: She spoke, and with the babe yet in her arms, To where her wounded brethren lay; there stay'd; (From The Princess.) Ask me no more. Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea : The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape, Ask me no more: what answer should I give? Ask me no more thy fate and mine are seal'd : (From The Princess.) In Memoriam A. H. H. Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: The highest, holiest manhood, thou: Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine. Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see ; And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster. We are fools and slight; We mock thee when we do not fear: But help thy foolish ones to bear; Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. Forgive what seem'd my sin in me; What seem'd my worth since I began; Thy creature, whom I found so fair. Forgive these wild and wandering cries, A Dedication. 1849 Dear, near and true-no truer Time himself To the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Your presence will be sun in winter, Should all our churchmen foam in spite At you, so careful of the right, Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome (Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight; Where, far from noise and smoke of town, All round a careless-order'd garden You'll have no scandal while you dine, And only hear the magpie gossip For groves of pine on either hand, Where, if below the milky steep And on thro' zones of light and shadow We might discuss the Northern sin Dispute the claims, arrange the chances; Or whether war's avenging rod Till you should turn to dearer matters, How best to help the slender store, Come, Maurice, come: the lawn as yet Is hoar with rime, or spongy-wet; But when the wreath of March has blossom'd, Crocus, anemone, violet, From 'The Passing of Arthur.' I have lived my life, and that which I have done Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? With these thou seëst-if indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)-- Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, So said he, and the barge with oar and sail But when that moan had past for evermore, Whereat he slowly turn'd and slowly clomb Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb From less to less and vanish into light. June Bracken and Heather. There on the top of the down, The wild heather round me and over me June's high blue, When I look'd at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown, I thought to myself I would offer this book to you, To you that are seventy-seven, With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, And a fancy as summer-new As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather. Crossing the Bar. Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea, But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark ; For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar. (Written after the poet had turned eighty.) [The authoritative biography, prepared by the second Lord Tennyson, appeared in two volumes in the autumn of 1897. The literature, biographical, critical, or elucidatory, is very extensive, and is added to yearly-it includes books on Tennyson and his works by Mr W. E. Wace (1881), Professor Van Dyke (5th ed. 1896), Mr E. C. Tainsh (1868; new ed. 1893), Mr H. J. Jennings (1884; new ed. 1892), Mr Thomas Davidson (Boston, 1889), Mr Churton Collins (1891), Mr Eugene Parsons (Chicago, 1891), Mr A. Waugh (1892), Mr A. Ritchie (1892-93), Mr A. Jenkinson (1892), Mr Joseph Jacobs (1893), Mr Stopford Brooke (1894), Signor Bellezza (Italian, 1894), Mr Stephen Gwynn (1899), Mr A. Lang (1901), and Sir Arthur Lyall (1902), besides essays, criticisms, and articles by the most notable English and American critics, of which a list up to that date will be found in the bibliography appended to Mr R. H. Shepherd's Tennysoniana (1866; new ed. 1879; bibliography separate, 1896). The article by Professor Palgrave in Chambers's Encyclopædia (1892), and that by Canon Ainger in the Dictionary of National Biography (1898), deserve special mention; also Mrs Richmond Ritchie's Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and the Brownings (1892), and Lord Tennyson and his Friends (1893); Mr Frederic Harrison's Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill (and others, 1899); and Canon Rawnsley's Memories of the Tennysons (1900). There is an analysis of In Memoriam by F. W. Robertson (1862), a Key to it by Dr Gatty (1881; 4th ed. 1891), a Commentary on it by Professor A. C. Bradley (1901); and an edition of it, The Princess, and Maud by Mr Charles Collins; a Concordance to Tennyson by Mr D. B. Brightwell (for the works up to 1869); a Tennyson Hand-book by Morton (1895), and a Tennyson Primer by Dixon (1896). See also Mr A. J. Church's The Laureate's Country (1890), Mr J. C. Walters's In Tennyson Land (1890), Mr G. G. Napier's Homes and Haunts of Alfred Tennyson (1892), and Mr B. Francis's Scenery of Tennyson's Poems (1893). Many of the poems have been translated; of Enoch Arden there are nine German versions, seven French, and two Dutch, as well as Italian, Spanish, Danish, Hungarian, and Bohemian.] MARY BROTHERTON. Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-33), the son of the historian (see page 193), passed from Eton to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became one of the Tennyson group. He had an exceptional aptitude for literary studies, and showed a precocious faculty for verse-writing and criticism. But his health was already matter of anxiety, and, travelling in Austria little more than a year after entering the Inner Temple, he died suddenly from heart weakness at Vienna before completing his twentythird year. His father wrote a touching Memoir to accompany a privately-printed volume of Remains of his work-prose and verse. His poems and one of his essays were republished by Mr Le Gallienne in 1893; Mr Gollancz also reprinted the poems in his edition of In Memoriam. It would be unfair to judge of what he might have done by what he actually accomplished when little more than a boy, under the visible influence of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. He will more certainly be remembered as the 'A. H. H.' of Tennyson's In Memoriam, the only begetter of that great elegiac series. William Cox Bennett (1820-95), son of a Greenwich watchmaker, carried on his father's business, but wrote much for the papers and became famous as a song-writer. He published several collections of songs, including War Songs and Songs of Sailors (set to music by J. L. Hatton), besides Prometheus the Fire-giver. John Tyndall (1820-93), born at LeighlinBridge, County Carlow, was employed on the ordnance survey, and for three years was a railway engineer; but in 1847 he became teacher of physics at Queenwood College, Hampshire, and in 1848 studied physics and chemistry at Marburg. Already F.R.S., he was in 1853 made professor to the Royal Institution. In 1856 he and Professor Huxley visited the Alps; and this expedition resulted in a famous joint work on glaciers. In 1859 he began his researches on radiation; a later subject was the acoustic properties of the atmosphere. In 1874, as President of the British Association at Belfast, he gave an address which, denounced as materialistic, led to keen and prolonged controversy, but ultimately came to be regarded as little more than a fair claim for the full freedom of scientific investigation about the origin of the world and of life. Conspicuous as were his services to the sciences as an investigator, he was even more eminent as a populariser-in the best sense of the term-of great scientific truths. He did much to secure the recognition by the educated public of much that otherwise might long have been the peculiar property of specialists. His style of exposition was exceptionally lucid, graceful, and free from technical terminology. His wife, who undertook his Life, has in the article in the Dictionary of National Biography given a list of sixteen separate publications; but his contributions to the scientific journals amounted to one hundred and forty-five. His works are largely read in America and in a German and other translations. In 1894 a memorial on his Life and Work was issued, with reminiscences by various friends. He was for some years scientific adviser to the Board of Trade and to the lighthouse authorities, but in 1883 retired from most of his appointments. He was LL.D. and D.C.L., and held numerous honours, British and foreign. Among his works are The Glaciers of the Alps (1860); Mountaineering (1861); Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863); Radiation (Rede Lecture, 1865); volumes on Light, Sound, Electricity, Faraday, and the forms of water in clouds, rivers, lakes, and other aggregations; Fragments of Science (1871; 6th ed. 1879); Hours of Exer cise in the Alps (1873); Essays on the Floating Matter of the Air (1881); and New Fragments (1892). Tyndall died from an overdose of chloral administered by his devoted wife. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the opening years of the just ended century two children were growing up in English homes who were destined to make an indelible mark on the thought and literature of their country, and to leave to the world its most perfect love-idyll in real lifea bright, high-spirited little girl, with great violet eyes, and dark curls falling all about her face, fitting, a slight child-like figure among her many brothers and sisters, through the stately house and wooded park of her father's country-seat among the Malvern Hills; and a noble, six-years-younger boy, with blue eyes and golden hair, impetuous, passionate, loving-hearted, alone with his father and mother and little sister in a quiet home in Camberwell, then a country suburb of London-Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett and Robert Browning. 'Elizabeth Barrett, daughter of Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, and Mary his wife, born at Coxhoe Hall, County of Durham, March the 6th, at seven o'clock in the evening in the year 1806.' So runs the parish register recording the birth of the poetess. The original family name was Moulton, but, by the will of his grandfather, the father of the poetess took the name of Barrett on succeeding to his estates in Jamaica. While still a very young man he married Mary, daughter of J. Graham Clarke, Esq., then residing at Fenham Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne, bought Hope End among the Malvern Hills, and settled down to the life of a country gentleman. Elizabeth was the eldest surviving sister of a merry troop of eight sons and three daughters. As future events showed, Mr Barrett was a man of despotic temper, with a supreme belief in ‘the divine right of fathers'-and also of husbands; but he encouraged and was proud of his gifted daughter, who repaid him with a passionate affection. I wrote verses very early,' she writes, at eight years old and earlier; but, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me. The Greeks were my demigods, and haunted me out of Pope's Homer, till I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of " Moses" the black pony.' Of a childish 'epic' in four books, called The Battle of Marathon, 'fifty copies were printed, because papa was bent upon spoiling ine. Next to Elizabeth in the family group came her brother Edward, her inseparable companion both in work and play, and to the lessons shared with him under his Scotch tutor, Mr M'Swiney (which the little girl greatly preferred to the instructions of Mrs Orme, her own governess), she probably owed her early acquaintance with the Greek and Latin classics. To this beloved brother she also owed her pet name of 'Ba,' by which she was called to the end of her life by those she most loved. Writing of these early years, she says: 'We lived at Hope End in a retirement scarcely broken to me except by books and my own thoughts. . . . I read books bad and good. A bird in a cage could have as good a story.' The scenery and associations of her early home remained with her as a happy memory to the last. During these quiet years of girlhood the wellknown blind Greek scholar, Hugh Stuart Boyd, came to live at Great Malvern, and between him and the eager, sympathetic young girl there soon sprang up a fast friendship. To the 'long mornings' spent with her blind friend over their beloved Greek she touchingly alludes in her poem 'Wine of Cyprus.' In 1826 she published anonymously An Essay on Mind, and other Poems. A didactic poem long repented of,' she writes, yet the bird pecks through the shell in it.' In 1828 her mother died, 'an angelic woman,' their cousin Mr Kenyon calls her, whose memory,' writes Elizabeth, in the bitterness of her first sorrow, 'is more precious to me than any earthly blessing left behind.' During the few following years the abolition of slavery in the West Indies (which, however, he disinterestedly advocated), and the cost of a successful but expensive lawsuit, considerably diminished Mr Barrett's fortune, and in 1832 the old home at Hope End was broken up and the estate sold. For two years the family resided at Sidmouth, and while there Prometheus Bound, a Translation from the Greek of Eschylus, appeared in 1835. The next move was to 74 Gloucester Place, London, and here, through her relative Mr John Kenyon, Elizabeth was introduced to most of her early literary friends -notably to Miss Mitford-and access was gained for her poems to some of the chief literary journals. Miss Mitford, with whom her acquaintance soon ripened into a warm friendship, thus describes her at this time: A slight girlish figure, very delicate, with exquisite hands and feet; a round face with a most noble forehead; large dark eyes with such eyelashes; a dark complexion, literally as bright as the dark China rose; a profusion of silky dark curls; and a look of youth and modesty hardly to be expressed.' 'Then came the failure in my health, which never had been strong,' writes Elizabeth, and the lung affection appears to have begun which was to condemn her henceforth to the restricted possibilities of an invalid; but she only devoted herself the more assiduously to the poetry which she had chosen as her life-work. The Romaunt of Margaret' and 'The Poet's Vow' appeared in the New Monthly Magazine; ‘The Young Queen' and 'Victoria's Tears' in the Athenæum; 'The Dream,' 'The Romaunt of the Page,' and 'The Romance of the Ganges' in Finden's Tableaux, then edited by Miss Mitford, while their author's own life often seemed to be hanging by a thread. In the spring of 1838 the family removed to 50 Wimpole Street, which was from henceforth her London home, and in the same year she published The Seraphim and other Poems, including 'Cowper's Grave' and others of her very finest lyrics. In the autumn of that year the state of her health became so critical that it was decided she should winter at Torquay, to which she was accompanied by her beloved brother Edward. For two winters she remained there, for months only lifted from her bed to the sofa, but the bright, keen spirit and indomitable will remained as vigorous as ever. In February 1840 The Crowned and Wedded Queen' appeared in the Athenæum, and shortly afterwards 'Napoleon's Return.' On the 11th July 1840 the sad event occurred which was to throw a shadow over her future life. Her brother Edward, with two companions, all experienced yachtsmen, started for a few hours' pleasure sail in a small yacht on a fine summer's day. Day after day passed in agonising suspense, but the boat did not return; still they hoped against hope, till at last the sea gave up its dead. The blow completely prostrated the stricken invalid; a morbid feeling took possession of her that she was responsible for her dear one's death, who had remained at Torquay moved by her tears at the prospect of parting with him. Her poem De Profundis, never published till after her own death, is Horne (with whom, though they had never met, she carried on a charming literary correspondence, since published) in his work called The New Spirit of the Age, a series of critical papers on contemporary literature; and in this work she came into connection, all unconsciously, for the first time, with the great influence of her future life. 'The Mottoes' (for the various critiques), says Horne, 'which are singularly happy and appropriate, were for the most part supplied by Miss Barrett and ROBERT BROWNING. From a Photograph by Elliott and Fry. a faint reflex of her feelings at this time, of which she could never afterwards speak, even to him she loved the most. In the September number of the Quarterly Review an important notice appeared of her Poems, while she herself was hovering between life and death. It was not till late in the summer of 1841 that she was able to be removed in an invalid carriage, by stages of twenty-five miles a day, to the house in Wimpole Street, where she was to pass, in the seclusion of her darkened rooms, so many invalid years. Meanwhile her fame as a poet was growing. 'The Cry of the Children,' suggested by Mr R. H. Horne's Report on Mines and Factories, appeared in Blackwood's Magazine and attracted much attention. She also co-operated with Mr Robert Browning, then unknown to each other.' Late in the autumn of 1844 two volumes of her Poems, dedicated to her father, and including 'The Drama of Exile,' 'The Cry of the Children,' Vision of Poets,' 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship,' &c., were published by Moxon, and received with a burst 'A of applause, and Elizabeth Barrett was universally recognised as the greatest womanpoet of her time. Meanwhile, as she lay in her darkened room, and the world was sounding with her praises, the great unlooked-for happiness of her life was coming all unknown to meet her. Dining one day in 1839 at Sergeant Talfourd's, some one pointed out to her cousin, Mr Kenyon, a 'slim, dark, very handsome' young man as Mr Robert Browning, the author of a notable poem called Paracelsus. The name recalled old memories, and Mr Kenyon accosted the young author, and asked, 'Was your father's name Robert, and did he go to school at the Rev. Mr Bell's at Cheshunt?' Next morning the young man asked his father if he remembered a school-fellow named John Kenyon. 'Certainly,' he answered, 'this is his face,' and he sketched a boy's head, in which his son at once recognised his acquaintance of the previous evening. The old comradeship was renewed, and Mr Kenyon often spoke in his friend's house of his invalid poetcousin Miss Barrett, and when her poems appeared |