bosom. Here spring up pillars, and columns, and pilasters, such as never were seen in classic sculpture. Forms of grandeur, nobility, majesty, are here. Grand, sweeping, perfect curves alternate with long stretches of the most delicate and dainty lacework. Great fluffs of down lie piled up about the borders of gleaming flats like the clouds that tumble away in mighty, rolling masses from the face of the summer moon. Deep grottoes and mountain peaks, fairy caves and enchanted hills, castles, palaces -I wander through them all, and the treasures of the infinite are mine for I find them in the snow. Along the base of the range of snow-mountains the roadside weeds have been transformed into things of wonder. Tall plumes, whiter than the brow of purity, lift themselves, feathery, soft. But they fall in a shower of diamonds at my touch. Mantles of whitest ermine drape the columns, and couches of fur invite repose. Here I seem to see, condensed into one stretch of country road, all the beauty of form that the universe contains. It is as if I had within my grasp the abstraction of beauty and could express it as I would. But I am afraid to try to express it, for only in the out-door world of God can such beauty as this be born.

It is growing too dark to see more. My heart is full, too, and I am bending, tired from the beauty of the day. The air has lost the golden mistiness, and the blue is dying from the sky. A great gray cloud comes out of the west. The shadows grow gray. The earth and sky and all lose their tints and merge into the gray. I cannot see where earth and sky meet. A snowflake falls upon my face, soft as a baby's kiss. The night is falling too. It was a kiss-the good-by kiss of the day. The cloud from the west comes on and more flakes fall.

It is growing dark. I answer the farewell of the day.
I'll go home.

C. D Robertson

ART. XII-THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

ON no other work was Tennyson engaged so long as on the Idylls of the King. More than fifty years separated the Lady of Shalott, Tennyson's earliest study in Arthurian romance, from Balin and Balan. The first installment of the Idylls themselves was issued from the press in 1859. Ten years later, The Coming of Arthur, the Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre, and the Passing of Arthur were added; in 1871, The Last Tournament; in 1872, Gareth and Lynette. In the latter year, the Idylls were arranged in their present order. In 1885, the series was closed with Balin and Balan. But if the Idylls were the chief, they were not the greatest, work of Tennyson's life. There is a sad lack of unity in the central impression. And this rises less from the nature of Tennyson's materials than from his chosen method of treatment. Malory's knights are hard-hitting fellows. Tennyson's are shadowy. The fights described in the chronicles are as convincing as any accounts to-day of battles in Cuba or Egypt. The battle-scenes of Tennyson appear as if woven on Bayeux tapestry. Wherein lies the difference? One man is telling a thrilling story; the other, according to his own confession, is "shadowing sense at war with soul." I have yet to be convinced that allegory is a thoroughly successful literary form. The long Middle-Age romances are very stupid reading. Spenser's poem is effective in spite of its allegory, not because of it; it is best where the allegory is least plain. Perhaps the only remarkably good allegories in English are Swift's and Bunyan's, but both Gulliver and Pilgrim's Progress can be read with interest by children who understand nothing of the satire on English institutions, and little, if anything, of the struggles of the human soul on its road to Heaven. If the writer of allegory leads us to care overmuch for the story, however, he lessens the value of its meaning; if the didacticism is made obtrusive, on the other hand, the story suffers.

The fault with Tennyson is that he fails clearly to impress us either with the allegory or with the story. He wavers between the two with the result that the whole thing seems ineffective. He

should have been more consistently didactic, or more vigorously epic. If he had been consistently didactic, he would have enforced the lesson that purity in the end is triumphant. This is not made clear. The certainty of In Memoriam that "somehow good shall be the final goal of ill"-this is notably absent from the Idylls. The poet seems to prove exactly what he does not intend, namely, that purity is impracticable. Only two or three characters remain chaste. There is no vindication of virtue at the end. Even Arthur is uncertain whether his kingdom will not "reel back into the beast." And if the allegory is not convincing, the story is less so. The epic hero should issue from his struggles with victorious courage. Arthur, broken-spirited, passes into other lands. There are vague rumors that he will never return. But the confused impression does not belong only to the final pages. The characterization is unsatisfactory throughout. Most of the figures are dream creatures; they have no warmth or life. If they approach reality, some touch of overdrawing, some inconsistency, is certain to mar the portrait. Lynette is too saucy and self-conscious to be, as she was meant to be, merely piquant. In the worst Yankee sense, she is "smart." Enid is too patient to be human; she is more absurd than Griselda. She unresentingly bears gross insults such as no pure woman would suffer even from lover or husband. Vivian is not only vulgar; she is impossibly malignant, inhuman. Merlin is not made to fall into a dotage, as in the old tale. He is as wise as ever. He hates Vivian, reads her falsity, understands that she plots his ruin-and yet yields. As to Arthur himself—it is a commonplace to say that he is a prig, that the one character held up for undivided admiration lacks the warm human sympathy which is the most lovable thing in character and the sense of humor which is the balance-wheel of conduct. We do not pity his downfall half so heartily as we are desired to; we feel that he has, to a large degree, brought it on himself. Arthur embodies Tennyson's favorite virtues-order, self-restraint, obedience, chastity. These are not active, but passive, virtues. In Tennyson's philosophy of life, yielding to unrestrained impulse is the unpardonable sin. The downfall of the Round Table began with the yielding to a noble impulse, but this was followed, as Tennyson meant us to see

it must be, by the yielding to an ignoble impulse. Mysticism and impurity are the two enemies of Arthur's government. As soon as men leave knightly exploits to listen to fanciful visions, so surely as the marriage bonds are carelessly regarded and loosely keptso soon and surely will heroism cease and the bonds of national allegiance weaken. This is all true, but only negatively true. And, as it happens, the class of virtues which wakens enthusiastic response in the hearts of most readers is never that of the negative virtues. Tennyson is always a little afraid of passion. We agree with him that passion unrestrained is disintegrating and ruinous. But it is open to doubt whether even that is not preferable to a cold incapacity for passion. Human nature will always give its heart to Lancelot, with his red blood and noble impulses, rather than to Arthur, who finds self-control easy because he has so little passion to control. Had Arthur striven to the uttermost for his life's set prize, he could not have lost the love of Guinevere, he could never have lost the loyalty of his subjects. But the philosophy of Tennyson is as far removed from Browning's as Carlyle's philosophy is from Matthew Arnold's. The moral teaching of the Idylls can never enlist our heart because it represents only half a truth, and that the negative half. Passions are not given us simply to be sat down upon. Self-control is good. The generous yielding to our highest impulses is better. Order, denial, resistance to evil-who finds such qualities anything but praiseworthy? But greater than these is-Love.

To say that Tennyson fails both in characterization and enforcement of his central conception, is to make very grave deductions. But it is not equivalent to saying that the Idylls do not have remarkable merits. In the first place, the very thing that removes Tennyson's poem from the realm of reality places it in an atmosphere of charm. Your hard-and-fast realist tells you that we want nothing from literature except a reproduction of the facts of life. On the other hand, what we want is often an escape from the tyranny of those facts. Real life we have always with us. It is one of the glories of poetry that it beckons us into the world of youthful illusion and joy which we had feared never to revisit. The Holy Grail, for example, is as charming a poem as

any modern pen has given us. It is mystical, suggestive, charged with sensuous and symbolic beauty. It offers us vistas; our imagination is enveloped in the purple haze of romance. The Idylls, moreover, are a triumph of merely technical skill. I incline to think their blank-verse the finest that has been written since Milton. Its only competitors, surely, are the blank-verse of Sohrab and Rustum and The Ring and the Book. But the vigor of Browning's blank-verse hardly makes up for its frequent harshness, and Arnold's lacks the flexibility of that in the Idylls. Tennyson's later blank-verse is well-nigh perfect. It is strong or graceful as the mood suggests, but its strength never descends into uncouthness nor its supple ease into weakness. Praise can hardly be too high for the choice of metaphors, for the diction, for the tone and color values of the Idylls. In no other work has Tennyson shown more clearly his artistic supremacy; in no other work, also, have his limitations as a teacher of ethics, and a student of human character, been more conspicuous.

Frederic L. Knowles