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is there wanting the poet's "beauty | companiment in that region; and they born of murmuring sound," which one are all about us now. We are at the top does not care to miss, for on all sides of the hill, and the turn of the road; are the bubble and trickle of spring one glimpse to the left down the sweet and hillside stream, and below the Nant Gwynant, Vale of Waters," noisier rush of the river. We could where the road winds down to Beddwish Capel Curig ten miles distant from Gelert, and we have turned our back Bettws, instead of five and a half, so for a time on sweet and tame loveliexquisite is the scenery through which ness, and green fields and streams; we we reach it! It comes into view, how- have reached Pen-y-Pass, the highest ever, in due time, and for the sake of point of our drive, and the famous Pass the pause between two panoramic pic- of Llanberis stretches before us down to tures of totally different character, we the valley. It is all we had been led to are glad of the halt and half-hour's rest expect — wild, and grand, and sombre; at the picturesque hotel there. Remote huge boulders, rolled, it would seem, in and lonely though it is, Capel Curig is a the giant ages from the rugged mounfavorite halting-place, and a line of tain-side to the verge of the road, hang vehicles of all descriptions at the hotel poised above us, ready to topple over door bears witness to the presence of and crush us; there is little or no vegetourists, who are soon seen swarming at tation, and the mountain walls are high doors and windows, and in greater num- on right and left, though not very close. ber in the dining-room. Far below us glints of sunshine begin to fall on Llanberis, and it is like passing into another world to descend from the sombre grandeur of the pass to the more familiar loveliness of Llanberis - Old Llanberis, that is, for the Llanberis of the tourist, with hotels, and lodginghouses, and railway station, lies a mile or two beyond. A lovely and tempting spot it is, and we leave it with regret, wishing we could enjoy the pleasant rambles it suggests, with perhaps an ascent of Snowdon on a day of sunshine and calm.

From the garden is to be had one of the finest views of Snowdon, not far distant westward; alas ! for us the view had to be imagined rather than enjoyed, for the greyness of the summer afternoon had gathered to a slow, drizzling rain, clouds had descended upon us, and the monarch of Welsh mountains sulked in the mist for the remainder of the afternoon. We drove from Capel Curig to Pen-y-Gwryd through a blinding deluge of rain, a dreary, huddled mass of mackintoshes and umbrellas, too damped to respond by more than a watery, deprecating smile to the gibes and sarcasms of the eastward-bound passengers on the coaches we met. "Ah!" they would cry, with an encouraging nod and smile, "it's very bad farther up!" But their gloomy prognostications were not to be fulfilled, for the deluge had resolved itself into a drizzle by the time we reached Pen-y-Gwryd, and that gradually passed off, leaving heavy clouds only to accompany us through the Pass of Llanberis. Does it always rain at Pen-y-Gwryd?

Wild and lonely it is, almost bleak; and wild and lonely is the pass we are approaching as we drive away from the inn door, and climb slowly up the hill.

Clouds and mist seem the fitting ac

But at Llanberis the hideous screech and roar of the noisy London and N. W. Railway indispensable, it must be confessed, in spite of its hideousness!

- reminds us of the flight of time, and of other spots of historic and romantic interest to be glanced at ere we leave the kindly little principality. Carnarvon Castle is not far off-grim and hoary sentinel by the sea, with its legend of the Prince of Wales of long ago

-Conway Castle - picturesque Bangor, with its famous bridge hung high in air. The fame of these places has been sung often enough, and by those on whose judgment holiday makers may safely rely, and to whose persuasions they need not fear to yield, in the choice of a summer resort.

M. F.

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Who breathed Sicilian music thro' his Friends, though the grave gapes like a pit,

WHEN beards were brown that now are Ever our deepest things are unexpressed :

From The New Review.
TENNYSON.

I.

Yet would we not disturb him from his tomb,

well-conducted and uncommon public ceremony, where the philosopher can find nothing to condemn, nor the satirAs we filed slowly out of the Abbey ist to ridicule." But the contrast beon the afternoon of Wednesday, the tween the outside and the inside of the 12th of October, there must have oc- Abbey, a contrast which may possibly curred to others, I think, as to myself, have been merely whimsical in itself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense served for a parable of the condition of of the symbolic contrast between what poetry in England as the burial of Tenwe had left and what we emerged upon. nyson has left it. If it be only the Inside the grey and vitreous atmo- outworn body of this glorious man sphere, the reverberations of music which we have relinquished to the safemoaning somewhere out of sight, the guard of the minster, gathered to his bones and monuments of the noble peers in the fulness of time, we have dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. no serious ground for apprehension, Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawk-nor, after the first painful moment, even ers urging upon the edges of a dense for sorrow. His harvest is ripe, and we and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of hold it in our granaries. The noble pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a physical presence which has been the "lady," and more insidious salesmen revered companion of three generations doing a brisk trade in what they falsely has, indeed, sunk at length. pretended to be "Tennyson's last poem." Next day we read in our newspapers affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast crowds outside the Abbey - horny hands dashing away the tear, seamstresses holding the "little green volumes" to their faces to hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see these things with their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet Street. I, alas ! though I sought assiduously could mark nothing of the kind. Entering the Abbey, conducted by courteous policemen through unparalleled masses of the curious, we distinguished patience, good behavior, cheerful and untiring inquisitiveness, a certain obvious gratitude for an incomprehensible spectacle provided by the authorities, but nothing else. And leaving the Abbey, as I say, the impression was one almost sinister in its abrupt transition. Poetry, authority, the grace and dignity of life, seemed to have been left behind us forever in that twilight where Tennyson was sleeping with Chaucer and with Dryden.

In recording this impression I desire nothing so little as to appear censorious. Even the external part of the funeral at Westminster seemed, as was said of the similar scene which was enacted there nearly two hundred years ago, "a

Thus sleeping in his Abbey's friendly shade,

And the rough waves of life forever laid.

But what if this vast and sounding funeral should prove to have really been the entombment of English poetry? What if it should be the prestige of verse that we left behind us in the Abbey? That is a question which has issues far more serious than the death of any one man, no matter how majestic that man may be.

Poetry is not a democratic art. We are constantly being told by the flexible scribes who live to flatter the multitude that the truest poetry is that which speaks to the million, that moves the great heart of the masses. In his private consciousness no one knows better than the lettered man who writes such sentences that they are not true. Since the pastoral days in which poets made great verses for a little clan, it has never been true that poetry of the noblest kind was really appreciated by the masses. If we take the bulk of what are called educated people, but a very small proportion are genuinely fond of reading. Sift this minority and but a minute residue of it will be found to be sincerely devoted to beautiful poetry.

The genuine lovers of verse are so few | him, but by the many who might be that if they could be made the subject supposed to stand outside his influence, of a statistical report we should prob- has been welcomed with delight and ably be astounded at the smallness of enthusiasm. But what is so sinister a their number. From the purely demo- | circumstance is the excessive character cratic point of view it is certain that of this exhibition. I think of the funeral they form a negligible quantity. They of Wordsworth at Grasmere, only fortywould produce no general effect at all if two years ago, with a score of persons they were not surrounded by a very gathering quietly under the low wall much larger number of persons who, that fenced them from the brawling without taste for poetry themselves, Rotha; and I turn to the spectacle of are yet traditionally impressed with its the 12th, the vast black crowd in the value, and treat it with conventional street, the ten thousand persons refused respect, buying it a little, frequently admittance to the Abbey, the whole conversing about it, pressing to gaze at enormous popular manifestation.1 What its famous professors, and competing does it mean? Is Tennyson, great as for places beside the tombs of its proph- he is, a thousand times greater than ets. The respect for poetry felt by Wordsworth? Has poetry, in forty these persons, although in itself un-years risen at this ratio in the public meaning, is extremely valuable in its estimation? The democracy, I fear, results. It supports the enthusiasm of doth protest too much, and there is the few who know and feel for them- danger in this hollow reverence. selves, and it radiates far and wide into the outer masses whose darkness would otherwise be unreached by the very glimmer of these things.

There is no question, however, that the existence in prominent public honor of an art in its essence so aristocratic as poetry, that is to say, so dependent on the suffrages of a few thousand persons who happen to possess, in greater or lesser degree, certain peculiar qualities of mind and ear, is, at the present day, anomalous, and therefore perilous. All this beautiful pinnacled structure of the glory of verse, this splendid position of poetry at the summit of the civil ornaments of the empire, is built of carven ice, and needs nothing but that the hot, popular breath should be turned upon it to sink into so much water. It is kept standing there, flashing and sparkling before our eyes, by a succession of happy accidents. To speak rudely, it is kept there by an effort of bluff on the part of a small, influential class.

The danger takes this form. It may at any moment come to be held that the poet, were he the greatest that ever lived, was greater than poetry, the artist more interesting than his art. This was a peril unknown in ancient times. The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were scarcely more closely identified with the man who wrote them than Gothic cathedrals were with their architects. Cowley was the first English poet about whom much personal interest was felt outside the poetic class. Dryden is far more evident to us than the Elizabethans were, yet phantasmal by the side of Pope. Since the age of Anne an interest in the poet, as distinguished from his poetry, has steadily increased; the fashion for Byron, the posthumous curiosity in Shelley and Keats, are examples of the rapid growth of this individualization in the present century. But since the death of Wordsworth it has taken colossal proportions, without, so far as can be observed, any parallel quickening of the taste for poetry itself. The result is that a very interesting or picturesque figure, if identified with poetry, may attract an amount of attention and admiration which is spurious as regards 1 See Mr. Hall Caine's interesting article in the

In reflecting on these facts, I have found myself depressed and terrified at an ebullition of popularity which seems to have struck almost everybody else with extreme satisfaction. It has been very natural that the stupendous honor apparently done to Tennyson, not merely by the few who always valued Times for October 17th.