science, and that its promises should flatter his imagination. The "crowning race" is a race

"Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book."

If we were to sleep the hundred years, and wake, our joy would be to

"Wake on science grown to more,

On secrets of the brain, the stars."

It is the promises and results of science which restore to sanity the speaker in "Locksley Hall;" and in "The Princess" the sport, half-science of galvanic batteries, model steam-engines, clock-work steamers, and fire-balloons, fills the writer with a faith that

"This fine old world of ours is but a child

Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time

To learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides."

But Mr. Tennyson's dream of the future is not more haunted by recurring images of scientific discoveries and revelations, than by the phantoms of great political organizations. That will be a time.

"When the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle flags are furl'd,

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."

A time in which

66
"Phantoms of other forms of rule,
New Majesties of mighty States "

will appear, become actual at least; a time in which years will reveal

the

"The vast Republics that may grow

The Federations and the Powers;

Titanic forces taking birth."

But these things are very far off; and this belief, and the faith that the progress of mankind is governed by a slowly self-revealing law, has in one respect a repressive influence on our hopes and our endeavours. He who is possessed by this faith will expect no speedy regeneration of mankind political or social, and will have little sympathy with those enthusiastic hearts whose hopes are founded on their desires, and are therefore infinite. But it is the characteristic of intense passion in many natures not to calculate. “Anger, for example, does not ask for satisfaction in gold or silver; it feels and resents a wrong that is infinite. Love demands the eternal blessedness of the thing loved-it feels, and delights to feel, that it is itself infinite, and can never end;" and so these passions of ours are, as Frederick Robertson has finely said, "outlaws of time and space," uncalculating, disdaining the bounds of the world. And thus the political passion in many, and those some of the noblest natures, is blind to consequences, scorns the limitations of circumstances, and impels to action, even when to the calculating spirit action must appear as inevitable failure. Whether are our successes or our failures, I wonder, the nobler things in life?

Now, from sympathy with these forms of emotion

and action, Mr. Tennyson is precluded. Mr. Tennyson's usual justness of mind forsakes him, whenever he has to speak of political movements into which passion in its uncalculating forms entered as a main motive power. Yet passion of this kind is the right and appropriate power for effecting many things. Mr. Tennyson is not free from an insular self-commendation at the expense of nations, which are animated by a different spirit from our own, not one less noble. It could only be by doing violence to all his instinctive tendencies that Mr. Tennyson could arrive at the truth about so simply heroic a man as Garibaldi. "Yonder," he says (in France)

"Whiff! there comes a sudden heat;

The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,
The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,
The little boys begin to shoot and stab,"

and so on.

Now, I say, that satire is vulgar, because it indicates a deficiency of sympathy, a want of intelligence, and a provincial spirit of admiring and disliking things as they resemble or differ from our ourselves. Mr. Tennyson's appreciation of the strong points of the English character is true and noble; only, a larger mind would sympathize with every honourable form in which the political passion gives itself expression. Mr. Tennyson's ideal for every country is England, and that is a blunder in politics :

"A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,

:

Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent."

That is an excellent verse; but it is nobler to make than to follow precedents, and great emotions and passionate thought soon create a history and tradition of precedents in the lives of both individuals and nations. Mr. Tennyson loves freedom, but it must be

"That sober freedom, out of which there springs
Our loyal passion for our temperate kings."

It is a love

"Of freedom in her royal seat

Of England, not the schoolboy heat-
The blind hysterics of the Celt.”

He has no sympathy with hearts that love "not wisely but too well":

"Love thou thy land with love far brought

From out the storied Past, and used

Within the Present, but transferred

Thro' future time by power of thought."

What Mr. Tennyson has written will always be true for men of a certain character; and to follow such counsel as his will lead them to their highest possible development. But for men of a different character it will be always false and futile. He has never found out those truths which are so happily put by Vauvenargues—“Reason deceives us more often than does nature." "If passion advises more boldly than reflection, it is because passion gives greater power

to carry out its advice."

"To do great things, one

must live as if one could never die."

Mr. Tennyson's political doctrine is in perfect harmony with his ideal of human character. As the ideal nation is one in which the highest wisdom is united with perfect self-government, so the ideal man is he whose life is led to sovereign power by self-knowledge resulting in self-control, and self-control growing perfect in self-reverence. Mr. Tennyson would have the umpire give the golden fruit to neither Here nor Aphrodite, but to Pallas, that we may

"Live by law,

Acting the law we live by without fear."

Self-reverence, self-control, self-knowledge, these are the supreme elements of character in Mr. Tennyson's type of manhood. What is the central point in the ethical purport of the "Idylls of the King"? It is to lead the reader to recognise in such natures as the king's the ideal of human nature. And what is Arthur ? The "blameless" monarch who "reverenced his conscience as a king," throughout the most passionate scene of the poems "sublime in self-repression:"—

"I wanted warmth and colour, which I found

In Lancelot, -now I see thee what thou art,
Thou art the highest, and most human too,
Not Lancelot, not another."

Mr. Tennyson has had occasion to write two remarkable poetical éloges-one on the late Prince Consort, the other on the late Duke of Wellington.

In both,