THE POET'S RANGE OF KNOWLEDGE the author's secrets, which is always pleasant. The book runs to over a thousand pages, and is so beautifully bound that it lies open at any page you choose. There is an interesting appendix to the Notes, giving the music to "The Silent Voices," composed by Lady Tennyson and arranged for four voices by Dr. Bridge for Lord Tennyson's funeral at the Abbey, October 12, 1892. Also a previously unpublished poem of his later years, entitled "Reticence." She is called the half-sister of Silence, and is thus beautifully described:—
"Not like Silence shall she stand,
Finger-lipt, but with right hand
Moving toward her lip, and there
Hovering, thoughtful, poised in air."
Then comes a facsimile of the poet's MS. of "Crossing the Bar," finally, besides the usual index of first lines, the book ends with an index to In Memoriam, and, what we have always wanted, an index to the songs.
Undoubtedly in the future this new edition will be the Tennyson for the library shelf, and a very complete and compact volume it is. Personally, I like the little old green volumes, but if I were now recommending an edition not in one volume, I would say, "Have the Eversley or Annotated Edition in nine volumes, which exactly reproduces the page and type of those old original volumes with the added advantage of the Notes." It is hardly to be expected that the spell with which Tennyson bound all English-speaking people for three generations should not in a measure be relaxed, but though we have a fuller chorus of singers than ever before, and an unusually appreciative public, the attempt so constantly made to decry Tennyson has no effect on those who have for years found in him a charm which no poet has surpassed, and, indeed, it will be long before a poet arises who has, as Sir Norman Lockyer observes, "such a wide range of knowledge and so unceasing an interest in the causes of things and the working out of Nature's laws, combined with such accuracy of observation and exquisite felicity of language." Let me give one more criticism, and this time by a noted scholar, Mr. A. Sidgwick, who speaks of his "inborn instinct for the subtle power of language and for musical sound; that feeling for beauty in phrase and thought, and that perfection of form which, taken all together, we call poetry." That perfection
