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).
A freeman is, I doubt not, freest here;
The single voice may speak his mind aloud;
An honest isolation need not fear
The Court, the Church, the Parliament, the crowd.
No, nor the Press! and look you well to that—
We must not dread in you the nameless autocrat.
I feel the thousand cankers of our State,
I fain would shake their triple-folded ease,
The hogs who can believe in nothing great.
Sneering bedridden in the down of Peace
Over their scrips and shares, their meats and wine,
With stony smirks at all things human and divine!
I honor much, I say, this man's appeal.
We drag so deep in our commercial mire,
We move so far from greatness, that I feel
Exception to be character'd in fire.
Who looks for Godlike greatness here shall see
The British Goddess, sleek Respectability.
Alas for her and all her small delights!
She feels not how the social frame is rack'd.
She loves a little scandal which excites;
A little feeling is a want of tact.
For her there lie in wait millions of foes,
And yet the "not too much" is all the rule she knows.
Poor soul! behold her: what decorous calm!
She, with her week-day worldliness sufficed,
Stands in her pew and hums her decent psalm
With decent dippings at the name of Christ!
And she has mov'd in that smooth way so long.
She hardly can believe that she shall suffer wrong.
Alas, our youth, so clever yet so small,
Thin dilettanti deep in nature's plan,
Who make the emphatic One, by whom is all.
An essence less concentred than a man!
Better wild Mahmoud's war-cry once again!
O fools, we want a manlike God and God-like men!
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:
Dear Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
How strange with you once more to meet,
To hold your hand, to hear your voice.
To sit beside you on this seat!
You mind the time we sat here last?—
Two little children,—lovers we.
Each loving each with simple faith—
I all to you,—you all to me.
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.
