"The end
of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been able
to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms have
been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic age he
has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience, silence, and
reverence. _Ehrfurcht_, reverence--the text of his address to the
students of Edinburgh University in 1866--is the last word of his
philosophy.
In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), a young graduate of Cambridge,
published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages entitled _Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, such as the _Sleeping
Beauty, Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_, were
full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like character,
and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's studies, or
exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few sweet chords, but
no _aria_. A number of them--_Claribel, Lilian, Adeline, Isabel,
Mariana, Madeline_--were sketches of women; not character portraits,
like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions of temperament, of
delicately differentiated types of feminine beauty. In _Mariana_,
expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid in Shakspere's _Measure for
Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed an art then
peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the central feeling
by landscape accessories.
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