long life in 1852, and a nation was in mourning. Then, if ever,
poets, whether laurelled or leafless, were called to give eloquent
utterance to the popular grief; and Tennyson, of all the poets, was
looked to for its highest expression. The Threnode of the Laureate was
duly forthcoming. The public was, as it had no right to be,
disappointed. Tennyson's Muse was ever a wild and wilful creature,
defiant of rules, and daringly insubordinate to arbitrary forms. It
could not, with the witling in the play, cap verses with any man. The
moment its tasks were dictated and the form prescribed, that moment
there was ground to expect the self-willed jade to play a jade's
trick, and leave us with no decent results of inspiration. For odes
and sonnets, and other such Procrustean moulds into which poetic
thought is at times cast, Tennyson had neither gift nor liking. When,
therefore, with the Duke's death, came a sudden demand upon his Muse,
and that in shape so solemn as to forbid, as the poet conceived, any
fanciful license of invention, the Pindaric form seemed inevitable;
and that form rendered a fair exhibition of the poet's peculiar genius
out of the question. Strapped up in prescription, and impelled to move
by official impulse, his Pegasus was as awkward as a cart-horse. And
yet men did him the justice to say that his failure out-topped the
success of others.

Far better--indeed, with the animating thrill of the war-trumpet--was
"The Charge of the Light Brigade," and simply because the topic
admitted of whatever novelty of treatment the bias of the bard might
devise. This is the Laureate's most successful attempt at strictly
popular composition. It proves him to possess the stuff of a Tyrtaeus
or a Koerner,--something vastly more stirring and stimulating than the
usual staple of

"The dry-tongued laurel's pattering talk."[21]

Howbeit, late may he have call for another war-song!

With the name of Tennyson we reach the term of our Laureate calendar.
Long ages and much perilously dry research must he traverse who shall
enlarge these outlines to the worthier proportions of history. Yet
will the labor not be wholly barren. It will bring him in contact with
all the famous of letters and poetry; he will fight over again
numberless quarrels of authors; he will soar in boundless Pindaric
flights, or sink, sooth to say, in unfathomed deeps of bathos. With
one moral he will be profoundly impressed: Of all the more splendid
resul