EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS FREDERIC HARRISON puts Tennyson on a pinnacle by himself as the supreme poet of the Victorian era, on account chiefly of the unapproached perfection of the laureate's style, his sure and neverfailing mastery of poetic diction. In Memoriam is regarded by Mr. Harrison as Tennyson's masterpiece, yet he says that the thirty-two lines of Hamlet's soliloquy "To be, or not to be" contain as much thought as the three thousand lines of Tennyson's masterpiece. Such an admission from so ardent a eulogist recalls Matthew Arnold's saying that Tennyson lacked intellectual power. Mr. Harrison agrees with Sir Alfred Lyall that In Memoriam does not contain a theodicy or a religious philosophy and says that Tennyson had too dubitating a temperament to formulate any scheme of theology. The author of Vastness and Despair was all his life shaken by the enigmas of the Universe, the Infinite, Death, and the pettiness and transitoriness of Life. The poems named indicate a morbid view of life, duty, and religion, and tend to unman and debilitate. The laureate's thinking was too often inconsequent and gloomy and this increased upon him with age. Even Mr. Harrison, who thinks In Memoriam the masterpiece of the greatest of modern poets, says it is long-winded, lugubrious, and unsettling. The Idylls of the King constitute an epic of eleven thousand lines, tame and artificial in places, but strangely fascinating, on the whole marvelously sustained, and deserving of its immense and prolonged popularity. Rizpah is Tennyson's supreme triumph in weird, tragic, and ghastly romance. THE REVIEW aims to make its contributed articles reflect the thought of the church; not of one class or school, but, as impartially as may be, the views of the various classes and schools of thought in our denomination. Such fairness as will be satisfactory to reasonable persons is justly due to varying views. In so large a body as ours the variety of opinion among men educated in different ways, in different parts of this large country or in other countries, and in different decades of a moving age, must be considerable. Occasionally we have been made aware that some contributor or would-be contributor of quite positive views on one side thinks that the other side ought not to be admitted to publication at all, and even, sometimes, that no other side has any right to exist. In fulfillment of the purpose to make the REVIEW represent comprehensively the mental life of the church the editor admits articles with which he partly or totally disagrees. For this reason it is not proper for anybody to say of something found in a contributed article, "The METHODIST REVIEW says"-rather should it be, "A writer in the METHODIST REVIEW says"; and as such articles are always over the author's autograph signature, exact correctness and fairness are practiced only when the name of the author of the quoted saying is given, so that whoever reads the statement may know who is responsible for it. Often there is the possibility that the REVIEW itself is distinctly opposed to the sentiment or opinion referred to. We invite the attention of observant readers to the obvious working of a purpose to exercise fairness and secure many-sidedness in the make-up of the REVIEW. The observer will notice that capable representatives of all classes, positions, ages, sexes, colors, sections, and previous or present conditions have had voice in our pages during the present editorship, which aims to recognize the rights of all entitled to utterance, to secure all-around presentation of important subjects, and to apprise the church of the varied contents of its own mind. A SEA VOYAGE SAMUEL JOHNSON used to say no one but a fool or a madman would go to sea, for being in a ship is being in a jail with the added chance of being drowned. But that rough old man was a very big coward. There is nothing like an ocean voyage, and they miss much who never take one, for in it there are many sources of delight. You have a sense of human power and victory as the splendid vessel cuts her way through the waters four hundred miles a day, and your triumphal progress realizes Mrs. Browning's picture of a huge steamship: "Crushing down the brine Like a blind Jove that feels his way with thunder." Now and then come a flashing sea, the brilliant days, when, between a sparkling sky and "Happy ship Doth rise and dip, With the blue crystal at her lip." Leaning over the stern, you observe that you are going forward, like French history, by revolutions, for a whirling screw down under the waves is pushing you on your way. You note that the ship, like Leviathan, "maketh a path to shine after her, so that one would think the deep to be hoary." She leaves a gleaming track behind; at night a glowing breadth of phosphorescence, by day a path of brightened water smitten pale by the writhing screw, and flung, now like a ribbon of ultra-marine, now like a strip of April grass, along even the blackest and most wintry sea. Few things are more suggestive and impressive than to watch the captain on deck with his sextant at noon asking the sun to give him latitude and longitude, or in the darkness questioning the North Star which, "in its fixed and steady constancy, hath no fellow in the firmament." It is a romance of "White Wings" to walk the tilting deck at night, and look up at the bellied canvas when all sails are set, with the moon shining brightly on them, and the listing masts tracking the sky with their slender tips as if to strike the stars from their places. Watching the waves through long, leisurely hours, you will wonder at the stintless beauty lavished in God's works. A wave, lifted but for an instant on the bosom of the deep, is shattered along its top into flying crystal; its steep front is marbled with falling froth, and exquisite meshes of fading foam are draped like white Mechlin lace down its black shoulders. Another wave, only one of ten thousand millions, in its brief life of half a minute, is crowned with a crest as snowy as Hermon's, inlaid with emerald as deep and delicate as that which tints Niagara's eternal front, and wreathed with a rainbow as lovely as the one God hung above a drowned world, on the vanishing clouds of the ended Deluge, when human history began anew on a clean page. Sing hallelujah while you watch the waves, for this same lavish God can clothe our poor forlorn and tossing souls in everlasting robes of righteousness, and bring us, dressed in beauteous faultlessness, before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy-his, ours, the angels', and our great Redeemer's! The moods of the sea are more fickle than a gambler's fortunes, and sometimes it makes you forget all past and future tenses in the intense present. Sometimes the sun goes down on a glassy sea, as smooth as polished steel, as monotonous as Mr. Labouchere finds Henry James's writings; not a wind equal to a baby's breath; the ocean perfectly quiet save that long, slow, easy swell which is to the sea what the heaving of the bosom is to a breathing creature. Before midnight this universal treaty of peace may be broken by a fierce war of the elements, a fight of Eolus with Neptune, wild winds battling with bellowing waves, while the plunging ship groans under the strain in every part of her frame. A boisterous night on the deep is apt to be sufficiently long and considerably dismal. You lie in your berth and hear outside the roar of the tempest and rush of hissing waves; inside, the doleful noises of tumbling furniture, creaking woodwork, and smashing crockery. At intervals a great wave leaps on board amidships, booms on the deck and crashes against the bulkheads with a sound like the report of a cannon; under it the ship wavers, trembles and staggers like a struck bullock when the butcher's ax crushes in his forehead. You brace yourself in your berth to keep from being pitched out on the floor, and watch boots and shoes and various pieces of baggage go waltzing across and back in the dim gloom. In some staterooms the patent washbowls go to playing like fountains, shooting columns of bilge-water into the air in a way to interest, if not amuse, the occupants. But the longest night comes to an end, and in the morning, if you are sailor enough to rise and dress and go on deck, you behold a magnificent, awe-inspiring and thrilling sight, the ocean in its majesty and fury. The winds scream in the rigging, the spray flies in showers and sheets far overhead, above the highest deck, while on all sides, around the tossed and buffeted and laboring steamer, is one mad, howling wilderness of indescribable tumult and confusion, of heaving hills and sinking gulfs. The ship hardly pretends to go over, goes through instead; puts her prow into every third wave and takes a few score tons of it on board, then sheds it sternward along her decks, until, from scupper to scupper or through open bulkwarks, it washes back into the deep, as the bow rides up the next great wave. Below you, on the main deck, water runs like a mill race up to a man's waist, and safety ropes are stretched in all directions. Now and then a sailor misses the life-lines, when a big wave comes over the bow, takes him off his feet, and rolls him along in its rushing flood until he strikes something to hold by and regains his footing. After the storm is past, the sea, oftentimes for days, runs so high that you journey as if through a hill-country where the hills melt like wax. The mountains have been carried into the midst of the sea, and your vessel goes careering over their liquid ranges. About the time you come to feel so thoroughly at home upon the briny deep that you suspect a drop of old Vikings' blood must be in your veins, and have been so long afloat with nothing visible but sea and sky that you wonder if all the land-world has sunk and gone forever, you sight Fastnet Rock, Cape Clear, the Old Head of Kinsale, your steamer signals Queenstown, and is reported in a few minutes at New York, Liverpool, London, and Paris. IN THE HOSPITAL To be visiting in the same period three inmates of as many hospitals is a considerable reimmersion in the privileges of pastoral life, a humanizing variation from editorial routine, a fresh and softening resaturation with sympathy for the hardness of the human lot. Hospital wards are provocative of thought and feeling, a region of austere yet benign reality, where experience bites the inmost nerve and cuts to the core of life, yet finds something bracing, rectifying, and tonic withal. A wealthy American mother with her two daughters spent several years in Europe. The older daughter, a girl of earnest, eager, and affluent nature, grew weary of walking in a vain show and being disquieted in vain with social frivolities and futilities, in a life of artificiality and make-believe; she grew impatient of prim prescriptive conventionalities and existence caged inside a book of etiquette; she longed to measure off her power on something hard, and to grapple reality with her conscious but unused and chafing strength: so one day she rose up sturdily, flung off her lawns and satins, strode away to the wards, donned nurse's garb, and for two years took the training course in a German hospital. A muscular soul is not content with practicing Delsartean attitudes of repose or with carving the air in calisthenic curves; sooner than that it would choose to be a Laocoön, with a perilous force to strain against for the hardening of flaccidity. An intense craving for reality forced Emily Dickinson to write: "I like a look of agony, Because I know it's true; In the hospital one is in momentary and abrasive collision with |