us a new and amazing interpretation of the culminating line in
_Crossing the Bar_. The whole flock was quick upon his heels. "Allow
me to remind the readers of your valuable paper that there are _two_
kinds of pilot" is the sentence that now catches our eyes as we open
the _Times_. And according to the _Globe_ if you need a rhyme
for orange you must use Blorenge. And the press exists to supply the real
wants of the public.[A]

They talk of decadence. But who will deny the future to a race capable
of producing, on the one hand, _Crossing the Bar_--and on the other,
this comment upon it, signed "T.F.W." and sent to the _Times_ from
Cambridge, October 27th, 1892?--

"... a poet so studious of fitness of language as Tennyson would
hardly, I suspect, have thrown off such words on such an occasion
haphazard. If the analogy is to be inexorably criticised, may it
not be urged that, having in his mind not the mere passage 'o'er
life's solemn main,' which we all are taking, with or without
reflection, but the near approach to an unexplored ocean beyond
it, he was mentally assigning to the pilot in whom his confidence
was fast the _status_ of the navigator of old days, the
sailing-master, on whose knowledge and care crews and captains
engaged in expeditions alike relied? Columbus himself married the
daughter of such a man, _un piloto Italiano famoso navigante_.
Camoens makes the people of Mozambique offer Vasco da Gama a
_piloto_ by whom his fleet shall be deftly (_sabiamente_)
conducted across the Indian Ocean. In the following century
(1520-30) Sebastian Cabot, then in the service of Spain,
commanded a squadron which was to pass through the Straits of
Magellan to the Moluccas, having been appointed by Charles V.