slipping hopelessly away were his power of moral resolve, and the necessary instinct of not leaving wife and children a burden upon others.

O well for him whose will is strong!

But ill for him who, bettering not with time,
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,
And ever weaker grows thro' acted crime
Or seeming-genial venial fault,

Recurring and suggesting still!

He seems as one whose footsteps halt,
Toiling in immeasurable sand,

And o'er a weary sultry land,

Far beneath a blazing vault,

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill
The city sparkles like a grain of salt.

It may, or may not have been, simple coincidence
that the address to this "friend of his devoutest
choice" was first printed on the very day, October
4, 1802, of that friend's marriage; but it certainly
gives an additional poignancy to the confessions
therein contained. It may never be ascertained,
as I have said, why Coleridge, when he first
admitted the ode into the collection of his ac-
knowledged poems, the Sibylline Leaves, in 1817,
deposed the name of his old friend, omitted the
lines that most significantly described him, and
substituted the vague and unrecognisable name
of "Lady." Should there be letters of Coleridge
still existing which would throw light on the
matter, Mr. Dykes Campbell, or other devout
students of the poet, may yet discover something

1

of interest on the subject. We know that an estrangement grew up between the two friends after these early days. Even had Wordsworth been without his defects (and he was no such perfect thing "), this was inevitable; and this may account for the revised version of the poem which still retained its original name of "Dejection." But more probably, I think, Coleridge desired to conceal from the general reader some of the more painful personal allusions and contrasts discoverable in the original version. Poetically, the ode has not suffered by the change. But as a contribution to the autobiography of one great poet, and a tribute of genuine admiration to another, the poem as first conceived will always have a peculiar interest to the student of Coleridge and Wordsworth.

VOL. II

I

though changes may too easily come upon men affecting their own attitude towards that poetry.

Of course, in one real and most deep sense we are all, as individuals, mourning a private and personal bereavement. And our grief is easily accounted for. No one of those to whom his poetry has been among the greatest blessings of their lives (and such are to be numbered by thousands and tens of thousands) can have failed, though his eyes never beheld the poet, to love him as a dear friend unseen. But apart from personal loss, there still remains a meaning which we understand when we say that the Englishspeaking world, our English race, feels the poorer for this event. It dispirits and discourages us, because we feel that the last of a long line has departed, and we are anxious and uneasy as to possibilities of the future. Are there any other poets, prophets, teachers, of the same rank in store for us? For those who are least anxious, perhaps least able, to analyse and compare, are certain that their instinct does not deceive them when they recognise in Tennyson something different in kind, as well as in degree, from all the many accomplished and musical writers of verse, who in their turn and for their purpose interest and please us.

It is indeed difficult to find the right word that shall define the difference here pointed to. "Originality," "individuality," "distinction," all are inadequate, though all are component parts,

THE DEATH OF TENNYSON

IT may not be quite easy to answer the apparently simple question, what it is that the world loses in the death of a great poet such as he who has just passed away. For our poet was, like Lear, "fourscore and upwards," and we could not have hoped for much, if any, absolutely new fruit of his genius. It is not as when men have had bitterly to reflect, in losing a Shelley or a Keats, a Mozart or a Schubert, that they were burying in the grave not only a fair possession, but "yet fairer hopes," that the voice was mute, and the wondrous imagination numbed for ever, while powers were yet in fullest vigour, or even not yet matured. And still we say it must have been repeated ten thousand times during the last month-that we are the poorer for our loss. Yet Lord Tennyson (one shrinks even now from calling him Tennyson only, and so confessing that he has gone to the majority) has taken nothing away with him of all his splendid work. All that has made us wiser, better, happier, in his poetry is with us still, and nothing can take it from us,