find it in Nature. There is, perhaps, more loveliness in Nature than in art, but there are not so many lovely things. The loveliness is broken to pieces and scattered: the almond tree in blossom will have a mob of nameless insects at its root, and the most perfect cell in the great forest-house is likely enough to smell like a sewer. Tennyson loved beauty more in its collected form in art, poetry, and sculpture; like his own “Lady of Shalott,” it was his office to look rather at the mirror than at the object. He was an artist, as it were, at two removes: he was a splendid imitator of the splendid imitations. It is true that his natural history was exquisitely exact, but natural history and natural religion are things that can be, under certain circumstances, more unnatural than anything in the world. In reading Tennyson’s natural descriptions we never seem to be in physical contact with the earth. We learn nothing of the coarse good-temper and rank energy of life. We see the whole scene accurately, but we see it through glass. In Tennyson’s works we see Nature indeed, and hear Nature, but we do not smell it. [Illustration: LOUTH (Reproduced from “The Laureate’s Country,” by kind permission of Messrs. Seeley & Co., Ltd.)] [Illustration: _From a photo by Messrs. Carlton & Sons, Horncastle_ SOMERSBY CHURCH] But this poet of beauty and a certain magnificent idleness lived at a time when all men had to wrestle and decide. It is not easy for any person who lives in our time, when the dust has settled and the spiritual perspective has been restored, to realise what the entrance of the idea of evolution meant for the men of those days. To us it is a discovery of another link in a chain which, however far we follow it, still stretches back into a divine mystery. To [Illustration: ALFRED TENNYSON _From the painting by Samuel Laurence_ Rischgitz Collection] many of the men of that time it would appear from their writings that it was the heart-breaking and desolating discovery of the end and origin of the chain. To them had happened the most black and hopeless catastrophe conceivable to human nature; they had found a logical explanation of all things. To them it seemed that an Ape had suddenly risen to gigantic stature and destroyed the seven heavens. It is difficult, no doubt, for us [Illustration: TENNYSON’S MOTHER] [Illustration: _From a photo by Messrs. Carlton & Sons, Horncastle_ BAG ENDERBY CHURCH]