tiveness with precision, of swiftness of handling with completeness of effect, it reminds you of the later magic of Rembrandt and the looser and richer, the less artfulseeming but more ample and sumptuous, of the styles of Shakespeare. And the matter is worthy of the manner. Everywhere are greatness and a high imagination moving at ease in the gold armour of an heroic style. There are passages in Demeter and Persephone that will vie with the best in Lucretius; Miriam is worth a wilderness of Aylmer's Fields; Owd Roä is one of the best of the studies in dialect; in Happy there are stanzas that recall the passion of Rizpah; nothing in modern English so thrills and vibrates with the prophetic inspiration, the fury of the seer, as Vastness; the verses To Mary Boyle-(in the same stanza as Musset's Le mie Prigioni)—are marked by such a natural grace of form and such a winning 'affectionateness' to coin a word of intention and accomplishment as Lord Tennyson has never surpassed nor very often equalled. In Vastness the insight into essentials, the command of primordial matter, the capacity of vital suggestion, are gloriously in evidence from the first line to

His

Master

ship.

the last. Here is no touch of ingenuity, no trace of 'originality,' no single sign of cleverness; the rhymes are merely inevitablethere is no visible transformation of metaphor in deference to their suggestions; nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous; but here in epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation of experience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique in English, and for all that one can see it is like to remain unique this good while yet. The impression you take is one of singular loftiness of purpose and a rare nobility of mind. Looking upon life and time and the spirit of man from the heights of his eighty years, it has been given to the Master Poet to behold much that is hid to them in the plain or on the slopes beneath him, and beholding it to frame and utter a message so lofty in style and in significance so potent that it sounds as of this world indeed but from the confines of experience, the farthest kingdoms of mortality.

IT

T is to note, too, that the Laureate of to-day deals with language in a way that to the Tennyson of the beginning was

In those early

-unhappily—impossible. years he neither would nor could have been responsible for the magnificent and convincing rhythms of Vastness, the austere yet passionate shapeliness of Happy, the effects of vigour and variety realised in Parnassus. For in those early years he was rather Benvenuto than Michelangelo, he was more of a jeweller than a sculptor, the phrase was too much to him, the inspiration of the incorrect too little. All that is changed, and for the best. Most interesting is it to the artist to remark how impatient-(as the Milton of the Agonistes was)—of rhyme and how confident in rhythm is the whilome poet of Oriana and The Lotus-Eaters and The Vision of Sin; and how this impatience and this confidence are revealed not merely in a piece of mysticism naked yet unashamed as The Gleam (whose movement with its constancy in double endings and avoidance of triplets is perhaps a little tame)—but also in what should have been a popular piece: the ode, to wit, On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. In eld, indeed, the craftsman inclines to play with his material: he is conscious of mastery; he is in the full enjoyment of his own; he indulges in experi

6

ments which to him are as a crown of glory and to them that come after him-to the noodles that would walk in his ways without first preparing themselves by prayer and study and a life of abnegation—are only the devil in disguise. The Rembrandt of The Syndics, the Shakespeare of The Tempest and Lear-what are these but pits for the feet of the Young Ass? and what else will be the Tennyson of Vastness and The Gleam? Lord,' quoth Dickens years ago in respect of the Idylls or of Maud, 'what a pleasure it is to come across a man that can write!' He also was an artist in words; and what he said then he would say now with greater emphasis and more assurance. From the first Lord Tennyson has been an exemplar; and now in these new utterances, his supremacy is completely revealed. There is no fear now that 'All will grow the flower, For all have got the seed'; for then it was a mannerism that people took and imitated, and now! Now it is art; it is the greater Shakespeare, the consummate Rembrandt, the unique Velasquez; and they may rise to it that

can.

D'

GORDON HAKE

Equip

ment.

R. HAKE is one of the most earnest Aim and and original of poets. He has taken nothing from his contemporaries, but has imagined a message for himself, and has chosen to deliver it in terms that are wholly his own. For him the accidents and trivialities of individualism, the transitory and changing facts that make up the external aspect of an age or a character, can hardly be said to exist. He only concerns himself with absolutes the eternal elements of human life and the immutable tides of human destiny. It is of these that the stuff of his message is compacted; it is from these that its essence is distilled. talk is not of Arthur and Guinevere, nor Chastelard and Atalanta, nor Paracelsus and Luria and Abt Vogler; of 'the drawing-room and the deanery' he has nothing to say; nothing of the tendencies of Strauss and Renan, nothing of the New Renaissance,

His