It was only in Paradise, so we learn from St. Basil, that roses ever grew without thorns. We cannot have the rose of such an exceptional life as Tennyson's without suffering for it. We suffer by the void its cessation produces, the disturbance in our literary hierarchy that it brings, the sense of uncertainty and insufficiency that follows upon it. The death of Victor Hugo led to precisely such a rocking and swaying of the ship of literature in France, and to this day it cannot be said that the balance there is completely restored. I cannot think that we gain much by ignoring this disturbance, which is inevitable, and still less by folding our hands and calling out that it means that the vessel is sinking. It means nothing of the kind. What it does mean is that when a man of the very highest rank in the profession lives to an exceptionally great age, and retains his intellectual gifts to the end, combining with these unusual advantages the still more fortuitous ones of being singular and picturesque in his personality and the object of much ungratified curiosity, he becomes the victim, in the eyes of his contemporaries, of a sort of vertical mirage. He is seen up in the sky where no man could be. I trust I shall not be accused of anything like disrespect to the genius of Tennyson--which I loved and admired as nearly to the pitch of idolatry as possible--when I say that his reputation at this moment is largely mirage. His gifts were of the very highest order; but in the popular esteem, at this moment, he holds a position which is, to carry on the image, topographically impossible. No poet, no man, ever reached that altitude above his fellows. The result of seeing one mountain in vertical mirage, and various surrounding acclivities (if that were possible) at their proper heights, would be to falsify the whole system of optical proportion. Yet this is what is now happening, and for some little time will continue to happen _in crescendo_, with regard to Tennyson and his surviving contemporaries. There is no need, however, to cherish "those gloomy thoughts led on by spleen" which the melancholy events of the past month have awakened. The recuperative force of the arts has never yet failed the human race, and will not fail us now. All the _Tit-Bits_ and _Pearson's Weeklies_ in the world will not be able to destroy a fragment of pure and original literature, although the tastes they foster may delay its recognition and curtail its rewards.