Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/80

74 Guard Your Own," and elsewhere in his poems. Tennyson was little more than a platonic Christian; for the organized churches he had almost contempt. "There's a Something that watches over us; and our individuality endures: that's my faith, and that's all my faith," is his own deliberate statement (Nineteenth Century, January, 1893, p. 169).

With these Examiner poems we come to an end of Tennyson's poetical indiscretions. Hereafter his contributions to periodicals were incorporated in due course in his poems, one alone contributed to Good Words in 1868 having as yet failed to find a place.

Several other poems of which I have taken no notice have been attributed to Tennyson by irresponsible editors, who, reversing the old editorial maxim "when in doubt leave out," have been daring enough to father on the poet, on the flimsiest evidence or none at all, verses he could never have written. An edition issued by Robbers of Amsterdam, containing pieces suppressed in the volumes of 1830 and 1833, gives a poem entitled "The Old Seat," purporting to be a sequel to "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," beginning:

In this article I have made only passing reference to the poems suppressed from the volumes of 1830, 1833, and 1842. These, together with all the poems mentioned above, and the original version of "The Lover's Tale" as printed and suppressed by Tennyson in 1833, are now published in a volume which, with the collected Works and the poems included in the Life, are likely to comprise for many years to come the complete body of Tennyson's known writings.