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Tennyson, like Longfellow, has been the people's poet. He has taught the beauty and bliss of pure affection; has looked forward to the time when

"All men's good

Be each man's rule, and universal Peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea."

He has taught,

"Tis only noble to be good.

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

And simple faith than Norman blood."

He has urged men to "make thy gold thy vassal, not thy king;

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"Nor harm an adder thro' the lust for harm,

Nor make a snail's horn shrink for wantonness;

And more-think well! Do well will follow thought,

And in the fatal sequence of this world

An evil thought may soil thy children's blood;
But curb the beast would cast thee in the mire,
And leave the hot swamp of voluptuousness
A cloud between the Nameless and thyself,
And lay thine uphill shoulder to the wheel,
And climb the Mount of Blessing."

In the midst of the speculation and scepticism of the time, he has kept a sublime faith. He asks, in "Vastness," ""What is all of it worth?"

"What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of

prayer?

All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all

that is fair?

What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpsecoffins at last,

Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a meaningless Past ?

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger

of bees in their live?

Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him forever: the dead are not dead but alive."

And then the great poet closes the last book, possibly, which he will ever give to the world, with these serene and inspiring words:

66

CROSSING THE BAR.

"Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bells,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

The floods may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face,
When I have crossed the bar."

Lord Tennyson died Oct. 6, 1892, at 1.35 A.M., at Aldworth. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, October 12, next to the grave of Robert Browning. "Crossing the Bar" was sung at the funeral; also Tennyson's favorite hymn, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty," and his last poem of ten lines beginning

"When the dumb hour clothed in black,

Brings the dreams about my bed,

Call me not so often back,

Silent voices of the dead,"

dedicated to his wife, a few days before his death, was sung to music of her own composition.

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IN NEW YORK SLIC LIBRARY

COTOR, LENOX

ALDEN FOUNDATIONO

CHARLES DICKENS.

CHARLES

DICKENS was born at Landport, a

suburb of Portsea, England, on Friday, February 7, 1812. His father, John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, seems to have been a man of kind heart, but incapacitated for earning a living for a wife and eight children, so that debt and poverty were the handmaids of the Dickens group.

Of the mother, Elizabeth Barrow, little is known, save that she taught her son Charles to read, and later the rudiments of Latin, and shared with the unsuccessful father both poverty and imprisonment for debt. When Charles was two years old, the family moved from Portsea to London, and two years later to Chatham. He was a sickly child, unable to join in the sports of hardier boys, and, for this reason, probably all the more fond of books.

He says in "David Copperfield," a picture, for the most part, of his own life, "My father had left a small collection of books, in a little room up-stairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own), and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, 'Roderick Random,' 'Peregrine Pickle,' 'Humphrey Clinker,' Tom Jones,' The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Don Quixote,' 'Gil Blas,' and 'Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me com

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