ller's
Daughter," "Harold," "Queen Mary," "Enoch Arden," and "The Idyls of the
King,"--is not love everywhere? These are poems of love between men
and women as lovers; but there is other love. In Tennyson: love of
country, as in his "The Revenge," "The Charge of the Light Brigade,"
and others; love of nature, as "The Brook;" the love of Queen, as in
the dedication in "The Idyls of the King;" love of a friend (and such
love!) flooding "In Memoriam" like spring tide's; love to God, as "St.
Agnes' Eve," "Sir Galahad," and in "King Arthur." By appeal to book do
we see how his poems constitute a literature of love, for he is in
essence saying continuously, "Life means love," and we shall not be
those to say him nay. May we not safely say no poet has given a more
beautiful and sympathetic explication of love in its entirety?
Browning has expressed the sex-love more mightily in Pompilia and
Caponsacchi. Tennyson has, however, given no partial landscape; he has
presented the whole. Love of the lover, of the widowed heart, of the
friend, of the parent, of the patriot, of the subject to sovereign, of
the redeemed of God. Truly, this does impress us as a nearly-completed
circle. If it is not, where lies the lack? Love is life, gladness,
pathos, power. A humblest spirit, when touched with the unspeakable
grace of love, becomes epic and beautiful, as is illustrated in "Enoch
Arden." Herein see a sure element of immortality in Tennyson. The
race will always with alacrity and sympathy read of love in tale or
poem; and this poet is always translating love's thought into speech.

And may not this prevalence of love in his poetry account for
Tennyson's lack of humor? In his conversation, as his son tells us, he
was even jocular, loving both to hear and to tell a humorous incident,
and his laughter rang out over a good jest, a thing of which we would
have next to no intimation in his poetry; for save in "Will
Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue" and "The Northern Farmer," and possibly
in "Amphion," his verse contains scarcely a vestige of humor.
Certainly his writings can not presume to be humorous. To Cervantes,
chivalry was grotesque; to Tennyson, chivalry was poetry,--there lay
the difference. Our laureate caught not the jest, but the real poetry
of that episode in the adventure of manhood; and this I take to be the
larger and worthier lesson. Cervantes and Tennyson were both right.
But Tennyson caught the vision of the sure