The children born of thee are sword and fire, Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws. And The fear lest this my realm, upreared By noble needs at one with noble vows, From flat confusion and brute violence Reel back into the beast and be no more. We are told that he is shallow, an echo of the thoughts of educated men at the time, and that, like the Victorians in general, he never probes anything to the bottom. It is true that he reflects his age; so do almost all other great men; and that his age was an age of transition; so, I believe, are all other ages. He represents his age both in his deep-rooted conservatism or moderate liberalism, and in his reverence for the new knowledge which was undermining the conservative stronghold, especially in religion. He is unjustly reproached with speaking contemptuously of the French Revolution, 'the red fool-fury of the Celt,' as 'no graver than a schoolboys' barring out.' He despised barricades and red flags and September massacres, because he believed that the victories of broadening Freedom are to be won by constitutional means. He is a little self-righteous about it, no doubt; that helps to date him. He came, we must remember, half-way between the Pantisocracy of Coleridge and his friends and the still cruder vagaries of our young intellectuals. Years brought the philosophic mind to Carlyle, Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Years will bring a relative sanity to our young Bolsheviks; they will then, I hope (for I wish them well), begin to read Tennyson. The second _Locksley Hall_ is peculiarly interesting for our purpose, because, though the author protested that it was written in character, dramatically, it is plain that it does express his political and social disillusionments and anxiety about the future; and Gladstone answered it as an attack upon the England of the day, calling attention to the great progress which had been made in the 'sixty years' since the first _Locksley Hall_. Tennyson saw that the Victorian social order was breaking up; and with great prescience he foretold many of the evils which have since come upon us. The deluge of political 'babble'; the ghastly cruelties of the Irish; the indifference of the new voters to the British Empire; the contempt for experience and wisdom, setting the feet above the brain and bringing back the dark ages without their faith or hope; the vague aspirations for international friendship, blighted by the pressure of over-population and ending in universal war; all these shadows of coming events, too clearly seen, have convinced him that there is no straight line of progress, but many a backward-streaming curve, which often seems more like retrogression than progress. This is not the language of 1851. In truth the clouds began to gather before the old Queen and the old poet died. Even in fiction, the note of disillusionment is heard with increasing clearness, in the latest novels of George Eliot, in