g month of flowers and
storms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and crocus are caught by the
gale as you speak them in his verse, in a fine disproportion with the
energy and gloom. His was a new apprehension of nature, an increase in
the number, and not only in the sum, of our national apprehensions of
poetry in nature. Unaware of a separate angel of modern poetry is he who
is insensible to the Tennyson note--the new note that we reaffirm even
with the notes of Vaughan, Traherne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake well in
our ears--the Tennyson note of splendour, all-distinct. He showed the
perpetually transfigured landscape in transfiguring words. He is the
captain of our dreams. Others have lighted a candle in England, he lit a
sun. Through him our daily suns, and also the backward and historic suns
long since set, which he did not sing, are magnified; and he bestows upon
us an exalted retrospection. Through him Napoleon's sun of Austerlitz
rises, for us, with a more brilliant menace upon arms and the plain;
through him Fielding's "most melancholy sun" lights the dying man to the
setting-forth on that last voyage of his with such an immortal gleam,
denying hope, as would not have lighted, for us, the memory of that
seaward morning, had our poetry not undergone the illumination, the
transcendent vision, of Tennyson's genius.

Emerson knew that the poet speaks adequately then only when he speaks "a
little wildly, or with the flower of the mind." Tennyson, the clearest-
headed of poets, is our wild poet; wild, notwithstanding that little
foppery we know of in him--that walking delicately, like Agag; wild,
notwithstanding the work, the ease, the neatness, the finish;
notwithstanding the assertion of manliness which, in asserting, somewhat
misses that mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the sensual, than
the defiant, than the accuser, than the denouncer. Wild flowers are
his--great poet--wild winds, wild lights, wild heart, wild eyes!

DICKENS AS A MAN OF LETTERS

It was said for many years, until the reversal that now befalls the
sayings of many years had happened to this also, that Thackeray was the
unkind satirist and Dickens the kind humourist. The truth seems to be
that Dickens imagined more evil people than did Thackeray, but that he
had an eager faith in good ones. Nothing places him so entirely out of
date as his trust in human sanctity, his love of it, his hope for it, his
leap at it. He saw