ning were given a
single race in a single century is abundant cause for giving hearty
thanks to God. They have purified, not our day only, but remote days
coming, till days shall set to rise no more, and have given the lie to
the poor folly of supposing highest genius and purest morality to be
incompatibles; for in life and poem, and in the poem of life, they have
swept clouds from our sky, until all purity stands revealed, fair as
the morning star smiling at Eastern lattices. In Tennyson is no
slightest appeal to the sensual. He hates pruriency, making protest
against it with a voice like the clangor of angry bells. In "Locksley
Hall Sixty Years After," he speaks wisely and justly, in sarcasm that
bites as acids do:

"Rip your brother's vices open, strip your own foul
passions bare:
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence--forward,
naked--let them stare.
Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of
your sewer;
Send the drain into the fountain lest the stream should
issue pure.

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the trough of Zolaism,
Forward, forward, aye and backward, downward, too,
in the abysm.
Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising
race of men."

And this is Tennyson the aged, whose moral eyes were as the physical
eyes of Moses on Pisgah, "undimmed." Bless him for his aged anger!
Happily, to-day, realism has lost its charm. We have had enough living
in sewers, when the suburbs were near with their breezy heights and
quiet homes. Stench needs no apostle. The age has outgrown these
hectic folk, who, in the name of nature, lead us back to Pompeii.
Gehenna needs not to be assisted. Jean Valjean, bent on an errand of
mercy, fled to the sewers of Paris, his appeal to these foul subways
being justified, since he sought them under stress for the preservation
of a life. Does this prove that men should take promenades in the
sewers as if they were boulevards? An author is not called on to tell
all he knows. Let writers of fiction assume that the public knows
there are foul things, and needs not to be reminded of them, and let
the romancist avoid them as he would a land of lepers.

Those who companied with Tennyson through his beautiful career were
helped into a growing love of purity. He had no panegyric for lust and
shame and sensuality, but made us feel they were shameful, so that we
blushed for those who had not