Such triumph over sin and guilt achieve,

And with that help the Wonder shall be seen

Fulfilled, the Hope accomplished.”

Both poets saw that the triumph of good must come out of great tribulation and trial of faith and obedience.

Milton says:

"Good with bad

Expect to hear, supernal grace contending
With sinfulness of man, thereby to learn
True patience, and to temper joy with fear."

Wordsworth says:—

"For if faith were left untried,

How could the might that lurks within her, then,
Be shown? Her glorious excellence (that ranks
Among the first of powers and virtues) proved?"

Meantime, Milton and Wordsworth, two of the greatest minds best able to conceive the vision of an ideal state, through the larger power of their imagination, and to represent it to the world by the skill of their poetic art, both rest on the individual performance of duty in daily life as the only true realisation of the ideal. Milton:

In our best experience he was rich,

And in the wisdom of our daily life."

In 1850, with the first half of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth ended his great, calm life; but the result of his work in gathering the shattered truths which were in the

French Revolution, in showing that God still loves and rules this world, that life is still precious and unspeakably worth living, that the glorious hopes for the world are not lost, but are being accomplished every day in each true worker for his own best elevation and that of others-all this endures, and is the living soul of the present day, giving immortal life to all its best work of every kind. And although some gloomy clouds of unbelief and doubt may darken a little of the clear heaven, other poets, later than Wordsworth, whose names are not yet written in the past history of English literature, are working with Wordsworth in this steadfast faith.

Tennyson, in his "Idylls of the King," brings Arthur back again as the new ideal for the later time; and he shows us England's old hero risen to the higher truths of the growing age. He is still the stainless knight, all that was noblest in the age of chivalry; all this, but more, for we rise out of the past into what we are, but we do not leave it behind. So Arthur of the later day, the pure and gracious knight, "reverences his conscience as his king," fights not for glory but for Christ, cares for the oppressed, sets right the wrong, and when his day of work is ended, and his scheme for the regeneration of the world broken up and destroyed, rests in the assurance that "the old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfils himself in many ways.'

"In Memoriam" teaches the same lesson of hope. Tennyson had lost his friend Arthur Hallam, a young man of rare ability and high character; and now, as far as this life is concerned, it would appear as if death had cut short all his work, and blasted the promise of what he might become. But Tennyson looks beyond this world, and sees the upward growth, which he had loved to mark in his friend, carried onwards still, under conditions more favourable, and attaining a height of nobleness and glory that

could not be reached on earth. This hope, of which faith assures him for his friend, Tennyson then transfers to the world. What is true of one can be looked for in the whole; and he says:

"I would the whole world grew like thee,
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity."

And he rests in the assurance

"That God for ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves."

Nearly fifty years have passed away since Tennyson lost his friend Arthur Hallam, and found hope for life and work in the conviction that not only—

"Transplanted human worth

Will bloom to profit otherwhere,"

but for the coming race on earth—

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all we thought, and loved, and did,
And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit."

This faith he has held through the changing years that have passed since that time; and now again in one of his later poems, "Despair," he shows with terrible power the impossibility of true work, or even of life itself, if we are—

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Trusting no longer that earthly flower will be heavenly fruit."

Another living poet whose work rests on faith in God's love and rule, and is therefore full of hope for the future, is Robert Browning. Much of the truth in his poetry is, perhaps, stored up for the use of coming generations; for while a poet reflects the age in which he lives, he looks

beyond it, and provides for future needs, at the same time leading on towards the better day. Browning says:

"'Tis in the advance of individual minds

That the slow crowd should ground their expectation
Eventually to follow."

And this advance he shows, like Wordsworth, can only be carried on by each one striving to do his duty in the present.

Mrs. Browning, the poetess of the nineteenth century, again teaches, in her great poem "Aurora Leigh," that there is hope for the world's future in God's love, while we do our part-form the noblest conceptions of the very highest ideal, and then work humbly for its realisation :

“And work all silently

And simply,' he returned, as God does all :

Distort our nature never for our work,

Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs.
The man most man with tenderest human hands
Works best for men-as God in Nazareth.'
He paused upon the word, and then resumed:
'Fewer programmes; we who have no prescience,
Fewer systems; we who hold and do not hold,
Less mapping out of masses to be saved.
Subsists no law of life outside of life;

No perfect manners without Christian souls;

The Christ Himself had been no lawgiver,

Unless He had given the life, too, with the law."

Among the living poets there are younger men, not yet risen perhaps to the full height of their powers, of whom the history of English Literature will speak hereafter. When the times need them, these will come forward and do their work, as faithfully and lastingly as our heroes of the past.

CHAPTER XXIII.

SOME PROSE WRITERS OF THE EARLIER YEARS OF

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

WE have seen the influence of the French Revolution over the poetry of the earlier years of the nineteenth century, and how out of the ideas it spread and the lessons it taught have come some of the deeper truths, which are the nourishment of the best work of the present day. We must now see how our great prose writers, those whose writings have laid the deepest hold upon the minds and hearts of their fellow-men, have been as faithful as the poets in seeking to work out the new truth, and to make it a living power in action. When we speak of new truth, we mean truth new to the world of the eighteenth century; for, as we have seen before, all the noble ideas contained in the first aims of the French Revolution had long lain in the very heart of Christianity, unsuspected even by its followers.

As we begin the nineteenth century, the first change we notice in our prose writers is the influence of the revival of literature which was taking place in Germany. The breaking-up of the French influence there was followed by a reaction of strong feeling, and this showed itself often in the exaggerated form of a morbid, sickly sentimentality. Something of this passed into English literature and tinged it for a while, but it was extinguished in the atmosphere of healthy English common-sense. The other influence from Germany we have already noticed, in the love for the free