necessary to the poet, and without which, as Goethe says, “he knows not the heavenly powers”: he had “ate his bread in sorrow”. The death of his father in 1831 had already brought him face to face, as he has himself expressed it, with the most solemn of all mysteries. In 1833 he had an awful shock in the sudden death of his friend Arthur Hallam, “an overwhelming sorrow which blotted out all joy from his life and made him long for death”. He had other minor troubles which contributed greatly to depress him,—the breaking up of the old home at Somersby, his own poverty and uncertain prospects, his being compelled in consequence to break off all intercourse with Miss Emily Selwood. It is possible that _Love and Duty_ may have reference to this sorrow; it is certain that _The Two Voices_ is autobiographical. Such was his education between 1832 and 1842, and such the influences which were moulding him, while he was slowly evolving _In Memoriam_ and the poems first published in the latter year. To the revision of the old poems he brought tastes and instincts cultivated by the critical study of all that was best in the poetry of the world, and more particularly by a familiarity singularly intimate and affectionate with the masterpieces of the ancient classics; he brought also the skill of a practised workman, for his diligence in production was literally that of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the sister art—_nulla dies sine line’_. Into the composition of the new poems all this entered. He was no longer a trifler and a Hedonist. As Spedding has said, his former poems betrayed “an over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses, a profusion of splendours, harmonies, perfumes, gorgeous apparel, luscious meals and drinks, and creature comforts which rather pall upon the sense, and make the glories of the outward world to obscure a little the world within”. Like his own _Lady of Shalott_, he had communed too much with shadows. But the serious poet now speaks. He appeals less to the ear and the eye, and more to the heart. The sensuous is subordinated to the spiritual and the moral. He deals immediately with the dearest concerns of man and of society. He has ceased to trifle. The σπουδαιότης, the high seriousness of the true poet, occasional before, now pervades and enters essentially into his work. It is interesting to note how many of these poems have direct didactic purpose. How solemn is the message delivered in such poems as _The Palace of Art_ and _The Vision of Sin_, how noble the teaching in _Love and Duty_, in _Œnone_, in _Godiva_, in _Ulysses_; to how many must such a poem as _The Two Voices_ have brought solace and light; how full of salutary lessons are the political poems _You ask me, why, though ill at ease_ and _Love thou thy Land_, and how noble is their expression! And, even where the poems are less directly didactic, it is such refreshment as busy life needs to converse with them, so pure, so wholesome, so graciously human is