ghing hundreds of Balaclava charges and
sea-fights; outshining the flawless perfection of "Maud":--a poem
written in heart's blood and immortal tears, with a wondrously potent
and subtle imagination, and a fire of humanity to burn up whole
mountains of brutal superstitions.

The passionate words of the poor old dying mother, full of a deathless
love for her boy who was hung, go straight as an arrow to its mark,
through all the conventions of society and all the teachings of the
Church.

Election, Election and Reprobation--it's all very well,
But I go to-night to my boy, and I shall not find him in Hell.

And if he be lost--but to save my soul, that is all your desire;
Do you think that I care for my soul if my boy be gone to the fire?

Tennyson gives the very essence of the moral revolt against Hell. Human
nature has so developed in sympathy that the sufferings of others,
though out of sight, afflict our imaginations. We loathe the spectacle
of Abraham and Lazarus gazing complacently on the torture of Dives.
Once it was not so. Those who were "saved" had little or no care for the
"damned." But the best men and women of to-day do not want to be saved
alone. They want a common salvation or none. And the mother's heart,
which the creeds have trampled upon, hates the thought of any happiness
in Heaven while son or daughter is agonising in Hell.

It is perfectly clear that Tennyson was far from an orthodox Christian.
Quite as certainly he was not a Bibliolator. He read the Bible, of
course; and so did Shelley. There are fine things in it, amidst its
falsehoods and barbarities; and the English version is a monument of our
literature. We regard as apocryphal, however, the story of Tennyson's
telling a boy, "Read the Bible and Shakespeare; the one will teach you
how to speak to God, and the other how to speak to your fellow-men."
Anyhow, when the poet came to die, he did not ask for the Bible and he
did ask for Shakespeare. The copy he habitually used was handed to him;
he opened it at "Cymbeline," one of the most pagan of Shakespeare's
plays; he read a little, and then held the book until Death came with
the fall of "tired eyelids upon tired eyes."

It was a poetic death, and a pagan death. There lay the aged,
world-weary poet; artificial light was withdrawn, and the moonlight
streamed through the window upon his noble figure. Wife and son, doctors
and nurses, were silent around him. And as Death put the