ALFRED TENNYSON (conclusion.)

The Poet Laureate's cruise with Sir Donald Currie, in the autumn of 1883, was an event of some importance, as he was then afforded an opportunity of reading his poems to a select audience of Royal personages; it is generally supposed that it was during that trip also that the Prime Minister offered him the title, his acceptance of which has since been the subject of so much comment and censure. Punch (September 22, 1883) described the voyage to the north in the following comical medley of parodies of the Laureate's poems :

A LAUREATE'S LOG.

(Rough Weather Notes from the New Berth-day Book.) MONDAY.

If you're waking, please don't call me, please don't call me, CURRIE dear,

For they tell me that to-morrow t'wards the open we're to

steer!

No doubt, for you and those aloft, the maddest merriest way,

But I always feel best in a bay, CURRIE, I always feel best in a bay !

TUESDAY.

Take, take, take?

What will I take for tea?

The thinnest slice-no butter,-
And that's quite enough for me!
WEDNESDAY.

It is the little roll within the berth
That by-and-by will put an end to mirth,
And, never ceasing, slowly prostrate all !
THURSDAY.

Let me alone! What pleasure can you have
In chaffing evil? Tell me, what's the fun
Of ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All you the rest, you know how to behave

In roughish weather! I, for one,

Ask for the shore—or death, dark death,—I am so done!

What? Really in? Well, come, the news I'm precious glad to hear;

For though in such good company I willingly would stay-— I'm glad to be back in the bay, CURRIE, I'm glad to be back

It is now somewhat more than fifty years since a young, and comparatively obscure writer addressed some presumptious lines to a lady of noble family, in which he sneered at her claims of long descent, ridiculed nobility generally, and concluded by advising her to go out amongst the poor, to teach the children, and to feed the beggars.

The tone of the poem was censorious and offensive; but Lady Clara Vere de Vere, to whom it was addressed, let it pass unnoticed by, knowing that "Everything comes to those who know how to wait," and now this last daughter of a hundred Earls has written a good-humoured rejoinder to the first Baron Tennyson, in which she playfully assumes her age to have remained what it was fifty years ago:—

Baron Alfred T. de T.,

Are we at last in sweet accord?

I learn-excuse my girlish glee-
That you've become a noble Lord;
So now that time to think you've had

Of what it is makes charming girls,
Perhaps you find they're not so bad-
Those daughters of a hundred earls.

Baron Alfred T. de T.,

When last your face I chanced to see, You had the passion of your kind,

You said some horrid things to me; And then-"we parted," you to sail For Oshkosh, in the simple steerage, But now-excuse my girlish glee— You reappear, and in the peerage!

Baron Alfred T. de T.,

Were you indeed misunderstood That other day I heard you say,

"Tis only noble to be good?"

I really thought you then affirmed-
'Tis so the words come back to me,
"Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood."
Baron Alfred T. de T.,

There stand twin-spectres in your hall,
And as they found you were a Lord

Two wholesome hearts were changed to gall; The two, an humble couple they,

I think I see them, on my life,
The while they read of "Baron" T.,
The grand old Adam, and his wife!

Trust me, Baron T. de T.,

From yon blue heaven above us bent, This simple granger and his spouse Smile as you read your long descent. Howe'er it be, it seems to me,

Nor must you think my language cruel, It seems-excuse my girlish gleeConsistency's a lovely jewel.

Baron Alfred T. de T.,

I know you're proud your name to own; Your pride is yet no mate for mine,

Don't bid me break your heart again
For pastime, ere to town I go;
I'll not do that, my noble Lord,

But give you something that I owe. Baron Alfred T. de T.,

When you were in that angry fit You turned to me and thundered out, "Go, teach the orphan girl to knit." I am an orphan girl myself,

And that my knitting you may see, Here is a mitten that I've knit

Excuse my gushing, girlish glee.

Nice to be a Lion's Lady in Society, no doubt!
Not so nice to smooth his mane at home when Leo is put

out.

Talk of tantrums! Read these lines he published afterwell, the jilt,

Pitching into poor Mamma, and charging me with nameless guilt!

Dear Mamma! I thought her hard-but I'm a mother now myself,

And I know what utter nonsense is the poet's scorn of pelf.

Now, there was another young lady who was treated with scant courtesy by the author of Locksley Hall, and she, too, has written a reply to the love-sick ravings of the young poet :

COUSIN AMY'S VIEW.

SCENE-The neighbourhood of Locksley Hall. Enter Lady AMY HARDCASH (atat. forty), with a book of poems and several children.

LADY AMY loquitur.

CHILDREN, leave me here a little; don't disturb me, I request;

For Mamma is very tired, and fain would take a little rest

'Tis the place, the same old place, though looking somewhat pinched and small.

Ah, tis many and many a day since last I looked on Locksley Hall!

Then 'twas in the spring of life and love-ah, Love, the great Has-been!

Love which, like the year's own Spring, is very nice-and very green!

In the Spring the new French fashions come the female heart to bless,

In the Spring the very housemaid gets herself another dress;

In the Spring we're apt to feel like children just let loose from school;

In the Spring a young girl's fancy's very apt to play the fool.

On the moorland, by the waters he was really very nice; There was no one else at hand, and I-forgot Mamma's advice.

He indulged in rosy raptures, heaved the most suggestive sighs,

Said the very prettiest things about my lips and hazel eyes. All his talk was most poetic, all his sentiments were grand, Though his meaning, I confess, I did not always understand. So that, when he popped the question, I did blush and hang my head,

And, well, I dare say the rest was pretty much as he has said.

LOCKSLEY'S famous-yes, and married, notwithstanding his fierce curse,

"Woman is the lesser man!" I hold that false as it is hard.

The most womanish of creatures surely is an angry bard.

Yet, sometimes, when, as at present, Spring is brightening all the land,

Comes that longing for the fields, Sir RUFUS cannot understand;

Comes a ghostly sort of doubt if e'en Society can give All, quite all, for which a well-loved woman might desire to live;

Comes a memory of his voice, a recollection of his glance, Thoughts of things which then had power to make my maiden pulses dance;

Comes, but I'm extremely stupid. Well, I know if our dear FAN

Took a fancy for a poet, I should soon dismiss the man.

Here she comes! She'll wed, I hope, rich Viscount VIVIAN ere the fall. that chance, had I espoused the Lord of Punch, June 1, 1878.

She ne'er had had Locksley Hall!

In a magazine entitled The Train, published in 1856, there was a poem called The Three Voices, written by Mr. Lewis Carroll, who has since become famous for his quaintly humorous works. This was a parody of the obvious truisms, the muddled metaphor, and vague. reasonings contained in Tennyson's Two Voices, and Mr. Carroll has wisely inserted it in his last collection of poems (Rhyme? and Reason? Macmillan and Co.), it is somewhat altered from its original form, and is much heightened in its effect by the intensely comic, and ably drawn, illustrations of Mr. Arthur B. Frost.

Unfortunately, this clever parody is too long to quote entire, and an extract gives but a faint idea of its terribly grotesque sorrows, and its whimsical burlesque of the Laureate's reasoning in The Two Voices:

THEY walked beside the wave-worn beach,
Her tongue was very apt to teach,

"Yet still before him, as he flies,
One pallid form shall ever rise,
And bodying forth in glassy eyes

"The vision of a vanished good,
Low peering through the tangled wood,
Shall freeze the current of his blood."

Till, like a silent water-mill,
When summer suns have dried the rill,
She reached a full stop, and was still.

To muse a little
did seem,
space
Then like the echo of a dream,
Harped back upon her threadbare theme.

Still an attentive ear he bent,

But could not fathom what she meant :
She was not deep, nor eloquent.

;

But, in truth, Tennyson has never failed so signally as when he has attempted to be metaphysical, and although his admirers have written many essays to explain the profundity of his ideas, and the beauties of his philosophy, their explanations seem to require some explaining, whilst it also seems that general readers fail to discern the charm in his would-be philosophical writings.

The Higher Pantheism may be taken as an

plains

Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns?

Is not the vision He? tho' He be not that which he seems? Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Dark is the world to thee; thyself art the reason why; For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel "I am I !"

There are several other couplets which do not tend to unravel the poet's tangled web of thought, whereas if we turn to The Heptalogia (Chatto and Windus, (1880), we find the whole mystery treated with much greater lucidity of expression in The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell. ONE, who is not, we see ; but one, whom we see not, is: Surely this is not that; but that is assuredly this.

What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over and under :

If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without thunder.

Doubt is faith in the main; but faith on the whole is doubt: We cannot believe by proof; but could we believe without? Why, and whither, and how? for barley and rye are not clover:

Neither are straight lines curves; yet over is under and over,

The Nineteenth Century for May, 1880, contained another of the Laureate's vague rhapsodical poems, entitled De Profundis, of which all the meaning was as well expressed in the following

"Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep,
From that great deep before our world begins;
Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep,

From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore.
Awfully deep, my boy, awfully deep.

With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy."

The Princess Ida; or, Castle Adamant, by Mr. W. S. Gilbert, which was produced at the Savoy Theatre, on January 5th, 1884, though a humorous adaptation of Tennyson's Princess, is not strictly a burlesque, and is styled by the author "A Respectful Operatic Per-version" of the Laureate's poem. It is altered from an earlier piece by Mr. Gilbert on the same theme. Almost the only passage which can be considered an actual parody of Tennyson's diction is the speech of the Princess Ida to the Neophytes, which is modelled on the Lady Psyche's harangue in the original poem :

"Women of Adamant, fair NeophytesWho thirst for such instruction as we give, Attend, while I unfold a parable.

The elephant is mightier than Man,

Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant

Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead).

And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's,

As Woman's brain to man's-(that's rule of three)
Conquers the foolish giant of the woods,

As woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man!

In mathematics, woman leads the way

The narrow-minded pedant still believes

That two and two make four! Why we can prove,

We women-household drudges as we are

That two and, two make five-or three-or seven;
Or five-and-twenty, if the case demands !
Diplomacy! The wiliest diplomate

Is absolutely helpless in our hands,

He wheedles monarchs-woman wheedles him!
Logic? Why, tyrant Man himself admits

It's waste of time to argue with a woman!
Then we excel in social qualities:
Though Man professes that he holds our sex
In utter scorn, I venture to believe
He'd rather spend the day with one of you
Than with five hundred of his fellow-men!
In all things we excel! Believing this,

A hundred maidens here have sworn to place
Their feet upon his neck. If we succeed,
We'll treat him better than he treated us:
But if we fail, why then let hope fail too!
Let no one care a penny how she looks-

Let red be worn with yellow-blue with green-
Crimson with scarlet-violet with blue!
Let all your things misfit, and you yourselves,
At inconvenient moments come undone !
Let hair-pins lose their virtue; let the hook
Disdain the fascination of the eye-
The bashful button modestly evade
The soft embraces of the button-hole!
Let old associations all dissolve,

Let Swan secede from Edgar-Gask from Gask
Sewell from Cross-Lewis from Allenby!

To the Star," through the "Star,"

Up the "Star" staircase--

Into the Assembly Room,

Crowded the Gownsmen.
Some one cried, "Chaff the cad!"
Forward they went like mad-
None knew exactly why-
All wished a lark to try-
E'en 'neath the Proctor's eye-
Into the Assembly Room.
On went the Gownsmen.

'Baccy to right of them,
'Baccy to left of them,
'Baccy in front of them,

Densely surrounds men!
Howled at by cad and scout,
Ordered by Proctors out,

Still they pressed onwards well,
Raising a stifling smell,
Into the "Star" Hotel,

To the Assembly Room,