Tennyson’s place is not among the “lords of the visionary eye,” among seers, among prophets, but not the least part of the debt which his countrymen owe to him is his dedication of his art to the noblest purposes. At a time when poetry was beginning to degenerate into what it has now almost universally become—a mere sense-pampering siren, and when critics were telling us, as they are still telling us, that we are to understand by it “all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form as distinct from its matter,” he remained true to the creed of his great predecessors. “L’art pour art,” he would say, quoting Georges Sand, “est un vain mot: l’art pour le vrai, l’art pour le beau et le bon, voila la religion que je cherche.” When he succeeded to the laureateship he was proud to remember that the wreath which had descended to him was greener from the brows Of him that utter’d nothing base, and he was a loyal disciple of that poet whose aim had been, in his own words, “to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, to feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous”.[7] Wordsworth had said that he wished to be regarded as a teacher or as nothing, but unhappily he did not always distinguish between the way in which a poet and a philosopher should teach. He forgot that the didactic element in a poem should be, to employ a homely illustration, what garlic should be in a salad, “scarce suspected, animate the whole,” that the poet teaches not as the moralist and the preacher teach, but as nature and life teach us. He taught us when he wrote _The Fountain_ and _The Highland Reaper, The Leach-gatherer_ and _Michael_, he merely wearied us when he sermonised in _The Excursion_ and in _The Prelude_. Tennyson never makes this mistake. He is seldom directly didactic. Would he inculcate subjugation to the law of duty—he gives us the funeral ode on Wellington, _The Charge of the Light Brigade_, and _Love and Duty_. Would he inculcate resignationto the will of God, and the moral efficacy of conventional Christianity—he gives us _Enoch Arden_. Would he picture the endless struggle between the sensual and the spiritual, and the relation of ideals to life—he gives us the _Idylls of the King_. Would he point to what atheism may lead—he gives us _Lucretius_. Poems which are masterpieces of sensuous art, such as mere æsthetes, like Rosetti and his school, must contemplate with admiring despair, he makes vehicles of the most serious moral and spiritual teaching. _The Vision of Sin_ is worth a hundred sermons on the disastrous effects of unbridled profligacy. In _The Palace of Art_ we have the quintessence of _The Book of Ecclesiastes_ and much more besides. Even in _The Lotos Eaters_ we have the mirror held up to Hedonism. On the education of the affections and on the purity of domestic life must depend very largely,