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Kansas University Weekly.
"Thy voice is heard through rolling drums
That beat to battle where he stands;
Thy face across his fancy comes
And gives the battle to his hands:
A moment, while the trumpets blow,
He sees his brood about thy knee;
The next, like fire he meets the foe
And strikes him dead for thine and thee."
The memory of wife and child at home follows the soldier to the battle field and nerves his arm to fight. The fifth,--
"Home they brought her warrior dead Shenor swooned nor uttered cry: All her maidens, watching, said, She must weep or she will die."
Then they praised him soft and low,
Called him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.
Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept,
Took the face cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.
Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
'Sweet my child, I live for thee.'"
The most beautiful of all, this tells of the power of the child upon the woman, strengthening her to live when all the joy of her life is gone. The final song, Ask me no more, no more, is in the same strain. No woman may put away from her that love of home, of which the child is the final result and cause.
I have given much space to these songs not alone for their relation of keynote to the whole poem, but because of their lyrical perfection. One sings them unconsciously and almost hears the harp. To me they are the sublimation of excellence in poetry and are only equalled in the English language, at least, by the songs and shorter poems of Robert Burns. They were inserted because, as Tennyson himself says, "the public did not see that the child was the true heroine."
But it is not alone in the songs that the child is plainly indicated as the heroine. Constantly recurring passages point to the fact, and Ida herself confesses the baby's power when she says to her brother,-
indeed I think
Our chiefest comfort is the little child Of one unworthy mother which she left; She shall not have it back: the child shall grow To prize the authentic mother of her mind. I took it for an hour in mine own bed This morning: there the tender orphan hands Felt at my heart, and seemed to charm from thence The wrath I nursed against the world."
The first four cantos of the poem are distinctly humorous. Tennyson, chivalrous as he ever is, must laugh at the female University and even at the august, but ridiculous, Ida. He makes the garrulous landlord thus describe the "University for maidens:"—
"His daughter and his housemaid were the boys; The land he understood for miles about Was tilled by women; all the swine were sows. And all the dogs—"
He makes Ida add a postscript to an already lenghty war despatch. Again, in the precipitous flight of the Princess and her maidens, after Cyril has trolled his tavern ditty and betrayed himself and the Prince
"then another shriek
'The Head, the Head, the Princess, O the Head!'
For blind with rage, she missed the plank and rolled
In the river."
The last three cantos are as distinctly serious. Mr. Stedman pronounces the tournament scene at the close of the fifth book an approach to Homeric swiftness and "the most vehement and rapid passage in the whole range of Tennyson's poetry." The close of the seventh canto, where the Prince and the Princess seem ot lose their vague impersonality and become breathing man and woman, marks the climax of poetic feeling and at the same time sets forth the only simple, practical and commonsense view of the woman question. Is not this the "sanity of true genius?" The Prince has lost his "haunting sense of hollow shows" and the Princess stoops to listen while he says:—
"The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink Together, dwarf'd or godlike, bond or free: For she that out of Lethe scales with man The shining steps of Nature, shares with man.
His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal,
Stays all the fair young planet in her hand—
If she be small, slight matured, miserable,
How shall men grow? but work no more alone!
For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words."
It is the mixture of humor and solemnity, of burlesque and tragic, in the poem that gives ground for the principal charge that critics have made against it—that of incongruity and lack of unity. The lack of unity disappears with a