"Fly, happy happy sails, and bear the Press!"


That mission no longer strikes us as exquisitely felicitous. "The
mission of the Cross," and of the missionaries, means international
complications; and "the markets of the Golden Year" are precisely the
most fruitful causes of wars and rumours of wars:-


"Sea and air are dark
With great contrivances of Power."


Tennyson's was not an unmitigated optimism, and had no special
confidence in


"The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings
That every sophister can lime."


His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the socialist chants
of Mr William Morris, or Songs before Sunrise. He had nothing to say
about


"The blood on the hands of the King,
And the lie on the lips of the Priest."