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gold pieces; thousands of thousandsstables, and coach-houses; a moderately millions mountains, of of gold: where sized park; a large garden and hotwill you keep them? Will you put an houses; and pleasant carriage drives Olympus of silver upon a golden Pelion through the shrubberies. In this man-make Ossa like a wart? Do you think sion are to live the favored votaries of the rain and dew would then come down the Goddess; the English gentleman, with to you, in the streams from such moun- his gracious wife, and his beautiful famtains, more blessedly than they will down ily; always able to have the boudoir and the mountains which God has made for the jewels for the wife, and the beautiyou, of moss and whinstone? But it is 10 ful ball dresses for the daughters, and not gold that you want to gather! What hunters for the sons, and a shooting in is it? greenbacks? No; not those neither. the Highlands for himself. At the botWhat is it then is it ciphers after a tom of the bank, is to be the mill; not capital I? Cannot you practise writing less than a quarter of a mile long, with ciphers, and write as many as you want? 15 a steam engine at each end, and two in Write ciphers for an hour every morn- the middle, and a chimney three hundred ing, in a big book, and say every even- feet high. In this mill are to be in coning, I am worth all those naughts more stant employment from eight hundred to than I was yesterday. Won't that do? a thousand workers, who never drink, Well, what in the name of Plutus is it 20 never strike, always go to church on you want? Not gold, not greenbacks, Sunday, and always express themselves not ciphers after a capital I? You will in respectful language. have to answer, after all, 'No; we want, somehow or other, money's worth.' Well, what is that? Let your Goddess 25 of Getting-on discover it, and let her learn to stay therein.

II. But there is yet another question to be asked respecting this Goddess of Getting-on. The first was of the continu- 30 ance of her power; the second is of its

extent.

Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of thing you propose to yourselves? It is very pretty indeed, seen from above; not at all so pretty, seen from below. For, observe, while to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting-on, to a thousand families she is the Goddess of not Getting-on. Nay,' you say, they have all their chance.' Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must always be the same number of blanks. Ah! but in a lottery it is not skill and intelligence which take the lead, but blind chance.' What then! do you think the old practice, that they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,' is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist? and that, though we may not take advantage of a child's or a woman's weakness, we may of a man's foolishness? Nay, but finally, work must be done, and some one must be at the top, some one at the bottom.' Granted, my friends. Work must always be, and captains of work must always be; and if you in the least remember the tone of any of my writings, you must know that they are thought unfit for this age, because they are always insisting on need of government, and speaking with scorn 55 of liberty. But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and

Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to be all the world's Pallas, and all the world's Madonna. They could 35 teach all men, and they could comfort all men. But, look strictly into the nature of the power of your Goddess of Getting-on; and you will find she is the Goddess- not of everybody's getting on 40 but only of somebody's getting on. This is a vital, or rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in your own ideal of the state of national life which this Goddess is to evoke and maintain. I 45 asked you what it was, when I was last here; 1- - you have never told me. Now, shall I try to tell you?

Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleas- 50 ant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath. it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and

1 The Two Paths,' p. 115 (small edition), and p. 99 of vol. x of the Revised Series of the Entire Works.'

taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work. Real kings, on the contrary, are known invariably by their doing quite the reverse of this,by their taking the least possible quan- 10 tity of the nation's work for themselves. There is no test of real kinghood so infallible as that. Does the crowned creature live simply, bravely, unostentatiously? probably he is a King. Does he 15 cover his body with jewels, and his table with delicates? in all probability he is not a King. It is possible he may be, as Solomon was; but that is when the nation shares his splendor with him. 20 Solomon made gold, not only to be in his own palace as stones, but to be in Jerusalem as stones. But even so, for the most part, these splendid kinghoods expire in ruin, and only the true king- 25 hoods live, which are of royal laborers governing loyal laborers; who, both leading rough lives, establish the true dynasties. Conclusively you will find that because you are king of a nation, it does not 30 follow that you are to gather for yourself all the wealth of that nation; neither, because you are king of a small part of the nation, and lord over the means of its maintenance- over field, or mill, or 35 mine,- are you to take all the produce of that piece of the foundation of national existence for yourself.

of these, better or worse shall come; and it is for you to choose which.

I know that none of this wrong is done with deliberate purpose. I know, on the 5 contrary, that you wish your workmen well; that you do much for them, and that you desire to do more for them, if you saw your way to such benevolence safely. I know that even all this wrong and misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving to do his best; but unhappily, not knowing for whom this best should be done. And all our hearts have been betrayed by the plausible impiety of the modern economist, that To do the best for yourself, is finally to do the best for others.' Friends, our great Master said not so; and most absolutely we shall find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves; but it will not do to have our eyes. fixed on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a Pagan says of this matter; hear what were, perhaps, the last written words of Plato,- if not the last actually written (for this we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and power his parting words in which, endeavoring to give full crowning and harmonious close to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and the words cease, broken off forever.

They are at the close of the dialogue called Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in ideal

You will tell me I need not preach against these things, for I cannot mend 40 dream, the early state of Athens; and the

them. No, good friends, I cannot; but you can, and you will; or something else can and will. Even good things have no abiding power and shall these evil things persist in victorious evil? All 45 history shows, on the contrary, that to be the exact thing they never can do. Change must come; but it is ours to determine whether change of growth, or change of death. Shall the Parthenon be 50 in ruins on its rock, and Bolton priory in its meadow, but these mills of yours be the consummation of the buildings of the earth, and their wheels be as the wheels of eternity? Think you that 55 'men may come, and men may go,' but

- mills go on forever? Not so; out

genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted themselves, until their spot was not the spot of his children.' And this, he says, was the end; that indeed through many generations, so long as the God's nature in them yet was full, they were submissive to the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly to all that had kindred with them in divineness; for

their uttermost spirit was faithful and true, and in every wise great; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they dealt with each other, and took all the chances of life; and despising all things except virtue, they cared little what happened day by day, and bore lightly the burden of gold and of possessions; for they saw that, if only their common love and virtue increased, all these things would be 10 by every human lip that has ever, in increased together with them; but to set their esteem and ardent pursuit upon material possession would be to lose that first, and their virtue and affection to

The rest is silence. Last words of the chief wisdom of the heathen, spoken of this idol of riches; this idol of yours; this golden image high by measureless cubits, 5 set up where your green fields of England are furnace-burnt into the likeness of the plain of Dura: this idol, forbidden to us, first of all idols, by our own Master and faith; forbidden to us also

any age or people, been accounted of as able to speak according to the purposes of God. Continue to make that forbidden deity your principal one, and soon

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pleasure will be possible. Catastrophe
will come; or worse than catastrophe,
slow moldering and withering into Hades.
But if you can fix some conception
of a true human state of life to be
striven for life good for all men as
for yourselves - if you can determine
some honest and simple order of exist-
ence; following those trodden ways of
wisdom, which are pleasantness, and
seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths,
which are peace; 1- then, and so sanc-
tifying wealth into 'commonwealth,' all
your art, your literature, your daily la-
bors, your domestic affection, and citi-
zen's duty, will join and increase into
one magnificent harmony. You
know then how to build, well enough;
you will build with stone well, but with
flesh better; temples not made with
hands, but riveted of hearts; and that kind
of marble, crimson-veined, is indeed
eternal.

gether with it. And by such reasoning, 15 no more art, no more science, no more and what of the divine nature remained in them, they gained all this greatness of which we have already told; but when the God's part of them faded and became extinct, being mixed again and again, 20 and effaced by the prevalent mortality; and the human nature at last exceeded, they then became unable to endure the courses of fortune; and fell into shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight 25 of him who could see, having lost everything that was fairest of their honor; while to the blind hearts which could not discern the true life, tending to happiness, it seemed that they were then chiefly 30 noble and happy, being filled with all iniquity of inordinate possession and power. Whereupon, the God of gods, whose Kinghood is in laws, beholding a once just nation thus cast into misery, 35 and desiring to lay such punishment upon them as might make them repent into restraining, gathered together all the gods into his dwelling-place, which from heaven's center overlooks whatever has 40 part in creation; and having assembled them, he said '—

will

1 I imagine the Hebrew chant merely intends passionate repetition, and not a distinction of this somewhat fanciful kind; yet we may profitably make it in reading the English.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892)

Tennyson was born at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire. The rich level landscape of the reclaimed fen district is clearly visible in his poems. He soon began to imitate the English masters of verse and the compositions written between 15 and 17' in Poems by Two Brothers (1827) show his transitory allegiance to Byron and Scott. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he took the Newdigate prize in 1829 with a blank verse poem on Timbuctoo, and the next year issued Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Numerous collegians, of whom many were afterward eminent in scholarship and affairs, became his sworn admirers and steadily announced that a new poet had arrived. Poems (1833) showed a further advance in quality and scope, but this and the preceding volume were ridiculed by the reviews for certain obvious affectations and slips of taste and Tennyson waited nine years before publishing again. During this interval, he set himself with great earnestness to comprehend the thoughts and movements of his time, enriched his mind by constant study of the classics and of English literature, recreated the best of his old poems and composed with great deliberation his new ones. When his two volumes of 1842 appeared, such poems as The Lady of Shalott and The Palace of Art had been transformed and with them came Ulysses, Morte d'Arthur, Locksley Hall and many others of moderate length, every one exquisitely tempered and wrought. His reputation was immediately secure, and steadily increased during fifty years more of continuous authorship. In 1850 he received the laurel greener from the brows of him that uttered nothing base.' The Princess had already appeared and In Memoriam which had been growing since the death of his friend Arthur Hallam in 1833, now sealed his title not only to the laureateship but to the position of chief spiritual guide to his age. Maud (1855) represented something of a departure from his previous methods toward a less restrained style and a more vigorous grasp on the realities of life, a departure which he carried still farther in some of his ballads' and in realistic studies such as The Northern Farmer. The chief enterprise of his later years, however, was The Idylls of the King, at which he wrought from 1856-59, and again in 1868–72, when the poem became substantially complete. For nearly ten years his chief energies were given to the production of his seven dramas; of these Queen Mary, Harold, and Becket were all written by 1879, though the last was not published until several years later. From 1880 until his death in 1892 every few years added another volume of miscellaneous poems. At least in his lyrics, Tennyson's voice remained to the last, unchanged to hoarse or mute,' a 'clear call' with only a few dark overtones caught from the perplexities of the new era into which his life extended. In the few years since his death, we have moved fast and far from the platforms of the Victorian age; its problems are not our problems, and still less its solutions. Our interest, then, shifts more and more from Tennyson's message,' which was of his time, and attaches to the rich and instructed beauty of his art, which is imperishable.

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Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven, 15
Either at morn or eventide.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky,

She drew her casement-curtain by,

And glanced athwart the glooming flats, 20
She only said, 'The night is dreary,

He cometh not,' she said;

She said, I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!'

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