life, and will be so for years after the signing of peace. As to the three main interests, outside my home life, which, as I look back upon half a century, seem to have held sway over my thoughts--contemporary literature, religious development, and social experiment--one is tempted to say a few last summarizing things, though, amid the noise of war, it is hard to say them with any real detachment of mind. When we came up to London in 1881, George Eliot was just dead (December, 1880); Browning and Carlyle passed away in the course of the 'eighties; Tennyson in 1892. I saw the Tennyson funeral in the Abbey, and remember it vividly. The burying of Mr. Gladstone was more stately; this of Tennyson, as befitted a poet, had a more intimate beauty. A great multitude filled the Abbey, and the rendering, in Sir Frederick Bridge's setting, of "Crossing the Bar" by the Abbey Choir sent the "wild echoes" of the dead man's verse flying up and on through the great arches overhead with a dramatic effect not to be forgotten. Yet the fame of the poet was waning when he died, and has been hotly disputed since; though, as it seems to me, these later years have seen the partial return of an ebbing tide. What was merely didactic in Tennyson is dead years ago; the difficulties of faith and philosophy, with which his own mind had wrestled, were, long before his death, swallowed up in others far more vital, to which his various optimisms, for all the grace in which he clothed them, had no key, or suggestion of a key, to offer. The "Idylls," so popular in their day, and almost all, indeed, of the narrative and dramatic work, no longer answer to the needs of a generation that has learned from younger singers and thinkers a more restless method, a more poignant and discontented thought. A literary world fed on Meredith and Henry James, on Ibsen or Bernard Shaw or Anatole France, or Synge or Yeats, rebels against the versified argument, however musical or skilful, built up in "In Memoriam," and makes mock of what it conceives to be the false history and weak sentiment of the "Idylls." All this, of course, is true, and has been said a thousand times, but--and here again the broad verdict is emerging--it does not touch the lyrical fame of a supreme lyrical poet. It may be that one small volume will ultimately contain all that is really immortal in Tennyson's work. But that volume, it seems to me, will be safe among the golden books of our literature, cherished alike by young lovers and the "drooping old."