ot mix our Queen with those
That wish to keep their people fools;
Our freedom's foemen are her foes,
She comprehends the race she rules.
Hands all round!
God the tyrant's cause confound!
To our dear kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great name of England round and round.

XLIX

=Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper=

[Published in _The Examiner_, February 14, 1852, and never reprinted
nor acknowledged. The proof sheets of the poem, with alterations in
Tennyson's autograph, were offered for public sale in 1906.]

To the Editor of _The Examiner_.

SIR,--I have read with much interest the poems of Merlin. The enclosed
is longer than either of those, and certainly not so good: yet as I
flatter myself that it has a smack of Merlin's style in it, and as I
feel that it expresses forcibly enough some of the feelings of our
time, perhaps you may be induced to admit it.

TALIESSEN.

How much I love this writer's manly style!
By such men led, our press had ever been
The public conscience of our noble isle,
Severe and quick to feel a civic sin,
To raise the people and chastise the times
With such a heat as lives in great creative rhymes.

O you, the Press! what good from you might spring!
What power is yours to blast a cause or bless!
I fear for you, as for some youthful king,
Lest you go wrong from power in excess.
Take heed of your wide privileges! we
The thinking men of England, loathe a tyranny.

A freeman is, I doubt not, freest here;
The single voice may speak his mind aloud;
An honest isolation need not fear
The Court, the Church, the Parliament, the crowd.
No, nor the Press! and look you well to that--
We must not dread in you the nameless autocrat.

And you, dark Senate of the public pen,
You may not, like yon tyrant, deal in spies.
Yours are the public acts of public men,
But yours are not their household privacies.
I grant you one of the great Powers on earth,
But be not you the blatant traitors of the hearth.

You hide the hand that writes: it must be so,
For better so you fight for public ends;
But some you strike can scarce return the blow;
You should be all the nobler, O my friends.
Be noble, you! nor work with faction's tools
To charm a lower sphere of fulminating fools.

But knowing all your power to heat or cool,
To soothe a civic wound or keep it