that is, of dwelling on the sound of his own name, was familiar to the Arabs. M. Lefébure has drawn my attention to a passage in the works of a mediæval Arab philosopher, Ibn Khaldoun: {196} “To arrive at the highest degree of inspiration of which he is capable, the diviner should have recourse to the use of certain phrases marked by a peculiar cadence and parallelism. Thus he emancipates his mind from the influence of the senses, and is enabled to attain an imperfect contact with the spiritual world.” Ibn Khaldoun regards the “contact” as extremely “imperfect.” He describes similar efforts made by concentrating the gaze on a mirror, a bowl of water, or the like. Tennyson was doubtless unaware that he had stumbled accidentally on a method of “ancient sages.” Psychologists will explain his experience by the word “dissociation.” It is not everybody, however, who can thus dissociate himself. The temperament of genius has often been subject to such influence, as M. Lefébure has shown in the modern instances of George Sand and Alfred de Musset: we might add Shelley, Goethe, and even Scott. The poet’s versatility was displayed in the appearance with these records of “weird seizures”, of the Irish dialect piece _To-morrow_, the popular _Spinster’s Sweet-Arts_, and the _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_. The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero has relapsed on the gloom of the hero of _Maud_. He represents himself, of course, not Tennyson, or only one of the moods of Tennyson, which were sometimes black enough. A very different mood chants the _Charge of the Heavy Brigade_, and speaks of “Green Sussex fading into blue With one gray glimpse of sea.” The lines _To Virgil_ were written at the request of the Mantuans, by the most Virgilian of all the successors of the “Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.” Never was Tennyson more Virgilian than in this unmatched panegyric, the sum and flower of criticism of that “Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more.” Hardly less admirable is the tribute to Catullus, and the old poet is young again in the bird-song of _Early Spring_. The lines on _Poets and their Bibliographies_, with _The Dead Prophet_, express Tennyson’s lifelong abhorrence of the critics and biographers, whose joy is in the futile and the unimportant, in personal gossip and the sweepings of the studio, the salvage of the wastepaper basket. The _Prefatory Poem to my Brother’s Sonnets_ is not only touching in itself, but proves that the poet can “turn to favour and to prettiness” such an affliction as the ruinous summer of 1879.