y thick over city and river; the Houses of
Parliament themselves were scarcely visible as I drove across
Westminster Bridge in the heavy London vapour--a symbol of the cloud
which was hanging over the immediate political future. The morning
papers were occupied with Lord Tennyson's new 'Locksley Hall' and Mr.
Gladstone's remarks upon it. I had read neither; but from the criticisms
it appeared that Lord Tennyson fancied himself to have seen a change
pass over England since his boyhood, and a change which was not to his
mind. The fruit of the new ideas which were then rising from the ground
had ripened, and the taste was disagreeable to him. The day which had
followed that 'august sunrise' had not been 'august' at all; and 'the
beautiful bold brow of Freedom' had proved to have something of brass
upon it. The 'use and wont' England, the England out of which had risen
the men who had won her great position for her, was losing its old
characteristics. Things which in his eager youth Lord Tennyson had
despised he saw now that he had been mistaken in despising; and the new
notions which were to remake the world were not remaking it in a shape
that pleased him. Like Goethe, perhaps he felt that he was stumbling
over the roots of the tree which he had helped to plant.

The contrast in Mr. Gladstone's article was certainly remarkable. Lord
Tennyson saw in institutions which were passing away the decay of what
in its time had been great and noble, and he saw little rising in the
place of them which humanly could be called improvement. To Mr.
Gladstone these revolutionary years had been years of the sweeping off
of long intolerable abuses, and of awaking to higher and truer
perceptions of duty. Never, according to him, in any period of her
history had England made more glorious progress, never had stood higher
than at the present moment in material power and moral excellence. How
could it be otherwise when they were the years of his own ascendency?

Metaphysicians tell us that we do not know anything as it really is.
What we call outward objects are but impressions generated upon our
sense by forces of the actual nature of which we are totally ignorant.
We imagine that we hear a sound, and that the sound is something real
which is outside us; but the sound is in the ear and is made by the ear,
and the thing outside is but a vibration of air. If no animal existed
with organs of hearing, the vibrations might be as before, but there