and letters were not slurred by his intact and energetic mind. His
Demeter and other Poems, with the dedication to Lord Dufferin,
appeared in the December of the year. The dedication was the lament
for the dead son and the salutation to the Viceroy of India, a piece
of resigned and manly regret. The Demeter and Persephone is a modern
and tender study of the theme of the most beautiful Homeric Hymn.
The ancient poet had no such thought of the restored Persephone as
that which impels Tennyson to describe her


"Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies
All night across the darkness, and at dawn
Falls on the threshold of her native land."


The spring, the restored Persephone, comes more vigorous and joyous
to the shores of the AEgean than to ours. All Tennyson's own is
Demeter's awe of those "imperial disimpassioned eyes" of her
daughter, come from the bed and the throne of Hades, the Lord of many
guests. The hymn, happy in its ending, has no thought of the grey
heads of the Fates, and their answer to the goddess concerning "fate
beyond the Fates," and the breaking of the bonds of Hades. The
ballad of Owd Roa is one of the most spirited of the essays in
dialect to which Tennyson had of late years inclined. Vastness
merely expresses, in terms of poetry, Tennyson's conviction that,
without immortality, life is a series of worthless contrasts. An
opposite opinion may be entertained, but a man has a right to express
his own, which, coming from so great a mind, is not undeserving of
attention; or, at least, is hardly deserving of reproof. The poet's
idea is also stated thus in The Ring, in terms which perhaps do not