back dead eight years later. Beginning with his unfortunate married life and the censure it brought upon him, his succeeding poems show an increase of bitterness, gloom, and defiance to all the laws of God and man. In reviewing some of his poems, later, Jeffrey thus interprets them, "Religion, love, patriotism, valor, devotion, constancy, ambition, all are to be laughed at, disbelieved in, and despised"; and his friend Thomas Moore, at a banquet in 1818, thus speaks of him: "Can I name to you a Byron, without recalling to your hearts recollections of all that his mighty genius has awakened there; his energy, his burning words, his intense passion, that disposition of fine fancy to wander only among the ruins of the heart, to dwell in places which the fire of feeling has desolated, and, like the chestnut tree, that grows best in volcanic soils, to luxuriate most where the conflagration of passion has left its mark?" Byron's nature was a proud one, stung to the quick by wrongs real or fancied, and in his later poems we must yet find something of the cry and writhing of a great soul suffering intense pain. Of his later works the most important are the Prisoner of Chillon, Mazeppa, the Lament of Tasso, Don Juan, besides the dramas, Manfred, Heaven and Earth, Cain, the Two Foscari, and Sardanapalus.

When the Greeks began their struggle for liberty,

in 1822, Byron was at once interested in their cause; and, late in 1823, he entered their revolutionary army. A short time afterward he fell ill, dying at Missolonghi, April 23, 1824.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was, like Byron, a spirit impatient of restraint. He was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet with the title On the Necessity of Atheism, and a little later he came into conflict with English ideas on the subject of marriage and divorce. The strictness and conservatism of England became so distasteful to him that he left his native country, in 1818, to reside on the continent. He was drowned in the Bay of Spezzia, Italy, in 1822. Among his earliest productions is Queen Mab, very fanciful and very exquisite, but atheistical in its tone. His Alastor (1816) is quite as exquisite and quite as intangible. The Revolt of Islam is longer and more ambitious, detailing the search of a pure, human intelligence for the Ideal Good. He wrote two dramatic poems, the Cenci (1819), dealing with the sad mediæval story of Beatrice Cenci; and Prometheus Unbound, dealing symbolically with the freedom of mankind. His fame, however, rests chiefly upon his almost flawless little lyrics, like the Cloud, the Skylark, the West Wind, and the Sensitive Plant. The Witch of Atlas and Epipsychidion have always been

much admired also. Upon the death of Keats, in 1821, he wrote an elegy entitled Adonais, modelled after the Greek elegiasts. Shelley himself regarded this as one of the very best of all his poems, and some critics deem it the finest dirge in the language.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) was the son of Rev. George Tennyson, rector of Somersby, in Lincolnshire. He first attended school at Louth, a village about twenty miles from Somersby, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1828. He was an excellent stu

dent, but the death of his father, in 1831, made it necessary for him to leave the university without graduation. His inclination to poetry was early manifested. He was especially fond of Byron, whose death he mourned as if he had been a near relative. He voices in verse his admiration of Milton, and traces of Spenser's influence are plain in his poetry. His two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles, also had poetic ability. Charles and Alfred published, in 1827, a small volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers, but the book attracted little attention.

In 1829, Tennyson's Timbuctoo won the Chancellor's prize at the university, but there was in this again little foreshadowing of the poet's great future. In 1830, he published a small collection of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, and, in 1832, a second volume of the same character.

After this, he published hardly anything until 1842, but spent the intervening years in reading and reflection as a preparation for greater work. In 1842, another volume appeared, entitled simply Poems. It contained, among others, Morte d'Arthur, the Talking Oak, Dora, Locksley Hall, the Two Voices, and Sir Galahad. This volume established Tennyson's fame, and many, including Wordsworth, now began to look upon him as the greatest poet of the day. Five years later, he published a far more elaborate work than any he had yet given forth, the Princess, relating the disastrous attempt of the title-character to solve the question of woman's mission by the establishment of an institution which should make woman intellectually the equal of man. It is a curious mixture of the modern and the mediæval, and is appropriately called a "Medley." Inserted between the parts, or cantos, and elsewhere in the poem, are some of the most charming little lyrics of our language. In 1850, on the death of Wordsworth, Tennyson was made Poet Laureate. His In Memoriam, an elegy on the death of his college friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, and by many regarded as his best work, was published the same year. It is generally regarded as our finest elegy, though some prefer Shelley's Adonais, and some Milton's Lycidas. Its general tone is that of deepest grief, pervaded with a sublime confidence in the wisdom and goodness of

God. The Idylls of the King, a group of poems approaching the epic in their nature, and dealing with a subject Milton had rejected, King Arthur and his court, appeared at various times. They are the most romantic, perhaps, of Tennyson's poems, and yet, almost unawares, they instil valuable moral lessons. Some of them are very exquisite; it would be difficult to find anything, anywhere, more so than the Holy Grail. Like most of the poets, Tennyson tried the drama. He wrote three plays upon subjects drawn from English history, Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1877), and Becket (1885). Others were the Falcon (1879), based upon Boccaccio's forty-ninth tale, already used in modern times by La Fontaine and Longfellow; the Cup (1881); and the Promise of May (mostly prose, 1882). Tennyson gave much attention to form and symmetry in his work, polishing and refining it with greatest care; and he excelled in the music of poetry. His range was very wide. He selected subjects from ancient, mediæval, and modern times; and he seemed equally familiar with many types of life, from Queen Mary down to the Northern Farmer and Dora. His fingers sweep many chords, from the tender pathos of the May Queen to the rattling, martial vigor of the Revenge or the Charge of the Light Brigade, and from the comparative lightness of Lilian or Lady Clare to the deeper-toned solemnity of In Memoriam. His