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The "French Revolution."-Sartor Resartus proved Carlyle to be a great literary artist. This title was broadened and confirmed by his historical masterpiece, The French Revolution. Here we see to best advantage what Emerson calls the "stereoscopic imagination" of Carlyle, which detaches the figures from the background, brings them, as it were, close to our eye, and gives them startling vividness. The stupid, patient king, the "lion Mirabeau," the "seagreen incorruptible Robespierre," Marat, the "large-headed dwarfish individual of smoke-bleared aspect,"-not only these chief figures, but the minor ones, a multitude of them, stand out in the reader's memory unforgettably. The larger pictures are equally admirable; the Storming of the Bastille, the Feast of Pikes, the long-drawn agony of the Night of Spurs. Above all, the unity and sweep of the story, reminding us of a play of Shakespeare or of Eschylus, only acted by millions of figures on a gigantic stage, place this with Macaulay's History as the two greatest examples in English of the dramatic portraiture of an era. The smoothness and lucidity of Macaulay's narrative, in comparison with the ruggedness, the deep glooms and sudden splendors of his own, is brought out by Carlyle's humorous exclamation upon reading Macaulay for the first time-"Flow on, thou shining river!"

Carlyle's Service to His Age.-Carlyle poured into the life of his time a stream of intense moral ardor and indignation which broke up the congealed waters and permanently raised the standard of feeling. He united in remarkable degree the artistic and the moral impulses; and he is in this respect typical of the Victorian era, during which, more than ever before, art has been infused with moral purpose.

IV. ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-1892)

Tennyson's Early Life and Poetry.-Tennyson was born in 1809, at Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire. His father was a vicar of the Established Church, holding his living by gift from a large landed proprietor; so that Tennyson was from

birth in close connection with the main conservative interests of England, the church and the land.

The country about Somersby is a typical English country, softly rolling, richly wooded, full of green lanes and quiet streams. Here, and on the sea-coast of Lincolnshire, where the family spent a part of each summer, Tennyson gathered his first impressions of nature, and began to cultivate those powers of observation which, ripening with his years, made him so wonderful an interpreter of nature's moods. Pictures of Lincolnshire landscape, inland and sea-coast, can be traced in the poetry even of his latest years.

At Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1828, he was a member of a remarkable group of undergraduates, called "The Apostles," all of whom attained eminence in later life. Among these his closest friend was Arthur Henry Hallam, himself a poet and a youth of splendid promise. Tennyson had already determined to devote his life to poetry, and had published, in conjunction with his brother, a small volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers. While at Cambridge, in 1830, he published his first independent volume, a group of little verse-studies in melody and picture, including "Claribel," "Mariana," and the "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," which revealed a new music, rich, dreamy, and delicious. In 1831 Tennyson and Hallam made a quixotic journey to the Pyrenees, with the aim of carrying money to the Spanish revolutionists. The project miscarried, but Tennyson found in the scenery of the Pyrenees the inspiration of his "Enone." In 1832 he published a second volume, which showed, in "The Lady of Shalott," "The Lotus-Eaters," "The Dream of Fair Women," and "Enone," a rapidly developing and already exquisite art. In this volume, too, he began, with "The Miller's Daughter" and "The May Queen," his long series of idylls of English life, with which he was destined to gain his widest popularity.

These early poems won for Tennyson the enthusiastic admiration of a small group of young men, with Hallam as leader of the chorus of praise. The critics, however, were differently minded, and greeted the new poet with an outburst of ridicule. Tennyson, now and always intensely sen

sitive to criticism, determined to be silent until he could overwhelm his opponents by a splendid and decisive triumph. For ten years he published nothing. These were years of privation, for the family property was swept away by an unfortunate investment; and they were also years of sor

row.

In 1833, Arthur Hallam, for whom Tennyson had a love "passing the love of women," died suddenly at Vienna. This tragic loss threw Tennyson back upon the deeper problems of human life and destiny. In the struggle to relay the shaken foundation of his existence, his nature grew strong; his work took on a lofty seriousness of tone and a new depth of meaning. He worked away, at his bachelor lodgings in London and with his family in the country, until 1842, when his long probation was over, and he was ready to lay the fruit of his toil before the world.

Tennyson's Triumph; The Poems of 1842.-The two volumes which appeared in 1842 contained the best of his previously published work, jealously revised, and many new poems of maturer power. These volumes took the critics and the world by storm. The range and variety of work in them was extraordinary. Almost every province of poetry was touched upon, from the lyric simplicity of "Break, Break, Break," to the largely moulded epic strength of "Morte d'Arthur." The series of idylls and eclogues picturing English home and country life, and pervaded by the atmosphere of familiar affections, was increased by such poems. as "The Gardener's Daughter," "Dora," "Lady Clare," and "The Lord of Burleigh." "Ulysses," in which Tennyson gave a magnificent new wording to an old legend, deals with the closing episode of the wandering hero's life. The picture of the aged Ulysses, determined to employ the remnant of his days in pushing out into the unknown waters of the West, rather than "rust unused" in barren Ithaca, was an outgrowth, Tennyson has told us, of his own need of taking heart and pushing forward, after Hallam's death. The new seriousness of the poet's mind, induced by the calamity of his loss, is shown also in such poems as "The Two Voices" and "The Vision of Sin." In the first we are shown the struggle of a despairing mind, as it beholds the misery of

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life, and questions whether or not it shall take refuge in selfdestruction. The second touches upon a more awful subject, "the end, here and hereafter, of the merely sensual man.' In "Locksley Hall" Tennyson infused into a story of broken love, a story in its main features as old as poetry itself, ideas drawn from recent discoveries of science, visions of the "increasing purpose" which runs through the ages, by which "the thoughts of men are widened." In the poems "Of Old Sat Freedom on the Heights," and "Love Thou Thy Land," Tennyson made a declaration of his political faith, in which a stern and ardent love of freedom was mingled with a veneration for old institutions, a distrust of violence and revolution. Finally, the 1842 volumes displayed Tennyson's gift of pure song, wonderfully refined and deepened during this ten years' silence, in such poems as "Move Eastward, Happy Earth," and "Break, Break, Break." The latter, "made in a Lincolnshire lane at five o'clock in the morning between blossoming hedges," is as moving and lovely a lyric as had been written in England since the age of Elizabeth.

Tennyson's Later Life and Poetry. In 1847 appeared The Princess. This was followed in 1850 by In Memoriam, begun seventeen years before, soon after the death of Arthur Hallam, whose memory it celebrates. In Memoriam made Tennyson's fame and material prosperity secure. In the year of its publication, Wordsworth, who had been poet laureate, died, and Tennyson took the laurel. A government pension enabled him to marry Emily Sellwood, to whom he had been engaged for many years. They settled at Farringford, in the Isle of Wight. Here, and at Aldworth, in Surrey, Tennyson lived for the rest of his life, retired from the world, but constantly binding himself by his work closer with the thoughts and affections of all English-speaking people. The most important landmarks of the long literary life still before him were: Maud (1855); Enoch Arden (1864); The Idylls of the King (begun with "Morte d'Arthur" before 1842 and completed in 1872); a series of dramas including Queen Mary, Harold, Becket, and The Foresters; a splendid volume of Ballads (1880), including "The Revenge," "The Defense of Lucknow," and "Rizpah"; and such striking single poems

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