“Ring in the nobler modes of life,
     With sweeter manners, purer laws.

* * * * *

     “Ring in the love of truth and right,
     Ring in the common love of good.

* * * * *

     “Ring in the valiant man and free,
     The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
     Ring out the darkness of the land,
     Ring in the Christ that is to be!”

What our formative, high-wrought English literature has suffered in Tennyson’s passing from the age on which he has shed so much glory those can best say who are of his era, and have been intimate, as each appeared, with every successive issue of his works.  To the latter, as to all thoughtful students of his writings, his has been the supreme interpreting voice of the past century, while his influence on the literary thought of his time has been of the highest and most potent kind.  Especially influential has Tennyson been in carrying forward, with new impulses and inspiration, the poetic traditions of that grand old motherland of English song to which our own poets in the New World, as well as the younger bards of the British Isles, owe so much.  If we except the Laureate, there have been few who have worn the singing robe of the poet who, in these later years at least, have spoken so impressively to cultured minds on either side of the ocean, or have more effectively expressed to his age the high and hallowing spirit of modern poetry.  It is this that has given the Laureate his exalted place among the great literary influences of the century, and made him the one indubitable representative of English song, with all its tuneful music and rare and delicate art.  To a few of the great choir of singers of the past Tennyson admittedly owed something, both in tradition and in art,—­for each new impulse has caught and embodied not a little of the spirit and temper, as well as the culture and inspiration, of the old,—­but his it was to impart new and fresher thought and a wider range of harmony and emotion than had been reached by almost any of his predecessors, and to speak to the mind and soul of his time as none other has spoken or could well speak.  From the era of Shakespeare and Milton and their chief successors, it is to Tennyson’s honor and fame that he has given continuity as well as high perfection to the great coursing stream of noble British verse.

AUTHORITIES.

Brooke, Stopford A. Tennyson:  his Art and Relation to Modern Life.

Van Dyke, Henry.  The Poetry of Tennyson. 
Bayne, Peter.  Tennyson and his Teachers. 
Brimley, George.  Essays on Tennyson. 
Tainsh, Ed. C. Study of the Works of Tennyson. 
Waugh, Arthur.  Tennyson:  A Study of his Life and Work. 
Stedman, E. C. Victorian Poets. 
Buchanan, R. Master Spirits. 
Forman.  Our Living Poets. 
Dowden, Ed. Tennyson and Browning. 
Tennyson, Hallam.  Memoir of the Poet (by his Son). 
Kingsley, C. Miscellanies.