Nay, there may be those about us whom we neither see nor name,

Felt within us as ourselves, the Powers of Good, the Powers of Ill, Strowing balm, or shedding poison in the fountains of the Will. Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine. Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.

It is rather the identification of the good with Christ, their Inspirer and their life. Tennyson has shown us his heart, and he has confessed to us his faith, in the "May Queen," where the dying girl says of the clergyman:

He taught me all the mercy, for he showed me all the sin.
Now, though my lamp was lighted late, there's One will let me in,
Nor would I now be well, mother, again if that could be,
For my desire is but to pass to Him that died for me.

The same trust in Christ as a Saviour is shown in his pathetic poem entitled "In the Children's Hospital." There the little child who has prayed to Jesus to help her in prospect of a surgical operation, and has put her arms outside the bed so that he may distinguish her from the other patients, has her prayer answered. The hard-hearted skeptical surgeon

Had brought his ghastly tools: we believed her asleep againHer dear, long, lean, little arms lying out on.the counterpane ; Say that his day is done? Ah, why should we care what they say? The Lord of the children had heard her, and Emmie had past

away.

Tennyson perceives that God's work for man must be met and appropriated by man's work for God. In theological parlance, regeneration must be accompanied by conversion, and there is no conversion without repentance and faith. In "Maud," even an irthly love

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has power to humble a man and to make him long to be more worthy of the object of his affection:

And ah for a man to arise in me,

That the man I am may cease to be.

And in "Guinevere" we see the forgiving love of Arthur for his faithless Queen result in her true repentance and in the awaking at last of responsive love for him whom she had so greatly wronged. The King's forgiveness comes first:

Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God

Forgives do thou for thine own soul the rest.

Let no man dream but that I love thee still.
Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul,
And so thou lean on our fair father Christ,
Hereafter in that world where all are pure

We two may meet before high God, and thou
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know
I am thine husband-not a smaller soul,

Nor Lancelot, nor another.

But Guinevere's repentance follows:

Now I see thee what thou art,

Thou art the highest and most human too,
Not Lancelot, nor another. Is there none
Will tell the King I love him, though so late?
Now-ere he goes to the great battle? none :
Myself must tell him in that purer life,
But now it were too daring. Ah, my God,
What might I not have made of thy fair world,
Had I but loved thy highest creature here?
It was my duty to have loved the highest :

It surely was my profit, had I known:

It would have been my pleasure, had I seen.
We needs must love the highest when we see it,
Not Lancelot, nor another.

There is a defect in this representation, in spite of its heart-moving pathos. Not enough stress is laid upon the necessity of a divine influence to enable us to see and love the highest. That divine influence accompanied and spoke through Arthur's forgiveness, or the guilty passion of the Queen would not have been replaced by contrition. I find a disproportionate stress laid upon the merely human agencies, and too little. stress laid upon the direct operation of the divine Spirit. Hence, in his outlook for the world's future, Tennyson has only hope of a consummation that is far away. He does not see that God can cut short his work in righteousness, and do what commonly takes a thousand years in one day. The naturalistic method of modern science has almost banished from his mind the conviction that Nature and History are plastic in the divine hands, and that the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.

The verses entitled " By an Evolutionist" attribute more of individual progress to old age, than to the Spirit of God:

Done for thee? starved the wild beast that was linked with thee eighty years back.

Less weight now for the ladder-of-heaven that hangs on a star.

If my body come from brutes, though somewhat finer than their

own,

I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice be mute?

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No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne, Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy Province of the brute.

I have climb'd to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the

Past,

Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire,

But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at last

As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height that is higher.

And while the poet expects the future triumph of good in this world of ours, he hardly hopes that the ghost of the brute will be laid for a million years to come:

Forward then, but still remember how the course of time will swerve,

Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve.

Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past.
I that loathed, have come to love him. Love will conquer at

the last.

These last quotations are from the poems of Tennyson's old age. They breathe a more unhopeful tone than the productions of his earlier manhood. The strong faith with which "In Memoriam" closes is somewhat weakened. We may indeed speak of a fourth period of Tennyson's productive activity, and may call it the period of growing despondency. Evolution has come to seem the exclusive method of God, though it has not taken the place of God. The poet's hold upon the personal Love at the heart of the Universe is relaxed. Let us believe it to be merely the decay of natural cheerfulness and the growth of egotistic petu

lance, rather than a renunciation of the faith of his youth. "Locksley Hall" has in it more of truth than "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," for in the former faith indignantly represses doubt :

Fool, again the dream, the fancy? But I know my words are wild,

For I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of
change.
Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day :
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

I believe that these verses have in them not only more of truth, but also more of Tennyson's own faith, than the poems of his later years. Yet it is delightful to find that his last poem expresses anew the confidence of his youth. It is the poet's personal version of Stephen's prayer, "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit":

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!