In all this he is excellent, perhaps unsurpassed; in all that is sad, or sweet, or picturesque, or naïvely joyous our hearts are with him. He stands alone in his dainty pictures of scenery, of women, of certain men. He touches the commonplaces of the time with a magic pencil. He beguiled the hard and stubborn Saxon, which yielded reluctantly even to the greatest masters of English verse, into a music it had never known before. He built up fairy castles, and galleries and cities of old time, and peopled them with a fair array of Arthurs and Launcelots, of Guineveres and Elaines, of Merlins and Gawains, whose very names were music, and whose deeds were just such as befitted scenes of witchery. He is, moreover, a man of marked personality and nationality in his writings. He is an Englishman and nothing else. He does not care to be anything else or more; for he can see nothing greater. All his scenery is English; his characters are English; his thoughts, feelings, and aspirations English. Byron’s corsairs and giaours and Childe Harolds would fight as fiercely, frown as darkly, sin as deeply, in any civilized language as in English—in warmer languages even better, perhaps; Shakspere’s profound observations and reading of character would have reached the world through any other channel as surely as, perhaps more readily than, through the English; some would doubt whether Milton ever wrote English at all. But all Tennyson is English or nothing. His dawns, his gloamings, his sunrises, his sunsets, his landscapes, his fens, his fogs, his smoke, his moonlight and moonlight effects, his winds, his birds, his flowers, his reeds and rushes, his trees, his brooklets, his seas, his cliffs, his coloring, his ruins, his graveyards, his walks and rides, his love of good cheer, his hums of great cities, his profound respect for the respectable, are all English. He has the sturdy English common sense and no small share, as will be seen, of English prejudice; and, though he feels something of the movements of the outer world, he has all the English narrowness of vision. So that, while his works will probably never become a part of any other literature than the English—for they would not be understood elsewhere—they have won their way into the English heart for their very _homeliness_, if for no higher reason. So long as this English poet was content to sing to us, we were content to listen, were his lay sad or gay. He had been singing all our life, and we were not weary of his music, even though the music was all pitched in much the same key. We never tire of a familiar voice that we love. But when we would be roused and wrought up by some martial strain, by some great event, by one of those movements that catch the heart of a people and sway it and hold it captive, by the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” Tennyson fails. Surely, for such an Englishman as he, the death of the Duke of Wellington ought to have proved an inspiring theme. It is true that as