THE HOLY GRAIL.

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disaster and ruin and red war, the breaking up of the sacred kingdom and enduring sorrow for the land. So the sin against the law of purity wreaks its dreadful stain, not on the sinner only, but on the lives of men and women all around, bringing darkness on the earth, and veiling the face of God.

For long years Tennyson shrank from the theme of the Holy Grail. It was pressed upon him by friends who knew his genius and his sacred passion. Yet he feared lest to weave that quest into his verse should seem to some irreverent. But at last he set himself to that august and prophetic task. And never did preacher of holy things seek more earnestly for consecration than Tennyson ere he wrote the story of the seeking of the Grail. And by the force of his whole manhood all set towards making utterance worthy of his theme, it was given him of God, in spite of Matthew Arnold's depreciation, to touch the conscience of England to the core, and to awaken in our land a new strain of aspiration and of reverence.

How much that is worthy of our deepest study, our loftiest admiration, must we pass by! I think we shall do well to pass to that last thin volume of poems of which the octogenarian poet revised the proofs when already the shadow of death-or for him shall

we not say "the light of death"?was on him, and to the poems that stand towards the end thereof,-"Doubt and Prayer," "Faith," "The Silent Voices," "God and the Universe." These are his final gift to us all. "This book," says his son, secretary, confidant, and biographer, "he felt was his last will and testament to the world, and throughout there are echoes of the different notes he had struck before, and a summing-up of the faith in which he had walked." With reverence then, as in the presence of the dead,—the dead whose death is the passage to more glorious life,-let us often read those four brief utterances which I have named.

And to these let us add the wonderful lines on the Making of Man, in which Darwinian Evolution is made to minister to faith in the ultimate perfection of our

race.

Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape

From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape?

Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages,

Shall not æon after æon pass and touch him into shape?

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade,

Prophet eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on

the shade,

WHAT OTHERS THOUGHT OF HIM. 87

Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric

Hallelujah to the Maker: "It is finish'd. Man is MADE."

Such is some faint outline of the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. I have not dwelt on his exquisite music, nor yet on the stately purity of his loftiest style. Rather I have quoted from those musically ruder fragments in which sound is made to minister to the expression of rugged or fiery thought. But pure was Tennyson in mind and heart as the stately measure of Guinevere or the Passing of Arthur. And, like all the greatest, modest. "I am delighted to know you," was the greeting to him of a famous statesman on first introduction. 66 You won't find much in me -after all," was the simple and sincere reply. But other men in whom was "much," did find much in him. "The

foremost man in my eyes of all his generation," he "realised to me, more than any one else whom I have ever known, the 'heroic' idea," said the Earl of Selborne. "A magnificent man, who stood before you in his native refinement and strength," said Jowett. "I left him," said Palgrave, "with a dim perception that the man was even greater than his work." There was in him, beyond all other elements of attractiveness or power, that commanding charm and impressiveness which belongs to a

man who feels himself ever in the immediate presence of God. Said he to his niece: "I should be sorely afraid to live my life without God's presence; but to feel that He is by my side now just as much as you are, that is the very joy of my heart." And looking up into that bronzed and thought-lined face, she saw that the glory of God was upon it, and that the presence of the Most High indeed overshadowed him.

And so, farewell to our poet,—yes, in a very special sense, surely, the poet of ordinary Englishmen, whatever his ultimate place in the Temple of Fame; more sane and self-controlled than Shelley, nearer to us and more in the world of men than Wordsworth, full conqueror of the more paralysing doubts that never ceased to enfeeble Clough, voicing all the thought, the feeling, and the hope that are noblest in the Victorian age, mighty wielder of the hammer of language, he stands serene on the threshold of the immortal life, and we see the light of God across his brow.

And from such a poet it is not only larger and more generous creeds that we have to learn. He stands before us in his purity and strength, an exemplar of practical life, an inspirer of ethical aspiration, a leader on the path of manly faithfulness. He is one of those to whom it is given to fill us with a longing to be like him.

HIS ETHICAL TEACHING.

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To strike to new harmonies the chords which vibrate still from the strong touch of Shakspeare and of Milton and of Wordsworth is not, indeed, for us. But we can be faithful to the best we know. The sublimest thing in Tennyson is not the harmonic ring of his exalted verse. It is the life-long loyalty to truth and the grandeur of faith that slowly grew therefrom. And so the ethical lesson which he leaves to us all seems to me just this:

Never consent to the suggestion that that is true which the better man within you pronounces false. Never assent to the creed of the orthodox or the sceptic unless to your inward man it seems a verity. When Aubrey de Vere urged him to add a "Paradiso" to "In Memoriam," he answered, "I have written what I have felt and known; and I will never write anything else." Never shelter yourself from doubt under the cloak of other men's creeds. Never consent to deny what you once reverenced as true, while the better man within you in the depth of your conscience holds it true still. Take for God's truth that which harmonises with all the best you know and helps and strengthens you in nobility of life. Live purely, faithfully, humbly, patiently, bravely; and all doubts will solve themselves at last at the roots of