Toward the end of his life, Carlyle, in the Inaugural Address given by him as Rector of Edinburgh University, in which he summed up so many of the convictions of a lifetime, put forward the following description of the completely healthy human spirit. "A man all lucid and in equilibrium. His intellect a clear mirror, geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to all objects and impressions made on it, and imaging all things in their correct proportions, not twisted up into convex or concave and distorting everything so that he cannot see the truth of the matter without endless groping and manipulation--healthy, clear and free, and discerning all round about him." He put this picture before young men as the ideal to be aimed at by the intellectual student, and in particular by the man of letters. "But," he said, "we can never never attain that at all." Perhaps not altogether. Perhaps even he who invented the phrase for the poet's duty of "holding the mirror up to Nature," did not wholly attain to it. But, according to his measure, it is no bad description of Alfred Tennyson, with the "universality of his mind," the simplicity of his good sense, the childlike sincerity of his spirit. This quality it was that both Carlyle and FitzGerald found and liked in him. It has been said that Tennyson and FitzGerald read the same books. One of the best instances of this is to be found in a long letter of FitzGerald's about posthumous fame and literary immortality. It was written to Cowell in 1847, and is given by Dr. Aldis Wright in his first collection. After speaking of Homer and the _Iliad_, FitzGerald writes: Yet as I often think it is not the poetical imagination, but bare Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the Iliad; the history of the world, the great infinitudes of Space and Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me. And when we think that Man must go on in the same plodding way, one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of discovery will distance all his imaginations and dissolve the language in which they are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now after two thousand years: a space that seems long to us whose lives are so brief; but a moment, the twinkling of an eye, if compared (not to Eternity alone), but to the ages which it is now known the world must have existed, and (unless for some external violence) must continue to exist.