inspiring character on the eternally momentous themes of life, death, and immortality. The work was published in 1850, and it at once challenged the admiration of the world for the perfection of its art, no less than for its high contemplative beauty. This was the year when Wordsworth passed to the grave, and Tennyson, in his room, was given the English laureateship. In this year, also, we find him happily married to Emily S. Sellwood, a lady of Berks, to whom the poet had been engaged since 1837. With his bride he took up house at Twickenham, near London, where his son, Hallam Tennyson, was born in 1852. In the following year he removed to Farringford, on the Isle of Wight, which was to be his home for forty years, and where, as his son tells us, some of his best-known works were written. Here, in 1854, his second son, Lionel, was born, whose young life of promise was terminated by jungle fever thirty-two years later on a return voyage from India, -all that was mortal of him finding repose in the depths of the Red Sea. To complete the chief incidents in the poet's personal career, we may here record that while Tennyson acquired another home at Aldworth, Surrey,-where he died Oct. 6, 1892, followed some four years later by his wife, — his happiest days were spent at Farringford, the pilgrimage place of many eminent worshippers of the poet's muse, where was dispensed an unostentatious

but open-handed and genial British hospitality. It should be added that, besides the perquisites which attach to the office of the Poet Laureate, Tennyson was given from 1845 a pension of £200 ($1000) and that, while in 1865 he refused a baronetcy, in 1884 he accepted a peerage, and had the honor of burial (Oct. 12, 1892) in Westminster Abbey.

We now revert to the poet's early, or, rather, to his middle-age, creative years, and to a résumé of his principal writings, with a brief, running comment on his message and art. In 1847, three years before he became Laureate, he published "The Princess," a charming narrative poem in blank verse, which, though it abounds in fine descriptions and has an obvious moral in the treatment of the theme, the woman question of today,- - is inherently lacking in unity and strength, as well as weak in the depicting of the characters. In later editions the poem was amended in several faulty respects, and was especially enriched by the insertion between the cantos of many lovely and now familiar songs, which serve not only to bind together the whole structure of the poem, but to enhance and enforce its high moral meaning. Any analysis of "The Princess is here deemed unnecessary, since it must not only be familiar to most readers of the poet's works, but familiar also in the varied annotated editions of such editors as Rolfe, Woodberry, and Wilson Farrand.

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Familiar, it is believed, also, that it will be to Tennysonian students in the "Study of the Princess," with critical and explanatory notes by Dr. S. E. Dawson, of Montreal (now of Ottawa, Canada), an able commentary which received the approval of Lord Tennyson himself, and elicited from him a highly interesting letter to the author on points in the poem either misunderstood or not discerningly apprehended by other critics and reviewers. The purport of the poem, it may be said, however, is to frown upon revolutionary attempts to alter the position of women, of scholastically be-gowned and college-capped dames, who would seek by other than nature's ways to put the sex upon an equality with man, while repressing their own individuality, doing violence to their maternal instincts, and trampling upon their "gracious household ways.” In the handling of the "medley" Tennyson brings into exercise not only his far-seeing powers, which were greatly in advance of his time, but his gifts of raillery and humor, especially in the early divisions of the poem, as well as his high, serious motives in the moral lessons to which he points in the later cantos, where he aims at the elevation of women in correspondence with the diversity of their natures, for, as he himself says, "Woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse." His ideal of perfect womanhood he would attain through the awakening power of the affections and the trans

forming power of love, rather than by ignoring the difference of physique, founding women's universities, and becoming blue-stockinged high priestesses of learning. Of the medley of characters in the poem, poetprinces in disguise at the college, violet-hooded lady principals,

"With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,

And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair,"

it is Lady Psyche's child that is the true, effective heroine of the story, as Dr. Dawson aptly points out. "Ridiculous in the lecture room, the babe in the poem, as in the songs, is made the central point upon which the plot turns, for the unconscious child is the concrete embodiment of Nature herself, clearing away all merely intellectual theories by her silent influence." This is the explanation, then, of the appearance of the babesymbol of the power and tenderness of Nature - in critical passages of the poem, as well as in the unsurpassably beautiful intercalary songs, for it is the child that enables the poet to soften the Princess's nature toward the Prince, and to effect the reconciliation between the Princess and Lady Psyche, while imparting beauty as well as high meaning in the recital of the incidents and development of the tale.

"In Memoriam," as we have stated, appeared in 1850, and was unique in its appeal to the mind of the era as a stately meditative poem on a single theme, — the