r feels,
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.
Mated with a squalid savage--what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time.
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range,
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

It would be difficult among the poets of the last century to parallel
these passages for their imaginative sweep and magnetic appeal to the
reader. The new criticism that disparages Tennyson and raises Browning
to the seventh heaven calls _Locksley Hall_ old-fashioned and
sentimental, but to me it is the greatest poem of its age. Next to
this I would place _In Memoriam_, which has never received its just
recognition. Readers of Taine will recall his flippant Gaelic comment
on Tennyson's conventional but cold words of lament. Nothing, it seems
to me, is further from the truth. The many beautiful lines in the poem
depict the changing moods of the man who mourned for his dead and
finally found comfort in the words of the Bible--the only source of
comfort in this world for the sorely wounded heart. The whole poem, as
his son Hallam says, emphasizes the poet's belief "in an omnipotent
and all-loving God, who has revealed himself through the highest
self-sacrificing love in the freedom of the human will and in the
immortality of the soul."

The meter of _In Memoriam_ serves to fix the poem in the memory. It
seems to fit the thought with perfect naturalness. It is not strange
that Queen Victoria should have placed this poem next to the Bible as
a means of comfort after the loss of her husband, whom she loved so
dearly that all the attractions of power and wealth never made her
forget him a single day.

_The Idylls of the King_ are also unappreciated in these days, yet
they contain a body of splendid poetry that cannot be duplicated. They
represent the author's dreams from early youth, when his imagination
was first fired by old Malory's chronicle of the good King Arthur.
They breathe a chivalry as lofty as Sidney's, and they teach many
ethical lessons that it would do the present-day world good to take to
heart. These noble poems, cast in the most musical blank verse in our
literature, were the work of thirty years, written only when the poet
felt genuine inspirati