A METRICAL ESSAY.

[EXTRACT.]

And, most of all, the pure ethereal fire,
Which seems to radiate from the poet's lyre,
Is to the world a mystery and a charm,
An Egis wielded on a mortal arm,

While reason turns her dazzled eye away,
And bows her sceptre to her subject's sway;
And thus the poet, clothed with godlike state,
Usurpt his Maker's title-to create;

He, whose thoughts differing not in shape, but dress,
What others feel more fitly can express,

Sits like the maniac on his fancied throne,

Peeps through the bars, and calls the world his own.
There breathes no being but has some pretence
To that fine instinct called poetic sense:

The rudest savage roaming through the wild;
The simplest rustic bending o'er his child;
The infant listening to the warbling bird;
The mother smiling at its half-formed word;
The boy uncaged, who tracks the fields at large;
The girl, turned matron to her babe-like charge;

*

E'en trembling age, when Spring's renewing air
Waves the thin ringlets of his silvery hair;-
All, all are glowing with the inward flame,
Whose wider halo wreathes the poet's name.

5. ALFRED TENNYSON.

In the year 1809, a little dark-eyed English baby first opened his eyes. He is known as Baron Tennyson, to-day, a white-haired man past eighty, poet laureate of England.

The same year saw the birth of William Gladstone and of Abraham Lincoln.

The life of the great English poet has been rather quiet. Yet every boy and girl wants to know something about him who wrote "The Brook" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

Lord Tennyson is the third of the twelve children of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, an English rector. His mother was a clergyman's daughter. He has always enjoyed the advantages of a refined and wealthy home.

He studied first with his father and afterwards at Cambridge College where he graduated. While here he won a medal for writing a poem.

At eighteen, with his brother Charles, he published a little volume called "Poems by Two Brothers." Only those signed C. T. were thought promising. Yet Alfred has become a famous poet while Charles has ceased to write.

Mr. Tennyson married early and has a large and happy family.

For twelve years after he began to publish his

poems they were wholly overlooked or derided by the public. Meanwhile he worked with the most patient painstaking to render his poems faultless.

He found a fine subject in the old stories of King Arthur and the Round Table. These gave him his "Idyls of the King." A storm of applause greeted them. He became the idol of all. Many tried to imitate him. His style was learned in a degree by inferior poets. People came to doubt again whether Tennyson was so uncommon a writer as they had thought.

All these changes in his popularity, together with his natural vexation about it, are expressed in his poem called "The Flower."

But his fame has grown steadily, and he is now called the first of living poets.

Fortune has smiled upon him. In 1850 he was made laureate, though not required to write on national occasions unless he chose. Later he was made a lord. For his poem "Sea Dreams," of about three hundred lines or verses, he received fifty dollars per line.

Through his works one learns what Mr. Tennyson thinks.

In a long poem, called "The Princess," he has told us what he thinks of woman.

In another, called "Enoch Arden," a touching sailor story, he shows us the grandeur of conquering one's self.

The divine beauty of forgiveness is the moral of many of his works, as in "Guinevere " and in "Sea Dreams."

In another lengthy poem, called "In Memoriam," he grieves for the death of his dear friend, Mr. Arthur Hallam, who was to have married Tennyson's sister Cecilia.

The poet's nature was touched very deeply by this death. His mind began to question everything. He began to ask why, to study the purpose of life.

At last he grew strong and hopeful again. He wrote that

"Life is not as idle ore,

But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipped in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the shocks of doom,
To shape and use."

"Forever nobler ends," he adds.

He tells us :

"Good shall fall-far off

at last to all,

And every winter change to spring.”

So through this poem he has given comforting thoughts to many in similar trouble.

He is a believer in progress. He sounds the very keynote of history when he says:

"And I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose

runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns."

He has given us a large number of the most charming songs and many of our familiar quotations. Among the latter one often hears "The grand old name of gentleman" or "Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls."

Mr. Tennyson is tall, slightly bent, with dark, dreamy eyes and whitened hair and beard.

He has lived a quiet, secluded life at his two beautiful homes in the Isle of Wight and at Haslemere in Sussex. He generally refuses to see strangers. He once sent away the Prince of Wales, mistaking him for a stranger.

unsocial, careless

He once told an

It is said he is rather shy and in dress and brusque in manner. American guest that he came very near visiting America. The visitor assured him that he would be very cordially received. "Ah," said the poet,

"that is just what I fear." He has taken no part in

questions of the day,

and has never taken his seat in the House of Lords. Some blame him for this, charging him with indifference to the toiling, struggling lives around him.

Yet his manner is but the result of a long life spent with books and devoted to training his eye