depth the peculiarities of the bucolic mind, in the "Northern Farmer; scan the great Woman's Rights question, in the poem of "The Princess;" and analyse psychologically the state into which the human mind falls in extreme old age, in "The Grandmother;" and prove the prince of storytellers in the "Idylls of the King "—and how rare is the storytelling faculty, in prose or poetry, the reading public know to their cost; but the Idylls are more than interesting tales well told, for, couched in the frame-work of the past, those old tales of the Round Table positively teem with the thoughts and feelings of our modern times; they repeat our own life dramas, until all the people there seem drawn out of the past and brought very near to us, by the intimate way in which we find them animated like ourselves, with the same hopes, and fears, and aspirations—and lastly, a man who in later life can pass easily to the creation of dramas, such as "Queen Mary," and "Harold," and "A'Beckett," and, after a comparatively brief study, seize those historical scenes and persons with a vigour of grip which might well make the despair of a Macaulay, a Froude, or a John Richard Green ;—such a poet is

indeed highly characteristic, and intensely representative, of the nineteenth century.

Third characteristic-Tennyson's Moral and Religious Instincts. In dealing now with Tennyson's religious sensibility, I come first to Tennyson's imaginative hold over past religious phases of Christian thought and feeling, and I dwell upon his deeply spiritual view of those two eternally recurrent phenomena of human intellect and passion in religion, the asceticism of Stylites, the ecstasy of St. Agnes-the Christianity of the Wilderness and of the Convent.

The sympathetic exercise of the imagination which enables a man to live and move in alien atmospheres to realize other men's notions of life, to see things through their eyes-is the power which will alone enable us to take a wide interest in the condition of others, or to do justice to their religious, political, and social views when differing from our own.

It is just for want of seeing how people come to think and feel thus and thus, that sectarians in Church and State bite and devour one another. No one can understand his neighbour's creed without a certain exercise of imagination; and had

we a little more of this faculty we should be able to live more calmly with Roman Catholics, dissenters, and other people who hold diverse opinions. And the moral lesson of a great imaginative effort like the poem of St. Simeon Stylites is put yourself in his mental atmosphere, live in his age.

VI. THE CHRISTIANITY OF THE WILDERNESS -St. Simeon Stylites. If there is one thing more puzzling than another to the mind of an ordinary Englishman, it is the asceticism which prevailed in the primitive church. We ask, why did these men leave their comfort and their city life, to wander about in the wilderness in hunger and thirst and nakedness, living in dens and caves, and inflicting ceaseless self-torment? They went out from the great cities, such as Alexandria, or Rome, and mortified their bodies with fasting and prayer, until they became Saints, and people flocked from all quarters to see them, and finally worshipped them as half divine; and all this was at its height in the fourth and fifth centuries, and it is no little puzzle to some of us. The poem of which I am about to read a portion is that of St. Simeon Stylites, the prince of ascetics, who, because he could not

sufficiently mortify his body by hunger and wandering, got on to the top of a pillar and lived there. There he stopped, and would come down only to mount a higher pillar, where he remained three years. The people crowded out to see him and bring him food; and thus he remained, exposed to all the inclemencies of the weather, preaching to the crowds, falling sometimes into long trances, until his fame spread as the greatest worker of miracles and the greatest saint in Christendom! One day he seemed to have been still for a longer time than usual. He was in the habit of bowing his head down to his knees, and he had not bowed himself for a long time. A devotee once counted that he bowed himself 1250 times, and then he left off counting. But when he had been now long motionless they climbed up to see what was the matter with him, and found he had been dead for some time!

Now, without realizing by the imagination, that age and atmosphere, it is impossible for us to understand how such conduct could commend itself to the multitude, or why they reckoned the ascetic a saint. But were you a poet, like Tennyson, you would seize the truth enshrined. Look

at what Alexandria, Antioch, and the whole East was at that time. It was an age of gigantic crime, luxury, lawlessness, and selfishness; an age too of prodigies, superstitions, and portents ; and if a man wanted to go right, he had to turn his back on the cities, and fly to the deserts. It was an age in which a man could hardly believe in the mastery of the soul over the body; and he who did believe, was constrained to sum up his belief in some immense symbol-nay, to become himself that symbol, as did Simeon upon his pillar. That spectacle meant-there is something in man that is greater than his body, that can master and even extinguish all its natural hunger and appetite-this body, which is always getting in the way of soul-progress! As the saint looked around, he saw men swept away by their bodily lusts, and ruled by all things which are transitory and ephemeral; and if, in the old days of Alexandria and Rome you would be a saint, surely you must get away from all that external world— mortify yourself, and treat every motion of the flesh as if it were a temptation of the devil! Thus you would at last have brought yourself into a state in which you were all spirit, and seemed