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He will not mourn for any over-much, although the fame which he predicted to his friend is quenched by an early death :

"The fame is quench'd that I foresaw,

The head hath miss'd an earthly wreath;

I curse not nature, no, nor death;

For nothing is that errs from law."

Even the thought of the foul corruption of the grave is not insupportable :

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For changes wrought on form or face;
No lower life that earth's embrace

May breed in him, can fright my faith.
Eternal process moving on,

From state to state the spirit walks;

And these are but the shatter'd stalks,
Or ruin'd chrysalis of one."

It is only when the doubt of a beneficent order of the world cannot be put away-it is only when (on the suggestion of some facts of geology) nature, "red in tooth and claw with ravine," seems ruthless alike to the individual and the species—that the voice of the mourner grows wild, and it appears to him that his grief has lost its sanctity, and wrongs the quiet of the dead.*

Mr. Tennyson finds law present throughout all nature, but there is no part of nature in which he dwells with so much satisfaction upon its presence as in human society. No one so largely as Mr. Tennyson has represented in art the new thoughts * In Memoriam, lx. lxi.

and feelings which form the impassioned side of the modern doctrine of progress. Mr. Tennyson is for ever haunted by "the vision of the world, and all the wonder that will be." But let it be observed, his not those of the Radical

hopes and aspirations are or Movement character. He is in all his poems a Conservative-though a liberal one. Let me illustrate the feeling of Shelley in contrast with that of Mr. Tennyson with reference to this idea of progress. In the year 1819 Shelley believed that England had reached almost as low a point of degradation as was possible :

"An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn-mud from a muddy spring,-
Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,-
A people starved and stabb'd in the untill'd field,—
An army which liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,-

Religion Christless, Godless, a book seal'd;

A Senate-Time's worst statute unrepeal'd."

This was what Shelley found in England forty-nine years ago. Yet did he despair? No: all these things

"Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day."

Shelley was inspired with an ardour for reform, which accounts for some extravagances of his own life, and which appears as a ruling passion in many of the

dramatis persona of his poems-in Lionel, in Lyon, in Cyntha, and others. But how did Shelley dream

that the regeneration of human society would come? Bursting forth like a glorious phantom-as the result of some bright, brief, national struggle; as the consequence of the apparition of some pure spirit, at once a poet and a prophet, before whose voice huge tyrannies and cruel hypocrisies would go down as piled-up clouds go down ruined and rent before a swift, pure wind; in some way or other which involved a catastrophe, not according to the ordinary laws of nature.

Now Mr. Tennyson's doctrine of progress, which he has absorbed from the moral and intellectual atmosphere surrounding him, is widely different. No idea, perhaps, occupies so large a place in his poems as that of the progress of the race. This it is which binds together the beginning, middle, and end of "Locksley Hall." This it is which suggests the apology for the random fantasies of the "Day-Dream." This it is which supplies the tempted with a weapon of defence, and the tempter with a deadlier weapon of attack in "The Two Voices." This it is of which Leonard writes, and at which old James girds in "The Golden Year." This it is which gives a broad basis of meditative thought to the "Morte d' Arthur," and makes it more than a glorious fable. This it is which is the sweetness of "The Poet's Song," that made the wild swan pause, and the lark drop suddenly to earth. This it is which forms the closing prophecy of "The Princess," and the full declaration

of the poet's faith. This it is which is heard in the final chords of “In Memoriam," changing the music from a minor to a major key. And the same doctrine is preached from the opposite side in the "Vision of Sin," in which the central vice of the base or sensual heart is represented as hopelessness with reference to the progress of human society:-

"Fill the can and fill the cup;

All the windy ways of men

Are but dust that rises up,

And is lightly laid again."

But in all these poems throughout which the idea of progress is so variously developed, and brought into relation with moods of mind so various, the progress of mankind is uniformly represented as the evolution and self-realization of a law-it is represented as taking place gradually and slowly, and its consummation is placed in a remote future. We "hear the roll of the ages." The "increasing purpose" runs through centuries; it is "with the process of the suns" that the thoughts of men are widened. It is when we should have slept through many decades and quinquenniads that we might wake to reap "the flower and quintessence of change."

"For we are Ancients of the Earth,

And in the morning of the times."

It is because millenniums will not bring the advance

* The same form of unbelief obtains a similar expression in "In Memoriam;" the utmost of despair being indicated by the appearance of Time, not as a builder of solid structures, but as a maniac scattering dust. In Mem. xlix.

of knowledge near its term, that the tempted soul in "The Two Voices" feels it a paltry thing to watch the spread of intellectual light for the poor thirty or forty years of a lifetime. It is "in long years" that man and woman shall grow to the full-grown man and woman, till at last they

"Upon the skirts of Time

Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers.

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Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm :

Then springs the crowning race of humankind."

And if this crowning race found a type in the lost friend of the "In Memoriam," it was a type which appeared before the times were prepared for such men, so that God took him to Himself—

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Apart from the growth of the individual, this golden age to which the poet looks forward, the coming of which he sees shine far-off, is characterized in his imagination chiefly by a great development of knowledge—especially of scientific knowledge; this first; and, secondly, by the universal presence of political order and freedom, national and international, secured by a vast and glorious federation. It is quite in harmony with Mr. Tennyson's feeling for law that he should be much impressed by the successes of

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