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 ALFRED TENNYSON

HE greatest poetic artist of the English-speaking race has passed away. There need be no sadness of farewell at such a close to such a career. To have passed a long life in undivided devotion to the noblest of the arts, to have grown in mastery of it almost to the end, to have become in very deed the voice of the nation he loved so well: this has been surely the supreme lot. It is characteristic that almost the only trouble of his later years was the intrusive reverence of his fellow-countrymen, a burden that might have been borne with somewhat more of patience and geniality. But there was a touch of the aristocrat about Tennyson that chimed in well with the dignity of his art, and completes the picture of the vates sacer, the consecrated voice of a mighty people, brooding in self-chosen isolation upon the things of highest import.

That is not the figure which Tennyson pre-