A few months before the wedding Wordsworth had died.  One night a few months after it Tennyson dreamt that the Prince Consort came and kissed him on the cheek.  “Very kind but very German,” he said in his dream.  Next morning a letter arrived offering him the Laureateship.

One of the first poems Tennyson wrote as laureate was his Ode on the Death of Wellington.  Few people liked it at the time, but now it has taken its place among our fine poems, and many of its lines are familiar household words.

Of Tennyson’s many beautiful short poems there is no room here to tell.  He wrote several plays too, but they are among the least read and the least remembered of his works.  For Tennyson was a lyrical rather than a dramatic poet.  His long poems besides In Memoriam are The Princess, Maud, and the Idylls of the King.  The Princess is perhaps the first of Tennyson’s long poems that you will like to read.  It is full of gayety, young life, and color.  It is a mock heroic tale of a princess who does not wish to marry and who founds a college for women, within the walls of which no man may enter.  But the Prince to whom the Princess has been betrothed since childhood and who loves her from having seen her portrait only, enters with his friends disguised as women students.  The result is confusion, war, and finally peace.  The story must not be taken too seriously; it is a poem, not a treatise, but it is interesting, especially at this time.  For even you who read this book must know that the question has not yet been settled as to how far a woman ought to be educated and take her share in the world’s work.  But forget that and read it only for its light-hearted poetry.  The Princess is in blank verse, but throughout there are scattered beautiful songs which add to the charm.  Here is one of the most musical—­

    “Sweet and low, sweet and low,
        Wind of the western sea,
    Low, low, breathe and blow,
        Wind of the western sea! 
    Over the rolling waters go,
    Come from the dying moon, and blow,
        Blow him again to me;
    While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

    “Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
        Father will come to thee soon;
    Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,
        Father will come to thee soon;
    Father will come to his babe in the nest,
    Silver sails all out of the west
        Under the silver moon: 
    Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.”

In the Idylls of the King, Tennyson, as you have already heard in Chapter IX, used the old story of Arthur.  He used the old story, but he wove into it something new, for we are meant to see in his twelve tales of the round table an allegory.  We are meant to see the struggle between what is base and what is noble in human nature.  But this inner meaning is not always easy to follow, and we may cast the allegory aside, and still have left to us beautiful