poplars made a noise of falling showers."

"No greatness, save it be some far-off touch Of greatness to know well I am not great."

"Hurt in the side, whereat she caught her breath; Through her own side she felt the sharp lance go."

"Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart, As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long A little bitter pool about a stone On the bare coast."

"Thy shadow still would glide from room to room, And I should evermore be vext with thee In hanging robe or vacant ornament, Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair."

"Far off a solitary trumpet blew. Then, waiting by the doors, the war-horse neigh'd As at a friend's voice, and he spake again."

"Through the thick night I hear the trumpet blow."

"And slipt aside, and like a wounded life Crept down into the hollows of the wood."

"Then Philip, with his eyes Full of that lifelong hunger, and his voice Shaking a little like a drunkard's hand."

"Had he not Spoken with That, which being everywhere Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone, Surely the man had died of solitude."

"Because things seen are mightier than things heard."

"For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck See through the gray skirts of a lifting squall The boat that bears the hope of life approach To save the life despair'd of, than he saw Death dawning on him, and the close of all."

"And he lay tranced; but when he rose and paced Back toward his solitary home again, All down the narrow street he went, Beating it in upon his weary brain, As though it were the burthen of a song, 'Not to tell her, never to let her know.'"

"Torn as a sail that leaves the rope is torn In tempest."

"Nay, one there is, and at the eastern end, Wealthy with wandering lines of mount and mere."

"Prick'd with incredible pinnacles into heaven."

"An out-door sign of all the warmth within, Smiled with his lips—a smile beneath a cloud; But Heaven had meant it for a sunny one."

"All the old echoes hidden in the wall."

"Their plumes driv'n backward by the wind they made In moving, all together down upon him Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North sea, Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, Down on a bark, and overbears the bark, And him that helms it, so they overbore Sir Lancelot and his charger."

"There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. The swimming vapor slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling through the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea. Behind the valley topmost Gargarus Stands up and takes the morning; but in front The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel, The crown of Troas."

"One seem'd all dark and red—a tract of sand, And some one pacing there alone, Who paced forever in a glimmering land, Lit with a low large moon.

One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. You seem'd to hear them climb and fall And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, Beneath the windy wall.

And one, a full-fed river winding slow By herds upon an endless plain, The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, With shadow-streaks of rain.

And one, the reapers at their sultry toil. In front they bound the sheaves. Behind Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil, And hoary to the wind.

And one, a foreground black with stones and slags, Beyond, a line of heights, and higher All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags, And highest, snow and fire.

And one, an English home—gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep—all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace."

Each stanza is a picture, bound, not in book nor gold, but in a stanza.

"Like flame from ashes."

"Sighing weariedly, as one Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, When all the goodlier guests are past away."

"As the crest of some slow-arching wave Heard in dead night along that table-shore Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing."

"Belted his body with her white embrace."

"And out beyond into the dream to come."

"Thus, as a hearth lit in a mountain home, And glancing on the window, when the gloom Of twilight deepens round it, seems a flame That rages in the woodland far below."

Looking at these landscapes, can words add weight to the claim for Alfred Tennyson as a painter?

And Tennyson is as pure as the air of mid-ocean. His moral qualities are in no regard inferior to his artistic qualities, although from centuries of poets we might have been schooled to anticipate that so sensitive and poetic a nature had been sensual, concluding a lowered standard of ethics, theoretical or practical, one or both, especially considering his earliest literary admiration was that poetic Don Juan, Lord Byron, whose poems were a transcript of his morals, where a luxuriant imagination and a poetic diction were combined in a high degree, and so the poet qualified to be a bane or blessing of a commanding order, he choosing so to use his extraordinary gifts as to pollute the living springs from which a generation of men and women drank. What we do find is, a Tennyson as removed from a Byron in moral mood and life as southern cross from northern lights. The morals of both life and poems are as limpid as the waters of pellucid Tahoe; and purest women may read from "Claribel" to "Crossing the Bar," and be only purer from the reading. Henry Van Dyke has written on "The Bible in Tennyson," an article, after his habit, discriminating and appreciative, in the course of which he shows how some of the delicious verse's of the laureate are literal extracts from the Book of God, so native is poetry to that sublime volume; though I incline to believe the larger loan of the Bible to Tennyson is the purity of thought evidenced in the poet's writings, and more particularly in the poet's life. Who has not been touched by the Bible who has lived in these later centuries? Modern life may no more get away from the Bible than our planet may flee from its own atmosphere. We can never estimate the moral potency of such a poet, living and writing for sixty years, though we may fairly account this longevity of pure living and pure thinking and pure writing among the primary blessings of our century. That two such pure men and poets as Tennyson and Browning were given a single race in a single century is abundant cause for giving hearty thanks to God. They have purified, not our day only, but remote days coming, till days shall set to rise no more, and have given the lie to the poor folly of supposing highest genius and purest morality to be incompatibles; for in life and poem, and in the poem of life, they have swept clouds from our sky, until all purity stands revealed, fair as the morning star smiling at Eastern lattices. In Tennyson is no slightest appeal to the sensual. He hates pruriency, making protest against it with a voice like the clangor of angry bells. In "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," he speaks wisely and justly, in sarcasm that bites as acids do:

"Rip your brother's vices open, strip your own foul passions bare: Down with Reticence, down with Reverence—forward, naked—let them stare. Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer; Send the drain into the fountain lest the stream should issue pure.

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the trough of Zolaism, Forward, forward, aye and backward, downward, too, in the abysm. Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men."

And this is Tennyson the aged, whose moral eyes were as the physical eyes of Moses on Pisgah, "undimmed." Bless him for his aged anger! Happily, to-day, realism has lost its charm. We have had enough living in sewers, when the suburbs were near with their breezy heights and quiet homes. Stench needs no apostle. The age has outgrown these hectic folk, who, in the name of nature, lead us back to Pompeii. Gehenna needs not to be assisted. Jean Valjean, bent on an errand of mercy, fled to the sewers of Paris, his appeal to these foul subways being justified, since he sought them under stress for the preservation of a life. Does this prove that men should take promenades in the sewers as if they were boulevards? An author is not called on to tell all he knows. Let writers of fiction assume that the public knows there are foul things, and needs not to be reminded of them, and let the romancist avoid them as he would a land of lepers.

Those who companied with Tennyson through his beautiful career were helped into a growing love of purity. He had no panegyric for lust and shame and sensuality, but made us feel they were shameful, so that we blushed for those who had not the modesty to blush for themselves. We are ashamed for Guinevere and Lancelot, and are proud of Enid and Elaine and Sir Galahad and King Arthur; and in them, and in others, have been helped to see the heroic beauty of simple virtue. This is an incalculable gain for soul. When we have learned that profligates, whatever their spasms of flashy achievements, are poor company, and that the pure are evermore good company, and goodness is a quest worthier than the quest for the golden grail, we have risen to nobility of soul which can never become out of date.

Noah was not more clearly a preacher of righteousness in his day than Tennyson in his, of whom say, as highest encomium we know to pronounce, "He made goodness beautiful to our eyes and desirable to our hearts; and, beyond this, made it easier for us to be good."

Over all this poet wrote, he might have looked straight in God's eye, and prayed, as King Arthur:

"And that which I have done May he within himself make pure!"

And we chant, sending our muse after him,—

"Nor was there moaning of the bar When he set out to sea."

To him saying, "We love him yet, and shall while life endures," borrowing Whittier's God-speed to the dead Bayard Taylor:

"Let the home-voices greet him in the far, Strange land that holds him; let the messages Of love pursue him o'er the chartless seas And unmapped vastness of his unknown star! Love's language, heard above the loud discourse, Of perishable fame, in every sphere Itself interprets; and its utterance here, Somewhere in God's unfolding universe, Shall reach our traveler, softening the surprise Of his rapt gaze on unfamiliar skies!"



VIII

The American Historians

The average American traveler is better acquainted with foreign lands than with his own country. Nor is he unique in this regard. I have known persons who lived a lifetime within a dozen squares of Westminster Abbey, and were never inside of that historic cathedral, as I have known persons to live forty years not fifty miles distant from Niagara, and never to have heard the organ speech of that great cataract. This is a common flaw in intellect. We tend to underestimate the near, and exaggerate the remote. Another application of the same frailty is noticeable in literature. Homegrown literature is, with not a few, depreciated. According to their logic, good things can not come out of Nazareth, and imported products are the only viands worth a Sybarite palate. In mediaeval days the form assumed was different, while the principle remained the same. Then the question of value turned upon whether a work was written in the learned language; namely, in Latin. If written in the vernacular, the work was immediately set down as vulgar. One of Martin Luther's valuable services was that, when the reverse was prevalent, he honored the vernacular of his country, and insisted that it be taught in the schools, a thing accounted an educational heresy in his time; and in his translation of the Bible into German, he created German literature.

Americans are a race of readers, and are the Rome to which all literature turns face and feet. Besides many books not great, all great books are translated into English. Everybody's book comes to America. We are a cosmopolitan population in a literary way. If you were to look at the book-counters of each succeeding month, you would see how all the writing world has been writing for us. From such conditions of supply, our taste becomes cultivated. We feel ourselves connoisseurs. If we give a more ready reading to a foreign than to a domestic book, the reason is not of necessity that the home book is deficient in interest or literary finish, but may be attributed simply to an undesigned and perhaps unperceived predisposition toward the imported and the remote.

I confess to a love for what is American. I love its Government; its prevalent and genuine democracy; its chance for the common man and woman to rise into success and fame and valuable service; its inheritance, unblemished by primogeniture or entail; its universality of education to a degree of intelligence; its history and tendency; and I love its literature, though, as appears to me, our historians have done the highest grade of work of any of our litterateurs—in saying which there is no disparagement of other literary workers, but simply a stated belief in the pre-eminent value of the historian in American letters. What I mean is this: During the fifty years last passed there were poets and novelists in England who, with all deference to our own writers, were equal or superior to the poets and novelists of America. America had no poets who stood the peer of Browning and Tennyson; and among novelists, our Hawthorne could not be said to surpass a Thackeray, Dickens, or Eliot. But say, proudly, beyond the sea were no historians the masters of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. This article wishes to point out the quality and range of American historians, with an expressed hope of causing research in this ample and fertile field.

Though first on the soil of the Western Hemisphere, the Spaniard has made no acknowledged and valuable contribution to American history. Nor, indeed, has any nation of this hemisphere, save our own. The French and Spanish Jesuit submitted religious monographs touching the early days of occupancy of New France and Mexico; but these will readily be seen to be rather chronicles than histories. And the historian, native to the United States, is he in whose hands have been the historical studies of our Western World. La Salle, Hennepin, Marquette, and Las Casas have written faulty but valuable memoirs; but they do not reach the dignity and value of histories, being what one might name crude ore rather than refined gold.

Another thing worthy a glad emphasis is, that America is her own historian. The New World has begotten the writers of its own story. How fully this is true will not be appreciated until a detailed and instantaneous survey is taken. Look down on this plain of history as one does on Tuscany from an Alp. Thus, and thus only, can we value our possession. In this estimate, mention is made of the greater historians, not because others are not worthy of notice, but because the scope of this essay does not allow, inasmuch as reference is here had to the specific gravity of the historian and the epoch of our history he has exploited.

Washington Irving, essayist, biographer, humorist, was, before all, a historian in temper, and was drawn as by some subtle and unseen attraction to study that nation to which America owed its discovery. Irving is an evident American. He loved the land through whose palisades the stately Hudson flowed. What touched America touched Irving, and who had loved or helped America had won Irving's heart as a trophy. And such evident patriotism is commendable in citizen and writer. We love not Caesar less, but Rome the more, when we believe in America before all nations of history. I love the patriot above the cosmopolitan, because in him is an honest look, a homeliness that touches the heart like the sight of a pasture-field, with its broken bars, where our childhood ran with happy feet. Carlyle was against things because they were English; so was Matthew Arnold. These men were self-expatriated in spirit. I like not the attitude. Give us men who love native land beyond all other lands, and who, removed therefrom, turn homesick eyes toward its invisible boundaries. Irving, admirable in many ways, was in no way more to be admired than in his predilection for his country as a theme for his historian's muse. To him pay tribute, because he is historian of the discovery of our brave Western Hemisphere. Irving has told the story of that great admiral of the ocean, Christopher Columbus. This memoir may not be exact. Irving may have idealized this pathfinder of the ocean; though if he has, he has observed the proprieties, literary and imaginative, as many successors have not. Some writers are seemingly bent on making every great soul commonplace, thinking that if they fail to belittle a distinguished benefactor of the race, if they have not played the Vandal with a swagger and conceit like Jack Falstaff, they have ignominiously failed; when the plain truth is, that if they succeeded in taking the glamour for those heroes of whom they write, they have hurt mankind so far, and have impoverished imagination and endeavor by their invidious task. We need not suppose Christopher Columbus and Washington saints, seeing there is no inclination to canonize them; but we need not hold their follies up to wake the guffaw of a crowd. Such laughter is dearly bought. One thing I hold so true no reasoning can damage it; namely, that a man like Columbus had nobler moods on which he voyaged as his caravel through the blue seas. Columbus was no swineherd, but a dreamer, whose dreams enlarged the world by half, and gave a new civilization room and triumph. He was of his age, and his morality was not unimpeachable; but in him were still great moralities and humanities. He had mountain-tops in his spirits, and on these peaks he stood. What puerile work it is to attempt robbing Columbus of his discoverer's glory by attempting to show how vikings discovered this continent! Such historians might fight a less bloody battle still by showing that the aborigines discovered this continent before the Norsemen did! What boots such folly? What gold of benefit comes of such quests? Certain we are that when Columbus set sail for a New World, no one believed the earth was round as he did, and no one knew the Norsemen had piloted across seas and found land; and Europe was ignorant of any shore westward, and Columbus, in his ignorance, risked all and vanquished all.

"Dragging up drowned honor by the locks,"

as says our Shakespeare. Columbus is America's benefactor. He showed the Puritans a New World, toward whose shores to sail, and behind whose harbor-bar to cast anchor. Nothing can invalidate these claims. Honor him who honors us in giving us a rendezvous for liberty and civilization. This mood of history Washington Irving caught, and because he did, I honor him. He was sagacious. He did not traduce a hero, but enthroned him. In short, Irving behaved toward Christopher Columbus as a historian and a gentleman, and set Americans a pattern in history-writing in that they should be the historiographers of their own world. This Nestor's lessons were heard and heeded. If you care to read Irving's various historical writings, the logic of these writings will appear. America was his home and love. He thought to write the story of how a brave man gave a world this huge room it knew not of. Loyalty made him historian. His researches gave him familiarity with Spanish archives. The movement of the era touched him; for Irving was susceptible to the finer moods of literature, as any who reads the "Sketch-book" knows; and once having set foot on Spanish historical terra firma, he began a journey as a traveler might. America led Irving to Columbus, Columbus led him to Spain, Spain led him to Mohammedism, and Mohammedism led him to Mohammed. How natural his literary travels! Consider the consecutiveness of his historical attempts: "Life of Columbus," "Spanish Voyages," "Conquest of Grenada," "Conquest of Spain," "Moorish Chronicles," and "Life of Mohammed." The influence of this historical research, too, you shall find in reading his romances: "Wolfert's Roost," "Legends of the Conquest of Spain," "Bracebridge Hall," and "Alhambra."

Patriotism taught Irving's Clio to find her voice. Nor must we forget, in any estimate of Irving's service, his biography of Washington. This is his tribute to the battle-days of his beloved America.

In strict affinity with Irving in the time of his history is Prescott. This man is a distinguished historian. To history he devoted his life, and to such effect that he is to be ranked among the masters of history among the ages. America attracted him as it had attracted Irving. The era of the discovery enticed him as the voyage had enticed Columbus. "Ferdinand and Isabella" are the dominant voices on his stage. Irving made them subordinate, and made Columbus the chief player, which mode Prescott reverses. The union of Castile and Aragon, and the subsequent wars against the Moriscoes, which virtually put the knife in their heart and concluded that triumph which had been begun by Charles Martel at Tours, is an attractive portion of history. In Prescott, as in Motley, is a wealth of research which fairly bewilders. Nothing is extemporaneous. Archives are ransacked. Moldy correspondence is made to tell its belated story. Certainly Prescott is abundant in information. I do not recall, save in Gibbon's, a series of histories where so much new knowledge is retailed as in Prescott. In seeming looseness of phrase, I have used the term "new knowledge," but these words are happily descriptive of "Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest of Peru," because the fields were practically untrodden to the ordinary reader. Everything is new, like a college to the freshman. We see a New World in more senses than one. The freshness of the facts is exhilarating. We march with Cortes; we conquer with Pizarro; we inspect Montezuma's palace; we become interested in the industrial system of the Incas, a system which should have given Henry George and Edward Bellamy a delight without alloy; we perceive the incredible valor and perseverance and endurance of Cortes; we front "new faces, other minds;" we discover the Amazon through perils and hardships so multitudinous and so severe as to tempt us to think these narrations a myth; we see rapacity insatiable as death, a bloody idol-worship pitiless and terrible; we read Prescott's history with growing avidity and increasing information; read Prescott, and become wiser concerning the aborigines of the Americas and the possibilities of human fortitude and prowess. A study of the Spanish era of discovery and conquest naturally led to a study of Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Prescott has accordingly brought up to date "Robertson's Life of Charles V," appending a biography of Charles V subsequent to his abdication; and as a certificate of indefatigable industry in historical research is an incomplete but exhaustive memoir, entitled, "The Life of Philip II." This work is written with such fairness of spirit and such wealth of information and investigation, such vivid presentation of a reign which had more of the movement of the universal dominion than any since the Roman days, and thus written so as to make us rebellious in spirit in finding the work incomplete. Death came too soon to give our indefatigable author time to complete his voluminous history. Read Prescott as a matter of American pride, and because he has dealt more capably with the era with which he treats than any other historian.

The United States has supplied her own historians, not needing to go abroad for either history or historian. George Bancroft, with a private library larger by almost half than the ten thousand-volume library Edward Gibbon used in writing "The Decline and Fall of the Roman empire;" George Bancroft, whose literary life was dedicated to one task, and that the writing the life of his country prior to the Constitution; George Bancroft, publicist as well as student of history, and who in such relation represented his Government with distinction at the courts of Germany and England,—George Bancroft has written a history of the United States which will no more become archaic than Macaulay or Grote. While one may now and then hear from the lips of the so-called "younger school of American historians" a criticism of George Bancroft, their carping is ungracious and gratuitous. Theirs has not been the art to equal him, nor will be. A literary life devoted to the mastery of one era of a nation's history is a worthy sight, good for the eyes, and arguing sanity of method and profundity of investigation. Whoever has read Bancroft can testify to his readableness, to his comprehensive knowledge, to his philosophical grasp, to his ability to make dead deeds vividly visible, and to his gift of interesting the reader in events and their philosophy. He has written a great history of the United States before the Constitution, so that no author has felt called on or equipped to reduplicate his task in the same detail and manner.

Where George Bancroft left off, Schouler has begun. More dramatic than Bancroft, and in consequence more compelling in interest, the history marches at a double-quick, like a charging regiment. His pictures of John Quincy Adams, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Sumner, Douglas, Lincoln, and a host beside, vitalize those men. We live with that giant brood. I have found Schouler invigoratingly helpful. He affords knowledge and inspiration; a man is behind his pages; we feel him and acknowledge him.

One change has come over the spirit of history to which all must bear joyful witness, and that is the passing of the king and the advent of the people. The world has grown more democratic than it knows. The people engage attention now. We do not know so much of Queen Victoria; but of the conquering, splendid race whose hereditary sovereign she is, we know much, very much. The case used to be wholly otherwise, the sovereign monopolizing attention; but that day is passed. So let it be. This change is one needed, and waited for long, and longed for eagerly. John Richard Green saw the demonetization of kings and a remonetization of the people, and so wrote a revolutionary history, calling it "A History of the English People," in which he subordinated the intrigues of courts and the selfish wars of potentates to the quiet growth of national spirit and the characteristics of domestic life, and the development and solidification of social instincts into social customs, and the framing of a literature, the reformation of religion, and the direction of the thought of the many. These constituted, as he believed, and as we believe, the genuine biography of a people; and McMaster has done for the United States what Green has done for England. His "History of the People of the United States" is so packed with knowledge; so accurate in laying hold of those things which we did not know, but wanted to know; so free in giving us the inside life of our country, as to make us wonder what we did before our historian of the people came to lend us knowledge. My conviction is, that a careful reading of McMaster will suffice to cure most of our dyspeptic feelings about national discontent in our time, and dispel the fabulous notion of an older time in America, when everybody was happy and everybody was contented. No such day ever existed. The kingdom of contentment is within us, like the kingdom of God. McMaster tells us the unvarnished tale of inflation and political and financial asininity in the former days, so that when he is done we are less liable to that frailty of the ignorant soul; namely, the moaning, "The former days were better than these."

Thus far, those authors have been named who have chronicled the discovery of America, the conquering of the Southern Hemisphere or the Eastern territory of that era known as the United States. This was done to keep a natural movement and logical progress. At this point, however, must be mentioned those voluminous histories of the States and Territories of the Pacific Coast, written by H. H. Bancroft. They are treasure-houses of material for the future historian. Hubert Bancroft has become the historian of the Spanish dominion in the United States, and deserves favorable thought for his wealth of research into archives which might have been lost, or at least less ample with the advance of time. Topography, geography, archaeology. State papers,—all have contributed their quota to him, and he has, after the generous manner of the scholar, contributed to us.

Francis Parkman is a distinguished master in the art of history. His theme is the "American Indian" and the "French Occupancy of America," and he has told a thrilling story. He knows the Indian as no one of our historians has known him, and has told of his noble traits, and his ruthless forays, and his sanguine cruelty. His utter lack of thrift; his feast-and-famine life; his stealth, stolidity, duplicity, and ferocity,—all are rehearsed. To read his record of the Indian is to have much of the glamour thrown around him by James Fenimore Cooper stripped from him incontinently and forever. The Indian was self-exterminative. He was the assassin of his race, and civilization was impossible so long as the American Indian was dominant; so that those who shed tears over the white man's conquest of the Indian may not well have weighed their cause. The Indian was not the quiet, inoffensive innocent presented in Cuba at its discovery. There were Indians and Indians. Some of them were friendly, peaceful, and kindly; but that this was the character of the American Indian as a whole is totally incorrect. Parkman shows that the Indian was, throughout North America, in his native strength furious in his ferocity, relentless as death, cruel beyond imagination, and occupied a territory he neither cultivated nor attempted to. The Indians were military vagabonds, whose continued control had left America an unpeopled wilderness to this day. Huntsmen and warriors they were; citizens and cultivators and civilizers they were not, and never would have been. Parkman tells the truth as history found them, and those truths are well worth our reading, because in their perusal we pass from sentimentality to reason, and see how this America of our day, rich, cultivated, civilized, and possessed of the largest amount of personal liberty ever vouchsafed to a citizen, is a noble exchange for the thoughtlessness, improvidence, and barbarity which were original holders of this realm. Speaking for myself, no author ever helped me to knowledge of the character of the aborigines of North America as Francis Parkman has done. I see that wild past, and feel it. And he has written the thrilling story of the French attempt to build an empire; and the attempt was courageous to the verge of wonder. There was in the Frenchman a careless ease and courage and sprightliness of temper, which lifted him above danger, as a boat is lifted on a billow's shoulders. Those perils were his drink; with a laugh and a jest he met his appointment with death as he would have met tryst with a woman. In "The Romance of American Geography," I have described the genius of the French voyager, for which I have an unbounded admiration, and in which I take an intemperate delight. He is the discoverer at his best, but the colonizer at his worst. The Jesuits had a brave chapter in the French occupancy. Their labors and sufferings and voyagings, their fealty to what they thought to be the cause of God, makes us proud of them, as if they were our own fellow-citizens. The settlement of Montreal and Quebec and contiguous territory, the religious fervor that mixed with the military spirit as waters of two streams mingle in a mountain-meadow,—read Parkman, and discover the dramatic instincts of these episodes which can be rehearsed no more upon our continent. Their day is past; but it was a great and stirring day. Gilbert Parker's "The Seats of the Mighty" is a chapter, torn from Parkman's "French Regime in Canada." All his facts and the romance are accurate, and are taken from Parkman's narrative, which misses nothing, but tells all. Parker's "Pierre and his People," and "An Adventure of the North" are tales of adventure, dewy with the freshness of a frontier world, and are in brief a section of the old French voyagers' days. Parkman's "Wolfe and Montcalm" is a picture, painted in smoke and blood, where heroism of Englishmen and Frenchmen mix themselves in an inextricable confusion. Pray you read Parkman, and be transported to a world where great deeds were done by men whose lives were as contradictory as an April day; but "their works do follow them" for all that, and do glorify them. Be glad for Francis Parkman, historian.

Many historians there are. John Fiske has written chapters on the discovery and colonization days; Rhodes has written on our Constitutional history; Winsor has written on our antiquities; Baird has written an exhaustive and competent history of the Huguenots, a series one will do more than well to read. Many scholars have written comparatively brief memoirs of the United States. Localities and States and single villages have had their historians; but the commanding figures whose faces fill the canvas, so to say,—of them this appreciation is written, to point youth to an Oregon of delight, where their leisure may stray with abundant profit and increasing pleasure, and, as I hope, with growing pride in American literature, so that they may make mental boast of America's sons, who have been stanch to enjoy and study the history of their own native land.

My final word is of that brilliant, irascible, and impressible American, John Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic; and fitting it is that a native of the first great stable Republic was drawn to study the European Republic which rose at the touch of William the Silent's genius, and sank back into lethargy of kingship when the blood of the tragic and heroic inauguration was all spilt. The contact of the United Netherlands with American history and future is known to all. From the Netherlands the Puritans set sail to found what proved to be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlands exercised an influence in shaping the future of the American Commonwealth has not been determined, and can not be, though Douglas Campbell has maintained that to the Dutch, and not to the English Puritan, nor yet to the Magna Charta, does the American Republic owe its chief debt. The theme is productive and stimulative and worthy, though the facts are indeterminate. America is attached to the Dutch Republic as a bold attempt whose failure was nobler than many successes. The Puritan exodus from Holland, when Pastor John Robinson prayed, preached, and prophesied, is one of the most thrilling events recorded of the seventeenth century—a century crowded with doings that thrill the flesh like a bugle-call.

Motley's histories are "The Rise of the Dutch Republic," "The United Netherlands," and "John of Barneveld," a series which, for brilliancy of characterization of men and times and events, and interest stimulated and held, may rank, without hyperbole, with the writings of Lord Macaulay. Both are always special pleaders, as I am of opinion history ought probably to be, seeing that it is human nature, and will, in all but solitary instances, be the case whether or no; both are fascinating as a romancist; both are colorists, gorgeous as Rembrandt; both glorify and make you admire and love their heroes, whether you are so minded or not; both have made the epoch of which they wrote vivid as the landscape upon which the sunset pours its crimson dyes. Motley's hero was William the Silent, Prince of Orange; and Macaulay's hero was William III, King of England, Prince of Orange. Motley will bear being ranked as a great historian. He hates Philip II, as I suppose good folks ought who despise egotism, intolerance, vindictiveness, and horrible cruelty. He lauds William the Silent as soldier and statesman, Prince Maurice as a soldier, and John of Barneveld as statesman. Motley marches across old battle-fields like a soldier clad in steel. He gives portraits of Queen Elizabeth, of Leicester, of Granvelle, of Prince Maurice, of John of Barneveld, of Henry of Navarre, of Philip II, of Count Egmont, of Charles V, of Don John of Austria, of Hugo Grotius, and of William the Silent, which are as noble as the portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. I confess myself a heavy debtor to Motley. He has taught me so much; has familiarized me with the great world-figure, William the Silent, so that I feel at home with him and his struggle, and participate with him in them. He has drawn so clearly the figures of Romanist, Arminian, and Calvinist, as to make them fairly glow upon his pages. Not as minister to St. James, under President Grant, was Motley at his best; but rifling the archives of Holland and Spain with an industry which knew no bounds, and rehearsing the dry-as-dust discoveries in histories that glow like a furnace. Here is the field in which he is all but unconquerable. Long live the American historians!



IX

King Arthur

Perhaps no reader of the world's literature would deny that letters and life had been indefinitely enriched by Alfred Tennyson.

How ideas affect life when once they have become participants therein is the bar at which all ideas must stand for judgment. Carbonic-acid gas enters the lungs, fills them, and blows out the lamp of life. Common air enters the lungs, crimsons the blood, exhilarates the spirit, gives elasticity to step and thought and pulse; is health, and pours oil into the lamp of life whereby the flame burns higher, like watch-fires on evening hills. One air brought death; one air brought more abundant life. What do ideas effect, and how do they affect him who entertains them is the final question and the final test. Now, our earth is always trying to grow men. Not harvests nor flowers nor forests, but man, is what the earth is proudest of. On transparent June days, standing upon the cliffs of the Isle of Man, I have seen the golden wheatfields on the hills of Wales; but heaven, looking earth's way, is oblivious to our tossing plumes of corn or tawny billows of the fields of wheat. Heaven's concern is in our crop of manhood; and ships that ply between the shores of earth and shores of heaven are never laden with gold or silver ingots, as Spanish galleons were, nor with glancing silks nor burning gems, but are forever freighted with elect spirits. Men and women are the commodity earth grows that heaven wants.

What helps the growth of man is good; what hurts the growth of man is bad. When one has become a shadow, lost to human eyes, test him with this acid. Did he do good? If he did evil, let his name perish; if he did good, let his name blaze in the galaxy among the inextinguishable stars. If he has made the growth of manhood easier and its method more apparent; if he has opened eyes to see the best, and spurred men to attempt the best they saw; if he has enamored them of virtue as aforetime they were enamored of vice,—trust me, that man was good. He will endure, and be passed from age to age, like rare traditions through centuries, till time shall die. Submit Alfred Tennyson to this test. Is virtue more apparent, more lovely, and of more luxuriant growth, like tropic forests, because of him? But one answer is possible, and that answer is, "King Arthur." To our moral riches, Victor Hugo added "Jean Valjean;" Dickens, "Sidney Carton;" Thackeray, "Colonel Newcome;" Browning, "Caponsacchi;" Tennyson, "King Arthur," who stands and will stand as Tennyson's vision of manhood at its prime.

The theme of this paper, then, is "King Arthur," being a philosophy of manhood as outlined by Alfred Tennyson; and the purpose of this essay is to bring into vital relation to King Arthur the totality of argument for manhood which Tennyson has constructed in his cycle of poems, thus taking into our field of vision, not simply "The Idyls of the King," adequate as they may be, but, in addition, "Enoch Arden," "Ulysses," "The Vision of Sin," "The Palace of Art," "Maud," "Columbus," "Locksley Hall," "The Lotos-Eaters," and "In Memoriam," and all poems which, by negation or affirmation, may suggest or enforce a thought regarding the furnishing of the soul.

In those idyls clustering about King Arthur, Tennyson has patently purposed painting the figure of a perfect man. How well he has executed his design depends on himself much, on the beholder much. Onlookers differ in opinion. Painters have their clientage. Poets are not omniscient; neither are we, a thing we are prone to forget. For myself, I confess not to see with those who deride the king, nor yet with those who think him statuesque, as if shaped, not out of flesh, but out of marble. He is not incredible, nor is he a shadow, stalking gaunt and battle-clad across the crags that fringe the Cornish sea. Not a few among us approximate perfection in character as blameless as Arthur's. I myself profess to have seen a King Arthur, and to have held high converse with him through many years. Whiteness of life is not an episode foreign to biography. There are many lives running white toward heaven as I have seen a path across the moonlit sea. Not to be credulous is well; not to be incredulous is better, when heavenly visions and heavenly incarnations are the theme. This is affirmed, that King Arthur is not more unreal than others Tennyson delineates. His art lacks the power to flood his people's veins with blood to plethora, with such bounding vitality as marks Shakespeare's creations. They lack, sometimes, color on the cheek and lip and sunlight in the eyes. His characters are as if seen in mist. Our failing is, we give credence to fleshly instinct and lust and failure in ideal more readily than to wise manliness and stalwart and heroic worth. But Enoch Arden is no dream. Arthur is no myth. I know a man whose heart is as pure, whose conduct as above reproach, and whose words are as big with charity, and thoughts as foreign to hypocrisy, as Arthur's were; for Arthur is not dead. They did not dream who said, "Arthur returns." He hides his name, lest he become spectacular, a raree-show, for mobs to follow and shout hoarse about; but he is here. I met him yesterday; and to-morrow I shall walk with him by the river, where the stream makes music, and the trees sing in minors, and the shadows darken on the grass.

What, then, is this Arthur's character? Looking at him as he sits astride his steed, yonder at Camelot, with his visor up, he is seen manhood at its prime. A ruddy face, with beard of gold, holding the sun as harvests do. Tourneys done, the king is turned battleward, where he is to die; and a man's picture comes to have special value at his death. When the wounded king is borne by Bedivere across the echoing crags toward the black funeral barge, we see him again, full in the face, and remember him always.

King Arthur was a self-made man. His birth was held to be uncertain. "Is he Uther's son?" was on many a lip. So men yet sometimes hold to some poor question of ancestry when worth, evident as light, fronts them. Some there are who live in so narrow a mood as to ask always "Where?" and never "What?" when the latter is God's unvarying method of estimation. This quest for ancestry for Arthur is of service to us as showing he had not empire ready to his hand. His kingdom did not make him; he made his kingdom; or, to give the entire history, he made himself and his kingdom. And this is oft-repeated history. When a man makes a kingdom, he first made himself. He does two things. Might goes not single, loves not solitude, but makes itself company. Milton made himself before he made the Bible epic of the world. He wrought himself and his complex history into his Iliad of heavenly battle. Souls have, in a true sense, a beaten path to tread. There is a highway worn to ruts and dust by travel of the great men's feet. And Arthur had much company, if he knew it not. Such men seem alone, though if they saw all their companionships they would know they walked on in a goodly company and great. Greatness has many fellowships, as stars have; and stars have fellowship of mountains and woods, and kindred stars, and waters where star-shadows lie, and oceans where galaxies tumble like defeated angels. All greatness is self-made. Names are bequeathed us, so much is borrowed. Character and value are self-made. Gold has intrinsic worth. Man has not, but makes his worth by the day's labor of his hands.

This provision is God's excellent antidote to dissatisfaction with one's estate. If worth could be handed down, like name or fortune, one might as well be a pasture-field, to pass from hand to hand as chattel, instead of man. Far otherwise God's plan. Each spirit works out, and must work out, his own destiny. Destinies are not ready-made but hand-made. King Arthur's fame is not dependent on his ancestry, but on himself. Ancestry we can not control; self we can. Tennyson, though part of a hereditary system, sees with perfect clearness how ancestry accounts for no man, and how every man must make his own room in the world; how nobility depends, not on a family's past, but on the individual's present; how wealth and service are the credentials of character society will accept, and the only credentials. This view is scarcely English, but is fully American. And Tennyson was not sympathetic with America. Democracies possessed not the flavor of the fruit he loved. When, however, the biography of greatness is to be written, who writes the story, if he write it truly, must tell a story of democracy. Tennyson is unconscious democrat when he writes Arthur's biography, because as poet he saw. His intuitions led him. He spoke, not as a lover of a certain social and political system, but as a discerner of spirits. The poet is not his best as a planned philosophizer; for in that role he becomes self-conscious; but is at his best when the wheel of his burning spirit, revolving as the planets do, throws off sparks or streams of fire. To the accuracy of this observation witness both Browning and Tennyson. When they were "possessed," as the Delphic oracle would say, they marched toward truth like an invincible troop. Truth seemed the missing half of their own sphere, toward which, by a subtle and lordly gravitation, they swung. When Tennyson's instincts speak, he is democrat; when his reason and his prejudice (for he was surcharged with both) speak, he is hot aristocrat. When he is biographer for royal Arthur, his instinct speaks, and his conviction holds that character and deeds do and shall count for more than blood; and this is no isolated idea advanced touching Arthur, but is prevalent throughout his verse. In "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," his heart speaks, full of eagerness, saying:

"Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'T is only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood."

Nor is the Laureate's subsequent acceptance of the peerage a retraction of these earlier sentiments; for he did but accept the ribbon of an order which was part of the political system of his native land. Himself was self-made. Who were the Tennysons? Who are the Tennysons? He made a house. And in the list of lords, does any one think there is a name whose device one would rather wear than that of Lord Tennyson? Holland has this bit of verse, whose application is apparent:

"Heaven is not reached at a single bound; But we build the ladder by which we rise From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, And mount to its summit round by round."

Genius does the same. The stairs each generation climbed are rotten at its death, so that no foot's weight can be borne upon them afterward. Man builds his own stairway greatnessward. In the Idyl of the King, entitled "Gareth and Lynette," is application of this thought of manhood above title or name or blood. Worth, the main thing, is the theme of the idyl.

Hear Gareth call, like voice of trumpets,

"Let be my name; until I make my name My deeds will speak."

He seemed, and was not, a kitchen knave. He seemed not, and he was, a knight of valor and of purity and might, of purpose and of succor. Silly Lynette might rain her superficial insults on him like a winter's sleet—this hindered not his service. He knew to wait, and dare, and do. His fame was in him. A great life bears not its honors on its back, as mountains do their pines, but in his heart, as women do their love. In Tennyson's concept of manhood, worth counts, not rank. To this argument, words from "In Memoriam" are a contribution:

"As some divinely-gifted man, Whose life in low estate began And on a simple village green;

Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star;

Who makes by force his merit known, And lives to clutch the golden keys, To mold a mighty State's decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne;

And moving on from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope The pillar of a people's hope, The center of a world's desire."

Such words seem as if fallen from the lips of Lincoln in a dream. "Aylmer's Field" is a protest, written in grief and tears and blood against the iniquity of ancestry as divorced from the pure course of nobler love. God made of one blood all kindreds of the earth, and means to mix this blood till time shall die. Hearts give scant heed to heraldry. Life is wider than a baron's field. Arthur Hallam, whose epitaph is the sweetest ever written, and bears title of "In Memoriam,"—Arthur Hallam, so greatly loved and missed, was never nobleman in genealogy, but was full prince in youth and ideality and purity and genius and promise, worth more than all the ancestries of buried kings. More: Tennyson was as much self-made as King Arthur. He made a house which rose to the sound of poet's lute, rehearsing, in our days, the story of Orpheus in the remote yesterdays. So myths come to be history. And who would not rather be author of "The Lotos-Eaters," and "Oenone," and "Ulysses," and "Enoch Arden," and "In Memoriam" than to have been possessed, with Sir Aylmer Aylmer, of

"Spacious hall, Hung with a hundred shields, the family tree Sprung from the midriff of a prostrate king?"

King Arthur's knights were novi viri. Whence came Lancelot and Geraint and Sir Percivale? And how came they, save as

"Rising on their dead selves To higher things?"

Arthur, at whose back march all the legions of Tennyson's poetry celebrative of manhood,—Arthur asserts the nobleness of manhood, irrespective of the accidents of wealth or birth. Many scenes in Tennyson are taken from the cottage. "The May Queen," "The Gardener's Daughter," "The Grandmother," "Rizpah," and, above all, "Enoch Arden," are poems showing how poetry dwells in the hearts of common folks. The verse of books they may not know; the verse of sentiment they are at home with. Birth is not a term in the proportion of worth; and I hold Arthur one of the strongest voices of our century assertive of the sufficiency of manhood. Self-made and greatly made was this king at Camelot.

King Arthur was optimist. He expected good in men, was not suspicious. "Interpreting others by his own pure heart," you interject, "He was duped." The harlot Vivien called him fool, and despised him; but she was fallen, shameful, treacherous, and, what was worse, so fallen as not to see the beauty in untarnished manhood, which is the last sign of turpitude. Many bad men have still left an honest admiration for a goodness themselves are alien to. Vivien was so lost as that goodness, manhood, knightliness, sweet and tall as mountain pines, made no appeal to her. Filth is dearer to some than mountain air. She was such. A fallen woman, given over to her fall, is horrible in depravity. Merlin saw that her estimate of Arthur was the measure of herself. Beatrix Esmond did not appreciate Henry Esmond; for the Pretender was her measure of soul. Though to her praise be it said that, in her old age, Esmond dead, she thought of him as women think