And fill all hearts with fatness and the lust
Of plenty--make me happy in my marriage!"


The year 1881 brought the death of another of the old Cambridge
friends, James Spedding, the biographer of Bacon; and Carlyle also
died, a true friend, if rather intermittent in his appreciation of
poetry. The real Carlyle did appreciate it, but the Carlyle of
attitude was too much of the iron Covenanter to express what he felt.
The poem Despair irritated the earnest and serious readers of "know-
nothing books." The poem expressed, dramatically, a mood like
another, a human mood not so very uncommon. A man ruined in this
world's happiness curses the faith of his youth, and the unfaith of
his reading and reflection, and tries to drown himself. This is one
conclusion of the practical syllogism, and it is a free country.
However, there were freethinkers who did not think that Tennyson's
kind of thinking ought to be free. Other earnest persons objected to
"First drink a health," in the re-fashioned song of Hands all Round.
They might have remembered a royal health drunk in water an hour
before the drinkers swept Mackay down the Pass of Killiecrankie. The
poet did not specify the fluid in which the toast was to be carried,
and the cup might be that which "cheers but not inebriates." "The
common cup," as the remonstrants had to be informed, "has in all ages
been the sacred symbol of unity."

The Promise of May was produced in November 1882, and the poet was
once more so unfortunate as to vex the susceptibilities of advanced
thinkers. The play is not a masterpiece, and yet neither the gallery
gods nor the Marquis of Queensberry need have felt their withers
wrung. The hero, or villain, Edgar, is a perfectly impossible