for the sake of the ancient worthies whom tradition had handed down as at one time or another connected with it?  There was rarely difficulty in selecting from among contemporary poets one of preeminent talent, whose elevation to the laurel would offend none of his fellows.  There was certainly no difficulty in the present case.  There was palpable evidence that Tennyson was by all admission the hierophant of his order; and it would be time enough to dispense with the title when a future occasion should be at a loss to decide among contending candidates.  The latter reasoning prevailed.  Tennyson accepted the laurel, and with it a self-imposed obligation to make occasional acknowledgments for the gift.

The first opportunity presented itself in the issue of a fresh edition of his poems, in 1851.  To these he prefixed some noble verses, dedicating the volumes to the Queen, and referring with as much delicacy as modesty to his place and his predecessor:—­

  “Victoria,—­since your royal grace
  To one of less desert allows
  This laurel, greener from the brows
  Of him that uttered nothing base.”—­

The next occasion was of a different order.  The hero of Waterloo ended his 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