No more shall Commerce be all in all, and Peace Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note, And watch her harvest ripen, her herd increase. ... a peace that was full of wrongs and shames, Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told ...  For the long long canker of peace is over and done:  And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep, And deathful grinning mouths of the fortress, names The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire!

What interpretation are we meant to give to all this sound and fury?  We would fain have put it down as intended to be the finishing-stroke in the picture of a mania which has reached its zenith.  We might call in aid of this construction more happy and refreshing passages from other poems, as when Mr. Tennyson is

Certain, if knowledge brings the sword,
That knowledge takes the sword away.[1]

[1] “Poems,” p. 182, ed. 1853.  See also “Locksley Hall,” p. 278.

And again in “The Golden Dream,”—­

              When shall all men’s good
  Be each man’s rule, and universal peace
  Lie like a shaft of light across the land?

And yet once more in a noble piece of “In Memoriam,”—­

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

But on the other hand we must recollect that very long ago, when the apparition of invasion from across the Channel had as yet spoiled no man’s slumbers, Mr. Tennyson’s blood was already up:[2]—­

  For the French, the Pope may shrive them ... 
  And the merry devil drive them
  Through the water and the fire.

[2] “Poems chiefly Lyrical,” 1830, p. 142.

And unhappily in the beginning of “Maud,” when still in the best use of such wits as he possesses, its hero deals largely in kindred extravagances (p. 7):—­

  When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,
    And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children’s bones,
  Is it peace or war? better war! loud war by land and by sea,
    War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.

He then anticipates that, upon an enemy’s attacking this country, “the smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue,” who typifies the bulk of the British people, “the nation of shopkeepers,” as it has been emasculated and corrupted by excess of peace, will leap from his counter and till to charge the enemy; and thus it is to be reasonably hoped that we shall attain to the effectual renovation of society.