ures, for, as he
himself says, "Woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse." His ideal of
perfect womanhood he would attain through the awakening power of the
affections and the transforming power of love, rather than by ignoring
the difference of physique, founding women's universities, and becoming
blue-stockinged high priestesses of learning. Of the medley of
characters in the poem, poet-princes in disguise at the college,
violet-hooded lady principals,

"With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair,"

it is Lady Psyche's child that is the true, effective heroine of the
story, as Dr. Dawson aptly points out. "Ridiculous in the lecture room,
the babe in the poem, as in the songs, is made the central point upon
which the plot turns, for the unconscious child is the concrete
embodiment of Nature herself, clearing away all merely intellectual
theories by her silent influence." This is the explanation, then, of the
appearance of the babe--symbol of the power and tenderness of Nature--in
critical passages of the poem, as well as in the unsurpassably beautiful
intercalary songs, for it is the child that enables the poet to soften
the Princess's nature toward the Prince, and to effect the
reconciliation between the Princess and Lady Psyche, while imparting
beauty as well as high meaning in the recital of the incidents and
development of the tale.

"In Memoriam," as we have stated, appeared in 1850, and was unique in
its appeal to the mind of the era as a stately meditative poem on a
single theme,--the death of the poet's friend, Arthur Hallam. The
English language, if we except Milton's 'Lycidas' and 'Hymn to the
Nativity,' and Wordsworth's grand 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality,'
has no poem so noble or so faultless in its art as this magnificent
series of detached elegies. The high thought, philosophic reflection,
and passionate religious sentiment that mark the whole work, added to
the exquisiteness of the versification, place it wellnigh supreme in the
literature of elegiac poetry. Its grave, majestic hymnal measure adds to
its solemn beauty and stateliness, while the varied phases of
spiritualized thought and emotional grief which find expression in the
poem seem to elevate it in its harmonies to the rank of a profound
psalm-chant from the choir of heaven. In the sumptuously embellished
edition of the elegy, embodying Mr. Harry Fenn's drawings, with a
sympat