was much kicking and plunging, for culty in following the track in the 66 Oh, I don't know! Where are you "" ? "Heaven knows! but my brute seems to know where every tree with prickles exists on the island." However, after a little forcible and authoritative language concerning thorntrees and island-horses in general, all was silence. So we returned to the dining-room, where our wreaths were doffed, and after talking over the events of the evening, we suddenly discovered how tired and sleepy we all were; so, bidding one another good-night, we each drifted off with a lantern to our mats and mosquito nets. But what a delightful recollection the forty-second birthday party of our brilliant author will always be to the few who had the good fortune to be preseut! THE SOCIAL BORE.-Ours is an age of necessarily contrary to Christian doctrine universal toleration; the vicious and the and practice. If there is an injunction to saint, the agnostic and the fanatic, have turn the other cheek to the smiter, there all a social welcome extended to them, and is no command to present either ear for an itching ear is always at their service, so the use of that enemy of mankind, the long as they are amusing, but no longer. social bore. But there is a command that Society has but one terror, but it is one a check should be kept on the unruly memwhich dogs its steps through the day and ber, and it is certainly a Christian act to far into the night; it is a fear before which assist the unhappy owner to control this the stoutest heart fails, and the man who member by giving him nothing to exercise has fled from any company, if questioned it upon. Further we are told to live at as to the reasons for his flight, has only to peace with all men, and to cultivate bores offer one excuse, and his offence is at once is to feel out of charity with the whole condoned. He has but to say that he was world. Sometimes one bore will frequent bored, or feared that he might be bored, or the society of another, whose tiresomeness, that he knew an army of bores awaited differing from his own, he is quite able to him in those regions to which his steps perceive, but whose intimacy he cultivates were for the moment ordered, and only the because he finds that by listening to his difeccentric or the imbecile question the pro- fuse discourses he receives a similar kindpriety or the necessity for his precipitate ness for himself. These natural selections retreat. If we are asked as to whether this should not be interfered with; bores should state of things is a wholesome one, show-by a gentle process of weeding out be ing that society is in a healthy and regen- placed together, and should be encouraged erate state, we can confidently affirm that to bore each other, for that is usually not the attitude is one of grace, and is not their ideal of amusement. Saturday Review. Alfred Baldwin, 283 296 302 V. A NIGHT IN INDIA. By S. C. Logan, VI. THE BEGINNINGS VII. THE TICKING OF THE CLOCK. By Mrs. Longman's Magazine, VIII. HAMPSTEAD HEATH. Вy Phil Robinson, Contemporary Review, For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. "FAILED." FAILED of the goal which once had been my aim, The distant port for which I once had I think the graven words above my name Failed to achieve the vision and the quest, Beyond all price : Failed to retain the birthright, having sold Paying the wage of God's eternal gold Failed of the purity that purges sight, To guide our tread. While cattle in the pool hard by Their burning feet are laving; With manhood's strong endeavor, And spring is gone forever. When apples drop from laden trees And golden sheaves are binding; Oh! then we feel glad autumn's glow, When winds are roaring high and shrill Failed, having laid his hand upon the When holly berries bright and red WHEN trees are greening overhead When daisies bend beneath our tread When streams are leaping fresh and bright Their songs of love are singing; Our hearts beat strong and lightly, For all around, in robes of spring, Fair earth, she smileth brightly. Among the reeds and sedges; SONNET. I THINK the immortal servants of mankind, Who, from their graves, watch by how slow degrees The World-Soul greatens with the cen turies, Mourn most man's barren levity of mind,- The laugh mistimed in tragic presences, O prophets, martyrs, saviours, ye were great, Than a dull jest, God's ennui to amuse : The world, for you, held purport: life ye wore Proudly, as kings their solemn robes of state; And humbly, as the mightiest monarchs use. From Temple Bar. DANTE AND TENNYSON. DANTE and Tennyson ! What greater contrast at first sight is there than that suggested by the two names? What more opposite than this pair of poets, in their fortunes, their opportunities, in the scope of their works and their respective place in literary history? The one, coming at the close of a long period of darkness and barbarism, the other succeeding to the rich inheritance of a spacious literature, the slow growth of centuries. The one having to forge and hammer out with infinite toil the melodies of his native tongue, to give a voice and utterance to Italy; the other with an already formed and highly cultivated language before him as his instrument. The one for the last nineteen years of his life an exile and a wanderer, refused reentrance within her walls by ungrateful Florence, except on terms too cruel and insulting to be accepted by such a haughty spirit, cut off at the age of fifty-six, at Ravenna, and lying there by the shores of the Adriatic. The other, if not hailed from the first as the coming poet of his age, yet, when once recognized, growing ever in the esteem of his countrymen, and dying full of years and full of honors, buried with an empire's lamentation. As a consequence of all this, the one is pervaded by an uniform seriousness, while the page of the other is lit up by a calm and serene cheerfulness. We see the Italian, in earlier life engaged in active service, political and military, as a soldier, an ambassador, a chief magistrate, but later on dwelling apart, and knowing by saddest experience "how salt a taste cleaves to a patron's bread, how hard a path mounts and descends a patron's stair." We see the Englishman, reared in the quiet seclusion of a Lincolnshire parsonage, and within the reverend walls of a great university, steadily achieving wealth and fame and high place, Dante representing more the Vates prophet, Tennyson rather the Vates poet, ac cording to the distinction drawn by Carlyle, though he admits that the two provinces run into each other and cannot be disjoined. Still, there are points of view from which the two may be compared; and some instances may be adduced of a subtle influence exercised upon the poet of the nineteenth century by the great Florentine; some echoes more or less distinct of Dantesque expression in Tennysonian diction; linger on some imitations of passages, for the most part perhaps unconscious ones, will occur to the reader of the "Divine Comedy." For, as Dante summed up for his generation the whole of the mediæval spirit, its religion, its ablosophy and theology, its faith and its struse scholastic speculations, its phichivalry, so that he has been called with truth the very incarnation of Catholicism-so did Tennyson speak to this century (through so large a porthat interpreted it to itself in all its tion of which he lived) with a voice manifold variety of interests, more clearly and fully than any other of his contemporaries. He reflects as in a mirror the doubts and problems of our age, the conquests it has achieved in the material world, its aspirations after high ideals; and as often too he notes, and does not spare its less attractive features, its restlessness and discontent, its shallowness and cynicism, its want of faith in God and in the future. He saw the commencement of what it is not too much to call a new social world. The love of liberty always burned brightly in his verse from the day when he wrote those stirring stanzas, "Of old sat Freedom on the heights," and "Love thou thy land, with love far-brought from out the storied Past," to the publication of his more recent volumes, when he dreads the advent of "changes all too fierce and fast"-the wind raised by some who would sing true freedom to her grave, Men loud against all forms of power Unfurnish'd brows, tempestuous tongues; Expecting all things in an hourBrass mouths and iron lungs! Nor has he followed less consistently The object of the above remarks is the admirable progress in physical sci- to bring out the many-sided mind of ence, the enormously extended com- Tennyson and show how he was in mand over the laws of nature that has sympathy with modern life in all its so deeply marked the present century. manifestations, and how in this reEver since he penned his glowing an- spect he bears some resemblance to ticipation of the triumphs that awaited the poet who in the midst of his mysthe coming race, tical and allegorical epic preserves the The Vision of the world, and all the won-strongest human interest in all that der that would be, was going on around him in the Italy of his time, and was sensitive to every form of art. It is not without interest to notice how the teaching of each of In the steamship, in the railway, in the these poets harmonizes and points to thoughts that shake mankind, the same goal, and to remember, with down to the volume to which "Locks-regard to "In Memoriam " in particuley Hall Sixty Years After" gave its title, he still traces the course of science with the keenest interest. In his very latest book he still prophesies, if not with the rapturous exultation of the old days, yet with a calm confidence in a great future in store for mankind. His watchword is still 'Forward! Dawn not Day! Is it Shame, so few should have climb'd from the dens in the level below, Men with a heart and a soul, no slaves of a four-footed will? But if twenty millions of summers are stored in the sunlight still, We are far from the noon of man, there is time for the race to grow. Again, in what vivid colors has Tennyson painted the scepticism that infects so much of our literature! It is enough to refer to some of the bestknown stanzas of the central portion of "In Memoriam "-"Are God and Nature then at Strife?"-"So careful of the type ?" etc. (No. lv., lvi.), while from his later books these deep questions in some form or another were seldom absent. Still through all lar, what Tennyson has himself told us of its scope and purpose. "It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In the poem altogether private grief swells out into thought of and hope for the whole world. It begins with a funeral and ends with a marriage begins with death and ends in promise of a new life — a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at the close." Dante is fearfully inexorable. But his three poems must be taken together as a whole if he is to be judged fairly, there breathes the hope that all things doctrine of purgatory must never be and the mercy, the consolation of the must make for good, What the philosophies, all the sciences, forgotten, and due account must be taken of the power it gave of saving a departed soul. Scattered here and there through the "Divine Comedy" there are traces of compunction and of hope, as where the angel to whom St. Peter gives the golden key of authority and the silver key of knowledge is bidden to err on |