and understood the harmony of Nature's forms and colours through
all the seasons: at the quiet ingleside he meditated on what he had seen
and heard, enshrined these in verse, and added to them the warmth of his
own devout and sensitive soul. There is no exaggeration in Arnold's
tribute:--

"He laid us, as we lay at birth,
On the cool, flowery lap of earth,
Smiles broke from us, and we had ease;
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sunlit fields again.
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain,
Our youth returned; for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead--
Spirits dried up and closely furled--
The freshness of the early world."

Of Wordsworth and his successor, Tennyson, it is impossible to speak
save in terms of affectionate gratitude. God looked kindly on Britain
when he sent two such men to minister to us. Tennyson did more than all
the bishops of the Church of England to stifle crude infidelity and
equally crude religious bigotry. There is not a single line he ever
wrote of which in his last days he had need, from the point of view of
truth and morality, to be ashamed. He increased the world's stock of
happiness by poems which have been the solace of men and women in the
hours of darkness and doubt, which have led men to rise to nobler things
on the stepping-stones of their dead selves, and which, I am certain,
his grateful fellow-countrymen will not willingly let die.

It is not the least of Tennyson's claims to our gratitude that his
genius was sensitive alike to the beauties of Celtic and of Anglo-Saxon
verse. It would be difficult to overpraise his masterly rendering of the
"Battle of Brunanburh," a vigorous old poem he found in the _Saxon
Chronicle_. Equally fine is his "Voyage of Maeldune," founded on a
Celtic legend of the seventh century. Those who wish to know what is
meant by Celtic glamour should read the last-named poem without delay.

CELT AND SAXON.

Between the literatures of the Celt and the Saxon there are, indeed,
well-marked differences. The Anglo-Saxons were a set of enterprising
pirates, who drove their keels over the misty ocean, came to Britain and
took forcible possession of it, dispersing or enslaving the original
possessors. They left a literature which is, in many respects, highly
interesting, but is in the main devoid of sunshine, humour, and
sprightliness. The old poem of "Beowulf," with its rough and sturdy
verse