26 
in modern life than Professor Huxley has spoken of poetic 
expression as ‘sensual caterwauling,” overlooking the fact that 
the power of expression is the wedded body of inspiration, 
employing the poet’s keenest sensibilities, and lending such value 
to thought as the cutting of a diamond to the rugged stone. 
The very tendency of which Professor Huxley complains 
naturally follows the iconoclastic overthrow of the cherished 
ideals of poetry. Modern days are days of doubt: ‘the old 
order changing, yielding place to new.” ‘'hrough this period of 
doubt and turbulence Alfred Tennyson has lived, and through 
much of it he has exerted an inflnence upon modern thought. 
The obligations of science to poetry should not be forgot- 
ten, for the inspirations of the poets have foreshadowed, if not 
heralded, the scientific revelations of our day, Professor Tyndall 
was led to the greatest discoveries of his life by the chance read- 
ing of a few lines from Emerson. Goethe presaged the idea of 
the vibratory transmission of light and the correlation of forces ; 
and Erasmus Darwin and Beddoes did the same for the ideas of 
Evolution and Development. Thus the poet, seizing upon the 
germs of discovery, pursues them to their ultimate bounds, 
The period of Milton was one of faith, of realistic faith, while 
the eighteenth century, with its lack of creative poetic power, 
marked its ebbing tide, and gave us none greater than Pope 
and Goldsmith as its legacy for the nineteenth century, with 
little faith to stimulate, till Wordsworth’s faith in ‘“‘ Nature”’ 
brought back the “ flowing tide.” The mantle of Wordsworth, 
the greatest poet of nature, fell most fitly upon Tennyson, the 
poet of Man, and he, more than any other poet, is the repre- 
sentative of nineteenth century thought. 
Unlike one or other of his compeers, who represent the melody, 
or wisdom, or passion, or other partial phase of the time, Tenny- 
son represents the very time itself, for in his verse he is as truly 
‘the glass of fashion and the mould of form”’ of the Victorian 
generation as Spenser was of the Elizabethan court, or Milton 
was of the Protectorate, or as Pope was of Queen Anne’s period. 
His first songs were like those of other men, only finer in 
quality. They were dreamy experiments in metre and word 
painting : groping for a truer form of expression; but at the same 
time, efforts of a mind alive to the vision of power and beauty. 
To men of severe and established tastes, such as Bulwer Lytton, 
they were repellent, but to the youthful they had the charm of 
sighing winds, and babbling waters: indeed an inexpressible 
wonder of luxury and weirdness. 
In the volume which came two years later, in 1832, the style 
is more clearly developed and pruned of mannerisms ; the poet has 
full command of delicious metres and stanzas; his every word is 
as needful as the flower or scroll of ornamental architecture, and 
