ter his estates--two infirmities which even his
accusers did not seek to connect with advanced thinking; and that
Euripides, though a technical innovator, stood hardly an inch ahead of
the fashionable dialectic of his day, and suffered only from the
ridicule of his comic contemporaries and the disdain of his
wife--misfortunes incident to the most respectable. Pindar and Virgil
were court favorites, repaying their patrons in golden song. Dante,
indeed, suffered banishment; but his banishment was just a move in a
political (or rather a family) game. Petrarch and Ariosto were not
uncomfortable in their generations. Chaucer and Shakespeare lived
happy lives and sang in the very key of their own times. Puritanism
waited for its hour of triumph to produce its great poet, who lived
unmolested when the hour of triumph passed and that of reprisals
succeeded. Racine was a royal pensioner; Goethe a chamberlain and the
most admired figure of his time. Of course, if you hold that these
poets one and all pale their ineffectual fires before the radiant
Shelley, our argument must go a few steps farther back. I have
instanced them as acknowledged kings of song.

The Case of Tennyson.

Tennyson was not persecuted. He was not (and more honor to him for his
clearness) even misunderstood. I have never met with the contention
that he stood an inch ahead of the thought of his time. As for seeing
through death and life and his own soul, and having the marvel of the
everlasting will spread before him like an open scroll,--well, to
begin with, I doubt if these things ever happened to any man. Heaven
surely has been, and is, more reticent than the verse implies. But if
they ever happened, Tennyson most certainly was not the man they
happened to. What Tennyson actually sang, till he taught himself to
sing better, was:--

"Airy, fairy Lilian,
Flitting fairy Lilian,
When I ask her if she love me,
Claps her tiny hands above me,
Laughing all she can;
She'll not tell me if she love me,
Cruel little Lilian."

There is not much of the scorn of scorn, or the love of love, or the
open scroll of the everlasting will, about _Cruel Little Lilian_. But
there _is_ a distinct striving after style--a striving that, as
everyone knows, ended in mastery: and through style Tennyson reached
such heights of thought as he was capable of. To the end his thought
remained inferior to his style: and to the end the two in h