TENSE 



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TENSE 



for him, and before his use of them in the 

 Idylls he had touched on them in such poems 

 as The Lady of Shalott and Sir Galahad. 



Estimate of His Work. Melody is perhaps 

 the .most notable characteristic of Tennyson's 

 verse. At the outset it was sometimes secured 

 at the expense of thought the little lyric 

 Where Claribel Low Lieth, for instance, is al- 

 most pure music without an idea. Later, how- 

 ever, the union of thought and melody was 

 what he everywhere sought, and his ability to 

 make sound fit sense is shown clearly in such 

 contrasting lines as these from the Passing of 

 Arthur. The first group are rugged and harsh, 

 as fits the scene they describe; the second 

 smooth, flowing, beautiful : 



The bare, black cliff clang'd round him, as he 



based 



His feet on juts of slippery crag, that rang, 

 Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels. 



And on a sudden, lo ! the level lake, 

 And the long glories of the winter moon. 



The music of his verse was but an expression 

 of the love for harmony which was one of his 

 strongest characteristics; and he was keenly 

 sensitive to the suffering which he saw in the 

 world the discords in life's harmony. It was 

 to science that he looked for the righting of 

 the world's wrongs, and thus he has been called 

 the poet of science. Evolution has a large place 

 in his writings. A.MC c. 



Consult Ainger's Tennyson for the Young; 

 Lyall's Tennyson, in English Men of Letters Se- 

 ries ; Gary's Tennyson: His Home, His Friends, 

 and His Work. 



TENSE, a word derived from the I/atin 

 tempo, meaning time, and used in grammar to 

 denote a form taken by a verb to express action 

 or state in relation to time. Tense is indicated 

 by changes in the form of verbs and by the use 

 of auxiliary words, as shown in the conjugations 

 given below. 



Tense Forms of the Indicative. There are 

 three principal tense divisions in the indicative 

 mode present, past and future but in each 

 case the act may be viewed as completed at 

 some definite time in the present, past or fu- 

 ture. Hence there are also three perfect tenses, 

 denoting perfected action or state. The follow- 

 ing tables gives these six tenses: 



Present I am, do, see, walk 

 Past I was, did, saw, walked 



Future I shall be, do, see, walk 

 Present Perfect I have been, done, seen, walked 

 Past Perfect I had been, done, seen, walked 



Future Perfect I shall have been, done, seen, 

 walked 



Action in the present, past and future may 

 also be represented as continuing, or in prog- 

 ress, and is then expressed thus: 

 I am doing, seeing, walking 

 I was doing, seeing, walking 

 I shall be doing, seeing, walking 



The perfect tenses likewise have a form which 

 shows that the action is continuous 

 I have been doing, seeing, walking 

 I had been doing, seeing, walking 

 I shall have been doing, seeing, walking 



Transitive verbs, like to see, may be conju- 

 gated in all tenses in both the active and the 

 passive voices. The passive forms are I am 

 seen, I was seen, I shall be seen, I am being 

 seen, etc. 



Past and Present Perfect. These two tense 

 forms are sometimes confused. The distinction 

 between them is this: Whereas the past tense 

 expresses action merely as belonging to past 

 time, the present perfect expresses action as 

 belonging to past time but also as touching the 

 present. It is correct to say, The Japanese 

 have made rapid progress within the last dec- 

 ade; also, The Japanese made rapid progress 

 during the last half of the nineteenth century. 

 In the first case the action is viewed as com- 

 ing up to the present, and in the second case 

 simply as taking place in past time. It is incor- 

 ' rect, on the other hand, to make such state- 

 ments as, / have left school five years ago, or 

 / wrote a letter the past half hour. The correct 

 forms are, / left school five years ago; and, / 

 have written a letter 'the past half hour. 



Past and Past Perfect. Compare the follow- 

 ing: Washington was first inaugurated in 1789 ; 

 Washington had already been inaugurated when 

 the first national census was taken. In the first 

 sentence there is a simple statement of action 

 in past time, and in the second a statement of 

 an act completed before some other specified 

 act. 



The Future Tenses. The simple future tense 

 denotes an action that will take place at one 

 time in the future, while the future perfect 

 views an action as one that will be completed 

 before the occurrence of some other future act. 

 The distinction may be seen in the following: 

 / shall leave to-morrow at ten o'clock; I shall 

 have left to-morrow before they arrive. 



Shall and Will. Most grammarians make the 

 following distinction between shall and will, 

 two auxiliary verbs used in forming the future 

 tenses of the indicative: When used with the 

 first person, both singular and plural, shall de- 

 notes simple futurity; when used with the sec- 



