48. Some cited old Lactantius. Christian author, who flourished early in the 4th century. The 1st edition of his works, one of the oldest of printed books, was brought out at Subiaco in 1465.

74. Guanahani. The native name of the first island discovered by Columbus.

107. The belting wall of Cambalu, etc. The royal residence of the Khan of Cathay. Compare Milton, Paradise Lost,' xi. 388: Čambalu, seat of Cathayan_Can.'

109. Prester John was a mythical Christian king of India. Compare Much Ado About Nothing, ii. 1. 274: I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the furthest inch of Asia, bring you the length of Prester John's foot.'

117. Howl'd me from Hispaniola. The name which Columbus gave to the island of Hayti.

125. Fonseca, my main enemy at their court. Juan Rodriguez Fonseca, a bigoted Spanish prelate, who called Columbus a visionary and treated him with persistent malignity.

126. Bovadilla. The Francisco de Bobadilla mentioned above.

144. Veragua. A province of New Granada in South America.

190. The Catalonian Minorite. Bernardo Buil (Boyle), a Benedictine monk, according to the best authorities (not a Minorite, or Franciscan), who was sent by the Pope to the new Indies in June, 1493, as apostolical vicar. He hated Columbus, but there seems to be no evidence that he excommunicated him.

206. Colón. The Spanish form of Columbus.'

Page 479. THE VOYAGE OF Maeldune.

Line 22. Fainter than any flitter mouse-shriek. The cry of the bat, which in England is popularly called 'flittermouse' (fluttering-mouse), 'flickermouse,' or flindermouse.' Compare Ben Jonson, Sad Shepherd,' ii. 8: And giddy flittermice, with leather wings,' etc.

26. They almost fell on each other. This idea, which occurs so often in the poem, is not to be found in the old legend.

48. The triumph of Finn. Finn, the son of Cumal, was the most renowned of all the heroes of ancient Ireland. He was commander of the Feni, or Feni of Erin,' a sort of standing army maintained by the monarch for the support of the throne. Each province had its own soldiers under a local captain, but all were under one commander-in-chief. Finn was equally brave and sagacious. His foresight was, indeed, so extraordinary that the people believed it to be a preternatural gift, and a legend was invented to account for it. He was killed at a place

called Athbrea, on the Boyne, A. D. 284. Ossian, or Oisin, the famous hero-poet, to whom the bards attribute many poems still extant, was the son of Finn.

55. The Isle of Fruits. The poet may have got the hint of this island from the isle of intoxicating wine-fruits' in the Celtic tale; but the rich details of the picture are all his own.

77. That undersea isle. The description here is developed from the simple statement in the old legend that they could see, beneath the clear water, a beautiful country, with many mansions surrounded by groves and woods.' So far from being tempted to dive down to the place, the sight of an animal fierce and terrible' which infests it makes them tremble lest they may not be able to cross the sea over the monster, on account of the extreme thinness of the water; but after much difficulty and danger they get across it safely.'

105. The Isle of the Double Towers. If I had not read the old tale, I should have said that this quaint and wild conception must have been taken from it; but, though it seems so thoroughly like a Celtic fancy, there is nothing in the legend that could have suggested it.

115. Saint Brendan. One of the most famous of the ancient Celtic legends is that of The Voyage of Saint Brendan,' undertaken in the sixth century. He set out from Kerry, sailed westward into the Atlantic, and, as some believed, landed on the shore of America. The adventures he met with were as varied and surprising as those of Maeldune.

Page 484. PREFATORY SONNET TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.'

Line 3. Their old craft, seaworthy still. 'The Contemporary Review."

7. This roaring moon of daffodil. Compare 'The Winter's Tale,' iv. 4. 118:

Clown. Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness. Thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam.

For the poet's account of the vegetarian dream, see the Memoir,' vol. ii. p. 317. The visit to Fitzgerald was made in 1876.

16. A thing enskied. See 'Measure for Measure,' i. 4. 34: 'I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted.'

28. Of Eshcol hugeness. See Numbers, xiii. 23.

32. Your golden Eastern lay. The 'Rubaíyát' of Omar Kayyam, translated by Fitzgerald in 1859.

46. My son. Tennyson.

Hallam, the present Lord

Page 489. TIRESIAS.

Line 9. My son. Used in a familiar figurative way. Menaceus, whom he addresses below, was the son of Creon, and directly descended from Cadmus, who had offended Ares (Mars) by killing the dragon guarding a spring sacred to the god.

25. Subjected to the Heliconian ridge. 'Subjected' is used in its etymological sense of lying below.

38. There in a secret olive-glade I saw, etc. The description of the goddess is nowise inferior to that of the same goddess and her companion deities in Enone.

96. The song-built towers and gates. The walls of Thebes rose to the music of Amphion's harp, as those of Troy to Apollo's. Compare 'Enone.'

147. A wiser than herself. Edipus.

164. Their ocean - islets. The Isles of the Blest.

192. Find the gate Is bolted, and the master gone. For the figure, compare The Deserted House.'

Page 495. DESPAIR.

Line 21. In the drear nightfold of your fatalist. The 1881 reading was dark nightfold.'

75. Tho' glory and shame dying out for ever, etc. The 1881 reading was: Tho' name and fame dying out,' etc.

Page 504. TO-MORROW.

Line 31. The white o' the may. All the English editions have May;' but I have no doubt that the reference is to the blossoms of the white hawthorn, as in The Village Wife,' line 80. See note on that passage.

48. The Sassenach whate. The Saxon (English) wheat.

Page 508. PROLOGUE TO GENERAL HAMLEY. Line 5. You came, and look'd, and loved the view, etc. The view from the poet's summer residence at Aldworth.

28. Tel-el-Kebir. A village in Lower Egypt, about fifty miles northeast of Cairo. Here, on the 13th of September, 1882, the English under General Wolseley defeated the Egyptian insurgents under Arabi Pasha, whose surrender soon followed.

Page 509. THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE AT BALACLAVA.

Line 5. When the points of the Russian lances arose on the sky. Originally, broke in on the sky.'

14-21. Thousands of horsemen had gather'd there on the height, etc. For these eight lines the first version had:

Down the hill slowly thousands of Russians

Drew to the valley, and halted at last on the height, With a wing push'd out to the left, and a wing to the right

But Scarlett was far on ahead, and he dashed up alone Thro' the great gray slope of men,

And he wheel'd his sabre, he held his own

Like an Englishman there and then;

And the three that were nearest him follow'd with force, etc.

Irene. The name, which is the Greek word for peace,' is in keeping with the character.

Line 14. Or Trade re-frain the Powers, etc. The hyphen is apparently intended to call attention to the derivation of re-frain from the late Latin refrenare, to bridle or hold in with a bit (frenum).

17. Kelt. Elsewhere the poet uses the form 'Celt. Compare In Memoriam,' cix.: The blind hysterics of the Celt;' 'A Welcome to Alexandra': Teuton or Celt, or whatever we be,' etc.

45. I will strike,' said he, etc. See his Ode (i. 1. 35, 36):

The allusions to the Æneid,' the Georgics,' and certain Eclogues' need no explanation. Line 3. He that sang the Works and Days. Hesiod.

18. The Northern Island sunder'd once from all the human race. Compare the first Eclogue,' 67: Et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos.' Page 513. EARLY SPRING.

Line 19. The woods with living airs. Originally, by living airs.'

33. A gleam from yonder vale. Originally, 'Some gleam,' etc.

Page 514. Frater Ave Atque Vale. The Latin quotations in the poem are from Catullus, the Frater ave atque vale' being the end of his lament for the loss of his brother (101.10). Page 514. HELEN'S TOWER.

Line 4. Mother's love in letter'd gold. The

ume.

Page 515. HANDS ALL ROUND.

The version of this song in the Examiner' was as follows:

First drink a health, this solemn night,

A health to England, every guest;
That man 's the best cosmopolite

Who loves his native country best.
May Freedom's oak for ever live
With stronger life from day to day;
That man 's the true Conservative
Who lops the moulder'd branch away.
Hands all round!

God the tyrant's hope confound!

To this great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round.

A health to Europe's honest men!

Heaven guard them from her tyrants' jails!
From wronged Poerio's noisome den,

From iron'd limbs and tortured nails!
We curse the crimes of Southern kings,

The Russian whips and Austrian rods

We likewise have our evil things;

Too much we make our Ledgers, Gods.
Yet hands all round!

God the tyrant's cause confound!

To Europe's better health we drink, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round!

What health to France, if France be she,
Whom martial prowess only charms?

Yet tell her better to be free

Than vanquish all the world in arms. Her frantic city's flashing heats

But fire, to blast, the hopes of men. Why change the titles of your streets? You fools, you'll want them all again. Yet hands all round!

God their tyrant's cause confound!

To France, the wiser France, we drink, my friends, And the great name of England, round and round.

Gigantic daughter of the West,

We drink to thee across the flood,
We know thee most, we love thee best,
For art thou not of British blood?
Should war's mad blast again be blown,
Permit not thou the tyrant powers
To fight thy mother here alone,

But let thy broadsides roar with ours.
Hands all round!

God the tyrant's cause confound!

To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round.

O rise, our strong Atlantic sons,

When war against our freedom springs!
O speak to Europe through your guns!
They can be understood by kings.

You must not mix our Queen with those
That wish to keep their people fools;
Our freedom's foemen are her foes,
She comprehends the race she rules.
Hands all round!

God the tyrant's cause confound!

To our dear kinsmen of the West, my friends,

And the great cause of Freedom, round and round.

Pages 515 to 517

All the reprints (not excepting that in the 'Memoir,' which has the tyrant's' in the 3d stanza, and great kinsmen' in the last) are more or less inaccurate. Only the first stanza of this version appears in the present song, which was written to be sung by Mr. Santley, at St. James's Hall, London, on the Queen's birthday, May 24, 1882.

The 6th line then had larger' for 'stronger,' and the 11th line had the great,' as also in the 11th line of the other two stanzas.

This new version as printed in the 'Tiresias' volume had 'true Cosmopolite' and 'best Con servative.' In 1889 it took its present form. Page 516. FREEDOM.

Line 3. The pillar'd Parthenon. Sometimes printed (without authority, as Lord Tennyson told me) the column'd Parthenon.'

17-20. Of Knowledge fusing class with class, etc. This stanza was not in the poem as first printed.

21. Who yet, like Nature, etc. Originally, 'Who, like great Nature,' etc. The next line had our Human Star.'

Page 516. POETS AND THEIR BIBLIOGRAPHIES.

Line 6. Adviser of the nine-years ponder`d lay. See Horace, Ars Poetica,' 388.

8. Catullus, whose dead songster never dies. Lesbia's sparrow.

Page 517. LoCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER.

For a long review of the poem by Mr. W. E. Gladstone, see 'The Nineteenth Century' for January, 1887. In the closing paragraph there is a reference to a criticism in the Spectator' (of December 18, 1886) bearing the signs of a master hand,' and finding a perfect harmony, a true equation, between the two "Locksley Halls;" the warmer picture due to the ample vitality of the prophet's youth, and the colder one not less due to the stinted vitality of his age. I add a portion of the article to which Mr. Gladstone alludes:

"The critics hitherto have done no justice to Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," if, indeed, they have carefully read it. We venture to say that it is at least as fine a picture of age reviewing the phenomena of life, and reviewing them with an insight impossible to youth into all that threatens man with defeat and degradation, though of course without any of that irrepressible elasticity of feeling which shows even by the very wildness and tumult of its despair that despair is, for it, ultimately impossible; as Tennyson's earlier poem was of youth passionately resenting the failure of its first bright hope, and yet utterly unable to repress the promise and potency" of its buoyant vitality. The difference between the "Locksley Hall of Tennyson's early poems and the " Locksley Hall" of his latest is this- that in the former all the melancholy is attributed to personal grief, while all the sanguine visionariness which really springs out of overflowing vitality justifies itself by dwelling on the cumulative resources of science and the arts; - in the latter, the mel

66

ancholy in the man, a result of ebbing vitality, justifies itself by the failure of knowledge and science to cope with the moral horrors which experience has brought to light, while the setoff against that melancholy is to be found in a real personal experience of true nobility in man and woman. Hence those who call the new

Locksley Hall" pessimist seem to us to do injustice to that fine poem. No one can expect age to be full of the irrepressible buoyancy of youth. Age is conscious of a dwindling power to meet the evils which loom larger as experience widens. What the noblest old age has to set off against this consciousness of rapidly diminishing buoyancy is a larger and more solid experience of human goodness, as well as a deeper faith in the power which guides youth and age alike. Now Tennyson's poem shows us these happier aspects of age, though it shows us also that exaggerated despondency in counting up the moral evils of life which is one of the consequences of dwindling vitality. No thing could well be finer than Tennyson's pic ture of the despair which his hero would feel if he had nothing but "evolution to depend on or than the rebuke which the speaker himself gives to that despondency when he remembers how much more than evolution there is to depend on, how surely that has been already evolved" in the heart of man which, itself inexplicable, yet promises an evolution far richer and more boundless than is suggested by any physical law. The final upshot of the swaying tides of progress and retrogression, in their periodic advance and retreat, is, he tells us, quite incalculable by us- - the complexity of the forward and backward movements of the wave being beyond our grasp; - and yet he is sure that there is that in us which supplies an ultimate solution of the riddle.

On the whole, we have here the natural pessimism of age in all its melancholy, alternating with that highest mood like "old experience which, in Milton's phrase, doth attain to something like prophetic strain." The various eddies caused by these positive and negative currents seem to us delineated with at least as firm a hand as that which painted the tumultuous ebb and flow of angry despair and angrier hope in the bosom of the deceived and resentful lover of sixty years since. The later "Locksley Hall" is in the highest sense worthy of its predecessor.'

Line 1. Half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts, etc. Compare the opening lines of the first Locksley Hall.'

13-16. In the hall there hangs a painting, etc. These two couplets were originally written for the first Locksley Hall.' See the notes on that poem.

29. Cross'd! for once he sail'd the sea, etc. The crossed feet indicate that the knight was a Crusader.

42. Cold upon the dead volcano, etc. Compare Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal':

The soul partakes the season's youth,

And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe

73. Gone the cry of Forward, Forward!' Compare the first Locksley Hall': 'Forward, forward let us range,' etc.

78. Let us hush this cry of Forward!' till ten thousand years have gone. Compare The Golden Year':

Ah, folly for it lies so far away,

Not in our time, nor in our children's time,
"T is like the second world to us that live;
'T were all as one to fix our hopes on heaven
As on the vision of the golden year.

89. France had shown a light to all men, etc. Referring to the French Revolution. 'Demos' (8μos) is the Greek name for the common people.

95. Peasants maim the helpless horse. The allusion, as Lord Tennyson wrote me, is to 'modern Irish doings.' The next couplet refers to an actual instance of wanton cruelty reported in the newspapers at the time.

103. Cosmos. Order and harmony as opposed to chaos.' The fabric of the external universe first received the title of cosmos, or "beautiful"' (Trench).

66

110. Equal-born? oh, yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat. The critic of the London Academy' (January 1, 1887) asks: 'Is it defensible to twist the Radical's demand for equality" of rights into a statement that all men are equal-born" in order to pour a very natural contempt upon it?' It is this equality of inalienable rights,' not equality of rank or endowments, which the Declaration of Independence claims for all men.

116.

The voices from the field. The vote of the laboring classes.

130. Thro' the tonquesters we may fall. Tennyson has tonguesters' (which he may have coined) again in Harold,' v. 1.:

Your voices: for your voices I have fought;
Watch'd for your voices; for your voices bear
Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six
I have seen, and heard of; for your voices have
Done many things, some less, some more: your voices.
Indeed, I would be consul.

133. Pluck the mighty from their seat, etc. Compare Luke, i. 52, and Psalms, cxlvii. 6.

145. Wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism. Alluding to the realistic' French novelist.

157. Jacobinism and Jacqueric. Mad opposition to legitimate government, like that of the Jacobins, a club of violent Republicans in the French Revolution of 1789, who got their name from the Jacobin monastery where their secret meetings were held. Jacquerie,' originally the name given to a revolt of the peasants of Picardy against the nobles in 1358, came to be applied to any similar insurrection of the lower classes.

162. All the millions one at length with all the visions of my youth. Compare the first' Locksley Hall':

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battleflags were furl'd

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

185. Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer home of all good things. See note on Leonine Elegiacs' above.

6

201-212. What are men that he should heed us? This passage takes for its text the 8th Psalm, which, beginning with the same dismay at the smallness of man's material significance, sees, nevertheless, that in his apprehension of the world he is proved "little lower than the angels"(The Academy ').

226. The dog too lame to follow with the cry. That is, with the rest of the pack. Compare 'Othello,' ii. 3. 370: Not like a hound that hunts, but one that fills up the cry;' and ' Coriolanus,' iii. 3. 120: You common cry of curs!' 240. Youthful jealousy is a liar. Alluding to the earlier poem, where he is described as a 'clown,' etc.

.

246. Roofs of slated hideousness. The 'model houses' to be seen in many English towns and villages, built on scientific principles, but with none of the picturesque charm of the old domestic architecture-better to live in, though not to look at.

276. Forward, till you see the Highest Human Nature is divine, etc. The youthful cry is taken up again in these closing lines, in which there is surely no pessimism.

278. The deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb. See Mark, xxi. 5, and compare John, xx. 12.

Page 525. OPENING OF THE INDIAN AND COLONIAL EXHIBITION.

Line 17. And wherever her flag fly. The original reading, as printed in the newspapers at

Page 525. To W. C. MACREADY.

At the banquet the sonnet was read to the guests by John Forster. It was printed at the time in The Household Narrative of Current Events' and other periodicals.

Page 526. TO THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA.

On the 20th of April, 1886, the poet's younger son, Lionel, died on the voyage home from India. A monument was erected to his memory in Freshwater Church on the Isle of Wight -a beautiful statue of St. John, from the chisel of Miss Mary Grant. A tribute more enduring than brass or marble, and more beautiful than sculptor could carve, is built in lofty and tender rhyme in these lines addressed by his father to the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.

Page 527. ON THE JUBILEE OF QUEEN VIC

TORIA.

Line 39. Henry's fifty years are all in shadow. Henry III., who came to the throne in 1216, and died in 1272. The other sovereigns referred to are Edward III., who reigned fifty-one years, and George III., who reigned sixty years.

Page 528. DEmeter and PERSEPHONE. Line 5. The God of ghosts and dreams. Her mes (Mercury), the 'serpent-wanded power' of line 25.

39. Aïdoneus. Dis (Pluto).

82. Three gray heads. The Fates.

114. The brother of this Darkness. Zeus (Jupiter).

119. For nine white moons. The earlier classical authorities made it eight months, the later ones six months.

The stone of Sisy

148. The Stone, the Wheel. phus and the wheel of Ixion. Page 530. OWD ROÄ. Line 6. Like out. Like anything (aught). 15. Faäithful an' True. See Revelation, xix. 11.

61. Cleän-wud. The wud is the old English wode or wood, meaning mad, frantic. Compare the play upon the word in the MidsummerNight's Dream,' ii. 1. 192:

And here am I, and wode within this wood,
Because I cannot meet my Helena.

94. Tother Hangel i Scriptur. See Judges, xiii. 20.

Page 533. VASTNESS.

Mr. W. E. Henley remarks: In "Vastness" the insight into essentials, the command of primordial matter, the capacity of vital snggestion, are gloriously in evidence from the first to the last. Here is no touch of ingenuity, no trace of originality," no sign of cleverness,

nothing is antic, peculiar, superfluous; but here is epic unity and completeness, here is a sublimation of experience expressed by means of a sublimation of style. It is unique in English, and, for all that one can see, it is likely to remain unique this good while yet.'