We often complain, and hear others complain, that the minds of this age are incapable of strong and patient intellectual effort; that they fritter themselves away in easy flights; that reader and writer alike disport themselves in the novel, the review, the leading article, till they lose both taste and power for soberer and weightier work. Popular history, we say, is but a series of sparkling and stimulating sketches, popular poetry but “short swallow-flights of song” skimming the very base of that Aonian mount above which Milton’s muse soared with no middle flight. Much, or all of this, in more genial moments, we allow to be true, but call it the necessity of the time, which we must hopefully, not querulously, adapt ourselves to. How should it be otherwise in this nineteenth century, in the midst of which God has placed us, with its whirl of conflicting principles, its tossing sea of



theories and anachronisms, beliefs and disbeliefs, truths of Heaven and falsehoods of the Pit, each struggling in its own direction, the whole mass drifting—whither? A man, be he reader or writer, in the midst of such a time, may not go definitely forward, with a single eye, to a single object; but must needs move, if haply he can move at all, in a constant zigzag, ever carried out of his course by side currents, ever fearing that the moment is at hand when he must abandon the helm and trust himself solely to the wind and the wave. To speak without figure, every man in these days is so beset, at every moment, by questions of great, nay, of the greatest importance, all of which claim his thoughts at once, that it becomes impossible for him to devote a lifetime to the study of a particular aspect of a particular question. Moreover, no thought, or mechanical process having the similitude of thought, which does not bear upon the great questions of the day (the great questions of all days, did they but know it!) can, except by factitious means, become interesting to us. The poet must tell us of the men of the day, their “sorrows and aspirations,” or of the men of the past,—solely as in contrast or other relation to ourselves;* and that suggestively, not exhaustingly; we have not time for more: the epic fragment will be more welcome than the epic complete. The historian must consign to the dustheap of oblivion, though with an erudite tear, his heraldries and genealogies, his “battles of the crows and kites,” ever remembering that knowledge is not good in itself, but only as it makes us good, and must be content to learn from the novelist, or let the novelist take his place; for the age has said,—We will have nothing more to do with phantoms, incoherent and inconceivable, however logical; we want to see men as they were and are; not with motives, but with impulses; not equations, with so many virtues minus so many vices, but men, with infinite possibilities of good and evil; we want to see them, not that we may satisfy a flippant curiosity, but that we may gauge ourselves by them, that we may know why we are what we are, why they were other than we. If you cannot satisfy us, we must seek those who can; though they should call themselves Magazine writers, nay Novelists; it matters little whether the acts recorded be truly told, in their minutiae of place and time and agent, so that the feelings and impulses be truly portrayed. Thus many in these days think and say; not without just cause given. For example, take the age of Elizabeth, a time the most interesting to us of all times in English history, perhaps in world-history; its men and women were so truly English, so truly noble;



it circumstances so like our own, its character so unlike. What have we in the literature of these days, of any days, since Elizabeth’s time itself, which, thank God, being dead, yet speaketh, putting before us that age as it really was, excepting a few years back, a few magazine articles, by Mr. Kingsley and Mr. Froude, and a novel by Mr. Kingsley?†

Not challenging any comparison with these men, but thankfully accepting the hint they have given, I purpose to call the attention of the readers of our magazine, for a short time, in this and subsequent numbers, to the life and acts of the man who was looked upon by his contemporaries as the star of Elizabeth’s court and time; the most perfect character, perhaps, of whom history has taken note: the courtier, the Christian, the scholar, the warrior, the friend of Spenser and Raleigh; the incomparable Sir Philip Sydney. I have no transcendental aim; I shall endeavour, for my own good and yours, to set Sir Philip Sydney before you as he looked and spoke, and wrote, and was; to give you glimpses of the times he lived in, and the men and women he was associated with; to teach you the lessons his life has taught me, and especially that most important lesson of his life (in these days) that a man may be a true servant of his country and his queen, an accomplished gentleman, a thorough scholar, alive to all the interests (called secular) of his fellow-men, and yet none the less, but by much the more, a true servant of Christ. I know not whether I shall succeed; I know I shall not fail utterly, for the effort will be good both for myself and you, and therefore I have heart and hope to begin.

We need not give the genealogists too hard measure. Many a Jabez, “more honourable than his brethren,” lies hid for us, a jewel in the dustheap, in the pages of those pedantic old pedigree-makers. The very names, the Fulke Fitz Warrens, and the Warren de l’Isles, that bristle over the pages of Collins’s account of the genealogy of the Sidney family,* have a twang of chivalry about them, an associative power that sets at nought the compiler’s evident respect for the duty of dulness. What charms must they have had for him who fed his mind daily with the mediæval romance and story, with the black letter of the “Morte d’Arthur” when a boy, with the converse of Edmund Spenser when a man! The perusal of his ancestry must have helped to make him what he was, the “chevalier sans puer et sans reproche,” and he did not hesitate to own its influence. He glories in being a Dudley,† and “does acknowledg that his cheefest honour is to be a Dudlei.” The perfunctory, copy-book morality of Horace and such writers, was not then in vogue; a man might thank God for a noble ancestry, as his heart told him to do, without rebuke of conscience for unseemly and pharisaical pride. A man is not merely what he makes himself; he is what God makes him; and when God would make a man noble and great, He often puts him where the blood of the noble and great may stir and tingle in his veins, where, with his mother’s milk or at his nurse’s knee, he may drink in tales of the valour and virtue, and obedience of those of his name and house; how, through faith, they subdued kingdoms, waxed valiant in fight, and turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Therefore these “ imagines” that crowd the hall



of Sir Philip Sidney’s childhood’s home are not all shadows to us, being not all shadows to him; and we may linger a little among them without grudging the time.

There were those of bad repute as well as of good, even among his mother’s ancestry, the De l’Isles; the first of that name who has an habitation in history, was “accounted one of the evil Councillors” of an evil monarch: Brian de l’Isle, who received nobility and dignity from King John. But we find no stain upon the valour of the race, and but that one upon their patriotism. Gerard, the evil Councillor’s great grandson (I think), was conspicuous in all Edward III.’s wars in Scotland and France. He was at Creçy, at Calais, at Poictiers, right through the peace of Bretigny: and many another mighty cleaver of helmets (whom it were needless to invoke) he numbered in his kith and kin. Beside the De l’Isles, we find among the family heroes the stalwart figure of Richard Beauchamp, “my Lord of Warwick,” known to the French at Agincourt and Bordeaux, and to us mostly through Shakespeare: also John Talbot, my Lord of Shrewsbury, who died a soldier’s death at Chastillion, rather than survive defeat; and the Beauchamps and Talbots upward to the time when they left their Norway forests with Rolf the Ganger, and upward still to the beginning of things. One of the daughters of the Talbots, Viscounts Lisle (in whom the family centers), marries (temp. Edw. IV.) one Edward Grey, probably a “King’s poor cousin,” who is thereupon made Baron, and afterwards Viscount Lisle; again the family centers in a daughter, by name of Elizabeth, and she marries Edmund Dudley, a powerful man of law of that day: known to us not favourably as an instrument of Henry VII. for the replenishing of his coffers. He with his colleague Empson made extortion an art; studied obsolete statutes with praiseworthy ingenuity; invented recherché methods of rifling the strong box of the subject, which were found to benefit himself, even more than his sovereign, till his sin found him out; and altogether did his best to merit the exalted position to which the vox populi and the young king’s consent adjudged him as soon as his master was dead. He was beheaded amid universal acclamation, in the second year of Henry VIII. There was a little son of his, six years old, John Dudley; to whom his father perhaps was indulgent enough when he had leisure, and who must have been sorely puzzled by his ignominious transit. He grows up; a valiant youth of good parts; goes to France with Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk to fight the Duke of Bourbon; being valiant as I said, he is knighted at 22; Sir John Dudley. The King notices him; “bluff” King Hal, who “loved a man;” honour grows upon him; he is master of the armory; he is master of Horse to pale-faced Anne of Cleves, our new queen; a Viscount (De l’Isle by title, for he represents his grandmother’s family); Lord High Admirall for life; one dignity following close upon another: waging war, meantime, as the Baillies of “Eddenborow” and the Dauphin at Boulogne can testify, successfully by land and sea. So his honour grows; and the block whereon he shall lay his head is yet in the heart of the oak, in the depth of the forest. An ambitious man, who, being high, dreams of being higher, perhaps highest: (for the times are big with all manner of possibilities:) not very clear in his convictions, but blustering and impetuous in the utterance of them, selling himself, body and soul, to the impulse of the moment; a lion in battle, in his heart of hearts a coward; not scrupulous of means, but by temperament



a fighter, rather than a plotter; the hottest-headed of men; so unlike the oily respectability and shallow consistency of his rival Somerset. Through Edward’s reign these two struggle; a life-and-death struggle. As the duke sinks, the earl rises; Earl (newly) of Warwick; soon a Duke too, of Northumberland; victor over Scots at Musselburgh, insurgents at Norwhich. Thus Duke meets Duke in the tug of war; Northumberland, once clearly in the ascendant, marries his eldest son to Somerset’s daughter; there seem fire-seeds of generosity in this man, which burst into blaze now and then. The next day, his third son Robert (to be Earl of Leicester, not invisible in this, or in general history,) is married (publicly enough, as appears from Edward’s journal), to Amy, daughter of Sir John Robsart; “after which marriage there were certain gentlemen that did strive who should first take away a goose’s head which was hanged alive on two cross-posts.” All that follows we know, how the gentle lady Jane Dudley is caught away from her oriel window and “Plato his Phaedo,” into a vortex of plot and intrigue, a Queen against her will, against her judgment: how the plain good sense of Englishmen declares against cajolery, even for a Protestant succession: and our blustering Duke rides out through Shoreditch, distrusting his doings and his party; “The people throng to see us, but none biddeth us God speed.” We remember his spasmodic effort to save himself, by setting up Queen Mary’s standard at the market-cross whither he had gone to set up Queen Jane’s; we remember his arrest at King’s College, and that uneasy struggle to win himself a respite by vehemently abjuring all he had vehemently professed; overdoing it even to the last, and impetuously declaring that he deserved to die a thousand such deaths, that he died in the true Catholic faith; and so, “dastard-like, with Peter, he forsook his Master.” Not pitied he, more than his father on that spot forty-three years ago; for he drags down with him to death the innocent, the gifted, the loving and loveable Jane Grey, sweetest saint that ever suffered for sins not her own.

This Duke’s children, by his wife Jane Guildford, of the old De la Warr stock, were

• 1. John, Earl of Warwick, imprisoned with his father, but liberated shortly after, with the seeds of jail fever in him; he died at Penshurst, October 1554.
• 2. Ambrose, Earl of Warwick: “he was a most excellent person, and died without issue.”
• 3. Robert, Earl of Leicester.
• 4. Guildford, who died on the scaffold, with his wife Jane Grey.
• 5. Henry, slain four years afterward at the siege of St. Quintin’s.
• And two daughters,—Lady Mary Sidney, and Catherine, Countess of Huntingdon.

Sir Philip’s father’s genealogy has no names in it so eminent for good or ill as some we have touched upon. There was a William de Sidne, an Angevin friend and servant of our Angevin King, Henry II.; and there was a William Sidnei, sprung lineally from him,—a Flodden-hero, who received knighthood from Henry VIII., and the manor of Penshurst in Kent from Edward VI. He has issue, four daughters,—

• Anne, Lady Hungerford; a daughter of whom (Sir Philip’s first cousin) marries a blue-blooded Castillian, Duke of Feria, of many and sounding titles.
• Lucy, Lady Harrington.
• Anne, Lady Fitzwilliam, ancestress of at least one man not immemorable,—George Gordon, Lord Byron.
• Frances, Countess of Suffolk.

And one son—Henry Sidney, the father of Sir Philip, one of the noblest to the many noble gentlemen of that



age, the young prince’s playfellow, the young king’s dearest friend. He is one of the four gentlemen of the bedchamber (another being William Cecil) ; he is “the most compleat young gentleman of the court;” being knighted, (no empty title in those days,) he marries the lady Mary, the great Duke’s daughter; for knighthood raises a man to the level of the highest. But troublous times are at hand; the boy-king dies in his friend’s arms. Sir Henry is in no mind for plotting; he retires, full of sad thought, with his young wife, to the beech-woods of Penshurst. His friend and king is gone; those nearest to him are engaged in an unlawful struggle, which cannot end but in failure and destruction; his allegiance, as a true Christian man, is due to one whom he can scarcely regard but as an enemy to the true Christian faith. They can do nothing but sit still and wait, though with heavy heart, they two; and as messenger after messenger comes in, like those who burst upon Job, each with his freight of dolorous tidings, what wonder if the gentle Mary’s heart sank utterly within her, if she resigned, as for ever, all thought of this world’s happiness? Her father put to an ignominious death; her noble young brother, and that sweet sister-in-law, whom she has but lately taken to her love: these are heavy blows indeed; but she has a brave heart; her stay is in God, and her help in tending that sick brother, John, who has come to them from prison, as a brand plucked from the burning; alas! only to smoulder slowly away, instead of being caught in sudden blaze. Other hope too she has,—to be better fulfilled; and, in these dull November days, God cheers her with a son, a richer and dearer blessing than aught He has taken away. To her children, her husband, and her God, life shall henceforth be given. The mischance of sickness has “cast a veil over her excellent beauty,”* the mischance of history over her gaiety of heart, and the world, with its critic sneers, is not for her. Yet is she no ascetic, “By nature of a large ingenuous spirit;” a mother indeed for our Philip, who learns, or inherits, from her that chivalrous sense of duty, that affectionate cheerfulness, that crystal-clear and radiant truthfulness of heart.†

Henry Sidney is respected, even trusted, by the Queen; he is sent to Ireland, two years after her accession, as Vice-Treasurer, and is connected therewith, as Justice, Deputy, Governor (under Mary and Elizabeth), for eleven years: resident there, or at Ludlow, for he is also Lord President of the Marches of Wales—a post more of a sinecure than his Irish one. What he does in Ireland time would fail us to tell. How he routs the insurgent Scots of Ulster—killing James Macconnel, their leader, with his own hand, and thus winning those “spolia opima,” which in all Rome’s history were gained but thrice; how he defeats the O’Molloy and the O’Reilly, and gains the submission of Shane O’Neill himself; how he fortifies Dublin; builds the bridge of Athlone; gives presidents to the remoter provinces; divides Munster into counties; revives obsolete statutes, “to the great good of the realm;” prints the laws and ordinances of Ireland; increases the crown revenues; settles the boundary of the “Pale;” projects a University; invites the Irish chieftains (many of them debased Normans) to his castle, and “reclaims them to clean-living and sobriety,” by a good example; how,



in brief, having found Ireland “ruined by intestine feuds, the Pale overrun by thieves and robbers, the countrymen poor, the soldiers beggarly, loose, and idle, the churches uncovered, and the clergy scattered,” he leaves it (compared with what it was) orderly and peaceful, prospering in Church and State: all this must be read in Collins, and in Fuller, who sums up the whole matter (as is his wont), epigrammatically, in nine Herculean labours. Altogether, this man stands out great above his fellows; patient and laborious to a degree; a much-suffering Ulysses (suffering too from sharp internal complaint); a man of parts, of “sweet delivery,” truthful, dutiful, modest, godly; of even cheerfulness, so that he writes to his son; “Yow degenerate from yowr father, yf yow find not your selfe most able in wytte and bodye to doe any thinge when you be most mery.” He lives splendidly, as a viceroy in Ireland ought to do; spends his patrimony on his queen’s service: dies poor, and is buried, “like Valerius,” at the public expense. He had been summoned from Ireland in consequence of intrigues between the Desmonds and the Ormonds, and, as he stepped on board, he exclaimed with the Psalmist, says Fuller, “When Israel came out of Egypt and the house of Jacob from among a strange people.”

He had three sons :—

• 1. Sir Philip.
• 2. Sir Robert, afterwards Earl of Leicester, and grandfather of Algernon Sidney.
• 3. Sir Thomas.

And four daughters, but one of whom survived him, the noble Countess of Pembroke, “Sidney’s sister,



Pembroke’s mother,”* of whom we shall hear again.

[ To be continued.]

Altogether disbelieving, and reprehending with the strongest indignation, the doctrine upon which so many of the critics of the present day seem to act, however they might shrink from maintaining it in so many words, that the reviewer, by virtue of his office, is superior to the writer reviewed, and knowing full well not only at what an infinite height above me is the poet upon whom I have taken on myself to pass a judgment, but also that a critique upon him, which by any partiality can be called adequate, is utterly beyond my power, it is with the greatest diffidence that I approach my subject. But whatever I shall advance will have been carefully weighed, and will be the result of several years’ almost uninterrupted reading of the Author. Would that every reviewer of a great writer could say as much.

The essay will extend through three numbers,—a length which it is hoped will not appear too great to the reader, if he reflects how great a work it is to criticise a great poet—to be in some sort an interpreter between him and the public. Indeed, as it is, there will be but too good cause for complaint of the criticism attempted here, as sketchy and imperfect. The first part will be devoted to the Miscellaneous



Poems, and The Princess; the second to In Memoriam; the third to the volume last published.

In commenting upon the Miscellaneous Poems, I have the choice of two methods; either to make meagre remarks upon many, or to examine a very few at greater length. The latter appears to me beyond doubt to be preferred. Accordingly, I shall particularize only three; The Lady of Shalott; The Two Voices ; and The Vision of Sin ; in each of which I shall point out and enforce one or more of the principal excellencies of their author. It is surely unnecessary to state that I do not consider these limited severally to the poems in which I shall call attention to them. Let one example suffice. I shall observe upon his melody in The Lady of Shalott; but scarcely one unmelodious line, if one at all, exists in the whole of his works.

No fitter poem than The Lady of Shalott can be taken for illustrating a faculty very desirable, if not absolutely requisite in poetry—painting in words. There is a mysterious sympathy between the different branches of Art, which binds them all into one closely connected whole. There are well-known instances, such as Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci, of men who have united in their single selves the painter, the architect, the sculptor, and the poet. The love of music expressed by poets is far too common to require example. Not that this is what I shall intend when I shall say presently that the great poet is a musician. But not only that; he is also a painter. One of the most remarkable instances of verbal painting is a Tale, which might almost with exact propriety be called a poem—Sintram and his Companions, by De la Motte Fouqué. But not inferior even to the German Romancer is the English poet. I have selected The Lady of Shalott because this pictorial power so pervades it throughout, that almost every new passage paints a new picture. But to the common eye still more striking than any of these are some of the pictures in The Palace of Art and Morte d’Arthur, which, accordingly, I quote in preference, commending the whole of The Lady of Shalott to the reader’s private examination.

• “One seem’d all dark and red,—a tract of sand,
• And some one pacing there alone,
• Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
• Lit with a low large moon.”

• “Or in a clear, wall’d city on the sea,
• Near gilded organ-pipes—her hair
• Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;
• An angel look’d at her.”

• “Or mythic Uther’s deeply-wounded son,
• 10In some fair space of sloping greens,
• Lay, dozing in the vale of Avalon,
• And watch’d by weeping queens.”

The Palace of Art.

• “A chapel nigh the field,
• A broken chancel with a broken cross,
• That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
• On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
• Lay a great water, and the moon was full.”

• “But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
• Clothed with his breath, and looking as he walk’d,
• Larger than human on the frozen hills.”

• “Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge,
• 10Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,
• Beneath them; and descending, they were ’ware
• That all the decks were dense with stately forms
• Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream—by these
• Three Queens with crowns of gold.”

Morte d’Arthur.

I will now explain in what sense I said that the poet is a musician other than as he is a lover of music. There have been those, surely a few only who have despised, or affected to despise, the mere language, whether of poetry or prose, maintaining that the matter is all in all, or at least so entirely principal, as to make the words, provided they are perspicuous, of little importance. Again there are others, perhaps a few likewise, who feel and acknowledge an altogether magical power in language. The generality come between these extremes, affected considerably by verbal force and sweetness, but very far from comprehending the full significance of words. In the second class I would place myself. Much verse do I know with good, even original, sentiments given in lucid and forcible language, to which I cannot yield the name of poetry, though at first somewhat puzzled to render a reason for my refusal, till supplied by Carlyle, who tells me that poetry is song,—that is, that poetry requires as one essential the free, spontaneous flow of music. Here I would I could dive deep into the mystery of music, and fully explain why ancient philosophers by musical ( μουδικός) meant good and orderly, show the intimate union they saw or felt between the measured flow of musical sounds and the good actions and peaceful thoughts of a well-regulated life. In default of this, I ask the reader to call back to his memory the sense of moral good which has made him happy while listening to some quiet melody, and with the recollection of this within him, let him read In Memoriam, and examine himself whether its calm refined rhythm does not produce the same feeling of moral satisfaction. Let him not fancy that this rhythm is merely the result of labour and practice, added to what is called a good ear; as little let him imagine that it is addressed to the ear alone; for it is meant through the ear to reach the soul. But surely to prove that music is allied to poetry is superfluous; how closely allied I have not space, if ability, to determine; it were more to the purpose to show that the poems of Tennyson are musical. And here I am perplexed from very abundance of material. His voice is “the richest-toned that sings,” “a lyre of widest range,” or rather all instruments in one. It is gilding refined gold to praise his melody; one might as well gravely enunciate that Shakespeare was a master of the human heart. You cannot open his poems without finding it, everywhere perfect of its kind, whether it be the fairy-like flow of The Lady of Shalott, the dreamy smoothness of the Lotos-Eaters, the measured dignity of Morte d’Arthur, the fiery, sometimes furious, energy, with the most rapid and abrupt transitions of Locksley Hall, that rhythmical perfection of In Memoriam, which I am really at a loss to characterize, except by saying that it seems to me the very maturity of a power of versification unequalled even before, “moulded in colossal calm,” or lastly, the superlative sweetness and softness of that already oft-quoted serenade, “Come into the garden, Maud.” I am averse to the easy practice of making quotations, but, as I have chosen The Lady of Shalott as a sort of text to which to append my observations upon Tennyson’s versification, a few passages from it may not only be allowed, but looked for. I give them without any comment.

In The Two Voices I shall particularize only the union of intellect and feeling which, as it is one of the most essential qualifications of poetry, so it distinguishes many of Tennyson’s longer poems in the highest degree. Indeed if I were to select that which I think most excellent in him, I should have little hesitation in choosing this. In his smaller poems, from the very nature of the case, there is often little room for it, or rather it would be entirely out of place; but in The Palace of Art, The Two Voices, The Vision of Sin, In Memoriam, (I name only some of his very greatest; but the list might easily be enlarged,) some of the most important and most difficult questions of life are discussed with an intellectual keenness and accuracy only to be expected from a philosopher, yet with all the melody, warmth and deep feeling of the greatest of poets. Mere philosophy, whether physics or psychology or metaphysics, is fit only for prose works, professedly and openly philosophical: there is something essentially prosaic in it; its chief requisites, precision, logical order, freedom from metaphor, the employment of the intellect alone, these, if not separately, at least when united, are altogether alien to poetry; and verse, in which philosophy is philosophically treated, has no more claim to rank as poetry than the Ethics of Aristotle, or the Second Book of the Novum Organum, if put with as little violence as possible into metre. But philosophy, poetically treated, true philosophical poetry, the great problems of life handled at once with intellectual subtlety and warmth of feeling, I regard as the highest kind of poetry of all; nay, it may be I am blinded by love, but I cannot help looking upon it as the highest effort of human genius. Uniting the interest of the subject themselves,—acuteness of reason and strength of feeling,—the wonderful magic of language,—the equally wonderful magic of rhythm, drawing and painting to the imagination,—so coming home at once to the souls, the minds, the hearts, the ears, eyes and fancies of men, it seems to me to have a grand comprehensiveness of beauty, which no other work of man comprises. I say advisedly it seems to me; for I know well that to one man one thing seems, and is, greatest, and to another man another thing; that to the man of science there is nothing so great as science, to the painter nothing so noble as pictures, to the musician nothing so deep and beautiful as music. So let it be; for truth and beauty, though of absolute certainty, are of infinite range; so that, though because of our fallen intellect there is now no one mind that can take in all knowledge and all beauty, yet beauty and truth can embrace all intellects and all tastes.

The Two Voices would itself afford an ample subject for a review; and indeed not only admits of, but requires, one; but my limits prevent me from saying at the present more than this, that I place it the highest of the Miscellaneous poems,—surpassed even by In Memoriam only by the latter being of greater length.

The Vision of Sin, beside being, as its name imports, a vision, is also an Allegory. A few words therefore about poetical Visions and Allegories in general, and Tennyson’s handling of them in particular, will be necessary before I enter more in detail upon the poem itself.

A poetical Vision, as it is most difficult for the poet to employ, so is it not easy for the critic to describe what it is. Whatever it may have in common with the dreams of sleep, it has so much distinct from them that it is upon no account to be classed simply among them. Two characteristics alone, its continuity and sequence, are sufficient to distinguish it from them.



But that it has much in common with them is equally plain, as in the following instances, the first from The Vision of Sin:

• “And I thought I would have spoken,
• And warned that madman, ere it grew too late,
• But, as in dreams I could not”—

The second, from A Dream of Fair Women:

• “With that sharp sound, the white dawn’s creeping beams,
• Stolen to my brain, dissolved the mystery
• Of folded sleep.”

though it is worthy of notice that this is the only passage in that poem which contains unmistakeably any feature peculiar to sleeping dreams.

On the other hand the continuity and sequence point to a day dream, the Vision of Inspiration, which poets really see, even in these later days. But whatever is its nature, it has been by universal consent conceded to the poet, though it has proved one of the most unmanageable and perilous of all his instruments. Young poets are constantly taking it in feeble and unskilful hands to their own hurt. Alas, their dreams are too often of men neither waking nor sleeping, nor indeed in any other state which the rest of the world knows of. But in nothing is Tennyson more felicitous than in his treatment of visions. Consistent, significant and beautiful, they yet so remind the reader of his own dreams as to convince him that the poet writes from experience. His narration of actual dreams is exact. I give a few examples.

• “Till now at noon she slept again,
• And seem’d knee-deep in mountain grass,
• And heard her native breezes pass,
• And runlets babbling down the glen,
• She breathed in sleep a lower moan,
• And murmuring, as at night and morn,
• She thought, ‘My spirit is here alone,
• Walks forgotten, and is forlorn.’
• Dreaming she knew it was a dream;
• 10She felt he was, and was not there.”

Mariana in the South.

• “And then to bed, where half in doze I seem’d
• To float about a glimmering night and watch
• A full sea, glazed with muffled moonlight, swell
• On some dark shore just seen that it was rich.”

The Princess.

• “When in the down I sink my head,
• Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath;
• Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death
• Nor can I dream of thee as dead:

• I walk as ere I walk’d forlorn,
• When all our path was fresh with dew,
• And all the bugle breezes blew
• Reveilleé to the breaking morn.

• But what is this? I turn about,
• 10I find a trouble in thine eye
• Which makes me sad I know not why,
• Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:

• But ere the lark hath left the lea
• I wake, and I discern the truth,
• It is the trouble of my youth
• That foolish sleep transfers to thee.”

In Memoriam.

But The Vision of Sin is also an Allegory. Allegories are perhaps a still more dangerous instrument of poetry than Vision. For beside the difficulty of treating them, there is something particularly unsatisfactory in the knowledge that you must not rest in the story, but must convert your flesh and blood men and women, into abstractions, into principles and emotions, into virtues and vices. Human nature loves and delights in the personal, and shrinks from the abstract; and especially poetry shuns abstractions, and holds close to persons. It is this very love of the personal that makes poets write allegories; but the reader is strongly tempted to get rid of the abstractions altogether, and turn the allegory into a mere tale. And it is as moral stories that The Faerie Queen, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and The Ancient Mariner are read for the most part. Fortunately some of their great lessons are so entirely on the surface, that he who runs cannot help but read. Certainly few care to enter minutely into the details, to find the moral bearing of this fact and that fact. For the interpretation



of an allegory involves the mysterious connection between the outward and the inward, which makes our daily life a marvel and a symbol. That it subsists all perhaps are conscious, though the multitude very dimly and partially; the spiritual meaning of many visible things many understand, but the entire significance of the whole no man can comprehend. However, as it is necessary that the story should be complete in itself, it may happen that parts of it have no immediate secondary meaning. But in some allegories the connection between the primary and secondary meanings is very close, of which I know no apter instance than Poe’s Tale of William Wilson, the story of which is so self-complete that it is possible that many have read it without suspecting that the double of the narrator is his conscience, yet its moral signification is most closely interwoven with its literal; as for instance, to bring forward one out of many, the second William Wilson cannot speak above a low, though distinct whisper, like the still small voice of conscience. And that this union in The Palace of Art and The Vision of Sin is very intimate, is palpable; but how intimate it is this is not so easy to see. I shall give a somewhat lengthy explanation of The Vision of Sin, in which I shall show that particular facts in the story, as the rising of the fountain, have a direct moral signification; if a similar analysis were made of The Palace of Art, I have little doubt that the details of this also would be found to be each immediately symbolical.—As it is against The Vision of Sin, that a charge not unfrequently laid against Tennyson in general, is perhaps most frequently and most plausibly brought, nay, as I have heard many confess that it is wholly unintelligible to them, it may be doing a service to his readers if I offer an explanation of it, an explanation which I cannot positively declare to be the true one, but which is the result of many very careful readings, and much reflection, and which has been assented to by all, and some of them well read in the poet, to whom I have communicated it.

And here will be the fittest place for me to endeavour to answer that charge of obscurity which I regard as entirely unfounded, if not presumptuous. For it does not imply merely difficulty, but unnecessary unintelligibility, the consequence either of ignorance of the subject, or of indolence, or of affectation.

Now, let us first consider what a poet is. Is he a man like ourselves? Has he our thoughts and feelings? Does he speak like common men? Yes, we answer emphatically, yes; it is the very circumstance that he sympathizes with us, that he knows what we think and feel, and puts our thoughts and feelings into language, that makes us so love and honour him; makes us look upon him as a brother and a king. But he does not stop here. The great poet has a mind of such wide range as to comprehend the thoughts and feelings of all mankind; as nothing is too low, so nothing is too high for him; workman and monarch, clown and philosopher, he understands and speaks for all. Who shall dare to attempt to limit his power? Who shall be bold, presumptuous enough to say, “Thus far, but no farther; thou shalt speak to me of things which I can at once understand, of every-day matters, of loves and marriages, of births and deaths; but if thou speakest to me of things beyond me, of things not apparent to the senses, or easily apprehended by the reason, then I will stop my ears, and call thee fool to thy face.” No one surely would dare to use express language so presumptuous, yet in effect this is being said to poets every day. But to such a one I would answer, Who art thou that thou shouldest define the limits of that which thou oughtest rather humbly to receive and gladly to welcome? Thinkest thou that the poet was sent into the world gifted with the faculty divine merely to please men



by descriptions of every-day things? though of a truth this is an important part of his office; but there are other, and far higher parts than this. He sees deeper than other men: he beholds what is not apparent to the senses and the reason, dulled and narrowed as they are in this world of eating and money-making, of hunting after pleasure, and honour, and power. And it is his peculiar and highest office to teach men this knowledge, and to keep alive in their hearts the apprehension and love of spiritual things. And now an important difference between the parts of a poem to which the word obscure can be applied, is laid open. The obscurity may lie either in the words or in the matter. Verbal obscurity is entirely to be condemned as the genuine mark of imperfect knowledge, unearnestness, or affectation. But very different is the case with obscurity of matter. Here the author is writing down to his reader, and the very nature of the case necessitates obscurity, but mark, obscurity only in the sentiments. The language itself may be accurate and clear at the first glance to one who understands the subject. Of this the best instance that occurs to me is a book recently published, but probably already well known, The Institutes of Metaphysics, by Ferrier, wherein that vexed question, the very cross of philosophers, is treated with a verbal clearness which shines out in most grateful contrast and relief to the darkness of the subject. And this is the case with The Two Voices, The Vision of Sin, the chapters of In Memoriam which are called obscure, and other poems or passages of Tennyson, against which that charge is brought. For his language, so far from being dark and vague, is remarkable for its precision and perspicuity. Ideas, which must have passed across the minds of many men many times, but impalpably and transiently, apparently impossible to be fixed in language, he has put out into plain exact words. Instances of this occur everywhere in his poems, perhaps most of all in The Two Voices, but I will make a single quotation, and that from A Dream of Fair Women.

• “No memory labours longer from the deep
• Gold-mines of thought to lift the hidden ore
• That glimpses, moving up, than I from sleep
• To gather and tell o’er
• Each little sound and sight. With what dull pain
• Compassed, how eagerly I sought to strike
• Into that wondrous track of dreams again!
• But no two dreams are like.”

If, then, any one is inclined to call Tennyson obscure and affected, let him question himself whether he is acquainted with the subject of the poem; and, if he finds that he is not, let him try to master it; and, when he has mastered it, I confidently predict that he will be even amazed to discover how felicitously it is treated, just at the proper length, and in the most forcible and precise language.—I will now give the promised explanation of The Vision of Sin. It is an Allegory, with a high moral purpose, to set forth the punishment of sensuality and pleasure-seeking.

• “A youth came riding toward a palace-gate;
• He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown,
• But that his heavy rider kept him down.”

Such of my readers as are acquainted with the Phædrus of Plato, will at once call to mind the myth of the two winged steeds and the charioteer, by which Plato represents the human soul, and will easily interpret the modern poet. For the information of such as are unacquainted with that dialogue I translate the following passage.

“Let the soul be likened to a nature composed of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now all the horses and the charioteers of the gods are both themselves good and of good descent, but the rest are of a mixed quality. And in the first place with respect to us, it is our guiding principle that drives the pair of horses; in the second place, of these horses, the one is good and noble,



and of like descent, the other is the opposite and of the opposite descent.”

I need now scarcely say, that these horses represent severally the good and the bad inclinations of our nature, while the charioteer is the guiding principle, which Plato would have called reason, but which perhaps we should rather call conscience. In the passage in The Vision of Sin there is but one horse, the spiritual part of man, “with wings, that would have flown, But that his heavy rider,” by which we are to understand the carnal desires, the body, “kept him down.” “And from the palace came a child of sin”—a temptation or a tempter,

• “Who took him by the curls, and led him in,
• Where sat a company with heated eyes,
• Expecting when a fountain should arise.
• A sleepy light upon their brows and lips—
• Suffused them, sitting, lying, languid shapes,
• By heaps of gourds, and skins of wine, and piles of grapes.”

A sated party of pleasure, waiting for the feeling of satiety to pass away; for it is that which is signified by the rising of the fountain. Then follows a scene of voluptuousness, which I doubt not every reader will now easily make out for himself, and in which I will draw attention to one thing only, the exquisite description of the music, partly under the terms of form and colour, asking him to bear in mind what I said before about the union of the arts.

But now a change comes over the dream:

• “And then I look’d up toward a mountain tract,
• That girt the region with high cliff and lawn;
• I saw that every morning, far withdrawn
• Beyond the darkness and the cataract,
• God made himself an awful rose of dawn
• Unheeded.”

This last line is perhaps the most strange and difficult in Tennyson; but I propose the following interpretation with little hesitation. The “awful rose of dawn” signifies primarily the red morning; in an extended sense the course of external nature, which goes on the same, day after day, despite of the wickedness of men, bearing silent testimony against them, but unheeded. And, indeed, it is one of the strangest things in this strange world how the universe silently fulfils its course, for a time, and that often no short one, taking little or no heed of man, neither of his good nor his evil deeds, neither of his joys nor his sorrows, so that patience is the virtue most required of the good, audacity the sin most to be feared by the bad. For a long time—for long, long years, sometimes, but not for ever,—“Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.” And, meanwhile, “A vapour, heavy, hueless, formless, cold, Comes floating on for many a month and year, Unheeded,” as the unspoken witness of the red dawn. This is the gradual coming on of old age, unnoticed amid the pleasures of youth. The dream is broken—and linked again. “A grey and gap-toothed man, as lean as death,” the youth of the former part of the poem, “rides slowly across a withered heath,” and no longer to a palace, but to “a ruined ruin.” I earnestly wish that I had space to examine minutely the speech of the old man; I can particularize one characteristic only, its bitter, intense misanthropy, and must entreat the reader to study it most carefully for himself. For the present, I content myself with saying, that the soul,—that soul, which in the young man was winged, “and would have flown,” is now in the old man utterly debased, —even its faculties of enjoyment are lost, except the very lowest,—it can comfort itself with only this, “Eat and drink, for to-morrow thou diest,” and with hating and cursing its fellows. Then comes “a further change; Once more uprose the mystic mountain range,” and below is beheld the spectacle of the unceasing work of life and death, and the old man has passed through death from



the life of time to the life of eternity, and stands for judgment. Three voices plead, two for, one against, him. The first says, “Behold it was a crime Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time.” His wickedness was a sensuality that wrought its own punishment, by destroying, as time went on, the faculties of sensual pleasure. But another, a sterner, voice replies, “The crime of sense became The crime of malice, and is equal blame.” Sensuality became deliberate hatred of his fellow men, and is worthy of equal punishment. Then the third speaks, “He had not wholly quenched his power; A little grain of conscience made him sour.” He had not quite destroyed the spiritual life within him, and what is not destroyed may yet spring up and flourish; and it was even this remnant of conscience that made him hate himself and his fellows for their wickedness. What shall be his sentence? “Is there any hope?” And from that high land pealed an answer, but in a tongue no man could understand,

• “And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn,
• God made himself an awful rose of dawn.”

Judgment had been given, but what it was no man knew, neither would the calm and silent universe, bearing, as of old, its unheeded testimony, reveal aught.

Such is the interpretation I venture to offer of this mysterious poem; a poem which, if I understand it rightly, I do not hesitate to call one of the very finest ever written. If my explanation is incorrect, I have but to beg the reader’s indulgence on account of its acknowledged difficulty.

The quality which I proceed to notice may not improbably have escaped many readers. In grace, in softness, in tenderness, Tennyson has never been surpassed. This would be very generally admitted; but his capacity for satire appears to have attracted little attention. This is strange; for it is exhibited most prominently in several poems,—passionate and fiery in Locksley Hall,—light and playful in The Princess, where the Prince describes their half-day’s round among the female professors, from which they “issued gorged with knowledge,”—as also in “The Brook,” where old Philip praises “his plough, his cows, his hogs, his dogs,” “his hens, his geese, his guinea-hens,” and, after telling a tale about nothing, full of “hows,” concludes with the whole “coltish chronicle,”—strong and bitter, and with a one-sided truth, in Maud. But it is in the speech of the old man in The Vision of Sin,—though not itself properly satirical,—that this satirical capacity is displayed most strikingly. It is the very utmost concentration of hatred of God, mankind, and self;—a very revelling in self-degradation, joined with contempt and mockery of others— fearful to read, and, as a composition, unsurpassable. It seems to have promised its author the very highest place among satirists, a mournful and doubtful, if not absolutely a bad, eminence; and most happy ought we to regard it that Tennyson was not tempted by that ambition, but beside the poem just analysed, wrote The Princess, and In Memoriam, and a host of shorter poems, which have more than womanly tenderness.

If my criticism has been necessarily fragmentary even upon these three short poems, much more must it be such upon The Princess—longer than all three of them together. I shall first direct attention to the songs, which could on no account be passed over, but shall not attempt, by reason of the small space left me, any comparison of Tennyson, with other song writers—only stating my opinion that he has written the most beautiful songs in the language, and pointing out those I consider the most beautiful of his. Three seem to me to stand out above the rest—all in The Princess, and coming close together, a most



lovely trio: “The splendour falls,” “Tears, idle tears,” and “O swallow, swallow, flying, flying south;” the second the most beautiful of all. The rhythm is wonderful, especially as two of them are without rhyme. As Mendelssohn has written Songs without Words, so these may be called Songs without Notes. All attempt to set them to worthy music seems hopeless—though another, only less exquisite than these, “Sweet and low,” has by a rare good fortune been joined to an air which exactly suits it, seeming its very other half. And equally lovely with this last are the two, “Home they brought her warrior dead,” and “Ask me no more.” And going out of The Princess, surely nothing more is needed than merely to mention a few lyrics, to which the name song may be given: “A Farewell,” “Break, break, break,” “Come not when I am dead,” “The Poet’s Song.”

Farther than this I can comment only upon three points, all connected with and illustrating one another, and all, to a great degree, meeting in one centre, Ida—the poetical aim of The Princess, Tennyson’s treatment of love, and his delineation of character.

Many men, if not the generality, seem to be fond of calling the poet an idealist, somewhat as a term of reproach, and of contrasting him, somewhat to his disadvantage, with practical men. And practical men, according to such, are politicians, generals, lawyers, men of business,—men who can secure the interest, in some cases of others, but if not that, then of themselves. And by interests they understand power, reputation, wealth. And in this sense such men are practical. But there is another sense of the word, a higher, and so a truer sense, in which these men may or may not deserve this epithet—which has then become a very honourable one, a more honourable than which cannot be accorded. For what is the strict meaning of practical? not only its etymological, but its original, and still best and true meaning. Π ραξις is moral action, and a practical man is he who performs moral actions. And here for moral, to adapt a phrase translated from Greek to a Christian age and country, we may fairly substitute spiritual or religious. Who then are the practical men in this sense of the word? Men who can buy cheap and sell dear, gain fortunes, high rank, popularity? clearly not necessarily so; certainly not, if these have been gained at the expense of truth, honour, benevolence—any part of virtue. No, not such men, but men very different; in the highest sense such as St. Paul and St. Augustine—men who discover to their fellows the comparative worth of heaven and earth, and the impolicy—to take a low ground, because worldly men prize themselves for their policy—of sacrificing the former for the latter. These have not all been powerful, honoured or wealthy; but, on the contrary, have been in penury, in disgrace often—sometimes have seemed to find their reward in imprisonment, and scourging, and death. They seem to have taken poor care of themselves; yet were they none the less the most practical men of the earth. And below these, but in a very high, almost the first rank, are poets and their brethren in art, who strive to refine and spiritualize mankind by the love of beauty. They may have their impracticalities; but so far as they aim at raising and ennobling first themselves, and then the rest of the world, so far they are practical. Accordingly we must not be surprised to find a practical end in poems. Indeed I should be inclined to refuse the name of a great poem to any that had not a distinct and well sustained moral purpose. And such a purpose, and that, in the present day, one of the most important, is to be found in The Princess. His object, is the education and position of women, whose salvation, no less than men’s, is to be wrought out not only by the feelings



but in part by the intellect also. I use the terms “feeling” and “intellect” in accordance with a division universally made, and very convenient; though I am prepared to regard them as only two sides of the same, or at least, (and this I positively assert,) as so intimately combined, that in general they both rise and fall together. None knows this better than Tennyson; he has expressed it over and over again—and in The Princess it may be said that he has devoted almost his longest poem to it. Not that he sets forth the mode followed by Ida as the right one; as I have before observed, he manifestly satirizes it as pedantic and superficial—width without depth; but, as is clearly laid down in the last chapter, it is the method only which is to be altered, the principle of extended education is retained. That chapter I most earnestly commend to the reader, as containing the most beautiful, which is also the true, idea of woman—which, when she shall have realized, then will she be that which God created her at the first—the glory of the man, the beauty of the universe.

The number of love poems is legion. “Old song which poet ever singeth, Of which the listening world is never weary,” as Alexander Smith says, whose own poetry is almost solely upon this one subject. And he speaks truly too, as a little consideration will show, with the reasons thereof. And of all poets, I know none whose treatment of love combines so much tenderness, purity, passion, and intellectuality as Tennyson’s. One at least of these qualities shines out in all his delineations,—intellectuality and passion are predominant in Locksley Hall, purity and tenderness in The Miller’s Daughter; these, together with intellectuality in The Day Dream, while the intensest passion burns in Fatima: and so I might go on throughout his poems; but the crowning delineation is in The Princess, which unites them all in a degree I know not of elsewhere, and makes its author, before all others, the Poet of Love.

This, together with the third point, will be made plain, if we examine at some length the character of Ida, who is at once the chief figure and the centre of the love poetry in The Princess. All Tennyson’s persons are brought before us with the true dramatic art which makes us feel and think of them as actual men and women. To select a few out of a vast number in his Miscellaneous Poems, I would instance the hero in Locksley Hall, the speaker and the first voice in The Two Voices, and the old man in The Vision of Sin. Whatever portrayal of character the plan of In Memoriam allows is exact. In the third part of this essay I shall analyze the hero in Maud, and I may now suggest in passing, the persons in The Brook, especially old Philip. But, as might have been expected, it is in The Princess that his dramatic power is best displayed. I proceed to comment upon Ida, merely observing of the others, that they are all drawn, or rather sketched, with the hand of a master. I have before said that Tennyson’s characters are felt as actual men and women; yet I now allow that Ida is an ideal. She is an ideal of woman, as woman was created, as she may yet be in the time of “the world’s great bridal”—the half “of that great race which is to be.” But, though an ideal, she is no abstraction, and is felt to be real and personal as much as any of the many male ideals which have been drawn from time immemorial: the Trojan, or rather Greek, and I might almost say English, Hector, the Scandinavian Odin, the Mediæval Sir Galahad—these are not the less human because no man has hitherto reached their standard; in the long, let us hope great, future, who knows but that equal heroes may arise? And so Ida is a woman, yes, as woman may yet become, with all the purity, softness, and loving tenderness which men assign to woman as her crowning and distinctive, though



not her exclusive, attribute. Woman she is from the very first; not less when lecturing to her female scholars and disdainfully thrusting the male intruders from her college, than when nursing the wounded Prince, and yielding to his love. Her courage and her devotion to her great cause make her at first reject his love and brave the anger of his father and her own, and the war that ensued; but her gratitude and her gentleness, or perhaps something greater even than these, something that already “killed her with herself”—for he had mixed with her girlhood’s dreams made her write,“Still take not his life; he risked it for my own: His mother lives.” With womanly indignation she takes her babe from the friend who seemed so deeply to have wronged her and her cause, “false, false, false;” but with womanly tenderness she cherishes it, and with womanly longing feels it a “pledge of a love not to be hers,” very soon restoring it to the mother. What sisterly affection mingles with her anger and resolution in her letter to her brother! With what feminine pride she promises him immortal renown as the champion of woman! How readily and gladly she opens her college to her wounded brothers and to her wounded lover, who alas! had been the foe that had “bred all this change!” Small praise, it may be said; but soon, almost as readily, though with deep sorrow and the darkest forebodings, with all her “world in secret blackened, seeming blank and waste, and vain,” she flings her doors wide, that all the wounded enemies not less than friends may enter, though all her maidens must be sent home, except those who may nurse the sick! And now, while she herself nurses the Prince and returns his love, surely all can see her woman,—devoted, dependent, loving,—looking to him who is to be her husband for aid and guidance in her great work of reforming half the world. She is the noblest, the sweetest, the most beautiful female character I know in fiction; the very flower of that pure, delicate mind which had already created



the Marianas, Eleanore, Lady Flora, and Lady Clare.

The dancers swept merrily by me on that night of Lady Lacy’s ball eleven years ago, and fanned me pleasantly as they bounded past to the tune of instruments, and there was nothing in all this to make me peevish, and fretful, and morose; yet I stood aside moodily, taking no part in the dancing, nor the talk—and though I asked myself often how it was that I felt so evil-minded on that night, yet I needed no answer, knowing well the reason, that it was because of my cousin Gertrude, and her troop of flatterers, and because she slighted me openly, putting me to shame before all who knew our betrothal; and because I could not help thinking that somehow her love had grown cold of late. And some there were who rated me for my gloomy looks, and pestered me with silly questionings, to which I lent little heed or answer. And all the while Gertrude was hidden from me by a ring of satellites, but her silver laugh and jesting troubled me heavily. “To-morrow,” said I, “I will speak to her kindly and firmly, and if it must be so, release her whatever comes to me.” I had fancied moreover that her father’s manner was shy and altered to me when I crossed him in the Hall; for he passed by me with unwonted coldness, and left the house immediately. Two gentlemen were talking in a low tone to one another, close at hand, but, though I moved to be out of overhearing, I had unconsciously caught the substance of their conversation, earnest and grave—some great failures in the north had followed the strikes, and certain great city houses were said to be deeply involved in the



loss. Why should I, with unreasoning, overleaping thought, so swiftly couple this with that strange meeting in the hall? I cannot tell, only a fear not wholly indefinite fell upon me.

I would leave now; where was the hostess, my firm, most constant protector in all boyish scrapes? in the glance I gave round the room I saw that Gertrude was not there: I was at her ladyship’s side presently, and held out my hand. “So soon, Charlie, you must be ill; upon my word you look so, let me”—“No, dear Lady Lacy, there is positively nothing the matter with me, a slight headache perhaps;” and as I urged this it came upon me indeed quick and throbbing—“my father said he should want me at a very early hour in the morning, and I cannot fail him.” “It is not much past twelve,” she said; “you are not generally so particular about sleep. Poor boy!” I saw she was aware of more than she expressed. A kind look and kinder pressure. “I am sorry I prepared such an entertainment for you, Charlie; good bye.”

Yet I could not go without saying “good-night” to my beautiful cousin, who caused me such secret sorrow, but knew it not. Passing the refreshment room I saw her, as I thought, sitting in the cool, for her face was scarlet with the flush of dancing, and slightly bent, but another step discovered that she was not alone, and what I saw besides I say not: then I passed out straightway into the night, where the snow lay deep upon the ground on that February morning, feeling not heart-broken and crushed as I used to think I should feel, if any great distress fell upon me, but full of animal spirit and strange excitement. There was not a star in all the sky: I was glad there were none to look down with their far-off, cold and restless eyes upon me; but a thick covering of snow-cloud was wrapped about the earth and shrouded it all night long. As I stepped upon the pavement the half-clothed, shivering form of a woman came and cried to me. “Pity, oh! pity, it is so cold, and my child is starving, Sir—no home, nor food for it all this day long;” and all her voice was broken by the chattering of her set teeth in the frozen jaws. Surely, surely it was the good Lord sent this encounter, at the moment when my selfish heart was thinking only of its grief; for when the woman was gone, a deep shame and inward silence came upon me, such, only stronger according to the growth of years, as in younger days had smitten me with cruel contrast when a lean starved face pressed itself into silly flatness against a pastrycook’s window, when I was within. Contrast, why contrast then? did I not indeed know that every day misery walked the gay streets with opulence, and squalor shared the houses with fashion? Ah! but man is very brave in the sunlight—did one ever behold a wraith in the noonday, or see meridian glamour? but the hour and waste of darkness, how are they not phantomed with infinite spirits!

“No home, no food all the day long,’” and yet our dogs are housed and fed! Oh! there should be echo of these words, reverberation deep and hollow, through every happy home at midnight, when the lights are out, and all men are at once alone,—“No home;” “no food.” Is it true? Question the winds that blow over cities at night-time, what voices they bear along with them. Is it enough, oh! good people, to thank God night and morning for home and life?—will it be asked ever at any time, chiefly at one great time, “Where is thy brother?”—will it be answered, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Alas! poor heart of mine, how should I ever comfort it again! already I was changed, even in this brief time. I said within myself, “Since no good sleep can come to me this night, I will walk among the streets till morning, and see the woe of the great city”—and while the words were yet within my mind, I struck upon it unawares.

“Oh! Richard—Dickey, doan’t—mercy! you’ll hurt the child—oh!”— God! the cry that went up shrieking to thy heaven—oh! didst Thou hear it? yet there came down no thunder nor fire, nor did the ground beneath open and consume. She had gone down before that fearful blow, her poor head striking, as it fell, against the projecting window-frame—surely she is dead: three or four men came out of the tap-room at the cry, for it was keen and piercing. I saw that they were drunk, all of them, like the monster who had done this evil deed; he stood leaning against the wall, all unconscious, muttering curses. I was kneeling upon the snow beside her now; it was a cruel sight beneath the wretched glimmer of the lamp-light—her cheek and mouth were full of blood; as I raised her head it flowed over me; presently I think she would have choked in the swoon: her bonnet fell from her to the ground as I lifted her, and her hair, wet with the trampled snow, was long and raven black. I took no heed to the inarticulate gabble round me; I knew the wretch had staggered towards me, making the dark air black with oaths, that his silly, half-witted comrades were doing their feeble best to lead him back, and once my arm received a kick meant for the helpless form it shielded:—but my eyes were upon her countenance trying to trace below the signs of want and famine, the lines of what must once have been tender, well-nigh beautiful.

The noise of the sliding and staggering of their feet was stopped by the swinging to of the door. I followed the direction of her arm to reach the pulse; the hand was very firmly clasping something—both hands; surely not a child, not a child?

“Wot’s up ’ere, Sir?—a woman drunk I ’spose.”

“Oh! policeman, look down here—look at this child.” He stooped and disengaged it tenderly enough for the man. “Why it’s dead, sir, stone dead—but not cold yet; may be she killed it herself a-fallin.” “No, no, no; the man’s in there, in there, her husband, who struck her down.” There was horror upon my face I know, and pride of experience in his voice as he answered, “Why, bless yer, sir, these things ’appens plenty enough; every night pretty nigh.” “See her looked to and sheltered for the night, and from the brute in there.” Then I left money with him, and hurried away.

It began again to snow thickly, coming slantwise against the cheek, so that I was fain lower my head awhile, and let the storm pass by. A dull and heavy sound of the quarters came from time to time from the churches, and at long intervals a traveller would pass rapidly, and, saving this, I seemed already alone in the great streets, yet I knew this could not be; somewhere in desolate bye-lanes I knew there was homeless woe, but a terror of the unknown evil chained me to the great thoroughfares, and I never left them.

An hour more and I was leaning against the parapet of Waterloo Bridge, where I have often stood since then, in dreams; as I have stood once in reality, by another river in another city, watching not the river nor the rush of the rough water, which lay indeed viewless far below, known only by reflection from dim lamps on bridges beyond, but watching the flow of silence and the darkness, as I could not from the narrow streets—darkness and silence infinite, most unlike that we meet on trackless moors, and on high mountain tops, but laden with the pestilence of huddled crowds, and



all the untold horrors of cities. I know not what unnameable horror is borne upon this nightly silence upon bridges—some dreadful dolour, ineffable, mysterious there is in it, which makes the great bridges at that hour, to my thinking, more awful than any place on earth. Where lies the horror? have I read somewhere, years ago, when my little store of reading made fancy doubly dear, and a legend was a thing remembered, did I read a story of self-inflicted death and murder underneath the arches? Only this I know, that all weird perplexity, and strange uncertain horror, and ghastly trooping of multitudinous forms, that crowd and sway and palpitate in shifting gloom, are all, all gathered together here, so that in evil dreams, which kept me nightly company many a long year afterwards, there was, chief of all, an oppressive haunting of my confused sense by a dark swift river, cold and rough and treacherous, far below me, banked on both sides of its limitless shores by a multitude of human beings, who cast forth arms of supplication across the water, while they wept and watched and waited, looking for some deliverance that never came nor would come till the end.

So standing trancedly, gathering in great store of fearful imagination for dreams to come, there fell upon my ear a sound of confused voices from the south side as of people quarrelling, which at times grew shrill and then ceased again, and recommenced. I hurried across the bridge as fast as my feet would bear me, in the snow, towards the direction of the noise, for the intervening space could not be great: turning the corner of the second street, the cries were again distinct, as if a door had suddenly opened, close at hand now; the cries of a young girl uppermost in wild supplication. “Oh! mother, mother, loose me, let me go—I can’t go home, loose me, let me go;” and they were answered by curses and reproaches, and names, hard and bitter. I heard them—the most stained and spotted names that women bear did her mother call her; and the soiled and sullied gaiety of her dress, and the rent and shattered comeliness of her face told a tale, not unheard before: for a moment the girl freed herself from the clenched and tightened hold of the other, and fled down the street. I saw the mother’s face then under the glimmer of the misty lamp,—saw the fruitless outstretchi