The volumes are so crammed with interesting and important matter that to discuss them in one article is impossible. But before concluding these remarks we must say that the good fortune which attended Tennyson during his life did not end with his death. Fortunate, indeed, is the famous man who escapes the catchpenny biographer. No man so illustrious as Tennyson ever before passed away without his death giving rise to a flood of books professing to tell the story of his life. Yet it chanced that for a long time before his death a monograph on Tennyson by Mr. Arthur Waugh—which, though of course it is sometimes at fault, was carefully prepared and well considered—had been in preparation, as had also a second edition of another sketch of the poet’s life by Mr. Henry Jennings, written with equal reticence and judgment. These two books, coming out, as far as we remember, in the very week of Tennyson’s funeral, did the good service of filling up the gap of five years until the appearance of this authorized biography by his son. Otherwise there is no knowing what pseudo-biographies stuffed with what errors and nonsense might have flooded the market and vexed the souls of Tennysonian students. For the future such pseudo-biographies will be impossible. III. Notwithstanding the apparently fortunate circumstances by which Tennyson was surrounded, the record of his early life produces in the reader’s mind a sense of unhappiness. Happiness is an affair of temperament, not of outward circumstances. Happy, in the sense of enjoying the present as Wordsworth enjoyed it, Tennyson could never be. Once, no doubt, Nature’s sweetest gift to all living things—the power of enjoying the present—was man’s inheritance too. Some of the human family have not lost it even yet; but poets are rarely of these. Give Wordsworth any pittance, enough to satisfy the simplest physical wants—enough to procure him plain living and leisure for “high thinking”—and he would be happier than Tennyson would have been, cracking the finest “walnuts” and sipping the richest “wine” amidst a circle of admiring and powerful friends. As to opinion, as to criticism of his work—what was that to Wordsworth? Had he not from the first the good opinion of her of whom he was the high priest elect. Natura Benigna herself? Nay, had he not from the first the good opinions of Wordsworth himself and Dorothy? Without this faculty of enjoying the present, how can a bard be happy? For the present alone exists. The past is a dream; the future is a dream; the present is the narrow plank thrown for an instant from the dream of the past to the dream of the future. And yet it is the poet (who of all men should enjoy the raree show hurrying and scrambling along the plank)—it is he who refuses to enjoy himself on his own trembling little plank in order to “stare round” from side to side.