O! teach the orphan-boy to read,

Or teach the orphan-girl to sew,
Pray Heaven for a human heart,

And let the foolish yeoman go.

Few things in connection with Mr. Tennyson's humanity are more profoundly truthful and suggestive than his delineations of woman. In The Princess, a royal maiden betrothed to a royal lover entertains the notion, that the heroic qualities of woman are undeveloped, because she is denied by man a fitting education. Rejecting the claims of love, and devoting herself to the exaltation of her sex, she founds, as some lady president of a Woman's Rights Association might be supposed to do, a University where maidens only shall be trained in manly learning. After numerous and quite eventful incidents in the history of her enterprise, she becomes the pitying nurse of her wounded lover, and humanized by pity, learns to love. Then, "her false self slips from her like a robe, and leaves her woman."

Yielding herself, she straightway yields her theories. With beautiful propriety, she and her lover are represented as learning, through the affections, wisdom's holiest lessons. In her, these lessons vanquish pride; in him, rough ways: to her, they add mental breadth without abatement of "the childlike in the larger mind;" to him, sweetness and moral height, without loss of those "wrestling thews that throw the world." The Prince is especially eloquent in insisting, that "the man be more of woman, she of man," if the two be ever rightly linked "like perfect music unto noble words;" and in answer to the question of the Princess, how it comes that his earnest words seem echoes from a woman's heart, utters a tribute to his mother, which, as a just statement of woman's place and power, could hardly be surpassed:

Alone, I said, from earlier than I know,

Immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world,
I loved the woman: he, that doth not, lives

A drowning life, besotted in sweet self,
Or pines in sad experience worse than death,

Or keeps his winged affections clipt with crime:
Yet was there one through whom I loved her, one
Not learned, save in gracious household ways,
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
In angel instincts, breathing Paradise,
Interpreter between the Gods and men,
Who looked all native to her place, and yet
On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved
And girdled her with music. Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him; and though he trip and fall,
He shall not blind his soul with clay.

It could not well be otherwise than that poetry, sympathizing heartily with woman and recognizing thoroughly the brotherhood of man, should be literally steeped in the charities of life. We should like to illustrate the point, but must content ourselves with reference to numerous passages in The Princess relating to children; to the touchingly beautiful poems, The May Queen, New Year's Eve, and Conclusion, descriptive of the joyous life of a youthful maiden slowly passing into death; to Audley Court, The Brook, The Day Dream, and others, responsive to the variant moods of a hearty, honest, healthy, humanity. Nor have we space to bring into view the poet's glimpses of that glorious future, "when comes the statelier Eden back to men," but commending our readers to his works, pass to consider a single poem, which we select as fit example of Mr. Tennyson's philosophy.

The poem referred to is The Two Voices. Unique in plan, profoundly metaphysical in thought, and splendidly poetical in form, this poem is not only one of Mr. Tennyson's finest efforts, but one among the finest in all literature. Reflective minds employed upon the riddle of the painful Earth are troubled not unfrequently by conflicts between Unbelief and Faith. God's government of men is pressed with difficulties; Vice triumphs. often over Virtue; Pain not unusually attends on Piety. In

the poet's mind the still small voice of Scepticism begins the argument by reference to the fulness of human misery, and by suggesting, as Job's wife upon occasion not unlike, that it were better to curse God and die. Faith combats the suggestion by arguments drawn from the elaborate skill displayed in man's body, the undisputed dominion of intellect over nature, and the grand completeness of that scheme of Providence which makes the individual an essential portion of the Universe. These arguments are successively opposed by references to the gorgeous perfection of insect bodily structure, to the countless multitudes of statelier minds than man's in God's domain, and to the inappreciable difference to the worlds were an individual atom kept in being or swept to utter annihilation. This last reference unseals the fount of tears. Unbelief concludes that Faith is vanquished, and again urges death as the remedy for woes. The contest is renewed. Faith looks to blessed change in coming years, and touchingly describes the glory of assisting to bring on this consummation, even if, amid the strugglings of truth with error, one should die. Unbelief denies that truth is ever reached. This denial and Faith's reply are rarest gems of imaginative thought. We quote some stanzas:

Cry, faint not; either Truth is born
Beyond the polar gleam forlorn,
Or in the gateways of the morn.

Cry, faint not, climb: the summits slope
Beyond the furthest flights of hope,
Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope,

Sometimes a little corner shines,
As over rainy mist inclines

A gleaming crag with belts of pines.

I will go forward, sayest thou,

I shall not fail to find her now.

Look up, the fold is on her brow.

If straight thy track, or if oblique,

Thou know'st not. Shadows thou dost strike,
Embracing cloud, Ixion-like.

Thus Unbelief; now Faith.

I know that age to age succeeds,
Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,
A dust of systems and of creeds.

I cannot hide that some have striven,
Achieving calm, to whom was given
The joy that mixes man with Heaven:

Who, rowing hard against the stream,
Saw distant gates of Eden gleam,
And did not dream it was a dream;

But heard by secret transport led,
Even in the charnels of the dead,
The murmur of the fountain-head-

Which did accomplish their desire,
Bore and forbore, and did not tire,
Like Stephen, an unquenched fire.

He heeded not reviling tones,

Nor sold his heart to idle moans,

Though cursed and scorned, and bruised with stones:

But looking upward, full of grace,

He prayed, and from a happy place
God's glory smote him on the face.

We cannot follow The Two Voices through all the windings of dispute. The argument on both sides is conducted with rare ability, not in the forms of logic, but according to the intuitions of keen-sighted imagination. We have sufficiently indicated, we think, its speculative subtlety, and its profound significance. We have only to add, that its ending, and as final result of exhaustive philosophizing, is the perfect triumph of Faith. The voice of Unbelief sinks into silence, because unable to establish doubts which at no time had firmer basis than some visionary notions, hastily generalized from imperfect glimpses of a small segment of God's universal plan. The voice of Faith, on the contrary, majestically summing up the probabilities that there

exists a world whence, in reality, streamed out that glory which smote Stephen on the face, rises into sublime utterance of soulyearnings after immortality, in breasts of sage and savage. Just then the Sabbath morning dawns, and soon "the sweet church-bells begin to peal."* Men, women, children, press with gladness to the house of prayer; nor show depression when they pass the place of graves. That holy house environed by God's acre-what is it but a proof that CHRIST HATH ABOLISHED Death, and hath brought LIFE AND IMMORTALITY TO LIGHT, THROUGH THE GOSPEL? Faith owns the proof; and the glories of Christianity, like rainbow over cloud, break grandly over the believing spirit.

And forth into the fields I went,
And Nature's living motion lent
The pulse of hope to discontent.

I wondered at the bounteous hours,
The slow result of winter showers:
You scarce could see the grass for flowers.

I wondered, while I paced along:

The woods were filled so full with song,
There seemed no room for sense of wrong.

So variously seemed all things wrought,
I marvelled how the mind was brought
To anchor by one gloomy thought:

And wherefore rather I made choice

To commune with that barren voice,
Than him that said, "Rejoice! rejoice!"

Deep, earnest, Christian, as is the philosophy pervading The Two Voices, and many other poems, not the less so is the piety breathed through those on which Mr. Tennyson's enduring

* The reader will remember the preservation of Faust from suicide by the bells on Easter morning. It is stated as probable that Chatterton was prevented from his first design of self-murder by a similar cause on the morning of the same festival.