and all the grand prophetic passage following, which is said, we know not how truly, to have won for the poet the respect of that great statesman whose loss all good men deplore.

In saying that “Locksley Hall” has deservedly had so great an influence over the minds of the young, we shall, we are afraid, have offended some who are accustomed to consider that poem as Werterian and unhealthy.  But, in reality, the spirit of the poem is simply anti-Werterian.  It is man rising out of sickness into health—­not conquered by Werterism, but conquering his selfish sorrow, and the moral and intellectual paralysis which it produces, by faith and hope—­faith in the progress of science and civilisation, hope in the final triumph of good.  Doubtless, that is not the highest deliverance—­not a permanent deliverance at all.  Faith in God and hope in Christ alone can deliver a man once and for all from Werterism, or any other moral disease; that truth was reserved for “In Memoriam:”  but as far as “Locksley Hall” goes, it is a step forward—­a whole moral aeon beyond Byron and Shelley; and a step, too, in the right direction, just because it is a step forward—­ because the path of deliverance is, as “Locksley Hall” sets forth, not backwards towards a fancied paradise of childhood—­not backward to grope after an unconsciousness which is now impossible, an implicit faith which would be unworthy of the man, but forward on the road on which God has been leading him, carrying upward with him the aspirations of childhood, and the bitter experience of youth, to help the organised and trustful labour of manhood.  There are, in fact, only two deliverances from Werterism possible in the nineteenth century; one is into Popery, and the other is—­

Forward, forward, let us range;
Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change;
Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day: 
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

But such a combination of powers as Mr. Tennyson’s naturally develop themselves into a high idyllic faculty; for it is the very essence of the idyl to set forth the poetry which lies in the simpler manifestations of Man and Nature; yet not explicitly, by a reflective moralising on them, as almost all our idyllists—­Cowper, Gray, Crabbe, and Wordsworth—­have been in the habit of doing, but implicitly, by investing them all with a rich and delightful tone of colouring, perfect grace of manner, perfect melody of rhythm, which, like a gorgeous summer atmosphere, shall glorify without altering the most trivial and homely sights.  And it is this very power, as exhibited in the “Lord of Burleigh,” “Audley Court,” and the “Gardener’s Daughter,” which has made Mr. Tennyson, not merely the only English rival of Theocritus and Bion, but, in our opinion, as much their superior as modern England is superior to ancient Greece.