ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

(1809-1892)

Contents

The Poetry Collections

POEMS, BY TWO BROTHERS

TIMBUCTOO : A POEM

POEMS, CHIEFLY LYRICAL

POEMS, 1832

THE LOVER’S TALE. A FRAGMENT.

POEMS, 1842

MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS, 1831-1868

THE PRINCESS: A MEDLEY

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.

MAUD, AND OTHER POEMS

IDYLLS OF THE KING

ENOCH ARDEN AND OTHER POEMS

BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS

TIRESIAS AND OTHER POEMS

LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER, ETC.

DEMETER AND OTHER POEMS

THE DEATH OF ŒNONE, AND OTHER POEMS

The Poems

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Plays

QUEEN MARY: A DRAMA

HAROLD: A DRAMA

BECKET

THE CUP: A TRAGEDY

THE FALCON

THE PROMISE OF MAY

THE FORESTERS: ROBIN HOOD AND MAID MARIAN

The Biographies

TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS by Hallam, Lord Tennyson

ALFRED TENNYSON by Andrew Lang

TENNYSON’S LIFE AND POETRY by Eugene Parsons

© Delphi Classics 2013

Version 1

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

By Delphi Classics, 2013

NOTE

When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.

The Poetry Collections

Tennyson was born in the Rectory at Somersby, Lincolnshire.

The birthplace c. 1900

An artist’s impression of Tennyson’s birthplace at the time of his birth

The famous portrait of Tennyson as a young man by Samuel Laurence, c.1840

POEMS, BY TWO BROTHERS

Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, being the fourth of twelve children.  His father, George Clayton Tennyson (1778–1831), was rector of Somersby (1807–1831), as well as vicar of Grimsby. His mother, Elizabeth Fytche (1781–1865), was the daughter of Stephen Fytche (1734–1799), vicar of St. James Church, Louth (1764) and rector of Withcall (1780), a small village between Horncastle and Louth. Rev. George Clayton Tennyson was an accomplished man, successful in studies of architecture, painting, music and, more importantly, able to infuse a like-minded passion for poetry in his son. The father, who supervised his children’s education himself, was financially well-off for a country clergyman, due to his shrewd money management, providing young Alfred with a stable and happy home in his childhood.

Tennyson and two of his elder brothers began writing poetry in their early teenage years, and a collection of poems by all three were published locally when Alfred was only 17 years old. One of those brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner later married Louisa Sellwood, the younger sister of Alfred’s future wife; the other was Frederick Tennyson.

Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1827, where he met Arthur Henry Hallam, a fellow poet, who became his closest friend and had a great influence on his early poetic works. In that same year, Tennyson published his first collection of poems, which he later referred to as “ boyish rhymes”, accompanied with poems by his elder brother Charles.  Poems by Two Brothers  was published in 1827, with verses, mostly imitative in the fashionable style of the day, with Alfred contributing to more than half the volume.

Louth marketplace, eleven miles from Somersby. The tall building in the center of the picture is the bookshop and printing-office of the Jackson brothers, who in 1827 printed and published the Tennyson boys’ ‘Poems by Two Brothers’.

The first edition

CONTENTS

ADVERTISEMENT.

STANZAS.

IN EARLY YOUTH I LOST MY SIRE.

MEMORY.

YES — THERE BE SOME GAY SOULS WHO NEVER WEEP.

HAVE YE NOT SEEN THE BUOYANT ORB?

THE EXILE’S HARP.

WHY SHOULD WE WEEP FOR THOSE WHO DIE?

RELIGION! THO’ WE SEEM TO SPURN.

REMORSE.

ON GOLDEN EVENINGS, WHEN THE SUN.

THE DELL OF E ——  — .

MY BROTHER.

ANTONY TO CLEOPATRA.

I WANDER IN DARKNESS AND SORROW.

TO ONE WHOSE HOPE REPOSED ON THEE.

THE OLD SWORD.

THE GONDOLA.

WE MEET NO MORE.

BY AN EXILE OF BASSORAH.

MARIA TO HER LUTE, THE GIFT OF HER DYING LOVER.

THE VALE OF BONES.

TO FANCY.

BOYHOOD.

DID NOT THY ROSEATE LIPS OUTVIE.

HUNTSMAN’S SONG.

PERSIA.

EGYPT.

THE DRUID’S PROPHECIES.

LINES.

SWISS SONG.

THE EXPEDITION OF NADIR SHAH INTO HINDOSTAN.

GREECE.

THE MAID OF SAVOY.

IGNORANCE OF MODERN EGYPT.

MIDNIGHT.

IN SUMMER, WHEN ALL NATURE GLOWS.

SCOTCH SONG.

BORNE ON LIGHT WINGS OF BUOYANT DOWN.

SONG: IT IS THE SOLEMN EVEN-TIME.

THE STARS OF YON BLUE PLACID SKY.

FRIENDSHIP.

ON THE DEATH OF MY GRANDMOTHER.

AND ASK YE WHY THESE SAD TEARS STREAM?

ON SUBLIMITY.

THE DEITY.

THE REIGN OF LOVE.

TIS THE VOICE OF THE DEAD.

TIME: AN ODE.

GOD’S DENUNCIATIONS AGAINST PHARAOH-HOPHRA, OR APRIES.

ALL JOYOUS IN THE REALMS OF DAY.

THE BATTLE-FIELD.

THE THUNDER-STORM.

THE GRAVE OF A SUICIDE.

ON THE DEATH OF LORD BYRON.

THE WALK AT MIDNIGHT.

MITHRIDATES PRESENTING BERENICE WITH THE CUP OF POISON.

THE BARD’S FAREWELL.

EPIGRAM.

ON BEING ASKED FOR A SIMILE TO ILLUSTRATE THE ADVANTAGE OF KEEPING THE PASSIONS SUBSERVIENT TO REASON.

EPIGRAM ON A MUSICIAN WHOSE HARP-STRINGS WERE CRACKED FROM WANT OF USING.

THE OLD CHIEFTAIN.

APOLLONIUS RHODIUS’S COMPLAINT.

THE FALL OF JERUSALEM.

LAMENTATION OF THE PERUVIANS.

SHORT EULOGIUM ON HOMER.

A SISTER, SWEET ENDEARING NAME!

THE SUN GOES DOWN IN THE DARK BLUE MAIN.

STILL, MUTE, AND MOTIONLESS SHE LIES.

OH! NEVER MAY FROWNS AND DISSENSION MOLEST.

ON A DEAD ENEMY.

LINES.

THE DUKE OF ALVA’S OBSERVATION ON KINGS.

AH! YES, THE LIP MAY FAINTLY SMILE.

THOU CAMEST TO THY BOWER, MY LOVE.

TO ——

THE PASSIONS.

THE HIGH-PRIEST TO ALEXANDER.

THE DEW, WITH WHICH THE EARLY MEAD IS DREST.

ON THE MOONLIGHT SHINING UPON A FRIEND’S GRAVE.

A CONTRAST.

EPIGRAM.

THE DYING CHRISTIAN.

THOSE WORLDLY GOODS THAT, DISTANT, SEEM.

HOW GAYLY SINKS THE GORGEOUS SUN WITHIN HIS GOLDEN BED.

OH! YE WILD WINDS, THAT ROAR AND RAVE.

SWITZERLAND.

A GLANCE.

BABYLON.

OH! WERE THIS HEART OF HARDEST STEEL.

THE SLIGHTED LOVER.

CEASE, RAILER, CEASE! UNTHINKING MAN.

ANACREONTIC.

IN WINTER’S DULL AND CHEERLESS REIGN.

SUNDAY MOBS.

PHRENOLOGY.

LOVE.

TO ——  —

SONG: TO SIT BESIDE A CRYSTAL SPRING

IMAGINATION.

THE OAK OF THE NORTH.

EXHORTATION TO THE GREEKS.

KING CHARLES’S VISION.

A sketch of Tennyson made close to the time of publication, aged 18

POEMS, BY TWO BROTHERS.

“Haec nos novimus esse nihil.” — MARTIAL.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE following Poems were written from the ages of fifteen to eighteen, not conjointly, but individually; which may account for their difference of style and matter. To light upon any novel combination of images, or to open any vein of sparkling thought untouched before, were no easy task; indeed, the remark itself is as old as the truth is clear; and, no doubt, if submitted to the microscopic eye of periodical criticism, a long list of inaccuracies and imitations would result from the investigation. But so it is: we have passed the Rubicon, and we leave the rest to fate; though its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever emerged from “ the shade,” and courted notoriety.

March, 1827.

‘Tis sweet to lead from stage to stage,

Like infancy to a maturer age,

The fleeting thoughts that crowd quick Fancy’s view,

And the coy image into form to woo;

Till all its charms to life and shape awake,

Wrought to the finest polish they can take:

Now out of sight the crafty Proteus steals,

The mind’s quick emissaries at his heels,

Its nature now a partial light reveals.

Each moment’s labour, easier than before,

Embodies the illusive image more;

Brings it more closely underneath the eye,

And lends it form and palpability.

What late in shadowy vision fleeted by,

Receives at each essay a deepening dye;

Till diction gives us, modell’d into song,

The fairy phantoms of the motley throng;

Detaining and elucidating well

Her airy embryos with binding spell;

For when the mind reflects its image true —

Sees its own aim — expression must ensue;

If all but language is supplied before,

She quickly follows, and the task is o’er.

Thus when the hand of pyrotechnic skill

Has stored the spokes of the fantastic wheel,

Apply the flame — it spreads as is design’d,

And glides and lightens o’er the track defined -,

Unerring on its faithful pathway burns,

Searches each nook, and tracks its thousand turns;

The well-fill’d tubes in flexile flame arrays,

And fires each winding of the pregnant maze;

Feeding on prompt materials, spurns delay,

Till o’er the whole the lambent glories play.

I know no joy so well deserves the name,

None that more justly may that title claim,

Than that of which the poet is possess’d

When warm imagination fires his breast,

And countless images like claimants throng,

Prompting the ardent ecstasy of song.

He walks his study in a dreaming mood,

Like Pythia’s priestess panting with the god;

His varying brow, betraying what he feels,

The labour of his plastic mind reveals:

Now roughly furrow’d into anxious storms,

If with much toil his lab’ring lines he forms;

Now brightening into triumph as, the skein

Unravelling, he cons them o’er again,

As each correction of his favourite piece

Confers more smoothness, elegance, or ease.

Such are the sweets of song — and in this age,

Perchance too many in its lists engage;

And they who now would fain awake the lyre,

May swell this supernumerary choir:

But ye, who deign to read, forget t’ apply

The searching microscope of scrutiny:

Few from too near inspection fail to lose,

Distance on all a mellowing haze bestows;

And who is not indebted to that aid

Which throws his failures into welcome shade?

STANZAS.

YON star of eve, so soft and clear,

Beams mildly from the realms of rest:

And, sure, some deathless angel there

Lives in its light supremely blest:

Yet if it be a spirit’s shrine,

I think, my love, it must be thine.

Oh! if in happier worlds than this

The just rejoice — to thee is giv’n

To taste the calm, undying bliss

Eternally in that blue heav’n,

Whither, thine earnest soul would flow,

While yet it linger’d here below.

If Beauty, Wit, and Virtue find

In heav’n a more exalted throne,

To thee such glory is assign’d,

And thou art matchless and alone:

Who lived on earth so pure — may grace

In heav’n the brightest seraph’s place.

For tho’ on earth thy beauty’s bloom

Blush’d in its spring, and faded then,

And, mourning o’er thine early tomb,

I weep thee still, but weep in vain;

Bright was the transitory gleam

That cheer’d thy life’s short wav’ring dream.

Each youthful rival may confess

Thy look, thy smile, beyond compare,

Nor ask the palm of loveliness,

When thou wert more than doubly fair:

Yet ev’n the magic of that form

Drew from thy mind its loveliest charm.

Be thou as the immortal are,

Who dwell beneath their God’s own wing

A spirit of light, a living star,

A holy and a searchless thing:

But oh! forget not those who mourn,

Because thou canst no more return.

IN EARLY YOUTH I LOST MY SIRE.

“Hinc mihi prima mali labes.” — VIRGIL.

IN early youth I lost my sire,

That fost’ring guide, which all require,

But chief in youth, when passion glows,

And, if uncheck’d, to frenzy grows,

The fountain of a thousand woes.

To flowers it is an hurtful thing

To lose the sunshine in the spring;

Without the sun they cannot bloom,

And seldom to perfection come.

E’en so my soul, that might have borne

The fruits of virtue, left forlorn,

By every blast of vice was torn.

Why lowers my brow, dost thou enquire?

Why burns mine eye with feverish fire?

I With hatred now, and now with ire?

In early youth I lost my sire.

From this I date whatever vice

Has numb’d my feelings into ice;

From this — the frown upon my brow;

From this — the pangs that rack me now.

My wealth, I can with safety say,

Ne’er bought me one unruffled day,

But only wore my life away.

The pruning-knife ne’er lopp’d a bough;

My passions spread, and strengthen’d too.

The chief of these was vast ambition,

That long’d with eagle-wing to soar;

Nor ever soften’d in contrition,

Tho’ that wild wing were drench’d in gore.

And other passions play’d their part

On stage most fit — a youthful heart;

Till far beyond all hope I fell,

A play-thing for the fiends of hell —

A vessel, tost upon a deep

Whose stormy waves would never sleep.

Alas! when virtue once has flown,

We need not ask why peace is gone:

If she at times a moment play’d

With bright beam on my mind’s dark shade,

I knew the rainbow soon would fade!

Why thus it is, dost thou enquire?

Why bleeds my breast with tortures dire?

Loathes the rank earth, yet soars not higher?

In early youth I lost my sire.

MEMORY.

“The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us: it is like those repositories in animals that are filled with stores of food on which they may ruminate when their present pasture fails.” — Addison.

MEMORY! dear enchanter!

Why bring back to view

Dreams of youth, which banter

All that e’er was true?

Why present before me

Thoughts of years gone by,

Which, like shadows o’er me,

Dim in distance fly?

Days of youth, now shaded

By twilight of long years,

Flowers of youth, now faded

Though bathed in sorrow’s tears:

Thoughts of youth, which waken

Mournful feelings now,

Fruits which time hath shaken

From off their parent bough:

Memory! why, oh why,

This fond heart consuming,

Show me years gone by,

When those hopes were blooming?

Hopes which now are parted,

Hopes which then I prized,

Which this world, cold-hearted,

Ne’er has realized?

I knew not then its strife,

I knew not then its rancour;

In every rose of life,

Alas! there lurks a canker.

Round every palm-tree, springing

With bright fruit in the waste,

A mournful asp is clinging,

Which sours it to our taste.

O’er every fountain, pouring

Its waters thro’ the wild,

Which man imbibes, adoring,

And deems it undefiled,

The poison-shrubs are dropping

Their dark dews day by day;

And Care is hourly lopping

Our greenest boughs away!

Ah! these are thoughts that grieve me

Then, when others rest.

Memory! why deceive me

By thy visions blest?

Why lift the veil, dividing

The brilliant courts of spring —

Where gilded shapes are gliding

In fairy colouring —

From age’s frosty mansion,

So cheerless and so chill?

Why bid the bleak expansion

Of past life meet us still?

Where’s now that peace of mind

O’er youth’s pure bosom stealing,

So sweet and so refined,

So exquisite a feeling?

Where’s now the heart exulting

In pleasure’s buoyant sense,

And gaiety, resulting

From conscious innocence?

All, all have past and fled,

And left me lorn and lonely;

All those dear hopes are dead,

Remembrance wakes them only I

I stand like some lone tower

Of former days remaining,

Within whose place of power

The midnight owl is plaining; —

Like oak-tree old and gray,

Whose trunk with age is failing,

Thro’ whose dark boughs for aye

The winter winds are wailing.

Thus, Memory, thus thy light

O’er this worn soul is gleaming,

Like some far fire at night

Along the dun deep streaming.

YES — THERE BE SOME GAY SOULS WHO NEVER WEEP.

“O Lachrymarum fons, tenero sacros

Ducentium ortus ex animo.”

Gray’s Poemata.

YES — there be some gay souls who never weep,

And some who, weeping, hate the tear they shed;

But sure in them the heart’s fine feelings sleep,

And all its loveliest attributes are dead.

For oh! to feel it swelling to the eye,

When melancholy thoughts have sent it there,

Is something so akin to ecstasy,

So true a balm to misery and care,

That those are cold, I ween, who cannot feel

The soft, the sweet, the exquisite control,

Which tears, as down the moisten’d cheek they steal,

Hold o’er the yielding empire of the soul.

They soothe, they ease, and they refine the breast,

And blunt the agonizing stings of grief,

And lend the tortured mind a healing rest,

A welcome opiate, and a kind relief.

Then, if the pow’r of woe thou wouldst disarm,

The tear thy burning wounds will gently close

The rage of grief will sink into a calm,

And her wild frenzy find the wish’d repose.

HAVE YE NOT SEEN THE BUOYANT ORB?

“A bubble...

That in the act of seizing shrinks to naught.”

CLARE.

HAVE ye not seen the buoyant orb, which oft

The tube and childhood’s playful breath produce.’

Fair, but impalpable — it mounts aloft,

While o’er its surface rove the restless hues;

And sun-born tints their gliding bloom diffuse:

But ‘twill not brook the touch — the vision bright,

Dissolved with instantaneous burst, we lose;

Breaks the thin globe with its array of light

And shrinks at once to naught, at contact e’er so slight.

So the gay hopes we chase with ardent zeal —

Which view’d at distance to our gaze appear

Sweetly embodied, tangible, and real —

Elude our grasp, and melt away to air:

The test of touch too delicate to bear,

In unsubstantial loveliness thy glow

Before our wistful eyes, too passing fair

For earth to realize or man to know,

Whose life is but a scene of fallacy and woe.

THE EXILE’S HARP.

I WILL hang thee, my harp, by the side of the fountain,

On the whispering branch of the lone-waving willow:

Above thee shall rush the hoarse gale of the mountain,

Below thee shall tumble the dark breaking billow.

The winds shall blow by thee, abandon’d, forsaken,

The wild gales alone shall arouse thy sad strain;

For where is the heart or the hand to awaken

The sounds of thy soul-soothing sweetness again?

Oh! harp of my fathers!

Thy chords shall decay,

One by one with the strings

Shall thy notes fade away;

Till the fiercest of tempests

Around thee may yell,

And not waken one sound

Of thy desolate shell!

Yet, oh! yet, ere I go, will I fling a wreath round thee,

With the richest of flowers in the green valley springing;

Those that see shall remember the hand that hath crown’d thee, —

When, wither’d and dead, to thee still they are clinging.

There! now I have wreathed thee — the roses are twining

Thy chords with their bright blossoms glowing and red:

Though the lapse of one day see their freshness declining,

Yet bloom for one day when thy minstrel has fled!

Oh! harp of my fathers!

No more in the hall,

The souls of the chieftains

Thy strains shall enthral:

One sweep will I give thee,

And wake thy bold swell;

Then, thou friend of my bosom,

For ever farewell!

WHY SHOULD WE WEEP FOR THOSE WHO DIE?

“Quamobrem, si dolorum finem mors affert, si securioris et melioris initium vitæ: si futura mala avertit — cur eam tantopere accusare, ex qua potius consolationem et laetitiam haurire fas esset?” —

Cicero.

WHY should we weep for those who die?

They fall — their dust returns to dust;

Their souls shall live eternally

Within the mansions of the just.

They die to live — they sink to rise,

They leave this wretched mortal shore;

But brighter suns and bluer skies

Shall smile on them for evermore.

Why should we sorrow for the dead?

Our life on earth is but a span;

They tread the path that all must tread,

They die the common death of man.

The noblest songster of the gale

Must cease, when Winter’s frowns appear;

The reddest rose is wan and pale,

When autumn tints the changing year.

The fairest flower on earth must fade,

The brightest hopes on earth must die:

Why should we mourn that man was made

To droop on earth, but dwell on high?

The soul, th’ eternal soul, must reign

In worlds devoid of pain and strife;

Then why should mortal man complain

Of death, which leads to happier life?

RELIGION! THO’ WE SEEM TO SPURN.

“Sublatam ex oculis quærimus.” — Horace.

RELIGION! tho’ we seem to spurn

Thy hallow’d joys, their loss we mourn,

With many a secret tear;

Tho’ we have long dissolved the tie,

The hour we broke it claims a sigh,

And Virtue still is dear.

Our hearts forget not she was fair,

And her pure feelings, ling’ring there,

Half win us back from ill;

And — tho’ so long to Vice resign’d

‘Twould seem we’ve left her far behind —

Pursue and haunt us still.

Thus light’s all-penetrating glow

Attends us to the deeps below,

With wav’ring, rosy gleam:

To the bold inmates of the bell

Faint rays of distant sunlight steal,

And thro’ the waters beam.

By the rude blasts of passion tost,

We sigh for bliss we ne’er had lost,

Had Conscience been our guide;

She burns a lamp we need not trim,

Whose steady flame is never dim,

But throws its lustre wide.

REMORSE.

“... Sudant tacita prascordia culpa.”

JUVENAL.

OH! ‘tis a fearful thing to glance

Back on the gloom of misspent years:

What shadowy forms of guilt advance,

And fill me with a thousand fears!

The vices of my life arise,

Portray’d in shapes, alas! too true;

And not one beam of hope breaks through,

To cheer my old and aching eyes,

T’ illume my night of wretchedness

My age of anguish and distress.

If I am damn’d, why find I not

Some comfort in this earthly spot?

But no! this world and that to come

Are both to me one scene of gloom!

Lest aught of solace I should see,

Or lose the thoughts of what I do,

Remorse, with soul-felt agony,

Holds up the mirror to my view.

And I was curséd from my birth,

A reptile made to creep on earth,

An hopeless outcast, born to die

A living death eternally!

With too much conscience to have rest,

Too little to be ever blest,

To yon vast world of endless woe,

Unlighted by the cheerful day,

My soul shall wing her weary way;

To those dread depths where aye the same

Throughout the waste of darkness, glow

The glimmerings of the boundless flame.

And yet I cannot here below

Take my full cup of guilt, as some,

And laugh away my doom to come.

I would I’d been all-heartless! then

I might have sinn’d like other men;

But all this side the grave is fear,

A wilderness so dank and drear,

That never wholesome plant would spring;

And all behind — I dare not think!

I would not risk th’ imagining —

From the full view my spirits shrink;

And starting backwards, yet I cling

To life, whose every hour to me

Hath been increase of misery.

But yet I cling to it, for well

I know the pangs that rack me now

Are trifles, to the endless hell

That waits me, when my burning brow

And my wrung eyes shall hope in vain

For one small drop to cool the pain,

The fury of that madd’ning flame

That then shall scorch my writhing frame!

Fiends! who have goaded me to ill!

Distracting fiends, who goad me still!

If e’er I work’d a sinful deed,

Ye know how bitter was the draught;

Ye know my inmost soul would bleed

And ye have look’d at me and laugh’d

Triumphing that I could not free

My spirit from your slavery!

Yet is there that in me which says,

Should these old feet their course retread

From out the portal of my days,

That I should lead the life I’ve led:

My agony, my torturing shame,

My guilt, my errors all the same!

O — God! that thou wouldst grant that ne’er

My soul its clay-cold bed forsake,

That I might sleep, and never wake

Unto the thrill of conscious fear;

For when the trumpet’s piercing cry

Shall burst upon my slumb’ring ear,

And countless seraphs throng the sky,

How shall I cast my shroud away,

And come into the blaze of day?

How shall I brook to hear each crime,

Here veil’d by secrecy and time,

Read out from thine eternal book?

How shall I stand before thy throne,

While earth shall like a furnace burn?

How shall I bear the with’ring look

Of men and angels, who will turn

Their dreadful gaze on me alone?

ON GOLDEN EVENINGS, WHEN THE SUN.

“The bliss to meet,

And the pain to part!” — MOORE.

ON golden evenings, when the sun

In splendour sinks to rest,

How we regret, when they are gone,

Those glories of the west,

That o’er the crimson-mantled sky

Threw their broad flush of deepest dye!

But when the wheeling orb again

Breaks gorgeous on the view,

And tints the earth and fires the main

With rich and ruddy hue,

We soon forget the eve of sorrow,

For joy at that more brilliant morrow.

E’en so when much-loved friends depart,

Their farewell rends the swelling heart;

But when those friends again we see,

We glow with soul-felt ecstasy,

That far exceeds the tearful feeling

That o’er our bosoms then was stealing.

The rapture of that joyous day

Bids former sorrows fade away;

And Memory dwells no more on sadness

When breaks that sudden morn of gladness!

THE DELL OF E ——  — .

“Tantum ævi longinqua valet mutare vetustas! “ — VIRGIL.

THERE was a long, low, rushy dell, emboss’d

With knolls of grass and clumps of copsewood green;

Midway a wandering burn the valley cross’d,

And streak’d with silvery line the woodland scene;

High hills on either side to heaven upsprung,

Y-clad with groves of undulating pine,

Upon whose heads the hoary vapours hung,

And far — far off the heights were seen to shine

In clear relief against the sapphire sky,

And many a blue stream wander’d thro’ the shade

Of those dark groves that clomb the mountains high,

And glistening ‘neath each lone entangled glade,

At length with brawling accent loudly fell

Within the limpid brook that wound along the dell.

How pleasant was the ever-varying light

Beneath that emerald coverture of boughs!

How often, at th’ approach of dewy night,

Have those tall pine-trees heard the lover’s vows!

How many a name was carved upon the trunk

Of each old hollow willow-tree, that stoop’d

To lave its branches in the brook, and drunk

Its freshening dew! How many a cypress droop’d

From those fair banks, where bloom’d the earliest flowers,

Which the young year from her abounding horn

Scatters profuse within her secret bowers!

What rapturous gales from that wild dell were borne!

And, floating on the rich spring breezes, flung

Their incense o’er that wave on whose bright banks they sprung!

Long years had past, and there again I came,

But man’s rude hand had sorely scathed the dell;

And though the cloud-capt mountains, still the same,

Uprear’d each heaven-invading pinnacle;

Yet were the charms of that lone valley fled,

And the gray winding of the stream was gone;

The brook once murmuring o’er its pebbly bed,

Now deeply — straightly — noiselessly went on.

Slow turn’d the sluggish wheel beneath its force,

Where clattering mills disturb’d the solitude:

Where was the prattling of its former course?

Its shelving, sedgy sides y-crown’d with wood?

The willow trunks were fell’d, the names erased

From one broad shatter’d pine which still its station graced.

Remnant of all its brethren, there it stood,

Braving the storms that swept the cliffs above,

Where once, throughout th’ impenetrable wood,

Were heard the plainings of the pensive dove.

But man had bid th’ eternal forests bow

That bloom’d upon the earth-imbedded base

Of the strong mountain, and perchance they now

Upon the billows were the dwelling-place

Of their destroyers, and bore terror round

The trembling earth: — ah! lovelier had they still

Whisper’d unto the breezes with low sound,

And greenly flourish’d on their native hill,

And flinging their proud arms in state on high,

Spread out beneath the sun their glorious canopy!

MY BROTHER.

“Meorum prime sodalium.” — HORACE. —

WITH falt’ring step I came to see,

In Death’s unheeding apathy,

That friend so dear in life to me,

My brother!

‘Mid flowers of loveliest scent and hue

That strew’d thy form, ‘twas sad to view

Thy lifeless face peep wanly through,

My brother!

Why did they (there they did not feel!)

With studious care all else conceal,

But thy cold face alone reveal,

My brother!

They might have known, what used to glow

With smiles, and oft dispell’d my woe,

Would chill me most, when faded so,

My brother!

The tolling of thy funeral bell,

The nine low notes that spoke thy knell,

I know not how I bore so well,

My brother!

But oh! the chill, dank mould that slid,

Dull-sounding, on thy coffin-lid,

That drew more tears than all beside,

My brother!

And then I hurried fast away;

How could I e’er have borne to stay

Where careless hand inhumed thy clay,

My brother!

ANTONY TO CLEOPATRA.

O CLEOPATRA! fare thee well,

We two can meet no more;

This breaking heart alone can tell

The love to thee I bore.

But wear not thou the conqueror’s chain

Upon thy race and thee;

And though we ne’er can meet again,

Yet still be true to me:

For I for thee have lost a throne,

To wear the crown of love alone.

Fair daughter of a regal line!

To thraldom bow not tamed;

My every wish on earth was thine,

My every hope the same.

And I have moved within thy sphere,

And lived within thy light;

And oh! thou wert to me so dear,

I breathed but in thy sight!

A subject world I lost for thee,

For thou wert all my world to me!

Then when the shriekings of the dying

Were heard along the wave,

Soul of my soul! I saw thee flying;

I follow’d thee, to save.

The thunder of the brazen prows

O’er Actium’s ocean rung;

Fame’s garland faded from my brows,

Her wreath away I flung.

I sought, I saw, I heard but thee:

For what to love was victory?

Thine on the earth, and on the throne,

And in the grave, am I;

And, dying, still I am thine own,

Thy bleeding Antony.

How shall my spirit joy to hear

That thou art ever true!

Nay — weep not — dry that burning tear,

That bathes thine eyes’ dark hue.

Shades of my fathers! lo! I come;

I hear your voices from the tomb!

I WANDER IN DARKNESS AND SORROW.

I WANDER in darkness and sorrow,

Unfriended, and cold, and alone,

As dismally gurgles beside me

The bleak river’s desolate moan.

The rise of the volleying thunder

The mountain’s lone echoes repeat:

The roar of the wind is around me,

The leaves of the year at my feet.

I wander in darkness and sorrow,

Uncheer’d by the moon’s placid ray;

Not a friend that I lov’d but is dead,

Not a hope but has faded away!

Oh! when shall I rest in the tomb,

Wrapt about with the chill winding-sheet?

For the roar of the wind is around me,

The leaves of the year at my feet.

I heed not the blasts that sweep o’er me,

I blame not the tempests of night;

They are not the foes who have banish’d

The visions of youthful delight:

I hail the wild sound of their raving,

Their merciless presence I greet,

Though the roar of the wind be around me,

The leaves of the year at my feet.

In this waste of existence, for solace,

On whom shall my lone spirit call?

Shall I fly to the friends of my bosom?

My God! I have buried them all!

They are dead, they are gone, they are cold,

My embraces no longer they meet;

Let the roar of the wind be around me,

The leaves of the year at my feet!

Those eyes that glanced love unto mine,

With motionless slumbers are prest;

Those hearts which once throbb’d but for me,

Are chill as the earth where they rest.

Then around on my wan wither’d form

Let the pitiless hurricanes beat;

Let the roar of the wind be around me,

The leaves of the year at my feet!

Like the voice of the owl in the hall,

Where the song and the banquet have ceased,

Where the green leaves have mantled the hearth

Whence arose the proud flame of the feast;

So I cry to the storm, whose dark wing

Scatters on me the wild-driving sleet —

“Let the roar of the wind be around me,

The fall of the leaves at my feet!”

TO ONE WHOSE HOPE REPOSED ON THEE.

“She’s gone...

She’s sunk, with her my joys entombing! “ — Byron.

To one whose hope reposed on thee,

Whose very life was in thine own,

How deep a wound thy death must be,

And the wild thought that thou art gone!

Oh! must the earth-born reptiles prey

Upon that cheek of late so blooming?

Alas! this heart must wear away

Long ere that cheek they’ve done consuming!

For hire the sexton toll’d thy bell —

But why should he receive a meed

Who work’d at least no mortal’s weal,

And made one lonely bosom bleed?

For hire with ready mould he stood —

But why should gain his care repay

Who told, as harshly as he could,

That all I loved was past away?

For, sure, it was too rude a blow

For Misery’s ever-wakeful ear,

To cast the earth with sudden throw

Upon the grave of one so dear:

For aye these bitter tears must swell,

Tho’ the sad scene is past and gone;

And still I hear the tolling bell,

For Memory makes each sense her own.

But stay, my soul! thy plaint forbear,

And be thy murmuring song forgiven!

Tread but the path of Virtue here,

And thou shalt meet with her in heaven!

THE OLD SWORD.

OLD Sword! tho’ dim and rusted

Be now thy sheeny blade,

Thy glitt’ring edge encrusted

With cankers Time hath made;

Yet once around thee swell’d the cry

Of triumph’s fierce delight,

The shoutings of the victory,

The thunders of the fight!

Tho’ age hath past upon thee

With still corroding breath,

Yet once stream’d redly on thee

The purpling tide of death:

What time amid the war of foes

The dastard’s cheek grew pale,

As through the feudal field arose

The ringing of the mail.

Old Sword! what arm hath wielded

Thy richly gleaming brand,

‘Mid lordly forms who shielded

The maidens of their land?

And who hath clov’n his foes in wrath

With thy puissant fire,

And scatter’d in his perilous path

The victims of his ire?

Old Sword! whose fingers clasp’d thee

Around thy carvéd hilt?

And with that hand which grasp’d thee

What heroes’ blood was spilt;

When fearlessly, with open hearts,

And lance to lance opposed,

Beneath the shade of barbed darts

The dark-eyed warriors closed?

Old Sword! I would not burnish

Thy venerable rust, —

Nor sweep away the tarnish

Of darkness and of dust!

Lie there, in slow and still decay,

Unfamed in olden rhyme,

The relic of a former day,

A wreck of ancient time!

THE GONDOLA.

“‘Tis sweet to hear

At midnight, o’er the blue and moonlit deep,

The song and oar of Adria’s gondolier.”

Don Juan.

O’ER ocean’s curling surges borne along,

Arion sung — the dolphin caught the strain,

As soft the mellow’d accents of his tongue

Stole o’er the surface of the watery plain.

And do those silver sounds, so deep, so clear,

Possess less magic than Arion’s lay?

Swell they less boldly on the ravish’d ear,

Or with less cadence do they die away?

Yon gondola, that skims the moonlight sea,

Yields me those notes more wild than Houri’s lyre,

That, as they rise, exalt to ecstasy,

And draw the tear as, length’ning, they expire.

An arch of purest azure beams above,

A sea, as blue, as beauteous, spreads below;

In this voluptuous clime of song and love

What room for sorrow? who shall cherish woe?

False thought! tho’ pleasure wing the careless hours,

Their stores tho’ Cyprus and Arabia send,

Tho’ for the ear their fascinating power

Divine Timotheus and Cecilia blend; —

All without Virtue’s relish fail to please,

Venetian charms the cares of Vice alloy,

Joy’s swiftest, brightest current they can freeze,

And all the genuine sweets of life destroy!

WE MEET NO MORE.

WE meet no more — the die is cast,

The chain is broke that tied us,

Our every hope on earth is past,

And there’s no helm to guide us:

We meet no more — the roaring blast

And angry seas divide us!

And I stand on a distant shore,

The breakers round me swelling;

And lonely thoughts of days gone o’er

Have made this breast their dwelling:

We meet no more — We meet no more:

Farewell for ever, Ellen!

BY AN EXILE OF BASSORAH.

WRITTEN WHILE SAILING DOWN THE EUPHRATES.

THOU land of the lily! thy gay flowers are blooming

In joy on thine hills, but they bloom not for me;

For a dark gulf of woe, all my fond hopes entombing,

Has roll’d its black waves ‘twixt this lone heart and thee.

The far-distant hills, and the groves of my childhood,

Now stream in the light of the sun’s setting ray:

And the tail-waving palms of my own native wildwood

In the blue haze of distance are melting away.

I see thee, Bassorah! in splendour retiring,

Where thy waves and thy walls in their majesty meet;

I see the bright glory thy pinnacles firing,

And the broad vassal river that rolls at thy feet.

see thee but faintly — thy tall towers are beaming

On the dusky horizon so far and so blue;

And minaret and mosque in the distance are gleaming,

While the coast of the stranger expands on my view.

I see thee no more: for the deep waves have parted

The land of my birth from her desolate son;

And I am gone from thee, though half brokenhearted,

To wander thro’ climes where thy name is unknown.

Farewell to my harp, which I hung in my anguish

On the lonely palmetto that nods to the gale;

For its sweet-breathing tones in forgetfulness languish,

And around it the ivy shall weave a green veil.

Farewell to the days which so smoothly have glided

With the maiden whose look was like Cama’s young glance,

And the sheen of whose eyes was the load-star which guided

My course on this earth thro’ the storms of mischance!

MARIA TO HER LUTE, THE GIFT OF HER DYING LOVER.

“O laborum

Dulce lenimen!” — Horace.

I LOVE thee, Lute! my soul is link’d to thee

As by some tie—’tis not a groundless love;

I cannot rouse thy plaintive melody,

And fail its magic influence to prove.

I think I found thee more than ever dear

(If thought can work within this fever’d brain)

Since Edward’s lifeless form was buried here,

And I deplored his hapless fate in vain.

‘Twas then to thee my strange affection grew,

For thou wert his — I’ve heard him wake thy strain:

Oh! if in heaven each other we shall view,

I’ll bid him sweep thy mournful chords again.

would not change thee for the noblest lyre

That ever lent its music to the breeze:

How could Maria taste its note of fire?

How wake a harmony that could not please?

Then, till mine eye shall glaze, and cheek shall fade,

I’ll keep thee, prize thee as my dearest friend;

And oft I’ll hasten to the green-wood shade,

My hours in sweet, tho’ fruitless grief to spend.

For in the tear there is a nameless joy;

The full warm gush relieves the aching soul:

So still, to ease my hopeless agony,

My lute shall warble and my tears shall roll.

THE VALE OF BONES.

“Albis informem — ossibus agrum.” — HORACE.

ALONG yon vapour-mantled sky

The dark-red moon is riding high;

At times her beams in beauty break

Upon the broad and silv’ry lake;

At times more bright they clearly fall

On some white castle’s ruin’d wall;

At times her partial splendour shines

Upon the grove of deep-black pines,

Through which the dreary night-breeze moans,

Above this Vale of scatter’d bones.

The low, dull gale can scarcely stir

The branches of that black’ning fir,

Which betwixt me and heav’n flings wide

Its shadowy boughs on either side,

And o’er yon granite rock uprears

Its giant form of many years.

And the shrill owlet’s desolate wail

Comes to mine ear along the gale,

As, list’ning to its lengthen’d tones,

I dimly pace the Vale of Bones.

Dark Valley I still the same art thou,

Unchanged thy mountain’s cloudy brow;

Still from yon cliffs, that part asunder,

Falls down the torrent’s echoing thunder;

Still from this mound of reeds and rushes

With bubbling sound the fountain gushes;

Thence, winding thro’ the whisp’ring ranks

Of sedges on the willowy banks,

Still brawling, chafes the rugged stones

That strew this dismal Vale of Bones.

Unchanged art thou! no storm hath rent

Thy rude and rocky battlement;

Thy rioting mountains sternly piled,

The screen of nature, wide and wild:

But who were they whose bones bestrew

The heather, cold with midnight dew,

Upon whose slowly-rotting clay

The raven long hath ceased to prey,

But, mould’ring in the moonlight air,

Their wan, white sculls show bleak and bare?

And, aye, the dreary night-breeze moans

Above them in this Vale of Bones!

I knew them all — a gallant band,

The glory of their native land,

And on each lordly brow elate

Sat valour and contempt of fate,

Fierceness of youth, and scorn of foe,

And pride to render blow for blow.

In the strong war’s tumultuous crash

How darkly did their keen eyes flash!

How fearlessly each arm was raised!

How dazzlingly each broad-sword blazed!

Though now the dreary night-breeze moans

Above them in this Vale of Bones.

What lapse of time shall sweep away

The memory of that gallant day,

When on to battle proudly going,

Your plumage to the wild winds blowing,

Your tartans far behind ye flowing,

Your pennons raised, your clarions sounding,

Fiercely your steeds beneath ye bounding,

Ye mix’d the strife of warring foes

In fiery shock and deadly close?

What stampings in the madd’ning strife,

What thrusts, what stabs, with brand and knife,

What desp’rate strokes for death or life,

Were there! What cries, what thrilling groans,

Re-echoed thro’ the Vale of Bones!

Thou peaceful Vale, whose mountains lonely

Sound to the torrent’s chiding only,

Or wild goat’s cry from rocky ledge,

Or bull-frog from the rustling sedge,

Or eagle from her airy cairn,

Or screaming of the startled hern —

How did thy million echoes waken

Amid thy caverns deeply shaken!

How with the red dew o’er thee rain’d

Thine emerald turf was darkly stain’d!

How did each innocent flower, that sprung

Thy greenly-tangled glades among,

Blush with the big and purple drops

That dribbled from the leafy copse!

I paced the valley, when the yell

Of triumph’s voice had ceased to swell;

When battle’s brazen throat no more

Raised its annihilating roar.

There lay ye on each other piled,

Your brows with noble dust defiled;

There, by the loudly-gushing water,

Lay man and horse in mingled slaughter.

Then wept I not, thrice gallant band;

For though no more each dauntless hand

The thunder of the combat hurl’d,

Yet still with pride your lips were curl’d;

And e’en in death’s o’erwhelming shade

Your fingers linger’d round the blade!

I deem’d, when gazing proudly there

Upon the fix’d and haughty air

That mark’d each warrior’s bloodless face,

Ye would not change the narrow space

Which each cold form of breathless clay

Then cover’d, as on earth ye lay,

For realms, for sceptres, or for thrones —

I dream’d not on this Vale of Bones!

But years have thrown their veil between,

And alter’d is that lonely scene;

And dreadful emblems of thy might,

Stern dissolution! meet my sight:

The eyeless socket, dark and dull,

The hideous grinning of the skull,

Are sights which Memory disowns,

Thou melancholy Vale of Bones!

TO FANCY.

BRIGHT angel of heavenliest birth!

Who dwellest among us unseen,

O’er the gloomiest spot on the earth

There’s a charm where thy footsteps have been.

We feel thy soft sunshine in youth,

While our joys like young blossoms are new;

For oh! thou art sweeter than Truth,

And fairer and lovelier too!

The exile, who mourneth alone,

Is glad in the glow of thy smile,

Tho’ far from the land of his own,

In the ocean’s most desolate isle:

And the captive, who pines in his chain,

Sees the banners of glory unroll’d,

As he dreams of his own native plain,

And the forms of the heroes of old.

In the earliest ray of the morn,

In the last rosy splendour of even,

We view thee — thy spirit is borne

On the murmuring zephyrs of heaven:

Thou art in the sunbeam of noon,

Thou art in the azure of air,

If I pore on the sheen of the moon,

If I search the bright stars, thou art there!

Thou art in the rapturous eye

Of the bard, when his visions rush o’er him;

And like the fresh iris on high

Are the wonders that sparkle before him.

Thou stirrest the thunders of song,

Those transports that brook not control;

Thy voice is the charm of his tongue,

Thy magic the light of his soul!

Like the day-star that heralds the sun,

Thou seem’st, when our young hopes are dawning;

But ah! when the day is begun,

Thou art gone like the star of the morning!

Like a beam in the winter of years,

When the joys of existence are cold,

Thine image can dry up our tears,

And brighten the eyes of the old!

Tho’ dreary and dark be the night

Of affliction that gathers around,

There is something of heaven in thy light,

Glad spirit! where’er thou art found:

As calmly the sea-maid may lie

In her pearly pavilion at rest,

The heart-broken and friendless may fly

To the shade of thy bower, and be blest!

BOYHOOD.

“Ah, happy years! once more who would not be a boy?”

Childe Harold.

BOYHOOD’S blest hours! when yet unfledged and callow,

We prove those joys we never can retain,

In riper years with fond regret we hallow,

Like some sweet scene we never see again.

For youth — whate’er may be its petty woes,

Its trivial sorrows — disappointments — fears,

As on in haste life’s wintry current flows —

Still claims, and still receives, its debt of tears.

Yes! when, in grim alliance, grief and time

Silver our heads and rob our hearts of ease,

We gaze along the deeps of care and crime

To the far, fading shore of youth and peace;

Each object that we meet the more endears

That rosy morn before a troubled day;

That blooming dawn — that sunrise of our years —

That sweet voluptuous vision past away!

For by the welcome, tho’ embittering power

Of wakeful memory, we too well behold

That lightsome — careless — unreturning hour,

Beyond the reach of wishes or of gold.

And ye, whom blighted hopes or passion’s heat

Have taught the pangs that careworn hearts dure,

Ye will not deem the vernal rose so sweet!

Ye will not call the driven snow so pure!

DID NOT THY ROSEATE LIPS OUTVIE.

“Ulla si juris tibi pejerati

Pœna, Barine, nocuisset unquam;

Denti si nigro fieres, vel uno

Turpior ungui

Crederem.” — Horace.

Did not thy roseate lips outvie

The gay anana’s spicy bloom;

Had not thy breath the luxury,

The richness of its deep perfume —

Were not the pearls it fans more clear

That those which grace the valved shell;

Thy foot more airy than the deer,

When startled from his lonely dell —

Were not thy bosom’s stainless whiteness,

Where angel loves their vigils keep,

More heavenly than the dazzling brightness

Of the cold crescent on the deep —

Were not thine eye a star might grace

Yon sapphire concave beaming clear,

Or fill the vanish’d Pleiad’s place,

And shine for aye as brightly there —

Had not thy locks the golden glow

That robes the gay and early east,

Thus falling in luxuriant flow

Around thy fair but faithless breast:

I might have deem’d that thou wert she

Of the Cumæan cave, who wrote

Each fate-involving mystery

Upon the feathery leaves that float,

Borne thro’ the boundless waste of air,

Wherever chance might drive along.

But she was wrinkled — thou art fair:

And she was old — but thou art young.

Her years were as the sands that strew

The fretted ocean-beach; but thou —

Triumphant in that eye of blue,

Beneath thy smoothly-marbled brow;

Exulting in thy form thus moulded,

By nature’s tenderest touch design’d;

Proud of the fetters thou hast folded

Around this fond deluded mind —

Deceivest still with practised look,

With fickle vow, and well-feign’d sigh.

I — tell thee, that I will not brook

Reiterated perjury!

Alas! I feel thy deep control,

E’en now when I would break thy chain:

But while I seek to gain thy soul,

Ah! say — hast thou a soul to gain?

HUNTSMAN’S SONG.

“Who the melodies of morn can tell?” — BEATTIE.

OH! what is so sweet as a morning in spring,

When the gale is all freshness, and larks, on the wing,

In clear liquid carols their gratitude sing?

I — rove o’er the hill as it sparkles with dew,

And the red flush of Phoebus with ecstasy view,

As he breaks thro’ the east o’er thy crags, Benvenue!

And boldly I bound o’er the mountainous scene,

Like the roe which I hunt thro’ the woodlands so green,

Or the torrent which leaps from the height to the plain.

The life of the hunter is chainless and gay,

As the wing of the falcon that wins him his prey:

No song is so glad as his blithe roundelay.

His eyes in soft arbours the Moslem may close,

And Fayoum’s rich odours may breathe from the rose,

To scent his bright harem and lull his repose:

Th’ Italian may vaunt of his sweet harmony,

And mingle soft sound of voluptuous glee;

But the lark’s airy music is sweeter to me.

Then happy the man who upsprings with the morn,

But not from a couch of effeminate lawn,

And slings o’er his shoulder his loud bugle-horn!

PERSIA.

“The flower and choice

Of many provinces from bound to bound.” — Milton.

LAND of bright eye and lofty brow!

Whose every gale is balmy breath

Of incense from some sunny flower,

Which on tall hill or valley low,

In clustering maze or circling wreath,

Sheds perfume; or in blooming bower

Of Schiraz or of Ispahan,

In bower untrod by foot of man,

Clasps round the green and fragrant stem

Of lotos, fair and fresh and blue,

And crowns it with a diadem

Of blossoms, ever young and new;

Oh! lives there yet within thy soul

Aught of the fire of him who led

Thy troops, and bade thy thunder roll

O’er lone Assyria’s crownless head?

I tell thee, had that conqueror red

From Thymbria’s plain beheld thy fall,

When stormy Macedonia swept

Thine honours from thee one and all,

He would have wail’d, he would have wept,

That thy proud spirit should have bow’d

To Alexander, doubly proud.

Oh, Iran! Iran! had he known

The downfall of his mighty throne,

Or had he seen that fatal night,

When the young king of Macedon

In madness led his veterans on,

And Thais held the funeral light,

Around that noble pile which rose

Irradiant with the pomp of gold,

In high Persepolis of old,

Encompass’d with its frenzied foes;

He would have groan’d, he would have spread

The dust upon his laurell’d head,

To view the setting of that star,

Which beam’d so gorgeously and far

O’er Anatolia and the fane

Of Belus, and Caister’s plain,

And Sardis, and the glittering sands

Of bright Pactolus, and the lands

Where Croesus held his rich domain:

On fair Diarbeck’s land of spice,

Adiabene’s plains of rice,

Where down th’ Euphrates, swift and strong,

The shield-like kuphars bound along;

And sad Cunaxa’s field, where, mixing

With host to adverse host opposed,

‘Mid clashing shield and spear transfixing,

The rival brothers sternly closed.

And further east, where, broadly roll’d,

Old Indus pours his stream of gold;

And there where, tumbling deep and hoarse,

Blue Ganga leaves her vaccine source;

Loveliest of all the lovely streams

That meet immortal Titan’s beams,

And smile upon their fruitful way

Beneath his golden Orient ray:

And southward to Cilicia’s shore,

Where Cydnus meets the billows’ roar,

And where the Syrian gates divide

The meeting realms on either side;

E’en to the land of Nile, whose crops

Bloom rich beneath his bounteous swell,

To hot Syene’s wondrous well,

Nigh to the long-lived Æthiops.

And northward far to Trebizonde,

Renown’d for kings of chivalry,

Near where old Hyssus, rolling from the strand,

Disgorges in the Euxine Sea —

The Euxine, falsely named, which whelms

The mariner in the heaving tide,

To high Sinope’s distant realms,

Whence cynics rail’d at human pride.

EGYPT.

“Egypt’s palmy groves,

Her grots, and Sepulchres of kings.”

Moore’s Laila Rookh.

The sombre pencil of the dim-gray dawn

Draws a faint sketch of Egypt to mine eye,

As yet uncolour’d by the brilliant morn,

And her gay orb careering up the sky.

And see! at last he comes in radiant pride,

Life in his eye, and glory in his ray;

No veiling mists his growing splendour hide,

And hang their gloom around his golden way.

The flowery region brightens in his smile,

Her lap of blossoms freights the passing gale,

That robs the odours of each balmy isle,

Each fragrant field and aromatic vale.

But the first glitter of his rising beam

Falls on the broad-based pyramids sublime,

As proud to show us with his earliest gleam

Those vast and hoary enemies of Time.

E’en History’s self, whose certain scrutiny

Few eras in the list of Time beguile,

Pauses, and scans them with astonish’d eye,

As unfamiliar with their aged pile.

Awful, august, magnificent, they tower

Amid the waste of shifting sands around;

The lapse of year and month and day and hour,

Alike unfelt, perform th’ unwearied round.

How often hath yon day-god’s burning light,

From the clear sapphire of his stainless heaven,

Bathed their high peaks in noontide brilliance bright,

Gilded at morn, and purpled them at even!

THE DRUID’S PROPHECIES.

MONA! with flame thine oaks are streaming,

Those sacred oaks we rear’d on high:

Lo! Mona, lo! the swords are gleaming

Adown thine hills confusedly.

Hark! Mona, hark! the chargers’ neighing!

The clang of arms and helmets bright!

The crash of steel, the dreadful braying

Of trumpets thro’ the madd’ning fight!

Exalt your torches, raise your voices;

Your thread is spun — your day is brief;

Yea! howl for sorrow! Rome rejoices,

But Mona — Mona bends in grief!

But woe to Rome, though now she raises

Yon eagles of her haughty power;

Though now her sun of conquest blazes,

Yet soon shall come her darkening hour!

Woe, woe to him who sits in glory,

Enthroned on thine hills of pride!

Can he not see the poignard gory

With his best heart’s-blood deeply dyed?

Ah! what avails his gilded palace,

Whose wings the seven-hill’d town enfold?

The costly bath, the crystal chalice?

The pomp of gems, the glare of gold?

See where, by heartless anguish driven,

Crownless he creeps ‘mid circling thorns;

Around him flash the bolts of heaven,

And angry earth before him yawns.

Then, from his pinnacle of splendour,

The feeble king, with locks of gray,

Shall fall, and sovereign Rome shall render

Her sceptre to the usurper’s  sway.

Who comes with sounds of mirth and gladness,

Triumphing o’er the prostrate dead?

Ay, me! thy mirth shall change to sadness,

When Vengeance strikes thy guilty head.

Above thy noonday feast suspended,

High hangs in air a naked sword:

Thy days are gone, thy joys are ended,

The cup, the song, the festal board.

Then shall the eagle’s shadowy pinion

Be spread beneath the eastern skies;

And dazzling far with wide dominion,

Five brilliant stars shall brightly rise.

Then, coward king! the helpless agéd

Shall bow beneath thy dastard blow;

But reckless hands and hearts, enragéd,

By double fate shall lay thee low.

And two, with death-wounds deeply mangled,

Low on their parent earth shall lie;

Fond wretches! ah! too soon entangled

Within the snares of royalty.

Then comes that mighty one victorious

In triumph o’er this earthly ball,

Exulting in his conquests glorious —

Ah! glorious to his country’s fall!

But thou shalt see the Romans flying,

O Albyn! with yon dauntless ranks;

And thou shalt view the Romans dying,

Blue Carun! on thy mossy banks.

But lo! what dreadful visions o’er me

Are bursting on this aged eye!

What length of bloody train before me

In slow succession passes by!

Thy hapless monarchs fall together,

Like leaves in winter’s stormy ire;

Some by the sword, and some shall wither

By lightning’s flame and fever’s fire.

They come! they leave their frozen regions,

Where Scandinavia’s wilds extend;

And Rome, though girt with dazzling legions,

Beneath their blasting power shall bend.

Woe, woe to Rome! though tall and ample

She rears her domes of high renown;

Yet fiery Goths shall fiercely trample

The grandeur of her temples down!

She sinks to dust; and who shall pity

Her dark despair and hopeless groans?

There is a wailing in her city —

Her babes are dash’d against the stones!

Then, Mona! then, though wan and blighted

Thy hopes be now by Sorrow’s dearth,

Then all thy wrongs shall be requited —

The Queen of Nations bows to earth!

LINES.

The eye must catch the point that shows,

The pensile dew-drop’s twinkling gleam,

Where on the trembling blade it glows,

Or hueless hangs the liquid gem.

Thus do some minds unmark’d appear

By aught that’s generous or divine,

Unless we view them in the sphere

Where with their fullest light they shine.

Occasion — circumstance — give birth

To charms that else unheeded lie,

And call the latent virtues forth

To break upon the wond’ring eye.

E’en he your censure has enroll’d

So rashly with the cold and dull,

Waits but occasion to unfold

An ardour and a force of soul.

Go then, impetuous youth, deny

The presence of the orb of day,

Because November’s cloudy sky

Transmits not his resplendent ray.

Time, and the passing throng of things,

Full well the mould of minds betray,

And each a clearer prospect brings: —

Suspend thy judgment for a day.

SWISS SONG.

I LOVE St. Gothard’s head of snows,

That shoots into the sky,

Where, yet unform’d, in grim repose

Ten thousand avalanches lie.

I love Lucerne’s transparent lake,

And Jura’s hills of pride,

Whence infant rivers, gushing, break

With small and scanty tide.

And thou, Mont Blanc! thou mighty pile

Of crags and ice and snow;

The Gallic foes in wonder smile

That we should love thee so!

But we were nurst within thy breast,

And taught to brave thy storms:

Thy tutorage was well confest

Against the Frank in arms —

The Frank who basely, proudly came

To rend us from our home,

With flashing steel and wasting flame. —

How could he, dare he come?

THE EXPEDITION OF NADIR SHAH INTO HINDOSTAN.

“Quoi! vous allez combattre un roi, dont la puissance

Semble forcer le ciel de prendre sa defense,

Sous qui toute l’Asie a vu tombre ses rois

Et qui tient la fortune attachée à ses lois!”

Racine’s Alexandre.

“Squallent populatibus agri.” — CLAUDIAN.

As the host of the locusts in numbers, in might

As the flames of the forest that redden the night,

They approach: but the eye may not dwell on the glare

Of standard and sabre that sparkle in air.

Like the fiends of destruction they rush on their way,

The vulture behind them is wild for his prey;

And the spirits of death, and the demons of wrath,

Wave the gloom of their wings o’er their desolate path.

Earth trembles beneath them, the dauntless, the bold;

Oh! weep for thy children, thou region of gold;

For thy thousands are bow’d to the dust of the plain, —

And all Delhi runs red with the blood of her slain.

For thy glory is past, and thy splendour is dim,

And the cup of thy sorrow is full to the brim;

And where is the chief in thy realms to abide,

The “Monarch of Nations,” the strength of his pride?

Like a thousand dark streams from the mountain they throng,

With the fife and the horn and the war-beating gong:

The land like an Eden before them is fair,

But behind them a wilderness dreary and bare.

The shrieks of the orphan, the lone widow’s wail,

The groans of the childless, are loud on the gale;

For the star of thy glory is blasted and wan,

And wither’d the flower of thy fame, Hindostan!

GREECE.

“Exoritur clamorque virum, clangorque tubarum.” — VIRGIL.

WHAT wakes the brave of yon isle-throng’s wave?

And why does the trumpet bray?

And the tyrant groan on his gory throne,

In fear and wild dismay?

Why, he sees the hosts around his coasts

Of those who will be free;

And he views the bands of trampled lands

In a dreadful league agree.

“Revenge!” they call, “for one for all —

In the page of song and story

Be their name erased, and ours replaced

In all its pristine glory!

“Too long in pain has Slavery’s chain

Our listless limbs encumber’d;

Too long beneath her freezing breath

Our torpid souls have slumber’d.

“But now we rise — the great, the wise

Of ages past inspire us!

Oh!  what could inflame our love of fame,

If that should fail to fire us?

“Let Cecrops’ town of old renown

Her bands and chieftains muster;

With joy unsheathe the blade of death,

And crush the foes who crush’d her!

“We come, we come, with trump and drum,

To smite the hand that smote us,

And spread the blaze of freedom’s rays

From Athens to Eurotas!”

THE MAID OF SAVOY.

DOWN Savoy’s hills of stainless white

A thousand currents run,

And sparkle bright in the early light

Of the slowly-rising sun:

But brighter far,

Like the glance of a star

From regions above,

Is the look of love

In the eye of the Maid of Savoy!

Down Savoy’s hills of lucid snow

A thousand roebucks leap,

And headlong they go when the bugles blow,

And sound from steep to steep:

But lighter far,

Like the motion of air

On the smooth river’s bed,

Is the noiseless tread

Of the foot of the Maid of Savoy!

In Savoy’s vales, with green array’d,

A thousand blossoms flower,

‘Neath the odorous shade by the larches made,

In their own ambrosial bower:

But sweeter still,

Like the cedars which rise

On Lebanon’s hill

To the pure blue skies,

Is the breath of the Maid of Savoy

In Savoy’s groves full merrily sing

A thousand songsters gay,

When the breath of spring calls them forth

the wing,

To sport in the sun’s mild ray:

But softer far,

Like the holy song

Of angels in air,

When they sweep along,

Is the voice of the Maid of Savoy!

IGNORANCE OF MODERN EGYPT.

DAY’S genial beams expand the flowers

That bloom in Damietta’s bowers;

Beneath the night’s descending dew

They close those leaves of finest hue:

So Science droops in Egypt’s land,

Beneath the Turkish despot’s hand;

The damps of Ignorance and Pride

Close up its leaves, its beauties hide:

The morrow’s rays her flowers may woo —

Is there no ray for Science too?

MIDNIGHT.

‘Tis midnight o’er the dim mere’s lonely bosom,

Dark, dusky, windy midnight: swift are driven

The swelling vapours onward: every blossom

Bathes its bright petals in the tears of heaven.

Imperfect, half-seen objects meet the sight,

The other half our fancy must portray;

A wan, dull, lengthen’d sheet of swimming light

Lies the broad lake: the moon conceals her ray,

Sketch’d faintly by a pale and lurid gleam

Shot thro’ the glimmering clouds: the lovely planet

Is shrouded in obscurity; the scream

Of owl is silenced; and the rocks of granite

Rise tall and drearily, while damp and dank

Hang the thick willows on the reedy bank.

Beneath, the gurgling eddies slowly creep,

Blacken’d by foliage; and the glutting wave,

That saps eternally the cold gray steep,

Sounds heavily within the hollow cave.

All earth is restless — from his glossy wing

The heath-fowl lifts his head at intervals;

Wet, driving, rainy, come the bursting squalls;

All nature wears her dun dead covering.

Tempest is gather’d, and the brooding storm

Spreads its black mantle o’er the mountain’s form;

And, mingled with the rising roar, is swelling,

From the far hunter’s booth, the blood-hound’s yelling,

The water-falls in various cadence chiming,

Or in one loud unbroken sheet descending,

Salute each other thro’ the night’s dark womb;

The moaning pine-trees to the wild blast bending,

Are pictured faintly thro’ the chequer’d gloom;

The forests, half-way up the mountain climbing.

Resound with crash of falling branches; quiver

Their aged mossy trunks: the startled doe

Leaps from her leafy lair: the swelling river

Winds his broad stream majestic, deep, and slow.

IN SUMMER, WHEN ALL NATURE GLOWS.

“Nature in every form inspires delight.” — COWPER.

IN summer, when all nature glows,

And lends its fragrance to the rose,

And tints the sky with deeper blue,

And copious sheds the fruitful dew;

When odours come with every gale,

And nature holds her carnival;

When all is bright and pure and calm,

The smallest herb or leaf can charm

The man whom nature’s beauties warm.

The glitt’ring tribes of insects gay,

Disporting in their parent-ray,

Each full of life and careless joy,

He views with philosophic eye:

For well he knows the glorious Hand,

That bade th’ eternal mountains stand,

And spread the vast and heaving main,

And studded heaven’s resplendent plain,

Gave life to nature’s humbler train.

Nor less admires his mighty pow’r

In the fine organs of a flow’r,

Than when he bids the thunder roll,

Rebellowing o’er the stormy pole;

Or launches forth his bolts of fire

On the lost objects of his ire;

Or with the yawning earthquake shocks

The reeling hills and shatter’d rocks,

And every mortal project mocks.

No skeptic he — who bold essays

T’ unravel all the mystic maze

Of the Creator’s mighty plan —

A task beyond the pow’rs of man;

Who, when his reason fails to soar

High as his will, believes no more —

No! — calmly thro’ the world he steals,

Nor seeks to trace what God conceals,

Content with what that God reveals.

SCOTCH SONG.

There are tears o’ pity, an’ tears o’ vvae,

An’ tears for excess o’ joy will fa’,

Yet the tears o’ luve are sweeter than a’!

There are sighs o’ pity, an’ sighs o’ wae,

An’ sighs o’ regret frae the saul will gae;

Yet the sighs o’ luve are sweeter than a’!

There’s the look o’ pity, the look o’ wae,

The look o’ frien’, an’ the look o’ fae;

Yet the look o’ luve is sweeter than a’!

There’s the smile o’ friends when they come frae far,

There’s the smile o’ joy in the festive ha’;

Yet the smile o’ luve is sweeter than a’!

BORNE ON LIGHT WINGS OF BUOYANT DOWN.

“Nunc mihi, nunc alii benigna.” — Horace.

BORNE on light wings of buoyant down,

Mounts the hoar thistle-beard aloft;

An air scarce felt can bear it on,

A touch propel, tho’ e’er so soft:

Dislodged from yonder thistle’s head,

Upon the passing gale it fled.

See! to each object on its way

A faithless moment it adheres;

But if one breeze upon it play,

Breaks its slight bonds and disappears:

Its silken sail each zephyr catches,

A breath its airy hold detaches.

The man who wins thy love awhile,

Should never dream it will remain;

For one fond word, one courteous smile,

Will set thy heart afloat again.

But he whose eye the light can chase,

That sports above the trembling vase,

Attend its roving sheen, pursue

Its rapid movements here and there,

And with a firm unwavering view

Arrest the fleeting phantom fair,

May fix inconstancy — ensure

Thy love, thy fickle faith secure!

How many have for many ask —

The kiss I fondly deem’d my own!

And hundreds in succession bask

In eye-beams due to me alone:

Tho’ all, like me, in turn must prove

The wandering nature of thy love.

Thou saw’st the glow-worm on our way,

Last eve, with mellow lustre shine —

Clad in pellucid flame she lay,

And glimmer’d in her amber shrine —

Would that those eyes of heavenly blue

Were half as faithful and as true!

And lo! the blush, quick mantling, breaks

In rich suffusion o’er thy cheek;

In sudden vermeil Conscience speaks,

No further, fuller proof I seek:

The rosy herald there was sent,

To bid thee own it and repent.

SONG: IT IS THE SOLEMN EVEN-TIME.

IT is the solemn even-time,

And the holy organ’s pealing:

And the vesper chime, oh! the vesper chime!

O’er the clear blue wave is stealing.

It is the solemn mingled swell

Of the monks in chorus singing:

And the vesper bell, oh! the vesper bell!

To the gale is its soft note flinging.

‘Tis the sound of the voices sweeping along,

Like the wind thro’ a grove of larches:

And the vesper song, oh! the vesper song!

Echoes sad thro’ the cloister’d arches.

THE STARS OF YON BLUE PLACID SKY.

“...  supereminet omnes.” — VIRGIL.

THE stars of yon blue placid sky

In vivid thousands burn,

And beaming from their orbs on high,

On radiant axes turn:

The eye with wonder gazes there,

And could but gaze on sight so fair.

But should a comet, brighter still,

His blazing train unfold

Among the many lights that fill

The sapphirine with gold;

More wonder then would one bestow

Than millions of a meaner glow.

E’en so, sweet maid! thy beauties shine

With light so peerless and divine,

That others, who have charm’d before,

When match’d with thee, attract no more.

FRIENDSHIP.

“Neque ego nunc de vulgari aut de mediocri, quae tamen ipsa et delectat et prodest, sed de vera et perfecta loquor [amicitial qualis eorum, qui pauci nominantur, fuit.” — Cicero.

O THOU most holy Friendship! whereso’er

Thy dwelling be — for in the courts of man

But seldom thine all-heavenly voice we hear,

Sweet’ning the moments of our narrow span;

And seldom thy bright footsteps do we scan

Along the weary waste of life unblest,

For faithless is its frail and wayward plan,

And perfidy is man’s eternal guest,

With dark suspicion link’d and shameless interest!

‘Tis thine, when life has reach’d its final goal,

Ere the last sigh that frees the mind be giv’n,

To speak sweet solace to the parting soul,

And pave the bitter path that leads to heav’n:

‘Tis thine, whene’er the heart is rack’d and riv’n

By the hot shafts of baleful calumny,

When the dark spirit to despair is driv’n,

To teach its lonely grief to lean on thee,

And pour within thine ear the tale of misery.

But where art thou, thou comet of an age,

Thou phoenix of a century? Perchance

Thou art but of those fables which engage

And hold the minds of men in giddy trance.

Yet, be it so, and be it all romance,

The thought of thine existence is so bright

With beautiful imaginings — the glance

Upon thy fancied being such delight,

That I will deem thee Truth, so lovely is thy might!

ON THE DEATH OF MY GRANDMOTHER.

“Cui pudor et justitise soror

Incorrupta fides nudaque veritas,

Quando ullum invenient parem?”

HORACE.

THERE on her bier she sleeps!

E’en yet her face its native sweetness keeps.

Ye need not mourn above that faded form,

Her soul defies the ravage of the worm;

Her better half has sought its heavenly rest,

Unstain’d, unharm’d, unfetter’d, unopprest;

And far above all worldly pain and woe,

She sees that God she almost saw below.

She trod the path of virtue from her birth,

And finds in Heaven what she sought on earth;

She wins the smile of her eternal King,

And sings his praise where kindred angels sing.

Her holy patience, her unshaken faith,

How well they smooth’d the rugged path of Death!

She met his dread approach without alarm,

For Heaven in prospect makes the spirit calm.

In steadfast trust and Christian virtue strong,

Hope on her brow, and Jesus on her tongue;

Her faith, like Stephen’s, soften’d her distress —

Scarce less her anguish, scarce her patience less!

AND ASK YE WHY THESE SAD TEARS STREAM?

“Te somnia nostra reducunt.” — OVID.

AND ask ye why these sad tears stream?

Why these wan eyes are dim with weeping?

I had a dream — a lovely dream,

Of her that in the grave is sleeping.

I saw her as ‘twas yesterday,

The bloom upon her cheek still glowing;

And round her play’d a golden ray,

And on her brows were gay flowers blowing.

With angel-hand she swept a lyre,

A garland red with roses bound it;

Its strings were wreath’d with lambent fire,

And amaranth was woven round it.

I — saw her mid the realms of light,

In everlasting radiance gleaming;

Co-equal with the seraphs bright,

Mid thousand thousand angels beaming.

I — strove to reach her, when, behold,

Those fairy forms of bliss Elysian,

And all that rich scene wrapt in gold

Faded in air — a lovely vision!

And I awoke, but oh! to me

That waking hour was doubly weary;

And yet I could not envy thee,

Although so blest, and I so dreary.

ON SUBLIMITY.

“The sublime always dwells on great objects and terrible.” — BURKE.

O TELL me not of vales in tenderest green,

The poplar’s shade, the plantain’s graceful tree;

Give me the wild cascade, the rugged scene,

The loud surge bursting o’er the purple sea:

On such sad views my soul delights to pore,

By Teneriffe’s peak, or Kilda’s giant height,

Or dark Loffoden’s melancholy shore,

What time gray eve is fading into night;

When by that twilight beam I scarce descry

The mingled shades of earth and sea and sky.

Give me to wander at midnight alone,

Through some august cathedral, where, from high,

The cold, clear moon on the mosaic stone

Comes glancing in gay colours gloriously,

Through windows rich with gorgeous blazonry,

Gilding the niches dim, where, side by side,

Stand antique mitred prelates, whose bones lie

Beneath the pavement, where their deeds of pride

Were graven, but long since are worn away

By constant feet of ages day by day.

Then, as Imagination aids, I hear

Wild heavenly voices sounding from the choir,

And more than mortal music meets mine ear,

Whose long, long notes among the tombs expire,

With solemn rustling of cherubic wings,

Round those vast columns which the roof upbear;

While sad and undistinguishable things

Do flit athwart the moonlit windows there;

And my blood curdles at the chilling sound

Of lone, unearthly steps, that pace the hallow’d ground!

I love the starry spangled heav’n, resembling

A canopy with fiery gems o’erspread,

When the wide loch with silvery sheen is trembling,

Far stretch’d beneath the mountain’s hoary head.

But most I love that sky, when, dark with storms,

It frowns terrific o’er this wilder’d earth,

While the black clouds, in strange and uncouth forms,

Come hurrying onward in their ruinous wrath;

And shrouding in their deep and gloomy robe

The burning eyes of heav’n and Dian’s lucid globe!

love your voice, ye echoing winds, that sweep

Thro’ the wide womb of midnight, when the veil

Of darkness rests upon the mighty deep,

The labouring vessel, and the shatter’d sail —

Save when the forked bolts of lightning leap

On flashing pinions, and the mariner pale

Raises his eyes to heav’n. Oh! who would sleep

What time the rushing of the angry gale

Is loud upon the waters? — Hail, all hail!

Tempest and clouds and night and thunder’s rending peal!

All hail, Sublimity! thou lofty one,

For thou dost walk upon the blast, and gird

Thy majesty with terrors, and thy throne

Is on the whirlwind, and thy voice is heard

In thunders and in shakings: thy delight

Is in the secret wood, the blasted heath,

The ruin’d fortress, and the dizzy height,

The grave, the ghastly charnel-house of death,

In vaults, in cloisters, and in gloomy piles,

Long corridors and towers and solitary aisles!

Thy joy is in obscurity, and plain

Is naught with thee; and on thy steps attend

Shadows but half distinguish’d; the thin train

Of hovering spirits round thy pathway bend,

With their low tremulous voice and airy tread,

What time the tomb above them yawns and gapes:

For thou dost hold communion with the dead

Phantoms and phantasies and grisly shapes;

And shades and headless spectres of St. Mark,

Seen by a lurid light, formless and still and dark!

What joy to view the varied rainbow smile

On Niagara’s flood of matchless might,

Where all around the melancholy isle

The billows sparkle with their hues of light!

While, as the restless surges roar and rave,

The arrowy stream descends with awful sound,

Wheeling and whirling with each breathless wave.

Immense, sublime, magnificent, profound!

If thou hast seen all this, and could’st not feel,

Then know, thine heart is framed of marble or of steel.

The hurricane fair earth to darkness changing,

Kentucky’s chambers of eternal gloom,

The swift-paced columns of the desert ranging

Th’ uneven waste, the violent Simoom,

Thy snow-clad peaks, stupendous Gungotree!

Whence springs the hallow’d Jumna’s echoing tide,

Hoar Cotopaxi’s cloud-capt majesty,

Enormous Chimborazo’s naked pride,

The dizzy cape of winds that cleaves the sky,

Whence we look down into eternity,

The pillar’d cave of Morven’s giant king,

The Yanar, and the Geyser’s boiling fountain,

The deep volcano’s inward murmuring,

The shadowy Colossus of the mountain;

Antiparos, where sunbeams never enter;

Loud Stromboli, amid the quaking isles;

The terrible Maelstrom, around his centre

Wheeling his circuit of unnumber’d miles:

These, these are sights and sounds that freeze the blood,

Yet charm the awe-struck soul which doats on solitude.

Blest be the bard, whose willing feet rejoice

To tread the emerald green of Fancy’s vales,

Who hears the music of her heavenly voice,

And breathes the rapture of her nectar’d gales!

Blest be the bard, whom golden Fancy loves,

He strays for ever thro’ her blooming bowers,

Amid the rich profusion of her groves,

And wreathes his forehead with her spicy flowers

Of sunny radiance; but how blest is he

Who feels the genuine force of high Sublimity!

THE DEITY.

“Immutable — immortal — infinite!” — Milton.

WHERE is the wonderful abode,

The holy, secret, searchless shrine,

Where dwells the immaterial God,

The all-pervading and benign?

Oh that he were reveal’d to me,

Fully and palpably display’d

In all the awful majesty

Of Heaven’s consummate pomp array’d ——

How would the overwhelming light

Of his tremendous presence beam!

And how insufferably bright

Would the broad glow of glory stream!

What tho’ this flesh would fade like grass,

Before th’ intensity of day?

One glance at him who always was,

The fiercest pangs would well repay.

When Moses on the mountain’s brow

Had met th’ Eternal face to face,

While anxious Israel stood below,

Wond’ring and trembling at its base;

His visage, as he downward trod,

Shone starlike on the shrinking crowd,

With lustre borrow’d from his God:

They could not brook it, and they bow’d.

The mere reflection of the blaze

That lighten’d round creation’s Lord,

Was too puissant for their gaze;

And he that caught it was adored.

Then how ineffably august,

How passing wond’rous must He be,

Whose presence lent to earthly dust

Such permanence of brilliancy!

Throned in sequester’d sanctity,

And with transcendent glories crown’d;

With all His works beneath His eye,

And suns and systems burning round, —

How shall I hymn Him? How aspire

His holy Name with song to blend,

And bid my rash and feeble lyre

To such an awless flight ascend?

THE REIGN OF LOVE.

“In freta dum fluvii current,” etc. — VIRGIL.

WHILE roses boast a purple dye,

While seas obey the blast,

Or glowing rainbows span the sky —

The reign of love shall last.

While man exults o’er present joy,

Or mourns o’er joy that’s past,

Feels virtue soothe, or vice alloy —

The reign of love shall last.

While female charms attract the mind,

In moulds of beauty cast;

While man is warm, or woman kind —

The reign of love shall last.

TIS THE VOICE OF THE DEAD.

“Non omnis moriar.” — HORACE.

‘TIS the voice of the dead

From the depth of their glooms:

Hark! they call me away

To the world of the tombs!

I come, lo! I come

To your lonely abodes,

For my dust is the earth’s

But this soul is my God’s!

Thine is not the triumph,

O invincible Death!

Thou hast not prevail’d,

Tho’ I yield thee my breath;

Thy sceptre shall wave

O’er a fragment of clay,

But my spirit, thou tyrant,

Is bounding away!

fear not, I feel not

The pang that destroys,

In the bliss of that thought —

That the blest shall rejoice:

For why should I shrink?

One moment shall sever

My soul from its chain,

Then it liveth for ever!

Then weep not for me,

Tho’ I sink, I shall rise;

I shall live, tho’ I sleep —

‘Tis the guilty who dies.

E’en now in mine ear

‘Tis a seraph who sings:

Farewell! — for I go

On the speed of his wings!

TIME: AN ODE.

I SEE the chariot, where,

Throughout the purple air,

The forelock’d monarch rides:

Arm’d like some antique vehicle for war,

Time, hoary Time! I see thy scythéd car,

In voiceless majesty,

Cleaving the clouds of ages that float by,

And change their many-colour’d sides,

Now dark, now dun, now richly bright,

In an ever-varying light.

The great, the lowly, and the brave

Bow down before the rushing force

Of thine unconquerable course;

Thy wheels are noiseless as the grave,

Yet fleet as Heaven’s red bolt they hurry on,

They pass above us, and are gone!

Clear is the track which thou hast past;

Strew’d with the wrecks of frail renown,

Robe, sceptre, banner, wreath, and crown,

The pathway that before thee lies,

An undistinguishable waste,

Invisible to human eyes,

Which fain would scan the various shapes which glide

In dusky cavalcade,

Imperfectly descried,

Through that intense, impenetrable shade.

Four gray steeds thy chariot draw;

In th’ obdurate, tameless jaw

Their rusted iron bits they sternly champ;

Ye may not hear the echoing tramp

Of their light-bounding, windy feet,

Upon that cloudy pavement beat.

Four wings have each, which, far outspread,

Receive the many blasts of heav’n,

As with unwearied speed,

Throughout the long extent of ether driv’n,

Onward they rush for ever and for aye:

Thy voice, thou mighty Charioteer!

Always sounding in their ear,

Throughout the gloom of night and heat of day.

Fast behind thee follows Death,

Thro’ the ranks of wan and weeping,

That yield their miserable breath,

On with his pallid courser proudly sweeping.

Arm’d is he in full mail

Bright breastplate and high crest,

Nor is the trenchant falchion wanting:

So fiercely does he ride the gale,

On Time’s dark car, before him, rest

The dew-drops of the charger’s panting,

On, on they go along the boundless skies,

All human grandeur fades away

Before their flashing, fiery, hollow eyes;

Beneath the terrible control

Of those vast arméd orbs, which roll

Oblivion on the creatures of a day.

Those splendid monuments alone he spares

Which, to her deathless votaries,

Bright Fame, with glowing hand, uprears

Amid the waste of countless years.

“Live ye!” to these he crieth; “live!

To ye eternity I give —

Ye, upon whose blessed birth

The noblest star of heaven hath shone;

Live, when the ponderous pyramids of earth

Are crumbling in oblivion!

Live, when, wrapt in sullen shade,

The golden hosts of heaven shall fade;

Live, when yon gorgeous sun on high

Shall veil the sparkling of his eye!

Live, when imperial Time and Death himself shall die!”

GOD’S DENUNCIATIONS AGAINST PHARAOH-HOPHRA, OR APRIES.

THOU beast of the flood, who hast said in thy soul,

“I have made me a stream that for ever shall roll!”

Thy strength is the flower that shall last but a day,

And thy might is the snow in the sun’s burning ray.

Arm, arm from the east, Babylonia’s son!

Arm, arm for the battle — the Lord leads thee on!

With the shield of thy fame, and the power of thy pride,

Arm, arm in thy glory — the Lord is thy guide.

Thou shalt come like a storm when the moonlight is dim,

And the lake’s gloomy bosom is full to the brim;

Thou shalt come like the flash in the darkness of night,

When the wolves of the forest shall howl for affright.

Woe, woe to thee, Tanis!  thy babes shall be thrown —

By the barbarous hands on the cold marble-stone:

Woe, woe to thee, Nile! for thy stream shall be red

With the blood that shall gush o’er thy billowy bed!

Woe, woe to thee, Memphis! the war-cry is near,

And the child shall be toss’d on the murderer’s spear;

For fiercely he comes in the day of his ire,

With wheels like a whirlwind, and chariots of fire!

ALL JOYOUS IN THE REALMS OF DAY.

“Hominum divomque pater.” — VIRGIL.

ALL joyous in the realms of day,

The radiant angels sing,

In incorruptible array,

Before the Eternal King:

Who, hymn’d by archangelic tongues,

In majesty and might,

The subject of ten thousand songs,

Sits veil’d in circling light.

Benignly great, serenely dread,

Amid th’ immortal choir,

How glory plays around his head

In rays of heavenly fire!

Before the blaze of Deity

The deathless legions bend,

And to the grand co-equal Three

Their choral homage lend.

They laud that God, who has no peers,

High — holy — searchless — pure;

Who has endured for countless years,

And ever will endure:

Who spoke, and fish, fowl, beast, in pairs,

Or swam, or flew, or trod;

Space glitter’d with unnumber’d stars,

And heaving oceans flow’d.

Then let us join our feeble praise

To that which angels give;

And hymns to that great Parent raise,

In whom we breathe and live!

THE BATTLE-FIELD.

“When all is o’er, it is humbling to tread

O’er the weltering field of the tombless dead!”

BYRON.

THE heat and the chaos of contest are o’er,

To mingle no longer — to madden no more:

And the cold forms of heroes are stretch’d on the plain;

Those lips cannot breathe thro’ the trumpet again!

For the globes of destruction have shatter’d their might,

The swift and the burning — and wrapt them in night:

Like lightning, electric and sudden they came;

They took but their life, and they left them their fame!

I — heard, oh! I heard, when, with barbarous bray,

They leapt from the mouth of the cannon away;

And the loud-rushing sound of their passage in air

Seem’d to speak in a terrible language—” Beware!”

Farewell to ye, chieftains; to one and to all,

Who this day have perish’d by sabre or ball;

Ye cannot awake from your desolate sleep —

Unbroken and silent and dreamless and deep!

THE THUNDER-STORM.

“Non imitabile fulmen.” — VIRGIL.

THE storm is brooding! — I would see it pass,

Observe its tenor, and its progress trace.

How dark and dun the gathering clouds appear,

Their rolling thunders seem to rend the ear!

But faint at first, they slowly, sternly rise,

From mutt’rings low to peals which rock the skies,

As if at first their fury they forbore,

And nursed their terrors for a closing roar.

And hark! they rise into a loftier sound,

Creation’s trembling objects quake around;

In silent awe the subject-nations hear

Th’ appalling crash of elemental war:

The lightning too each eye in dimness shrouds,

The fiery progeny of clashing clouds,

That carries death upon its blazing wing,

And the keen tortures of th’ electric sting:

Not like the harmless flash on summer’s eve

(When no rude blasts their silent slumbers leave),

Which, like a radiant vision to the eye,

Expands serenely in the placid sky;

It rushes fleeter than the swiftest wind,

And bids attendant thunders wait behind:

Quick — forked — livid, thro’ the air it flies,

A moment blazes — dazzles — bursts — and dies:

Another, and another yet, and still

To each replies its own allotted peal.

But see, at last, Us force and fury spent,

The tempest slackens, and the clouds are rent:

How sweetly opens on th’ enchanted view

The deep-blue sky, more fresh and bright in hue!

A finer fragrance breathes in every vale,

A fuller luxury in every gale;

My ravish’d senses catch the rich perfume,

And Nature smiles in renovated bloom!

THE GRAVE OF A SUICIDE.

HARK! how the gale, in mournful notes and stern,

Sighs thro’ yon grove of aged oaks, that wave

(While down these solitary walks I turn)

Their mingled branches o’er yon lonely grave!

Poor soul! the dawning of thy life was dim;

Frown’d the dark clouds upon thy natal day;

Soon rose thy cup of sorrow to the brim,

And hope itself but shed a doubtful ray.

That hope had fled, and all within was gloom;

That hope had fled — thy woe to frenzy grew;

For thou, wed to misery from the womb —

Scarce one bright scene thy night of darkness knew!

Oft when the moonbeam on the cold bank sleeps,

Where ‘neath the dewy turf thy form is laid,

In silent woe thy wretched mother weeps,

By this lone tomb, and by this oak-tree’s shade.

“Oh! softly tread: in death he slumbers here;

‘Tis here,” she cries, “within this narrow cell!” —

The bitter sob, the wildly-starting tear,

The quivering lip, proclaim the rest too well!

ON THE DEATH OF LORD BYRON.

“Unus tanta dedit? — dédit et majora daturus

Ni celeri letho corriperetur, erat.”

DON MANUEL DE SOUZA COUTINO’S

Epitaph on Camoens.

THE hero and the bard is gone!

His bright career on earth is done,

Where with a comet’s blaze he shone.

He died — where vengeance arms the brave,

Where buried freedom quits her grave,

In regions of the eastern wave.

Yet not before his ardent lay

Had bid them chase all fear away,

And taught their trumps a bolder bray.

Thro’ him their ancient valour glows,

And, stung by thraldom’s scathing woes,

They rise again, as once they rose.

As once in conscious glory bold,

To war their sounding cars they roll’d,

Uncrush’d, untrampled, uncontroll’d!

Each drop that gushes from their side,

Will serve to swell the crimson tide,

That soon shall whelm the Moslem’s pride!

At last upon their lords they turn,

At last the shame of bondage learn,

At last they feel their fetters burn!

Oh! how the heart expands to see

An injured people all agree

To burst those fetters and be free!

Each far-famed mount that cleaves the skies,

Each plain where buried glory lies,

All, all exclaim—” Awake! arise!”

Who would not feel their wrongs? and who

Departed freedom would not rue,

With all her trophies in his view?

To see imperial Athens reign,

And, towering o’er the vassal main,

Rise in embattled strength again —

To see rough Sparta train once more

Her infants’ ears for battle’s roar,

Stern, dreadful, chainless, as before —

Was Byron’s hope — was Byron’s aim:

With ready heart and hand he came;

But perish’d in that path of fame!

THE WALK AT MIDNIGHT.

“Tremulo sub lumine.” — Virgil.

SOFT, shadowy moonbeam! by thy light

Sleeps the wide meer serenely pale:

How various are the sounds of night,

Borne on the scarcely-rising gale!

The swell of distant brook is heard,

Whose far-off waters faintly roll;

And piping of the shrill small bird,

Arrested by the wand’ring owl.

Come hither! let us thread with care

The maze of this green path, which binds

The beauties of the broad parterre,

And thro’ yon fragrant alley winds.

Or on this old bench will we sit,

Round which the clust’ring woodbine wreathes,

While birds of night around us flit;

And thro’ each lavish wood-walk breathes,

Unto my ravish’d senses, brought

From yon thick-woven odorous bowers,

The still rich breeze, with incense fraught

Of glowing fruits and spangled flowers.

The whispering leaves, the gushing stream,

Where trembles the uncertain moon,

Suit more the poet’s pensive dream,

Than all the jarring notes of noon.

Then, to the thickly-crowded mart

The eager sons of interest press;

Then, shine the tinsel works of art —

Now, all is Nature’s loneliness!

Then, wealth aloft in state displays

The glittering of her gilded cars;

Now, dimly stream the mingled rays

Of yon far-twinkling, silver stars.

Yon church, whose cold gray spire appears

In the black outline of the trees,

Conceals the object of my tears,

Whose form in dreams my spirit sees.

There in the chilling bed of earth

The chancel’s letter’d stone above —

There sleepeth she who gave me birth,

Who taught my lips the hymn of love!

Yon mossy stems of ancient oak,

So widely crown’d with sombre shade,

Those ne’er have heard the woodman’s stroke

Their solemn, secret depths invade.

How oft the grassy way I’ve trod

That winds their knotty boles between,

And gather’d from the blooming sod

The flowers that flourish’d there unseen!

Rise! let us trace that path once more,

While o’er our track the cold beams shine;

Down this low shingly vale, and o’er

Yon rude, rough bridge of prostrate pine.

MITHRIDATES PRESENTING BERENICE WITH THE CUP OF POISON.

OH! Berenice, lorn and lost,

This wretched soul with shame is bleeding:

Oh! Berenice, I am tost

By griefs, like wave to wave succeeding.

Fall’n Pontus! all her fame is gone,

And dim the splendour of her glory;

Low in the west her evening sun,

And dark the lustre of her story.

Dead is the wreath that round her brow

The glowing hands of Honour braided:

What change of fate can wait her now,

Her sceptre spoil’d, her throne degraded?

And wilt thou, wilt thou basely go,

My love, thy life, thy country shaming,

In all the agonies of woe,

‘Mid madd’ning shouts, and standards flaming?

And wilt thou, wilt thou basely go,

Proud Rome’s triumphal car adorning?

Hark! hark! I hear thee answer “No!”

The proffer’d life of thraldom scorning.

Lone, crownless, destitute, and poor,

My heart with bitter pain is burning;

So thick a cloud of night hangs o’er,

My daylight into darkness turning.

Yet though my spirit, bow’d with ill,

Small hope from future fortune borrows;

One glorious thought shall cheer me still,

That thou art free from abject sorrows —

Art free for ever from the strife

Of slavery’s pangs and tearful anguish;

For life is death, and death is life,

To those whose limbs in fetters languish.

Fill high the bowl! the draught is thine!

The Romans! — now thou need’st not heed them!

‘Tis nobler than the noblest wine —

It gives thee back to fame and freedom!

The scalding tears my cheek bedew;

My life, my love, my all — we sever!

One last embrace, one long adieu,

And then farewell — farewell for ever!

THE BARD’S FAREWELL.

“The king, sensible that nothing kept alive the ideas of military valour and of ancient glory so much as the traditional poetry of the people — which, assisted by the power of music and the jollity of festivals, made deep impression on the minds of the youth — gathered together all the Welsh bards, and, from a barbarous though not absurd policy, ordered them to be put to death.” — HUME.

SNOWDON! thy cliffs shall hear no more

This deep-toned harp again;

But banner-cry and battle-roar

Shall form a fiercer strain!

O’er thy sweet chords, my magic lyre!

What future hand shall stray?

What brain shall feel thy master’s fire,

Or frame his matchless lay?

Well might the crafty Edward fear:

Should I but touch thy chord,

Its slightest sound would couch the spear,

And bare the indignant sword!

Full well he knew the wizard-spell

That dwelt upon thy string;

And trembled, when he heard thy swell

Thro’ Snowdon’s caverns ring!

These eyes shall sleep in death’s dull night,

This hand all nerveless lie,

Ere once again yon orb of light

Break o’er the clear blue sky!

And thou, by Hell’s own furies nurst,

Unfurl thy banner’s pride!

But know that, living, thee I cursed;

And, cursing thee, I died!

EPIGRAM.

MEDEA’S herbs her magic gave —

They taught her how to kill or save:

No foreign aid couldst thou devise,

For in thyself thy magic lies.

ON BEING ASKED FOR A SIMILE TO ILLUSTRATE THE ADVANTAGE OF KEEPING THE PASSIONS SUBSERVIENT TO REASON.

As the sharp, pungent taste is the glory of mustard,

But, if heighten’d, would trouble your touchy papillae;

As a few laurel-leaves add a relish to custard,

But, if many, would fight with your stomach and kill ye: ——

So the passions, if freed from the precincts of reason,

Have noxious effects — but if duly confined, sir,

Are useful, no doubt — this each writer agrees on:

So I’ve dish’d up a simile just to your mind, sir.

EPIGRAM ON A MUSICIAN WHOSE HARP-STRINGS WERE CRACKED FROM WANT OF USING.

“WHY dost thou not string thine old harp?” says a friend:

“Thy complaints,” replied Dolce, “I think never end;

I’ve reason enough to remember the thing,

For you always are harping upon the old string.”

THE OLD CHIEFTAIN.

“And said I, that my limbs were old!” — SCOTT.

RAISE, raise the song of the hundred shells!

Though my hair is gray and my limbs are cold;

Yet in my bosom proudly dwells

The memory of the days of old;

When my voice was high, and my arm was strong,

And the foeman before my stroke would bow,

And I could have raised the sounding song

As loudly as I hear ye now.

For when I have chanted the bold song of death,

Not a page would have stay’d in the hall,

Not a lance in the rest, not a sword in the sheath,

Not a shield on the dim gray wall.

And who might resist the united powers

Of battle and music that day,

When, all martiall’d in arms on the heaven-kissing towers,

Stood the chieftains in peerless array?

When our enemy sunk from our eyes as the snow

Which falls down the stream in the dell,

When each word that I spake was the death of a foe,

And each note of my harp was his knell?

So raise ye the song of the hundred shells;

Though my hair is gray and my limbs are cold,

Yet in my bosom proudly dwells

The memory of the days of old!

APOLLONIUS RHODIUS’S COMPLAINT.

WITH cutting taunt they bade me lay

My high-strung harp aside,

As if I dare not soar away

On Fancy’s plume of pride!

Oh! while there’s image in my brain

And vigour in my hand,

The first shall frame the soul-fraught strain.

The last these chords command!

‘Tis true, I own, the starting tear

Had swell’d into mine eye,

When she, whose hand the plant should rear,

Could bid it fade and die:

But, deaf to cavil, spite, and scorn,

I still must wake the lyre;

And still, on Fancy’s pinions borne,

To Helicon aspire. —

And all the ardent lays I pour,

Another realm shall claim;

My name shall live — a foreign shore

Shall consecrate my name.

My country’s scorn I will not brook,

But she shall rue it long;

And Rhodes shall bless the hour she took

The exiled child of song.

THE FALL OF JERUSALEM.

JERUSALEM! Jerusalem!

Thou art low! thou mighty one,

How is the brilliance of thy diadem,

How is the lustre of thy throne

Rent from thee, and thy sun of fame

Darken’d by the shadowy pinion

Of the Roman bird, whose sway

All the tribes of earth obey,

Crouching ‘neath his dread dominion,

And the terrors of his name!

How is thy royal seat — whereon

Sat in days of yore

Lowly Jesse’s godlike son,

And the strength of Solomon,

In those rich and happy times

When the ships from Tarshish bore

Incense, and from Ophir’s land,

With silken sail and cedar oar,

Wafting to Judea’s strand

All the wealth of foreign climes —

How is thy royal seat o’erthrown!

Gone is all thy majesty:

Salem! Salem! city of kings,

Thou sittest desolate and lone,

Where once the glory of the Most High

Dwelt visibly enshrined between the wings

Of Cherubims, within whose bright embrace

The golden mercy-seat remain’d:

Land of Jehovah! view that sacred place

Abandon’d and profaned!

Wail! fallen Salem! Wail:

Mohammed’s votaries pollute thy fane;

The dark division of thine holy veil

Is rent in twain!

Thrice hath Sion’s crowned rock

Seen thy temple’s marble state,

Awfully, serenely great,

Towering on his sainted brow,

Rear its pinnacles of snow:

Thrice, with desolating shock,

Down to earth hath seen it driv’n

From his heights, which reach to heav’n!

Wail, fallen Salem! Wail:

Though not one stone above another

There was left to tell the tale

Of the greatness of thy story,

Yet the long lapse of ages cannot smother

The blaze of thine abounding glory;

Which thro’ the mist of rolling years,

O’er history’s darken’d page appears,

Like the morning star, whose gleam

Gazeth thro’ the waste of night,

What time old Ocean’s purple stream

In his cold surge hath deeply laved

Its ardent front of dewy light.

Oh! who shall e’er forget thy bands, which braved

The terrors of the desert’s barren reign,

And that strong arm which broke the chain

Wherein ye foully lay enslaved,

Or that sublime Theocracy which paved

Your way thro’ ocean’s vast domain,

And on, far on to Canaan’s emerald plain

Led the Israelitish crowd

With a pillar and a cloud?

Signs on earth and signs on high

Prophesied thy destiny;

A trumpet’s voice above thee rung,

A starry sabre o’er thee hung;

Visions of fiery armies, redly flashing

In the many-colour’d glare

Of the setting orb of day;

And flaming chariots, fiercely dashing,

Swept along the peopled air,

In magnificent array:

The temple doors, on brazen hinges crashing,

Burst open with appalling sound,

A wondrous radiance streaming round!

“Our blood be on our heads!” ye said:

Such your awless imprecations:

Full bitterly at length ‘twas paid

Upon your captive nation!

Arms of adverse legions bound thee,

Plague and pestilence stood round thee;

Seven weary suns had brighten’d Syria’s sky,

Yet still was heard th’ unceasing cry —

“From south, north, east, and west, a voice,

Woe unto thy sons and daughters!

Woe to Salem! thou art lost!”

A sound divine

Came from the sainted, secret, inmost shrine:

“Let us go hence!” — and then a noise —

The thunders of the parting Deity,

Like the rush of countless waters,

Like the murmur of a host!

Though now each glorious hope be blighted,

Yet an hour shall come, when ye,

Though scatter’d like the chaff, shall be

Beneath one standard once again united;

When your wandering race shall own,

Prostrate at the dazzling throne

Of your high Almighty Lord,

The wonders of His searchless word,

Th’ unfading splendours of His Son!

LAMENTATION OF THE PERUVIANS.

THE foes of the East have come down on our shore,

And the state and the strength of Peru are no more:

Oh! cursed, doubly cursed, was that desolate hour,

When they spread o’er our land in the pride of their power!

Lament for the Inca, the son of the Sun; —

Ataliba’s fallen — Peru is undone!

Pizarro! Pizarro! though conquest may wing

Her course round thy banners that wanton in air;

Yet remorse to thy grief-stricken conscience shall cling,

And shriek o’er thy banquets in sounds of despair.

It shall tell thee, that he who beholds from his throne

The blood thou hast spilt and the deeds thou hast done,

Shall mock at thy fear, and rejoice at thy groan,

And arise in his wrath for the death of his son!

Why blew ye, ye gales, when the murderer came?

Why fann’d ye the fire, and why fed ye the flame?

Why sped ye his sails o’er the ocean so blue?

Are ye also combined for the fall of Peru?

And thou, whom no prayers, no entreaties can bend,

Thy crimes and thy murders to heav’n shall ascend:

For vengeance the ghosts of our forefathers call:

At thy threshold, Pizarro, in death shalt thou fall!

Ay, there — even there, in the halls of thy pride,

With the blood of thine heart shall thy portals be dyed!

Lo! dark as the tempests that frown from the North,

From the cloud of past time Manco Capac looks forth —

Great Inca! to whom the gay day-star gave birth,

Whose throne is the heav’n, and whose foot-stool the earth —

His visage is sad as the vapours that rise

From the desolate mountain of fire to the skies;

But his eye flashes flame as the lightnings that streak

Those volumes that shroud the volcano’s high peak.

Hark! he speaks — bids us fly to our mountains, and cherish

Bold freedom’s last spark ere for ever it perish;

Bids us leave these wild condors to prey on each other,

Each to bathe his fierce beak in the gore of his brother!

This symbol we take of our godhead the Sun,

And curse thee and thine for the deeds thou hast done.

May the curses pursue thee of those thou hast slain,

Of those that have fallen in war on the plain,

When we went forth to greet ye — but foully ye threw

Your dark shots of death on the sons of Peru.

May the curse of the widow — the curse of the brave —

The curse of the fatherless, cleave to thy grave!

And the words which they spake with their last dying breath

Embitter the pangs and the tortures of death!

May he that assists be childless and poor,

With famine behind him, and death at his door:

May his nights be all sleepless, his days spent alone,

And ne’er may he list to a voice but his own!

Or, if he shall sleep, in his dreams may he view

The ghost of our Inca, the fiends of Peru:

May the flames of destruction that here he has spread

Be tenfold return’d on his murderous head!

SHORT EULOGIUM ON HOMER.

IMMORTAL bard! thy warlike lay

Demands the greenest, brightest bay,

That ever wreathed the brow

Of minstrel bending o’er his lyre,

With ardent hand and soul of fire,

Or then, or since, or now.

A SISTER, SWEET ENDEARING NAME!

“Why should we mourn for the blest!” — BYRON.

A SISTER, sweet endearing name!

Beneath this tombstone sleeps;

A brother (who such tears could blame?)

In pensive anguish weeps.

I saw her when in health she wore

A soft and matchless grace,

And sportive pleasures wanton’d o’er

The dimples of her face.

I saw her when the icy wind

Of sickness froze her bloom;

I saw her (bitterest stroke!) consign’d

To that cold cell — the tomb!

Oh! when I heard the crumbling mould

Upon her coffin fall,

And thought within she lay so cold,

And knew that worms would crawl

O’er her sweet cheek’s once lovely dye,

I shudder’d as I turn’d

From the sad spot, and in mine eye

The full warm tear-drop burn’d.

Again I come — again I feel

Reflection’s poignant sting,

As I retrace my sister’s form,

And back her image bring.

Herself I cannot — from the sod

She will not rise again;

But this sweet thought, “She rests with God,”

Relieves a brother’s pain.

THE SUN GOES DOWN IN THE DARK BLUE MAIN.

“Irreparabile tempus.” — VIRGIL.

THE sun goes down in the dark blue main,

To rise the brighter to-morrow;

But oh! what charm can restore again

Those days now consign’d to sorrow?

The moon goes down on the calm still night,

To rise sweeter than when she parted;

But oh! what charm can restore the light

Of joy to the broken-hearted?

The blossoms depart in the wintry hour,

To rise in vernal glory;

But oh! what charm can restore the flower

Of youth to the old and hoary?

STILL, MUTE, AND MOTIONLESS SHE LIES.

“Belle en sa fleur d’adolescence.” — Berquin.

“Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay.” — YOUNG.

STILL, mute, and motionless she lies,

The mist of death has veil’d her eyes.

And is that bright-red lip so pale,

Whose hue was freshen’d by a gale

More sweet than summer e’er could bring

To fan her flowers with balmy wing!

Thy breath, the summer gale, is fled,

And leaves thy lip, the flower, decay’d.

When I was young, with fost’ring care

I rear’d a tulip bright and fair,

And saw its lovely leaves expand,

The labour of my infant hand.

But winter came — its varied dye

Each morn grew fainter to mine eye;

Till, with’ring, it was bright no more,

Nor bloom’d as it was wont before:

And gazing there in boyish grief,

Upon the dull and alter’d leaf,

“Alas! sweet flower,” I cried in vain,

“Would I could bid thee blush again!”

So now, “Return, thou crimson dye,

To Celia’s lip!” I wildly cry;

And steal upon my hopeless view,

And flush it with reviving hue,

Soft as the early vermeil given

To the dim paleness of the heaven

When slowly gaining on the sight,

It breaks upon the cheerless white.

It is an idle wish — a dream —

I may not see the glazed eye beam;

I may not warm the damps of death,

Or link again the scatter’d wreath;

Array in leaves the wintry scene,

Or make parch’d Afric’s deserts green;

Replace the rose-bud on the tree.

Or breathe the breath of life in thee.

OH! NEVER MAY FROWNS AND DISSENSION MOLEST.

“Ipse meique

Ante Larem proprium.” — HORACE.

OH! never may frowns and dissension molest

The pleasure I find at the social hearth;

A pleasure the dearest — the purest — the best

Of all that are found or enjoy’d on the earth!

For who could e’er traverse this valley of tears,

Without the dear comforts of friendship and home;

And bear all the dark disappointments and fears,

Which chill most of our joys and annihilate some?

Vain, bootless pursuers of honour and fame!

‘Tis idle to tell ye, what soon ye must prove —

That honour’s a bauble, and glory a name,

When put in the balance with friendship and love.

For when by fruition their pleasure is gone,

We think of them no more — they but charm for a while;

When the objects of love and affection are flown,

With pleasure we cling to their memory still!

ON A DEAD ENEMY.

“Non odi mortuum.” — Cicero.

I CAME in haste with cursing breath,

And heart of hardest steel;

But when I saw thee cold in death,

I felt as man should feel.

For when I look upon that face,

That cold, unheeding, frigid brow,

Where neither rage nor fear has place,

By Heaven! I cannot hate thee now!

LINES.

“Cur pendet tacita fistula cum lyra?” — HORACE.

WHENCE is it, friend, that thine enchanting lyre

Of wizard charm, should thus in silence lie?

Ah! why not boldly sweep its chords of fire,

And rouse to life its latent harmony?

Thy fancy, fresh, exuberant, boundless, wild,

Like the rich herbage of thy Plata’s shore,

By Song’s resistless witchery beguiled

Would then transport us, since it charm’d before!

For if thy vivid thoughts possess’d a spell,

Which chain’d our ears, and fix’d attention’s gaze,

As at the social board we heard thee tell

Of Chili’s woods and Orellana’s maze —

How will they, deck’d in Song’s enlivening grace,

Demand our praise, with added beauties told;

How in thy potent language shall we trace

Those thoughts more vigorous and those words more bold!

THE DUKE OF ALVA’S OBSERVATION ON KINGS.

KINGS, when to private audience they descend,

And make the baffled courtier their prey,

Do use an orange, as they treat a friend —

Extract the juice, and cast the rind away.

When thou art favour’d by thy sovereign’s eye,

Let not his glance thine inmost thoughts discover;

Or he will scan thee through, and lay thee by,

Like some old book which he has read all over.

AH! YES, THE LIP MAY FAINTLY SMILE.

AH! yes, the lip may faintly smile,

The eye may sparkle for a while;

But never from that wither’d heart

The consciousness of ill shall part!

That glance, that smile of passing light,

Are as the rainbow of the night;

But seldom seen, it dares to bloom

Upon the bosom of the gloom.

Its tints are sad and coldly pale,

Dim-glimmering thro’ their misty veil;

Unlike the ardent hues which play

Along the flowery bow of day.

The moonbeams sink in dark-robed shades.

Too soon the airy vision fades;

And double night returns, to shroud

The volumes of the showery cloud.

THOU CAMEST TO THY BOWER, MY LOVE.

“Virgo egregia forma.” — TERENCE.

THOU CAMest to thy bower, my love, across the musky grove,

To fan thy blooming charms within the coolness of the shade;

Thy locks were like a midnight cloud with silver moonbeams wove,

And o’er thy face the varying tints of youthful passion play’d.

Thy breath was like the sandal-wood that casts a rich perfume,

Thy blue eyes mock’d the lotos in the noonday of his bloom;

Thy cheeks were like the beamy flush that gilds the breaking day,

And in th’ ambrosia of thy smiles the god of rapture lay.

Fair as the cairba-stone art thou, that stone of dazzling white,

Ere yet unholy fingers changed its milk-white hue to night;

And lovelier than the loveliest glance from Even’s placid star,

And brighter than the sea of gold, the gorgeous Himsagar.

In high Mohammed’s boundless heaven Al Cawthor’s stream may play,

The fount of youth may sparkling gush beneath the western ray;

And Tasnim’s wave in crystal cups may glow with musk and wine,

But oh! their lustre could not match one beauteous tear of thine!

TO ——

AND shall we say the rose is sweet,

Nor grant that claim to thee,

In whom the loveliest virtues meet

In social harmony?

And shall we call the lily pure,

Nor grant that claim to thee,

Whose taintless, spotless soul is, sure,

The shrine of purity?

And shall we say the sun is bright,

Nor grant that claim to thee,

Whose form and mind with equal light

Both beam so radiantly?

THE PASSIONS.

“You have passions in your heart — scorpions; they sleep now — beware how you awaken them! they will sting you even to death!”

—— Mysteries of Udolpho, vol iii.

BEWARE, beware, ere thou takest

The draught of misery!

Beware, beware, ere thou wakest

The scorpions that sleep in thee!

The woes which thou canst not number,

As yet are wrapt in sleep;

Yet oh! yet they slumber,

But their slumbers are not deep.

Yet oh! yet while the rancour

Of hate has no place in thee,

While thy buoyant soul has an anchor

In youth’s bright tranquil sea:

Yet oh! yet while the blossom

Of hope is blooming fair,

While the beam of bliss lights thy bosom —

Oh! rouse not the serpent there!

For bitter thy tears will trickle

‘Neath misery’s heavy load,

When the world has put in its sickle

To the crop which fancy sow’d.

When the world has rent the cable

That bound thee to the shore,

And launch’d thee weak and unable

To bear the billow’s roar;

Then the slightest touch will waken

Those pangs that will always grieve thee,

And thy soul will be fiercely shaken

With storms that will never leave thee!

So beware, beware, ere thou takest

The draught of misery!

Beware, beware, ere thou wakest

The scorpions that sleep in thee!

THE HIGH-PRIEST TO ALEXANDER.

“Derrame en todo el orbe de la tierra

Las armas, el furor, y nueva guerra.”

La Araucana, Canto xvi.

Go forth, thou man of force!

The world is all thine own;

Before thy dreadful course

Shall totter every throne.

Let India’s jewels glow

Upon thy diadem:

Go, forth to conquest go,

But spare Jerusalem.

For the God of gods, which liveth

Through all eternity,

‘Tis He alone which giveth

And taketh victory:

‘Tis He the bow that blasteth,

And breaketh the proud one’s quiver

And the Lord of armies resteth

In His Holy of Holies for ever!

For God is Salem’s spear,

And God is Salem’s sword;

What mortal man shall dare

To combat with the Lord?

Every knee shall bow

Before His awful sight;

Every thought sink low

Before the Lord of might.

For the God of gods, which liveth

Through all eternity,

‘Tis He alone which giveth

And taketh victory:

‘Tis He the bow that blasteth,

And breaketh the proud one’s quiver;

And the Lord of armies resteth

In His Holy of Holies for ever!

THE DEW, WITH WHICH THE EARLY MEAD IS DREST.

“Spes nunquam implenda.” — LUCRETIUS.

THE dew, with which the early mead is drest,

Which fell by night inaudible and soft,

Mocks the foil’d eye that would its hues arrest,

That glance and change so quickly and so oft.

So in this fruitless sublunary waste,

This trance of life, this unsubstantial show,

Each hope we grasp at flies, to be replaced

By one as fair and as fallacious too.

His limbs encased in aromatic wax,

The jocund bee hies home his hoard to fill:

On human joys there lies the heavy tax

Of hope unrealized, and beck’ning still.

But why with earth’s vile fuel should we feed

Those hopes which Heaven, and Heaven alone, should claim?

Why should we lean upon a broken reed,

Or chase a meteor’s evanescent flame?

0 — man! relinquish Passion’s baleful joys,

And bend at Virtue’s bright unsullied shrine;

Oh! learn her chaste and hallow’d glow to prize,

Pure — unalloy’d — ineffable — divine!

ON THE MOONLIGHT SHINING UPON A FRIEND’S GRAVE.

SHOW not, O moon! with pure and liquid beam,

That mournful spot, where Memory fears to tread;

Glance on the grove, or quiver in the stream,

Or tip the hills — but shine not on the dead:

It wounds the lonely hearts that still survive,

And after buried friends are doom’d to live.

A CONTRAST.

DOST ask why Laura’s soul is riv’n

By pangs her prudence can’t command?

To one who heeds not she has giv’n

Her heart, alas! without her hand.

But Chloe claims our sympathy,

To wealth a martyr and a slave;

For when the knot she dared to tie,

Her hand without her heart she gave.

EPIGRAM.

A SAINT by soldiers fetter’d lay;

An angel took his bonds away.

An angel put the chains on me;

And ‘tis a soldier sets me free.

THE DYING CHRISTIAN.

“It cannot die, it cannot stay,

But leaves its darken’d dust behind.” — BYRON.

I DIE — my limbs with icy feeling

Bespeak that Death is near;

His frozen hand each pulse is stealing;

Yet still I do not fear!

There is a hope — not frail as that

Which rests on human things —

The hope of an immortal state,

And with the King of kings!

And ye may gaze upon my brow,

Which is not sad, tho’ pale;

These hope-illumined features show

But little to bewail.

Death should not chase the wonted bloom

From off the Christian’s face;

Ill prelude of the bliss to come,

Prepared by heavenly grace.

Lament no more — no longer weep

That I depart from men;

Brief is the intermediate sleep,

And bliss awaits me then!

THOSE WORLDLY GOODS THAT, DISTANT, SEEM.

THOSE worldly goods that, distant, seem

With every joy and bliss to teem,

Are spurn’d as trivial when possess’d,

And, when acquired, delight us least:

As torrent-rainbows, which appear

Still dwindling as we still draw near;

And yet contracting on the eye,

Till the bright circling colours die.

HOW GAYLY SINKS THE GORGEOUS SUN WITHIN HIS GOLDEN BED.

“Tu fais naitre la lumière

Du sein de l’obscurité.” — ROUSSEAU.

How gayly sinks the gorgeous sun within his golden bed,

As heaven’s immortal azure glows and deepens into red!

How gayly shines the burnish’d main beneath that living light,

And trembles with his million waves magnificently bright!

But ah! how soon that orb of day must close his burning eye,

And night, in sable pall array’d, involve yon lovely sky!

E’en thus in life our fairest scenes are preludes to our woe;

For fleeting as that glorious beam is happiness below.

But what? though evil fates may frown upon our mortal birth,

Yet Hope shall be the star that lights our night of grief on earth:

And she shall point to sweeter morns, when brighter suns shall rise,

And spread the radiance of their rays o’er earth, and sea, and skies!

OH! YE WILD WINDS, THAT ROAR AND RAVE.

“It is the great army of the dead returning on the northern blast.”

Song of the Five Bards in Ossian.

OH! ye wild winds, that roar and rave

Around the headland’s stormy brow,

That toss and heave the Baltic wave,

And bid the sounding forest bow,

Whence is your course? and do ye bear

The sigh of other worlds along,

When through the dark immense of air

Ye rush in tempests loud and strong?

Methinks, upon your moaning course

I hear the army of the dead;

Each on his own invisible horse,

Triumphing in his trackless tread.

For when the moon conceals her ray,

And midnight spreads her darkest veil,

Borne on the air, and far away,

Upon the eddying blasts they sail.

Then, then their thin and feeble bands

Along the echoing winds are roll’d;

The bodiless tribes of other lands!

The formless, misty sons of old!”

And then at times their wailings rise,

The shrilly wailings of the grave!

And mingle with the madden’d skies,

The rush of wind, and roar of wave.

Heard you that sound? It was the hum

Of the innumerable host,

As down the northern sky they come,

Lamenting o’er their glories lost.

Now for a space each shadowy king,

Who sway’d of old some mighty realm,

Mounts on the tempest’s squally wing,

And grimly frowns thro’ barréd helm.

Now each dim ghost, with awful yells,

Uprears on high his cloudy form;

And with his feeble accent swells

The hundred voices of the storm.

Why leave ye thus the narrow cell,

Ye lords of night and anarchy!

Your robes the vapours of the dell,

Your swords the meteors of the sky?

Your bones are whitening on the heath;

Your fame is in the minds of men:

And would ye break the sleep of death,

That ye might live to war again?

SWITZERLAND.

“Tous les objets de mon amour,

Nos clairs ruisseaux,

Nos hameaux,

Nos coteaux,

Nos montagnes?” — Ranz des Vâches.

WITH Memory’s eye,

Thou land of joy!

I view thy cliffs once more;

And tho’ thy plains

Red slaughter stains,

‘Tis Freedom’s blessed gore.

Thy woody dells,

And shadowy fells,

Exceed a monarch’s halls;

Thy pine-clad hills,

And gushing rills,

And foaming water-falls.

The Gallic foe

Has work’d thee woe,

But trumpet never scared thee;

How could he think

That thou wouldst shrink,

With all thy rocks to guard thee?

E’en now the Gaul,

That wrought thy fall,.

At his own triumph wonders;

So long the strife

For death and life,

So loud our rival thunders!

Oh! when shall Time

Avenge the crime,

And to our rights restore us?

And bid the Seine

Be choked with slain,

And Paris quake before us?

A GLANCE.

LADY! you threw a glance at me,

I knew its meaning well;

He who has loved, and only he,

Its mysteries can tell:

That hieroglyphic of the brain,

Which none but Cupid’s priests explain.

BABYLON.

“Come down, and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground: there is no throne.” — Isaiah xlvii i.

Bow, daughter of Babylon, bow thee to dust!

Thine heart shall be quell’d, and thy pride shall be crush’d:

Weep, Babylon, weep! for thy splendour is past;

And they come like the storm in the day of the blast.

Howl, desolate Babylon, lost one and lone!

And bind thee in sackcloth — for where is thy throne?

Like a wine-press in wrath will I trample thee down,

And rend from thy temples the pride of thy crown.

Though thy streets be a hundred, thy gates be all brass,

Yet thy proud ones of war shall be wither’d like grass;

Thy gates shall be broken, thy strength be laid low,

And thy streets shall resound to the shouts of the foe!

Though thy chariots of power on thy battlements bound,

And the grandeur of waters encompass thee round;

Yet thy walls shall be shaken,’thy waters shall fail,

Thy matrons shall shriek, and thy king shall be pale.

The terrible day of thy fall is at hand,

When my rage shall descend on the face of thy land;

The lances are pointed, the keen sword is bared,

The shields are anointed the helmets prepared.

I call upon Cyrus! He comes from afar,

And the armies of nations are gather’d to war:

With the blood of thy children his path shall be red,

And the bright sun of conquest shall blaze o’er his head!

Thou glory of kingdoms! thy princes are drunk,

But their loins shall be loosed, and their hearts shall be sunk;

They shall crouch to the dust, and be counted as slaves,

At the roll of his wheels, like the rushing of waves!

For I am the Lord, who have mightily spann’d

The breadth of the heavens, and the sea and the land;

And the mountains shall flow at my presence, and earth

Shall reel to and fro in the glance of my wrath!

Your proud domes of cedar on earth shall be thrown,

And the rank grass shall wave o’er the lonely hearth-stone;

And your sons and your sires and your daughters shall bleed

By the barbarous hands of the murdering Mede!

I will sweep ye away in destruction and death,

As the whirlwind that scatters the chaff with its breath;

And the fanes of your gods shall be sprinkled with gore,

And the course of your stream shall be heard of no more!

There the wandering Arab shall ne’er pitch his tent,

But the beasts of the desert shall wail and lament;

In their desolate houses the dragons shall lie,

And the satyrs shall dance, and the bittern shall cry!

OH! WERE THIS HEART OF HARDEST STEEL.

“Vultus nimium lubricus aspici.” — HORACE.

OH! were this heart of hardest steel,

That steel should yield to thee;

And tho’ naught else could make it feel,

‘Twould melt thy form to see:

That eye, that cheek, that lip, possess

Such fascinating loveliness!

The first may claim whatever praise

By amorous bard is paid;

In the dark lightning of its rays

I view thy soul portray’d:

And in that soul what light must be,

When it imparts so bounteously!

Thy cheek, e’en in its humblest bloom,

Like rich carnation glows;

But when the mantling blushes come,

How fades the brightest rose!

Dead the fine hues, the beauty dead,

And coarse the velvet of its head.

Th’ anemone’s deep crimson dye

Beams on thy lip’s red charm;

Thy voice is more than harmony,

Thy breath as sweet as balm:

But still more balmy would it be,

Would it but waft one sigh for me.

To gaze on thee is ecstasy,

Is ecstasy — but pain:

Such is thy lip, thy cheek, thine eye,

I gaze, and gaze again:

Oh!  might those three bright features bear

For me a kiss — a blush — a tear!

THE SLIGHTED LOVER.

“Spes animi credula mutui.” — HORACE.

I LOVED a woman, and too fondly thought

The vows she made were constant and sincere;

But now, alas! in agony am taught,

That she is faithless — I no longer dear!

Why was I frenzied when her bright black eye,

With ray pernicious, flash’d upon my gaze?

Why did I burn with feverish ecstasy,

Stung with her scorn, and ravish’d with her praise?

Would that her loveliness of form and mind

Had only kindled friendship’s calmer glow!

Then had I been more tranquil and resign’d,

And her neglect had never touch’d me so.

But with such peerless charms before his sight,

Who would not own resistless Love’s control?

Feel the deep thrilling of intense delight,

And lose at once the balance of his soul?

Such was my fate — one sole enchanting hope,

One darling object from all else I chose:

That hope is gone — its blighted blossoms droop;

And where shall hopeless passion find repose?

CEASE, RAILER, CEASE! UNTHINKING MAN.

“Cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum,

Quam aut aquila, aut serpens Epidaurius?” — HORACE.

CEASE, railer, cease! unthinking man,

Is every virtue found in thee?

How plain another’s faults we scan,

Our own how faintly do we see!

So one who roves o’er marshy ground

When evening fogs the scene obscure,

Sees vapour hang on all things round,

And falsely deems his station pure!

ANACREONTIC.

“Insanire juvat.” — Horace.

LET others of wealth and emolument dream,

At profits exult, and at losses repine;

Far different my object, far different my theme —

Warm love and frank friendship, and roses and wine!

Let other dull clods, without fancy or fire,

Give my dear friend of Teos a mere poet’s due;

Discarding his morals, his fancy admire,

I deem him a bard, and a moralist too.

Ye sober, ye specious, ye sage, ye discreet!

Your joys in perspective I never could brook;

With rapture I seize on whatever is sweet,

Real, positive, present — no further I look.

I will not be fetter’d by maxims or duties;

The cold charm of ethics I wholly despise:

My hours glide along amid bottles and beauties —

There’s nothing to match with old crust and bright eyes!

vary my cups as his fashions the dandy,

And one day the creatures of gin haunt my brain;

And the next I depute the same office to brandy;

And so on, and so on, and the same round again!

I’m a flighty young spark — but I deem myself blest,

And as happy a soul as my clerical brother;

Tho’ the wish of a moment’s first half’s dispossest

Of its sway o’er my mind, by the wish of the other.

And thou who this wild mode of living despisest,

Sententious and grave, of thy apophthegms boast,

Cry shame of my nostrums; but I know who’s wisest,

Makes the best use of life, and enjoys it the most.

IN WINTER’S DULL AND CHEERLESS REIGN.

“Deme supercilio nubem.” — HORACE.

IN winter’s dull and cheerless reign,

What flower could ever glow?

Beneath the ice of thy disdain,

What song could ever flow?

Restore thy smile! — beneath its ray

The flower of verse shall rise;

And all the ice that froze my lay

Be melted by thine eyes!

SUNDAY MOBS.

THO’ we at times amid the mob may find

A beauteous face, with many a charm combined:

Yet still it wants the signature of mind.

On such a face no fine expression dwells,

That eye no inborn dignity reveals;

Tho’ bright its jetty orb as all may see,

The glance is vacant — has no charms for me.

When Sunday’s sun is sinking in the west,

Our streets all swarm with numbers gayly drest;

Prank’d out in ribbons, and in silks array’d,

To catch the eyes of passing sons of trade.

Then giggling milliners swim pertly by,

Obliquely glancing with a roguish eye;

With short and airy gait they trip along,

And vulgar volubility of tongue;

Their minds well pictured in their every tread,

And that slight backward tossing of the head:

But no idea, ‘faith, that harbours there,

Is independent of a stomacher.

Their metaphors from gowns and caps are sought,

And stays incorporate with every thought:

And if in passing them I can but spare

A moment’s glance — far better thrown elsewhere —

They deem my admiration caught, nor wist

They turn it on an ancient fabulist,

Who aptly pictured, in the jackdaw’s theft,

These pert aspirers of their wits bereft.

To these, as well as any under heaven,

A well-formed set of features may be given:

But where’s the halo? where’s the spell divine?

And the sweet, modest, captivating mien?

“Those tenderer tints that shun the careless eye,”

Where are they? — far from these low groups they fly:

Yes, far indeed! — for here you cannot trace

The flash of intellect along the face;

No vermeil blush e’er spreads its lovely dye,

Herald of genuine sensibility.

These extras, e’en in beauty’s absence, a charm;

But when combined with beauty, how they warm!

These are the charms that will not be withstood,

Sure signs of generous birth and gentle blood.

There is a something I cannot describe,

Beyond th’ all-gaining influence of a bribe,

Which stamps the lady in the meanest rout,

And by its sure criterion marks her out;

Pervades each feature, thro’ each action flows,

And lends a charm to every thing she does;

Which not the weeds of Irus could disguise,

And soon detected wheresoe’er it lies.

PHRENOLOGY.

“Quorsum haec tam putida tendunt? “ — HORACE.

A CURIOUS sect’s in vogue, who deem the soul

Of man is legible upon his poll:

Give them a squint r t yonder doctor’s pate,

And they’ll soon tell you why he dines on plate:

Ask why yon bustling statesman, who for years

Has pour’d his speeches in the senate’s ears,

Tho’ always in a politician’s sweat,

Has hardly grasp’d the seals of office yet?

The problem gravels me — the man’s possest

Of talents — this his many schemes attest.

The drawback, what? — they tell me, looking big,

“His skull was never moulded for intrigue.”

Whene’er a culprit has consign’d his breath,

And proved the Scripture adage — death for death,

With peering eyes the zealous throng appear,

To see if murder juts behind his ear.

So far ‘tis barely plausible — but stay!

I — ne’er can muster brass enough to say

That a rude lump, or bunch too prominent,

Is a bad symbol of a vicious bent.

But when the sages strike another key,

Consorting things that never will agree,

And my consistency of conduct rate

By inequalities upon my pate

And make an inharmonious bump the test

Of my delight in concord—’tis at best

An awkward system, and not over-wise,

And badly built on incoherencies.

Another lustrum will behold our youth,

With eager souls all panting after truth,

Shrewd Spurzheim’s visionary pages turn.

And, with Napoleon’s bust before them, learn

Without the agency of what small bone

Quicklime had ne’er upon a host been thrown:

In what rough rise a trivial sink had saved

The towns he burnt, the nations he enslaved.

E’en now, when Harold’s minstrel left the scene,

Where such a brilliant meteor he had been,

Thus with the same officiousness of pains,

Gazettes announced the volume of his brains.

Rise, sons of Science and Invention, rise!

Make some new inroad on the starry skies;

Draw from the main some truths unknown before,

Rummage the strata, every nook explore,

To lead mankind from this fantastic lore;

Solve the long-doubted problems pending still,

And these few blanks in nature’s annals fill:

Tell us why Saturn rolls begirt with flame?

Whence the red depth of Mars’s aspect came?

Are the dark tracts the silver moon displays

Dusk with the gloom of caverns or of seas?

Think ye, with Olbers, that her glow intense,

Erst deem’d volcanic, is reflected hence?

Are the black spots, which in yon sun appear

Long vistas thro’ his flaming atmosphere,

Rents in his fiery robe, thro’ which the eye

Gains access to his secret sanctuary?

Or may we that hypothesis explode,

Led by your science nearer to our God?

Shall we, with Glasgow’s learned Watt, maintain

That yon bright bow is not produced by rain?

Or deem the theory but ill surmised,

And call it light (as Brewster) polarized?

Tell when the clouds their fleecy load resign,

How the frail nitre-moulded points combine;

What secret cause, when heaven and ocean greet,

Commands their close, or dictates their retreat.

On you we rest, to check th’ encroaching sway

This outré science gains from day to day;

Investigation’s blood-hound scent employ

On themes more worthy of our scrutiny;

Rob this attractive magnet of its force,

And check this torrent’s inundating course.

LOVE.

I.

ALMIGHTY Love! whose nameless pow’r

This glowing heart defines too well,

Whose presence cheers each fleeting hour,

Whose silken bonds our souls compel,

Diffusing such a sainted spell,

As gilds our being with the light

Of transport and of rapturous bliss,

And almost seeming to unite

The joys of other worlds to this,

The heavenly smile, the rosy kiss; —

Before whose blaze my spirits shrink,

My senses all are wrapt in thee,

Thy force I own too much, to think

(So full, so great thine ecstasy)

That thou art less than deity!

Thy golden chains embrace the land,

The starry sky, the dark blue main;

And at the voice of thy command

(So vast, so boundless is thy reign)

All nature springs to life again!

II.

The glittering fly, the wondrous things

That microscopic art descries;

The lion of the waste, which springs.

Bounding upon his enemies;

The mighty sea-snake of the storm,

The vorticella’s viewless form,

The vast leviathan, which takes

His pastime in the sounding floods;

The crafty elephant, which makes

His haunts in Ceylon’s spicy woods —

Alike confess thy magic sway,

Thy soul-enchanting voice obey!

Oh! whether thou, as bards have said,

Of bliss or pain the partial giver,

Wingest thy shaft of pleasing dread

From out thy well-stored golden quiver,

O’er earth thy cherub wings extending,

Thy sea-born mother’s side attending; —

Or else, as Indian fables say,

Upon thine emerald lory riding,

Through gardens, ‘mid the restless play

Of fountains, in the moonbeam gliding,

‘Mid sylph-like shapes of maidens dancing,

Thy scarlet standard high advancing; —

Thy fragrant bow of cane thou bendest,

Twanging the string of honey’d bees,

And thence the flower-tipp’d arrow sendest,

Which gives or robs the heart of ease;

Camdeo, or Cupid, oh be near

To listen, and to grant my prayer!

TO ——  —

THE dew that sits upon the rose

The brilliant hue beneath it shows;

Nor can it hide the velvet dye

O’er which it glitters tremblingly.

The fine-wove veil thrown o’er thy face,

Betrays its bloom — thro’ it we trace

A loveliness, tho’ veil’d, reveal’d,

Too bright to be by aught conceal’d.

SONG: TO SIT BESIDE A CRYSTAL SPRING

To sit beside a crystal spring,

Cool’d by the passing zephyr’s wing,

And bend my every thought to thee,

Is life, is bliss, is ecstasy!

And as within that spring I trace

Each line, each feature of my face;

The faithful mirror tells me true —

It tells me that I think of you!

IMAGINATION.

PERENNIAL source of rapturous pleasure, hail!

Whose inexhaustive stores can never fail;

Thou ardent inmate of the poet’s brain,

Bright as the sun and restless as the main,

From all material Nature’s stores at will

Creating, blending, and arranging still;

Things in themselves both beautiful and grand,

Receive fresh lustre from thy kindling hand;

And even those whose abstract charms are few,

Thy spell-like touch arrays in colours bright and new.

Oh! thou art Poetry’s informing soul,

Detach’d from thee she stagnates and is dull;

She has no sweets without thee, and from thee

Derives her magic and her majesty;

Thou art th’ essential adjunct of her charms,

‘Tis by thy aid that she transports and warms:

Nor will I e’er with that weak sect concur,

Who on obscurity alone confer

Thy misapplied and prostituted name —

A false and spurious and ungrounded claim! —

Construct a mass of thoughts uncouth and wild,

Their words involved, and meaning quite exiled;

A mazy labyrinth without a clue,

Wherein they lose themselves and readers too;

The crude abortions of a heated brain,

Where sense and symmetry are sought in vain!

But images both bright and sorted well,

And perspicuity, that crowning spell,

Fervour chastised by judgment and by taste,

And language vivid, elegant, and chaste —

These form the poet; in such garb array’d,

Then, Fancy, all thy beauties are display’d;

We feel thy loveliness and own thy sway,

Confess thy magic pow’r, and praise the glowing lay!

THE OAK OF THE NORTH.

“Quae quantum vertice ad auras

Æthereas, tantum radice in Tartara tendit,

Ergo non hyemes illam, non flabra, neque imbres

Convellunt; immota manet, multosque nepotes

Multa virum volens durando sæcula vincit.” — VIRGIL.

THOU forest lord! whose deathless arms

Full many an age of rolling time

Have mock’d the madness of the storms,

Unfaded in thy shadowy prime

Thou livest still — and still shalt stay,

Tho’ the destroying tyrant bow

The temple, and the tower, and lay

The pomp and pride of empires low.

And if thy stately form be riven

And blasted by the fiery levin,

Still dost thou give that giant front,

Undaunted, to the pitiless brunt

Of angry winds, that vainly rave;

And, like the scars by battle graven

Upon the bosoms of the brave,

The tokens of resistless heaven

Deep in thy rugged breast are seen,

The marks of frays that once have been;

The lightning’s stroke, the whirlwind’s force,

Have marr’d thee in their furious course,

But they have left thee unsubdued;

And if they bend thy crest awhile.

Thou dost arise in might renew’d,

Tameless in undiminish’d toil,

Singly against an hostile host

Contending, like th’ immortal king,

Who quell’d the Titans’ impious boast

With thunder, tho’ he stood alone

Defender of his starry throne,

Dashing th’ aspiring mountains down.

Dark Ossa, like a powerless thing,

And Pelion with his nodding pines;

Then bound with adamantine chains,

Where the glad sunlight never shines,

The earth-born in eternal pains.

Of many who were born with thee,

Scarce now a thought survives to tell;

War hath ta’en some — their memory

But faintly lives of those who fell:

Even the conqueror’s glorious name,

That boasts a life beyond the tomb,

Borne on the wings of rushing fame,

May bow before the common doom,

Before the measure of its praise

Hath filled thy multitude of days.

And ere the poet’s hallow’d star,

Refulgent o’er his voicelesss urn,

Glance thro’ the gloom of years so far,

Its living fires may cease to burn.

Thy mere existence shall be more

Than others’ immortality;

The spirits of the great, who bore

A sway on earth, and still would be

Remember’d when they are not seen,

Shall die like echoes on the wind,

Nor leave of all that they have been

In living hearts one thrill behind;

Their very names shall be forgot,

Ancient of days! ere thou art not.

The druid’s mystic harp, that hung

So long upon thy stormy boughs,

Mute as its master’s magic tongue,

Who slumbereth in that deep repose,

No earthly sound shall wake again,

Nor glare of sacrificial fire,

Nor howl of victims in their pain,

Or the weird priestess in her ire,

Hath mingled with th’ oblivious dust

Of him who called its spirit forth,

In those prophetic tones which hush’d

The enraptured children of the north

Binding them with a holy fear,

And smiting each enchanted ear

With such a sound as seem’d to raise

The hidden forms of future days:

Sleep on! — no Roman foe alarms

Your rest; and over ye shall wave

A guardian God’s protecting arms,

And flowers shall deck your grassy grave

And he who gazeth on thee now,

Ere long shall lie as low as they;

The daring heart, the intrepid brow,

Not long can feel youth’s joyous glow,

The strength of life must soon decay

A few short years fleet swiftly by,

And rayless is the sparkling eye,

Mute the stern voice of high command,

And still oppression’s iron hand;

The lords of earth shall waste away

Beneath the worm, and many a day

Of wintry frost and summer sun,

Ere yet thy number’d hours be done;

For thou art green and flourishing,

The mountain-forest’s stately king,

Unshaken as the granite stone

That stands thine everlasting throne.

There was a tower, whose haughty head

Erewhile rose darkly by thy side,

But they are number’d with the dead,

Who ruled within its place of pride;

For time and overwhelming war

Have crumbled it, and overthrown

Bulwark, and battlement, and bar,

Column, and arch, and sculptured stone

Around thy base are rudely strewn

The tokens of departed power,

The wrecks of unrecorded fame

Lie mouldering in the frequent shower:

But thou art there, the very same

As when those hearts, which now are cold,

First beat in triumph to behold

The shadow of its form, which fell

At distance o’er the darken’d dell,

No more the battle’s black array

Shall sternly meet the rising day;

No beacon-fire’s disastrous light

Flame fiercely in the perilous night.

Forgotten is that fortress now,

Deserted is the feudal hall,

But here and there the red flowers blow

Upon its bare and broken wall.

And ye may hear the night-wind moan

Thro’ shatter’d hearths with moss o’ergrown,

Wild grasses wave above the gate;

And where the trumpets sung at morn,

The tuneless night-bird dwells forlorn,

And the unanswer’d ravens prate,

Till silence is more desolate.

For thou hast heard the clarion’s breath

Pour from thy heights its blast of death,

While gathering multitudes replied

Defiance with a shout that hurl’d

Back on their foes the curse of pride,

And bended bows, and flags unfurl’d;

And swiftly from the hollow vale

Their arrowy vengeance glanced, like hail,

What time some fearless son of war,

Emerging to the upper air,

Gain’d the arm’d steep’s embattled brows,

Thro’ angry swords around him waving,

‘Mid the leagued thousands of his foes,

Their fury like a lion braving:

And faster than the summer rain

Stream’d forth the life-blood of the slain,

Whom civil hate and feudal power

Mingled in that tempestuous hour,

Steeping thy sinewy roots, that drew

Fresh vigour from that deadly dew,

And still shall live — tho’ monarchs fail;

And those who waged the battle then

Are made the marvel of a tale,

To warm the hearts of future men.

On such a heart did Cambria gaze,

When Freedom on that dismal day

Saw Edward’s haughty banners blaze

Triumphant, and the dread array

In the deep vales beneath her gleam,

Then started from her ancient throne,

That mighty song could not redeem

From ruthless hands and hearts of stone.

While ages yield their fleeting breath,

Art thou the only living thing

On earth, which all-consuming death

Blasts not with his destroying wing?

No! thou shalt die! — tho’ gloriously

Those proud arms beat the azure air.

Some hour in Time’s dark womb shall see

The strength they boast no longer there.

Tho’ to thy life, as to thy God’s,

Unnumber’d years are as a day,

When He, who is eternal, nods,

Thy mortal strength must pass away.

Unconquer’d Fate, with viewless hand,

Hath mark’d the moment of thy doom,

For He, who could create, hath spann’d

Thy being, and its hour shall come:

Some thunderbolt more dread than all

That ever scathed thee with their fire,

Arm’d with the force of heaven, shall fall

Upon thee, and thou shalt expire!

Or age, that curbs a giant’s might,

Shall bow thee down and fade thy bloom,

The last of all, the bitterest blight

That chills our hearts, except the tomb.

And then thou canst but faintly strive

Against the foes thou hast defied,

Returning spring shall not revive

The beauty of thy summer pride;

And the green earth no more shall sleep

Beneath thy dark and stilly shade,

Where silvery dews were wont to weep,

And the red day-beam never stray’d,

But flow’rets of the tenderest hue,

That live not in the garish noon,

Pale violets of a heavenly blue,

Unfaded by the sultry sun,

Unwearied by the blasts that shook

Thy lofty head, securely throve,

Nor heeded in that grassy nook

The ceaseless wars that raged above.

The revelling elves at noon of night

Shall throng no more beneath thy boughs,

When moonbeams shed a solemn light,

And every star intensely glows;

No verdant canopy shall screen

From view the orgies of their race,

But the blue heaven’s unclouded sheen

Shall pierce their secret dwelling-place.

Tho’ now the lavrock pours at morn,

Shrined in thy leaves, his rapturous lay,

Then shall the meanest songster scorn

To hail thee, as he wings his way.

The troubled eagle, when he flies

Before the lightnings, and the wrath

Of gathering winds and stormy skies,

That darken o’er his cloudy path,

With ruffled breast and angry eye

Shall pass thee, and descend in haste

Amid the sheltering bowers that lie

Far down beneath the rolling blast.

Thine awful voice, that swells on high

Above the rushing of the north,

Above the thunders of the sky,

When midnight hurricanes come forth,

Like some fall’n conqueror’s, who bewails

His laurels torn, his humbled fame,

Shall murmur to the passing gales

At once thy glory and thy shame!

EXHORTATION TO THE GREEKS.

“En illa, illa quam sape optastis, libertas! “ — SALLUST.

AROUSE thee, O Greece! and remember the day,

When the millions of Xerxes were quell’d on their way!

Arouse thee, O Greece! let the pride of thy name

Awake in thy bosom the light of thy fame!

Why hast thou shone in the temple of glory?

Why hast thou blazed in those annals of fame?

For know that the former bright page of thy story

Proclaims but thy bondage and tells but thy shame:

Proclaims from how high thou art fallen! — how low

Thou art plunged in the dark gulf of thraldom and woe!

Arouse thee, O Greece! from the weight of thy slumbers!

The chains are upon thee! — arise from thy sleep!

Remember the time, when nor nations nor numbers

Could break thy thick phalanx embodied and deep.

Old Athens and Sparta remember the morning,

When the swords of the Grecians were red to the hilt:

And, the bright gem of conquest her chaplet adorning,

Plataea rejoiced at the blood that ye spilt!

Remember the night, when, in shrièks of affright,

The fleets of the East in your ocean were sunk:

Remember each day, when, in battle array,

From the fountain of glory how largely ye drunk!

For there is not aught that a freeman can fear,

As the fetters of insult, the name of a slave;

And there is not a voice to a nation so dear,

As the war-song of freedom that calls on the brave.

KING CHARLES’S VISION.

A vision somewhat resembling the following, and prophetic of the Northern Alexander, is said to have been witnessed by Charles XI. of Sweden, the antagonist of Sigismund. The reader will exclaim, “Credat Judaeus Apella!”

KING CHARLES was sitting all alone,

In his lonely palace-tower,

When there came on his ears a heavy groan

At the silent midnight hour.

He turn’d him round where he heard the sound,

But nothing might he see;

And he only heard the nightly bird

That shriek’d right fearfully.

He tam’d him round where he heard the sound,

To his casement’s arched frame;

“And he was aware of a light that was there,”

But he wist not whence it came.

He looked forth into the night,

‘Twas calm as night might be;

But broad and bright the flashing light

Stream’d red and radiantly.

From ivory sheath his trusty brand

Of stalwart steel he drew;

And he raised the lamp in his better hand,

But its flame was dim and blue.

And he open’d the door of that palace-tower,

But harsh turn’d the jarring key:

“By the Virgin’s might,” cried the king that night,

“All is not as it should be!”

Slow turn’d the door of the crazy tower,

And slowly again did it close;

And within and without, and all about,

A sound of voices rose.

The king he stood in dreamy mood,

For the voices his name did call;

Then on he past, till he came at last

To the pillar’d audience-hall.

Eight-and-forty columns wide,

Many and carved and tall

(Four-and-twenty on each side),

Stand in that lordly hall. —

The king had been pight in the mortal fight,

And struck the deadly blow;

The king he had strode in the red red blood,

Often, afore, and now:

Yet his heart had ne’er been so harrow’d with fear

As it was this fearful hour;

For his eyes were not dry, and his hair stood on high,

And his soul had lost its power.

For a blue livid flame, round the hall where he came,

In fiery circles ran;

And sounds of death, and chattering teeth,

And gibbering tongues began.

He saw four-and-twenty statesmen old

Round a lofty table sit;

And each in his hand did a volume hold,

Wherein mighty things were writ.

In burning steel were their limbs all cased;

On their cheeks was the flush of ire:

Their armour was braced, and their helmets were laced,

And their hollow eyes darted fire.

With sceptre of might, and with gold crown bright,

And locks like the raven’s wing,

And in regal state at that board there sat

The likeness of a king.

With crimson tinged, and with ermine fringed,

And with jewels spangled o’er,

And rich as the beam of the sun on the stream,

A sparkling robe he wore.

Yet though fair shone the gem on his proud diadem,

Though his robe was jewell’d o’er,

Though brilliant the vest on his mailed breast,

Yet they all were stain’d with gore!

And his eye darted ire, and his glance shot fire,

And his look was high command;

And each, when he spoke, struck his mighty book,

And raised his shadowy hand.

And a headman stood by, with his axe on high,

And quick was his ceaseless stroke;

And loud was the shock on the echoing block,

As the steel shook the solid oak.

While short and thick came the mingled shriek

Of the wretches who died by his blow;

And fast fell each head on the pavement red,

And warm did the life-blood flow.

Said the earthly king to the ghostly king,

“What fearful sights are those?”

Said the ghostly king to the earthly king,

“They are signs of future woes!”

Said the earthly king to the ghostly king,

“By St. Peter, who art thou?”

Said the ghostly king to the earthly king,

“I shall be, but I am not now.”

Said the earthly king to the ghostly king,

“But when will thy time draw nigh?”

“Oh! the sixth after thee will a warrior be,

And that warrior am I.

“And the lords of the earth shall be pale at my birth,

And conquest shall hover o’er me;

And the kingdoms shall shake, and the nations shall quake,

And the thrones fall down before me.

“And Cracow shall bend to my majesty,

And the haughty Dane shall bow;

And the Pole shall fly from my piercing eye,

And the scowl of my clouded brow.

“And around my way shall the hot balls play,

And the red-tongued flames arise;

And my pathway shall be on the midnight sea,

‘Neath the frown of the wintry skies.

“Thro’ narrow pass, over dark morass,

And the waste of the weary plain,

Over ice and snow, where the dark streams flow,

Thro’ the woods of the wild Ukraine.

“And though sad be the close of my life and my woes,

And the hand that shall slay me unshown;

Yet in every clime, thro’ the lapse of all time,

Shall my glorious conquests be known.

“And blood shall be shed, and the earth shall be red

With the gore of misery;

And swift as this flame shall the light of my fame

O’er the world as brightly fly.”

As the monarch spoke, crew the morning cock,

When all that pageant bright,

And the glitter of gold, and the statesmen old,

Fled into the gloom of night!

TIMBUCTOO : A POEM

In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge for Timbuctoo — an impressive feat for a nineteen-year-old to accomplish. Tennyson's father had urged his son to enter, writing "You're doing nothing at the university; you might at least get the English poem prize."

The assignment was to write a poem on the subject of "Timbuctoo", a topical choice at the beginning of the European colonisation of the interior of Africa. There were legends of a great civilisation in what is modern-day Mali. Timbuctoo had been visited by a modern European for the first time in 1826, namely the Scottish explorer, A.G. Laing, who was murdered soon after.

Tennyson reworked a poem, titled Armageddon, which he had written at the age of 15 to suit the new subject requirement. Armageddon included a vision of the distant human future, in outer space, followed by a view of a lifeless earth and a final impending battle of good and evil spiritual powers. All entries were expected to be composed in heroic couplets, but Tennyson's entry was formed in Miltonic blank verse. Nevertheless, he won. Personally, Tennyson never thought much of his poem, labelling it as "a wild and unmethodised performance". He was too embarrassed to read it himself at commencement, so the previous year's winner did it for him. For the rest of his life, the poet denied any publication of Timbuctoo.

Timbuctoo

Deep in that lion-haunted island lies A mystic city, goal of enterprise. (Chapman.)

I stood upon the Mountain which o’erlooks

The narrow seas, whose rapid interval

Parts Afric from green Europe, when the Sun

Had fall’n below th’ Atlantick, and above

The silent Heavens were blench’d with faery light,

Uncertain whether faery light or cloud,

Flowing Southward, and the chasms of deep, deep blue

Slumber’d unfathomable, and the stars

Were flooded over with clear glory and pale.

I gaz’d upon the sheeny coast beyond,

There where the Giant of old Time infixed

The limits of his prowess, pillars high

Long time eras’d from Earth: even as the sea

When weary of wild inroad buildeth up

Huge mounds whereby to stay his yeasty waves.

And much I mus’d on legends quaint and old

Which whilome won the hearts of all on Earth

Toward their brightness, ev’n as flame draws air;

But had their being in the heart of Man

As air is th’ life of flame: and thou wert then

A center’d glory  circled Memory,

Divinest Atalantis, whom the waves

Have buried deep, and thou of later name

Imperial Eldorado roof’d with gold:

Shadows to which, despite all shocks of Change,

All on-set of capricious Accident,

Men clung with yearning Hope which would not die.

As when in some great City where the walls

Shake, and the streets with ghastly faces throng’d

Do utter forth a subterranean voice,

Among the inner columns far retir’d

At midnight, in the lone Acropolis.

Before the awful Genius of the place

Kneels the pale Priestess in deep faith, the while

Above her head the weak lamp dips and winks

Unto the fearful summoning without:

Nathless she ever clasps the marble knees,

Bathes the cold hand with tears, and gazeth on

Those eyes which wear no light but that wherewith

Her phantasy informs them. Where are ye

Thrones of the Western wave, fair Islands green?

Where are your moonlight halls, your cedarn glooms,

The blossoming abysses of your hills?

Your flowering Capes and your gold-sanded bays

Blown round with happy airs of odorous winds?

Where are the infinite ways which, Seraph-trod,

Wound thro’ your great Elysian solitudes,

Whose lowest depths were, as with visible love,

Fill’d with Divine effulgence, circumfus’d,

Flowing between the clear and polish’d stems,

And ever circling round their emerald cones

In coronals and glories, such as gird

The unfading foreheads of the Saints in Heaven?

For nothing visible, they say, had birth

In that blest ground but it was play’d about

With its peculiar glory. Then I rais’d

My voice and cried “Wide Afric, doth thy Sun

Lighten, thy hills enfold a City as fair

As those which starr’d the night o’ the Elder World?

Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo

A dream as frail as those of ancient Time?”

A curve of whitening, flashing, ebbing light!

A rustling of white wings! The bright descent

Of a young Seraph! and he stood beside me

There on the ridge, and look’d into my face

With his unutterable, shining orbs,

So that with hasty motion I did veil

My vision with both hands, and saw before me

Such colour’d spots as dance athwart the eyes

Of those that gaze upon the noonday Sun.

Girt with a Zone of flashing gold beneath

His breast, and compass’d round about his brow

With triple arch of everchanging bows,

And circled with the glory of living light

And alternation of all hues, he stood.

“O child of man, why muse you here alone

Upon the Mountain, on the dreams of old

Which fill’d the Earth with passing loveliness,

Which flung strange music on the howling winds,

And odours rapt from remote Paradise?

Thy sense is clogg’d with dull mortality,

Thy spirit fetter’d with the bond of clay:

Open thine eye and see.” I look’d, but not

Upon his face, for it was wonderful

With its exceeding brightness, and the light

Of the great angel mind which look’d from out

The starry glowing of his restless eyes.

I felt my soul grow mighty, and my spirit

With supernatural excitation bound

Within me, and my mental eye grew large

With such a vast circumference of thought,

That in my vanity I seem’d to stand

Upon the outward verge and bound alone

Of full beautitude. Each failing sense

As with a momentary flash of light

Grew thrillingly distinct and keen. I saw

The smallest grain that dappled the dark Earth,

The indistinctest atom in deep air,

The Moon’s white cities, and the opal width

Of her small glowing lakes, her silver heights

Unvisited with dew of vagrant cloud,

And the unsounded, undescended depth

Of her black hollows. The clear Galaxy

Shorn of its hoary lustre, wonderful,

Distinct and vivid with sharp points of light

Blaze within blaze, an unimagin’d depth

And harmony of planet-girded Suns

And moon-encircled planets, wheel in wheel,

Arch’d the wan Sapphire. Nay, the hum of men,

Or other things talking in unknown tongues,

And notes of busy life in distant worlds

Beat like a far wave on my anxious ear.

A maze of piercing, trackless, thrilling thoughts

Involving and embracing each with each

Rapid as fire, inextricably link’d,

Expanding momently with every sight

And sound which struck the palpitating sense,

The issue of strong impulse, hurried through

The riv’n rapt brain: as when in some large lake

From pressure of descendant crags, which lapse

Disjointed, crumbling from their parent slope

At slender interval, the level calm

Is ridg’d with restless and increasing spheres

Which break upon each other, each th’ effect

Of separate impulse, but more fleet and strong

Than its precursor, till the eye in vain

Amid the wild unrest of swimming shade

Dappled with hollow and alternate rise

Of interpenetrated arc, would scan

Definite round.

I know not if I shape

These things with accurate similitude

From visible objects, for but dimly now,

Less vivid than a half-forgotten dream,

The memory of that mental excellence

Comes o’er me, and it may be I entwine

The indecision of my present mind

With its past clearness, yet it seems to me

As even then the torrent of quick thought

Absorbed me from the nature of itself

With its own fleetness. Where is he that borne

Adown the sloping of an arrowy stream,

Could link his shallop to the fleeting edge,

And muse midway with philosophic calm

Upon the wondrous laws which regulate

The fierceness of the bounding element?

My thoughts which long had grovell’d in the slime

Of this dull world, like dusky worms which house

Beneath unshaken waters, but at once

Upon some earth-awakening day of spring

Do pass from gloom to glory, and aloft

Winnow the purple, bearing on both sides

Double display of starlit wings which burn

Fanlike and fibred, with intensest bloom:

E’en so my thoughts, ere while so low, now felt

Unutterable buoyancy and strength

To bear them upward through the trackless fields

Of undefin’d existence far and free.

Then first within the South methought I saw

A wilderness of spires, and chrystal pile

Of rampart upon rampart, dome on dome,

Illimitable range of battlement

On battlement, and the Imperial height

Of Canopy o’ercanopied.

Behind,

In diamond light, upsprung the dazzling Cones

Of Pyramids, as far surpassing Earth’s

As Heaven than Earth is fairer. Each aloft

Upon his narrow’d Eminence bore globes

Of wheeling suns, or stars, or semblances

Of either, showering circular abyss

Of radiance. But the glory of the place

Stood out a pillar’d front of burnish’d gold

Interminably high, if gold it were

Or metal more ethereal, and beneath

Two doors of blinding brilliance, where no gaze

Might rest, stood open, and the eye could scan

Through length of porch and lake and boundless hall,

Part of a throne of fiery flame, where from

The snowy skirting of a garment hung,

And glimpse of multitudes of multitudes

That minister’d around it  if I saw

These things distinctly, for my human brain

Stagger’d beneath the vision, and thick night

Came down upon my eyelids, and I fell.

With ministering hand he rais’d me up;

Then with a mournful and ineffable smile,

Which but to look on for a moment fill’d

My eyes with irresistible sweet tears,

In accents of majestic melody,

Like a swol’n river’s gushings in still night

Mingled with floating music, thus he spake:

“There is no mightier Spirit than I to sway

The heart of man: and teach him to attain

By shadowing forth the Unattainable;

And step by step to scale that mighty stair

Whose landing-place is wrapt about with clouds

Of glory of Heaven.  1  With earliest Light of Spring,

And in the glow of sallow Summertide,

And in red Autumn when the winds are wild

With gambols, and when full-voiced Winter roofs

The headland with inviolate white snow,

I play about his heart a thousand ways,

Visit his eyes with visions, and his ears

With harmonies of wind and wave and wood

Of winds which tell of waters, and of waters

Betraying the close kisses of the wind

And win him unto me: and few there be

So gross of heart who have not felt and known

A higher than they see: They with dim eyes

Behold me darkling. Lo! I have given thee

To understand my presence, and to feel

My fullness; I have fill’d thy lips with power.

I have rais’d thee nigher to the Spheres of Heaven,

Man’s first, last home: and thou with ravish’d sense

Listenest the lordly music flowing from

Th’illimitable years. I am the Spirit,

The permeating life which courseth through

All th’ intricate and labyrinthine veins

Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread

With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare,

Reacheth to every corner under Heaven,

Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth:

So that men’s hopes and fears take refuge in

The fragrance of its complicated glooms

And cool impleached twilights. Child of Man,

See’st thou yon river, whose translucent wave,

Forth issuing from darkness, windeth through

The argent streets o’ the City, imaging

The soft inversion of her tremulous Domes.

Her gardens frequent with the stately Palm,

Her Pagods hung with music of sweet bells.

Her obelisks of ranged Chrysolite,

Minarets and towers? Lo! how he passeth by,

And gulphs himself in sands, as not enduring

To carry through the world those waves, which bore

The reflex of my City in their depths.

Oh City! Oh latest Throne! where I was rais’d

To be a mystery of loveliness

Unto all eyes, the time is well nigh come

When I must render up this glorious home

To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers

Shall darken with the waving of her wand;

Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,

Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,

Low-built, mud-wall’d, Barbarian settlement,

How chang’d from this fair City!”

Thus far the Spirit:

Then parted Heavenward on the wing: and I

Was left alone on Calpe, and the Moon

Had fallen from the night, and all was dark!

POEMS, CHIEFLY LYRICAL

Tennyson published his first solo collection of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. Claribel and Mariana, which are now considered as being among Tennyson’s most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Many of the poems contain experimental elements such as irregular metres and words employed for their musical or evocative powers rather than for their precise literal meanings. The collection also includes the introspective “The Owl” and “The Kraken” Although censured by some critics as overly sentimental, Tennyson’s verse soon attracted the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Mariana follows a common theme in much of Tennyson's work, depicting the subject of despondent isolation. Mariana is portrayed as continuously lamenting her lack of interaction with society. Her isolation defines her existence and her longing for a connection leaves her wishing for death at the end of every stanza. The concept of Mariana originates in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, but the lover of Tennyson's Mariana does not return at the end of the poem. Instead, she is utterly abandoned, desiring her death even more.  The poem was well-received by critics, being described as one of Tennyson's skill at poetry.

The original title page

Mariana by John Everett Millais, 1851

CONTENTS

Claribel: A Melody

Lilian

Isabel

The ‘How’ and the ‘Why’

Elegiacs

Mariana

O —— : Clear-headed friend...

Madeline

The Merman

The Mermaid

Supposed Confessions

The Burial of Love

To ——

Song The Owl

Second Song To the Same

Recollections of the Arabian Nights

Ode to Memory

Song “I’the glooming light...”

Song: A Spirit haunts the year’s last hours

Adeline

A Character

Song “The lintwhite and the throstlecock...”

Song “Every day hath its night...”

The Poet

The Poet’s Mind

Nothing Will Die

All Things Will Die

Hero to Leander

The Mystic

The Dying Swan

A Dirge

The Grasshopper

Love, Pride and Forgetfulness

Chorus: “The varied earth...”

Lost Hope

The Deserted House

The Tears of Heaven

Love and Sorrow

To a Lady Sleeping

Sonnet “Could I outwear my present state of woe...”

Sonnet “Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon...”

Sonnet “Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good...”

Sonnet “The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain...”

Love

The Kraken

The Ballad of Oriana

Circumstance

English War Song

National Song

The Sleeping Beauty

Dualisms

We are Free

The Sea Fairies

Sonnet to J. M. K.

Claribel: A Melody

Where Claribel low-lieth

The breezes pause and die,

Letting the rose-leaves fall:

But the solemn oak-tree sigheth,

Thick-leaved, ambrosial,

With an ancient melody

Of an inward agony,

Where Claribel low-lieth.

At eve the beetle boometh

Athwart the thicket lone:

At noon the wild bee hummeth

About the moss’d headstone:

At midnight the moon cometh,

And looketh down alone.

Her song the lintwhite swelleth,

The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth,

The callow throstle lispeth,

The slumbrous wave outwelleth,

The babbling runnel crispeth,

The hollow grot replieth

Where Claribel low-lieth.

Lilian

I

Airy, Fairy Lilian,

Flitting, fairy Lilian,

When I ask her if she love me,

Claps her tiny hands above me,

Laughing all she can;

She ‘ll not tell me if she love me,

Cruel little Lilian.

II

When my passion seeks

Pleasance in love-sighs,

She, looking thro’ and thro’ me

Thoroughly to undo me,

Smiling, never speaks:

So innocent-arch, so cunning-simple,

From beneath her gathered wimple

Glancing with black-bearded eyes,

Till the lightning laughters dimple

The baby-roses in her cheeks;

Then away she flies.

III

Prythee weep, May Lilian!

Gaiety without eclipse

Whearieth me, May Lilian;

Thro’ my every heart it thrilleth

When from crimson-threaded lips

Silver-treble laughter trilleth:

Prythee weep, May Lilian!

IV

Praying all I can,

If prayers will not hush thee,

Airy Lilian,

Like a rose-leaf I will crush thee,

Fairy Lilian.

Isabel

I

Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed

With the clear-pointed flame of chastity,

Clear, without heat, undying, tended by

Pure vestal thoughts in the translucent fane

Of her still spirit [1]; locks not wide-dispread,

Madonna-wise on either side her head;

Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign

The summer calm of golden charity,

Were fixed shadows of thy fixed mood,

Revered Isabel, the crown and head,

The stately flower of female fortitude,

Of perfect wifehood and pure lowlihead. [2]

II

The intuitive decision of a bright

And thorough-edged intellect to part

Error from crime; a prudence to withhold;

The laws of marriage [3] character’d in gold

Upon the blanched [4] tablets of her heart;

A love still burning upward, giving light

To read those laws; an accent very low

In blandishment, but a most silver flow

Of subtle-paced counsel in distress,

Right to the heart and brain, tho’ undescried,

Winning its way with extreme gentleness

Thro’ [5] all the outworks of suspicious pride.

A courage to endure and to obey;

A hate of gossip parlance, and of sway,

Crown’d Isabel, thro’ [6] all her placid life,

The queen of marriage, a most perfect wife.

III

The mellow’d reflex of a winter moon;

A clear stream flowing with a muddy one,

Till in its onward current it absorbs

With swifter movement and in purer light

The vexed eddies of its wayward brother:

A leaning and upbearing parasite,

Clothing the stem, which else had fallen quite,

With cluster’d flower-bells and ambrosial orbs

Of rich fruit-bunches leaning on each other —

Shadow forth thee: — the world hath not another

(Though all her fairest forms are types of thee,

And thou of God in thy great charity)

Of such a finish’d chasten’d purity.

The ‘How’ and the ‘Why’

I am any man’s suitor,

If any will be my tutor:

Some say this life is pleasant,

Some think it speedeth fast:

In time there is no present,

In eternity no future,

In eternity no past.

We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die,

Who will riddle me the how and the why?

The bulrush nods unto his brother

The wheatears whisper to each other:

What is it they say? What do they there?

Why two and two make four? Why round is not square?

Why the rocks stand still, and the light clouds fly?

Why the heavy oak groans, and the white willows sigh?

Why deep is not high, and high is not deep?

Whether we wake or whether we sleep?

Whether we sleep or whether we die?

How you are you? Why I am I?

Who will riddle me the how and the why?

The world is somewhat; it goes on somehow;

But what is the meaning of then and now!

I feel there is something; but how and what?

I know there is somewhat; but what and why!

I cannot tell if that somewhat be I.

The little bird pipeth ‘why! why!’

In the summerwoods when the sun falls low,

And the great bird sits on the opposite bough,

And stares in his face and shouts ‘how? how?’

And the black owl scuds down the mellow twilight,

And chaunts ‘how? how?’ the whole of the night.

Why the life goes when the blood is spilt?

What the life is? where the soul may lie?

Why a church is with a steeple built;

And a house with a chimney-pot?

Who will riddle me the how and the what?

Who will riddle me the what and the why?

Elegiacs

Lowflowing breezes are roaming the broad valley dimm’d in the gloaming:

Thoro’ the black-stemm’d pines only the far river shines.

Creeping thro’ blossomy rushes and bowers of rose-blowing bushes,

Down by the poplar tall rivulets babble and fall.

Barketh the shepherd-dog cheerily; the grasshopper carolleth clearly;

Deeply the turtle coos; shrilly the owlet halloos;

Winds creep; dews fell chilly: in her first sleep earth breathes stilly:

Over the pools in the burn watergnats murmur and mourn.

Sadly the far kine loweth: the glimmering water outfloweth:

Twin peaks shadow’d with pine slope to the dark hyaline.

Lowthroned Hesper is stayed between the two peaks; but the Naiad

Throbbing in mild unrest holds him beneath in her breast.

The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth,

Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind.

Thou comest morning and even; she cometh not morning or even.

False-eyed Hesper, unkind, where is my sweet Rosalind?

Mariana

WITH BLACKEST moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all:

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall.

The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, “My life is dreary,

He cometh not,” she said;

She said, “I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!”

Her tears fell with the dews at even;

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;

She could not look on the sweet heaven,

Either at morn or eventide.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky,

She drew her casement-curtain by,

And glanced athwart the glooming flats.

She only said, “My life is dreary,

He cometh not,” she said;

She said, “I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!”

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:

The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen’s low

Came to her: without hope of change,

In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn

About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, “The day is dreary,

He cometh not,” she said;

She said, “I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!”

About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,

And o’er it many, round and small,

The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.

Hard by a poplar shook alway,

All silver-green with gnarled bark:

For leagues no other tree did mark

The level waste, the rounding gray.

She only said, “My life is dreary,

He cometh not,” she said;

She said, “I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!”

And ever when the moon was low,

And the shrill winds were up and away

In the white curtain, to and fro,

She saw the gusty shadow sway.

But when the moon was very low,

And wild winds bound within their cell,

The shadow of the poplar fell

Upon her bed, across her brow.

She only said, “The night is dreary,

He cometh not,” she said;

She said, “I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!”

All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creak’d;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,

Or from the crevice peer’d about.

Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors,

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices call’d her from without.

She only said, “My life is dreary,

He cometh not,” she said;

She said, “I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!”

The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,

The slow clock ticking, and the sound

Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound

Her sense; but most she loath’d the hour

When the thick-moted sunbeam lay

Athwart the chambers, and the day

Was sloping toward his western bower.

Then, said she, “I am very dreary,

He will not come,” she said;

She wept, “I am aweary, aweary,

O God, that I were dead!”

O —— : Clear-headed friend...

First printed in 1830.

The friend to whom these verses were addressed was Joseph William Blakesley, third Classic and Senior Chancellor’s Medallist in 1831, and afterwards Dean of Lincoln. Tennyson said of him: “He ought to be Lord Chancellor, for he is a subtle and powerful reasoner, and an honest man”.—’Life’, i., 65. He was a contributor to the ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘Quarterly Reviews’, and died in April, 1885. See memoir of him in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’.

I

Clear-headed friend, whose joyful scorn,

Edged with sharp laughter, cuts atwain

The knots that tangle human creeds, [1]

The wounding cords that [2] bind and strain

The heart until it bleeds,

Ray-fringed eyelids of the morn

Roof not a glance so keen as thine:

If aught of prophecy be mine,

Thou wilt not live in vain.

II

Low-cowering shall the Sophist sit;

Falsehood shall bear her plaited brow:

Fair-fronted Truth shall droop not now

With shrilling shafts of subtle wit.

Nor martyr-flames, nor trenchant swords

Can do away that ancient lie;

A gentler death shall Falsehood die,

Shot thro’ and thro’[3] with cunning words.

III

Weak Truth a-leaning on her crutch,

Wan, wasted Truth in her utmost need,

Thy kingly intellect shall feed,

Until she be an athlete bold,

And weary with a finger’s touch

Those writhed limbs of lightning speed;

Like that strange angel [4] which of old,

Until the breaking of the light,

Wrestled with wandering Israel,

Past Yabbok brook the livelong night,

And heaven’s mazed signs stood still

In the dim tract of Penuel.

Madeline

I

Thou art not steep’d in golden languors,

No tranced summer calm is thine,

Ever varying Madeline.

Thro’ [1] light and shadow thou dost range,

Sudden glances, sweet and strange,

Delicious spites and darling angers,

And airy [2] forms of flitting change.

II

Smiling, frowning, evermore,

Thou art perfect in love-lore.

Revealings deep and clear are thine

Of wealthy smiles: but who may know

Whether smile or frown be fleeter?

Whether smile or frown be sweeter,

Who may know?

Frowns perfect-sweet along the brow

Light-glooming over eyes divine,

Like little clouds sun-fringed, are thine,

Ever varying Madeline.

Thy smile and frown are not aloof

From one another,

Each to each is dearest brother;

Hues of the silken sheeny woof

Momently shot into each other.

All the mystery is thine;

Smiling, frowning, evermore,

Thou art perfect in love-lore,

Ever varying Madeline.

III

A subtle, sudden flame,

By veering passion fann’d,

About thee breaks and dances

When I would kiss thy hand,

The flush of anger’d shame

O’erflows thy calmer glances,

And o’er black brows drops down

A sudden curved frown:

But when I turn away,

Thou, willing me to stay,

Wooest not, nor vainly wranglest;

But, looking fixedly the while,

All my bounding heart entanglest

In a golden-netted smile;

Then in madness and in bliss,

If my lips should dare to kiss

Thy taper fingers amorously, [3]

Again thou blushest angerly;

And o’er black brows drops down

A sudden-curved frown.

The Merman

First printed in 1830.

I

Who would be

A merman bold,

Sitting alone,

Singing alone

Under the sea,

With a crown of gold,

On a throne?

II

I would be a merman bold;

I would sit and sing the whole of the day;

I would fill the sea-halls with a voice of power;

But at night I would roam abroad and play

With the mermaids in and out of the rocks,

Dressing their hair with the white sea-flower;

And holding them back by their flowing locks

I would kiss them often under the sea,

And kiss them again till they kiss’d me

Laughingly, laughingly;

And then we would wander away, away

To the pale-green sea-groves straight and high,

Chasing each other merrily.

III

There would be neither moon nor star;

But the wave would make music above us afar —

Low thunder and light in the magic night —

Neither moon nor star.

We would call aloud in the dreamy dells,

Call to each other and whoop and cry

All night, merrily, merrily;

They would pelt me with starry spangles and shells,

Laughing and clapping their hands between,

All night, merrily, merrily:

But I would throw to them back in mine

Turkis and agate and almondine: [1]

Then leaping out upon them unseen

I would kiss them often under the sea,

And kiss them again till they kiss’d me

Laughingly, laughingly.

Oh! what a happy life were mine

Under the hollow-hung ocean green!

Soft are the moss-beds under the sea;

We would live merrily, merrily.

The Mermaid

First printed in 1830.

I

Who would be

A mermaid fair,

Singing alone,

Combing her hair

Under the sea,

In a golden curl

With a comb of pearl,

On a throne?

II

I would be a mermaid fair;

I would sing to myself the whole of the day;

With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair;

And still as I comb’d I would sing and say,

“Who is it loves me? who loves not me?”

I would comb my hair till my ringlets would fall,

Low adown, low adown,

From under my starry sea-bud crown

Low adown and around,

And I should look like a fountain of gold

Springing alone

With a shrill inner sound,

Over the throne

In the midst of the hall;

Till that [1] great sea-snake under the sea

From his coiled sleeps in the central deeps

Would slowly trail himself sevenfold

Round the hall where I sate, and look in at the gate

With his large calm eyes for the love of me.

And all the mermen under the sea

Would feel their [2] immortality

Die in their hearts for the love of me.

III

But at night I would wander away, away,

I would fling on each side my low-flowing locks,

And lightly vault from the throne and play

With the mermen in and out of the rocks;

We would run to and fro, and hide and seek,

On the broad sea-wolds in the [1] crimson shells,

Whose silvery spikes are nighest the sea.

But if any came near I would call, and shriek,

And adown the steep like a wave I would leap

From the diamond-ledges that jut from the dells;

For I would not be kiss’d [2] by all who would list,

Of the bold merry mermen under the sea;

They would sue me, and woo me, and flatter me,

In the purple twilights under the sea;

But the king of them all would carry me,

Woo me, and win me, and marry me,

In the branching jaspers under the sea;

Then all the dry pied things that be

In the hueless mosses under the sea

Would curl round my silver feet silently,

All looking up for the love of me.

And if I should carol aloud, from aloft

All things that are forked, and horned, and soft

Would lean out from the hollow sphere of the sea,

All looking down for the love of me.

Supposed Confessions

OF A SECOND-RATE SENSITIVE MIND NOT IN UNITY WITH ITSELF

There has been only one important alteration made in this poem, when it was reprinted among the ‘Juvenilia’ in 1871, and that was the suppression of the verses beginning “A grief not uninformed and dull” to “Indued with immortality” inclusive, and the substitution of “rosy” for “waxen”.

Capitals are in all cases inserted in the reprint where the Deity is referred to, “through” is altered into “thro’” all through the poem, and hyphens are inserted in the double epithets. No further alterations were made in the edition of 1830.

Oh God! my God! have mercy now.

I faint, I fall. Men say that thou

Didst die for me, for such as me,

Patient of ill, and death, and scorn,

And that my sin was as a thorn

Among the thorns that girt thy brow,

Wounding thy soul. — That even now,

In this extremest misery

Of ignorance, I should require

A sign! and if a bolt of fire

Would rive the slumbrous summernoon

While I do pray to thee alone,

Think my belief would stronger grow!

Is not my human pride brought low?

The boastings of my spirit still?

The joy I had in my freewill

All cold, and dead, and corpse-like grown?

And what is left to me, but thou,

And faith in thee? Men pass me by;

Christians with happy countenances —

And children all seem full of thee!

And women smile with saint-like glances

Like thine own mother’s when she bow’d

Above thee, on that happy morn

When angels spake to men aloud,

And thou and peace to earth were born.

Goodwill to me as well as all —

I one of them: my brothers they:

Brothers in Christ — a world of peace

And confidence, day after day;

And trust and hope till things should cease,

And then one Heaven receive us all.

How sweet to have a common faith!

To hold a common scorn of death!

And at a burial to hear

The creaking cords which wound and eat

Into my human heart, whene’er

Earth goes to earth, with grief, not fear,

With hopeful grief, were passing sweet!

A grief not uninformed, and dull

Hearted with hope, of hope as full

As is the blood with life, or night

And a dark cloud with rich moonlight.

To stand beside a grave, and see

The red small atoms wherewith we

Are built, and smile in calm, and say —

“These little moles and graves shall be

Clothed on with immortality

More glorious than the noon of day —

All that is pass’d into the flowers

And into beasts and other men,

And all the Norland whirlwind showers

From open vaults, and all the sea

O’er washes with sharp salts, again

Shall fleet together all, and be

Indued with immortality.”

Thrice happy state again to be

The trustful infant on the knee!

Who lets his waxen fingers play

About his mother’s neck, and knows

Nothing beyond his mother’s eyes.

They comfort him by night and day;

They light his little life alway;

He hath no thought of coming woes;

He hath no care of life or death,

Scarce outward signs of joy arise,

Because the Spirit of happiness

And perfect rest so inward is;

And loveth so his innocent heart,

Her temple and her place of birth,

Where she would ever wish to dwell,

Life of the fountain there, beneath

Its salient springs, and far apart,

Hating to wander out on earth,

Or breathe into the hollow air,

Whose dullness would make visible

Her subtil, warm, and golden breath,

Which mixing with the infant’s blood,

Fullfills him with beatitude.

Oh! sure it is a special care

Of God, to fortify from doubt,

To arm in proof, and guard about

With triple-mailed trust, and clear

Delight, the infant’s dawning year.

Would that my gloomed fancy were

As thine, my mother, when with brows

Propped on thy knees, my hands upheld

In thine, I listen’d to thy vows,

For me outpour’d in holiest prayer —

For me unworthy! — and beheld

Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew

The beauty and repose of faith,

And the clear spirit shining through.

Oh! wherefore do we grow awry

From roots which strike so deep? why dare

Paths in the desert? Could not I

Bow myself down, where thou hast knelt,

To th’ earth — until the ice would melt

Here, and I feel as thou hast felt?

What Devil had the heart to scathe

Flowers thou hadst rear’d — to brush the dew

From thine own lily, when thy grave

Was deep, my mother, in the clay?

Myself? Is it thus? Myself? Had I

So little love for thee? But why

Prevail’d not thy pure prayers? Why pray

To one who heeds not, who can save

But will not? Great in faith, and strong

Against the grief of circumstance

Wert thou, and yet unheard. What if

Thou pleadest still, and seest me drive

Thro’ utter dark a fullsailed skiff,

Unpiloted i’ the echoing dance

Of reboant whirlwinds, stooping low

Unto the death, not sunk! I know

At matins and at evensong,

That thou, if thou were yet alive,

In deep and daily prayers wouldst strive

To reconcile me with thy God.

Albeit, my hope is gray, and cold

At heart, thou wouldest murmur still —

“Bring this lamb back into thy fold,

My Lord, if so it be thy will”.

Wouldst tell me I must brook the rod,

And chastisement of human pride;

That pride, the sin of devils, stood

Betwixt me and the light of God!

That hitherto I had defied

And had rejected God — that grace

Would drop from his o’erbrimming love,

As manna on my wilderness,

If I would pray — that God would move

And strike the hard hard rock, and thence,

Sweet in their utmost bitterness,

Would issue tears of penitence

Which would keep green hope’s life. Alas!

I think that pride hath now no place

Nor sojourn in me. I am void,

Dark, formless, utterly destroyed.

Why not believe then? Why not yet

Anchor thy frailty there, where man

Hath moor’d and rested? Ask the sea

At midnight, when the crisp slope waves

After a tempest, rib and fret

The broadimbasèd beach, why he

Slumbers not like a mountain tarn?

Wherefore his ridges are not curls

And ripples of an inland mere?

Wherefore he moaneth thus, nor can

Draw down into his vexed pools

All that blue heaven which hues and paves

The other? I am too forlorn,

Too shaken: my own weakness fools

My judgment, and my spirit whirls,

Moved from beneath with doubt and fear.

“Yet” said I, in my morn of youth,

The unsunned freshness of my strength,

When I went forth in quest of truth,

“It is man’s privilege to doubt,

If so be that from doubt at length,

Truth may stand forth unmoved of change,

An image with profulgent brows,

And perfect limbs, as from the storm

Of running fires and fluid range

Of lawless airs, at last stood out

This excellence and solid form

Of constant beauty. For the Ox

Feeds in the herb, and sleeps, or fills

The horned valleys all about,

And hollows of the fringed hills

In summerheats, with placid lows

Unfearing, till his own blood flows

About his hoof. And in the flocks

The lamb rejoiceth in the year,

And raceth freely with his fere,

And answers to his mother’s calls

From the flower’d furrow. In a time,

Of which he wots not, run short pains

Through his warm heart; and then, from whence

He knows not, on his light there falls

A shadow; and his native slope,

Where he was wont to leap and climb,

Floats from his sick and filmed eyes,

And something in the darkness draws

His forehead earthward, and he dies.

Shall man live thus, in joy and hope

As a young lamb, who cannot dream,

Living, but that he shall live on?

Shall we not look into the laws

Of life and death, and things that seem,

And things that be, and analyse

Our double nature, and compare

All creeds till we have found the one,

If one there be?” Ay me! I fear

All may not doubt, but everywhere

Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God,

Whom call I Idol? Let thy dove

Shadow me over, and my sins

Be unremembered, and thy love

Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet

Somewhat before the heavy clod

Weighs on me, and the busy fret

Of that sharpheaded worm begins

In the gross blackness underneath.

O weary life! O weary death!

O spirit and heart made desolate!

O damnéd vacillating state!

The Burial of Love

His eyes in eclipse,

Pale cold his lips,

The light of his hopes unfed,

Mute his tongue,

His bow unstrung

With the tears he hath shed,

Backward drooping his graceful head.

Love is dead;

His last arrow sped;

He hath not another dart;

Go — carry him to his dark deathbed;

Bury him in the cold, cold heart —

Love is dead.

Oh, truest love! art thou forlorn,

And unrevenged? Thy pleasant wiles

Forgotten, and thine innocent joy?

Shall hollow-hearted apathy,

The cruellest form of perfect scorn,

With langour of most hateful smiles,

For ever write

In the weathered light

Of the tearless eye

An epitaph that all may spy?

No! sooner she herself shall die.

For her the showers shall not fall,

Nor the round sun that shineth to all;

Her light shall into darkness change;

For her the green grass shall not spring,

Nor the rivers flow, nor the sweet birds sing,

Till Love have his full revenge.

To ——

Sainted Juliet! dearest name!

If to love be life alone,

Divinest Juliet,

I love thee, and live; and yet

Love unreturned is like the fragrant flame

Folding the slaughter of the sacrifice

Offered to Gods upon an altarthrone;

My heart is lighted at thine eyes,

Changed into fire, and blown about with sighs.

Song The Owl

First printed in 1830.

I

When cats run home and light is come,

And dew is cold upon the ground,

And the far-off stream is dumb,

And the whirring sail goes round,

And the whirring sail goes round;

Alone and warming his five wits,

The white owl in the belfry sits.

II

When merry milkmaids click the latch,

And rarely smells the new-mown hay,

And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch

Twice or thrice his roundelay,

Twice or thrice his roundelay;

Alone and warming his five wits,

The white owl in the belfry sits.

Second Song To the Same

First printed in 1830.

I

Thy tuwhits are lull’d I wot,

Thy tuwhoos of yesternight,

Which upon the dark afloat,

So took echo with delight,

So took echo with delight,

That her voice untuneful grown,

Wears all day a fainter tone.

II

I would mock thy chaunt anew;

But I cannot mimick it;

Not a whit of thy tuwhoo,

Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,

Thee to woo to thy tuwhit,

With a lengthen’d loud halloo,

Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o.

Recollections of the Arabian Nights

First printed in 1830.

With this poem should be compared the description of Harun al Rashid’s Garden of Gladness in the story of Nur-al-din Ali and the damsel Anis al Talis in the Thirty-Sixth Night. The style appears to have been modelled on Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Lewti, and the influence of Coleridge is very perceptible throughout the poem.

When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free

In the silken sail of infancy,

The tide of time flow’d back with me,

The forward-flowing tide of time;

And many a sheeny summer-morn,

Adown the Tigris I was borne,

By Bagdat’s shrines of fretted gold,

High-walled gardens green and old;

True Mussulman was I and sworn,

For it was in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Anight my shallop, rustling thro’

The low and bloomed foliage, drove

The fragrant, glistening deeps, and clove

The citron-shadows in the blue:

By garden porches on the brim,

The costly doors flung open wide,

Gold glittering thro’ lamplight dim,

And broider’d sofas on each side:

In sooth it was a goodly time,

For it was in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Often, where clear-stemm’d platans guard

The outlet, did I turn away

The boat-head down a broad canal

From the main river sluiced, where all

The sloping of the moon-lit sward

Was damask-work, and deep inlay

Of braided blooms unmown, which crept

Adown to where the waters slept.

A goodly place, a goodly time,

For it was in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

A motion from the river won

Ridged the smooth level, bearing on

My shallop thro’ the star-strown calm,

Until another night in night

I enter’d, from the clearer light,

Imbower’d vaults of pillar’d palm,

Imprisoning sweets, which, as they clomb

Heavenward, were stay’d beneath the dome

Of hollow boughs. A goodly time,

For it was in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Still onward; and the clear canal

Is rounded to as clear a lake.

From the green rivage many a fall

Of diamond rillets musical,

Thro’ little crystal arches low

Down from the central fountain’s flow

Fall’n silver-chiming, seem’d to shake

The sparkling flints beneath the prow.

A goodly place, a goodly time,

For it was in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Above thro’  many a bowery turn

A walk with vary-colour’d shells

Wander’d engrain’d. On either side

All round about the fragrant marge

From fluted vase, and brazen urn

In order, eastern flowers large,

Some dropping low their crimson bells

Half-closed, and others studded wide

With disks and tiars, fed the time

With odour in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Far off, and where the lemon-grove

In closest coverture upsprung,

The living airs of middle night

Died round the bulbul as he sung;

Not he: but something which possess’d

The darkness of the world, delight,

Life, anguish, death, immortal love,

Ceasing not, mingled, unrepress’d.

Apart from place, withholding time,

But flattering the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Black the garden-bowers and grots

Slumber’d: the solemn palms were ranged

Above, unwoo’d of summer wind:

A sudden splendour from behind

Flush’d all the leaves with rich gold-green,

And, flowing rapidly between

Their interspaces, counterchanged

The level lake with diamond-plots

Of dark and bright. A lovely time,

For it was in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Dark-blue the deep sphere overhead,

Distinct with vivid stars inlaid,

Grew darker from that under-flame:

So, leaping lightly from the boat,

With silver anchor left afloat,

In marvel whence that glory came

Upon me, as in sleep I sank

In cool soft turf upon the bank,

Entranced with that place and time,

So worthy of the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Thence thro’ the garden I was drawn

A realm of pleasance, many a mound,

And many a shadow-chequer’d lawn

Full of the city’s stilly sound,

And deep myrrh-thickets blowing round

The stately cedar, tamarisks,

Thick rosaries of scented thorn,

Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks

Graven with emblems of the time,

In honour of the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

With dazed vision unawares

From the long alley’s latticed shade

Emerged, I came upon the great

Pavilion of the Caliphat.

Right to the carven cedarn doors,

Flung inward over spangled floors,

Broad-based flights of marble stairs

Ran up with golden balustrade,

After the fashion of the time,

And humour of the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

The fourscore windows all alight

As with the quintessence of flame,

A million tapers flaring bright

From twisted silvers look’d to shame

The hollow-vaulted dark, and stream’d

Upon the mooned domes aloof

In inmost Bagdat, till there seem’d

Hundreds of crescents on the roof

Of night new-risen, that marvellous time,

To celebrate the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Then stole I up, and trancedly

Gazed on the Persian girl alone,

Serene with argent-lidded eyes

Amorous, and lashes like to rays

Of darkness, and a brow of pearl

Tressed with redolent ebony,

In many a dark delicious curl,

Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone;

The sweetest lady of the time,

Well worthy of the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Six columns, three on either side,

Pure silver, underpropt a rich

Throne of the massive ore, from which

Down-droop’d, in many a floating fold,

Engarlanded and diaper’d

With inwrought flowers, a cloth of gold.

Thereon, his deep eye laughter-stirr’d

With merriment of kingly pride,

Sole star of all that place and time,

I saw him in his golden prime,

THE GOOD HAROUN ALRASCHID!

Ode to Memory

First printed in 1830.

After the title in 1830 ed. is “Written very early in life”. The influence most perceptible in this poem is plainly Coleridge, on whose Songs of the Pixies it seems to have been modelled. Tennyson considered it, and no wonder, as one of the very best of “his early and peculiarly concentrated Nature-poems”. See Life, i., 27. It is full of vivid and accurate pictures of his Lincolnshire home and haunts. See Life, i., 25-48, passim.

I

Thou who stealest fire,

From the fountains of the past,

To glorify the present; oh, haste,

Visit my low desire!

Strengthen me, enlighten me!

I faint in this obscurity,

Thou dewy dawn of memory.

II

Come not as thou camest of late,

Flinging the gloom of yesternight

On the white day; but robed in soften’d light

Of orient state.

Whilome thou camest with the morning mist,

Even as a maid, whose stately brow

The dew-impearled winds of dawn have kiss’d,

When she, as thou,

Stays on her floating locks the lovely freight

Of overflowing blooms, and earliest shoots

Of orient green, giving safe pledge of fruits,

Which in wintertide shall star

The black earth with brilliance rare.

III

Whilome thou camest with the morning mist.

And with the evening cloud,

Showering thy gleaned wealth into my open breast,

(Those peerless flowers which in the rudest wind

Never grow sere,

When rooted in the garden of the mind,

Because they are the earliest of the year).

Nor was the night thy shroud.

In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest

Thou leddest by the hand thine infant Hope.

The eddying of her garments caught from thee

The light of thy great presence; and the cope

Of the half-attain’d futurity,

Though deep not fathomless,

Was cloven with the million stars which tremble

O’er the deep mind of dauntless infancy.

Small thought was there of life’s distress;

For sure she deem’d no mist of earth could dull

Those spirit-thrilling eyes so keen and beautiful:

Sure she was nigher to heaven’s spheres,

Listening the lordly music flowing from

The illimitable years.

O strengthen me, enlighten me!

I faint in this obscurity,

Thou dewy dawn of memory.

IV

Come forth I charge thee, arise,

Thou of the many tongues, the myriad eyes!

Thou comest not with shows of flaunting vines

Unto mine inner eye,

Divinest Memory!

Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall

Which ever sounds and shines

A pillar of white light upon the wall

Of purple cliffs, aloof descried:

Come from the woods that belt the grey hill-side,

The seven elms, the poplars four

That stand beside my father’s door,

And chiefly from the brook that loves

To purl o’er matted cress and ribbed sand,

Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,

Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,

In every elbow and turn,

The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland.

O! hither lead thy feet!

Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat

Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds,

Upon the ridged wolds,

When the first matin-song hath waken’d loud

Over the dark dewy earth forlorn,

What time the amber morn

Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud.

V

Large dowries doth the raptured eye

To the young spirit present

When first she is wed;

And like a bride of old

In triumph led,

With music and sweet showers

Of festal flowers,

Unto the dwelling she must sway.

Well hast thou done, great artist Memory,

In setting round thy first experiment

With royal frame-work of wrought gold;

Needs must thou dearly love thy first essay,

And foremost in thy various gallery

Place it, where sweetest sunlight falls

Upon the storied walls;

For the discovery

And newness of thine art so pleased thee,

That all which thou hast drawn of fairest

Or boldest since, but lightly weighs

With thee unto the love thou bearest

The first-born of thy genius.

Artist-like,

Ever retiring thou dost gaze

On the prime labour of thine early days:

No matter what the sketch might be;

Whether the high field on the bushless Pike,

Or even a sand-built ridge

Of heaped hills that mound the sea,

Overblown with murmurs harsh,

Or even a lowly cottage whence we see

Stretch’d wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,

Where from the frequent bridge,

Like emblems of infinity,

The trenched waters run from sky to sky;

Or a garden bower’d close

With plaited alleys of the trailing rose,

Long alleys falling down to twilight grots,

Or opening upon level plots

Of crowned lilies, standing near

Purple-spiked lavender:

Whither in after life retired

From brawling storms,

From weary wind,

With youthful fancy reinspired,

We may hold converse with all forms

Of the many-sided mind,

And those whom passion hath not blinded,

Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.

My friend, with you to live alone,

Were how much better than to own

A crown, a sceptre, and a throne!

O strengthen, enlighten me!

I faint in this obscurity,

Thou dewy dawn of memory.

Song “I’the glooming light...”

I

I’ the glooming light

Of middle night

So cold and white,

Worn Sorrow sits by the moaning wave;

Beside her are laid

Her mattock and spade,

For she hath half delved her own deep grave.

Alone she is there:

The white clouds drizzle: her hair falls loose;

Her shoulders are bare;

Her tears are mixed with the bearded dews.

II

Death standeth by;

She will not die;

With glazed eye

She looks at her grave: she cannot sleep;

Ever alone

She maketh her moan:

She cannot speak; she can only weep;

For she will not hope.

The thick snow falls on her flake by flake,

The dull wave mourns down the slope,

The world will not change, and her heart will not break.

Song: A Spirit haunts the year’s last hours

First printed in 1830.

The poem was written in the garden at the Old Rectory, Somersby; an autumn scene there which it faithfully describes. This poem seems to have haunted Poe, a fervent admirer of Tennyson’s early poems.

I

A Spirit haunts the year’s last hours

Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:

To himself he talks;

For at eventide, listening earnestly,

At his work you may hear him sob and sigh

In the walks;

Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

Of the mouldering flowers:

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

II

The air is damp, and hush’d, and close,

As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose

An hour before death;

My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves

At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,

And the breath

Of the fading edges of box beneath,

And the year’s last rose.

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

Adeline

First printed in 1830.

I

Mystery of mysteries,

Faintly smiling Adeline,

Scarce of earth nor all divine,

Nor unhappy, nor at rest,

But beyond expression fair

With thy floating flaxen hair;

Thy rose-lips and full blue eyes

Take the heart from out my breast.

Wherefore those dim looks of thine,

Shadowy, dreaming Adeline?

II

Whence that aery bloom of thine,

Like a lily which the sun

Looks thro’ in his sad decline,

And a rose-bush leans upon,

Thou that faintly smilest still,

As a Naïad in a well,

Looking at the set of day,

Or a phantom two hours old

Of a maiden passed away,

Ere the placid lips be cold?

Wherefore those faint smiles of thine,

Spiritual Adeline?

III

What hope or fear or joy is thine?

Who talketh with thee, Adeline?

For sure thou art not all alone:

Do beating hearts of salient springs

Keep measure with thine own?

Hast thou heard the butterflies

What they say betwixt their wings?

Or in stillest evenings

With what voice the violet woos

To his heart the silver dews?

Or when little airs arise,

How the merry bluebell rings

To the mosses underneath?

Hast thou look’d upon the breath

Of the lilies at sunrise?

Wherefore that faint smile of thine,

Shadowy, dreaming Adeline?

IV

Some honey-converse feeds thy mind,

Some spirit of a crimson rose

In love with thee forgets to close

His curtains, wasting odorous sighs

All night long on darkness blind.

What aileth thee? whom waitest thou

With thy soften’d, shadow’d brow,

And those dew-lit eyes of thine,

Thou faint smiler, Adeline?

V

Lovest thou the doleful wind

When thou gazest at the skies?

Doth the low-tongued Orient

Wander from the side of the morn,

Dripping with Sabsean spice

On thy pillow, lowly bent

With melodious airs lovelorn,

Breathing Light against thy face,

While his locks a-dropping twined

Round thy neck in subtle ring

Make a carcanet of rays,

And ye talk together still,

In the language wherewith Spring

Letters cowslips on the hill?

Hence that look and smile of thine,

Spiritual Adeline.

A Character

First printed in 1830.

The only authoritative light thrown on the person here described is what the present Lord Tennyson gives, who tells us that “the then well-known Cambridge orator S was partly described”. He was “a very plausible, parliament-like, self-satisfied speaker at the Union Debating Society “. The character reminds us of Wordsworth’s Moralist. See Poet’s Epitaph;

One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling,

Nor form nor feeling, great nor small;

A reasoning, self-sufficient thing,

An intellectual all in all.

Shakespeare’s fop, too (Hotspur’s speech, Henry IV., i., i., 2), seems to have suggested a touch or two.

With a half-glance upon the sky

At night he said, “The wanderings

Of this most intricate Universe

Teach me the nothingness of things”.

Yet could not all creation pierce

Beyond the bottom of his eye.

He spake of beauty: that the dull

Saw no divinity in grass,

Life in dead stones, or spirit in air;

Then looking as ‘twere in a glass,

He smooth’d his chin and sleek’d his hair,

And said the earth was beautiful.

He spake of virtue: not the gods

More purely, when they wish to charm

Pallas and Juno sitting by:

And with a sweeping of the arm,

And a lack-lustre dead-blue eye,

Devolved his rounded periods.

Most delicately hour by hour

He canvass’d human mysteries,

And trod on silk, as if the winds

Blew his own praises in his eyes,

And stood aloof from other minds

In impotence of fancied power.

With lips depress’d as he were meek,

Himself unto himself he sold:

Upon himself himself did feed:

Quiet, dispassionate, and cold,

And other than his form of creed,

With chisell’d features clear and sleek.

Song “The lintwhite and the throstlecock...”

I

The lintwhite and the throstlecock

Have voices sweet and clear;

All in the bloomed May.

They from the blosmy brere

Call to the fleeting year,

If that he would them hear

And stay. Alas! that one so beautiful

Should have so dull an ear.

II

Fair year, fair year, thy children call,

But thou art deaf as death;

All in the bloomèd May.

When thy light perisheth

That from thee issueth,

Our life evanisheth: Oh! stay.

Alas! that lips so cruel-dumb

Should have so sweet a breath!

III

Fair year, with brows of royal love

Thou comest, as a king,

All in the bloomèd May.

Thy golden largess fling,

And longer hear us sing;

Though thou art fleet of wing,

Yet stay. Alas! that eyes so full of light

Should be so wandering!

IV

Thy locks are all of sunny sheen

In rings of gold yronne,

All in the bloomèd May,

We pri’thee pass not on;

If thou dost leave the sun,

Delight is with thee gone, Oh! stay.

Thou art the fairest of thy feres,

We pri’thee pass not on.

Song “Every day hath its night...”

I

Every day hath its night:

Every night its morn:

Thorough dark and bright

Wingèd hours are borne;

Ah! welaway!

Seasons flower and fade;

Golden calm and storm

Mingle day by day.

There is no bright form

Doth not cast a shade ¬

Ah! welaway!

II

When we laugh, and our mirth

Apes the happy vein,

We’re so kin to earth,

Pleasaunce fathers pain ¬

Ah! welaway!

Madness laugheth loud:

Laughter bringeth tears:

Eyes are worn away

Till the end of fears

Cometh in the shroud,

Ah! welaway!

III

All is change, woe or weal;

Joy is Sorrow’s brother;

Grief and gladness steal

Symbols of each other;

Ah! welaway!

Larks in heaven’s cope

Sing: the culvers mourn

All the livelong day.

Be not all forlorn;

Let us weep, in hope ¬

Ah! welaway!

The Poet

First printed in 1830.

In this poem we have the first grand note struck by Tennyson, the first poem exhibiting the  of the true poet.

The poet in a golden clime was born,

With golden stars above;

Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

The love of love.

He saw thro’  life and death, thro’   good and ill,

He saw thro’   his own soul.

The marvel of the everlasting will,

An open scroll,

Before him lay: with echoing feet he threaded

The secretest walks of fame:

The viewless arrows of his thoughts were headed

And wing’d with flame, ¬

Like Indian reeds blown from his silver tongue,

And of so fierce a flight,

From Calpe unto Caucasus they sung,

Filling with light

And vagrant melodies the winds which bore

Them earthward till they lit;

Then, like the arrow-seeds of the field flower,

The fruitful wit

Cleaving, took root, and springing forth anew

Where’er they fell, behold,

Like to the mother plant in semblance, grew

A flower all gold,

And bravely furnish’d all abroad to fling

The winged shafts of truth,

To throng with stately blooms the breathing spring

Of Hope and Youth.

So many minds did gird their orbs with beams,

Tho’  one did fling the fire.

Heaven flow’d upon the soul in many dreams

Of high desire.

Thus truth was multiplied on truth, the world

Like one  great garden show’d,

And thro’ the wreaths of floating dark upcurl’d,

Rare sunrise flow’d.

And Freedom rear’d in that august sunrise

Her beautiful bold brow,

When rites and forms before his burning eyes

Melted like snow.

There was no blood upon her maiden robes

Sunn’d by those orient skies;

But round about the circles of the globes

Of her keen eyes

And in her raiment’s hem was traced in flame

WISDOM, a name to shake

All evil dreams of power a sacred name.

And when she spake,

Her words did gather thunder as they ran,

And as the lightning to the thunder

Which follows it, riving the spirit of man,

Making earth wonder,

So was their meaning to her words.

No sword

Of wrath her right arm whirl’d,

But one poor poet’s scroll, and with his word

She shook the world.

The Poet’s Mind

A companion poem to the preceding. After line 7 in 1830 appears this stanza, afterwards omitted:

Clear as summer mountain streams,

Bright as the inwoven beams,

Which beneath their crisping sapphire

In the midday, floating o’er

The golden sands, make evermore

To a blossom-starrèd shore.

Hence away, unhallowed laughter!

I

Vex not thou the poet’s mind

With thy shallow wit:

Vex not thou the poet’s mind;

For thou canst not fathom it.

Clear and bright it should be ever,

Flowing like a crystal river;

Bright as light, and clear as wind.

II

Dark-brow’d sophist, come not anear;

All the place is holy ground;

Hollow smile and frozen sneer

Come not here.

Holy water will I pour

Into every spicy flower

Of the laurel-shrubs that hedge it around.

The flowers would faint at your cruel cheer.

In your eye there is death,

There is frost in your breath

Which would blight the plants.

Where you stand you cannot hear

From the groves within

The wild-bird’s din.

In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants,

It would fall to the ground if you came in.

In the middle leaps a fountain

Like sheet lightning,

Ever brightening

With a low melodious thunder;

All day and all night it is ever drawn

From the brain of the purple mountain

Which stands in the distance yonder:

It springs on a level of bowery lawn,

And the mountain draws it from Heaven above,

And it sings a song of undying love;

And yet, tho’ its voice be so clear and full,

You never would hear it; your ears are so dull;

So keep where you are: you are foul with sin;

It would shrink to the earth if you came in.

Nothing Will Die

Reprinted without any important alteration among the Juvenilia in 1871 and onward. No change made except that “through” is spelt “thro’,” and in the last line “and” is substituted for “all”.

When will the stream be aweary of flowing

Under my eye? When will the wind be aweary of blowing

Over the sky? When will the clouds be aweary of fleeting?

When will the heart be aweary of beating? And nature die?

Never, oh! never, nothing will die?

The stream flows,

The wind blows,

The cloud fleets,

The heart beats,

Nothing will die.

Nothing will die;

All things will change

Through eternity.

‘Tis the world’s winter;

Autumn and summer

Are gone long ago;

Earth is dry to the centre,

But spring, a new comer,

A spring rich and strange,

Shall make the winds blow

Round and round,

Through and through,

Here and there,

Till the air

And the ground

Shall be filled with life anew.

The world was never made;

It will change, but it will not fade.

So let the wind range;

For even and morn

Ever will be

Through eternity.

Nothing was born;

Nothing will die;

All things will change.

All Things Will Die

Reprinted among Juvenilia in 1872 and onward, without alteration.

Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing

Under my eye;

Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing

Over the sky.

One after another the white clouds are fleeting;

Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating

Full merrily;

Yet all things must die.

The stream will cease to flow;

The wind will cease to blow;

The clouds will cease to fleet;

The heart will cease to beat;

For all things must die.

All things must die.

Spring will come never more.

Oh! vanity!

Death waits at the door.

See! our friends are all forsaking

The wine and the merrymaking.

We are called we must go.

Laid low, very low,

In the dark we must lie.

The merry glees are still;

The voice of the bird

Shall no more be heard,

Nor the wind on the hill.

Oh! misery!

Hark! death is calling

While I speak to ye,

The jaw is falling,

The red cheek paling,

The strong limbs failing;

Ice with the warm blood mixing;

The eyeballs fixing.

Nine times goes the passing bell:

Ye merry souls, farewell.

The old earth

Had a birth,

As all men know,

Long ago.

And the old earth must die.

So let the warm winds range,

And the blue wave beat the shore;

For even and morn

Ye will never see

Through eternity.

All things were born.

Ye will come never more,

For all things must die.

Hero to Leander

Oh go not yet, my love,

The night is dark and vast;

The white moon is hid in her heaven above,

And the waves climb high and fast.

Oh! kiss me, kiss me, once again,

Lest thy kiss should be the last.

Oh kiss me ere we part;

Grow closer to my heart.

My heart is warmer surely than the bosom of the main.

Oh joy! 0 bliss of blisses!

My heart of hearts art thou.

Come bathe me with thy kisses,

My eyelids and my brow.

Hark how the wild rain hisses,

And the loud sea roars below.

Thy heart beats through thy rosy limbs

So gladly doth it stir;

Thine eye in drops of gladness swims.

I have bathed thee with the pleasant myrrh;

Thy locks are dripping balm;

Thou shalt not wander hence to-night,

I’ll stay thee with my kisses.

To-night the roaring brine

Will rend thy golden tresses;

The ocean with the morrow light

Will be both blue and calm;

And the billow will embrace thee with a kiss as soft as mine.

No western odours wander

On the black and moaning sea,

And when thou art dead, Leander,

My soul must follow thee!

Oh go not yet, my love

Thy voice is sweet and low;

The deep salt wave breaks in above

Those marble steps below.

The turretstairs are wet

That lead into the sea.

Leander! go not yet.

The pleasant stars have set:

Oh! go not, go not yet,

Or I will follow thee.

The Mystic

Angels have talked with him, and showed him thrones:

Ye knew him not: he was not one of ye,

Ye scorned him with an undiscerning scorn;

Ye could not read the marvel in his eye,

The still serene abstraction; he hath felt

The vanities of after and before;

Albeit, his spirit and his secret heart

The stern experiences of converse lives,

The linked woes of many a fiery change

Had purified, and chastened, and made free.

Always there stood before him, night and day,

Of wayward vary colored circumstance,

The imperishable presences serene

Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound,

Dim shadows but unwaning presences

Fourfaced to four corners of the sky;

And yet again, three shadows, fronting one,

One forward, one respectant, three but one;

And yet again, again and evermore,

For the two first were not, but only seemed,

One shadow in the midst of a great light,

One reflex from eternity on time,

One mighty countenance of perfect calm,

Awful with most invariable eyes.

For him the silent congregated hours,

Daughters of time, divinely tall, beneath

Severe and youthful brows, with shining eyes

Smiling a godlike smile (the innocent light

Of earliest youth pierced through and through with all

Keen knowledges of low-embowed eld)

Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud

Which droops low hung on either gate of life,

Both birth and death; he in the centre fixt,

Saw far on each side through the grated gates

Most pale and clear and lovely distances.

He often lying broad awake, and yet

Remaining from the body, and apart

In intellect and power and will, hath heard

Time flowing in the middle of the night,

And all things creeping to a day of doom.

How could ye know him? Ye were yet within

The narrower circle; he had wellnigh reached

The last, with which a region of white flame,

Pure without heat, into a larger air

Upburning, and an ether of black blue,

Investeth and ingirds all other lives.

The Dying Swan

First printed in 1830.

The superstition here assumed is so familiar from the Classics as well as from modern tradition that it scarcely needs illustration or commentary. But see Plato, Phaedrus, xxxi., and Shakespeare, King John, v., 7.

I

The plain was grassy, wild and bare,

Wide, wild, and open to the air,

Which had built up everywhere

An under-roof of doleful gray.

With an inner voice the river ran,

Adown it floated a dying swan,

And loudly did lament.

It was the middle of the day.

Ever the weary wind went on,

And took the reed-tops as it went.

II

Some blue peaks in the distance rose,

And white against the cold-white sky,

Shone out their crowning snows.

One willow over the water wept,

And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;

Above in the wind was the swallow,

Chasing itself at its own wild will,

And far thro’ the marish green and still

The tangled water-courses slept,

Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.

III

The wild swan’s death-hymn took the soul

Of that waste place with joy

Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear

The warble was low, and full and clear;

And floating about the under-sky,

Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole

Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;

But anon her awful jubilant voice,

With a music strange and manifold,

Flow’d forth on a carol free and bold;

As when a mighty people rejoice

With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold,

And the tumult of their acclaim is roll’d

Thro’  the open gates of the city afar,

To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star.

And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,

And the willow-branches hoar and dank,

And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,

And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,

And the silvery marish-flowers that throng

The desolate creeks and pools among,

Were flooded over with eddying song.

A Dirge

First printed in 1830.

I

Now is done thy long day’s work;

Fold thy palms across thy breast,

Fold thine arms, turn to thy rest.

Let them rave.

Shadows of the silver birk

Sweep the green that folds thy grave.

Let them rave.

II

Thee nor carketh care nor slander;

Nothing but the small cold worm

Fretteth thine enshrouded form.

Let them rave.

Light and shadow ever wander

O’er the green that folds thy grave.

Let them rave.

III

Thou wilt not turn upon thy bed;

Chaunteth not the brooding bee

Sweeter tones than calumny?

Let them rave.

Thou wilt never raise thine head

From the green that folds thy grave.

Let them rave.

IV

Crocodiles wept tears for thee;

The woodbine and eglatere

Drip sweeter dews than traitor’s tear.

Let them rave.

Rain makes music in the tree

O’er the green that folds thy grave.

Let them rave.

V

Round thee blow, self-pleached deep,

Bramble-roses, faint and pale,

And long purples of the dale.

Let them rave.

These in every shower creep.

Thro’ the green that folds thy grave.

Let them rave.

VI

The gold-eyed kingcups fine:

The frail bluebell peereth over

Rare broidry of the purple clover.

Let them rave.

Kings have no such couch as thine,

As the green that folds thy grave.

Let them rave.

VII

Wild words wander here and there;

God’s great gift of speech abused

Makes thy memory confused:

But let them rave.

The balm-cricket carols clear

In the green that folds thy grave.

Let them rave.

The Grasshopper

I

Voice of the summerwind,

Joy of the summerplain,

Life of the summerhours,

Carol clearly, bound along.

No Tithon thou as poets feign

(Shame fall ‘em they are deaf and blind)

But an insect lithe and strong,

Bowing the seeded summerflowers.

Prove their falsehood and thy quarrel,

Vaulting on thine airy feet.

Clap thy shielded sides and carol,

Carol clearly, chirrup sweet.

Thou art a mailed warrior in youth and strength complete;

Armed cap-a-pie,

Full fair to see;

Unknowing fear,

Undreading loss,

A gallant cavalier

Sans peur et sans reproche,

In sunlight and in shadow,

The Bayard of the meadow.

II

I would dwell with thee,

Merry grasshopper,

Thou art so glad and free,

And as light as air;

Thou hast no sorrow or tears,

Thou hast no compt of years,

No withered immortality,

But a short youth sunny and free.

Carol clearly, bound along,

Soon thy joy is over,

A summer of loud song,

And slumbers in the clover.

What hast thou to do with evil

In thine hour of love and revel,

In thy heat of summerpride,

Pushing the thick roots aside

Of the singing flowered grasses,

That brush thee with their silken tresses?

What hast thou to do with evil,

Shooting, singing, ever springing

In and out the emerald glooms,

Ever leaping, ever singing,

Lighting on the golden blooms?

Love, Pride and Forgetfulness

Ere yet my heart was sweet Love’s tomb,

Love laboured honey busily.

I was the hive and Love the bee,

My heart the honey-comb.

One very dark and chilly night

Pride came beneath and held a light.

The cruel vapours went through all,

Sweet Love was withered in his cell;

Pride took Love’s sweets, and by a spell,

Did change them into gall;

And Memory tho’ fed by Pride

Did wax so thin on gall,

Awhile she scarcely lived at all,

What marvel that she died?

Chorus: “The varied earth...”

In an unpublished drama written very early.

The varied earth, the moving heaven,

The rapid waste of roving sea,

The fountainpregnant mountains riven

To shapes of wildest anarchy,

By secret fire and midnight storms

That wander round their windy cones,

The subtle life, the countless forms

Of living things, the wondrous tones

Of man and beast are full of strange

Astonishment and boundless change.

The day, the diamonded light,

The echo, feeble child of sound,

The heavy thunder’s griding might,

The herald lightning’s starry bound,

The vocal spring of bursting bloom,

The naked summer’s glowing birth,

The troublous autumn’s sallow gloom,

The hoarhead winter paving earth

With sheeny white, are full of strange

Astonishment and boundless change.

Each sun which from the centre flings

Grand music and redundant fire,

The burning belts, the mighty rings,

The murmurous planets’ rolling choir,

The globefilled arch that, cleaving air,

Lost in its effulgence sleeps,

The lawless comets as they glare,

And thunder thro’ the sapphire deeps

In wayward strength, are full of strange

Astonishment and boundless change.

Lost Hope

You cast to ground the hope which once was mine,

But did the while your harsh decree deplore,

Embalming with sweet tears the vacant shrine,

My heart, where Hope had been and was no more.

So on an oaken sprout

A goodly acorn grew;

But winds from heaven shook the acorn out,

And filled the cup with dew.

The Deserted House

First printed in 1830, omitted in all the editions till 1848 when it was restored. The poem is of course allegorical, and is very much in the vein of many poems in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

I

Life and Thought have gone away

Side by side,

Leaving door and windows wide:

Careless tenants they!

II

All within is dark as night:

In the windows is no light;

And no murmur at the door,

So frequent on its hinge before.

III

Close the door, the shutters close,

Or thro’ the windows we shall see

The nakedness and vacancy

Of the dark deserted house.

IV

Come away: no more of mirth

Is here or merry-making sound.

The house was builded of the earth,

And shall fall again to ground.

V

Come away: for Life and Thought

Here no longer dwell;

But in a city glorious ¬

A great and distant city have bought

A mansion incorruptible.

Would they could have stayed with us!

The Tears of Heaven

Heaven weeps above the earth all night till morn,

In darkness weeps, as all ashamed to weep,

Because the earth hath made her state forlorn

With selfwrought evils of unnumbered years,

And doth the fruit of her dishonour reap.

And all the day heaven gathers back her tears

Into her own blue eyes so clear and deep,

And showering down the glory of lightsome day,

Smiles on the earth’s worn brow to win her if she may.

Love and Sorrow

O Maiden, fresher than the first green leaf

With which the fearful springtide flecks the lea,

Weep not, Almeida, that I said to thee

That thou hast half my heart, for bitter grief

Doth hold the other half in sovranty.

Thou art my heart’s sun in love’s crystalline:

Yet on both sides at once thou canst not shine:

Thine is the bright side of my heart, and thine

My heart’s day, but the shadow of my heart,

Issue of its own substance, my heart’s night

Thou canst not lighten even with thy light,

All powerful in beauty as thou art.

Almeida, it my heart were substanceless,

Then might thy rays pass thro’ to the other side,

So swiftly, that they nowhere would abide,

But lose themselves in utter emptiness.

Half-light, half-shadow, let my spirit sleep;

They never learnt to love who never knew to weep.

To a Lady Sleeping

O Thou whose fringed lids I gaze upon,

Through whose dim brain the winged dreams are borne,

Unroof the shrines of clearest vision,

In honour of the silverflecked morn:

Long hath the white wave of the virgin light

Driven back the billow of the dreamful dark.

Thou all unwittingly prolongest night,

Though long ago listening the poised lark,

With eyes dropt downward through the blue serene,

Over heaven’s parapets the angels lean.

Sonnet “Could I outwear my present state of woe...”

Could I outwear my present state of woe

With one brief winter, and indue i’ the spring

Hues of fresh youth, and mightily outgrow

The wan dark coil of faded suffering ¬

Forth in the pride of beauty issuing

A sheeny snake, the light of vernal bowers,

Moving his crest to all sweet plots of flowers

And watered vallies where the young birds sing;

Could I thus hope my lost delights renewing,

I straightly would commend the tears to creep

From my charged lids; but inwardly I weep:

Some vital heat as yet my heart is wooing:

This to itself hath drawn the frozen rain

From my cold eyes and melted it again.

Sonnet “Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon...”

Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon,

And bitter blasts the screaming autumn whirl,

All night through archways of the bridged pearl

And portals of pure silver walks the moon.

Wake on, my soul, nor crouch to agony,

Turn cloud to light, and bitterness to joy,

And dross to gold with glorious alchemy,

Basing thy throne above the world’s annoy.

Reign thou above the storms of sorrow and ruth

That roar beneath; unshaken peace hath won thee:

So shalt thou pierce the woven glooms of truth;

So shall the blessing of the meek be on thee;

So in thine hour of dawn, the body’s youth,

An honourable old shall come upon thee.

Sonnet “Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good...”

Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good,

Or propagate again her loathed kind,

Thronging the cells of the diseased mind,

Hateful with hanging cheeks, a withered brood,

Though hourly pastured on the salient blood?

Oh! that the wind which bloweth cold or heat

Would shatter and o’erbear the brazen beat

Of their broad vans, and in the solitude

Of middle space confound them, and blow back

Their wild cries down their cavernthroats, and slake

With points of blastborne hail their heated eyne!

So their wan limbs no more might come between

The moon and the moon’s reflex in the night;

Nor blot with floating shades the solar light.

Sonnet “The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain...”

The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain,

Down an ideal stream they ever float,

And sailing on Pactolus in a boat,

Drown soul and sense, while wistfully they strain

Weak eyes upon the glistering sands that robe

The understream. The wise could he behold

Cathedralled caverns of thick-ribbed gold

And branching silvers of the central globe,

Would marvel from so beautiful a sight

How scorn and ruin, pain and hate could flow:

But Hatred in a gold cave sits below,

Pleached with her hair, in mail of argent light

Shot into gold, a snake her forehead clips

And skins the colour from her trembling lips.

Love

I

Thou, from the first, unborn, undying love,

Albeit we gaze not on thy glories near,

Before the face of God didst breathe and move,

Though night and pain and ruin and death reign here.

Thou foldest, like a golden atmosphere,

The very throne of the eternal God:

Passing through thee the edicts of his fear

Are mellowed into music, borne abroad

By the loud winds, though they uprend the sea,

Even from his central deeps: thine empery

Is over all: thou wilt not brook eclipse;

Thou goest and returnest to His Lips

Like lightning: thou dost ever brood above

The silence of all hearts, unutterable Love.

II

To know thee is all wisdom, and old age

Is but to know thee: dimly we behold thee

Athwart the veils of evil which enfold thee.

We beat upon our aching hearts with rage;

We cry for thee: we deem the world thy tomb.

As dwellers in lone planets look upon

The mighty disk of their majestic sun,

Hollowed in awful chasms of wheeling gloom,

Making their day dim, so we gaze on thee.

Come, thou of many crowns, white-robed love,

Oh! rend the veil in twain: all men adore thee;

Heaven crieth after thee; earth waileth for thee:

Breathe on thy winged throne, and it shall move

In music and in light o’er land and sea.

III

And now methinks I gaze upon thee now,

As on a serpent in his agonies

Awestricken Indians; what time laid low

And crushing the thick fragrant reeds he lies,

When the new year warm breathed on the earth,

Waiting to light him with his purple skies,

Calls to him by the fountain to uprise.

Already with the pangs of a new birth

Strain the hot spheres of his convulsed eyes,

And in his writhings awful hues begin

To wander down his sable sheeny sides,

Like light on troubled waters: from within

Anon he rusheth forth with merry din,

And in him light and joy and strength abides;

And from his brows a crown of living light

Looks through the thickstemmed woods by day and night.

The Kraken

Reprinted without alteration, except in the spelling of “antient,” among Juvenilia in 1871 and onward.

Below the thunders of the upper deep;

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His antient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

About his shadowy sides: above him swell

Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

And far away into the sickly light,

From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

Unnumber’d and enormous polypi

Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

There hath he lain for ages and will lie

Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by man and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

The Ballad of Oriana

This fine ballad was evidently suggested by the old ballad of Helen of Kirkconnel, both poems being based on a similar incident, and both being the passionate soliloquy of the bereaved lover, though Tennyson’s treatment of the subject is his own. Helen of Kirkconnel was one of the poems which he was fond of reciting, and Fitzgerald says that he used also to recite this poem, in a way not to be forgotten, at Cambridge tables. Life, i., p. 77.

My heart is wasted with my woe, Oriana.

There is no rest for me below, Oriana.

When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,

And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow, Oriana,

Alone I wander to and fro, Oriana.

Ere the light on dark was growing, Oriana,

At midnight the cock was crowing, Oriana:

Winds were blowing, waters flowing,

We heard the steeds to battle going, Oriana;

Aloud the hollow bugle blowing, Oriana.

In the yew-wood black as night, Oriana,

Ere I rode into the fight, Oriana,

While blissful tears blinded my sight

By star-shine and by moonlight, Oriana,

I to thee my troth did plight, Oriana.

She stood upon the castle wall, Oriana:

She watch’d my crest among them all, Oriana:

She saw me fight, she heard me call,

When forth there stept a foeman tall, Oriana,

Atween me and the castle wall, Oriana.

The bitter arrow went aside, Oriana:

The false, false arrow went aside, Oriana:

The damned arrow glanced aside,

And pierced thy heart, my love, my bride, Oriana!

Thy heart, my life, my love, my bride, Oriana!

Oh! narrow, narrow was the space, Oriana.

Loud, loud rung out the bugle’s brays, Oriana.

Oh! deathful stabs were dealt apace,

The battle deepen’d in its place, Oriana;

But I was down upon my face, Oriana.

They should have stabb’d me where I lay, Oriana!

How could I rise and come away, Oriana?

How could I look upon the day?

They should have stabb’d me where I lay, Oriana

They should have trod me into clay, Oriana.

O breaking heart that will not break, Oriana!

O pale, pale face so sweet and meek, Oriana!

Thou smilest, but thou dost not speak,

And then the tears run down my cheek, Oriana:

What wantest thou? whom dost thou seek, Oriana?

I cry aloud: none hear my cries, Oriana.

Thou comest atween me and the skies, Oriana.

I feel the tears of blood arise

Up from my heart unto my eyes, Oriana.

Within my heart my arrow lies, Oriana.

O cursed hand! O cursed blow! Oriana!

O happy thou that liest low, Oriana!

All night the silence seems to flow

Beside me in my utter woe, Oriana.

A weary, weary way I go, Oriana.

When Norland winds pipe down the sea, Oriana,

I walk, I dare not think of thee, Oriana.

Thou liest beneath the greenwood tree,

I dare not die and come to thee, Oriana.

I hear the roaring of the sea, Oriana.

Circumstance

Two children in two neighbour villages

Playing mad pranks along the healthy leas;

Two strangers meeting at a festival;

Two lovers whispering by an orchard wall;

Two lives bound fast in one with golden ease;

Two graves grass-green beside a gray church-tower,

Wash’d with still rains and daisy-blossomed;

Two children in one hamlet born and bred;

So runs the round of life from hour to hour.

English War Song

Who fears to die? Who fears to die?

Is there any here who fears to die

He shall find what he fears, and none shall grieve

For the man who fears to die;

But the withering scorn of the many shall cleave

To the man who fears to die.

Chorus. ¬

Shout for England!

Ho! for England!

George for England!

Merry England!

England for aye!

The hollow at heart shall crouch forlorn,

He shall eat the bread of common scorn;

It shall be steeped in the salt, salt tear,

Shall be steeped in his own salt tear:

Far better, far better he never were born

Than to shame merry England here.

Chorus. Shout for England! etc.

There standeth our ancient enemy;

Hark! he shouteth the ancient enemy!

On the ridge of the hill his banners rise;

They stream like fire in the skies;

Hold up the Lion of England on high

Till it dazzle and blind his eyes.

Chorus. Shout for England! etc.

Come along! we alone of the earth are free;

The child in our cradles is bolder than he;

For where is the heart and strength of slaves?

Oh! where is the strength of slaves?

He is weak! we are strong; he a slave, we are free;

Come along! we will dig their graves.

Chorus. Shout for England! etc.

There standeth our ancient enemy;

Will he dare to battle with the free?

Spur along! spur amain! charge to the fight:

Charge! charge to the fight!

Hold up the Lion of England on high!

Shout for God and our right!

Chorus.-Shout for England! etc.

National Song

There is no land like England

Where’er the light of day be;

There are no hearts like English hearts,

Such hearts of oak as they be.

There is no land like England

Where’er the light of day be;

There are no men like Englishmen,

So tall and bold as they be.

Chorus.

For the French the Pope may shrive ‘em,

For the devil a whit we heed ‘em,

As for the French, God speed ‘em

Unto their hearts’ desire,

And the merry devil drive ‘em

Through the water and the fire.

Our glory is our freedom,

We lord it o’er the sea;

We are the sons of freedom,

We are free.

There is no land like England,

Where’er the light of day be;

There are no wives like English wives,

So fair and chaste as they be.

There is no land like England,

Where’er the light of day be;

There are no maids like English maids,

So beautiful as they be.

Chorus. For the French, etc.

The Sleeping Beauty, 1832

I

Year after year unto her feet,

She lying on her couch alone,

Across the purpled coverlet,

The maiden’s jet-black hair has grown,

On either side her tranced form

Forth streaming from a braid of pearl:

The slumbrous light is rich and warm,

And moves not on the rounded curl.

II

The silk star-broider’d coverlid

Unto her limbs itself doth mould

Languidly ever; and, amid

Her full black ringlets downward roll’d,

Glows forth each softly-shadow’d arm,

With bracelets of the diamond bright:

Her constant beauty doth inform

Stillness with love, and day with light.

III

She sleeps: her breathings are not heard

In palace chambers far apart.

The fragrant tresses are not stirr’d

That lie upon her charmed heart.

She sleeps: on either hand upswells

The gold-fringed pillow lightly prest:

She sleeps, nor dreams, but ever dwells

A perfect form in perfect rest.

Dualisms

Two bees within a chrystal flowerbell rocked

Hum a lovelay to the westwind at noontide.

Both alike, they buzz together,

Both alike, they hum together

Through and through the flowered heather.

Where in a creeping cove the wave unshocked

Lays itself calm and wide,

Over a stream two birds of glancing feather

Do woo each other, carolling together.

Both alike, they glide together

Side by side;

Both alike, they sing together,

Arching blue-glossed necks beneath the purple weather.

Two children lovelier than Love, adown the lea are singing,

As they gambol, lilygarlands ever stringing:

Both in blosmwhite silk are frockèd:

Like, unlike, they roam together

Under a summervault of golden weather;

Like, unlike, they sing together

Side by side,

Mid May’s darling goldenlockèd,

Summer’s tanling diamondeyed.

We are Free

The winds, as at their hour of birth,

Leaning upon the ridged sea,

Breathed low around the rolling earth

With mellow preludes, “We are Free”;

The streams through many a lilied row,

Down-carolling to the crispèd sea,

Low-tinkled with a bell-like flow

Atween the blossoms, “We are free”.

The Sea Fairies

First published in 1830 but excluded from all editions till its restoration, when it was greatly altered, in 1853. I here give the text as it appeared in 1830; where the present text is the same as that of 1830 asterisks indicate it.

This poem is a sort of prelude to the Lotos-Eaters, the burthen being the same, a siren song: “Why work, why toil, when all must be over so soon, and when at best there is so little to reward?”

Slow sailed the weary mariners, and saw

Between the green brink and the running foam

White limbs unrobed in a chrystal air,

Sweet faces, etc.

...

middle sea.

Whither away, whither away, whither away?

Fly no more!

Whither away wi’ the singing sail? whither away wi’ the oar?

Whither away from the high green field and the happy blossoming shore?

Weary mariners, hither away,

One and all, one and all,

Weary mariners, come and play;

We will sing to you all the day;

Furl the sail and the foam will fall

From the prow! one and all

Furl the sail! drop the oar!

Leap ashore!

Know danger and trouble and toil no more.

Whither away wi’ the sail and the oar?

Drop the oar,

Leap ashore,

Fly no more!

Whither away wi’ the sail? whither away wi’ the oar?

Day and night to the billow, etc.

...

over the lea;

They freshen the silvery-crimson shells,

And thick with white bells the cloverhill swells

High over the full-toned sea.

Merrily carol the revelling gales

Over the islands free:

From the green seabanks the rose downtrails

To the happy brimmèd sea.

Come hither, come hither, and be our lords,

For merry brides are we:

We will kiss sweet kisses, etc.

...

With pleasure and love and revelry;

...

ridgèd sea.

Ye will not find so happy a shore

Weary mariners! all the world o’er;

Oh! fly no more!

Harken ye, harken ye, sorrow shall darken ye,

Danger and trouble and toil no more;

Whither away?

Drop the oar;

Hither away,

Leap ashore;

Oh! fly no more no more.

Whither away, whither away, whither away with the sail and the oar?

Slow sail’d the weary mariners and saw,

Betwixt the green brink and the running foam,

Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest

To little harps of gold; and while they mused,

Whispering to each other half in fear,

Shrill music reach’d them on the middle sea.

Whither away, whither away, whither away? fly no more.

Whither away from the high green field, and the happy blossoming shore?

Day and night to the billow the fountain calls;

Down shower the gambolling waterfalls

From wandering over the lea:

Out of the live-green heart of the dells

They freshen the silvery-crimsoned shells,

And thick with white bells the clover-hill swells

High over the full-toned sea:

O hither, come hither and furl your sails,

Come hither to me and to me:

Hither, come hither and frolic and play;

Here it is only the mew that wails;

We will sing to you all the day:

Mariner, mariner, furl your sails,

For here are the blissful downs and dales,

And merrily merrily carol the gales,

And the spangle dances in bight and bay,

And the rainbow forms and flies on the land

Over the islands free;

And the rainbow lives in the curve of the sand;

Hither, come hither and see;

And the rainbow hangs on the poising wave,

And sweet is the colour of cove and cave,

And sweet shall your welcome be:

O hither, come hither, and be our lords

For merry brides are we:

We will kiss sweet kisses, and speak sweet words:

O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten

With pleasure and love and jubilee:

O listen, listen, your eyes shall glisten

When the sharp clear twang of the golden cords

Runs up the ridged sea.

Who can light on as happy a shore

All the world o’er, all the world o’er?

Whither away? listen and stay: mariner, mariner, fly no more.

Sonnet to J. M. K.

First printed in 1830, not in 1833.

This sonnet was addressed to John Mitchell Kemble, the well-known Editor of the Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems. He intended to go into the Church, but was never ordained, and devoted his life to early English studies. See memoir of him in Dict, of Nat. Biography.

My hope and heart is with thee thou wilt be

A latter Luther, and a soldier-priest

To scare church-harpies from the master’s feast;

Our dusted velvets have much need of thee:

Thou art no Sabbath-drawler of old saws,

Distill’d from some worm-canker’d homily;

But spurr’d at heart with fieriest energy

To embattail and to wall about thy cause

With iron-worded proof, hating to hark

The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone

Half God’s good sabbath, while the worn-out clerk

Brow-beats his desk below. Thou from a throne

Mounted in heaven wilt shoot into the dark

Arrows of lightnings. I will stand and mark.

POEMS, 1832

In the spring of 1831, Tennyson’s father died, requiring the poet to leave Cambridge before taking his degree. He returned to the rectory, where he was permitted to live for another six years, sharing responsibility for his widowed mother and the family. At this time Tennyson published his second book of poetry, which included his now famous ballad, The Lady of Shalott. The volume received heavy criticism, discouraging Tennyson so much that he did not publish another book for ten years, though he continued to write privately. That same year, the poet’s close friend Hallam, who had recently married Tennyson’s sister, died suddenly and unexpectedly after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage while holidaying in Vienna. Hallam’s sudden and unexpected death in 1833 had a profound impact on the poet, and inspired several masterpieces, including In the Valley of Cauteretz and In Memoriam A.H.H., a long poem detailing the Way of the Soul.

The Lady of Shalott is now celebrated as one of Tennyson’s greatest poems, featuring an Arthurian subject matter loosely based on medieval sources. Tennyson wrote two versions of the poem; one published in 1833, of twenty stanzas, the other in 1842 of nineteen stanzas. It was loosely based on the Arthurian legend of Elaine of Astolat, as recounted in a thirteenth-century Italian novella Donna di Scalotta, with the 1833 version being closer to the source material than the 1842 version. Tennyson focused on the Lady’s isolation in the tower and her decision to participate in the living world, two subjects not even mentioned in Donna di Scalotta.

The first four stanzas describe a pastoral setting. The Lady of Shalott lives in an island castle in a river which flows to Camelot, but little is known about her by the local farmers.  Then the mysterious conditions of the lady’s life are gradually revealed. She suffers from a curse and must continually weave images on her loom, without ever looking directly out at the world. Instead, she looks into a mirror which reflects the busy road and the people of Camelot, who pass by her island. The reflected images are described as ‘shadows of the world’ — a metaphor that suggests they are a poor substitute for seeing directly. The remaining seven stanzas describe the effect on the lady of seeing Lancelot, as she stops weaving and looks out of her window toward Camelot, bringing about the curse.

The poem poses a question that has interested artists and poets for centuries.  Should artists use art to celebrate the world or should we enjoy the world by simply living in it? It has also been suggested that The Lady of Shalott is a representation of Tennyson’s view of society, with the distance at which other people are seen through the lady’s eyes being symbolic of the distance the poet feels from society. The fact that she only sees the world through a window pane is significant of the way in which Shalott and Tennyson see the world — in a filtered sense. The poem has gone on to inspire representations in numerous media forms for over a century, with some art historians going so far as to claim that the poem sparked the initial pre-Raphaelite fascination with Arthurian themes, as particularly demonstrated in the late Victorian paintings by John Waterhouse.

The first edition

CONTENTS

Mine be the strength of spirit...

To ––(“My life is full...”)

Buonoparte

Sonnet: “Oh, beauty, passing beauty!...”

Sonnet: “But were I loved, as I desire to be”

The Lady of Shalott, 1833

Mariana in the South

Eleänore

The Miller’s Daughter

Fatima (O Love, Love, Love!)

Œnone, 1833

The Sisters

To ––

The Palace of Art

The May Queen

New Year’s Eve

The Hesperides

The Lotos Eaters

Choric Song

Rosalind

My Rosalind, my Rosalind

A Dream of Fair Women

Song  “Who can say...?”

Margaret

Kate

Sonnet: “Blow ye the trumpet, gather from afar...”

Poland

To –– (“As when, with downcast eyes...”)

O Darling Room

To Christopher North

The Death of the Old Year

To J. S.

Waterhouse’s “I Am Half-Sick of Shadows,” Said the Lady of Shalott

John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott, 1888

Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot

Mine be the strength of spirit...

Reprinted without any alteration, except that Power is spelt with a small p, among the Juvenilia in 1871 and onward.

Mine be the strength of spirit, full and free,

Like some broad river rushing down alone,

With the selfsame impulse wherewith he was thrown

From his loud fount upon the echoing lea:

Which with increasing might doth forward flee

By town, and tower, and hill, and cape, and isle,

And in the middle of the green salt sea

Keeps his blue waters fresh for many a mile.

Mine be the Power which ever to its sway

Will win the wise at once, and by degrees

May into uncongenial spirits flow;

Even as the great gulfstream of Florida

Floats far away into the Northern Seas

The lavish growths of Southern Mexico.

To ––(“My life is full...”)

When this poem was republished among the Juvenilia in 1871 several alterations were made in it. For the first stanza was substituted the following:

My life is full of weary days,

But good things have not kept aloof,

Nor wander’d into other ways:

I have not lack’d thy mild reproof,

Nor golden largess of thy praise.

The second began “And now shake hands”. In the fourth stanza for “sudden laughters” of the jay was substituted the felicitous “sudden scritches,” and the sixth and seventh stanzas were suppressed.

I

All good things have not kept aloof

Nor wandered into other ways:

I have not lacked thy mild reproof,

Nor golden largess of thy praise.

But life is full of weary days.

II

Shake hands, my friend, across the brink

Of that deep grave to which I go:

Shake hands once more: I cannot sink

So far  far down, but I shall know

Thy voice, and answer from below.

III

When in the darkness over me

The fourhanded mole shall scrape,

Plant thou no dusky cypresstree,

Nor wreathe thy cap with doleful crape,

But pledge me in the flowing grape.

IV

And when the sappy field and wood

Grow green beneath the showery gray,

And rugged barks begin to bud,

And through damp holts newflushed with May,

Ring sudden laughters of the Jay,

V

Then let wise Nature work her will,

And on my clay her darnels grow;

Come only, when the days are still,

And at my headstone whisper low,

And tell me if the woodbines blow.

VI

If thou art blest, my mother’s smile

Undimmed, if bees are on the wing:

Then cease, my friend, a little while,

That I may hear the throstle sing

His bridal song, the boast of spring.

VII

Sweet as the noise in parchèd plains

Of bubbling wells that fret the stones,

(If any sense in me remains)

Thy words will be: thy cheerful tones

As welcome to my crumbling bones.

Buonoparte

He thought to quell the stubborn hearts of oak,

Madman!  to chain with chains, and bind with bands

That island queen who sways the floods and lands

From Ind to Ind, but in fair daylight woke,

When from her wooden walls, lit by sure hands,

With thunders and with lightnings and with smoke,

Peal after peal, the British battle broke,

Lulling the brine against the Coptic sands.

We taught him lowlier moods, when Elsinore

Heard the war moan along the distant sea,

Rocking with shatter’d spars, with sudden fires

Flamed over: at Trafalgar yet once more

We taught him: late he learned humility

Perforce, like those whom Gideon school’d with briers.

Sonnet: “Oh, beauty, passing beauty!...”

Oh, Beauty, passing beauty! sweetest Sweet!

How canst thou let me waste my youth in sighs?

I only ask to sit beside thy feet.

Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes,

Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold

My arms about thee  scarcely dare to speak.

And nothing seems to me so wild and bold,

As with one kiss to touch thy blessed cheek.

Methinks if I should kiss thee, no control

Within the thrilling brain could keep afloat

The subtle spirit. Even while I spoke,

The bare word KISS hath made my inner soul

To tremble like a lutestring, ere the note

Hath melted in the silence that it broke.

Sonnet: “But were I loved, as I desire to be”

Reprinted in 1872 among Early Sonnets with two alterations, “If I were loved” for “But were I loved,” and “tho’” for “though”.

But were I loved, as I desire to be,

What is there in the great sphere of the earth,

And range of evil between death and birth,

That I should fear  if I were loved by thee?

All the inner, all the outer world of pain

Clear Love would pierce and cleave, if thou wert mine,

As I have heard that, somewhere in the main,

Fresh water-springs come up through bitter brine.

‘Twere joy, not fear, clasped hand in hand with thee,

To wait for death  mute  careless of all ills,

Apart upon a mountain, though the surge

Of some new deluge from a thousand hills

Flung leagues of roaring foam into the gorge

Below us, as far on as eye could see.

The Lady of Shalott, 1833

Part the First.

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro’ the field the road runs by

To many-tower’d Camelot;

The yellow-leaved waterlily

The green-sheathed daffodilly

Tremble in the water chilly

Round about Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens shiver.

The sunbeam showers break and quiver

In the stream that runneth ever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.

Four gray walls, and four gray towers

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

Underneath the bearded barley,

The reaper, reaping late and early,

Hears her ever chanting cheerly,

Like an angel, singing clearly,

O’er the stream of Camelot.

Piling the sheaves in furrows airy,

Beneath the moon, the reaper weary

Listening whispers, ‘ ‘Tis the fairy,

Lady of Shalott.’

The little isle is all inrail’d

With a rose-fence, and overtrail’d

With roses: by the marge unhail’d

The shallop flitteth silken sail’d,

Skimming down to Camelot.

A pearl garland winds her head:

She leaneth on a velvet bed,

Full royally apparelled,

The Lady of Shalott.

Part the Second.

No time hath she to sport and play:

A charmed web she weaves alway.

A curse is on her, if she stay

Her weaving, either night or day,

To look down to Camelot.

She knows not what the curse may be;

Therefore she weaveth steadily,

Therefore no other care hath she,

The Lady of Shalott.

She lives with little joy or fear.

Over the water, running near,

The sheepbell tinkles in her ear.

Before her hangs a mirror clear,

Reflecting tower’d Camelot.

And as the mazy web she whirls,

She sees the surly village churls,

And the red cloaks of market girls

Pass onward from Shalott.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,

An abbot on an ambling pad,

Sometimes a curly shepherd lad,

Or long-hair’d page in crimson clad,

Goes by to tower’d Camelot:

And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue

The knights come riding two and two:

She hath no loyal knight and true,

The Lady of Shalott.

But in her web she still delights

To weave the mirror’s magic sights,

For often thro’ the silent nights

A funeral, with plumes and lights

And music, came from Camelot:

Or when the moon was overhead

Came two young lovers lately wed;

`I am half sick of shadows,’ said

The Lady of Shalott.

Part the Third.

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,

He rode between the barley-sheaves,

The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,

And flam’d upon the brazen greaves

Of bold Sir Lancelot.

A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d

To a lady in his shield,

That sparkled on the yellow field,

Beside remote Shalott.

The gemmy bridle glitter’d free,

Like to some branch of stars we see

Hung in the golden Galaxy.

The bridle bells rang merrily

As he rode down from Camelot:

And from his blazon’d baldric slung

A mighty silver bugle hung,

And as he rode his arm our rung,

Beside remote Shalott.

All in the blue unclouded weather

Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather,

The helmet and the helmet-feather

Burn’d like one burning flame together,

As he rode down from Camelot.

As often thro’ the purple night,

Below the starry clusters bright,

Some bearded meteor, trailing light,

Moves over green Shalott.

His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d;

On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;

From underneath his helmet flow’d

His coal-black curls as on he rode,

As he rode down from Camelot.

From the bank and from the river

He flash’d into the crystal mirror,

‘Tirra lirra, tirra lirra:’

Sang Sir Lancelot.

She left the web, she left the loom

She made three paces thro’ the room

She saw the water-flower bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look’d down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Part the Fourth.

In the stormy east-wind straining,

The pale yellow woods were waning,

The broad stream in his banks complaining,

Heavily the low sky raining

Over tower’d Camelot;

Outside the isle a shallow boat

Beneath a willow lay afloat,

Below the carven stern she wrote,

The Lady of Shalott.

A cloudwhite crown of pearl she dight,

All raimented in snowy white

That loosely flew (her zone in sight

Clasp’d with one blinding diamond bright)

Her wide eyes fix’d on Camelot,

Though the squally east-wind keenly

Blew, with folded arms serenely

By the water stood the queenly

Lady of Shalott.

With a steady stony glance —

Like some bold seer in a trance,

Beholding all his own mischance,

Mute, with a glassy countenance —

She look’d down to Camelot.

It was the closing of the day:

She loos’d the chain, and down she lay;

The broad stream bore her far away,

The Lady of Shalott.

As when to sailors while they roam,

By creeks and outfalls far from home,

Rising and dropping with the foam,

From dying swans wild warblings come,

Blown shoreward; so to Camelot

Still as the boathead wound along

The willowy hills and fields among,

They heard her chanting her deathsong,

The Lady of Shalott.

A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy,

She chanted loudly, chanted lowly,

Till her eyes were darken’d wholly,

And her smooth face sharpen’d slowly,

Turn’d to tower’d Camelot:

For ere she reach’d upon the tide

The first house by the water-side,

Singing in her song she died,

The Lady of Shalott.

Under tower and balcony,

By garden wall and gallery,

A pale, pale corpse she floated by,

Deadcold, between the houses high,

Dead into tower’d Camelot.

Knight and burgher, lord and dame,

To the planked wharfage came:

Below the stern they read her name,

The Lady of Shalott.

They cross’d themselves, their stars they blest,

Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest.

There lay a parchment on her breast,

That puzzled more than all the rest,

The wellfed wits at Camelot.

‘The web was woven curiously,

The charm is broken utterly,

Draw near and fear not, — this is I,

The Lady of Shalott.’

Mariana in the South

First printed in 1833.

This poem had been written as early as 1831 (see Arthur Hallam’s letter, Life, i., 284-5, Appendix), and Lord Tennyson tells us that it “came to my father as he was travelling between Narbonne and Perpignan”; how vividly the characteristic features of Southern France are depicted must be obvious to every one who is familiar with them. It is interesting to compare it with the companion poem; the central position is the same in both, desolate loneliness, and the mood is the same, but the setting is far more picturesque and is therefore more dwelt upon. The poem was very greatly altered when re-published in 1842, that text being practically the final one, there being no important variants afterwards.

In the edition of 1833 the poem opened with the following stanza, which was afterwards excised and the stanza of the present text substituted.

Behind the barren hill upsprung

With pointed rocks against the light,

The crag sharpshadowed overhung

Each glaring creek and inlet bright.

Far, far, one light blue ridge was seen,

Looming like baseless fairyland;

Eastward a slip of burning sand,

Dark-rimmed with sea, and bare of green,

Down in the dry salt-marshes stood

That house dark latticed. Not a breath

Swayed the sick vineyard underneath,

Or moved the dusty southernwood.

“Madonna,” with melodious moan

Sang Mariana, night and morn,

“Madonna! lo! I am all alone,

Love-forgotten and love-forlorn.”

With one black shadow at its feet,

The house thro’ all the level shines,

Close-latticed to the brooding heat,

And silent in its dusty vines:

A faint-blue ridge upon the right,

An empty river-bed before,

And shallows on a distant shore,

In glaring sand and inlets bright.

But “Ave Mary,” made she moan,

And “Ave Mary,” night and morn,

And “Ah,” she sang, “to be all alone,

To live forgotten, and love forlorn”.

She, as her carol sadder grew,

From brow and bosom slowly down

Thro’ rosy taper fingers drew

Her streaming curls of deepest brown

To left and right,  and made appear,

Still-lighted in a secret shrine,

Her melancholy eyes divine,

The home of woe without a tear.

And “Ave Mary,” was her moan,

“Madonna, sad is night and morn”;

And “Ah,” she sang, “to be all alone,

To live forgotten, and love forlorn”.

Till all the crimson changed,  and past

Into deep orange o’er the sea,

Low on her knees herself she cast,

Before Our Lady murmur’d she;

Complaining, “Mother, give me grace

To help me of my weary load”.

And on the liquid mirror glow’d

The clear perfection of her face.

“Is this the form,” she made her moan,

“That won his praises night and morn?”

And “Ah,” she said, “but I wake alone,

I sleep forgotten, I wake forlorn”.

Nor bird would sing, nor lamb would bleat,

Nor any cloud would cross the vault,

But day increased from heat to heat,

On stony drought and steaming salt;

Till now at noon she slept again,

And seem’d knee-deep in mountain grass,

And heard her native breezes pass,

And runlets babbling down the glen.

She breathed in sleep a lower moan,

And murmuring, as at night and morn,

She thought, “My spirit is here alone,

Walks forgotten, and is forlorn”.

Dreaming, she knew it was a dream:

She felt he was and was not there,

She woke: the babble of the stream

Fell, and without the steady glare

Shrank one sick willow  sere and small.

The river-bed was dusty-white;

And all the furnace of the light

Struck up against the blinding wall.

She whisper’d, with a stifled moan

More inward than at night or morn,

“Sweet Mother, let me not here alone

Live forgotten, and die forlorn”.

And rising, from her bosom drew

Old letters, breathing of her worth,

For “Love,” they said, “must needs be true,

To what is loveliest upon earth”.

An image seem’d to pass the door,

To look at her with slight, and say,

“But now thy beauty flows away,

So be alone for evermore”.

“O cruel heart,” she changed her tone,

“And cruel love, whose end is scorn,

Is this the end to be left alone,

To live forgotten, and die forlorn!”

But sometimes in the falling day

An image seem’d to pass the door,

To look into her eyes and say,

“But thou shalt be alone no more”.

And flaming downward over all

From heat to heat the day decreased,

And slowly rounded to the east

The one black shadow from the wall.

“The day to night,” she made her moan,

“The day to night, the night to morn,

And day and night I am left alone

To live forgotten, and love forlorn.”

At eve a dry cicala sung,

There came a sound as of the sea;

Backward the lattice-blind she flung,

And lean’d upon the balcony.

There all in spaces rosy-bright

Large Hesper glitter’d on her tears,

And deepening thro’ the silent spheres,

Heaven over Heaven rose the night.

And weeping then she made her moan,

“The night comes on that knows not morn,

When I shall cease to be all alone,

To live forgotten, and love forlorn”.

Eleänore

First printed in 1833. When reprinted in 1842 the alterations noted were then made, and after that the text remained unchanged.

I

Thy dark eyes open’d not,

Nor first reveal’d themselves to English air,

For there is nothing here,

Which, from the outward to the inward brought,

Moulded thy baby thought.

Far off from human neighbourhood,

Thou wert born, on a summer morn,

A mile beneath the cedar-wood.

Thy bounteous forehead was not fann’d

With breezes from our oaken glades,

But thou wert nursed in some delicious land

Of lavish lights, and floating shades:

And flattering thy childish thought

The oriental fairy brought,

At the moment of thy birth,

From old well-heads of haunted rills,

And the hearts of purple hills,

And shadow’d coves on a sunny shore,

The choicest wealth of all the earth,

Jewel or shell, or starry ore,

To deck thy cradle, Eleänore.

II

Or the yellow-banded bees,

Thro’  half-open lattices

Coming in the scented breeze,

Fed thee, a child, lying alone,

With whitest honey in fairy gardens cull’d

A glorious child, dreaming alone,

In silk-soft folds, upon yielding down,

With the hum of swarming bees

Into dreamful slumber lull’d.

III

Who may minister to thee?

Summer herself should minister

To thee, with fruitage golden-rinded

On golden salvers, or it may be,

Youngest Autumn, in a bower

Grape-thicken’d from the light, and blinded

With many a deep-hued bell-like flower

Of fragrant trailers, when the air

Sleepeth over all the heaven,

And the crag that fronts the Even,

All along the shadowing shore,

Crimsons over an inland  mere,

Eleänore!

IV

How may full-sail’d verse express,

How may measured words adore

The full-flowing harmony

Of thy swan-like stateliness,

Eleänore?

The luxuriant symmetry

Of thy floating gracefulness,

Eleänore?

Every turn and glance of thine,

Every lineament divine,

Eleänore,

And the steady sunset glow,

That stays upon thee? For in thee

Is nothing sudden, nothing single;

Like two streams of incense free

From one censer, in one shrine,

Thought and motion mingle,

Mingle ever. Motions flow

To one another, even as tho’

They were modulated so

To an unheard melody,

Which lives about thee, and a sweep

Of richest pauses, evermore

Drawn from each other mellow-deep;

Who may express thee, Eleänore?

V

I stand before thee, Eleänore;

I see thy beauty gradually unfold,

Daily and hourly, more and more.

I muse, as in a trance, the while

Slowly, as from a cloud of gold,

Comes out thy deep ambrosial smile.

I muse, as in a trance, whene’er

The languors of thy love-deep eyes

Float on to me. I would I were

So tranced, so rapt in ecstacies,

To stand apart, and to adore,

Gazing on thee for evermore,

Serene, imperial Eleänore!

VI

Sometimes, with most intensity

Gazing, I seem to see

Thought folded over thought, smiling asleep,

Slowly awaken’d, grow so full and deep

In thy large eyes, that, overpower’d quite,

I cannot veil, or droop my sight,

But am as nothing in its light:

As tho’  a star, in inmost heaven set,

Ev’n while we gaze on it,

Should slowly round his orb, and slowly grow

To a full face, there like a sun remain

Fix’d  then as slowly fade again,

And draw itself to what it was before;

So full, so deep, so slow,

Thought seems to come and go

In thy large eyes, imperial Eleänore.

VII

As thunder-clouds that, hung on high,

Roof’d the world with doubt and fear,

Floating thro’ an evening atmosphere,

Grow golden all about the sky;

In thee all passion becomes passionless,

Touch’d by thy spirit’s mellowness,

Losing his fire and active might

In a silent meditation,

Falling into a still delight,

And luxury of contemplation:

As waves that up a quiet cove

Rolling slide, and lying still

Shadow forth the banks at will:

Or sometimes they swell and move,

Pressing up against the land,

With motions of the outer sea:

And the self-same influence

Controlleth all the soul and sense

Of Passion gazing upon thee.

His bow-string slacken’d, languid Love,

Leaning his cheek upon his hand,

Droops both his wings, regarding thee,

And so would languish evermore,

Serene, imperial Eleänore.

VIII

But when I see thee roam, with tresses unconfined,

While the amorous, odorous wind

Breathes low between the sunset and the moon;

Or, in a shadowy saloon,

On silken cushions half reclined;

I watch thy grace; and in its place

My heart a charmed slumber keeps,

While I muse upon thy face;

And a languid fire creeps

Thro’ my veins to all my frame,

Dissolvingly and slowly: soon

From thy rose-red lips MY name

Floweth; and then, as in a swoon,

With dinning sound my ears are rife,

My tremulous tongue faltereth,

I lose my colour, I lose my breath,

I drink the cup of a costly death,

Brimm’d with delirious draughts of warmest life.

I die with my delight, before

I hear what I would hear from thee;

Yet tell my name again to me,

I would  be dying evermore,

So dying ever, Eleänore.

The Miller’s Daughter

First published in 1833. It was greatly altered when republished in 1842, and in some respects, so Fitzgerald thought, not for the better. No alterations of much importance were made in it after 1842. The characters as well as the scenery were, it seems, purely imaginary. Tennyson said that if he thought of any mill it was that of Trumpington, near Cambridge, which bears a general resemblance to the picture here given.

In the first edition the poem opened with the following stanza, which the Quarterly ridiculed, and which was afterwards excised. Its omission is surely not to be regretted, whatever Fitzgerald may have thought.

I met in all the close green ways,

While walking with my line and rod,

The wealthy miller’s mealy face,

Like the moon in an ivy-tod.

He looked so jolly and so good

While fishing in the milldam-water,

I laughed to see him as he stood,

And dreamt not of the miller’s daughter.

I see the wealthy miller yet,

His double chin, his portly size,

And who that knew him could forget

The busy wrinkles round his eyes?

The slow wise smile that, round about

His dusty forehead drily curl’d,

Seem’d half-within and half-without,

And full of dealings with the world?

In yonder chair I see him sit,

Three fingers round the old silver cup

I see his gray eyes twinkle yet

At his own jest  gray eyes lit up

With summer lightnings of a soul

So full of summer warmth, so glad,

So healthy, sound, and clear and whole,

His memory scarce can make me  sad.

Yet fill my glass: give me one kiss:

My own sweet  Alice, we must die.

There’s somewhat in this world amiss

Shall be unriddled by and by.

There’s somewhat flows to us in life,

But more is taken quite away.

Pray, Alice, pray, my darling wife,

That we may die the self-same day.

Have I not found a happy earth?

I least should breathe a thought of pain.

Would God renew me from my birth

I’d almost live my life again.

So sweet it seems with thee to walk,

And once again to woo thee mine

It seems in after-dinner talk

Across the walnuts and the wine

To be the long and listless boy

Late-left an orphan of the squire,

Where this old mansion mounted high

Looks down upon the village spire:

For even here,  where I and you

Have lived and loved alone so long,

Each morn my sleep was broken thro’

By some wild skylark’s matin song.

And oft I heard the tender dove

In firry woodlands making moan;

But ere I saw your eyes, my love,

I had no motion of my own.

For scarce my life with fancy play’d

Before I dream’d that pleasant dream

Still hither thither idly sway’d

Like those long mosses  in the stream.

Or from the bridge I lean’d to hear

The milldam rushing down with noise,

And see the minnows everywhere

In crystal eddies glance and poise,

The tall flag-flowers when  they sprung

Below the range of stepping-stones,

Or those three chestnuts near, that hung

In masses thick with milky cones.

But, Alice, what an hour was that,

When after roving in the woods

(‘Twas April then), I came and sat

Below the chestnuts, when their buds

Were glistening to the breezy blue;

And on the slope, an absent fool,

I cast me down, nor thought of you,

But angled in the higher pool.

A love-song I had somewhere read,

An echo from a measured strain,

Beat time to nothing in my head

From some odd corner of the brain.

It haunted me, the morning long,

With weary sameness in the rhymes,

The phantom of a silent song,

That went and came a thousand times.

Then leapt a trout. In lazy mood

I watch’d the little circles die;

They past into the level flood,

And there a vision caught my eye;

The reflex of a beauteous form,

A glowing arm, a gleaming neck,

As when a sunbeam wavers warm

Within the dark and dimpled beck.

For you remember, you had set,

That morning, on the casement’s edge

A long green box of mignonette,

And you were leaning from the ledge:

And when I raised my eyes, above

They met with two so full and bright

Such eyes! I swear to you, my love,

That these have never lost their light.

I loved, and love dispell’d the fear

That I should die an early death:

For love possess’d the atmosphere,

And filled the breast with purer breath.

My mother thought, What ails the boy?

For I was alter’d, and began

To move about the house with joy,

And with the certain step of man.

I loved the brimming wave that swam

Thro’ quiet meadows round the mill,

The sleepy pool above the dam,

The pool beneath it never still,

The meal-sacks on the whiten’d floor,

The dark round of the dripping wheel,

The very air about the door

Made misty with the floating meal.

And oft in ramblings on the wold,

When April nights begin to blow,

And April’s crescent glimmer’d cold,

I saw the village lights below;

I knew your taper far away,

And full at heart of trembling hope,

From off the wold I came, and lay

Upon the freshly-flower’d slope.

The deep brook groan’d beneath the mill;

And “by that lamp,” I thought “she sits!”

The white chalk-quarry  from the hill

Gleam’d to the flying moon by fits.

“O that I were beside her now!

O will she answer if I call?

O would she give me vow for vow,

Sweet Alice, if I told her all?”

Sometimes I saw you sit and spin;

And, in the pauses of the wind,

Sometimes I heard you sing within;

Sometimes your shadow cross’d the blind.

At last you rose and moved the light,

And the long shadow of the chair

Flitted across into the night,

And all the casement darken’d there.

But when at last I dared to speak,

The lanes, you know, were white with may,

Your ripe lips moved not, but your cheek

Flush’d like the coming of the day;

And so it was  half-sly, half-shy,

You would, and would not, little one!

Although I pleaded tenderly,

And you and I were all alone.

And slowly was my mother brought

To yield consent to my desire:

She wish’d me happy, but she thought

I might have look’d a little higher;

And I was young  too young to wed:

“Yet must I love her for your sake;

Go fetch your Alice here,” she said:

Her eyelid quiver’d as she spake.

And down I went to fetch my bride:

But, Alice, you were ill at ease;

This dress and that by turns you tried,

Too fearful that you should not please.

I loved you better for your fears,

I knew you could not look but well;

And dews, that would have fall’n in tears,

I kiss’d away before they fell.

I watch’d the little flutterings,

The doubt my mother would not see;

She spoke at large of many things,

And at the last she spoke of me;

And turning look’d upon your face,

As near this door you sat apart,

And rose, and, with a silent grace

Approaching, press’d you heart to heart.

Ah, well  but sing the foolish song

I gave you, Alice, on the day

When, arm in arm, we went along,

A pensive pair, and you were gay,

With bridal flowers  that I may seem,

As in the nights of old, to lie

Beside the mill-wheel in the stream,

While those full chestnuts whisper by.

It is the miller’s daughter,

And she is grown so dear, so dear,

That I would be the jewel

That trembles at  her ear:

For hid in ringlets day and night,

I’d touch her neck so warm and white.

And I would be the girdle

About her dainty, dainty waist,

And her heart would beat against me,

In sorrow and in rest:

And I should know if it beat right,

I’d clasp it round so close and tight.

And I would be the necklace,

And all day long to fall and rise

Upon her balmy bosom,

With her laughter or her sighs,

And I would lie so light, so light,

I scarce should be  unclasp’d at night.

A trifle, sweet! which true love spells

True love interprets  right alone.

His light upon the letter dwells,

For all the spirit is his own.

So, if I waste words now, in truth

You must blame Love. His early rage

Had force to make me rhyme in youth

And makes me talk too much in age.

And now those vivid hours are gone,

Like mine own life to me thou art,

Where Past and Present, wound in one,

Do make a garland for the heart:

So sing  that other song I made,

Half anger’d with my happy lot,

The day, when in the chestnut shade

I found the blue Forget-me-not.

Love that hath us in the net,

Can he pass, and we forget?

Many suns arise and set.

Many a chance the years beget.

Love the gift is Love the debt.

Even so.

Love is hurt with jar and fret.

Love is made a vague regret.

Eyes with idle tears are wet.

Idle habit links us yet.

What is love? for we forget:

Ah, no! no!

Look thro’ mine eyes with thine. True wife,

Round my true heart thine arms entwine;

My other dearer life in life,

Look thro’ my very soul with thine!

Untouch’d with any shade of years,

May those kind eyes for ever dwell!

They have not shed a many tears,

Dear eyes, since first I knew them well.

Yet tears they shed: they had their part

Of sorrow: for when time was ripe,

The still affection of the heart

Became an outward breathing type,

That into stillness past again,

And left a want unknown before;

Although the loss that brought us pain,

That loss but made us love the more.

With farther lookings on. The kiss,

The woven arms, seem but to be

Weak symbols of the settled bliss,

The comfort, I have found in thee:

But that God bless thee, dear  who wrought

Two spirits to one equal mind

With blessings beyond hope or thought,

With blessings which no words can find.

Arise, and let us wander forth,

To yon old mill across the wolds;

For look, the sunset, south and north,

Winds all the vale in rosy folds,

And fires your narrow casement glass,

Touching the sullen pool below:

On the chalk-hill the bearded grass

Is dry and dewless. Let us go.

Fatima (O Love, Love, Love!)

O Love, Love, Love! O withering might!

O sun, that from  thy noonday height

Shudderest when I strain my sight,

Throbbing thro’ all thy heat and light,

Lo, falling from my constant mind,

Lo, parch’d and wither’d, deaf and blind,

I whirl like leaves in roaring wind.

Last night I wasted hateful hours

Below the city’s eastern towers:

I thirsted for the brooks, the showers:

I roll’d among the tender flowers:

I crush’d them on my breast, my mouth:

I look’d athwart the burning drouth

Of that long desert to the south.

Last night, when some one spoke his name,

From my swift blood that went and came

A thousand little shafts of flame.

Were shiver’d in my narrow frame

O Love, O fire! once he drew

With one long kiss, my whole soul thro’

My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

Before he mounts the hill, I know

He cometh quickly: from below

Sweet gales, as from deep gardens, blow

Before him, striking on my brow.

In my dry brain my spirit soon,

Down-deepening from swoon to swoon,

Faints like a dazzled morning moon.

The wind sounds like a silver wire,

And from beyond the noon a fire

Is pour’d upon the hills, and nigher

The skies stoop down in their desire;

And, isled in sudden seas of light,

My heart, pierced thro’ with fierce delight,

Bursts into blossom in his sight.

My whole soul waiting silently,

All naked in a sultry sky,

Droops blinded with his shining eye:

I will possess him or will die.

I will grow round him in his place,

Grow, live, die looking on his face,

Die, dying clasp’d in his embrace.

Œnone, 1833

First published in 1833. On being republished in 1842 this poem was practically rewritten, the alterations and additions so transforming the poem as to make it almost a new work. Both versions are provided in this works. Œnone is the first of Tennyson’s fine classical studies. The poem is modelled partly on the Alexandrian Idyll, such an Idyll for instance as the second Idyll of Theocritus or the Megara or Europa of Moschus, and partly perhaps on the narratives in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, to which the opening bears a typical resemblance. It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s Judgment of Paris which tells the same story, and tells it on the same lines on which it is told here, though it is not placed in the mouth of Œnone. Beattie’s poem opens with an elaborate description of Ida and of Troy in the distance. Paris, the husband of Œnone, is one afternoon confronted with the three goddesses who are, as in Tennyson’s Idyll, elaborately delineated as symbolising what they here symbolise. Each makes her speech and each offers what she has to offer, worldly dominion, wisdom, sensual pleasure. There is, of course, no comparison in point of merit between the two poems, Beattie’s being in truth perfectly commonplace. In its symbolic aspect the poem may be compared with the temptations to which Christ is submitted in Paradise Regained. See books iii. and iv.

There is a dale in Ida, lovelier

Than any in old Ionia, beautiful

With emerald slopes of sunny sward, that lean

Above the loud glenriver, which hath worn

A path thro’ steepdown granite walls below

Mantled with flowering tendriltwine. In front

The cedarshadowy valleys open wide.

Far-seen, high over all the God-built wall

And many a snowycolumned range divine,

Mounted with awful sculptures  men and Gods,

The work of Gods  bright on the dark-blue sky

The windy citadel of Ilion

Shone, like the crown of Troas. Hither came

Mournful Œnone wandering forlorn

Of Paris, once her playmate. Round her neck,

Her neck all marblewhite and marblecold,

Floated her hair or seemed to float in rest.

She, leaning on a vine-entwinèd stone,

Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shadow

Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff.

“O mother Ida, manyfountained Ida,

Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

The grasshopper is silent in the grass,

The lizard with his shadow on the stone

Sleeps like a shadow, and the scarletwinged

Cicala in the noonday leapeth not

Along the water-rounded granite-rock.

The purple flower droops: the golden bee

Is lilycradled: I alone awake.

My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,

My heart is breaking and my eyes are dim,

And I am all aweary of my life.

“O mother Ida, manyfountained Ida,

Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

Hear me O Earth, hear me O Hills, O Caves

That house the cold crowned snake! O mountain brooks,

I am the daughter of a River-God,

Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all

My sorrow with my song, as yonder walls

Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed,

A cloud that gathered shape: for it may be

That, while I speak of it, a little while

My heart may wander from its deeper woe.

“O mother Ida, manyfountained Ida,

Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

Aloft the mountain lawn was dewydark,

And dewydark aloft the mountain pine;

Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,

Leading a jetblack goat whitehorned, whitehooved,

Came up from reedy Simois all alone.

“O mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

I sate alone: the goldensandalled morn

Rosehued the scornful hills: I sate alone

With downdropt eyes: white-breasted like a star

Fronting the dawn he came: a leopard skin

From his white shoulder drooped: his sunny hair

Clustered about his temples like a God’s:

And his cheek brightened, as the foambow brightens

When the wind blows the foam; and I called out,

‘Welcome Apollo, welcome home Apollo,

Apollo, my Apollo, loved Apollo’.

“Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

He, mildly smiling, in his milk-white palm

Close-held a golden apple, lightningbright

With changeful flashes, dropt with dew of Heaven

Ambrosially smelling. From his lip,

Curved crimson, the full-flowing river of speech

Came down upon my heart.

“‘ My own Œnone,

Beautifulbrowed Œnone, mine own soul,

Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav’n

“For the most fair,” in aftertime may breed

Deep evilwilledness of heaven and sore

Heartburning toward hallowed Ilion;

And all the colour of my afterlife

Will be the shadow of to-day. To-day

Herè and Pallas and the floating grace

Of laughter-loving Aphrodite meet

In manyfolded Ida to receive

This meed of beauty, she to whom my hand

Award the palm. Within the green hillside,

Under yon whispering tuft of oldest pine,

Is an ingoing grotto, strown with spar

And ivymatted at the mouth, wherein

Thou unbeholden may’st behold, unheard

Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods.’

“Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

It was the deep midnoon: one silvery cloud

Had lost his way between the piney hills.

They came  all three  the Olympian goddesses.

Naked they came to the smoothswarded bower,

Lustrous with lilyflower, violeteyed

Both white and blue, with lotetree-fruit thickset,

Shadowed with singing-pine; and all the while,

Above, the overwandering ivy and vine

This way and that in many a wild festoon

Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs

With bunch and berry and flower thro’ and thro’.

On the treetops a golden glorious cloud

Leaned, slowly dropping down ambrosial dew.

How beautiful they were, too beautiful

To look upon! but Paris was to me

More lovelier than all the world beside.

“O mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

First spake the imperial Olympian

With archèd eyebrow smiling sovranly,

Fulleyèd here. She to Paris made

Proffer of royal power, ample rule

Unquestioned, overflowing revenue

Wherewith to embellish state, ‘from many a vale

And river-sundered champaign clothed with corn,

Or upland glebe wealthy in oil and wine

Honour and homage, tribute, tax and toll,

From many an inland town and haven large,

Mast-thronged below her shadowing citadel

In glassy bays among her tallest towers.’

“O mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

Still she spake on and still she spake of power

‘Which in all action is the end of all.

Power fitted to the season, measured by

The height of the general feeling, wisdomborn

And throned of wisdom  from all neighbour crowns

Alliance and allegiance evermore. Such boon from me

Heaven’s Queen to thee kingborn,

A shepherd all thy life and yet kingborn,

Should come most welcome, seeing men, in this

Only are likest gods, who have attained

Rest in a happy place and quiet seats

Above the thunder, with undying bliss

In knowledge of their own supremacy;

The changeless calm of undisputed right,

The highest height and topmost strength of power.’

“Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

She ceased, and Paris held the costly fruit

Out at arm’s length, so much the thought of power

Flattered his heart: but Pallas where she stood

Somewhat apart, her clear and barèd limbs

O’erthwarted with the brazen-headed spear

Upon her pearly shoulder leaning cold;

The while, above, her full and earnest eye

Over her snowcold breast and angry cheek

Kept watch, waiting decision, made reply.

“‘Selfreverence, selfknowledge, selfcontrol

Are the three hinges of the gates of Life,

That open into power, everyway

Without horizon, bound or shadow or cloud.

Yet not for power (power of herself

Will come uncalled-for) but to live by law

Acting the law we live by without fear,

And, because right is right, to follow right

Were wisdom, in the scorn of consequence.

(Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.)

Not as men value gold because it tricks

And blazons outward Life with ornament,

But rather as the miser, for itself.

Good for selfgood doth half destroy selfgood.

The means and end, like two coiled snakes, infect

Each other, bound in one with hateful love.

So both into the fountain and the stream

A drop of poison falls. Come hearken to me,

And look upon me and consider me,

So shall thou find me fairest, so endurance,

Like to an athlete’s arm, shall still become

Sinewed with motion, till thine active will

(As the dark body of the Sun robed round

With his own ever-emanating lights)

Be flooded o’er with her own effluences,

And thereby grow to freedom.’ “Here she ceased

And Paris pondered. I cried out, ‘Oh, Paris,

Give it to Pallas!’ but he heard me not,

Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me!

“O mother Ida, manyfountained Ida,

Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

Idalian Aphrodite oceanborn,

Fresh as the foam, newbathed in Paphian wells,

With rosy slender fingers upward drew

From her warm brow and bosom her dark hair

Fragrant and thick, and on her head upbound

In a purple band: below her lucid neck

Shone ivorylike, and from the ground her foot

Gleamed rosywhite, and o’er her rounded form

Between the shadows of the vine-bunches

Floated the glowing sunlights, as she moved.

“Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

She with a subtle smile in her mild eyes,

The herald of her triumph, drawing nigh

Half-whispered in his ear, ‘I promise thee

The fairest and most loving wife in Greece’.

I only saw my Paris raise his arm:

I only saw great Herè’s angry eyes,

As she withdrew into the golden cloud,

And I was left alone within the bower;

And from that time to this I am alone.

And I shall be alone until I die.

“Yet, mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

Fairest  why fairest wife? am I not fair?

My love hath told me so a thousand times.

Methinks I must be fair, for yesterday,

When I passed by, a wild and wanton pard,

Eyed like the evening star, with playful tail

Crouched fawning in the weed. Most loving is she?

Ah me, my mountain shepherd, that my arms

Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest

Close-close to thine in that quickfalling dew

Of fruitful kisses, thick as Autumn rains

Flash in the pools of whirling Simois.

“Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

They came, they cut away my tallest pines

My dark tall pines, that plumed the craggy ledge

High over the blue gorge, or lower down

Filling greengulphèd Ida, all between

The snowy peak and snowwhite cataract

Fostered the callow eaglet  from beneath

Whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark

The panther’s roar came muffled, while I sat

Low in the valley. Never, nevermore

Shall lone Œnone see the morning mist

Sweep thro’ them  never see them overlaid

With narrow moon-lit slips of silver cloud,

Between the loud stream and the trembling stars.

“Oh! mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

Hath he not sworn his love a thousand times,

In this green valley, under this green hill,

Ev’n on this hand, and sitting on this stone?

Sealed it with kisses? watered it with tears?

Oh happy tears, and how unlike to these!

Oh happy Heaven, how can’st thou see my face?

Oh happy earth, how can’st thou bear my weight?

O death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud,

There are enough unhappy on this earth,

Pass by the happy souls, that love to live:

I pray thee, pass before my light of life.

And shadow all my soul, that I may die.

Thou weighest heavy on the heart within,

Weigh heavy on my eyelids  let me die.

“Yet, mother Ida, hear me ere I die.

I will not die alone, for fiery thoughts

Do shape themselves within me, more and more,

Whereof I catch the issue, as I hear

Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills,

Like footsteps upon wool. I dimly see

My far-off doubtful purpose, as a mother

Conjectures of the features of her child

Ere it is born. I will not die alone.

“Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

Hear me, O earth. I will not die alone,

Lest their shrill, happy laughter, etc.

(Same as last stanza of subsequent editions.)

The Sisters

We were two daughters of one race:

She was the fairest in the face:

The wind is blowing in turret and tree.

They were together and she fell;

Therefore revenge became me well.

O the Earl was fair to see!

She died: she went to burning flame:

She mix’d her ancient blood with shame.

The wind is howling in turret and tree.

Whole weeks and months, and early and late,

To win his love I lay in wait:

O the Earl was fair to see!

I made a feast; I bad him come;

I won his love, I brought him home.

The wind is roaring in turret and tree.

And after supper, on a bed,

Upon my lap he laid his head:

O the Earl was fair to see!

I kiss’d his eyelids into rest:

His ruddy cheek upon my breast.

The wind is raging in turret and tree.

I hated him with the hate of hell,

But I loved his beauty passing well.

O the Earl was fair to see!

I rose up in the silent night:

I made my dagger sharp and bright.

The wind is raving in turret and tree.

As half-asleep his breath he drew,

Three times I stabb’d him thro’ and thro’.

O the Earl was fair to see!

I curl’d and comb’d his comely head,

He look’d so grand when he was dead.

The wind is blowing in turret and tree.

I wrapt his body in the sheet,

And laid him at his mother’s feet.

O the Earl was fair to see!

To ––

I send you here a sort of allegory,

(For you will understand it) of a soul,

A sinful soul possess’d of many gifts,

A spacious garden full of flowering weeds,

A glorious Devil, large in heart and brain,

That did love Beauty only, (Beauty seen

In all varieties of mould and mind)

And Knowledge for its beauty; or if Good,

Good only for its beauty, seeing not

That beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters

That doat upon each other, friends to man,

Living together under the same roof,

And never can be sunder’d without tears.

And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be

Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie

Howling in outer darkness. Not for this

Was common clay ta’en from the common earth,

Moulded by God, and temper’d with the tears

Of angels to the perfect shape of man.

The Palace of Art

I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house

Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.

I said, “O Soul, make merry and carouse,

Dear soul, for all is well”.

A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnish’d brass,

I chose. The ranged ramparts bright

From level meadow-bases of deep grass

Suddenly scaled the light.

Thereon I built it firm. Of ledge or shelf

The rock rose clear, or winding stair.

My soul would live alone unto herself

In her high palace there.

And “while the world  runs round and round,”

I said, “Reign thou apart, a quiet king,

Still as, while Saturn  whirls, his stedfast  shade

Sleeps on his luminous  ring.”

To which my soul made answer readily:

“Trust me, in bliss I shall abide

In this great mansion, that is built for me,

So royal-rich and wide”

...

Four courts I made, East, West and South and North,

In each a squared lawn, wherefrom

The golden gorge of dragons spouted forth

A flood of fountain-foam.

And round the cool green courts there ran a row

Of cloisters, branch’d like mighty woods,

Echoing all night to that sonorous flow

Of spouted fountain-floods.

And round the roofs a gilded gallery

That lent broad verge to distant lands,

Far as the wild swan wings, to where the sky

Dipt down to sea and sands.

From those four jets four currents in one swell

Across the mountain stream’d below

In misty folds, that floating as they fell

Lit up a torrent-bow.

And high on every peak a statue seem’d

To hang on tiptoe, tossing up

A cloud of incense of all odour steam’d

From out a golden cup.

So that she thought, “And who shall gaze upon

My palace with unblinded eyes,

While this great bow will waver in the sun,

And that sweet incense rise?”

For that sweet incense rose and never fail’d,

And, while day sank or mounted higher,

The light aerial gallery, golden-rail’d,

Burnt like a fringe of fire.

Likewise the deep-set windows, stain’d and traced,

Would seem slow-flaming crimson fires

From shadow’d grots of arches interlaced,

And tipt with frost-like spires.

...

Full of long-sounding corridors it was,

That over-vaulted grateful gloom,

Thro’ which the livelong day my soul did pass,

Well-pleased, from room to room.

Full of great rooms and small the palace stood,

All various, each a perfect whole

From living Nature, fit for every mood

And change of my still soul.

For some were hung with arras green and blue,

Showing a gaudy summer-morn,

Where with puff’d cheek the belted hunter blew

His wreathed bugle-horn.

One seem’d all dark and red  a tract of sand,

And some one pacing there alone,

Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,

Lit with a low large moon.

One show’d an iron coast and angry waves.

You seem’d to hear them climb and fall

And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves,

Beneath the windy wall.

And one, a full-fed river winding slow

By herds upon an endless plain,

The ragged rims of thunder brooding low,

With shadow-streaks of rain.

And one, the reapers at their sultry toil.

In front they bound the sheaves.

Behind Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil,

And hoary to the wind.

And one, a foreground black with stones and slags,

Beyond, a line of heights, and higher

All barr’d with long white cloud the scornful crags,

And highest, snow and fire.

And one, an English home  gray twilight pour’d

On dewy pastures, dewy trees,

Softer than sleep  all things in order stored,

A haunt of ancient Peace.

Nor these alone, but every landscape fair,

As fit for every mood of mind,

Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern, was there,

Not less than truth design’d.

...

Or the maid-mother by a crucifix,

In tracts of pasture sunny-warm,

Beneath branch-work of costly sardonyx

Sat smiling, babe in arm.

Or in a clear-wall’d city on the sea,

Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair

Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;

An angel look’d at her.

Or thronging all one porch of Paradise,

A group of Houris bow’d to see

The dying Islamite, with hands and eyes

That said, We wait for thee.

Or mythic Uther’s deeply-wounded son

In some fair space of sloping greens

Lay, dozing in the vale of Avalon,

And watch’d by weeping queens.

Or hollowing one hand against his ear,

To list a foot-fall, ere he saw

The wood-nymph, stay’d the Ausonian king to hear

Of wisdom and of law.

Or over hills with peaky tops engrail’d,

And many a tract of palm and rice,

The throne of Indian Cama  slowly sail’d

A summer fann’d with spice.

Or sweet Europa’s  mantle blew unclasp’d,

From off her shoulder backward borne:

From one hand droop’d a crocus: one hand grasp’d

The mild bull’s golden horn.

Or else flush’d Ganymede, his rosy thigh

Half-buried in the Eagle’s down,

Sole as a flying star shot thro’ the sky

Above  the pillar’d town.

Nor  these alone: but every  legend fair

Which the supreme Caucasian mind

Carved out of Nature for itself, was there,

Not less than life, design’d.

* * * *

Then in the towers I placed great bells that swung,

Moved of themselves, with silver sound;

And with choice paintings of wise men I hung

The royal dais round.

For there was Milton like a seraph strong,

Beside him Shakespeare bland and mild;

And there the world-worn Dante grasp’d his song,

And somewhat grimly smiled.

And there the Ionian father of the rest;

A million wrinkles carved his skin;

A hundred winters snow’d upon his breast,

From cheek and throat and chin.

Above, the fair hall-ceiling stately set

Many an arch high up did lift,

And angels rising and descending met

With interchange of gift.

Below was all mosaic choicely plann’d

With cycles of the human tale

Of this wide world, the times of every land

So wrought, they will not fail.

The people here, a beast of burden slow,

Toil’d onward, prick’d with goads and stings;

Here play’d, a tiger, rolling to and fro

The heads and crowns of kings;

Here rose, an athlete, strong to break or bind

All force in bonds that might endure,

And here once more like some sick man declined,

And trusted any cure.

But over these she trod: and those great bells

Began to chime. She took her throne:

She sat betwixt the shining Oriels,

To sing her songs alone.

And thro’ the topmost Oriels’ colour’d flame

Two godlike faces gazed below;

Plato the wise, and large-brow’d Verulam,

The first of those who know.

And all those names, that in their motion were

Full-welling fountain-heads of change,

Betwixt the slender shafts were blazon’d fair

In diverse raiment strange:

Thro’ which the lights, rose, amber, emerald, blue,

Flush’d in her temples and her eyes,

And from her lips, as morn from Memnon,  drew

Rivers of melodies.

No nightingale delighteth to prolong

Her low preamble all alone,

More than my soul to hear her echo’d song

Throb thro’ the ribbed stone;

Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth,

Joying to feel herself alive,

Lord over Nature, Lord of  the visible earth,

Lord of the senses five;

Communing with herself: “All these are mine,

And let the world have peace or wars,

Tis one to me”. She  when young night divine

Crown’d dying day with stars,

Making sweet close of his delicious toils

Lit light in wreaths and anadems,

And pure quintessences of precious oils

In hollow’d moons of gems,

To mimic heaven; and clapt her hands and cried,

“I marvel if my still delight

In this great house so royal-rich, and wide,

Be flatter’d to the height.

“O all things fair to sate my various eyes!

O shapes and hues that please me well!

O silent faces of the Great and Wise,

My Gods, with whom I dwell!

“O God-like isolation which art mine,

I can but count thee perfect gain,

What time I watch the darkening droves of swine

That range on yonder plain.

“In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin,

They graze and wallow, breed and sleep;

And oft some brainless devil enters in,

And drives them to the deep.”

Then of the moral instinct would she prate,

And of the rising from the dead,

As hers by right of full-accomplish’d Fate;

And at the last she said:

“I take possession of man’s mind and deed.

I care not what the sects may brawl,

I sit as God holding no form of creed,

But contemplating all.”

* * *

Full oft  the riddle of the painful earth

Flash’d thro’ her as she sat alone,

Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth,

And intellectual throne.

And so she throve and prosper’d: so three years

She prosper’d: on the fourth she fell,

Like Herod,  when the shout was in his ears,

Struck thro’ with pangs of hell.

Lest she should fail and perish utterly,

God, before whom ever lie bare

The abysmal deeps of Personality,

Plagued her with sore despair.

When she would think, where’er she turn’d her sight,

The airy hand confusion wrought,

Wrote “Mene, mene,” and divided quite

The kingdom of her thought.

Deep dread and loathing of her solitude

Fell on her, from which mood was born

Scorn of herself; again, from out that mood

Laughter at her self-scorn.

“What! is not this my place of strength,” she said,

“My spacious mansion built for me,

Whereof the strong foundation-stones were laid

Since my first memory? “

But in dark corners of her palace stood

Uncertain shapes; and unawares

On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood,

And horrible nightmares,

And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame,

And, with dim fretted foreheads all,

On corpses three-months-old at noon she came,

That stood against the wall.

A spot of dull stagnation, without light

Or power of movement, seem’d my soul,

‘Mid onward-sloping  motions infinite

Making for one sure goal.

A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand;

Left on the shore; that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land

Their moon-led waters white.

A star that with the choral starry dance

Join’d not, but stood, and standing saw

The hollow orb of moving Circumstance

Roll’d round by one fix’d law.

Back on herself her serpent pride had curl’d.

“No voice,” she shriek’d in that lone hall,

“No voice breaks thro’ the stillness of this world:

One deep, deep silence all!”

She, mouldering with the dull earth’s mouldering sod,

Inwrapt tenfold in slothful shame,

Lay there exiled from eternal God,

Lost to her place and name;

And death and life she hated equally,

And nothing saw, for her despair,

But dreadful time, dreadful eternity,

No comfort anywhere;

Remaining utterly confused with fears,

And ever worse with growing time,

And ever unrelieved by dismal tears,

And all alone in crime:

Shut up as in a crumbling tomb, girt round

With blackness as a solid wall,

Far off she seem’d to hear the dully sound

Of human footsteps fall.

As in strange lands a traveller walking slow,

In doubt and great perplexity,

A little before moon-rise hears the low

Moan of an unknown sea;

And knows not if it be thunder or a sound

Of rocks  thrown down, or one deep cry

Of great wild beasts; then thinketh, “I have found

A new land, but I die”.

She howl’d aloud, “I am on fire within.

There comes no murmur of reply.

What is it that will take away my sin,

And save me lest I die?”

So when four years were wholly finished,

She threw her royal robes away.

“Make me a cottage in the vale,” she said,

“Where I may mourn and pray.

“Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are

So lightly, beautifully built:

Perchance I may return with others there

When I have purged my guilt.”

The May Queen

The first two parts were first published in 1833. The scenery is typical of Lincolnshire; in Fitzgerald’s phrase, it is all Lincolnshire inland, as Locksley Hall is seaboard.

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear;

To-morrow ‘ill be the happiest time of all the glad  New-year;

Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day;

For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

There’s many a black, black eye, they say, but none so bright as mine;

There’s Margaret and Mary, there’s Kate and Caroline:

But none so fair as little Alice in all the land they say,

So I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

I sleep so sound all night, mother, that I shall never wake,

If you  do not call me loud when the day begins to break:

But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay,

For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

As I came up the valley whom think ye should I see,

But Robin  leaning on the bridge beneath the hazel-tree?

He thought of that sharp look, mother, I gave him yesterday,

But I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

He thought I was a ghost, mother, for I was all in white,

And I ran by him without speaking, like a flash of light.

They call me cruel-hearted, but I care not what they say,

For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

They say he’s dying all for love, but that can never be:

They say his heart is breaking, mother  what is that to me?

There’s many a bolder lad ‘ill woo me any summer day,

And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

Little Effie shall go with me to-morrow to the green,

And you’ll be there, too, mother, to see me made the Queen;

For the shepherd lads on every side ‘ill come from far away,

And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

The honeysuckle round the porch has wov’n its wavy bowers,

And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo-flowers;

And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in swamps and hollows gray,

And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

The night-winds come and go, mother, upon the meadow-grass,

And the happy stars above them seem to brighten as they pass;

There will not be a drop of rain the whole of the live-long day,

And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

All the valley, mother, ‘ill be fresh and green and still,

And the cowslip and the crowfoot are over all the hill,

And the rivulet in the flowery dale ‘ill merrily glance and play,

For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

So you must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear,

To-morrow ‘ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year:

To-morrow ‘ill be of all the year the maddest merriest day,

For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

New Year’s Eve

If you’re waking call me early, call me early, mother dear,

For I would see the sun rise upon the glad New-year.

It is the last New-year that I shall ever see,

Then you may lay me low i’ the mould and think no more of me.

To-night I saw the sun set: he set and left behind

The good old year, the dear old time, and all my peace of mind;

And the New-year’s coming up, mother, but I shall never see

The blossom on  the blackthorn, the leaf upon the tree.

Last May we made a crown of flowers: we had a merry day;

Beneath the hawthorn on the green they made me Queen of May;

And we danced about the may-pole and in the hazel copse,

Till Charles’s Wain came out above the tall white chimney-tops.

There’s not a flower on all the hills: the frost is on the pane:

I only wish to live till the snowdrops come again:

I wish the snow would melt and the sun come out on high:

I long to see a flower so before the day I die.

The building rook’ll caw from the windy tall elm-tree,

And the tufted plover pipe along the fallow lea,

And the swallow’ll come back again with summer o’er the wave.

But I shall lie alone, mother, within the mouldering grave.

Upon the chancel-casement, and upon that grave of mine,

In the early, early morning the summer sun’ll shine,

Before the red cock crows from the farm upon the hill,

When you are warm-asleep, mother, and all the world is still.

When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning light

You’ll never see me more in the long gray fields at night;

When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool

On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the pool.

You’ll bury me,  my mother, just beneath the hawthorn shade,

And you’ll come  sometimes and see me where I am lowly laid.

I shall not forget you, mother, I shall hear you when you pass,

With your feet above my head in the long and pleasant grass.

I have been wild and wayward, but you’ll forgive  me now;

You’ll kiss me, my own mother, and forgive me ere I go;

Nay, nay, you must not weep,  nor let your grief be wild,

You should not fret for me, mother, you  have another child.

If I can I’ll come again, mother, from out my resting-place;

Tho’ you’ll  not see me, mother, I shall look upon your face;

Tho’ I cannot speak a word, 1 shall harken what you  say,

And be often, often with you when you think  I’m far away.

Good-night, good-night, when I have said good-night for evermore,

And you  see me carried out from the threshold of the door;

Don’t let Effie come to see me till my grave be growing green:

She’ll be a better child to you than ever I have been.

She’ll find my garden-tools upon the granary floor:

Let her take ‘em: they are hers: I shall never garden more:

But tell her, when I’m gone, to train the rose-bush that I set

About the parlour-window and the box of mignonette.

Good-night, sweet mother: call me before the day is born.

All night I lie awake, but I fall asleep at morn;

But I would see the sun rise upon the glad New-year,

So, if your waking, call me, call me early, mother dear.

The Hesperides

Hesperus and his daughters three

That sing about the golden tree.

(Comus).

The Northwind fall’n, in the newstarred night

Zidonian Hanno, voyaging beyond

The hoary promontory of Soloë

Past Thymiaterion, in calmèd bays,

Between the Southern and the Western Horn,

Heard neither warbling of the nightingale,

Nor melody o’ the Lybian lotusflute

Blown seaward from the shore; but from a slope

That ran bloombright into the Atlantic blue,

Beneath a highland leaning down a weight

Of cliffs, and zoned below with cedarshade,

Came voices, like the voices in a dream,

Continuous, till he reached the other sea.

The Lotos Eaters

First published in 1833, but when republished in 1842 the alterations in the way of excision, alteration, and addition were very extensive. The text of 1842 is practically the final text. This charming poem is founded on Odyssey, ix., 82 seq.

“On the tenth day we set foot on the land of the lotos-eaters who eat a flowery food. So we stepped ashore and drew water.... When we had tasted meat and drink I sent forth certain of my company to go and make search what manner of men they were who here live upon the earth by bread.... Then straightway they went and mixed with the men of the lotos-eaters, and so it was that the lotos-eaters devised not death for our fellows but gave them of the lotos to taste. Now whosoever of them did eat the honey-sweet fruit of the lotos had no more wish to bring tidings nor to come back, but there he chose to abide with the lotos-eating men ever feeding on the lotos and forgetful of his homeward way. Therefore I led them back to the ships weeping and sore against their will ... lest haply any should eat of the lotos and be forgetful of returning.”

(Lang and Butcher’s translation.)

But in the details of his poem Tennyson has laid many other poets under contribution, notably Moschus, Idyll, v.; Bion, Idyll, v.; Spenser, Faerie Queen, II. vi. (description of the Idle Lake), and Thomson’s Castle of Indolence.

“Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land,

“This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.”

In the afternoon they came unto a land,

In which it seemed always afternoon.

All round the coast the languid air did swoon,

Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.

Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;

And like a downward smoke, the slender stream

Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,

Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;

And some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke,

Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

They saw the gleaming river seaward flow

From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops,

Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,

Stood sunset-flush’d: and, dew’d with showery drops,

Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.

The charmed sunset linger’d low adown

In the red West: thro’ mountain clefts the dale

Was seen far inland, and the yellow down

Border’d with palm, and many a winding vale

And meadow, set with slender galingale;

A land where all things always seem’d the same!

And round about the keel with faces pale,

Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,

Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave

To each, but whoso did receive of them,

And taste, to him the gushing of the wave

Far far away did seem to mourn and rave

On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,

His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;

And deep-asleep he seem’d, yet all awake,

And music in his ears his beating heart did make.

They sat them down upon the yellow sand,

Between the sun and moon upon the shore;

And sweet it was to dream of Father-land,

Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore

Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,

Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.

Then some one said, “We will return no more”;

And all at once they sang, “Our island home

Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam”.

Choric Song

1

There is sweet music here that softer falls

Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

Or night-dews on still waters between walls

Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes;

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.

Here are cool mosses deep,

And thro’ the moss the ivies creep,

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

2

Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,

And utterly consumed with sharp distress,

While all things else have rest from weariness?

All things have rest: why should we toil alone,

We only toil, who are the first of things,

And make perpetual moan,

Still from one sorrow to another thrown:

Nor ever fold our wings,

And cease from wanderings,

Nor steep our brows in slumber’s holy balm;

Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,

“There is no joy but calm!”

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

3

Lo! in the middle of the wood,

The folded leaf is woo’d from out the bud

With winds upon the branch, and there

Grows green and broad, and takes no care,

Sun-steep’d at noon, and in the moon

Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow

Falls, and floats adown the air.

Lo! sweeten’d with the summer light,

The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,

Drops in a silent autumn night.

All its allotted length of days,

The flower ripens in its place,

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,

Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.

4

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,

Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.

Death is the end of life; ah, why

Should life all labour be?

Let us alone.

Time driveth onward fast,

And in a little while our lips are dumb.

Let us alone.

What is it that will last?

All things are taken from us, and become

Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.

Let us alone.

What pleasure can we have

To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave

In silence; ripen, fall and cease:

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

5

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,

With half-shut eyes ever to seem

Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,

Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;

To hear each other’s whisper’d speech:

Eating the Lotos day by day,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,

And tender curving lines of creamy spray;

To lend our hearts and spirits wholly

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;

To muse and brood and live again in memory,

With those  old faces of our infancy

Heap’d over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

6

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,

And dear the last embraces of our wives

And their warm tears: but all hath suffer’d change;

For surely now our household hearths are cold:

Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:

And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.

Or else the island princes over-bold

Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings

Before them of the ten-years’ war in Troy,

And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.

Is there confusion in the little isle?

Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile:

‘Tis hard to settle order once again.

There is confusion worse than death,

Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labour unto aged breath,

Sore task to hearts worn out with  many wars

And eyes grow dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

7

But, propt on beds  of amaranth and moly,

How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)

With half-dropt eyelids still,

Beneath a heaven dark and holy,

To watch the long bright river drawing slowly

His waters from the purple hill

To hear the dewy echoes calling

From cave to cave thro’ the thick-twined vine

To watch  the emerald-colour’d water falling

Thro’ many a wov’n acanthus-wreath divine!

Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,

Only to hear were sweet, stretch’d out beneath the pine.

8

The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:

The Lotos blows by every winding creek:

All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:

Thro’ every hollow cave and alley lone

Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.

We have had enough of action, and of motion we,

Roll’d to starboard, roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl’d

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl’d

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,

Like a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong;

Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,

Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,

Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;

Till they perish and they suffer  some,’tis whisper’d  down in hell

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,

Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore

Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;

Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

Rosalind

Not reprinted till 1884 when it was unaltered, as it has remained since: but the poem appended and printed by Tennyson in italics has not been reprinted.

My Rosalind, my Rosalind,

My frolic falcon, with bright eyes,

Whose free delight, from any height of rapid flight,

Stoops at all game that wing the skies,

My Rosalind, my Rosalind,

My bright-eyed, wild-eyed falcon, whither,

Careless both of wind and weather,

Whither fly ye, what game spy ye,

Up or down the streaming wind?

II

The quick lark’s closest-carolled strains,

The shadow rushing up the sea,

The lightningflash atween the rain,

The sunlight driving down the lea,

The leaping stream, the very wind,

That will not stay, upon his way,

To stoop the cowslip to the plains,

Is not so clear and bold and free

As you, my falcon Rosalind.

You care not for another’s pains,

Because you are the soul of joy,

Bright metal all without alloy.

Life shoots and glances thro’ your veins,

And flashes off a thousand ways,

Through lips and eyes in subtle rays.

Your hawkeyes are keen and bright,

Keen with triumph, watching still

To pierce me through with pointed light;

And oftentimes they flash and glitter

Like sunshine on a dancing rill,

And your words are seeming-bitter,

Sharp and few, but seeming-bitter

From excess of swift delight.

III

Come down, come home, my Rosalind,

My gay young hawk, my Rosalind:

Too long you keep the upper skies;

Too long you roam, and wheel at will;

But we must hood your random eyes,

That care not whom they kill,

And your cheek, whose brilliant hue

Is so sparkling fresh to view,

Some red heath-flower in the dew,

Touched with sunrise. We must bind

And keep you fast, my Rosalind,

Fast, fast, my wild-eyed Rosalind,

And clip your wings, and make you love:

When we have lured you from above,

And that delight of frolic flight, by day or night,

From North to South;

We’ll bind you fast in silken cords,

And kiss away the bitter words

From off your rosy mouth.

My Rosalind, my Rosalind

My Rosalind, my Rosalind,

Bold, subtle, careless Rosalind,

Is one of those who know no strife

Of inward woe or outward fear;

To whom the slope and stream of life,

The life before, the life behind,

In the ear, from far and near,

Chimeth musically clear.

My falconhearted Rosalind,

Fullsailed before a vigorous wind,

Is one of those who cannot weep

For others’ woes, but overleap

All the petty shocks and fears

That trouble life in early years,

With a flash of frolic scorn

And keen delight, that never falls

Away from freshness, self-upborne

With such gladness, as, whenever

The freshflushing springtime calls

To the flooding waters cool,

Young fishes, on an April morn,

Up and down a rapid river,

Leap the little waterfalls

That sing into the pebbled pool.

My happy falcon, Rosalind;

Hath daring fancies of her own,

Fresh as the dawn before the day,

Fresh as the early seasmell blown

Through vineyards from an inland bay.

My Rosalind, my Rosalind,

Because no shadow on you falls

Think you hearts are tennis balls

To play with, wanton Rosalind?

A Dream of Fair Women

First published in 1833 but very extensively altered on its republication in 1842. It had been written by June, 1832, and appears to have been originally entitled Legend of Fair Women (see Spedding’s letter dated 21st June, 1832, Life, i., 116). In nearly every edition between 1833 and 1853 it was revised, and perhaps no poem proves more strikingly the scrupulous care which Tennyson took to improve what he thought susceptible of improvement. The work which inspired it, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, was written about 1384, thus “preluding” by nearly two hundred years the “spacious times of great Elizabeth”. There is no resemblance between the poems beyond the fact that both are visions and both have as their heroines illustrious women who have been unfortunate. Cleopatra is the only one common to the two poems. Tennyson’s is an exquisite work of art  the transition from the anarchy of dreams to the dreamland landscape and to the sharply denned figures  the skill with which the heroines (what could be more perfect that Cleopatra and Jephtha’s daughter?) are chosen and contrasted  the wonderful way in which the Iphigenia of Euripides and Lucretius and the Cleopatra of Shakespeare are realised are alike admirable. The poem opened in 1833 with the following strangely irrelevant verses, excised in 1842, which as Fitzgerald observed “make a perfect poem by themselves without affecting the ‘dream ‘”

As when a man, that sails in a balloon,

Downlooking sees the solid shining ground

Stream from beneath him in the broad blue noon,

Tilth, hamlet, mead and mound:

And takes his flags and waves them to the mob,

That shout below, all faces turned to where

Glows ruby-like the far up crimson globe,

Filled with a finer air:

So lifted high, the Poet at his will

Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all,

Higher thro’ secret splendours mounting still,

Self-poised, nor fears to fall.

Hearing apart the echoes of his fame.

While I spoke thus, the seedsman, memory,

Sowed my deepfurrowed thought with many a name,

Whose glory will not die.

I read, before my eyelids dropt their shade,

“The Legend of Good Women,” long ago

Sung by the morning star  of song, who made

His music heard below;

Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath

Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill

The spacious times of great Elizabeth

With sounds that echo still.

And, for a while, the knowledge of his art

Held me above the subject, as strong gales

Hold swollen clouds from raining, tho’ my heart,

Brimful of those wild tales,

Charged both mine eyes with tears.

In every land I saw, wherever light illumineth,

Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand

The downward slope to death.

Those far-renowned brides of ancient song

Peopled the hollow dark, like burning stars,

And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong,

And trumpets blown for wars;

And clattering flints batter’d with clanging hoofs:

And I saw crowds in column’d sanctuaries;

And forms that pass’d  at windows and on roofs

Of marble palaces;

Corpses across the threshold; heroes tall

Dislodging pinnacle and parapet

Upon the tortoise creeping to the wall;

Lances in ambush set;

And high shrine-doors burst thro’ with heated blasts

That run before the fluttering tongues of fire;

White surf wind-scatter’d over sails and masts,

And ever climbing higher;

Squadrons and squares of men in brazen plates,

Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes,

Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,

And hush’d seraglios.

So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land

Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,

Torn from the fringe of spray.

I started once, or seem’d to start in pain,

Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak,

As when a great thought strikes along the brain,

And flushes all the cheek.

And once my arm was lifted to hew down,

A cavalier from off his saddle-bow,

That bore a lady from a leaguer’d town;

And then, I know not how,

All those sharp fancies, by down-lapsing thought

Stream’d onward, lost their edges, and did creep

Roll’d on each other, rounded, smooth’d and brought

Into the gulfs of sleep.

At last methought that I had wander’d far

In an old wood: fresh-wash’d in coolest dew,

The maiden splendours of the morning star

Shook in the steadfast  blue.

Enormous elmtree-boles did stoop and lean

Upon the dusky brushwood underneath

Their broad curved branches, fledged with clearest green,

New from its silken sheath.

The dim red morn had died, her journey done,

And with dead lips smiled at the twilight plain,

Half-fall’n across the threshold of the sun,

Never to rise again.

There was no motion in the dumb dead air,

Not any song of bird or sound of rill;

Gross darkness of the inner sepulchre

Is not so deadly still

As that wide forest.

Growths of jasmine turn’d

Their humid arms festooning tree to tree,

And at the root thro’ lush green grasses burn’d

The red anemone.

I knew the flowers, I knew the leaves, I knew

The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn

On those long, rank, dark wood-walks, drench’d in dew,

Leading from lawn to lawn.

The smell of violets, hidden in the green,

Pour’d back into my empty soul and frame

The times when I remember to have been

Joyful and free from blame.

And from within me a clear under-tone

Thrill’d thro’ mine ears in that unblissful clime

“Pass freely thro’: the wood is all thine own,

Until the end of time”.

At length I saw a lady  within call,

Stiller than chisell’d marble, standing there;

A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,

And most divinely fair.

Her loveliness with shame and with surprise

Froze my swift speech: she turning on my face

The star-like sorrows of immortal eyes,

Spoke slowly in her place.

“I had great beauty: ask thou not my name:

No one can be more wise than destiny.

Many drew swords and died.

Where’er I came I brought calamity.”

“No marvel, sovereign lady : in fair field

Myself for such a face had boldly died,”

I answer’d free; and turning I appeal’d

To one  that stood beside.

But she, with sick and scornful looks averse,

To her full height her stately stature draws;

“My youth,” she said, “was blasted with a curse:

This woman was the cause.

“I was cut off from hope in that sad place,

Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears:

My father held his hand upon his face;

I, blinded with my tears,

“Still strove to speak: my voice was thick with sighs

As in a dream. Dimly I could descry

The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes,

Waiting to see me die.

“The high masts flicker’d as they lay afloat;

The crowds, the temples, waver’d, and the shore;

The bright death quiver’d at the victim’s throat;

Touch’d; and I knew no more.”

Whereto the other with a downward brow:

“I would the white cold heavy-plunging foam,

Whirl’d by the wind, had roll’d me deep below,

Then when I left my home.”

Her slow full words sank thro’ the silence drear,

As thunder-drops fall on a sleeping sea:

Sudden I heard a voice that cried, “Come here,

That I may look on thee”.

I turning saw, throned on a flowery rise,

One sitting on a crimson scarf unroll’d;

A queen, with swarthy cheeks  and bold black eyes,

Brow-bound with burning gold.

She, flashing forth a haughty smile, began:

“I govern’d men by change, and so I sway’d

All moods. Tis long since I have seen a man.

Once, like the moon, I made

“The ever-shifting currents of the blood

According to my humour ebb and flow.

I have no men to govern in this wood:

That makes my only woe.

“Nay  yet it chafes me that I could not bend

One will; nor tame and tutor with mine eye

That dull cold-blooded Caesar. Prythee, friend,

Where is Mark Antony?

“The man, my lover, with whom I rode sublime

On Fortune’s neck: we sat as God by God:

The Nilus would have risen before his time

And flooded at our nod.

“We drank the Libyan  Sun to sleep, and lit

Lamps which outburn’d Canopus. O my life In Egypt!

O the dalliance and the wit,

The flattery and the strife,

“And the wild kiss, when fresh from war’s alarms,

My Hercules, my Roman Antony,

My mailèd Bacchus leapt into my arms,

Contented there to die!

“And there he died: and when I heard my name

Sigh’d forth with life, I would not brook my fear

Of the other: with a worm I balk’d his fame.

What else was left? look here!”

(With that she tore her robe apart, and half

The polish’d argent of her breast to sight

Laid bare. Thereto she pointed with a laugh,

Showing the aspick’s bite.)

“I died a Queen. The Roman soldier found

Me lying dead, my crown about my brows,

A name for ever!  lying robed and crown’d,

Worthy a Roman spouse.”

Her warbling voice, a lyre of widest range

Struck  by all passion, did fall down and glance

From tone to tone, and glided thro’ all change

Of liveliest utterance.

When she made pause I knew not for delight;

Because with sudden motion from the ground

She raised her piercing orbs, and fill’d with light

The interval of sound.

Still with their fires Love tipt his keenest darts;

As once they drew into two burning rings

All beams of Love, melting the mighty hearts

Of captains and of kings.

Slowly my sense undazzled. Then I heard

A noise of some one coming thro’ the lawn,

And singing clearer than the crested bird,

That claps his wings at dawn.

“The torrent brooks of hallow’d Israel

From craggy hollows pouring, late and soon,

Sound all night long, in falling thro’ the dell,

Far-heard beneath the moon.

“The balmy moon of blessed Israel

Floods all the deep-blue gloom with beams divine:

All night the splinter’d crags that wall the dell

With spires of silver shine.”

As one that museth where broad sunshine laves

The lawn by some cathedral, thro’ the door

Hearing the holy organ rolling waves

Of sound on roof and floor,

Within, and anthem sung, is charm’d and tied

To where he stands,  so stood I, when that flow

Of music left the lips of her that died

To save her father’s vow;

The daughter of the warrior Gileadite,

A maiden pure; as when she went along

From Mizpeh’s tower’d gate with welcome light,

With timbrel and with song.

My words leapt forth: “Heaven heads the count of crimes

With that wild oath”. She render’d answer high:

“Not so, nor once alone; a thousand times

I would be born and die.

“Single I grew, like some green plant, whose root

Creeps to the garden water-pipes beneath,

Feeding the flower; but ere my flower to fruit

Changed, I was ripe for death.

“My God, my land, my father  these did move

Me from my bliss of life, that Nature gave,

Lower’d softly with a threefold cord of love

Down to a silent grave.

“And I went mourning, ‘No fair Hebrew boy

Shall smile away my maiden blame among

The Hebrew mothers’  emptied of all joy,

Leaving the dance and song,

“Leaving the olive-gardens far below,

Leaving the promise of my bridal bower,

The valleys of grape-loaded vines that glow

Beneath the battled tower

“The light white cloud swam over us. Anon

We heard the lion roaring from his den;

We saw the large white stars rise one by one,

Or, from the darken’d glen,

“Saw God divide the night with flying flame,

And thunder on the everlasting hills.

I heard Him, for He spake, and grief became

A solemn scorn of ills.

“When the next moon was roll’d into the sky,

Strength came to me that equall’d my desire.

How beautiful a thing it was to die

For God and for my sire!

“It comforts me in this one thought to dwell,

That I subdued me to my father’s will;

Because the kiss he gave me, ere I fell,

Sweetens the spirit still.

“Moreover it is written that my race

Hew’d Ammon, hip and thigh, from Aroer

On Arnon unto Minneth.” Here her face

Glow’d, as I look’d at her.

She lock’d her lips: she left me where I stood:

“Glory to God,” she sang, and past afar,

Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood,

Toward the morning-star.

Losing her carol I stood pensively,

As one that from a casement leans his head,

When midnight bells cease ringing suddenly,

And the old year is dead.

“Alas! alas!” a low voice, full of care,

Murmur’d beside me: “Turn and look on me:

I am that Rosamond, whom men call fair,

If what I was I be.

“Would I had been some maiden coarse and poor!

O me, that I should ever see the light!

Those dragon eyes of anger’d Eleanor

Do haunt me, day and night.”

She ceased in tears, fallen from hope and trust:

To whom the Egyptian: “O, you tamely died!

You should have clung to Fulvia’s waist, and thrust

The dagger thro’ her side”.

With that sharp sound the white dawn’s creeping beams,

Stol’n to my brain, dissolved the mystery

Of folded sleep. The captain of my dreams

Ruled in the eastern sky.

Morn broaden’d on the borders of the dark,

Ere I saw her, who clasp’d in her last trance

Her murder’d father’s head, or Joan of Arc,

A light of ancient France;

Or her, who knew that Love can vanquish Death,

Who kneeling, with one arm about her king,

Drew forth the poison with her balmy breath,

Sweet as new buds in Spring.

No memory labours longer from the deep

Gold-mines of thought to lift the hidden ore

That glimpses, moving up, than I from sleep

To gather and tell o’er

Each little sound and sight. With what dull pain

Compass’d, how eagerly I sought to strike

Into that wondrous track of dreams again!

But no two dreams are like.

As when a soul laments, which hath been blest,

Desiring what is mingled with past years,

In yearnings that can never be exprest

By sighs or groans or tears;

Because all words, tho’ cull’d  with choicest art,

Failing to give the bitter of the sweet,

Wither beneath the palate, and the heart

Faints, faded by its heat.

Song  “Who can say...?”

Who can say

Why To-day

To-morrow will be yesterday?

Who can tell

Why to smell

The violet, recalls the dewy prime

Of youth and buried time?

The cause is nowhere found in rhyme.

Margaret

First printed in 1833.

Another of Tennyson’s delicious fancy portraits, the twin sister to Adeline.

1

O sweet pale Margaret,

O rare pale Margaret,

What lit your eyes with tearful power,

Like moonlight on a falling shower?

Who lent you, love, your mortal dower

Of pensive thought and aspect pale,

Your melancholy sweet and frail

As perfume of the cuckoo-flower?

From the westward-winding flood,

From the evening-lighted wood,

From all things outward you have won

A tearful grace, as tho’  you stood

Between the rainbow and the sun.

The very smile before you speak,

That dimples your transparent cheek,

Encircles all the heart, and feedeth

The senses with a still delight

Of dainty sorrow without sound,

Like the tender amber round,

Which the moon about her spreadeth,

Moving thro’ a fleecy night.

2

You love, remaining peacefully,

To hear the murmur of the strife,

But enter not the toil of life.

Your spirit is the calmed sea,

Laid by the tumult of the fight.

You are the evening star, alway

Remaining betwixt dark and bright:

Lull’d echoes of laborious day

Come to you, gleams of mellow light

Float by you on the verge of night.

3

What can it matter, Margaret,

What songs below the waning stars

The lion-heart, Plantagenet,

Sang looking thro’ his prison bars?

Exquisite Margaret, who can tell

The last wild thought of Chatelet,

Just ere the falling axe did part

The burning brain from the true heart,

Even in her sight he loved so well?

4

A fairy shield your Genius made

And gave you on your natal day.

Your sorrow, only sorrow’s shade,

Keeps real sorrow far away.

You move not in such solitudes,

You are not less divine,

But more human in your moods,

Than your twin-sister, Adeline.

Your hair is darker, and your eyes

Touch’d with a somewhat darker hue,

And less aerially blue,

But ever trembling thro’ the dew

Of dainty-woeful sympathies.

5

O sweet pale Margaret,

O rare pale Margaret,

Come down, come down, and hear me speak:

Tie up the ringlets on your cheek:

The sun is just about to set.

The arching lines are tall and shady,

And faint, rainy lights are seen,

Moving in the leavy beech.

Rise from the feast of sorrow, lady,

Where all day long you sit between

Joy and woe, and whisper each.

Or only look across the lawn,

Look out below your bower-eaves,

Look down, and let your blue eyes dawn

Upon me thro’ the jasmine-leaves.

Kate

Reprinted without alteration among the Juvenilia in 1895.

I know her by her angry air,

Her brightblack eyes, her brightblack hair,

Her rapid laughters wild and shrill,

As laughter of the woodpecker

From the bosom of a hill.

‘Tis Kate  she sayeth what she will;

For Kate hath an unbridled tongue,

Clear as the twanging of a harp.

Her heart is like a throbbing star.

Kate hath a spirit ever strung

Like a new bow, and bright and sharp

As edges of the scymetar.

Whence shall she take a fitting mate?

For Kate no common love will feel;

My woman-soldier, gallant Kate,

As pure and true as blades of steel.

Kate saith “the world is void of might”.

Kate saith “the men are gilded flies”.

Kate snaps her fingers at my vows;

Kate will not hear of lover’s sighs.

I would I were an armèd knight,

Far famed for wellwon enterprise,

And wearing on my swarthy brows

The garland of new-wreathed emprise:

For in a moment I would pierce

The blackest files of clanging fight,

And strongly strike to left and right,

In dreaming of my lady’s eyes.

Oh! Kate loves well the bold and fierce;

But none are bold enough for Kate,

She cannot find a fitting mate.

Sonnet: “Blow ye the trumpet, gather from afar...”

Written, on hearing of the outbreak of the Polish Insurrection.

Blow ye the trumpet, gather from afar

The hosts to battle: be not bought and sold.

Arise, brave Poles, the boldest of the bold;

Break through your iron shackles  fling them far.

O for those days of Piast, ere the Czar

Grew to this strength among his deserts cold;

When even to Moscow’s cupolas were rolled

The growing murmurs of the Polish war!

Now must your noble anger blaze out more

Than when from Sobieski, clan by clan,

The Moslem myriads fell, and fled before

Than when Zamoysky smote the Tartar Khan,

Than earlier, when on the Baltic shore

Boleslas drove the Pomeranian.

Poland

Reprinted without alteration in 1872, except the removal of italics in “now” among the Early Sonnets.

How long, O God, shall men be ridden down,

And trampled under by the last and least

Of men? The heart of Poland hath not ceased

To quiver, tho’ her sacred blood doth drown

The fields; and out of every smouldering town

Cries to Thee, lest brute Power be increased,

Till that o’ergrown Barbarian in the East

Transgress his ample bound to some new crown:

Cries to thee, “Lord, how long shall these things be?

How long this icyhearted Muscovite

Oppress the region?” Us, O Just and Good,

Forgive, who smiled when she was torn in three;

Us, who stand now, when we should aid the right

A matter to be wept with tears of blood!

To –– (“As when, with downcast eyes...”)

Reprinted without alteration as first of the Early Sonnets in 1872; subsequently in the twelfth line “That tho’” was substituted for “Altho’,” and the last line was altered to

“And either lived in either’s heart and speech,”

and “hath” was not italicised.

As when with downcast eyes we muse and brood,

And ebb into a former life, or seem

To lapse far back in some confused dream

To states of mystical similitude;

If one but speaks or hems or stirs his chair,

Ever the wonder waxeth more and more,

So that we say, “All this hath been before,

All this hath been, I know not when or where”.

So, friend, when first I look’d upon your face,

Our thought gave answer each to each, so true

Opposed mirrors each reflecting each

Altho’ I knew not in what time or place,

Methought that I had often met with you,

And each had lived in the other’s mind and speech.

O Darling Room

I

O darling room, my heart’s delight,

Dear room, the apple of my sight,

With thy two couches soft and white,

There is no room so exquisite,

No little room so warm and bright,

Wherein to read, wherein to write.

II

For I the Nonnenwerth have seen,

And Oberwinter’s vineyards green,

Musical Lurlei; and between

The hills to Bingen have I been,

Bingen in Darmstadt, where the Rhene

Curves towards Mentz, a woody scene.

III

Yet never did there meet my sight,

In any town, to left or right,

A little room so exquisite,

With two such couches soft and white;

Not any room so warm and bright,

Wherein to read, wherein to write.

To Christopher North

You did late review my lays,

Crusty Christopher;

You did mingle blame and praise,

Rusty Christopher.

When I learnt from whom it came,

I forgave you all the blame,

Musty Christopher;

I could not forgive the praise,

Fusty Christopher.

The Death of the Old Year

Only one alteration has been made in this poem, in line 41, where in 1842 “one’ was altered to” twelve “.

Full knee-deep lies the winter snow,

And the winter winds are wearily sighing:

Toll ye the church-bell sad and slow,

And tread softly and speak low,

For the old year lies a-dying.

Old year, you must not die;

You came to us so readily,

You lived with us so steadily,

Old year, you shall not die.

He lieth still: he doth not move:

He will not see the dawn of day.

He hath no other life above.

He gave me a friend, and a true, true-love,

And the New-year will take ‘em away.

Old year, you must not go;

So long as you have been with us,

Such joy as you have seen with us,

Old year, you shall not go.

He froth’d his bumpers to the brim;

A jollier year we shall not see.

But tho’ his eyes are waxing dim,

And tho’ his foes speak ill of him,

He was a friend to me.

Old year, you shall not die;

We did so laugh and cry with you,

I’ve half a mind to die with you,

Old year, if you must die.

He was full of joke and jest,

But all his merry quips are o’er.

To see him die, across the waste

His son and heir doth ride post-haste,

But he’ll be dead before.

Every one for his own.

The night is starry and cold, my friend,

And the New-year blithe and bold, my friend,

Comes up to take his own.

How hard he breathes! over the snow

I heard just now the crowing cock.

The shadows flicker to and fro:

The cricket chirps: the light burns low:

‘Tis nearly twelve  o’clock.

Shake hands, before you die.

Old year, we’ll dearly rue for you:

What is it we can do for you?

Speak out before you die.

His face is growing sharp and thin.

Alack! our friend is gone.

Close up his eyes: tie up his chin:

Step from the corpse, and let him in

That standeth there alone,

And waiteth at the door.

There’s a new foot on the floor, my friend,

And a new face at the door, my friend,

A new face at the door.

To J. S.

This beautiful poem was addressed to James Spedding on the death of his brother Edward.

The wind, that beats the mountain, blows

More softly round the open wold,

And gently comes the world to those

That are cast in gentle mould.

And me this knowledge bolder made,

Or else I had not dared to flow

In these words toward you, and invade

Even with a verse your holy woe.

‘Tis strange that those we lean on most,

Those in whose laps our limbs are nursed,

Fall into shadow, soonest lost:

Those we love first are taken first.

God gives us love. Something to love

He lends us; but, when love is grown

To ripeness, that on which it throve

Falls off, and love is left alone.

This is the curse of time. Alas!

In grief I am not all unlearn’d;

Once thro’ mine own doors Death did pass;

One went, who never hath return’d.

He will not smile  nor speak to me

Once more. Two years his chair is seen

Empty before us. That was he

Without whose life I had not been.

Your loss is rarer; for this star

Rose with you thro’ a little arc

Of heaven, nor having wander’d far

Shot on the sudden into dark.

I knew your brother: his mute dust

I honour and his living worth:

A man more pure and bold  and just

Was never born into the earth.

I have not look’d upon you nigh,

Since that dear soul hath fall’n asleep.

Great Nature is more wise than I:

I will not tell you not to weep.

And tho’ mine own eyes fill with dew,

Drawn from the spirit thro’ the brain,

I will not even preach to you,

“Weep, weeping dulls the inward pain”.

Let Grief be her own mistress still.

She loveth her own anguish deep

More than much pleasure. Let her will

Be done  to weep or not to weep.

I will not say “God’s ordinance

Of Death is blown in every wind”;

For that is not a common chance

That takes away a noble mind.

His memory long will live alone

In all our hearts, as mournful light

That broods above the fallen sun,

And dwells in heaven half the night.

Vain solace! Memory standing near

Cast down her eyes, and in her throat

Her voice seem’d distant, and a tear

Dropt on the letters  as I wrote.

I wrote I know not what. In truth,

How should I soothe you anyway,

Who miss the brother of your youth?

Yet something I did wish to say:

For he too was a friend to me:

Both are my friends, and my true breast

Bleedeth for both; yet it may be

That only  silence suiteth best.

Words weaker than your grief would make

Grief more. ‘Twere better I should cease;

Although myself could almost take

The place of him that sleeps in peace.

Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace:

Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,

While the stars burn, the moons increase,

And the great ages onward roll.

Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet.

Nothing comes to thee new or strange.

Sleep full of rest from head to feet;

Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.

THE LOVER’S TALE. A FRAGMENT.

It was originally intended by Tennyson that this long poem should form part of his 1833 volume. It was put in type and, according to custom, copies were distributed among his friends, when, on the eve of publication, he decided to omit the poem. Again, in 1869, it was sent to press with a new third part added, and was again withdrawn, the third part only—’The Golden Supper,’ founded on a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron — being published in the volume, ‘The Holy Grail.’ In 1866, 1870 and 1875, attempts had been made by Mr Herne Shepherd to publish editions of The Lover’s Tale, reprinted from stray proof copies of the 1833 printing. Each of these attempts was repressed by Tennyson, and at last in 1879 the complete poem was issued, with an apologetic reference to the necessity of reprinting the poem to prevent its circulation in an unauthorised form. But the 1879 issue is considerably altered from the original issue of 1833, as written by Tennyson in his nineteenth year. Since only as a product of Tennyson’s youth does the poem merit any attention, it has seemed good to reprint it here as originally written.

THE LOVER’S TALE

A FRAGMENT

The Poem of the Lover’s Tale (the lover is supposed to be himself a poet) was written in my nineteenth year, and consequently contains nearly as many faults as words. That I deemed it not wholly unoriginal is my only apology for its publication — an apology lame and poor, and somewhat impertinent to boot: so that if its infirmities meet with more laughter than charity in the world, I shall not raise my voice in its defence. I am aware how deficient the Poem is in point of art, and it is not without considerable misgivings that I have ventured to publish even this fragment of it. ‘Enough,’ says the old proverb, ‘is as good as a feast.’ — (Tennyson’s original introductory note.)

Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff,

Filling with purple gloom the vacancies

Between the tufted hills the sloping seas

Hung in mid-heaven, and half-way down rare sails,

White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky.

Oh! pleasant breast of waters, quiet bay,

Like to a quiet mind in the loud world,

Where the chafed breakers of the outer sea

Sunk powerless, even as anger falls aside,

And withers on the breast of peaceful love,

Thou didst receive that belt of pines, that fledged

The hills that watch’d thee, as Love watcheth Love, —

In thine own essence, and delight thyself

To make it wholly thine on sunny days.

Keep thou thy name of ‘Lover’s bay’: See, Sirs,

Even now the Goddess of the Past, that takes

The heart, and sometimes toucheth but one string,

That quivers, and is silent, and sometimes

Sweeps suddenly all its half-moulder’d chords

To an old melody, begins to play

On those first-moved fibres of the brain.

I come, Great mistress of the ear and eye:

Oh! lead me tenderly, for fear the mind

Rain thro’ my sight, and strangling sorrow weigh

Mine utterance with lameness. Tho’ long years

Have hallowed out a valley and a gulf

Betwixt the native land of Love and me,

Breathe but a little on me, and the sail

Will draw me to the rising of the sun,

The lucid chambers of the morning star,

And East of life.

Permit me, friend, I prithee,

To pass my hand across my brows, and muse

On those dear hills, that nevermore will meet

The sight that throbs and aches beneath my touch,

As tho’ there beat a heart in either eye;

For when the outer lights are darken’d thus,

The memory’s vision hath a keener edge.

It grows upon me now — the semicircle

Of dark blue waters and the narrow fringe

Of curving beach — its wreaths of dripping green —

Its pale pink shells — the summer-house aloft

That open’d on the pines with doors of glass,

A mountain nest the pleasure boat that rock’d

Light-green with its own shadow, keel to keel,

Upon the crispings of the dappled waves

That blanched upon its side.

O Love, O Hope,

They come, they crowd upon me all at once,

Moved from the cloud of unforgotten things,

That sometimes on the horizon of the mind

Lies folded — often sweeps athwart in storm —

They flash across the darkness of my brain,

The many pleasant days, the moolit nights,

The dewy dawnings and the amber eyes,

When thou and I, Camilla, thou and I

Were borne about the bay, or safely moor’d

Beneath some low brow’d cavern, where the wave

Plash’d sapping its worn ribs (the while without,

And close above us, sang the wind-tost pine,

And shook its earthly socket, for we heard,

In rising and in falling with the tide,

Close by our ears, the huge roots strain and creak),

Eye feeding upon eye with deep intent;

And mine, with love too high to be express’d

Arrested in its sphere, and ceasing from

All contemplation of all forms, did pause

To worship mine own image, laved in light,

The centre of the splendours, all unworthy

Of such a shrine — mine image in her eyes,

By diminution made most glorious,

Moved with their motions, as those eyes were moved

With motions of the soul, as my heart beat

Twice to the melody of hers. Her face

Was starry-fair, not pale, tenderly flush’d

As ‘twere with dawn. She was dark-hair’d, dark-eyed;

Oh, such dark eyes! A single glance of them

Will govern a whole life from birth to death,

Careless of all things else, led on with light

In trances and in visions: look at them,

You lose yourself in utter ignorance,

You cannot find their depth; for they go back,

And farther back, and still withdraw themselves

Quite into the deep soul, that evermore,

Fresh springing from her fountains in the brain,

Still pouring thro’, floods with redundant light

Her narrow portals.

Trust me, long ago

I should have died, if it were possible

To die in gazing on that perfectness

Which I do bear within me; I had died

But from my farthest lapse, my latest ebb,

Thine image, like a charm of light and strength

Upon the waters, pushed me back again

On these deserted sands of barren life.

Tho’ from the deep vault, where the heart of hope

Fell into dust, and crumbled in the dark —

Forgetting who to render beautiful

Her countenance with quick and healthful blood —

Thou didst not sway me upward, could I perish

With such a costly casket in the grasp

Of memory? He, that saith it, hath o’erstepp’d

The slippery footing of his narrow wit,

And fall’n away from judgment. Thou art light,

To which my spirit leaneth all her flowers,

And length of days, and immortality

Of thought, and freshness ever self-renew’d.

For Time and Grief abode too long with Life,

And like all other friends i’ the world, at last

They grew aweary of her fellowship:

So Time and Grief did beckon unto Death,

And Death drew nigh and beat the doors of Life;

But thou didst sit alone in the inner house,

A wakeful port’ress and didst parle with Death,

‘This is a charmed dwelling which I hold’;

So Death gave back, and would no further come.

Yet is my life nor in the present time,

Nor in the present place. To me alone,

Pushed from his chair of regal heritage,

The Present is the vassal of the Past:

So that, in that I have lived, do I live,

And cannot die, and am, in having been,

A portion of the pleasant yesterday,

Thrust forward on to-day and out of place;

A body journeying onward, sick with toil,

The lithe limbs bow’d as with a heavy weight

And all the senses weaken’d in all save that

Which, long ago, they had glean’d and garner’d up

Into the granaries of memory —

The clear brow, bulwark of the precious brain,

Now seam’d and chink’d with years — and all the while

The light soul twines and mingles with the growths

Of vigorous early days, attracted, won,

Married, made one with, molten into all

The beautiful in Past of act or place.

Even as the all-enduring camel, driven

Far from the diamond fountain by the palms,

Toils onward thro’ the middle moonlight nights,

Shadow’d and crimson’d with the drifting dust,

Or when the white heats of the blinding noons

Beat from the concave sand; yet in him keeps

A draught of that sweet fountain that he loves,

To stay his feet from falling, and his spirit

From bitterness of death.

Ye ask me, friends,

When I began to love. How should I tell ye?

Or from the after fulness of my heart,

Flow back again unto my slender spring

And first of love, tho’ every turn and depth

Between is clearer in my life than all

Its present flow. Ye know not what ye ask.

How should the broad and open flower tell

What sort of bud it was, when press’d together

In its green sheath, close lapt in silken folds?

It seemed to keep its sweetness to itself,

Yet was not the less sweet for that it seem’d.

For young Life knows not when young Life was born,

But takes it all for granted: neither Love,

Warm in the heart, his cradle can remember

Love in the womb, but resteth satisfied,

Looking on her that brought him to the light:

Or as men know not when they fall asleep

Into delicious dreams, our other life,

So know I not when I began to love.

This is my sum of knowledge — that my love

Grew with myself — and say rather, was my growth,

My inward sap, the hold I have on earth,

My outward circling air wherein I breathe,

Which yet upholds my life, and evermore

Was to me daily life and daily death:

For how should I have lived and not have loved?

Can ye take off the sweetness from the flower,

The colour and the sweetness from the rose,

And place them by themselves? or set apart

Their motions and their brightness from the stars,

And then point out the flower or the star?

Or build a wall betwixt my life and love,

And tell me where I am? ‘Tis even thus:

In that I live I love; because I love

I live: whate’er is fountain to the one

Is fountain to the other; and whene’er

Our God unknits the riddle of the one,

There is no shade or fold of mystery

Swathing the other.

Many, many years,

For they seem many and my most of life,

And well I could have linger’d in that porch,

So unproportioned to the dwelling place,

In the maydews of childhood, opposite

The flush and dawn of youth, we lived together,

Apart, alone together on those hills.

Before he saw my day my father died,

And he was happy that he saw it not:

But I and the first daisy on his grave

From the same clay came into light at once.

As Love and I do number equal years

So she, my love, is of an age with me.

How like each other was the birth of each!

The sister of my mother — she that bore

Camilla close beneath her beating heart,

Which to the imprisoned spirit of the child,

With its true touched pulses in the flow

And hourly visitation of the blood,

Sent notes of preparation manifold,

And mellow’d echoes of the outer world —

My mother’s sister, mother of my love,

Who had a twofold claim upon my heart,

One twofold mightier than the other was,

In giving so much beauty to the world,

And so much wealth as God had charged her with,

Loathing to put it from herself for ever,

Crown’d with her highest act the placid face

And breathless body of her good deeds past.

So we were born, so orphan’d. She was motherless,

And I without a father. So from each

Of those two pillars which from earth uphold

Our childhood, one had fall’n away, and all

The careful burthen of our tender years

Trembled upon the other. He that gave

Her life, to me delightedly fulfill’d

All loving-kindnesses, all offices

Of watchful care and trembling tenderness.

He worked for both: he pray’d for both: he slept

Dreaming of both; nor was his love the less

Because it was divided, and shot forth

Boughs on each side, laden with wholesome shade,

Wherein we rested sleeping or awake,

And sung aloud the matin-song of life.

She was my foster-sister: on one arm

The flaxen ringlets of our infancies

Wander’d, the while we rested: one soft lap

Pillow’d us both: one common light of eyes

Was on us as we lay: our baby lips,

Kissing one bosom, ever drew from thence

The stream of life, one stream, one life, one blood,

One sustenance, which, still as thought grew large,

Still larger moulding all the house of thought,

Perchance assimilated all our tastes

And future fancies. ‘Tis a beautiful

And pleasant meditation, what whate’er

Our general mother meant for me alone,

Our mutual mother dealt to both of us:

So what was earliest mine in earliest life,

I shared with her in whom myself remains.

As was our childhood, so our infancy,

They tell me, was a very miracle

Of fellow-feeling and communion.

They tell me that we would not be alone, —

We cried when we were parted; when I wept,

Her smile lit up the rainbow on my tears,

Stay’d on the clouds of sorrow; that we loved

The sound of one another’s voices more

Than the grey cuckoo loves his name, and learn’d

To lisp in tune together; that we slept

In the same cradle always, face to face,

Heart beating time to heart, lip pressing lip,

Folding each other, breathing on each other,

Dreaming together (dreaming of each other

They should have added) till the morning light

Sloped thro’ the pines, upon the dewy pane

Falling, unseal’d our eyelids, and we woke

To gaze upon each other. If this be true,

At thought of which my whole soul languishes

And faints, and hath no pulse, no breath, as tho’

A man in some still garden should infuse

Rich attar in the bosom of the rose,

Till, drunk with its own wine and overfull

Of sweetness, and in smelling of itself,

It fall on its own thorns — if this be true —

And that way my wish leaneth evermore

Still to believe it—’tis so sweet a thought,

Why in the utter stillness of the soul

Doth question’d memory answer not, nor tell,

Of this our earliest, our closest drawn,

Most loveliest, most delicious union?

Oh, happy, happy outset of my days!

Green springtide, April promise, glad new year

Of Being, which with earliest violets,

And lavish carol of clear-throated larks,

Fill’d all the march of life. — I will not speak of thee;

These have not seen thee, these can never know thee,

They cannot understand me. Pass on then

A term of eighteen years. Ye would but laugh

If I should tell ye how I heard in thought

Those rhymes, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’

‘The Four-and-twenty Blackbirds’ ‘Banbury Cross,’

‘The Gander’ and ‘The man of Mitylene,’

And all the quaint old scraps of ancient crones,

Which are as gems set in my memory,

Because she learn’d them with me. Or what profits it

To tell ye that her father died, just ere

The daffodil was blown; or how we found

The drowned seaman on the shore? These things

Unto the quiet daylight of your minds

Are cloud and smoke, but in the dark of mine

Show traced with flame. Move with me to that hour,

Which was the hinge on which the door of Hope,

Once turning, open’d far into the outward,

And never closed again.

I well remember,

It was a glorious morning, such a one

As dawns but once a season. Mercury

On such a morning would have flung himself

From cloud to cloud, and swum with balanced wings

To some tall mountain. On that day the year

First felt his youth and strength, and from his spring

Moved smiling toward his summer. On that day,

Love working shook his wings (that charged the winds

With spiced May-sweets from bound to bound) and blew

Fresh fire into the sun, and from within

Burst thro’ the heated buds, and sent his soul

Into the songs of birds, and touch’d far-off

His mountain-altars, his high hills, with flame

Milder and purer. Up the rocks we wound;

The great pine shook with lovely sounds of joy,

That came on the sea-wind. As mountain brooks

Our blood ran free: the sunshine seem’d to brood

More warmly on the heart than on the brow.

We often paused, and looking back, we saw

The clefts and openings in the hills all fill’d

With the blue valley and the glistening brooks,

And with the low dark groves — a land of Love;

Where Love was worshipp’d upon every height,

Where Love was worshipp’d under every tree —

A land of promise, flowing with the milk

And honey of delicious memories

Down to the sea, as far as eye could ken,

From verge to verge it was a holy land,

Still growing holier as you near’d the bay,

For where the temple stood. When we had reach’d

The grassy platform on some hill, I stoop’d,

I gather’d the wild herbs, and for her brows

And mine wove chaplets of the self-same flower,

Which she took smiling, and with my work there

Crown’d her clear forehead. Once or twice she told me

(For I remember all things), to let grow

The flowers that run poison in their veins.

She said, ‘The evil flourish in the world’;

Then playfully she gave herself the lie:

‘Nothing in nature is unbeautiful,

So, brother, pluck and spare not.’ So I wove

Even the dull-blooded poppy, ‘whose red flower

Hued with the scarlet of a fierce sunrise,

Like to the wild youth of an evil king,

Is without sweetness, but who crowns himself

Above the secret poisons of his heart

In his old age’ — a graceful thought of hers

Graven on my fancy! As I said, with these

She crown’d her forehead. O how like a nymph,

A stately mountain-nymph, she look’d! how native

Unto the hills she trod on! What an angel!

How clothed with beams! My eyes, fix’d upon hers,

Almost forgot even to move again.

My spirit leap’d as with those thrills of bliss

That shoot across the soul in prayer, and show us

That we are surely heard. Methought a light

Burst from the garland I had woven, and stood

A solid glory on her bright black hair:

A light, methought, broke from her dark, dark eyes,

And shot itself into the singing winds;

A light, methought, flash’d even from her white robe,

As from a glass in the sun, and fell about

My footsteps on the mountains.

About sunset

We came unto the hill of woe, so call’d

Because the legend ran that, long time since,

One rainy night, when every wind blew loud,

A woful man had thrust his wife and child

With shouts from off the bridge, and following, plunged

Into the dizzy chasm below. Below,

Sheer thro’ the black-wall’d cliff the rapid brook

Shot down his inner thunders, built above

With matted bramble and the shining gloss

Of ivy-leaves, whose low-hung tresses, dipp’d

In the fierce stream, bore downward with the wave.

The path was steep and loosely strewn with crags

We mounted slowly: yet to both of us

It was delight, not hindrance: unto both

Delight from hardship to be overcome,

And scorn of perilous seeming: unto me

Intense delight and rapture that I breathed,

As with a sense of nigher Deity,

With her to whom all outward fairest things

Were by the busy mind referr’d, compared,

As bearing no essential fruits of excellence.

Save as they were the types and shadowings

Of hers — and then that I became to her

A tutelary angel as she rose,

And with a fearful self-impelling joy

Saw round her feet the country far away,

Beyond the nearest mountain’s bosky brows,

Burst into open prospect — heath and hill,

And hollow lined and wooded to the lips —

And steep down walls of battlemented rock

Girded with broom or shiver’d into peaks —

And glory of broad waters interfused,

Whence rose as it were breath and steam of gold;

And over all the great wood rioting

And climbing, starr’d at slender intervals

With blossom tufts of purest white; and last,

Framing the mighty landskip to the West,

A purple range of purple cones, between

Whose interspaces gush’d, in blinding bursts,

The incorporate light of sun and sea.

At length,

Upon the tremulous bridge, that from beneath

Seemed with a cobweb firmament to link

The earthquake-shattered chasm, hung with shrubs,

We passed with tears of rapture. All the West,

And even unto the middle South, was ribb’d

And barr’d with bloom on bloom. The sun beneath,

Held for a space ‘twixt cloud and wave, shower’d down

Rays of a mighty circle, weaving over

That varied wilderness a tissue of light

Unparallel’d. On the other side the moon,

Half-melted into thin blue air, stood still

And pale and fibrous as a wither’d leaf,

Nor yet endured in presence of his eyes

To imbue his lustre; most unloverlike;

Since in his absence full of light and joy

And giving light to others. But this chiefest,

Next to her presence whom I loved so well,

Spoke loudly, even into my inmost heart,

As to my outward hearing: the loud stream,

Forth issuing from his portals in the crag

(A visible link unto the home of my heart),

Ran amber toward the West, and nigh the sea,

Parting my own loved mountains, was received

Shorn of its strength, into the sympathy

Of that small bay, which into open main

Glow’d intermingling close beneath the sun

Spirit of Love! That little hour was bound,

Shut in from Time, and dedicate to thee;

Thy fires from heav’n had touch’d it, and the earth

They fell on became hallow’d evermore.

We turn’d: our eyes met: her’s were bright, and mine

Were dim with floating tears, that shot the sunset,

In light rings round me; and my name was borne

Upon her breath. Henceforth my name has been

A hallow’d memory, like the names of old;

A center’d, glory-circled memory,

And a peculiar treasure, brooking not

Exchange or currency; and in that hour

A hope flow’d round me, like a golden mist

Charm’d amid eddies of melodious airs,

A moment, ere the onward whirlwind shatter it,

Waver’d and floated — which was less than Hope,

Because it lack’d the power of perfect Hope;

But which was more and higher than all Hope,

Because all other Hope hath lower aim;

Even that this name to which her seraph lips

Did lend such gentle utterance, this one name

In some obscure hereafter, might inwreathe

(How lovelier, nobler then!) her life, her love,

With my life, love, soul, spirit and heart and strength.

‘Brother,’ she said, ‘let this be call’d henceforth

The Hill of Hope’; and I replied: ‘O sister,

My will is one with thine; the Hill of Hope.’

Nevertheless, we did not change the name.

Love lieth deep; Love dwells not in lip-depths:

Love wraps her wings on either side the heart,

Constraining it with kisses close and warm,

Absorbing all the incense of sweet thoughts

So that they pass not to the shrine of sound.

Else had the life of that delighted hour

Drunk in the largeness of the utterance

Of Love; but how should earthly measure mete

The heavenly unmeasured or unlimited Love,

Which scarce can tune his high majestic sense

Unto the thunder-song that wheels the spheres;

Scarce living in the Aeolian harmony,

And flowing odour of the spacious air;

Scarce housed in the circle of this earth:

Be cabin’d up in words and syllables,

Which waste with the breath that made ‘em.

Sooner earth

Might go round heaven, and the straight girth of Time

Inswathe the fullness of Eternity,

Than language grasp the infinite of Love.

O day, which did enwomb that happy hour,

Thou art blest in the years, divinest day!

O Genius of that hour which dost uphold

Thy coronal of glory like a God,

Amid thy melancholy mates far-seen,

Who walk before thee, and whose eyes are dim

With gazing on the light and depth of thine

Thy name is ever worshipp’d among hours!

Had I died then, I had not seem’d to die

For bliss stood round me like the lights of heaven,

That cannot fade, they are so burning bright.

Had I died then, I had not known the death;

Planting my feet against this mound of time

I had thrown me on the vast, and from this impulse

Continuing and gathering ever, ever,

Agglomerated swiftness, I had lived

That intense moment thro’ eternity.

Oh, had the Power from whose right hand the light

Of Life issueth, and from whose left hand floweth

The shadow of Death, perennial effluences,

Whereof to all that draw the wholesome air,

Somewhile the one must overflow the other;

Then had he stemm’d my day with night and driven

My current to the fountain whence it sprang —

Even his own abiding excellence —

On me, methinks, that shock of gloom had fall’n

Unfelt, and like the sun I gazed upon,

Which, lapt in seeming dissolution,

And dipping his head low beneath the verge,

Yet bearing round about him his own day,

In confidence of unabated strength,

Steppeth from heaven to heaven, from light to light,

And holding his undimmed forehead far

Into a clearer zenith, pure of cloud;

So bearing on thro’ Being limitless

The triumph of this foretaste, I had merged

Glory in glory, without sense of change.

We trod the shadow of the downward hill;

We pass’d from light to dark. On the other side

Is scooped a cavern and a mountain-hall,

Which none have fathom’d. If you go far in

(The country people rumour) you may hear

The moaning of the woman and the child,

Shut in the secret chambers of the rock.

I too have heard a sound — perchance of streams

Running far-off within its inmost halls,

The home of darkness, but the cavern mouth,

Half overtrailed with a wanton weed

Gives birth to a brawling stream, that stepping lightly

Adown a natural stair of tangled roots,

Is presently received in a sweet grove

Of eglantine, a place of burial

Far lovelier than its cradle; for unseen

But taken with the sweetness of the place,

It giveth out a constant melody

That drowns the nearer echoes. Lower down

Spreads out a little lake, that, flooding, makes

Cushions of yellow sand; and from the woods

That belt it rise three dark tall cypresses;

Three cypresses, symbols of mortal woe,

That men plant over graves.

Hither we came,

And sitting down upon the golden moss

Held converse sweet and low — low converse sweet,

In which our voices bore least part. The wind

Told a love-tale beside us, how he woo’d

The waters, and the crisp’d waters lisp’d

The kisses of the wind, that, sick with love,

Fainted at intervals, and grew again

To utterance of passion. Ye cannot shape

Fancy so fair as is this memory.

Methought all excellence that ever was

Had drawn herself from many thousand years,

And all the separate Edens of this earth,

To centre in this place and time. I listen’d,

And her words stole with most prevailing sweetness

Into my heart, as thronged fancies come,

All unawares, into the poet’s brain;

Or as the dew-drops on the petal hung,

When summer winds break their soft sleep with sighs,

Creep down into the bottom of the flower.

Her words were like a coronal of wild blooms

Strung in the very negligence of Art,

Or in the art of Nature, where each rose

Doth faint upon the bosom of the other,

Flooding its angry cheek with odorous tears.

So each with each inwoven lived with each,

And were in union more than double-sweet.

What marvel my Camilla told me all?

It was so happy an hour, so sweet a place,

And I was as the brother of her blood,

And by that name was wont to live in her speech,

Dear name! which had too much of nearness in it

And heralded the distance of this time.

At first her voice was very sweet and low,

As tho’ she were afeard of utterance;

But in the onward current of her speech,

(As echoes of the hollow-banked brooks

Are fashioned by the channel which they keep)

His words did of their meaning borrow sound,

Her cheek did catch the colour of her words,

I heard and trembled, yet I could but hear;

My heart paused, — my raised eyelids would not fall,

But still I kept my eyes upon the sky.

I seem’d the only part of Time stood still,

And saw the motion of all other things;

While her words, syllable by syllable,

Like water, drop by drop, upon my ear

Fell, and I wish’d, yet wish’d her not to speak,

But she spoke on, for I did name no wish.

What marvel my Camilla told me all

Her maiden dignities of Hope and Love,

‘Perchance’ she said ‘return’d.’ Even then the stars

Did tremble in their stations as I gazed;

But she spake on, for I did name no wish,

No wish — no hope. Hope was not wholly dead,

But breathing hard at the approach of Death,

Updrawn in expectation of her change —

Camilla, my Camilla, who was mine

No longer in the dearest use of mine —

The written secrets of her inmost soul

Lay like an open scroll before my view,

And my eyes read, they read aright, her heart

Was Lionel’s: it seem’d as tho’ a link

Of some light chain within my inmost frame

Was riven in twain: that life I heeded not

Flow’d from me, and the darkness of the grave,

The darkness of the grave and utter night,

Did swallow up my vision: at her feet,

Even the feet of her I loved, I fell,

Smit with exceeding sorrow unto death.

Then had the earth beneath me yawning given

Sign of convulsion; and tho’ horrid rifts

Sent up the moaning of unhappy spirits

Imprison’d in her centre, with the heat

Of their infolding element; had the angels,

The watchers at heaven’s gate, push’d them apart,

And from the golden threshold had down-roll’d

Their heaviest thunder, I had lain as still,

And blind and motionless as then I lay!

White as quench’d ashes, cold as were the hopes

Of my lorn love! What happy air shall woo

The wither’d leaf fall’n in the woods, or blasted

Upon this bough? a lightning stroke had come

Even from that Heaven in whose light I bloom’d

And taken away the greenness of my life,

The blossom and the fragrance. Who was cursed

But I? who miserable but I? even Misery

Forgot herself in that extreme distress,

And with the overdoing of her part

Did fall away into oblivion.

The night in pity took away my day

Because my grief as yet was newly born,

Of too weak eyes to look upon the light,

And with the hasty notice of the ear,

Frail life was startled from the tender love

Of him she brooded over. Would I had lain

Until the pleached ivy tress had wound

Round my worn limbs, and the wild briar had driven

Its knotted thorns thro’ my unpaining brows

Leaning its roses on my faded eyes.

The wind had blown above me, and the rain

Had fall’n upon me, and the gilded snake

Had nestled in this bosomthrone of love,

But I had been at rest for evermore.

Long time entrancement held me: all too soon,

Life (like a wanton too-officious friend

Who will not hear denial, vain and rude

With proffer of unwished for services)

Entering all the avenues of sense,

Pass’d thro’ into his citadel, the brain

With hated warmth of apprehensiveness:

And first the chillness of the mountain stream

Smote on my brow, and then I seem’d to hear

Its murmur, as the drowning seaman hears,

Who with his head below the surface dropt,

Listens the dreadful murmur indistinct

Of the confused seas, and knoweth not

Beyond the sound he lists: and then came in

O’erhead the white light of the weary moon,

Diffused and molten into flaky cloud.

Was my sight drunk, that it did shape to me

Him who should own that name? or had my fancy

So lethargised discernment in the sense,

That she did act the step-dame to mine eyes,

Warping their nature, till they minister’d

Unto her swift conceits? ‘Twere better thus

If so be that the memory of that sound

With mighty evocation, had updrawn

The fashion and the phantasm of the form

It should attach to. There was no such thing. —

It was the man she loved, even Lionel,

The lover Lionel, the happy Lionel,

All joy; who drew the happy atmosphere

Of my unhappy sighs, fed with my tears,

To him the honey dews of orient hope.

Oh! rather had some loathly ghastful brow,

Half-bursten from the shroud, in cere cloth bound,

The dead skin withering on the fretted bone,

The very spirit of Paleness made still paler

By the shuddering moonlight, fix’d his eyes on mine

Horrible with the anger and the heat

Of the remorseful soul alive within,

And damn’d unto his loathed tenement.

Methinks I could have sooner met that gaze!

Oh, how her choice did leap forth from his eyes!

Oh, how her love did clothe itself in smiles

About his lips! This was the very arch-mock

And insolence of uncontrolled Fate,

When the effect weigh’d seas upon my head

To twit me with the cause.

Why how was this?

Could he not walk what paths he chose, nor breathe

What airs he pleased! Was not the wide world free,

With all her interchange of hill and plain

To him as well as me? I know not, faith:

But Misery, like a fretful, wayward child,

Refused to look his author in the face,

Must he come my way too? Was not the South,

The East, the West, all open, if he had fall’n

In love in twilight? Why should he come my way,

Robed in those robes of light I must not wear,

With that great crown of beams about his brows?

Come like an angel to a damned soul?

To tell him of the bliss he had with God;

Come like a careless and a greedy heir,

That scarce can wait the reading of the will

Before he takes possession? Was mine a mood

To be invaded rudely, and not rather

A sacred, secret, unapproached woe

Unspeakable? I was shut up with grief;

She took the body of my past delight,

Narded, and swathed and balm’d it for herself,

And laid it in a new-hewn sepulchre,

Where man had never lain. I was led mute

Into her temple like a sacrifice;

I was the high-priest in her holiest place,

Not to be loudly broken in upon.

Oh! friend, thoughts deep and heavy as these well-nigh

O’erbore the limits of my brain; but he

Bent o’er me, and my neck his arm upstay’d

From earth. I thought it was an adder’s fold,

And once I strove to disengage myself,

But fail’d, I was so feeble. She was there too:

She bent above me too: her cheek was pale,

Oh! very fair and pale: rare pity had stolen

The living bloom away, as tho’ a red rose

Should change into a white one suddenly.

Her eyes, I saw, were full of tears in the morn,

And some few drops of that distressful rain

Being wafted on the wind, drove in my sight,

And being there they did break forth afresh

In a new birth, immingled with my own,

And still bewept my grief. Keeping unchanged

The purport of their coinage. Her long ringlets,

Drooping and beaten with the plaining wind,

Did brush my forehead in their to-and-fro:

For in the sudden anguish of her heart

Loosed from their simple thrall they had flowed abroad,

And onward floating in a full, dark wave,

Parted on either side her argent neck,

Mantling her form half way. She, when I woke,

After my refluent health made tender quest

Unanswer’d, for I spoke not: for the sound

Of that dear voice so musically low,

And now first heard with any sense of pain,

As it had taken life away before,

Choked all the syllables that in my throat

Strove to uprise, laden with mournful thanks,

From my full heart: and ever since that hour,

My voice hath somewhat falter’d — and what wonder

That when hope died, part of her eloquence

Died with her? He, the blissful lover, too,

From his great hoard of happiness distill’d

Some drops of solace; like a vain rich man,

That, having always prosper’d in the world,

Folding his hands deals comfortable words

To hearts wounded for ever; yet, in truth,

Fair speech was his and delicate of phrase,

Falling in whispers on the sense, address’d

More to the inward than the outward ear,

As rain of the midsummer midnight soft

Scarce-heard, recalling fragrance and the green

Of the dead spring — such as in other minds

Had film’d the margents of the recent wound.

And why was I to darken their pure love,

If, as I knew, they two did love each other,

Because my own was darken’d? Why was I

To stand within the level of their hopes,

Because my hope was widow’d, like the cur

In the child’s adage? Did I love Camilla?

Ye know that I did love her: to this present

My full-orb’d love hath waned not. Did I love her,

And could I look upon her tearful eyes?

Tears wept for me; for me — weep at my grief?

What had she done to weep — let my heart

Break rather — whom the gentlest airs of heaven

Should kiss with an unwonted gentleness.

Her love did murder mine; what then? she deem’d

I wore a brother’s mind: she call’d me brother:

She told me all her love: she shall not weep.

The brightness of a burning thought awhile

Battailing with the glooms of my dark will,

Moonlike emerged, lit up unto itself,

Upon the depths of an unfathom’d woe,

Reflex of action, starting up at once,

As men do from a vague and horrid dream,

And throwing by all consciousness of self,

In eager haste I shook him by the hand;

Then flinging myself down upon my knees

Even where the grass was warm where I had lain,

I pray’d aloud to God that he would hold

The hand of blessing over Lionel,

And her whom he would make his wedded wife,

Camilla! May their days be golden days,

And their long life a dream of linked love,

From which may rude Death never startle them,

But grow upon them like a glorious vision

Of unconceived and awful happiness,

Solemn but splendid, full of shapes and sounds,

Swallowing its precedent in victory.

Let them so love that men and boys may say,

Lo! how they love each other! till their love

Shall ripen to a proverb unto all,

Known when their faces are forgot in the land.

And as for me, Camilla, as for me,

Think not thy tears will make my name grow green, —

The dew of tears is an unwholesome dew.

The course of Hope is dried, — the life o’ the plant —

They will but sicken the sick plant more.

Deem then I love thee but as brothers do,

So shalt thou love me still as sisters do;

Or if thou dream’st aught farther, dream but how

I could have loved thee, had there been none else

To love as lovers, loved again by thee.

Or this, or somewhat like to this, I spoke,

When I did see her weep so ruefully;

For sure my love should ne’er induce the front

And mask of Hate, whom woful ailments

Of unavailing tears and heart deep moans

Feed and envenom, as the milky blood

Of hateful herbs a subtle-fanged snake.

Shall Love pledge Hatred in her bitter draughts,

And batten on his poisons? Love forbid!

Love passeth not the threshold of cold Hate,

And Hate is strange beneath the roof of Love.

O Love, if thou be’st Love, dry up these tears

Shed for the love of Love; for tho’ mine image,

The subject of thy power, be cold in her,

Yet, like cold snow, it melteth in the source

Of these sad tears, and feeds their downward flow.

So Love, arraign’d to judgment and to death,

Received unto himself a part of blame.

Being guiltless, as an innocent prisoner,

Who when the woful sentence hath been past,

And all the clearness of his fame hath gone

Beneath the shadow of the curse of men,

First falls asleep in swoon. Wherefrom awaked

And looking round upon his tearful friends,

Forthwith and in his agony conceives

A shameful sense as of a cleaving crime —

For whence without some guilt should such grief be?

So died that hour, and fell into the abysm

Of forms outworn, but not to be outworn,

Who never hail’d another worth the Life

That made it sensible. So died that hour,

Like odour wrapt into the winged wind

Borne into alien lands and far away.

There be some hearts so airy-fashioned,

That in the death of love, if e’er they loved,

On that sharp ridge of utmost doom ride highly

Above the perilous seas of change and chance;

Nay, more, holds out the lights of cheerfulness;

As the tall ship, that many a dreary year

Knit to some dismal sandbank far at sea,

All through the lifelong hours of utter dark,

Showers slanting light upon the dolorous wave.

For me all other Hopes did sway from that

Which hung the frailest: falling, they fell too,

Crush’d link on link into the beaten earth,

And Love did walk with banish’d Hope no more,

It was ill-done to part ye, Sisters fair;

Love’s arms were wreathed about the neck of Hope,

And Hope kiss’d Love, and Love drew in her breath

In that close kiss, and drank her whisper’d tales.

They said that Love would die when Hope was gone,

And Love mourned long, and sorrowed after Hope;

At last she sought out memory, and they trod

The same old paths where Love had walked with Hope,

And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears.

II

From that time forth I would not see her more,

But many weary moons I lived alone —

Alone, and in the heart of the great forest.

Sometimes upon the hills beside the sea

All day I watched the floating isles of shade,

And sometimes on the shore, upon the sands

Insensibly I drew her name, until

The meaning of the letters shot into

My brain: anon the wanton billow wash’d

Them over, till they faded like my love.

The hollow caverns heard me — the black brooks

Of the mid-forest heard me — the soft winds,

Laden with thistledown and seeds of flowers,

Paused in their course to hear me, for my voice

Was all of thee: the merry linnet knew me,

The squirrel knew me, and the dragon-fly

Shot by me like a flash of purple fire.

The rough briar tore my bleeding palms; the hemlock,

Brow high, did strike my forehead as I pas’d;

Yet trod I not the wild-flower in my path,

Nor bruised the wild-bird’s egg.

Was this the end?

Why grew we then together i’ the same plot?

Why fed we the same fountain? drew the same sun?

Why were our mothers branches of one stem?

Why were we one in all things, save in that

Where to have been one had been the roof and crown

Of all I hoped and fear’d? if that same nearness

Were father to this distance, and that one

Vauntcourier this double? If affection

Living slew Love, and Sympathy hew’d out

The bosom-sepulchre of Sympathy.

Chiefly I sought the cavern and the hill

Where last we roam’d together, for the sound

Of the loud stream was pleasant, and the wind

Came wooingly with violet smells. Sometimes

All day I sat within the cavern-mouth,

Fixing my eyes on those three cypress-cones

Which spired above the wood; and with mad hand

Tearing the bright leaves of the ivy-screen,

I cast them in the noisy brook beneath,

And watch’d them till they vanished from my sight

Beneath the bower of wreathed eglantines:

And all the fragments of the living rock,

(Huge splinters, which the sap of earliest showers,

Or moisture of the vapour, left in clinging,

When the shrill storm-blast feeds it from behind,

And scatters it before, had shatter’d from

The mountain, till they fell, and with the shock

Half dug their own graves), in mine agony,

Did I make bear of all the deep rich moss

Wherewith the dashing runnel in the spring

Had liveried them all over. In my brain

The spirit seem’d to flag from thought to thought,

Like moonlight wandering through a mist: my blood

Crept like the drains of a marsh thro’ all my body;

The motions of my heart seem’d far within me,

Unfrequent, low, as tho’ it told its pulses;

And yet it shook me, that my frame did shudder,

As it were drawn asunder by the rack.

But over the deep graves of Hope and Fear,

The wreck of ruin’d life and shatter’d thought,

Brooded one master-passion evermore,

Like to a low hung and a fiery sky

Above some great metropolis, earth shock’d

Hung round with ragged-rimmed burning folds,

Embathing all with wild and woful hues —

Great hills of ruins, and collapsed masses

Of thunder-shaken columns, indistinct

And fused together in the tyrannous light.

So gazed I on the ruins of that thought

Which was the playmate of my youth — for which

I lived and breathed: the dew, the sun, the rain,

Unto the growth of body and of mind;

The blood, the breath, the feeling and the motion,

The slope into the current of my years,

Which drove them onward — made them sensible;

The precious jewel of my honour’d life,

Erewhile close couch’d in golden happiness,

Now proved counterfeit, was shaken out,

And, trampled on, left to its own decay.

Sometimes I thought Camilla was no more,

Some one had told me she was dead, and ask’d me

If I would see her burial: then I seem’d

To rise, and thro’ the forest-shadow borne

With more than mortal swiftness, I ran down

The sleepy sea-bank, till I came upon

The rear of a procession, curving round

The silver-sheeted bay: in front of which

Six stately virgins, all in white, upbare

A broad earth-sweeping pall of whitest lawn,

Wreathed round the bier with garlands: in the distance,

From out the yellow woods, upon the hill,

Look’d forth the summit and the pinnacles

Of a grey steeple. All the pageantry,

Save those six virgins which upheld the bier,

Were stoled from head to foot in flowing black;

One walk’d abreast with me, and veiled his brow,

And he was loud in weeping and in praise

Of the departed: a strong sympathy

Shook all my soul: I flung myself upon him

In tears and cries: I told him all my love,

How I had loved her from the first; whereat

He shrunk and howl’d, and from his brow drew back

His hand to push me from him; and the face

The very face and form of Lionel,

Flash’d through my eyes into my innermost brain,

And at his feet I seemed to faint and fall,

To fall and die away. I could not rise,

Albeit I strove to follow. They pass’d on,

The lordly Phantasms; in their floating folds

They pass’d and were no more: but I had fall’n

Prone by the dashing runnel on the grass.

Always th’ inaudible, invisible thought

Artificer and subject, lord and slave

Shaped by the audible and visible,

Moulded the audible and visible;

All crisped sounds of wave, and leaf and wind,

Flatter’d the fancy of my fading brain;

The storm-pavilion’d element, the wood,

The mountain, the three cypresses, the cave,

Were wrought into the tissue of my dream.

The moanings in the forest, the loud stream,

Awoke me not, but were a part of sleep;

And voices in the distance, calling to me,

And in my vision bidding me dream on,

Like sounds within the twilight realms of dreams,

Which wander round the bases of the hills,

And murmur in the low-dropt eaves of sleep,

But faint within the portals. Oftentimes

The vision had fair prelude, in the end

Opening on darkness, stately vestibules

To cares and shows of Death; whether the mind,

With a revenge even to itself unknown,

Made strange division of its suffering

With her, whom to have suffering view’d had been

Extremest pain; or that the clear-eyed Spirit,

Being blasted in the Present, grew at length

Prophetical and prescient of whate’er

The Future had in store; or that which most

Enchains belief, the sorrow of my spirit

Was of so wide a compass it took in

All I had loved, and my dull agony.

Ideally to her transferred, became

Anguish intolerable.

The day waned;

Alone I sat with her: about my brow

Her warm breath floated in the utterance

Of silver-chorded tones: her lips were sunder’d

With smiles of tranquil bliss, which broke in light

Like morning from her eyes — her eloquent eyes

(As I have seen them many hundred times),

Fill’d all with clear pure fire, thro’ mine down rain’d

Their spirit-searching splendours. As a vision

Unto a haggard prisoner, iron-stay’d

In damp and dismal dungeons underground

Confined on points of faith, when strength is shock’d

With torment, and expectancy of worse

Upon the morrow, thro’ the ragged walls,

All unawares before his half-shut eyes,

Comes in upon him in the dead of night,

And with th’ excess of sweetness and of awe,

Makes the heart tremble, and the eyes run over

Upon his steely gyves; so those fair eyes

Shone on my darkness forms which ever stood

Within the magic cirque of memory,

Invisible but deathless, waiting still

The edict of the will to reassume

The semblance of those rare realities

Of which they were the mirrors. Now the light,

Which was their life, burst through the cloud of thought

Keen, irrepressible.

It was a room

Within the summer-house of which I spoke,

Hung round with paintings of the sea, and one

A vessel in mid-ocean, her heaved prow

Clambering, the mast bent, and the revin wind

In her sail roaring. From the outer day,

Betwixt the closest ivies came a broad

And solid beam of isolated light,

Crowded with driving atomies, and fell

Slanting upon that picture, from prime youth

Well-known, well-loved. She drew it long ago

Forth gazing on the waste and open sea,

One morning when the upblown billow ran

Shoreward beneath red clouds, and I had pour’d

Into the shadowing pencil’s naked forms

Colour and life: it was a bond and seal

Of friendship, spoken of with tearful smiles;

A monument of childhood and of love,

The poesy of childhood; my lost love

Symbol’d in storm. We gazed on it together

In mute and glad remembrance, and each heart

Grew closer to the other, and the eye

Was riveted and charm-bound, gazing like

The Indian on a still-eyed snake, low crouch’d

A beauty which is death, when all at once

That painted vessel, as with inner life,

‘Gan rock and heave upon that painted sea;

An earthquake, my loud heartbeats, made the ground

Roll under us, and all at once soul, life,

And breath, and motion, pass’d and flow’d away

To those unreal billows: round and round

A whirlwind caught and bore us; mighty gyves,

Rapid and vast, of hissing spray wind-driven

Far through the dizzy dark. Aloud she shriek’d —

My heart was cloven with pain. I wound my arms

About her: we whirl’d giddily: the wind

Sung: but I clasp’d her without fear: her weight

Shrank in my grasp, and over my dim eyes

And parted lips which drank her breath, down hung

The jaws of Death: I, screaming, from me flung

The empty phantom: all the sway and whirl

Of the storm dropt to windless calm, and I

Down welter’d thro’ the dark ever and ever.

POEMS, 1842

In 1842, while living modestly in London, Tennyson published two volumes of Poems, of which the first volume mostly contained works already published in 1832, including a revised The Lady of Shallot, whilst the second volume was comprised almost entirely of new poems. This time, after a ten year hiatus, Tennyson’s publication received immediate success, with both critics and the general public. The collection contains such famous poems as Locksley Hall, Tithonus and Ulysses.

Ulysses was written in 1833 and has since become an often quoted work, popularly used to illustrate the dramatic monologue form. In the poem, Ulysses describes his discontent and restlessness upon returning to his kingdom, Ithaca, after his far-ranging travels. Facing old age, Ulysses yearns to explore again, despite his reunion with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. The poem has sparked numerous interpretations since its first publication, with some readers viewing Ulysses as resolute and heroic, admiring the Greek hero for his determination for adventure and glory; on the other hand, more recent readers have identified potential ironies in the poem, believing Ulysses wishes to selfishly abandon his kingdom and family, demonstrating the flawed protagonists of early epic poetry.

The first edition, in two volumes

CONTENTS

Œnone, 1842

The Lady of Shalott, 1842

Conclusion.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere

You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease

Of old sat Freedom on the heights

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought

The Goose

The Epic

Morte d’Arthur

The Gardener’s Daughter

Dora

Audley Court

Walking to the Mail

St Simon Stylites

The Talking Oak

Love and Duty

Ulysses

Locksley Hall

Godiva

The Two Voices

The Day-Dream

The Sleeping Palace

The Sleeping Beauty, 1842

The Arrival

The Revival

The Departure

Moral

L’Envoi

Epilogue

Amphion

Sir Galahad

Edward Grey

Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue made at The Cock.

Lady Clare

The Lord of Burleigh

Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere

A Farewell

The Beggar Maid

The Vision of Sin

The Skipping Rope

Move eastward, happy earth...

Break, break, break...

The Poet’s Song

Tennyson, close to the time of publication

Œnone, 1842

First published in 1833. On being republished in 1842 this poem was practically rewritten, the alterations and additions so transforming the poem as to make it almost a new work. Both versions are provided in this works. Œnone is the first of Tennyson’s fine classical studies. The poem is modelled partly on the Alexandrian Idyll, such an Idyll for instance as the second Idyll of Theocritus or the Megara or Europa of Moschus, and partly perhaps on the narratives in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, to which the opening bears a typical resemblance. It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s Judgment of Paris which tells the same story, and tells it on the same lines on which it is told here, though it is not placed in the mouth of Œnone. Beattie’s poem opens with an elaborate description of Ida and of Troy in the distance. Paris, the husband of Œnone, is one afternoon confronted with the three goddesses who are, as in Tennyson’s Idyll, elaborately delineated as symbolising what they here symbolise. Each makes her speech and each offers what she has to offer, worldly dominion, wisdom, sensual pleasure. There is, of course, no comparison in point of merit between the two poems, Beattie’s being in truth perfectly commonplace. In its symbolic aspect the poem may be compared with the temptations to which Christ is submitted in Paradise Regained. See books iii. and iv.

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier

Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.

The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,

Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,

And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand

The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down

Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars

The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine

In cataract after cataract to the sea.

Behind the valley topmost Gargarus

Stands up and takes the morning: but in front

The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal

Troas and Ilion’s column’d citadel,

The crown of Troas.

Hither came at noon

Mournful Œnone, wandering forlorn

Of Paris, once her playmate on the hills.

Her cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck

Floated her hair or seem’d to float in rest.

She, leaning on a fragment twined with vine,

Sang to the stillness, till the mountain-shade

Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff.

“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d  Ida,

Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

For now the noonday quiet holds the hill:

The grasshopper is silent in the grass;

The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,

Rests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps.

The purple flowers droop: the golden bee

Is lily-cradled: I alone awake.

My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,

My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,

And I am all aweary of my life.

“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,

Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

Hear me O Earth, hear me O Hills, O Caves

That house the cold crown’d snake! O mountain brooks,

I am the daughter of a River-God,

Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all

My sorrow with my song, as yonder walls

Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed,

A cloud that gather’d shape: for it may be

That, while I speak of it, a little while

My heart may wander from its deeper woe.

“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,

Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

I waited underneath the dawning hills,

Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark,

And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine:

Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,

Leading a jet-black goat white-horn’d, white-hooved,

Came up from reedy Simois  all alone.

“O mother Ida, harken ere I die.

Far-off the torrent call’d me from the cleft:

Far up the solitary morning smote

The streaks of virgin snow. With down-dropt eyes

I sat alone: white-breasted like a star

Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard skin

Droop’d from his shoulder, but his sunny hair

Cluster’d about his temples like a God’s;

And his cheek brighten’d as the foam-bow brightens

When the wind blows the foam, and all my heart

Went forth to embrace him coming ere he came.

“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm

Disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold,

That smelt ambrosially, and while I look’d

And listen’d, the full-flowing river of speech

Came down upon my heart.

“‘My own Œnone,

Beautiful-brow’d Œnone, my own soul,

Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav’n

“For the most fair,” would seem to award it thine,

As lovelier than whatever Oread haunt

The knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace

Of movement, and the charm of married brows.’

“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

He prest the blossom of his lips to mine,

And added ‘This was cast upon the board,

When all the full-faced presence of the Gods

Ranged in the halls of Peleus; whereupon

Rose feud, with question unto whom ‘twere due:

But light-foot Iris brought it yester-eve,

Delivering, that to me, by common voice

Elected umpire, Herè comes to-day,

Pallas and Aphrodite, claiming each

This meed of fairest. Thou, within the cave

Behind yon whispering tuft of oldest pine,

Mayst well behold them unbeheld, unheard

Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods.’

“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

It was the deep midnoon: one silvery cloud

Had lost his way between the piney sides

Of this long glen. Then to the bower they came,

Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower,

And at their feet the crocus brake like fire,

Violet, amaracus, and asphodel,

Lotos and lilies: and a wind arose,

And overhead the wandering ivy and vine,

This way and that, in many a wild festoon

Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs

With bunch and berry and flower thro’ and thro’.

“O mother Ida, harken ere I die.

On the tree-tops a crested peacock lit,

And o’er him flow’d a golden cloud, and lean’d

Upon him, slowing dropping fragrant dew.

Then first I heard the voice of her, to whom

Coming thro’ Heaven, like a light that grows

Larger and clearer, with one mind the Gods

Rise up for reverence. She to Paris made

Proffer of royal power, ample rule

Unquestion’d, overflowing revenue

Wherewith to embellish state, ‘from many a vale

And river-sunder’d champaign clothed with corn,

Or labour’d mines undrainable of ore.

Honour,’ she said, ‘and homage, tax and toll,

From many an inland town and haven large,

Mast-throng’d beneath her shadowing citadel

In glassy bays among her tallest towers.’

“O mother Ida, harken ere I die.

Still she spake on and still she spake of power,

‘Which in all action is the end of all;

Power fitted to the season; wisdom-bred

And throned of wisdom  from all neighbour crowns

Alliance and allegiance, till thy hand

Fail from the sceptre staff. Such boon from me,

From me, Heaven’s Queen, Paris to thee king-born,

A shepherd all thy life but yet king-born,

Should come most welcome, seeing men, in power

Only, are likest gods, who have attain’d

Rest in a happy place and quiet seats

Above the thunder, with undying bliss

In knowledge of their own supremacy.’

“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

She ceased, and Paris held the costly fruit

Out at arm’s-length, so much the thought of power

Flatter’d his spirit; but Pallas where she stood

Somewhat apart, her clear and bared limbs

O’erthwarted with the brazen-headed spear

Upon her pearly shoulder leaning cold,

The while, above, her full and earnest eye

Over her snow-cold breast and angry cheek

Kept watch, waiting decision, made reply.

“‘Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,

These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

Yet not for power, (power of herself

Would come uncall’d for) but to live by law,

Acting the law we live by without fear;

And, because right is right, to follow right

Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.’

“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

Again she said: ‘I woo thee not with gifts.

Sequel of guerdon could not alter me

To fairer. Judge thou me by what I am,

So shalt thou find me fairest. Yet indeed,

If gazing on divinity disrobed

Thy mortal eyes are frail to judge of fair,

Unbiass’d by self-profit, oh! rest thee sure

That I shall love thee well and cleave to thee,

So that my vigour, wedded to thy blood,

Shall strike within thy pulses, like a God’s,

To push thee forward thro’ a life of shocks,

Dangers, and deeds, until endurance grow

Sinew’d with action, and the full-grown will.

Circled thro’ all experiences, pure law,

Commeasure perfect freedom.’ “Here she ceased,

And Paris ponder’d, and I cried, ‘O Paris,

Give it to Pallas!’ but he heard me not,

Or hearing would not hear me, woe is me!

“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida.

Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

Idalian Aphrodite, beautiful,

Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian  wells,

With rosy slender fingers backward drew

From her warm brows and bosom  her deep hair

Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat

And shoulder: from the violets her light foot

Shone rosy-white, and o’er her rounded form

Between the shadows of the vine-bunches

Floated the glowing sunlights, as she moved.

“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

She with a subtle smile in her mild eyes,

The herald of her triumph, drawing nigh

Half-whisper’d in his ear, ‘I promise thee

The fairest and most loving wife in Greece’.

She spoke and laugh’d: I shut my sight for fear:

But when I look’d, Paris had raised his arm,

And I beheld great Herè’s angry eyes,

As she withdrew into the golden cloud,

And I was left alone within the bower;

And from that time to this I am alone,

And I shall be alone until I die.

“Yet, mother Ida, harken ere I die.

Fairest  why fairest wife? am I not fair?

My love hath told me so a thousand times.

Methinks I must be fair, for yesterday,

When I past by, a wild and wanton pard,

Eyed like the evening star, with playful tail

Crouch’d fawning in the weed. Most loving is she?

Ah me, my mountain shepherd, that my arms

Were wound about thee, and my hot lips prest

Close, close to thine in that quick-falling dew

Of fruitful kisses, thick as Autumn rains

Flash in the pools of whirling Simois.

“O mother, hear me yet before I die.

They came, they cut away my tallest pines,

My dark tall pines, that plumed the craggy ledge

High over the blue gorge, and all between

The snowy peak and snow-white cataract

Foster’d the callow eaglet  from beneath

Whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn

The panther’s roar came muffled, while I sat

Low in the valley. Never, never more

Shall lone Œnone see the morning mist

Sweep thro’ them; never see them overlaid

With narrow moon-lit slips of silver cloud,

Between the loud stream and the trembling stars.

“O mother, here me yet before I die.

I wish that somewhere in the ruin’d folds,

Among the fragments tumbled from the glens,

Or the dry thickets, I could meet with her,

The Abominable,  that uninvited came

Into the fair Peleïan banquet-hall,

And cast the golden fruit upon the board,

And bred this change; that I might speak my mind,

And tell her to her face how much I hate

Her presence, hated both of Gods and men.

“O mother, here me yet before I die.

Hath he not sworn his love a thousand times,

In this green valley, under this green hill,

Ev’n on this hand, and sitting on this stone?

Seal’d it with kisses? water’d it with tears?

O happy tears, and how unlike to these!

O happy Heaven, how canst thou see my face?

O happy earth, how canst thou bear my weight?

O death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud,

There are enough unhappy on this earth,

Pass by the happy souls, that love to live:

I pray thee, pass before my light of life,

And shadow all my soul, that I may die.

Thou weighest heavy on the heart within,

Weigh heavy on my eyelids: let me die.

“O mother, hear me yet before I die.

I will not die alone, for fiery thoughts

Do shape themselves within me, more and more,

Whereof I catch the issue, as I hear

Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills,

Like footsteps upon wool. I dimly see

My far-off doubtful purpose, as a mother

Conjectures of the features of her child

Ere it is born: her child!  a shudder comes

Across me: never child be born of me,

Unblest, to vex me with his father’s eyes!

“O mother, hear me yet before I die.

Hear me, O earth. I will not die alone,

Lest their shrill happy laughter come to me

Walking the cold and starless road of

Death Uncomforted, leaving my ancient love

With the Greek woman.  I will rise and go

Down into Troy, and ere the stars come forth

Talk with the wild Cassandra,  for she says

A fire dances before her, and a sound

Rings ever in her ears of armed men.

What this may be I know not, but I know

That, wheresoe’er I am by night and day,

All earth and air seem only burning fire.”

The Lady of Shalott, 1842

Part I

The Lady of Shalott by William Holman-Hunt, painted 1889-1902.

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And through the field the road runs by

To many-towered Camelot;

And up and down the people go,

Gazing where the lilies blow

Round an island there below,

The island of Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver

Through the wave that runs for ever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.

Four grey walls, and four grey towers,

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

By the margin, willow-veiled,

Slide the heavy barges trailed

By slow horses; and unhailed

The shallop flitteth silken-sailed

Skimming down to Camelot:

But who hath seen her wave her hand?

Or at the casement seen her stand?

Or is she known in all the land,

The Lady of Shalott?

Only reapers, reaping early

In among the bearded barley,

Hear a song that echoes cheerly

From the river winding clearly,

Down to towered Camelot:

And by the moon the reaper weary,

Piling sheaves in uplands airy,

Listening, whispers “‘Tis the fairy

Lady of Shalott.”

Part II

I am half-sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse, 1916.

There she weaves by night and day

A magic web with colours gay.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot.

She knows not what the curse may be,

And so she weaveth steadily,

And little other care hath she,

The Lady of Shalott.

And moving through a mirror clear

That hangs before her all the year,

Shadows of the world appear.

There she sees the highway near

Winding down to Camelot:

There the river eddy whirls,

And there the surly village-churls,

And the red cloaks of market girls,

Pass onward from Shalott.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,

An abbot on an ambling pad,

Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,

Or long-haired page in crimson clad,

Goes by to towered Camelot;

And sometimes through the mirror blue

The knights come riding two and two:

She hath no loyal knight and true,

The Lady of Shalott.

But in her web she still delights

To weave the mirror’s magic sights,

For often through the silent nights

A funeral, with plumes and lights

And music, went to Camelot:

Or when the moon was overhead,

Came two young lovers lately wed;

“I am half sick of shadows,” said

The Lady of Shalott.

Part III

The Lady of Shallot Looking at Lancelot by John William Waterhouse.

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,

He rode between the barley-sheaves,

The sun came dazzling through the leaves,

And flamed upon the brazen greaves

Of bold Sir Lancelot.

A red-cross knight for ever kneeled

To a lady in his shield,

That sparkled on the yellow field,

Beside remote Shalott.

The gemmy bridle glittered free,

Like to some branch of stars we see

Hung in the golden Galaxy.

The bridle bells rang merrily

As he rode down to Camelot:

And from his blazoned baldric slung

A mighty silver bugle hung,

And as he rode his armour rung,

Beside remote Shalott.

All in the blue unclouded weather

Thick-jewelled shone the saddle-leather,

The helmet and the helmet-feather

Burned like one burning flame together,

As he rode down to Camelot.

As often through the purple night,

Below the starry clusters bright,

Some bearded meteor, trailing light,

Moves over still Shalott.

His broad clear brow in sunlight glowed;

On burnished hooves his war-horse trode;

From underneath his helmet flowed

His coal-black curls as on he rode,

As he rode down to Camelot.

From the bank and from the river

He flashed into the crystal mirror,

“Tirra lirra,” by the river

Sang Sir Lancelot.

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces through the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She looked down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror cracked from side to side;

“The curse is come upon me,” cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Part IV

The Lady of Shallot by John William Waterhouse, 1888.

In the stormy east-wind straining,

The pale yellow woods were waning,

The broad stream in his banks complaining,

Heavily the low sky raining

Over towered Camelot;

Down she came and found a boat

Beneath a willow left afloat,

And round about the prow she wrote

The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river’s dim expanse,

Like some bold seer in a trance

Seeing all his own mischance,

With a glassy countenance

Did she look to Camelot.

And at the closing of the day

She loosed the chain, and down she lay;

The broad stream bore her far away,

The Lady of Shalott.

Lying, robed in snowy white

That loosely flew to left and right —

The leaves upon her falling light —

Through the noises of the night

She floated down to Camelot:

And as the boat-head wound along

The willowy hills and fields among,

They heard her singing her last song,

The Lady of Shalott.

Heard a carol, mournful, holy,

Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,

Till her blood was frozen slowly,

And her eyes were darkened wholly,

Turned to towered Camelot.

For ere she reached upon the tide

The first house by the water-side,

Singing in her song she died,

The Lady of Shalott.

Under tower and balcony,

By garden-wall and gallery,

A gleaming shape she floated by,

Dead-pale between the houses high,

Silent into Camelot.

Out upon the wharfs they came,

Knight and burgher, lord and dame,

And round the prow they read her name,

The Lady of Shalott.

Who is this? and what is here?

And in the lighted palace near

Died the sound of royal cheer;

And they crossed themselves for fear,

All the knights at Camelot:

But Lancelot mused a little space;

He said, “She has a lovely face;

God in his mercy lend her grace,

The Lady of Shalott.”

Conclusion.

I thought to pass away before, and yet alive I am;

And in the fields all around I hear the bleating of the lamb.

How sadly, I remember, rose the morning of the year!

To die before the snowdrop came, and now the violet ‘s here.

O, sweet is the new violet, that comes beneath the skies;

And sweeter is the young lamb’s voice to me that cannot rise;

And sweet is all the land about, and all the flowers that blow;

And sweeter far is death than life, to me that long to go.

It seemed so hard at first, mother, to leave the blessèd sun,

And now it seems as hard to stay; and yet, His will be done!

But still I think it can’t be long before I find release;

And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace.

O, blessings on his kindly voice, and on his silver hair,

And blessings on his whole life long, until he meet me there!

O, blessings on his kindly heart and on his silver head!

A thousand times I blest him, as he knelt beside my bed.

He taught me all the mercy, for he showed me all the sin;

Now, though my lamp was lighted late, there ‘s One will let me in.

Nor would I now be well, mother, again, if that could be;

For my desire is but to pass to Him that died for me.

I did not hear the dog howl, mother, or the death-watch beat, —

There came a sweeter token when the night and morning meet;

But sit beside my bed, mother, and put your hand in mine,

And Effie on the other side, and I will tell the sign.

All in the wild March-morning I heard the angels call, —

It was when the moon was setting, and the dark was over all;

The trees began to whisper, and the wind began to roll,

And in the wild March-morning I heard them call my soul.

For, lying broad awake, I thought of you and Effie dear;

I saw you sitting in the house, and I no longer here;

With all my strength I prayed for both, — and so I felt resigned,

And up the valley came a swell of music on the wind.

I thought that it was fancy, and I listened in my bed;

And then did something speak to me, — I know not what was said;

For great delight and shuddering took hold of all my mind,

And up the valley came again the music on the wind.

But you were sleeping; and I said, “It ‘s not for them, — it ‘s mine;”

And if it comes three times, I thought, I take it for a sign.

And once again it came, and close beside the window-bars;

Then seemed to go right up to heaven and die among the stars.

So now I think my time is near; I trust it is. I know

The blessèd music went that way my soul will have to go.

And for myself, indeed, I care not if I go to-day;

But Effie, you must comfort her when I am past away.

And say to Robin a kind word, and tell him not to fret;

There ‘s many a worthier than I, would make him happy yet.

If I had lived — I cannot tell — I might have been his wife;

But all these things have ceased to be, with my desire of life.

O, look! the sun begins to rise! the heavens are in a glow;

He shines upon a hundred fields, and all of them I know.

And there I move no longer now, and there his light may shine, —

Wild flowers in the valley for other hands than mine.

O, sweet and strange it seems to me, that ere this day is done

The voice that now is speaking may be beyond the sun, —

Forever and forever with those just souls and true, —

And what is life, that we should moan? why make we such ado?

Forever and forever, all in a blessèd home, —

And there to wait a little while till you and Effie come, —

To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast, —

And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

Of me you shall not win renown:

You thought to break a country heart

For pastime, ere you went to town.

At me you smiled, but unbeguiled

I saw the snare, and I retired:

The daughter of a hundred Earls,

You are not one to be desired.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

I know you proud to bear your name,

Your pride is yet no mate for mine,

Too proud to care from whence I came.

Nor would I break for your sweet sake

A heart that doats on truer charms.

A simple maiden in her flower

Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

Some meeker pupil you must find,

For were you queen of all that is,

I could not stoop to such a mind.

You sought to prove how I could love,

And my disdain is my reply.

The lion on your old stone gates

Is not more cold to you than I.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

You put strange memories in my head.

Not thrice your branching limes have blown

Since I beheld young Laurence dead.

Oh your sweet eyes, your low replies:

A great enchantress you may be;

But there was that across his throat

Which you hardly cared to see.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

When thus he met his mother’s view,

She had the passions of her kind,

She spake some certain truths of you.

Indeed I heard one bitter word

That scarce is fit for you to hear;

Her manners had not that repose

Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

There stands a spectre in your hall:

The guilt of blood is at your door:

You changed a wholesome heart to gall.

You held your course without remorse,

To make him trust his modest worth,

And, last, you fix’d a vacant stare,

And slew him with your noble birth.

Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,

From yon blue heavens above us bent

The grand old gardener and his wife

Smile at the claims of long descent.

Howe’er it be, it seems to me,

‘Tis only noble to be good.

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

And simple faith than Norman blood.

I know you, Clara Vere de Vere:

You pine among your halls and towers:

The languid light of your proud eyes

Is wearied of the rolling hours.

In glowing health, with boundless wealth,

But sickening of a vague disease,

You know so ill to deal with time,

You needs must play such pranks as these.

Clara, Clara Vere de Vere,

If Time be heavy on your hands,

Are there no beggars at your gate,

Nor any poor about your lands?

Oh! teach the orphan-boy to read,

Or teach the orphan-girl to sew,

Pray Heaven for a human heart,

And let the foolish yoeman go.

You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease

You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,

Within this region I subsist,

Whose spirits falter in the mist,

And languish for the purple seas?

It is the land that freemen till,

That sober-suited Freedom chose,

The land, where girt with friends or foes

A man may speak the thing he will;

A land of settled government,

A land of just and old renown,

Where Freedom broadens slowly down

From precedent to precedent:

Where faction seldom gathers head,

But by degrees to fulness wrought,

The strength of some diffusive thought

Hath time and space to work and spread.

Should banded unions persecute

Opinion, and induce a time

When single thought is civil crime,

And individual freedom mute;

Tho’ Power should make from land to land

The name of Britain trebly great

Tho’ every channel  of the State

Should almost choke with golden sand

Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,

Wild wind! I seek a warmer sky,

And I will see before I die

The palms and temples of the South.

Of old sat Freedom on the heights

Of old sat Freedom on the heights,

The thunders breaking at her feet:

Above her shook the starry lights:

She heard the torrents meet.

There in her place  she did rejoice,

Self-gather’d in her prophet-mind,

But fragments of her mighty voice

Came rolling on the wind.

Then stept she down thro’ town and field

To mingle with the human race,

And part by part to men reveal’d

The fullness of her face

Grave mother of majestic works,

From her isle-altar gazing down,

Who, God-like, grasps the triple forks,

And, King-like, wears the crown:

Her open eyes desire the truth.

The wisdom of a thousand years

Is in them. May perpetual youth

Keep dry their light from tears;

That her fair form may stand and shine,

Make bright our days and light our dreams,

Turning to scorn with lips divine

The falsehood of extremes!

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought

From out the storied Past, and used

Within the Present, but transfused

Thro’ future time by power of thought.

True love turn’d round on fixed poles,

Love, that endures not sordid ends,

For English natures, freemen, friends,

Thy brothers and immortal souls.

But pamper not a hasty time,

Nor feed with crude imaginings

The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings,

That every sophister can lime.

Deliver not the tasks of might

To weakness, neither hide the ray

From those, not blind, who wait for day,

Tho’  sitting girt with doubtful light.

Make knowledge circle with the winds;

But let her herald, Reverence, fly

Before her to whatever sky

Bear seed of men and growth  of minds.

Watch what main-currents draw the years:

Cut Prejudice against the grain:

But gentle words are always gain:

Regard the weakness of thy peers:

Nor toil for title, place, or touch

Of pension, neither count on praise:

It grows to guerdon after-days:

Nor deal in watch-words overmuch;

Not clinging to some ancient saw;

Not master’d by some modern term;

Not swift nor slow to change, but firm:

And in its season bring the law;

That from Discussion’s lip may fall

With Life, that, working strongly, binds

Set in all lights by many minds,

To close the interests of all.

For Nature also, cold and warm,

And moist and dry, devising long,

Thro’ many agents making strong,

Matures the individual form.

Meet is it changes should control

Our being, lest we rust in ease.

We all are changed by still degrees,

All but the basis of the soul.

So let the change which comes be free

To ingroove itself with that, which flies,

And work, a joint of state, that plies

Its office, moved with sympathy.

A saying, hard to shape an act;

For all the past of Time reveals

A bridal dawn of thunder-peals,

Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact.

Ev’n now we hear with inward strife

A motion toiling in the gloom

The Spirit of the years to come

Yearning to mix himself with Life.

A slow-develop’d strength awaits

Completion in a painful school;

Phantoms of other forms of rule,

New Majesties of mighty States

The warders of the growing hour,

But vague in vapour, hard to mark;

And round them sea and air are dark

With great contrivances of Power.

Of many changes, aptly join’d,

Is bodied forth the second whole,

Regard gradation, lest the soul

Of Discord race the rising wind;

A wind to puff your idol-fires,

And heap their ashes on the head;

To shame the boast so often made,

That we are wiser than our sires.

Oh, yet, if Nature’s evil star

Drive men in manhood, as in youth,

To follow flying steps of Truth

Across the brazen bridge of war

If New and Old, disastrous feud,

Must ever shock, like armed foes,

And this be true, till Time shall close,

That Principles are rain’d in blood;

Not yet the wise of heart would cease

To hold his hope thro’ shame and guilt,

But with his hand against the hilt,

Would pace the troubled land, like Peace;

Not less, tho’ dogs of Faction bay,

Would serve his kind in deed and word,

Certain, if knowledge bring the sword,

That knowledge takes the sword away

Would love the gleams of good that broke

From either side, nor veil his eyes;

And if some dreadful need should rise

Would strike, and firmly, and one stroke:

To-morrow yet would reap to-day,

As we bear blossom of the dead;

Earn well the thrifty months, nor wed

Raw haste, half-sister to Delay.

The Goose

This poem, which was written at the time of the Reform Bill agitation, is a political allegory showing how illusory were the supposed advantages held out by the Radicals to the poor and labouring classes. The old woman typifies these classes, the stranger the Radicals, the goose the Radical programme, Free Trade and the like, the eggs such advantages as the proposed Radical measures might for a time seem to confer, the cluttering goose, the storm and whirlwind the heavy price which would have to be paid for them in the social anarchy resulting from triumphant Radicalism. The allegory may be narrowed to the Free Trade question.

I knew an old wife lean and poor,

Her rags scarce held together;

There strode a stranger to the door,

And it was windy weather.

He held a goose upon his arm,

He utter’d rhyme and reason,

“Here, take the goose, and keep you warm,

It is a stormy season”.

She caught the white goose by the leg,

A goose  ‘twas no great matter.

The goose let fall a golden egg

With cackle and with clatter.

She dropt the goose, and caught the pelf,

And ran to tell her neighbours;

And bless’d herself, and cursed herself,

And rested from her labours.

And feeding high, and living soft,

Grew plump and able-bodied;

Until the grave churchwarden doff’d,

The parson smirk’d and nodded.

So sitting, served by man and maid,

She felt her heart grow prouder:

But, ah! the more the white goose laid

It clack’d and cackled louder.

It clutter’d here, it chuckled there;

It stirr’d the old wife’s mettle:

She shifted in her elbow-chair,

And hurl’d the pan and kettle.

“A quinsy choke thy cursed note!”

Then wax’d her anger stronger:

“Go, take the goose, and wring her throat,

I will not bear it longer”.

Then yelp’d the cur, and yawl’d the cat;

Ran Gaffer, stumbled Gammer.

The goose flew this way and flew that,

And fill’d the house with clamour.

As head and heels upon the floor

They flounder’d all together,

There strode a stranger to the door,

And it was windy weather:

He took the goose upon his arm,

He utter’d words of scorning;

“So keep you cold, or keep you warm,

It is a stormy morning”.

The wild wind rang from park and plain,

And round the attics rumbled,

Till all the tables danced again,

And half the chimneys tumbled.

The glass blew in, the fire blew out,

The blast was hard and harder.

Her cap blew off, her gown blew up,

And a whirlwind clear’d the larder;

And while on all sides breaking loose

Her household fled the danger,

Quoth she, “The Devil take the goose,

And God forget the stranger!”

The Epic

This Prologue was written, like the Epilogue, after “The Epic” had been composed, being added, Fitzgerald says, to anticipate or excuse “the faint Homeric echoes,” to give a reason for telling an old-world tale. The poet “mouthing out his hollow oes and aes” is, we are told, a good description of Tennyson’s tone and manner of reading.

At Francis Allen’s on the Christmas-eve,

The game of forfeits done  the girls all kiss’d

Beneath the sacred bush and past away

The parson Holmes, the poet Everard Hall,

The host, and I sat round the wassail-bowl,

Then half-way ebb’d: and there we held a talk,

How all the old honour had from Christmas gone,

Or gone, or dwindled down to some odd games

In some odd nooks like this; till I, tired out

With cutting eights that day upon the pond,

Where, three times slipping from the outer edge,

I bump’d the ice into three several stars,

Fell in a doze; and half-awake I heard

The parson taking wide and wider sweeps,

Now harping on the church-commissioners,

Now hawking at Geology and schism;

Until I woke, and found him settled down

Upon the general decay of faith

Right thro’ the world, “at home was little left,

And none abroad: there was no anchor, none,

To hold by”. Francis, laughing, clapt his hand

On Everard’s shoulder, with “I hold by him”.

“And I,” quoth Everard, “by the wassail-bowl.”

“Why, yes,” I said, “we knew your gift that way

At college: but another which you had,

I mean of verse (for so we held it then),

What came of that?” “You know,” said Frank, “he burnt

His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books “

And then to me demanding why? “Oh, sir,

He thought that nothing new was said, or else

Something so said ‘twas nothing  that a truth

Looks freshest in the fashion of the day:

God knows: he has a mint of reasons: ask.

It pleased me well enough.” “Nay, nay,” said Hall,

“Why take the style of those heroic times?

For nature brings not back the Mastodon,

Nor we those times; and why should any man

Remodel models? these twelve books of mine

Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth,

Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt.”

“But I,” Said Francis, “pick’d the eleventh from this hearth,

And have it: keep a thing its use will come.

I hoard it as a sugar-plum for Holmes.”

He laugh’d, and I, though sleepy, like a horse

That hears the corn-bin open, prick’d my ears;

For I remember’d Everard’s college fame

When we were Freshmen: then at my request

He brought it; and the poet little urged,

But with some prelude of disparagement,

Read, mouthing out his hollow oes and aes,

Deep-chested music, and to this result.

Morte d’Arthur

This is Tennyson’s first study from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. We learn from Fitzgerald that it was written as early as the spring of 1835, for in that year Tennyson read it to Fitzgerald and Spedding, “out of a MS. in a little red book,” and again we learn that he repeated some lines of it at the end of May, 1835, one calm day on Windermere, adding “Not bad that, Fitz., is it?” (Life, i., 184). It is here represented as the eleventh book of an Epic, the rest of which had been destroyed, though Tennyson afterwards incorporated it, adding introductory lines, with what was virtually to prove an Epic in twelve books, The Idylls of the King. The substance of the poem is drawn from the third, fourth and fifth chapters of the twenty-first book of Malory’s Romance, which is followed very closely. It is called “an Homeric echo,” but the diction bears a much closer resemblance to that of Virgil than to that of Homer, though the rhythm is perhaps more Homeric than Virgilian. It is Tennyson’s masterpiece in “the grand style,” and is indeed as near perfection as any work of this kind could be. In spite of its singular mixture of simplicity, purely Homeric, and artificiality, at times ultra-Virgilian, the incongruity never shocks, so noble and impressive is the general effect. The text of 1842 was never subsequently altered except in the spelling of “mere” and “though” in lines 37, 77, 147, 155, 162, 272, and in the insertion in 1853 of the line:

“Across the ridge and pac’d beside the mere.”

So all day long the noise of battle roll’d

Among the mountains by the winter sea;

Until King Arthur’s table, man by man,

Had fall’n in Lyonness about their Lord,

King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,

A broken chancel with a broken cross,

That stood on a dark strait of barren land.

On one side lay the Ocean, and on one

Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

“The sequel of to-day unsolders all

The goodliest fellowship of famous knights

Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep

They sleep  the men I loved. I think that we

Shall never more, at any future time,

Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,

Walking about the gardens and the halls

Of Camelot, as in the days that were.

I perish by this people which I made,

Tho’ Merlin sware that I should come again

To rule once more  but let what will be, be,

I am so deeply smitten thro’ the helm

That without help I cannot last till morn.

Thou therefore take my brand  Excalibur,

Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how

In those old days, one summer noon, an arm

Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

Holding the sword  and how I row’d across

And took it, and have worn it, like a king:

And, wheresoever I am sung or told

In aftertime, this also shall be known:

But now delay not: take Excalibur,

And fling him far into the middle mere:

Watch what thou seëst, and lightly bring me word.”

To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere:

“It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus,

Aidless, alone, and smitten thro’ the helm.

A little thing may harm a wounded man.

Yet I thy hest will all perform at full,

Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word.”

So saying, from the ruin’d shrine he stept

And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,

Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,

Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang

Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down

By zig-zag paths, and juts of pointed rock,

Came on the shining levels of the lake.

There drew he forth the brand Excalibur,

And o’er him, drawing it, the winter moon,

Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth

And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt:

For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks,

Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work

Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long

That both his eyes were dazzled, as he stood,

This way and that dividing the swift mind,

In act to throw: but at the last it seem’d

Better to leave Excalibur conceal’d

There in the many-knotted waterflags,

That whistled stiff and dry about the marge.

So strode he back slow to the wounded king.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

“Hast thou perform’d my mission which I gave?

What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?”

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:

“I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,

And the wild water lapping on the crag.”

To whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale:

“Thou hast betray’d thy nature and thy name,

Not rendering true answer, as beseem’d

Thy fëalty, nor like a noble knight:

For surer sign had follow’d, either hand,

Or voice, or else a motion of the mere.

This is a shameful thing for men to lie.

Yet now, I charge thee, quickly go again

As thou art lief and dear, and do the thing

I bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word.”

Then went Sir Bedivere the second time

Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere,

Counting the dewy pebbles, fix’d in thought;

But when he saw the wonder of the hilt,

How curiously and strangely chased, he smote

His palms together, and he cried aloud,

“And if indeed I cast the brand away,

Surely a precious thing, one worthy note,

Should thus be lost for ever from the earth,

Which might have pleased the eyes of many men.

What good should follow this, if this were done?

What harm, undone? deep harm to disobey,

Seeing obedience is the bond of rule,

Were it well to obey then, if a king demand

An act unprofitable against himself?

The king is sick, and knows not what he does.

What record, or what relic of my lord

Should be to aftertime, but empty breath

And rumours of a doubt? but were this kept,

Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings,

Some one might show it at a joust of arms,

Saying, ‘King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur,

Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake.

Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps

Upon the hidden bases of the hills.”

So might some old man speak in the aftertime

To all the people, winning reverence.

But now much honour and much fame were lost.”

So spake he, clouded with his own conceit,

And hid Excalibur the second time,

And so strode back slow to the wounded King.

Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily:

“What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?”

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:

“I heard the water lapping on the crag,

And the long ripple washing in the reeds.”

To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath:

“Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue,

Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me!

Authority forgets a dying king,

Laid widow’d of the power in his eye

That bow’d the will. I see thee what thou art,

For thou, the latest-left of all my knights,

In whom should meet the offices of all,

Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt;

Either from lust of gold, or like a girl

Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes.

Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice,

And the third time may prosper, get thee hence:

But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur,

I will arise and slay thee with my hands.”

Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,

And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged

Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch’d the sword,

And strongly wheel’d and threw it. The great brand

Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,

And flashing round and round, and whirl’d in an arch,

Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,

Seen where the moving isles of winter shock

By night, with noises of the northern sea.

So flash’d and fell the brand Excalibur:

But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

And caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him

Three times, and drew him under in the mere.

And lightly went the other to the King.

Then spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath:

‘Now see I by thine eyes that this is done.

Speak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?”

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:

“Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems

Should blind my purpose, for I never saw,

Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die,

Not tho’ I live three lives of mortal men,

So great a miracle as yonder hilt.

Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him;

But when I look’d again, behold an arm,

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

That caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him

Three times, and drew him under in the mere.”

And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard:

“My end draws nigh;’tis time that I were gone.

Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight,

And bear me to the margin; yet I fear

My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die.”

So saying, from the pavement he hath rose,

Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm,

And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes

As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere

Remorsefully regarded thro’ his tears,

And would have spoken, but he found not words,

Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee,

O’er both his shoulders drew the languid hands,

And rising bore him thro’ the place of tombs.

But, as he walk’d, King Arthur panted hard,

Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed

When all the house is mute. So sigh’d the King,

Muttering and murmuring at his ear”

Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die “.

But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,

Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk’d,

Larger than human on the frozen hills.

He heard the deep behind him, and a cry

Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.

Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves

And barren chasms, and all to left and right

The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based

His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang

Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels

And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,

And the long glories of the winter moon.

Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge,

Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,

Beneath them; and descending they were ware

That all the decks were dense with stately forms

Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream  by these

Three Queens with crowns of gold  and from them rose

A cry that shiver’d to the tingling stars,

And, as it were one voice, an agony

Of lamentation, like a wind, that shrills

All night in a waste land, where no one comes,

Or hath come, since the making of the world.

Then murmur’d Arthur, “Place me in the barge,”

And to the barge they came. There those three Queens

Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept.

But she, that rose the tallest of them all

And fairest, laid his head upon her lap,

And loosed the shatter’d casque, and chafed his hands,

And call’d him by his name, complaining loud,

And dropping bitter tears against his brow

Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white

And colourless, and like the wither’d moon

Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east;

And all his greaves and cuisses dash’d with drops

Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls

That made his forehead like a rising sun

High from the däis-throne  were parch’d with dust;

Or, clotted into points and hanging loose,

Mix’d with the knightly growth that fringed his lips.

So like a shatter’d column lay the King;

Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest,

From spur to plume a star of tournament,

Shot thro’ the lists at Camelot, and charged

Before the eyes of ladies and of kings.

Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere,

“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?

Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?

For now I see the true old times are dead,

When every morning brought a noble chance,

And every chance brought out a noble knight.

Such times have been not since the light that led

The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.

But now the whole ROUND TABLE is dissolved

Which was an image of the mighty world;

And I, the last, go forth companionless.

And the days darken round me, and the years,

Among new men, strange faces, other minds.”

And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?

I have lived my life, and that which I have done

May He within Himself make pure! but thou,

If thou shouldst never see my face again,

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

But now farewell. I am going a long way

With these thou seëst  if indeed I go

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)

To the island-valley of Avilion;

Where falls not hail, or rain,  or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard-lawns

And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.”

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail

Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan

That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere

Revolving many memories, till the hull

Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn.

And on the mere the wailing died away.

Here ended Hall, and our last light, that long

Had wink’d and threaten’d darkness, flared and fell:

At which the Parson, sent to sleep with sound,

And waked with silence, grunted “Good!” but we

Sat rapt: It was the tone with which he read

Perhaps some modern touches here and there

Redeem’d it from the charge of nothingness

Or else we loved the man, and prized his work;

I know not: but we sitting, as I said,

The cock crew loud; as at that time of year

The lusty bird takes every hour for dawn:

Then Francis, muttering, like a man ill-used,

“There now  that’s nothing!” drew a little back,

And drove his heel into the smoulder’d log,

That sent a blast of sparkles up the flue;

And so to bed; where yet in sleep I seem’d

To sail with Arthur under looming shores.

Point after point; till on to dawn, when dreams

Begin to feel the truth and stir of day,

To me, methought, who waited with a crowd,

There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore,

King Arthur, like a modern gentleman

Of stateliest port; and all the people cried,

“Arthur is come again: he cannot die”.

Then those that stood upon the hills behind

Repeated  “Come again, and thrice as fair”;

And, further inland, voices echoed

“Come With all good things, and war shall be no more”.

At this a hundred bells began to peal,

That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed

The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas morn.

The Gardener’s Daughter

OR

The Pictures.

In the Gardener’s Daughter we have the first of that delightful series of poems dealing with scenes and characters from ordinary English life, and named appropriately English Idylls. The originator of this species of poetry in England was Southey, in his English Eclogues, written before 1799. In the preface to these eclogues, which are in blank verse, Southey says: “The following eclogues, I believe, bear no resemblance to any poems in our language. This species of composition has become popular in Germany, and I was induced to attempt it by an account of the German idylls given me in conversation.” Southey’s eclogues are eight in number: The Old Mansion House, The Grandmother’s Tale, Hannah, The Sailor’s Mother, The Witch, The Ruined Cottage, The Last of the Family and The Alderman’s Funeral. Southey was followed by Wordsworth in The Brothers and Michael. Southey has nothing of the charm, grace and classical finish of his disciple, but how nearly Tennyson follows him, as copy and model, may be seen by anyone who compares Tennyson’s studies with The Ruined Cottage. But Tennyson’s real master was Theocritus, whose influence pervades these poems not so much directly in definite imitation as indirectly in colour and tone.

The Gardener’s Daughter was written as early as 1835, as it was read to Fitzgerald in that year (Life of Tennyson, i., 182). Tennyson originally intended to insert a prologue to be entitled The Antechamber, which contained an elaborate picture of himself, but he afterwards suppressed it. It is given in the Life, i., 233-4. This poem stands alone among the Idylls in being somewhat overloaded with ornament. The text of 1842 remained unaltered through all the subsequent editions except in line 235. After 1851 the form “tho’” is substituted for “though”.

This morning is the morning of the day,

When I and Eustace from the city went

To see the Gardener’s Daughter; I and he,

Brothers in Art; a friendship so complete

Portion’d in halves between us, that we grew

The fable of the city where we dwelt.

My Eustace might have sat for Hercules;

So muscular he spread, so broad of breast.

He, by some law that holds in love, and draws

The greater to the lesser, long desired

A certain miracle of symmetry,

A miniature of loveliness, all grace

Summ’d up and closed in little;  Juliet, she

So light of foot, so light of spirit  oh, she

To me myself, for some three careless moons,

The summer pilot of an empty heart

Unto the shores of nothing! Know you not

Such touches are but embassies of love,

To tamper with the feelings, ere he found

Empire for life? but Eustace painted her,

And said to me, she sitting with us then,

“When will you paint like this?” and I replied,

(My words were half in earnest, half in jest),

“‘Tis not your work, but Love’s. Love, unperceived,

A more ideal Artist he than all,

Came, drew your pencil from you, made those eyes

Darker than darkest pansies, and that hair

More black than ashbuds in the front of March.”

And Juliet answer’d laughing, “Go and see

The Gardener’s daughter: trust me, after that,

You scarce can fail to match his masterpiece “.

And up we rose, and on the spur we went.

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite

Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.

News from the humming city comes to it

In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;

And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear

The windy clanging of the minster clock;

Although between it and the garden lies

A league of grass, wash’d by a slow broad stream,

That, stirr’d with languid pulses of the oar,

Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,

Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge

Crown’d with the minster-towers.

The fields between

Are dewy-fresh, browsed by deep-udder’d kine,

And all about the large lime feathers low,

The lime a summer home of murmurous wings.

In that still place she, hoarded in herself,

Grew, seldom seen: not less among us lived

Her fame from lip to lip. Who had not heard

Of Rose, the Gardener’s daughter? Where was he,

So blunt in memory, so old at heart,

At such a distance from his youth in grief,

That, having seen, forgot? The common mouth,

So gross to express delight, in praise of her

Grew oratory. Such a lord is Love,

And Beauty such a mistress of the world.

And if I said that Fancy, led by Love,

Would play with flying forms and images,

Yet this is also true, that, long before

I look’d upon her, when I heard her name

My heart was like a prophet to my heart,

And told me I should love. A crowd of hopes,

That sought to sow themselves like winged seeds,

Born out of everything I heard and saw,

Flutter’d about my senses and my soul;

And vague desires, like fitful blasts of balm

To one that travels quickly, made the air

Of Life delicious, and all kinds of thought,

That verged upon them sweeter than the dream

Dream’d by a happy man, when the dark East,

Unseen, is brightening to his bridal morn.

And sure this orbit of the memory folds

For ever in itself the day we went

To see her. All the land in flowery squares,

Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind,

Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud

Drew downward: but all else of heaven was pure

Up to the Sun, and May from verge to verge,

And May with me from head to heel. And now,

As tho’ ‘twere yesterday, as tho’ it were

The hour just flown, that morn with all its sound

(For those old Mays had thrice the life of these),

Rings in mine ears. The steer forgot to graze,

And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood,

Leaning his horns into the neighbour field,

And lowing to his fellows. From the woods

Came voices of the well-contented doves.

The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy,

But shook his song together as he near’d

His happy home, the ground. To left and right,

The cuckoo told his name to all the hills;

The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm;

The redcap  whistled;  and the nightingale

Sang loud, as tho’ he were the bird of day.

And Eustace turn’d, and smiling said to me,

“Hear how the bushes echo! by my life,

These birds have joyful thoughts. Think you they sing

Like poets, from the vanity of song?

Or have they any sense of why they sing?

And would they praise the heavens for what they have?”

And I made answer, “Were there nothing else

For which to praise the heavens but only love,

That only love were cause enough for praise”.

Lightly he laugh’d, as one that read my thought,

And on we went; but ere an hour had pass’d,

We reach’d a meadow slanting to the North;

Down which a well-worn pathway courted us

To one green wicket in a privet hedge;

This, yielding, gave into a grassy walk

Thro’ crowded lilac-ambush trimly pruned;

And one warm gust, full-fed with perfume, blew

Beyond us, as we enter’d in the cool.

The garden stretches southward. In the midst

A cedar spread his dark-green layers of shade.

The garden-glasses shone, and momently

The twinkling laurel scatter’d silver lights.

“Eustace,” I said, “This wonder keeps the house.”

He nodded, but a moment afterwards

He cried, “Look! look!” Before he ceased I turn’d,

And, ere a star can wink, beheld her there.

For up the porch there grew an Eastern rose,

That, flowering high, the last night’s gale had caught,

And blown across the walk. One arm aloft

Gown’d in pure white, that fitted to the shape

Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood.

A single stream of all her soft brown hair

Pour’d on one side: the shadow of the flowers

Stole all the golden gloss, and, wavering

Lovingly lower, trembled on her waist

Ah, happy shade  and still went wavering down,

But, ere it touch’d a foot, that might have danced

The greensward into greener circles, dipt,

And mix’d with shadows of the common ground!

But the full day dwelt on her brows, and sunn’d

Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe-bloom,

And doubled his own warmth against her lips,

And on the bounteous wave of such a breast

As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade,

She stood, a sight to make an old man young.

So rapt, we near’d the house; but she, a Rose

In roses, mingled with her fragrant toil,

Nor heard us come, nor from her tendance turn’d

Into the world without; till close at hand,

And almost ere I knew mine own intent,

This murmur broke the stillness of that air

Which brooded round about her: “Ah, one rose,

One rose, but one, by those fair fingers cull’d,

Were worth a hundred kisses press’d on lips

Less exquisite than thine.” She look’d: but all

Suffused with blushes  neither self-possess’d

Nor startled, but betwixt this mood and that,

Divided in a graceful quiet  paused,

And dropt the branch she held, and turning, wound

Her looser hair in braid, and stirr’d her lips

For some sweet answer, tho’ no answer came,

Nor yet refused the rose, but granted it,

And moved away, and left me, statue-like,

In act to render thanks. I, that whole day,

Saw her no more, altho’ I linger’d there

Till every daisy slept, and Love’s white star

Beam’d thro’ the thicken’d cedar in the dusk.

So home we went, and all the livelong way

With solemn gibe did Eustace banter me.

“Now,” said he, “will you climb the top of Art;

You cannot fail but work in hues to dim

The Titianic Flora. Will you match

My Juliet? you, not you,  the Master,

Love, A more ideal Artist he than all.”

So home I went, but could not sleep for joy,

Reading her perfect features in the gloom,

Kissing the rose she gave me o’er and o’er,

And shaping faithful record of the glance

That graced the giving  such a noise of life

Swarm’d in the golden present, such a voice

Call’d to me from the years to come, and such

A length of bright horizon rimm’d the dark.

And all that night I heard the watchmen peal

The sliding season: all that night I heard

The heavy clocks knolling the drowsy hours.

The drowsy hours, dispensers of all good,

O’er the mute city stole with folded wings,

Distilling odours on me as they went

To greet their fairer sisters of the East.

Love at first sight, first-born, and heir to all,

Made this night thus. Henceforward squall nor storm

Could keep me from that Eden where she dwelt.

Light pretexts drew me: sometimes a

Dutch love For tulips; then for roses, moss or musk,

To grace my city-rooms; or fruits and cream

Served in the weeping elm; and more and more

A word could bring the colour to my cheek;

A thought would fill my eyes with happy dew;

Love trebled life within me, and with each

The year increased. The daughters of the year,

One after one, thro’ that still garden pass’d:

Each garlanded with her peculiar flower

Danced into light, and died into the shade;

And each in passing touch’d with some new grace

Or seem’d to touch her, so that day by day,

Like one that never can be wholly known,

Her beauty grew; till Autumn brought an hour

For Eustace, when I heard his deep “I will,”

Breathed, like the covenant of a God, to hold

From thence thro’ all the worlds: but I rose up

Full of his bliss, and following her dark eyes

Felt earth as air beneath me,  till I reach’d

The wicket-gate, and found her standing there.

There sat we down upon a garden mound,

Two mutually enfolded; Love, the third,

Between us, in the circle of his arms

Enwound us both; and over many a range

Of waning lime the gray cathedral towers,

Across a hazy glimmer of the west,

Reveal’d their shining windows: from them clash’d

The bells; we listen’d; with the time we play’d;

We spoke of other things; we coursed about

The subject most at heart, more near and near,

Like doves about a dovecote, wheeling round

The central wish, until we settled there.

Then, in that time and place, I spoke to her,

Requiring, tho’ I knew it was mine own,

Yet for the pleasure that I took to hear,

Requiring at her hand the greatest gift,

A woman’s heart, the heart of her I loved;

And in that time and place she answer’d me,

And in the compass of three little words,

More musical than ever came in one,

The silver fragments of a broken voice,

Made me most happy, faltering

“I am thine”.

Shall I cease here? Is this enough to say

That my desire, like all strongest hopes,

By its own energy fulfilled itself,

Merged in completion? Would you learn at full

How passion rose thro’ circumstantial grades

Beyond all grades develop’d? and indeed

I had not staid so long to tell you all,

But while I mused came Memory with sad eyes,

Holding the folded annals of my youth;

And while I mused, Love with knit brows went by,

And with a flying finger swept my lips,

And spake, “Be wise: not easily forgiven

Are those, who setting wide the doors, that bar

The secret bridal chambers of the heart.

Let in the day”. Here, then, my words have end.

Yet might I tell of meetings, of farewells

Of that which came between, more sweet than each,

In whispers, like the whispers of the leaves

That tremble round a nightingale  in sighs

Which perfect Joy, perplex’d for utterance,

Stole from her  sister Sorrow. Might I not tell

Of difference, reconcilement, pledges given,

And vows, where there was never need of vows,

And kisses, where the heart on one wild leap

Hung tranced from all pulsation, as above

The heavens between their fairy fleeces pale

Sow’d all their mystic gulfs with fleeting stars;

Or while the balmy glooming, crescent-lit,

Spread the light haze along the river-shores,

And in the hollows; or as once we met

Unheedful, tho’ beneath a whispering rain

Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind,

And in her bosom bore the baby, Sleep.

But this whole hour your eyes have been intent

On that veil’d picture  veil’d, for what it holds

May not be dwelt on by the common day.

This prelude has prepared thee. Raise thy soul;

Make thine heart ready with thine eyes: the time

Is come to raise the veil. Behold her there,

As I beheld her ere she knew my heart,

My first, last love; the idol of my youth,

The darling of my manhood, and, alas!

Now the most blessed memory of mine age.

Dora

With farmer Allan at the farm abode

William and Dora. William was his son,

And she his niece. He often look’d at them,

And often thought “I’ll make them man and wife”.

Now Dora felt her uncle’s will in all,

And yearn’d towards William; but the youth, because

He had been always with her in the house,

Thought not of Dora. Then there came a day

When Allan call’d his son, and said,

“My son: I married late, but I would wish to see

My grandchild on my knees before I die:

And I have set my heart upon a match.

Now therefore look to Dora; she is well

To look to; thrifty too beyond her age.

She is my brother’s daughter: he and I

Had once hard words, and parted, and he died

In foreign lands; but for his sake I bred

His daughter Dora: take her for your wife;

For I have wish’d this marriage, night and day,

For many years.” But William answer’d short;

“I cannot marry Dora; by my life,

I will not marry Dora”. Then the old man

Was wroth, and doubled up his hands, and said:

“You will not, boy! you dare to answer thus!

But in my time a father’s word was law,

And so it shall be now for me. Look to it;

Consider, William: take a month to think,

And let me have an answer to my wish;

Or, by the Lord that made me, you shall pack,

And never more darken my doors again.”

But William answer’d madly; bit his lips,

And broke away.  The more he look’d at her

The less he liked her; and his ways were harsh;

But Dora bore them meekly. Then before

The month was out he left his father’s house,

And hired himself to work within the fields;

And half in love, half spite, he woo’d and wed

A labourer’s daughter, Mary Morrison.

Then, when the bells were ringing,

Allan call’d His niece and said: “My girl, I love you well;

But if you speak with him that was my son,

Or change a word with her he calls his wife,

My home is none of yours. My will is law.”

And Dora promised, being meek. She thought,

“It cannot be: my uncle’s mind will change!”

And days went on, and there was born a boy

To William; then distresses came on him;

And day by day he pass’d his father’s gate,

Heart-broken, and his father helped him not.

But Dora stored what little she could save,

And sent it them by stealth, nor did they know

Who sent it; till at last a fever seized

On William, and in harvest time he died.

Then Dora went to Mary. Mary sat

And look’d with tears upon her boy, and thought

Hard things of Dora. Dora came and said:

“I have obey’d my uncle until now,

And I have sinn’d, for it was all thro’ me

This evil came on William at the first.

But, Mary, for the sake of him that’s gone,

And for your sake, the woman that he chose,

And for this orphan, I am come to you:

You know there has not been for these five years

So full a harvest, let me take the boy,

And I will set him in my uncle’s eye

Among the wheat; that when his heart is glad

Of the full harvest, he may see the boy,

And bless him for the sake of him that’s gone.”

And Dora took the child, and went her way

Across the wheat, and sat upon a mound

That was unsown, where many poppies grew.

Far off the farmer came into the field

And spied her not; for none of all his men

Dare tell him Dora waited with the child;

And Dora would have risen and gone to him,

But her heart fail’d her; and the reapers reap’d

And the sun fell, and all the land was dark.

But when the morrow came, she rose and took

The child once more, and sat upon the mound;

And made a little wreath of all the flowers

That grew about, and tied it round his hat

To make him pleasing in her uncle’s eye.

Then when the farmer passed into the field

He spied her, and he left his men at work,

And came and said: “Where were you yesterday?

Whose child is that? What are you doing here?”

So Dora cast her eyes upon the ground,

And answer’d softly, “This is William’s child?”

“And did I not,” said Allan, “did I not

Forbid you, Dora?” Dora said again:

“Do with me as you will, but take the child

And bless him for the sake of him that’s gone!”

And Allan said: “I see it is a trick

Got up betwixt you and the woman there.

I must be taught my duty, and by you!

You knew my word was law, and yet you dared

To slight it. Well  for I will take the boy;

But go you hence, and never see me more.”

So saying, he took the boy, that cried aloud

And struggled hard. The wreath of flowers fell

At Dora’s feet. She bow’d upon her hands,

And the boy’s cry came to her from the field,

More and more distant. She bow’d down her head,

Remembering the day when first she came,

And all the things that had been. She bow’d down

And wept in secret; and the reapers reap’d,

And the sun fell, and all the land was dark.

Then Dora went to Mary’s house, and stood

Upon the threshold. Mary saw the boy

Was not with Dora. She broke out in praise

To God, that help’d her in her widowhood.

And Dora said, “My uncle took the boy;

But, Mary, let me live and work with you:

He says that he will never see me more”.

Then answer’d Mary, “This shall never be,

That thou shouldst take my trouble on thyself:

And, now, I think, he shall not have the boy,

For he will teach him hardness, and to slight

His mother; therefore thou and I will go,

And I will have my boy, and bring him home;

And I will beg of him to take thee back;

But if he will not take thee back again,

Then thou and I will live within one house,

And work for William’s child until he grows

Of age to help us.” So the women kiss’d

Each other, and set out, and reach’d the farm.

The door was off the latch: they peep’d, and saw

The boy set up betwixt his grandsire’s knees,

Who thrust him in the hollows of his arm,

And clapt him on the hands and on the cheeks,

Like one that loved him; and the lad stretch’d out

And babbled for the golden seal, that hung

From Allan’s watch, and sparkled by the fire.

Then they came in: but when the boy beheld

His mother, he cried out to come to her:

And Allan set him down, and Mary said:

“O Father!  if you let me call you so

I never came a-begging for myself,

Or William, or this child; but now I come

For Dora: take her back; she loves you well.

O Sir, when William died, he died at peace

With all men; for I ask’d him, and he said,

He could not ever rue his marrying me

I have been a patient wife: but, Sir, he said

That he was wrong to cross his father thus:

‘God bless him!’ he said, ‘and may he never know

The troubles I have gone thro’!’ Then he turn’d

His face and pass’d  unhappy that I am!

But now, Sir, let me have my boy, for you

Will make him hard, and he will learn to slight

His father’s memory; and take Dora back,

And let all this be as it was before.”

So Mary said, and Dora hid her face

By Mary. There was silence in the room;

And all at once the old man burst in sobs:

“I have been to blame  to blame. I have kill’d my son.

I have kill’d him  but I loved him  my dear son.

May God forgive me!  I have been to blame.

Kiss me, my children.” Then they clung about

The old man’s neck, and kiss’d him many times.

And all the man was broken with remorse;

And all his love came back a hundredfold;

And for three hours he sobb’d o’er William’s child,

Thinking of William. So those four abode

Within one house together; and as years

Went forward, Mary took another mate;

But Dora lived unmarried till her death.

Audley Court

“The Bull, the Fleece are cramm’d, and not a room

For love or money. Let us picnic there

At Audley Court.” I spoke, while Audley feast

Humm’d like a hive all round the narrow quay,

To Francis, with a basket on his arm,

To Francis just alighted from the boat,

And breathing of the sea. “With all my heart,”

Said Francis. Then we shoulder’d thro’  the swarm,

And rounded by the stillness of the beach

To where the bay runs up its latest horn.

We left the dying ebb that faintly lipp’d

The flat red granite; so by many a sweep

Of meadow smooth from aftermath we reach’d

The griffin-guarded gates and pass’d thro’ all

The pillar’d dusk  of sounding sycamores

And cross’d the garden to the gardener’s lodge,

With all its casements bedded, and its walls

And chimneys muffled in the leafy vine.

There, on a slope of orchard, Francis laid

A damask napkin wrought with horse and hound,

Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home,

And, half-cut-down, a pasty costly-made,

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,

Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks

Imbedded and injellied; last with these,

A flask of cider from his father’s vats,

Prime, which I knew; and so we sat and eat

And talk’d old matters over; who was dead,

Who married, who was like to be, and how

The races went, and who would rent the hall:

Then touch’d upon the game, how scarce it was

This season; glancing thence, discuss’d the farm,

The fourfield system, and the price of grain;

And struck upon the corn-laws, where we split,

And came again together on the king

With heated faces; till he laugh’d aloud;

And, while the blackbird on the pippin hung

To hear him, clapt his hand in mine and sang

“Oh! who would fight and march and counter-march,

Be shot for sixpence in a battle-field,

And shovell’d up into a  bloody trench

Where no one knows? but let me live my life.

“Oh! who would cast and balance at a desk,

Perch’d like a crow upon a three-legg’d stool,

Till all his juice is dried, and all his joints

Are full of chalk? but let me live my life.

“Who’d serve the state? for if I carved my name

Upon the cliffs that guard my native land,

I might as well have traced it in the sands;

The sea wastes all: but let me live my life.

“Oh! who would love? I wooed a woman once,

But she was sharper than an eastern wind,

And all my heart turn’d from her, as a thorn

Turns from the sea: but let me live my life.”

He sang his song, and I replied with mine:

I found it in a volume, all of songs,

Knock’d down to me, when old Sir Robert’s pride,

His books  the more the pity, so I said

Came to the hammer here in March  and this

I set the words, and added names I knew.

“Sleep, Ellen Aubrey, sleep and dream of me:

Sleep, Ellen, folded in thy sister’s arm,

And sleeping, haply dream her arm is mine.

“Sleep, Ellen, folded in Emilia’s arm;

Emilia, fairer than all else but thou,

For thou art fairer than all else that is.

“Sleep, breathing health and peace upon her breast:

Sleep, breathing love and trust against her lip:

I go to-night: I come to-morrow morn.

“I go, but I return: I would I were

The pilot of the darkness and the dream.

Sleep, Ellen Aubrey, love, and dream of me.”

So sang we each to either, Francis Hale,

The farmer’s son who lived across the bay,

My friend; and I, that having wherewithal,

And in the fallow leisure of my life

A rolling stone of here and everywhere,

Did what I would; but ere the night we rose

And saunter’d home beneath a moon that, just

In crescent, dimly rain’d about the leaf

Twilights of airy silver, till we reach’d

The limit of the hills; and as we sank

From rock to rock upon the gloomy quay,

The town was hush’d beneath us: lower down

The bay was oily-calm: the harbour buoy

With one green sparkle ever and anon

Dipt by itself, and we were glad at heart.

Walking to the Mail

John. I’m glad I walk’d.

How fresh the meadows look

Above the river, and, but a month ago,

The whole hill-side was redder than a fox.

Is yon plantation where this byway joins

The turnpike?

James. Yes.

John. And when does this come by?

James. The mail? At one o’clock.

John. What is it now?

James. A quarter to.

John. Whose house is that I see?

No, not the County Member’s with the vane:

Up higher with the yewtree by it, and half

A score of gables.

James. That? Sir Edward Head’s:

But he’s abroad: the place is to be sold.

John. Oh, his. He was not broken?

James. No, sir, he,

Vex’d with a morbid devil in his blood

That veil’d the world with jaundice, hid his face

From all men, and commercing with himself,

He lost the sense that handles daily life

That keeps us all in order more or less

And sick of home went overseas for change.

John. And whither?

James. Nay, who knows? he’s here and there.

But let him go; his devil goes with him,

As well as with his tenant, Jockey Dawes.

John. What’s that?

James. You saw the man  on Monday, was it?

There by the hump-back’d willow; half stands up

And bristles; half has fall’n and made a bridge;

And there he caught the younker tickling trout

Caught in flagrante  what’s the Latin word?

Delicto; but his house, for so they say,

Was haunted with a jolly ghost, that shook

The curtains, whined in lobbies, tapt at doors,

And rummaged like a rat: no servant stay’d:

The farmer vext packs up his beds and chairs,

And all his household stuff; and with his boy

Betwixt his knees, his wife upon the tilt,

Sets out,  and meets a friend who hails him,

“What! You’re flitting!” “Yes, we’re flitting,” says the ghost

(For they had pack’d the thing among the beds).

“Oh, well,” says he, “you flitting with us too

Jack, turn the horses’ heads and home again”.

John. He left his wife behind; for so I heard.

James. He left her, yes. I met my lady once:

A woman like a butt, and harsh as crabs.

John. Oh, yet, but I remember, ten years back

‘Tis now at least ten years  and then she was

You could not light upon a sweeter thing:

A body slight and round and like a pear

In growing, modest eyes, a hand a foot

Lessening in perfect cadence, and a skin

As clean and white as privet when it flowers.

James. Ay, ay, the blossom fades and they that loved

At first like dove and dove were cat and dog.

She was the daughter of a cottager,

Out of her sphere. What betwixt shame and pride,

New things and old, himself and her, she sour’d

To what she is: a nature never kind!

Like men, like manners: like breeds like, they say.

Kind nature is the best: those manners next

That fit us like a nature second-hand;

Which are indeed the manners of the great.

John. But I had heard it was this bill that past,

And fear of change at home, that drove him hence.

James. That was the last drop in the cup of gall.

I once was near him, when his bailiff brought

A Chartist pike. You should have seen him wince

As from a venomous thing: he thought himself

A mark for all, and shudder’d, lest a cry

Should break his sleep by night, and his nice eyes

Should see the raw mechanic’s bloody thumbs

Sweat on his blazon’d chairs; but, sir, you know

That these two parties still divide the world

Of those that want, and those that have: and still

The same old sore breaks out from age to age

With much the same result. Now I myself,

A Tory to the quick, was as a boy

Destructive, when I had not what I would.

I was at school  a college in the South:

There lived a flayflint near; we stole his fruit,

His hens, his eggs; but there was law for us;

We paid in person. He had a sow, sir. She,

With meditative grunts of much content,

Lay great with pig, wallowing in sun and mud.

By night we dragg’d her to the college tower

From her warm bed, and up the corkscrew stair

With hand and rope we haled the groaning sow,

And on the leads we kept her till she pigg’d.

Large range of prospect had the mother sow,

And but for daily loss of one she loved,

As one by one we took them  but for this

As never sow was higher in this world

Might have been happy: but what lot is pure!

We took them all, till she was left alone

Upon her tower, the Niobe of swine,

And so return’d unfarrowed to her sty.

John. They found you out?

James. Not they.

John. Well  after all  What know we of the secret of a man?

His nerves were wrong. What ails us, who are sound,

That we should mimic this raw fool the world,

Which charts us all in its coarse blacks or whites,

As ruthless as a baby with a worm,

As cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows

To Pity  more from ignorance than will,

But put your best foot forward, or I fear

That we shall miss the mail: and here it comes

With five at top: as quaint a four-in-hand

As you shall see  three pyebalds and a roan.

St Simon Stylites

It is not easy to identify the St. Simeon Stylites of Hone’s narrative and Tennyson’s poem, whether he is to be identified with St. Simeon the Elder, of whom there are three memoirs given in the Acta Sanctorum, tom. i., 5th January, 261-286, or with St. Simeon Stylites, Junior, of whom there is an elaborate biography in Greek by Nicephorus printed with a Latin translation and notes in the Acta Sanctorum, tom. v., 24th May, 298-401. It seems clear that whoever compiled the account popularised by Hone had read both and amalgamated them. The main lines in the story of both saints are exactly the same. Both stood on columns, both tortured themselves in the same ways, both wrought miracles, and both died at their posts of penance. St. Simeon the Elder was born at Sisan in Syria about A.D. 390, and was buried at Antioch in A.D. 459 or 460. The Simeon the Younger was born at Antioch A. D. 521 and died in A.D. 592. His life, which is of singular interest, is much more elaborately related.

This poem is not simply a dramatic study. It bears very directly on Tennyson’s philosophy of life. In these early poems he has given us four studies in the morbid anatomy of character: The Palace of Art, which illustrates the abuse of aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment of self; The Vision of Sin, which illustrates the effects of similar indulgence in the grosser pleasures of the senses; The Two Voices, which illustrates the mischief of despondent self-absorption, while the present poem illustrates the equally pernicious indulgence in an opposite extreme, asceticism affected for the mere gratification of personal vanity.

Altho’ I be the basest of mankind,

From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,

Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet

For troops of devils, mad with blasphemy,

I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold

Of saintdom, and to clamour, morn and sob,

Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer,

Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.

Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,

This not be all in vain that thrice ten years,

Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,

In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,

In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps,

A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,

Patient on this tall pillar I have borne

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow;

And I had hoped that ere this period closed

Thou wouldst have caught me up into Thy rest,

Denying not these weather-beaten limbs

The meed of saints, the white robe and the palm.

O take the meaning, Lord: I do not breathe,

Not whisper, any murmur of complaint.

Pain heap’d ten-hundred-fold to this, were still

Less burthen, by ten-hundred-fold, to bear,

Than were those lead-like tons of sin, that crush’d

My spirit flat before thee. O Lord, Lord,

Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,

For I was strong and hale of body then;

And tho’ my teeth, which now are dropt away,

Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard

Was tagg’d with icy fringes in the moon,

I drown’d the whoopings of the owl with sound

Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw

An angel stand and watch me, as I sang.

Now am I feeble grown; my end draws nigh;

I hope my end draws nigh: half deaf I am,

So that I scarce can hear the people hum

About the column’s base, and almost blind,

And scarce can recognise the fields I know;

And both my thighs are rotted with the dew;

Yet cease I not to clamour and to cry,

While my stiff spine can hold my weary head,

Till all my limbs drop piecemeal from the stone,

Have mercy, mercy: take away my sin.

O Jesus, if thou wilt not save my soul,

Who may be saved? who is it may be saved?

Who may be made a saint, if I fail here?

Show me the man hath suffered more than I.

For did not all thy martyrs die one death?

For either they were stoned, or crucified,

Or burn’d in fire, or boil’d in oil, or sawn

In twain beneath the ribs; but I die here

To-day, and whole years long, a life of death.

Bear witness, if I could have found a way

(And heedfully I sifted all my thought)

More slowly-painful to subdue this home

Of sin, my flesh, which I despise and hate,

I had not stinted practice, O my God.

For not alone this pillar-punishment,

Not this alone I bore: but while I lived

In the white convent down the valley there,

For many weeks about my loins I wore

The rope that haled the buckets from the well,

Twisted as tight as I could knot the noose;

And spake not of it to a single soul,

Until the ulcer, eating thro’ my skin,

Betray’d my secret penance, so that all

My brethren marvell’d greatly. More than this

I bore, whereof, O God, thou knowest all.

Three winters, that my soul might grow to thee,

I lived up there on yonder mountain side.

My right leg chain’d into the crag, I lay

Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones;

Inswathed sometimes in wandering mist, and twice

Black’d with thy branding thunder, and sometimes

Sucking the damps for drink, and eating not,

Except the spare chance-gift of those that came

To touch my body and be heal’d, and live:

And they say then that I work’d miracles,

Whereof my fame is loud amongst mankind,

Cured lameness, palsies, cancers. Thou, O God,

Knowest alone whether this was or no.

Have mercy, mercy; cover all my sin.

Then, that I might be more alone with thee,

Three years I lived upon a pillar, high

Six cubits, and three years on one of twelve;

And twice three years I crouch’d on one that rose

Twenty by measure; last of all, I grew

Twice ten long weary weary years to this,

That numbers forty cubits from the soil.

I think that I have borne as much as this

Or else I dream  and for so long a time,

If I may measure time by yon slow light,

And this high dial, which my sorrow crowns

So much  even so. And yet I know not well,

For that the evil ones comes here, and say,

“Fall down, O Simeon: thou hast suffer’d long

For ages and for ages!” then they prate

Of penances I cannot have gone thro’,

Perplexing me with lies; and oft I fall,

Maybe for months, in such blind lethargies,

That Heaven, and Earth, and Time are choked. But yet

Bethink thee, Lord, while thou and all the saints

Enjoy themselves in Heaven, and men on earth

House in the shade of comfortable roofs,

Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food,

And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls,

I, ‘tween the spring and downfall of the light,

Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,

To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the Saints;

Or in the night, after a little sleep,

I wake: the chill stars sparkle; I am wet

With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost.

I wear an undress’d goatskin on my back;

A grazing iron collar grinds my neck;

And in my weak, lean arms I lift the cross,

And strive and wrestle with thee till I die:

O mercy, mercy! wash away my sin.

O Lord, thou knowest what a man I am;

A sinful man, conceived and born in sin:

‘Tis their own doing; this is none of mine;

Lay it not to me. Am I to blame for this,

That here come those that worship me? Ha! ha!

They think that I am somewhat. What am I?

The silly people take me for a saint,

And bring me offerings of fruit and flowers:

And I, in truth (thou wilt bear witness here)

Have all in all endured as much, and more

Than many just and holy men, whose names

Are register’d and calendar’d for saints.

Good people, you do ill to kneel to me.

What is it I can have done to merit this?

I am a sinner viler than you all.

It may be I have wrought some miracles,

And cured some halt and maim’d; but what of that?

It may be, no one, even among the saints,

May match his pains with mine; but what of that?

Yet do not rise: for you may look on me,

And in your looking you may kneel to God.

Speak! is there any of you halt or maim’d?

I think you know I have some power with Heaven

From my long penance: let him speak his wish.

Yes, I can heal. Power goes forth from me.

They say that they are heal’d. Ah, hark! they shout

“St. Simeon Stylites”. Why, if so,

God reaps a harvest in me. O my soul,

God reaps a harvest in thee. If this be,

Can I work miracles and not be saved?

This is not told of any. They were saints.

It cannot be but that I shall be saved;

Yea, crown’d a saint. They shout, “Behold a saint!”

And lower voices saint me from above.

Courage, St. Simeon! This dull chrysalis

Cracks into shining wings, and hope ere death

Spreads more and more and more, that God hath now

Sponged and made blank of crimeful record all

My mortal archives. O my sons, my sons,

I, Simeon of the pillar, by surname Stylites, among men;

I, Simeon, The watcher on the column till the end;

I, Simeon, whose brain the sunshine bakes;

I, whose bald brows in silent hours become

Unnaturally hoar with rime, do now

From my high nest of penance here proclaim

That Pontius and Iscariot by my side

Show’d like fair seraphs. On the coals I lay,

A vessel full of sin: all hell beneath

Made me boil over. Devils pluck’d my sleeve;

Abaddon and Asmodeus caught at me.

I smote them with the cross; they swarm’d again.

In bed like monstrous apes they crush’d my chest:

They flapp’d my light out as I read: I saw

Their faces grow between me and my book:

With colt-like whinny and with hoggish whine

They burst my prayer. Yet this way was left,

And by this way I’scaped them. Mortify

Your flesh, like me, with scourges and with thorns;

Smite, shrink not, spare not. If it may be, fast

Whole Lents, and pray. I hardly, with slow steps,

With slow, faint steps, and much exceeding pain,

Have scrambled past those pits of fire, that still

Sing in mine ears. But yield not me the praise:

God only thro’ his bounty hath thought fit,

Among the powers and princes of this world,

To make me an example to mankind,

Which few can reach to. Yet I do not say

But that a time may come  yea, even now,

Now, now, his footsteps smite the threshold stairs

Of life  I say, that time is at the doors

When you may worship me without reproach;

For I will leave my relics in your land,

And you may carve a shrine about my dust,

And burn a fragrant lamp before my bones,

When I am gather’d to the glorious saints.

While I spake then, a sting of shrewdest pain

Ran shrivelling thro’ me, and a cloudlike change,

In passing, with a grosser film made thick

These heavy, horny eyes. The end! the end!

Surely the end! What’s here? a shape, a shade,

A flash of light. Is that the angel there

That holds a crown? Come, blessed brother, come,

I know thy glittering face. I waited long;

My brows are ready. What! deny it now?

Nay, draw, draw, draw nigh. So I clutch it. Christ!

‘Tis gone: ‘tis here again; the crown! the crown!

So now ‘tis fitted on and grows to me,

And from it melt the dews of Paradise,

Sweet! sweet! spikenard, and balm, and frankincense.

Ah! let me not be fool’d, sweet saints: I trust

That I am whole, and clean, and meet for Heaven.

Speak, if there be a priest, a man of God,

Among you there, and let him presently

Approach, and lean a ladder on the shaft,

And climbing up into my airy home,

Deliver me the blessed sacrament;

For by the warning of the Holy Ghost,

I prophesy that I shall die to-night,

A quarter before twelve.  But thou, O Lord,

Aid all this foolish people; let them take

Example, pattern: lead them to thy light.

The Talking Oak

Tennyson told Mr. Aubrey de Vere that the poem was an experiment meant to test the degree in which it is in the power of poetry to humanise external nature. Tennyson might have remembered that Ovid had made the same experiment nearly two thousand years ago, while Goethe had immediately anticipated him in his charming Der Junggesett und der Mühlbach. There was certainly no novelty in such an attempt. The poem is in parts charmingly written, but the oak is certainly “garrulously given,” and comes perilously near to tediousness.

Once more the gate behind me falls;

Once more before my face

I see the moulder’d Abbey-walls,

That stand within the chace.

Beyond the lodge the city lies,

Beneath its drift of smoke;

And ah! with what delighted eyes

I turn to yonder oak.

For when my passion first began,

Ere that, which in me burn’d,

The love, that makes me thrice a man,

Could hope itself return’d;

To yonder oak within the field

I spoke without restraint,

And with a larger faith appeal’d

Than Papist unto Saint.

For oft I talk’d with him apart,

And told him of my choice,

Until he plagiarised a heart,

And answer’d with a voice.

Tho’ what he whisper’d, under Heaven

None else could understand;

I found him garrulously given,

A babbler in the land.

But since I heard him make reply

Is many a weary hour;

‘Twere well to question him, and try

If yet he keeps the power.

Hail, hidden to the knees in fern,

Broad Oak of Sumner-chace,

Whose topmost branches can discern

The roofs of Sumner-place!

Say thou, whereon I carved her name,

If ever maid or spouse,

As fair as my Olivia, came

To rest beneath thy boughs.

“O Walter, I have shelter’d here

Whatever maiden grace

The good old Summers, year by year,

Made ripe in Sumner-chace:

“Old Summers, when the monk was fat,

And, issuing shorn and sleek,

Would twist his girdle tight, and pat

The girls upon the cheek.

“Ere yet, in scorn of Peter’s-pence,

And number’d bead, and shrift,

Bluff Harry broke into the spence,

And turn’d the cowls adrift:

“And I have seen some score of those

Fresh faces, that would thrive

When his man-minded offset rose

To chase the deer at five;

“And all that from the town would stroll,

Till that wild wind made work

In which the gloomy brewer’s soul

Went by me, like a stork:

“The slight she-slips of loyal blood,

And others, passing praise,

Strait-laced, but all too full in bud

For puritanic stays:

“And I have shadow’d many a group

Of beauties, that were born

In teacup-times of hood and hoop,

Or while the patch was worn;

“And, leg and arm with love-knots gay,

About me leap’d and laugh’d

The Modish Cupid of the day,

And shrill’d his tinsel shaft.

“I swear (and else may insects prick

Each leaf into a gall)

This girl, for whom your heart is sick,

Is three times worth them all;

“For those and theirs, by Nature’s law,

Have faded long ago;

But in these latter springs I saw

Your own Olivia blow,

“From when she gamboll’d on the greens,

A baby-germ, to when

The maiden blossoms of her teens

Could number five from ten.

“I swear, by leaf, and wind, and rain

(And hear me with thine ears),

That, tho’ I circle in the grain

Five hundred rings of years

“Yet, since I first could cast a shade,

Did never creature pass

So slightly, musically made,

So light upon the grass:

“For as to fairies, that will flit

To make the greensward fresh,

I hold them exquisitely knit,

But far too spare of flesh.”

Oh, hide thy knotted knees in fern,

And overlook the chace;

And from thy topmost branch discern

The roofs of Sumner-place.

But thou, whereon I carved her name,

That oft hast heard my vows,

Declare when last Olivia came

To sport beneath thy boughs.

“O yesterday, you know, the fair

Was holden at the town;

Her father left his good arm-chair,

And rode his hunter down.

“And with him Albert came on his.

I look’d at him with joy:

As cowslip unto oxlip is,

So seems she to the boy.

“An hour had past  and, sitting straight

Within the low-wheel’d chaise,

Her mother trundled to the gate

Behind the dappled grays.

“But, as for her, she stay’d  at home,

And on the roof she went,

And down the way you use to come,

She look’d with discontent.

“She left the novel half-uncut

Upon the rosewood shelf;

She left the new piano shut:

She could not please herself.

“Then ran she, gamesome as the colt,

And livelier than a lark

She sent her voice thro’ all the holt

Before her, and the park.

“A light wind chased her on the wing,

And in the chase grew wild,

As close as might be would he cling

About the darling child:

“But light as any wind that blows

So fleetly did she stir,

The flower she touch’d on dipt and rose,

And turn’d to look at her.

“And here she came, and round me play’d,

And sang to me the whole

Of those three stanzas that you made

About my ‘giant bole’;

“And in a fit of frolic mirth

She strove to span my waist:

Alas, I was so broad of girth,

I could not be embraced.

“I wish’d myself the fair young beech

That here beside me stands,

That round me, clasping each in each,

She might have lock’d her hands.

“Yet seem’d the pressure thrice as sweet

As woodbine’s fragile hold,

Or when I feel about my feet

The berried briony fold.”

O muffle round thy knees with fern,

And shadow Sumner-chace!

Long may thy topmost branch discern

The roofs of Sumner-place!

But tell me, did she read the name

I carved with many vows

When last with throbbing heart I came

To rest beneath thy boughs?

“O yes, she wander’d round and round

These knotted knees of mine,

And found, and kiss’d the name she found,

And sweetly murmur’d thine.

“A teardrop trembled from its source,

And down my surface crept.

My sense of touch is something coarse,

But I believe she wept.

“Then flush’d her cheek with rosy light,

She glanced across the plain;

But not a creature was in sight:

She kiss’d me once again.

“Her kisses were so close and kind,

That, trust me on my word,

Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind,

But yet my sap was stirr’d:

“And even into my inmost ring

A pleasure I discern’d

Like those blind motions of the Spring,

That show the year is turn’d.

“Thrice-happy he that may caress

The ringlet’s waving balm

The cushions of whose touch may press

The maiden’s tender palm.

“I, rooted here among the groves,

But languidly adjust

My vapid vegetable loves

With anthers and with dust:

“For, ah! my friend, the days were brief

Whereof the poets talk,

When that, which breathes within the leaf,

Could slip its bark and walk.

“But could I, as in times foregone,

From spray, and branch, and stem,

Have suck’d and gather’d into one

The life that spreads in them,

“She had not found me so remiss;

But lightly issuing thro’,

I would have paid her kiss for kiss

With usury thereto.”

O flourish high, with leafy towers,

And overlook the lea,

Pursue thy loves among the bowers,

But leave thou mine to me.

O flourish, hidden deep in fern,

Old oak, I love thee well;

A thousand thanks for what I learn

And what remains to tell.

“‘Tis little more: the day was warm;

At last, tired out with play,

She sank her head upon her arm,

And at my feet she lay.

“Her eyelids dropp’d their silken eaves.

I breathed upon her eyes

Thro’ all the summer of my leaves

A welcome mix’d with sighs.

“I took the swarming sound of life

The music from the town

The murmurs of the drum and fife

And lull’d them in my own.

“Sometimes I let a sunbeam slip,

To light her shaded eye;

A second flutter’d round her lip

Like a golden butterfly;

“A third would glimmer on her neck

To make the necklace shine;

Another slid, a sunny fleck,

From head to ancle fine.

“Then close and dark my arms I spread,

And shadow’d all her rest

Dropt dews upon her golden head,

An acorn in her breast.

“But in a pet she started up,

And pluck’d it out, and drew

My little oakling from the cup,

And flung him in the dew.

“And yet it was a graceful gift

I felt a pang within

As when I see the woodman lift

His axe to slay my kin.

“I shook him down because he was

The finest on the tree.

He lies beside thee on the grass.

O kiss him once for me.

“O kiss him twice and thrice for me,

That have no lips to kiss,

For never yet was oak on lea

Shall grow so fair as this.”

Step deeper yet in herb and fern,

Look further thro’ the chace,

Spread upward till thy boughs discern

The front of Sumner-place.

This fruit of thine by Love is blest,

That but a moment lay

Where fairer fruit of Love may rest

Some happy future day.

I kiss it twice, I kiss it thrice,

The warmth it thence shall win

To riper life may magnetise

The baby-oak within.

But thou, while kingdoms overset,

Or lapse from hand to hand,

Thy leaf shall never fail, nor yet

Thine acorn in the land.

May never saw dismember thee,

Nor wielded axe disjoint,

That art the fairest-spoken tree

From here to Lizard-point.

O rock upon thy towery top

All throats that gurgle sweet!

All starry culmination drop

Balm-dews to bathe thy feet!

All grass of silky feather grow

And while he sinks or swells

The full south-breeze around thee blow

The sound of minster bells.

The fat earth feed thy branchy root,

That under deeply strikes!

The northern morning o’er thee shoot

High up, in silver spikes!

Nor ever lightning char thy grain,

But, rolling as in sleep,

Low thunders bring the mellow rain,

That makes thee broad and deep!

And hear me swear a solemn oath,

That only by thy side

Will I to Olive plight my troth,

And gain her for my bride.

And when my marriage morn may fall,

She, Dryad-like, shall wear

Alternate leaf and acorn-ball

In wreath about her hair.

And I will work in prose and rhyme,

And praise thee more in both

Than bard has honour’d beech or lime,

Or that Thessalian growth,

In which the swarthy ringdove sat,

And mystic sentence spoke;

And more than England honours that,

Thy famous brother-oak,

Wherein the younger Charles abode

Till all the paths were dim,

And far below the Roundhead rode,

And humm’d a surly hymn.

Love and Duty

Whether this beautiful poem is autobiographical and has reference to the compulsory separation of Tennyson and Miss Emily Sellwood, afterwards his wife, in 1840, it is impossible for this editor to say, as Lord Tennyson in his Life of his father is silent on the subject.

Of love that never found his earthly close,

What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts?

Or all the same as if he had not been?

Not so. Shall Error in the round of time

Still father Truth? O shall the braggart shout

For some blind glimpse of freedom work itself

Thro’ madness, hated by the wise, to law

System and empire? Sin itself be found

The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?

And only he, this wonder, dead, become

Mere highway dust? or year by year alone

Sit brooding in the ruins of a life,

Nightmare of youth, the spectre of himself!

If this were thus, if this, indeed, were all,

Better the narrow brain, the stony heart,

The staring eye glazed o’er with sapless days,

The long mechanic pacings to and fro,

The set gray life, and apathetic end.

But am I not the nobler thro’ thy love?

O three times less unworthy! likewise thou

Art more thro’ Love, and greater than thy years.

The Sun will run his orbit, and the Moon

Her circle. Wait, and Love himself will bring

The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit

Of wisdom.

Wait: my faith is large in Time,

And that which shapes it to some perfect end.

Will some one say, then why not ill for good?

Why took ye not your pastime? To that man

My work shall answer, since I knew the right

And did it; for a man is not as God,

But then most Godlike being most a man.

So let me think ‘tis well for thee and me

Ill-fated that I am, what lot is mine

Whose foresight preaches peace, my heart so slow

To feel it! For how hard it seem’d to me,

When eyes, love-languid thro’ half-tears, would dwell

One earnest, earnest moment upon mine,

Then not to dare to see! when thy low voice,

Faltering, would break its syllables, to keep

My own full-tuned,  hold passion in a leash,

And not leap forth and fall about thy neck,

And on thy bosom, (deep-desired relief!)

Rain out the heavy mist of tears, that weigh’d

Upon my brain, my senses, and my soul!

For love himself took part against himself

To warn us off, and Duty loved of Love

O this world’s curse  beloved but hated  came Like

Death betwixt thy dear embrace and mine,

And crying, “Who is this? behold thy bride,”

She push’d me from thee.

If the sense is hard

To alien ears, I did not speak to these

No, not to thee, but to thyself in me:

Hard is my doom and thine: thou knowest it all.

Could Love part thus? was it not well to speak,

To have spoken once? It could not but be well.

The slow sweet hours that bring us all things good,

The slow sad hours that bring us all things ill,

And all good things from evil, brought the night

In which we sat together and alone,

And to the want, that hollow’d all the heart,

Gave utterance by the yearning of an eye,

That burn’d upon its object thro’ such tears

As flow but once a life. The trance gave way

To those caresses, when a hundred times

In that last kiss, which never was the last,

Farewell, like endless welcome, lived and died.

Then follow’d counsel, comfort and the words

That make a man feel strong in speaking truth;

Till now the dark was worn, and overhead

The lights of sunset and of sunrise mix’d

In that brief night; the summer night, that paused

Among her stars to hear us; stars that hung

Love-charm’d to listen: all the wheels of Time

Spun round in station, but the end had come.

O then like those, who clench  their nerves to rush

Upon their dissolution, we two rose,

There-closing like an individual life

In one blind cry of passion and of pain,

Like bitter accusation ev’n to death,

Caught up the whole of love and utter’d it,

And bade adieu for ever. Live  yet live

Shall sharpest pathos blight us, knowing all

Life needs for life is possible to will

Live happy; tend thy flowers; be tended by

My blessing! Should my Shadow cross thy thoughts

Too sadly for their peace, remand it thou

For calmer hours to Memory’s darkest hold,

If not to be forgotten  not at once

Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams,

O might it come like one that looks content,

With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth,

And point thee forward to a distant light,

Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart

And leave thee frëer, till thou wake refresh’d,

Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown

Full quire, and morning driv’n her plow of pearl

Far furrowing into light the mounded rack,

Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.

Ulysses

This noble poem, which is said to have induced Sir Robert Peel to give Tennyson his pension, was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, presumably therefore in 1833. “It gave my feeling,” Tennyson said to his son, “about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” It is not the Ulysses of Homer, nor was it suggested by the Odyssey. The germ, the spirit and the sentiment of the poem are from the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s Inferno, where Ulysses in the Limbo of the Deceivers speaks from the flame which swathes him.

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d

Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil’d and wrought, and thought with me

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads  you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all; but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Locksley Hall

Locksley Hall was suggested, as Tennyson acknowledged, by Sir William Jones’ translation of the old Arabian Moâllakât, a collection from the works of pre-Mahommedan poets. See Sir William Jones’ works, quarto edition, vol. iv., pp. 247-57. But only one of these poems, namely the poem of Amriolkais, could have immediately influenced him. In this the poet supposes himself attended on a journey by a company of friends, and they pass near a place where his mistress had lately lived, but from which her tribe had then removed. He desires them to stop awhile, that he may weep over the deserted remains of her tent. They comply with his request, but exhort him to show more strength of mind, and urge two topics of consolation, namely, that he had before been equally unhappy and that he had enjoyed his full share of pleasures. Thus by the recollection of his past delights his imagination is kindled and his grief suspended. But Tennyson’s chief indebtedness is rather in the oriental colouring given to his poem, chiefly in the sentiment and imagery.

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ‘tis early morn:

Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.

‘Tis the place, and all around it,  as of old, the curlews call,

Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime

With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;

When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s  breast;

In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;

In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,

And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.

And I said, “My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,

Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.”

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light,

As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.

And she turn’d  her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs

All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes

Saying, “I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong”;

Saying, “Dost thou love me, cousin?” weeping, “I have loved thee long”.

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn’d it in his glowing hands;

Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass’d in music out of sight.

Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,

And her whisper throng’d my pulses with the fulness of the Spring.

Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,

And our spirits rush’d together at the touching of the lips.

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!

O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!

Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,

Puppet to a father’s threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!

Is it well to wish thee happy?  having known me  to decline

On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

Yet it shall be: thou shalt lower to his level day by day,

What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathise with clay.

As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,

And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,

Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

What is this? his eyes are heavy: think not they are glazed with wine.

Go to him: it is thy duty: kiss him: take his hand in thine.

It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought:

Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.

He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand

Better thou wert dead before me, tho’ I slew thee with my hand!

Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart’s disgrace,

Roll’d in one another’s arms, and silent in a last embrace.

Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!

Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!

Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule!

Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten’d forehead of the fool!

Well  ‘tis well that I should bluster!  Hadst thou less unworthy proved

Would to God  for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.

Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit?

I will pluck it from my bosom, tho’ my heart be at the root.

Never, tho’ my mortal summers to such length of years should come

As the many-winter’d crow that leads the clanging rookery home.

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind?

Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?

I remember one that perish’d: sweetly did she speak and move:

Such a one do I remember, whom to look it was to love.

Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?

No  she never loved me truly: love is love for evermore.

Comfort? comfort scorn’d of devils! this is truth the poet sings,

That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow  is remembering happier things.

Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,

In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall,

Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.

Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep,

To thy widow’d marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.

Thou shalt hear the “Never, never,” whisper’d by the phantom years,

And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;

And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.

Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow: get thee to thy rest again.

Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry,

‘Tis a purer life than thine; a lip to drain thy trouble dry.

Baby lips will laugh me down: my latest rival brings thee rest.

Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother’s breast.

O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.

Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two.

O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,

With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart.

“They were dangerous guides the feelings  she herself was not exempt

Truly, she herself had suffer’d”  Perish in thy self-contempt!

Overlive it  lower yet  be happy! wherefore should I care,

I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.

What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?

Every door is barr’d with gold, and opens but to golden keys.

Every gate is throng’d with suitors, all the markets overflow.

I have but an angry fancy: what is that which I should do?

I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman’s ground,

When the ranks are roll’d in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound.

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels,

And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other’s heels.

Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page.

Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age!

Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,

When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;

Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,

Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father’s field,

And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,

Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;

And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,

Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men;

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:

That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunderstorm;

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

So I triumph’d, ere my passion sweeping thro’ me left me dry,

Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;

Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint,

Science moves, but slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point:

Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,

Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.

Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.

What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,

Tho’ the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy’s?

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,

And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,

Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.

Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,

They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:

Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder’d string?

I am shamed thro’ all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.

Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman’s pleasure, woman’s pain

Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match’d with mine,

Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine

Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat

Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat;

Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr’d;

I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle’s ward.

Or to burst all links of habit  there to wander far away,

On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.

Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,

Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,

Slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer  from the crag;

Droops the heavy-blossom’d bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree

Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.

There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,

In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.

There the passions cramp’d no longer shall have scope and breathing-space;

I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

Iron-jointed, supple-sinew’d, they shall dive, and they shall run,

Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;

Whistle back the parrot’s call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks.

Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books

Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,

But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.

I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,

Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!

Mated with a squalid savage  what to me were sun or clime?

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,

Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua’s moon in Ajalon!

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range.

Let the great world spin  for ever down the ringing grooves  of change.

Thro’ the shadow of the globe  we sweep into the younger day:

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:

Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.

Ancient founts of inspiration well thro’ all my fancy yet.

Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!

Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,

Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.

Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;

For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

Godiva

The poem was written in 1840 when Tennyson was returning from Coventry to London, after his visit to Warwickshire in that year. The Godiva pageant takes place in that town at the great fair on Friday in Trinity week. Earl Leofric was the Lord of Coventry in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and he and his wife Godiva founded a magnificent Benedictine monastery at Coventry. The first writer who mentions this legend is Matthew of Westminster, who wrote in 1307, that is some 250 years after Leofric’s time, and what authority he had for it is not known. It is certainly not mentioned by the many preceding writers who have left accounts of Leofric and Godiva (see Gough’s edition of Camden’s ‘Britannia’, vol. ii., p. 346, and for a full account of the legend see W. Reader, ‘The History and Description of Coventry Show Fair, with the History of Leofric and Godiva’). With Tennyson’s should be compared Moultrie’s beautiful poem on the same subject, and Landor’s Imaginary Conversation between Leofric and Godiva.

I waited for the train at Coventry;

I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,

To match the three tall spires;  and there I shaped

The city’s ancient legend into this:

Not only we, the latest seed of Time,

New men, that in the flying of a wheel

Cry down the past, not only we, that prate

Of rights and wrongs, have loved the people well,

And loathed to see them overtax’d; but she

Did more, and underwent, and overcame,

The woman of a thousand summers back,

Godiva, wife to that grim Earl, who ruled

In Coventry: for when he laid a tax

Upon his town, and all the mothers brought

Their children, clamouring, “If we pay, we starve!”

She sought her lord, and found him, where he strode

About the hall, among his dogs, alone,

His beard a foot before him, and his hair

A yard behind. She told him of their tears,

And pray’d him, “If they pay this tax, they starve”.

Whereat he stared, replying, half-amazed,

“You would not let your little finger ache

For such as these?”—”But I would die,” said she.

He laugh’d, and swore by Peter and by Paul;

Then fillip’d at the diamond in her ear;

“O ay, ay, ay, you talk!”—”Alas!” she said,

“But prove me what it is I would not do.”

And from a heart as rough as Esau’s hand,

He answer’d, “Ride you naked thro’ the town,

And I repeal it”; and nodding as in scorn,

He parted, with great strides among his dogs.

So left alone, the passions of her mind,

As winds from all the compass shift and blow,

Made war upon each other for an hour,

Till pity won. She sent a herald forth,

And bad him cry, with sound of trumpet, all

The hard condition; but that she would loose

The people: therefore, as they loved her well,

From then till noon no foot should pace the street,

No eye look down, she passing; but that all

Should keep within, door shut, and window barr’d.

Then fled she to her inmost bower, and there

Unclasp’d the wedded eagles of her belt,

The grim Earl’s gift; but ever at a breath

She linger’d, looking like a summer moon

Half-dipt in cloud: anon she shook her head,

And shower’d the rippled ringlets to her knee;

Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair

Stole on; and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid

From pillar unto pillar, until she reach’d

The gateway; there she found her palfrey trapt

In purple blazon’d with armorial gold.

Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity:

The deep air listen’d round her as she rode,

And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.

The little wide-mouth’d heads upon the spout

Had cunning eyes to see: the barking cur

Made her cheek flame: her palfrey’s footfall shot

Light horrors thro’ her pulses: the blind walls

Were full of chinks and holes; and overhead

Fantastic gables, crowding, stared: but she

Not less thro’ all bore up, till, last, she saw

The white-flower’d elder-thicket from the field

Gleam thro’ the Gothic archways  in the wall.

Then she rode back cloth’d on with chastity:

And one low churl,  compact of thankless earth,

The fatal byword of all years to come,

Boring a little auger-hole in fear,

Peep’d — but his eyes, before they had their will,

Were shrivell’d into darkness in his head,

And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait

On noble deeds, cancell’d a sense misused;

And she, that knew not, pass’d: and all at once,

With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon

Was clash’d and hammer’d from a hundred towers,

One after one: but even then she gain’d

Her bower; whence reissuing, robed and crown’d,

To meet her lord, she took the tax away,

And built herself an everlasting name.

The Two Voices

First published in 1842, though begun as early as 1833 and in course of composition in 1834. See Spedding’s letter dated 19th September, 1834. Its original title was The Thoughts of a Suicide. No alterations were made in the poem after 1842.

It adds interest to this poem to know that it is autobiographical. It was written soon after the death of Arthur Hallam when Tennyson’s depression was deepest. “When I wrote The Two Voices I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said, ‘Is life worth anything?’” It is the history  as Spedding put it  of the agitations, the suggestions and counter-suggestions of a mind sunk in hopeless despondency, and meditating self-destruction, together with the manner of its recovery to a more healthy condition. We have two singularly interesting parallels to it in preceding poetry. The one is in the third book of Lucretius (830-1095), where the arguments for suicide are urged, not merely by the poet himself, but by arguments placed by him in the mouth of Nature herself, and urged with such cogency that they are said to have induced one of his editors and translators, Creech, to put an end to his life. The other is in Spenser, in the dialogue between Despair and the Red Cross Knight, where Despair puts the case for self-destruction, and the Red Cross Knight rebuts the arguments (Faerie Queene, I. ix., st. xxxviii.-liv.).

A still small voice spake unto me,

“Thou art so full of misery,

Were it not better not to be?”

Then to the still small voice I said;

“Let me not cast in endless shade

What is so wonderfully made”.

To which the voice did urge reply;

“To-day I saw the dragon-fly

Come from the wells where he did lie.

“An inner impulse rent the veil

Of his old husk: from head to tail

Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

“He dried his wings: like gauze they grew:

Thro’ crofts and pastures wet with dew

A living flash of light he flew.”

I said, “When first the world began

Young Nature thro’ five cycles ran,

And in the sixth she moulded man.

“She gave him mind, the lordliest

Proportion, and, above the rest,

Dominion in the head and breast.”

Thereto the silent voice replied;

“Self-blinded are you by your pride:

Look up thro’ night: the world is wide.

“This truth within thy mind rehearse,

That in a boundless universe

Is boundless better, boundless worse.

“Think you this mould of hopes and fears

Could find no statelier than his peers

In yonder hundred million spheres?”

It spake, moreover, in my mind:

“Tho’ thou wert scatter’d to the wind,

Yet is there plenty of the kind”.

Then did my response clearer fall:

“No compound of this earthly ball

Is like another, all in all”.

To which he answer’d scoffingly;

“Good soul! suppose I grant it thee,

Who’ll weep for thy deficiency?

“Or will one beam  be less intense,

When thy peculiar difference

Is cancell’d in the world of sense?”

I would have said, “Thou canst not know,”

But my full heart, that work’d below,

Rain’d thro’ my sight its overflow.

Again the voice spake unto me:

“Thou art so steep’d in misery,

Surely ‘twere better not to be.

“Thine anguish will not let thee sleep,

Nor any train of reason keep:

Thou canst not think, but thou wilt weep.”

I said, “The years with change advance:

If I make dark my countenance,

I shut my life from happier chance.

“Some turn this sickness yet might take,

Ev’n yet.” But he: “What drug can make

A wither’d palsy cease to shake?”

I wept, “Tho’ I should die, I know

That all about the thorn will blow

In tufts of rosy-tinted snow;

“And men, thro’ novel spheres of thought

Still moving after truth long sought,

Will learn new things when I am not.”

“Yet,” said the secret voice, “some time,

Sooner or later, will gray prime

Make thy grass hoar with early rime.

“Not less swift souls that yearn for light,

Rapt after heaven’s starry flight,

Would sweep the tracts of day and night.

“Not less the bee would range her cells,

The furzy prickle fire the dells,

The foxglove cluster dappled bells.”

I said that “all the years invent;

Each month is various to present

The world with some development.

“Were this not well, to bide mine hour,

Tho’ watching from a ruin’d tower

How grows the day of human power?”

“The highest-mounted mind,” he said,

“Still sees the sacred morning spread

The silent summit overhead.

“Will thirty seasons render plain

Those lonely lights that still remain,

Just breaking over land and main?

“Or make that morn, from his cold crown

And crystal silence creeping down,

Flood with full daylight glebe and town?

“Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let

Thy feet, millenniums hence, be set

In midst of knowledge, dream’d not yet.

“Thou hast not gain’d a real height,

Nor art thou nearer to the light,

Because the scale is infinite.

“‘Twere better not to breathe or speak,

Than cry for strength, remaining weak,

And seem to find, but still to seek.

“Moreover, but to seem to find

Asks what thou lackest, thought resign’d,

A healthy frame, a quiet mind.”

I said, “When I am gone away,

‘He dared not tarry,’ men will say,

Doing dishonour to my clay.”

“This is more vile,” he made reply,

“To breathe and loathe, to live and sigh,

Than once from dread of pain to die.

“Sick art thou  a divided will

Still heaping on the fear of ill

The fear of men, a coward still.

“Do men love thee? Art thou so bound

To men, that how thy name may sound

Will vex thee lying underground?

“The memory of the wither’d leaf

In endless time is scarce more brief

Than of the garner’d Autumn-sheaf.

“Go, vexed Spirit, sleep in trust;

The right ear, that is fill’d with dust,

Hears little of the false or just.”

“Hard task, to pluck resolve,” I cried,

“From emptiness and the waste wide

Of that abyss, or scornful pride!

“Nay  rather yet that I could raise

One hope that warm’d me in the days

While still I yearn’d for human praise.

“When, wide in soul, and bold of tongue,

Among the tents I paused and sung,

The distant battle flash’d and rung.

“I sung the joyful Paean clear,

And, sitting, burnish’d without fear

The brand, the buckler, and the spear

“Waiting to strive a happy strife,

To war with falsehood to the knife,

And not to lose the good of life

“Some hidden principle to move,

To put together, part and prove,

And mete the bounds of hate and love

“As far as might be, to carve out

Free space for every human doubt,

That the whole mind might orb about

“To search thro’ all I felt or saw,

The springs of life, the depths of awe,

And reach the law within the law:

“At least, not rotting like a weed,

But, having sown some generous seed,

Fruitful of further thought and deed,

“To pass, when Life her light withdraws,

Not void of righteous self-applause,

Nor in a merely selfish cause

“In some good cause, not in mine own,

To perish, wept for, honour’d, known,

And like a warrior overthrown;

“Whose eyes are dim with glorious tears,

When, soil’d with noble dust, he hears

His country’s war-song thrill his ears:

“Then dying of a mortal stroke,

What time the foeman’s line is broke.

And all the war is roll’d in smoke.”

“Yea!” said the voice, “thy dream was good,

While thou abodest in the bud.

It was the stirring of the blood.

“If Nature put not forth her power

About the opening of the flower,

Who is it that could live an hour?

“Then comes the check, the change, the fall.

Pain rises up, old pleasures pall.

There is one remedy for all.

“Yet hadst thou, thro’ enduring pain,

Link’d month to month with such a chain

Of knitted purport, all were vain.

“Thou hadst not between death and birth

Dissolved the riddle of the earth.

So were thy labour little worth.

“That men with knowledge merely play’d,

I told thee  hardly nigher made,

Tho’ scaling slow from grade to grade;

“Much less this dreamer, deaf and blind,

Named man, may hope some truth to find,

That bears relation to the mind.

“For every worm beneath the moon

Draws different threads, and late and soon

Spins, toiling out his own cocoon.

“Cry, faint not: either Truth is born

Beyond the polar gleam forlorn,

Or in the gateways of the morn.

“Cry, faint not, climb: the summits slope

Beyond the furthest nights of hope,

Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope.

“Sometimes a little corner shines,

As over rainy mist inclines

A gleaming crag with belts of pines.

“I will go forward, sayest thou,

I shall not fail to find her now.

Look up, the fold is on her brow.

“If straight thy track, or if oblique,

Thou know’st not. Shadows thou dost strike,

Embracing cloud, Ixion-like;

“And owning but a little more

Than beasts, abidest lame and poor,

Calling thyself a little lower

“Than angels. Cease to wail and brawl!

Why inch by inch to darkness crawl?

There is one remedy for all.”

“O dull, one-sided voice,” said I,

“Wilt thou make everything a lie,

To flatter me that I may die?

“I know that age to age succeeds,

Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,

A dust of systems and of creeds.

“I cannot hide that some have striven,

Achieving calm, to whom was given

The joy that mixes man with Heaven:

“Who, rowing hard against the stream,

Saw distant gates of Eden gleam,

And did not dream it was a dream”;

“But heard, by secret transport led,

Ev’n in the charnels of the dead,

The murmur of the fountain-head

“Which did accomplish their desire,

Bore and forbore, and did not tire,

Like Stephen, an unquenched fire.

“He heeded not reviling tones,

Nor sold his heart to idle moans,

Tho’ cursed and scorn’d, and bruised with stones:

“But looking upward, full of grace,

He pray’d, and from a happy place

God’s glory smote him on the face.”

The sullen answer slid betwixt:

“Not that the grounds of hope were fix’d,

The elements were kindlier mix’d.”

I said, “I toil beneath the curse,

But, knowing not the universe,

I fear to slide from bad to worse.

“And that, in seeking to undo

One riddle, and to find the true,

I knit a hundred others new:

“Or that this anguish fleeting hence,

Unmanacled from bonds of sense,

Be fix’d and froz’n to permanence:

“For I go, weak from suffering here;

Naked I go, and void of cheer:

What is it that I may not fear?”

“Consider well,” the voice replied,

“His face, that two hours since hath died;

Wilt thou find passion, pain or pride?

“Will he obey when one commands?

Or answer should one press his hands?

He answers not, nor understands.

“His palms are folded on his breast:

There is no other thing express’d

But long disquiet merged in rest.

“His lips are very mild and meek:

Tho’ one should smite him on the cheek,

And on the mouth, he will not speak.

“His little daughter, whose sweet face

He kiss’d, taking his last embrace,

Becomes dishonour to her race

“His sons grow up that bear his name,

Some grow to honour, some to shame,

But he is chill to praise or blame.

“He will not hear the north wind rave,

Nor, moaning, household shelter crave

From winter rains that beat his grave.

“High up the vapours fold and swim:

About him broods the twilight dim:

The place he knew forgetteth him.”

“If all be dark, vague voice,” I said,

“These things are wrapt in doubt and dread,

Nor canst thou show the dead are dead.

“The sap dries up: the plant declines.

A deeper tale my heart divines.

Know I not Death? the outward signs?

“I found him when my years were few;

A shadow on the graves I knew,

And darkness in the village yew.

“From grave to grave the shadow crept:

In her still place the morning wept:

Touch’d by his feet the daisy slept.

“The simple senses crown’d his head:

‘Omega! thou art Lord,’ they

said; ‘We find no motion in the dead.’

“Why, if man rot in dreamless ease,

Should that plain fact, as taught by these,

Not make him sure that he shall cease?

“Who forged that other influence,

That heat of inward evidence,

By which he doubts against the sense?

“He owns the fatal gift of eyes,

That read his spirit blindly wise,

Not simple as a thing that dies.

“Here sits he shaping wings to fly:

His heart forebodes a mystery:

He names the name Eternity.

“That type of Perfect in his mind

In Nature can he nowhere find.

He sows himself in every wind.

“He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend,

And thro’ thick veils to apprehend

A labour working to an end.

“The end and the beginning vex

His reason: many things perplex,

With motions, checks, and counterchecks.

“He knows a baseness in his blood

At such strange war with something good,

He may not do the thing he would.

“Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn.

Vast images in glimmering dawn,

Half shown, are broken and withdrawn.

“Ah! sure within him and without,

Could his dark wisdom find it out,

There must be answer to his doubt.

“But thou canst answer not again.

With thine own weapon art thou slain,

Or thou wilt answer but in vain.

“The doubt would rest, I dare not solve.

In the same circle we revolve.

Assurance only breeds resolve.”

As when a billow, blown against,

Falls back, the voice with which I fenced

A little ceased, but recommenced.

“Where wert thou when thy father play’d

In his free field, and pastime made,

A merry boy in sun and shade?

“A merry boy they called him then.

He sat upon the knees of men

In days that never come again,

“Before the little ducts began

To feed thy bones with lime, and ran

Their course, till thou wert also man:

“Who took a wife, who rear’d his race,

Whose wrinkles gather’d on his face,

Whose troubles number with his days:

“A life of nothings, nothing-worth,

From that first nothing ere his birth

To that last nothing under earth!”

“These words,” I said, “are like the rest,

No certain clearness, but at best

A vague suspicion of the breast:

“But if I grant, thou might’st defend

The thesis which thy words intend

That to begin implies to end;

“Yet how should I for certain hold,

Because my memory is so cold,

That I first was in human mould?

“I cannot make this matter plain,

But I would shoot, howe’er in vain,

A random arrow from the brain.

“It may be that no life is found,

Which only to one engine bound

Falls off, but cycles always round.

“As old mythologies relate,

Some draught of Lethe might await

The slipping thro’ from state to state.

“As here we find in trances, men

Forget the dream that happens then,

Until they fall in trance again.

“So might we, if our state were such

As one before, remember much,

For those two likes might meet and touch.

“But, if I lapsed from nobler place,

Some legend of a fallen race

Alone might hint of my disgrace;

“Some vague emotion of delight

In gazing up an Alpine height,

Some yearning toward the lamps of night.

“Or if thro’ lower lives I came

Tho’ all experience past became

Consolidate in mind and frame

“I might forget my weaker lot;

For is not our first year forgot?

The haunts of memory echo not.

“And men, whose reason long was blind,

From cells of madness unconfined,

Oft lose whole years of darker mind.

“Much more, if first I floated free,

As naked essence, must I be

Incompetent of memory:

“For memory dealing but with time,

And he with matter, could she climb

Beyond her own material prime?

“Moreover, something is or seems,

That touches me with mystic gleams,

Like glimpses of forgotten dreams

“Of something felt, like something here;

Of something done, I know not where;

Such as no language may declare.”

The still voice laugh’d. “I talk,” said he,

“Not with thy dreams.

Suffice it thee Thy pain is a reality.”

“But thou,” said I, “hast miss’d thy mark,

Who sought’st to wreck my mortal ark,

By making all the horizon dark.

“Why not set forth, if I should do

This rashness, that which might ensue

With this old soul in organs new?

“Whatever crazy sorrow saith,

No life that breathes with human breath

Has ever truly long’d for death.

“‘Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,

Oh life, not death, for which we pant;

More life, and fuller, that I want.”

I ceased, and sat as one forlorn.

Then said the voice, in quiet scorn,

“Behold it is the Sabbath morn”.

And I arose, and I released

The casement, and the light increased

With freshness in the dawning east.

Like soften’d airs that blowing steal,

When meres begin to uncongeal,

The sweet church bells began to peal.

On to God’s house the people prest:

Passing the place where each must rest,

Each enter’d like a welcome guest.

One walk’d between his wife and child,

With measur’d footfall firm and mild,

And now and then he gravely smiled.

The prudent partner of his blood

Lean’d on him, faithful, gentle, good,

Wearing the rose of womanhood.

And in their double love secure,

The little maiden walk’d demure,

Pacing with downward eyelids pure.

These three made unity so sweet,

My frozen heart began to beat,

Remembering its ancient heat.

I blest them, and they wander’d on:

I spoke, but answer came there none:

The dull and bitter voice was gone.

A second voice was at mine ear,

A little whisper silver-clear,

A murmur, “Be of better cheer”.

As from some blissful neighbourhood,

A notice faintly understood,

“I see the end, and know the good”.

A little hint to solace woe,

A hint, a whisper breathing low,

“I may not speak of what I know”.

Like an Aeolian harp that wakes

No certain air, but overtakes

Far thought with music that it makes:

Such seem’d the whisper at my side:

“What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?” I cried.

“A hidden hope,” the voice replied:

So heavenly-toned, that in that hour

From out my sullen heart a power

Broke, like the rainbow from the shower,

To feel, altho’ no tongue can prove

That every cloud, that spreads above

And veileth love, itself is love.

And forth into the fields I went,

And Nature’s living motion lent

The pulse of hope to discontent.

I wonder’d at the bounteous hours,

The slow result of winter showers:

You scarce could see the grass for flowers.

I wonder’d, while I paced along:

The woods were fill’d so full with song,

There seem’d no room for sense of wrong.

So variously seem’d all things wrought,

I marvell’d how the mind was brought

To anchor by one gloomy thought;

And wherefore rather I made choice

To commune with that barren voice,

Than him that said, “Rejoice! rejoice!”

The Day-Dream

Prologue

O, Lady Flora, let me speak:

A pleasant hour has past away

While, dreaming on your damask cheek,

The dewy sister-eyelids lay.

As by the lattice you reclined,

I went thro’ many wayward moods

To see you dreaming  and, behind,

A summer crisp with shining woods.

And I too dream’d, until at last

Across my fancy, brooding warm,

The reflex of a legend past,

And loosely settled into form.

And would you have the thought I had,

And see the vision that I saw,

Then take the broidery-frame, and add

A crimson to the quaint Macaw,

And I will tell it. Turn your face,

Nor look with that too-earnest eye

The rhymes are dazzled from their place,

And order’d words asunder fly.

The Sleeping Palace

1

The varying year with blade and sheaf

Clothes and reclothes the happy plains;

Here rests the sap within the leaf,

Here stays the blood along the veins.

Faint shadows, vapours lightly curl’d,

Faint murmurs from the meadows come,

Like hints and echoes of the world

To spirits folded in the womb.

2

Soft lustre bathes the range of urns

On every slanting terrace-lawn.

The fountain to his place returns

Deep in the garden lake withdrawn.

Here droops the banner on the tower,

On the hall-hearths the festal fires,

The peacock in his laurel bower,

The parrot in his gilded wires.

3

Roof-haunting martins warm their eggs:

In these, in those the life is stay’d.

The mantles from the golden pegs

Droop sleepily: no sound is made,

Not even of a gnat that sings.

More like a picture seemeth all

Than those old portraits of old kings,

That watch the sleepers from the wall.

4

Here sits the Butler with a flask

Between his knees, half-drain’d; and there

The wrinkled steward at his task,

The maid-of-honour blooming fair:

The page has caught her hand in his:

Her lips are sever’d as to speak:

His own are pouted to a kiss:

The blush is fix’d upon her cheek.

5

Till all the hundred summers pass,

The beams, that thro’ the Oriel shine,

Make prisms in every carven glass,

And beaker brimm’d with noble wine.

Each baron at the banquet sleeps,

Grave faces gather’d in a ring.

His state the king reposing keeps.

He must have been a jovial king.

6

All round a hedge upshoots, and shows

At distance like a little wood;

Thorns, ivies, woodbine, misletoes,

And grapes with bunches red as blood;

All creeping plants, a wall of green

Close-matted, bur and brake and briar,

And glimpsing over these, just seen,

High up, the topmost palace-spire.

7

When will the hundred summers die,

And thought and time be born again,

And newer knowledge, drawing nigh,

Bring truth that sways the soul of men?

Here all things in there place remain,

As all were order’d, ages since.

Come, Care and Pleasure, Hope and Pain,

And bring the fated fairy Prince.

The Sleeping Beauty, 1842

1

Year after year unto her feet,

She lying on her couch alone,

Across the purpled coverlet,

The maiden’s jet-black hair has grown,

On either side her tranced form

Forth streaming from a braid of pearl:

The slumbrous light is rich and warm,

And moves not on the rounded curl.

2

The silk star-broider’d  coverlid

Unto her limbs itself doth mould

Languidly ever; and, amid

Her full black ringlets downward roll’d,

Glows forth each softly-shadow’d arm,

With bracelets of the diamond bright:

Her constant beauty doth inform

Stillness with love, and day with light.

3

She sleeps: her breathings are not heard

In palace chambers far apart.

The fragrant tresses are not stirr’d

That lie upon her charmed heart.

She sleeps: on either hand  upswells

The gold-fringed pillow lightly prest:

She sleeps, nor dreams, but ever dwells

A perfect form in perfect rest.

The Arrival

1

All precious things, discover’d late,

To those that seek them issue forth;

For love in sequel works with fate,

And draws the veil from hidden worth.

He travels far from other skies

His mantle glitters on the rocks

A fairy Prince, with joyful eyes,

And lighter footed than the fox.

2

The bodies and the bones of those

That strove in other days to pass,

Are wither’d in the thorny close,

Or scatter’d blanching on  the grass.

He gazes on the silent dead:

“They perish’d in their daring deeds.”

This proverb flashes thro’ his head,

“The many fail: the one succeeds”.

3

He comes, scarce knowing what he seeks:

He breaks the hedge: he enters there:

The colour flies into his cheeks:

He trusts to light on something fair;

For all his life the charm did talk

About his path, and hover near

With words of promise in his walk,

And whisper’d voices at his ear.

4

More close and close his footsteps wind;

The Magic Music  in his heart

Beats quick and quicker, till he find

The quiet chamber far apart.

His spirit flutters like a lark,

He stoops  to kiss her  on his knee.

“Love, if thy tresses be so dark,

How dark those hidden eyes must be!

The Revival

1

A touch, a kiss! the charm was snapt.

There rose a noise of striking clocks,

And feet that ran, and doors that clapt,

And barking dogs, and crowing cocks;

A fuller light illumined all,

A breeze thro’ all the garden swept,

A sudden hubbub shook the hall,

And sixty feet the fountain leapt.

2

The hedge broke in, the banner blew,

The butler drank, the steward scrawl’d,

The fire shot up, the martin flew,

The parrot scream’d, the peacock squall’d,

The maid and page renew’d their strife,

The palace bang’d, and buzz’d and clackt,

And all the long-pent stream of life

Dash’d downward in a cataract.

3

And last with these  the king awoke,

And in his chair himself uprear’d,

And yawn’d, and rubb’d his face, and spoke,

“By holy rood, a royal beard!

How say you? we have slept, my lords,

My beard has grown into my lap.”

The barons swore, with many words,

‘Twas but an after-dinner’s nap.

4

“Pardy,” return’d the king, “but still

My joints are something  stiff or so.

My lord, and shall we pass the bill

I mention’d half an hour ago?”

The chancellor, sedate and vain,

In courteous words return’d reply:

But dallied with his golden chain,

And, smiling, put the question by.

The Departure

1

And on her lover’s arm she leant,

And round her waist she felt it fold,

And far across the hills they went

In that new world which is the old:

Across the hills and far away

Beyond their utmost purple rim,

And deep into the dying day

The happy princess follow’d him.

2

“I’d sleep another hundred years,

O love, for such another kiss;”

“O wake for ever, love,” she hears,

“O love, ‘twas such as this and this.”

And o’er them many a sliding star,

And many a merry wind was borne,

And, stream’d thro’ many a golden bar,

The twilight melted into morn.

3

“O eyes long laid in happy sleep!”

“O happy sleep, that lightly fled!”

“O happy kiss, that woke thy sleep!”

“O love, thy kiss would wake the dead!”

And o’er them many a flowing range

Of vapour buoy’d the crescent-bark,

And, rapt thro’ many a rosy change,

The twilight died into the dark.

4

“A hundred summers! can it be?

And whither goest thou, tell me where?”

“O seek my father’s court with me!

For there are greater wonders there.”

And o’er the hills, and far away

Beyond their utmost purple rim,

Beyond the night across the day,

Thro’ all the world she follow’d him.

Moral

1

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And if you find no moral there,

Go, look in any glass and say,

What moral is in being fair.

Oh, to what uses shall we put

The wildweed-flower that simply blows?

And is there any moral shut

Within the bosom of the rose?

2

But any man that walks the mead,

In bud or blade, or bloom, may find,

According as his humours lead,

A meaning suited to his mind.

And liberal applications lie

In Art like Nature, dearest friend;

So ‘twere to cramp its use, if I

Should hook it to some useful end.

L’Envoi

1

You shake your head. A random string

Your finer female sense offends.

Well  were it not a pleasant thing

To fall asleep with all one’s friends;

To pass with all our social ties

To silence from the paths of men;

And every hundred years to rise

And learn the world, and sleep again;

To sleep thro’ terms of mighty wars,

And wake on science grown to more,

On secrets of the brain, the stars,

As wild as aught of fairy lore;

And all that else the years will show,

The Poet-forms of stronger hours,

The vast Republics that may grow,

The Federations and the Powers;

Titanic forces taking birth

In divers seasons, divers climes;

For we are Ancients of the earth,

And in the morning of the times.

2

So sleeping, so aroused from sleep

Thro’ sunny decads new and strange,

Or gay quinquenniads would we reap

The flower and quintessence of change.

3

Ah, yet would I  and would I might!

So much your eyes my fancy take

Be still the first to leap to light

That I might kiss those eyes awake!

For, am I right or am I wrong,

To choose your own you did not care;

You’d have my moral from the song,

And I will take my pleasure there:

And, am I right or am I wrong,

My fancy, ranging thro’ and thro’,

To search a meaning for the song,

Perforce will still revert to you;

Nor finds a closer truth than this

All-graceful head, so richly curl’d,

And evermore a costly kiss

The prelude to some brighter world.

4

For since the time when Adam first

Embraced his Eve in happy hour,

And every bird of Eden burst

In carol, every bud to flower,

What eyes, like thine, have waken’d hopes?

What lips, like thine, so sweetly join’d?

Where on the double rosebud droops

The fullness of the pensive mind;

Which all too dearly self-involved,

Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;

A sleep by kisses undissolved,

That lets thee  neither hear nor see:

But break it. In the name of wife,

And in the rights that name may give,

Are clasp’d the moral of thy life,

And that for which I care to live.

Epilogue

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,

And, if you find a meaning there,

O whisper to your glass, and say,

“What wonder, if he thinks me fair?”

What wonder I was all unwise,

To shape the song for your delight

Like long-tail’d birds of Paradise,

That float thro’ Heaven, and cannot light?

Or old-world trains, upheld at court

By Cupid-boys of blooming hue

But take it  earnest wed with sport,

And either sacred unto you.

Amphion

In this humorous allegory the poet bewails his unhappy lot on having fallen on an age so unpropitious to poetry, contrasting it with the happy times so responsive to his predecessors who piped to a world prepared to dance to their music. However, he must toil and be satisfied if he can make a little garden blossom.

My father left a park to me,

But it is wild and barren,

A garden too with scarce a tree

And waster than a warren:

Yet say the neighbours when they call,

It is not bad but good land,

And in it is the germ of all

That grows within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great

In days of old Amphion,

And ta’en my fiddle to the gate,

Nor cared for seed or scion!

And had I lived when song was great,

And legs of trees were limber,

And ta’en my fiddle to the gate,

And fiddled in the timber!

‘Tis said he had a tuneful tongue,

Such happy intonation,

Wherever he sat down and sung

He left a small plantation;

Wherever in a lonely grove

He set up his forlorn pipes,

The gouty oak began to move,

And flounder into hornpipes.

The mountain stirr’d its bushy crown,

And, as tradition teaches,

Young ashes pirouetted down

Coquetting with young beeches;

And briony-vine and ivy-wreath

Ran forward to his rhyming,

And from the valleys underneath

Came little copses climbing.

The linden broke her ranks and rent

The woodbine wreathes that bind her,

And down the middle, buzz! she went,

With all her bees behind her.

The poplars, in long order due,

With cypress promenaded,

The shock-head willows two and two

By rivers gallopaded.

The birch-tree swang her fragrant hair,

The bramble cast her berry,

The gin within the juniper

Began to make him merry.

Came wet-shot alder from the wave,

Came yews, a dismal coterie;

Each pluck’d his one foot from the grave,

Poussetting with a sloe-tree:

Old elms came breaking from the vine,

The vine stream’d out to follow,

And, sweating rosin, plump’d the pine

From many a cloudy hollow.

And wasn’t it a sight to see

When, ere his song was ended,

Like some great landslip, tree by tree,

The country-side descended;

And shepherds from the mountain-caves

Look’d down, half-pleased, half-frighten’d,

As dash’d about the drunken leaves

The random sunshine lighten’d!

Oh, nature first was fresh to men,

And wanton without measure;

So youthful and so flexile then,

You moved her at your pleasure.

Twang out, my fiddle! shake the twigs!

And make her dance attendance;

Blow, flute, and stir the stiff-set sprigs,

And scirrhous roots and tendons.

‘Tis vain! in such a brassy age

I could not move a thistle;

The very sparrows in the hedge

Scarce answer to my whistle;

Or at the most, when three-parts-sick

With strumming and with scraping,

A jackass heehaws from the rick,

The passive oxen gaping.

But what is that I hear? a sound

Like sleepy counsel pleading:

O Lord!  ‘tis in my neighbour’s ground,

The modern Muses reading.

They read Botanic Treatises.

And works on Gardening thro’ there,

And Methods of transplanting trees

To look as if they grew there.

The wither’d Misses! how they prose

O’er books of travell’d seamen,

And show you slips of all that grows

From England to Van Diemen.

They read in arbours clipt and cut,

And alleys, faded places,

By squares of tropic summer shut

And warm’d in crystal cases.

But these, tho’ fed with careful dirt,

Are neither green nor sappy;

Half-conscious of the garden-squirt,

The spindlings look unhappy,

Better to me the meanest weed

That blows upon its mountain,

The vilest herb that runs to seed

Beside its native fountain.

And I must work thro’ months of toil,

And years of cultivation,

Upon my proper patch of soil

To grow my own plantation.

I’ll take the showers as they fall,

I will not vex my bosom:

Enough if at the end of all

A little garden blossom.

Sir Galahad

This poem may be regarded as a prelude to The Holy Grail. The character of Galahad is deduced principally from the seventeenth book of the Morte d’Arthur. In the twenty-second chapter of that book St. Joseph of Arimathea says to him: “Thou hast resembled me in two things in that thou hast seen the marvels of the sangreal, and in that thou has been a clean maiden”.

My good blade carves the casques of men,

My tough lance thrusteth sure,

My strength is as the strength of ten,

Because my heart is pure.

The shattering trumpet shrilleth high,

The hard brands shiver on the steel,

The splinter’d spear-shafts crack and fly,

The horse and rider reel:

They reel, they roll in clanging lists,

And when the tide of combat stands,

Perfume and flowers fall in showers,

That lightly rain from ladies’ hands.

How sweet are looks that ladies bend

On whom their favours fall!

For them I battle till the end,

To save from shame and thrall:

But all my heart is drawn above,

My knees are bow’d in crypt and shrine:

I never felt the kiss of love,

Nor maiden’s hand in mine.

More bounteous aspects on me beam,

Me mightier transports move and thrill;

So keep I fair thro’ faith and prayer

A virgin heart in work and will.

When down the stormy crescent goes,

A light before me swims,

Between dark stems the forest glows,

I hear a noise of hymns:

Then by some secret shrine I ride;

I hear a voice, but none are there;

The stalls are void, the doors are wide,

The tapers burning fair.

Fair gleams the snowy altar-cloth,

The silver vessels sparkle clean,

The shrill bell rings, the censer swings,

And solemn chaunts resound between.

Sometimes on lonely mountain-meres

I find a magic bark;

I leap on board: no helmsman steers:

I float till all is dark.

A gentle sound, an awful light!

Three angels bear the holy Grail:

With folded feet, in stoles of white,

On sleeping wings they sail.

Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!

My spirit beats her mortal bars,

As down dark tides the glory slides,

And star-like mingles with the stars.

When on my goodly charger borne

Thro’ dreaming towns I go,

The cock crows ere the Christmas morn,

The streets are dumb with snow.

The tempest crackles on the leads,

And, ringing, spins from brand and mail;

But o’er the dark a glory spreads,

And gilds the driving hail.

I leave the plain, I climb the height;

No branchy thicket shelter yields;

But blessed forms in whistling storms

Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields.

A maiden knight  to me is given

Such hope, I know not fear;

I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven

That often meet me here.

I muse on joy that will not cease,

Pure spaces clothed in living beams,

Pure lilies of eternal peace,

Whose odours haunt my dreams;

And, stricken by an angel’s hand,

This mortal armour that I wear,

This weight and size, this heart and eyes,

Are touch’d, are turn’d to finest air.

The clouds are broken in the sky,

And thro’ the mountain-walls

A rolling organ-harmony

Swells up, and shakes and falls.

Then move the trees, the copses nod,

Wings flutter, voices hover clear:

“O just and faithful knight of God!

Ride on! the prize is near”.

So pass I hostel, hall, and grange;

By bridge and ford, by park and pale,

All-arm’d I ride, whate’er betide,

Until I find the holy Grail.

Edward Grey

Sweet Emma Moreland of yonder town

Met me walking on yonder way,

“And have you lost your heart?” she said;

“And are you married yet, Edward Gray?”

Sweet Emma Moreland spoke to me:

Bitterly weeping I turn’d away:

“Sweet Emma Moreland, love no more

Can touch the heart of Edward Gray.

“Ellen Adair she loved me well,

Against her father’s and mother’s will:

To-day I sat for an hour and wept,

By Ellen’s grave, on the windy hill.

“Shy she was, and I thought her cold;

Thought her proud, and fled over the sea;

Fill’d I was with folly and spite,

When Ellen Adair was dying for me.

“Cruel, cruel the words I said!

Cruelly came they back to-day:

‘You’re too slight and fickle,’ I said,

‘To trouble the heart of Edward Gray’.

“There I put my face in the grass

Whisper’d, ‘Listen to my despair:

I repent me of all I did:

Speak a little, Ellen Adair!’

“Then I took a pencil, and wrote

On the mossy stone, as I lay,

‘Here lies the body of Ellen Adair;

And here the heart of Edward Gray!’

“Love may come, and love may go,

And fly, like a bird, from tree to tree:

But I will love no more, no more,

Till Ellen Adair come back to me.

“Bitterly wept I over the stone:

Bitterly weeping I turn’d away;

There lies the body of Ellen Adair!

And there the heart of Edward Gray!”

Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue made at The Cock.

The Cock Tavern, No. 201 Fleet Street, on the north side of Fleet Street, stood opposite the Temple and was of great antiquity, going back nearly 300 years. Strype, bk. iv., h. 117, describes it as “a noted public-house,” and Pepys’ Diary, 23rd April, 1668, speaks of himself as having been “mighty merry there”. The old carved chimney-piece was of the age of James I., and the gilt bird over the portal was the work of Grinling Gibbons. When Tennyson wrote this poem it was the favourite resort of templars, journalists and literary people generally, as it had long been. But the old place is now a thing of the past. On the evening of 10th April, 1886, it closed its doors for ever after an existence of nearly 300 years.

O plump head-waiter at The Cock,

To which I most resort,

How goes the time? ‘Tis five o’clock.

Go fetch a pint of port:

But let it not be such as that

You set before chance-comers,

But such whose father-grape grew fat

On Lusitanian summers.

No vain libation to the Muse,

But may she still be kind,

And whisper lovely words, and use

Her influence on the mind,

To make me write my random rhymes,

Ere they be half-forgotten;

Nor add and alter, many times,

Till all be ripe and rotten.

I pledge her, and she comes and dips

Her laurel in the wine,

And lays it thrice upon my lips,

These favour’d lips of mine;

Until the charm have power to make

New life-blood warm the bosom,

And barren commonplaces break

In full and kindly

blossom.

I pledge her silent at the board;

Her gradual fingers steal

And touch upon the master-chord

Of all I felt and feel.

Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans,

And phantom hopes assemble;

And that child’s heart within the man’s

Begins to move and tremble.

Thro’ many an hour of summer suns

By many pleasant ways,

Against its fountain upward runs

The current of my days:

I kiss the lips I once have kiss’d;

The gas-light wavers dimmer;

And softly, thro’ a vinous mist,

My college friendships glimmer.

I grow in worth, and wit, and sense,

Unboding critic-pen,

Or that eternal want of pence,

Which vexes public men,

Who hold their hands to all, and cry

For that which all deny them

Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry,

And all the world go by them.

Ah yet, tho’  all the world forsake,

Tho’  fortune clip my wings,

I will not cramp my heart, nor take

Half-views of men and things.

Let Whig and Tory stir their blood;

There must be stormy weather;

But for some true result of good

All parties work together.

Let there be thistles, there are grapes;

If old things, there are new;

Ten thousand broken lights and shapes,

Yet glimpses of the true.

Let raffs be rife in prose and rhyme,

We lack not rhymes and reasons,

As on this whirligig of Time

We circle with the seasons.

This earth is rich in man and maid;

With fair horizons bound:

This whole wide earth of light and shade

Comes out, a perfect round.

High over roaring Temple-bar,

And, set in Heaven’s third story,

I look at all things as they are,

But thro’ a kind of glory.

Head-waiter, honour’d by the guest

Half-mused, or reeling-ripe,

The pint, you brought me, was the best

That ever came from pipe.

But tho’  the port surpasses praise,

My nerves have dealt with stiffer.

Is there some magic in the place?

Or do my peptics differ?

For since I came to live and learn,

No pint of white or red

Had ever half the power to turn

This wheel within my head,

Which bears a season’d brain about,

Unsubject to confusion,

Tho’  soak’d and saturate, out and out,

Thro’ every convolution.

For I am of a numerous house,

With many kinsmen gay,

Where long and largely we carouse

As who shall say me nay:

Each month, a birthday coming on,

We drink defying trouble,

Or sometimes two would meet in one,

And then we drank it double;

Whether the vintage, yet unkept,

Had relish, fiery-new,

Or, elbow-deep in sawdust, slept,

As old as Waterloo;

Or stow’d (when classic Canning died)

In musty bins and chambers,

Had cast upon its crusty side

The gloom of ten Decembers.

The Muse, the jolly Muse, it is!

She answer’d to my call,

She changes with that mood or this,

Is all-in-all to all:

She lit the spark within my throat,

To make my blood run quicker,

Used all her fiery will, and smote

Her life into the liquor.

And hence this halo lives about

The waiter’s hands, that reach

To each his perfect pint of stout,

His proper chop to each.

He looks not like the common breed

That with the napkin dally;

I think he came like Ganymede,

From some delightful valley.

The Cock was of a larger egg

Than modern poultry drop,

Stept forward on a firmer leg,

And cramm’d a plumper crop;

Upon an ampler dunghill trod,

Crow’d lustier late and early,

Sipt wine from silver, praising God,

And raked in golden barley.

A private life was all his joy,

Till in a court he saw

A something-pottle-bodied boy,

That knuckled at the taw:

He stoop’d and clutch’d him, fair and good,

Flew over roof and casement:

His brothers of the weather stood

Stock-still for sheer amazement.

But he, by farmstead, thorpe and spire,

And follow’d with acclaims,

A sign to many a staring shire,

Came crowing over Thames.

Right down by smoky Paul’s they bore,

Till, where the street grows straiter,

One fix’d for ever at the door,

And one became head-waiter.

But whither would my fancy go?

How out of place she makes

The violet of a legend blow

Among the chops and steaks!

‘Tis but a steward of the can,

One shade more plump than common;

As just and mere a serving-man

As any born of woman.

I ranged too high: what draws me down

Into the common day?

Is it the weight of that half-crown,

Which I shall have to pay?

For, something duller than at first,

Nor wholly comfortable,

I sit (my empty glass reversed),

And thrumming on the table:

Half-fearful that, with self at strife

I take myself to task;

Lest of the fullness of my life

I leave an empty flask:

For I had hope, by something rare,

To prove myself a poet;

But, while I plan and plan, my hair

Is gray before I know it.

So fares it since the years began,

Till they be gather’d up;

The truth, that flies the flowing can,

Will haunt the vacant cup:

And others’ follies teach us not,

Nor much their wisdom teaches;

And most, of sterling worth, is what

Our own experience preaches.

Ah, let the rusty theme alone!

We know not what we know.

But for my pleasant hour, ‘tis gone,

‘Tis gone, and let it go.

‘Tis gone: a thousand such have slipt

Away from my embraces,

And fall’n into the dusty crypt

Of darken’d forms and faces.

Go, therefore, thou! thy betters went

Long since, and came no more;

With peals of genial clamour sent

From many a tavern-door,

With twisted quirks and happy hits,

From misty men of letters;

The tavern-hours of mighty wits

Thine elders and thy betters.

Hours, when the Poet’s words and looks

Had yet their native glow:

Not yet the fear of little books

Had made him talk for show:

But, all his vast heart sherris-warm’d,

He flash’d his random speeches;

Ere days, that deal in ana, swarm’d

His literary leeches.

So mix for ever with the past,

Like all good things on earth!

For should I prize thee, couldst thou last,

At half thy real worth?

I hold it good, good things should pass:

With time I will not quarrel:

It is but yonder empty glass

That makes me maudlin-moral.

Head-waiter of the chop-house here,

To which I most resort,

I too must part: I hold thee dear

For this good pint of port.

For this, thou shalt from all things suck

Marrow of mirth and laughter;

And, wheresoe’er thou move, good luck

Shall fling her old shoe after.

But thou wilt never move from hence,

The sphere thy fate allots:

Thy latter days increased with pence

Go down among the pots:

Thou battenest by the greasy gleam

In haunts of hungry sinners,

Old boxes, larded with the steam

Of thirty thousand dinners.

We fret, we fume, would shift our skins,

Would quarrel with our lot;

Thy care is, under polish’d tins,

To serve the hot-and-hot;

To come and go, and come again,

Returning like the pewit,

And watch’d by silent gentlemen,

That trifle with the cruet.

Live long, ere from thy topmost head

The thick-set hazel dies;

Long, ere the hateful crow shall tread

The corners of thine eyes:

Live long, nor feel in head or chest

Our changeful equinoxes,

Till mellow Death, like some late guest,

Shall call thee from the boxes.

But when he calls, and thou shalt cease

To pace the gritted floor,

And, laying down an unctuous lease

Of life, shalt earn no more;

No carved cross-bones, the types of Death,

Shall show thee past to Heaven:

But carved cross-pipes, and, underneath,

A pint-pot neatly graven.

Lady Clare

This poem was suggested by Miss Ferrier’s powerful novel The Inheritance. A comparison with the plot of Miss Ferrier’s novel will show with what tact and skill Tennyson has adapted the tale to his ballad. Thomas St. Clair, youngest son of the Earl of Rossville, marries a Miss Sarah Black, a girl of humble and obscure birth. He dies, leaving a widow and as is supposed a daughter, Gertrude, who claim the protection of Lord Rossville, as the child is heiress presumptive to the earldom. On Lord Rossville’s death she accordingly becomes Countess of Rossville. She has two lovers, both distant connections, Colonel Delmour and Edward Lyndsay. At last it is discovered that she was not the daughter of Thomas St. Clair and her supposed mother, but of one Marion La Motte and Jacob Leviston, and that Mrs. St. Clair had adopted her when a baby and passed her off as her own child, that she might succeed to the title. Meanwhile Delmour by the death of his elder brother succeeds to the title and estates forfeited by the detected foundling, but instead of acting as Tennyson’s Lord Ronald does, he repudiates her and marries a duchess. But her other lover Lyndsay is true to her and marries her. Delmour not long afterwards dies without issue, and Lyndsay succeeds to the title, Gertrude then becoming after all Countess of Rossville. In details Tennyson follows the novel sometimes very closely. Thus the “single rose,” the poor dress, the bitter exclamation about her being a beggar born, are from the novel.

Lord Ronald courted Lady Clare,

I trow they did not part in scorn;

Lord Ronald, her cousin, courted her

And they will wed the morrow morn.

It was the time when lilies blow,

And clouds are highest up in air,

Lord Ronald brought a lily-white doe

To give his cousin Lady Clare.

I trow they did not part in scorn:

Lovers long-betroth’d were they:

They two will wed the morrow morn!

God’s blessing on the day!

“He does not love me for my birth,

Nor for my lands so broad and fair;

He loves me for my own true worth,

And that is well,” said Lady Clare.

In there came old Alice the nurse,

Said, “Who was this that went from thee?”

“It was my cousin,” said Lady Clare,

“To-morrow he weds with me.”

“O God be thank’d!” said Alice the nurse,

“That all comes round so just and fair:

Lord Ronald is heir of all your lands,

And you are not the Lady Clare.”

“Are ye out of your mind, my nurse, my nurse?”

Said Lady Clare, “that ye speak so wild”;

“As God’s above,” said Alice the nurse,

“I speak the truth: you are my child.

“The old Earl’s daughter died at my breast;

I speak the truth, as I live by bread!

I buried her like my own sweet child,

And put my child in her stead.”

“Falsely, falsely have ye done,

O mother,” she said, “if this be true,

To keep the best man under the sun

So many years from his due.”

“Nay now, my child,” said Alice the nurse,

“But keep the secret for your life,

And all you have will be Lord Ronald’s,

When you are man and wife.”

“If I’m a beggar born,” she said,

“I will speak out, for I dare not lie.

Pull off, pull off, the broach  of gold,

And fling the diamond necklace by.”

“Nay now, my child,” said Alice the nurse,

“But keep the secret all ye can.”

She said, “Not so: but I will know

If there be any faith in man”.

“Nay now, what faith?” said Alice the nurse,

“The man will cleave unto his right.”

“And he shall have it,” the lady replied,

“Tho’  I should die to-night.”

“Yet give one kiss to your mother dear!

Alas, my child, I sinn’d for thee.”

“O mother, mother, mother,” she said,

“So strange it seems to me.

“Yet here’s a kiss for my mother dear,

My mother dear, if this be so,

And lay your hand upon my head,

And bless me, mother, ere I go.”

She clad herself in a russet gown,

She was no longer Lady Clare:

She went by dale, and she went by down,

With a single rose in her hair.

The lily-white doe Lord Ronald had brought

Leapt up from where she lay,

Dropt her head in the maiden’s hand,

And follow’d her all the way.

Down stept Lord Ronald from his tower:

“O Lady Clare, you shame your worth!

Why come you drest like a village maid,

That are the flower of the earth?”

“If I come drest like a village maid,

I am but as my fortunes are:

I am a beggar born,” she said,

“And not the Lady Clare.”

“Play me no tricks,” said Lord Ronald,

“For I am yours in word and in deed.

Play me no tricks,” said Lord Ronald,

“Your riddle is hard to read.”

O and proudly stood she up!

Her heart within her did not fail:

She look’d into Lord Ronald’s eyes,

And told him all her nurse’s tale.

He laugh’d a laugh of merry scorn:

He turn’d, and kiss’d her where she stood:

“If you are not the heiress born,

And I,” said he, “the next in blood

“If you are not the heiress born,

And I,” said he, “the lawful heir,

We two will wed to-morrow morn,

And you shall still be Lady Clare.”

The Lord of Burleigh

This poem tells the well-known story of Sarah Hoggins who married under the circumstances related in the poem. She died in January, 1797, sinking, so it was said, but without any authority for such a statement, under the burden of an honour “unto which she was not born”. The story is that Henry Cecil, heir presumptive to his uncle, the ninth Earl of Exeter, was staying at Bolas, a rural village in Shropshire, where he met Sarah Hoggins and married her. They lived together at Bolas, where the two eldest of his children were born, for two years before he came into the title. She bore him two other children after she was Countess of Exeter, dying at Burleigh House near Stamford at the early age of twenty-four. The obituary notice runs thus: “January, 1797. At Burleigh House near Stamford, aged twenty-four, to the inexpressible surprise and concern of all acquainted with her, the Right Honbl. Countess of Exeter.”

In her ear he whispers gaily,

“If my heart by signs can tell,

Maiden, I have watch’d thee daily,

And I think thou lov’st me well”.

She replies, in accents fainter,

“There is none I love like thee”.

He is but a landscape-painter,

And a village maiden she.

He to lips, that fondly falter,

Presses his without reproof:

Leads her to the village altar,

And they leave her father’s roof.

“I can make no marriage present;

Little can I give my wife.

Love will make our cottage pleasant,

And I love thee more than life.”

They by parks and lodges going

See the lordly castles stand:

Summer woods, about them blowing,

Made a murmur in the land.

From deep thought himself he rouses,

Says to her that loves him well,

“Let us see these handsome houses

Where the wealthy nobles dwell”.

So she goes by him attended,

Hears him lovingly converse,

Sees whatever fair and splendid

Lay betwixt his home and hers;

Parks with oak and chestnut shady,

Parks and order’d gardens great,

Ancient homes of lord and lady,

Built for pleasure and for state.

All he shows her makes him dearer:

Evermore she seems to gaze

On that cottage growing nearer,

Where they twain will spend their days.

O but she will love him truly!

He shall have a cheerful home;

She will order all things duly,

When beneath his roof they come.

Thus her heart rejoices greatly,

Till a gateway she discerns

With armorial bearings stately,

And beneath the gate she turns;

Sees a mansion more majestic

Than all those she saw before:

Many a gallant gay domestic

Bows before him at the door.

And they speak in gentle murmur,

When they answer to his call,

While he treads with footstep firmer,

Leading on from hall to hall.

And, while now she wonders blindly,

Nor the meaning can divine,

Proudly turns he round and kindly,

“All of this is mine and thine”.

Here he lives in state and bounty,

Lord of Burleigh, fair and free,

Not a lord in all the county

Is so great a lord as he.

All at once the colour flushes

Her sweet face from brow to chin:

As it were with shame she blushes,

And her spirit changed within.

Then her countenance all over

Pale again as death did prove:

But he clasp’d her like a lover,

And he cheer’d her soul with love.

So she strove against her weakness,

Tho’ at times her spirits sank:

Shaped her heart with woman’s meekness

To all duties of her rank:

And a gentle consort made he,

And her gentle mind was such

That she grew a noble lady,

And the people loved her much.

But a trouble weigh’d upon her,

And perplex’d her, night and morn,

With the burthen of an honour

Unto which she was not born.

Faint she grew, and ever fainter,

As she murmur’d “Oh, that he

Were once more that landscape-painter

Which did win my heart from me!”

So she droop’d and droop’d before him,

Fading slowly from his side:

Three fair children first she bore him,

Then before her time she died.

Weeping, weeping late and early,

Walking up and pacing down,

Deeply mourn’d the Lord of Burleigh,

Burleigh-house by Stamford-town.

And he came to look upon her,

And he look’d at her and said,

“Bring the dress and put it on her,

That she wore when she was wed”.

Then her people, softly treading,

Bore to earth her body, drest

In the dress that she was wed in,

That her spirit might have rest.

Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere

A FRAGMENT

Like souls that balance joy and pain,

With tears and smiles from heaven again

The maiden Spring upon the plain

Came in a sun-lit fall of rain.

In crystal vapour everywhere

Blue isles of heaven laugh’d between,

And, far in forest-deeps unseen,

The topmost elm-tree  gather’d green

From draughts of balmy air.

Sometimes the linnet piped his song:

Sometimes the throstle whistled strong:

Sometimes the sparhawk, wheel’d along,

Hush’d all the groves from fear of wrong:

By grassy capes with fuller sound

In curves the yellowing river ran,

And drooping chestnut-buds began

To spread into the perfect fan,

Above the teeming ground.

Then, in the boyhood of the year,

Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere

Rode thro’ the coverts of the deer,

With blissful treble ringing clear.

She seem’d a part of joyous Spring:

A gown of grass-green silk she wore,

Buckled with golden clasps before;

A light-green tuft of plumes she bore

Closed in a golden ring.

Now on some twisted ivy-net,

Now by some tinkling rivulet,

In mosses mixt  with violet

Her cream-white mule his pastern set:

And fleeter now  she skimm’d the plains

Than she whose elfin prancer springs

By night to eery warblings,

When all the glimmering moorland rings

With jingling bridle-reins.

As she fled fast thro’ sun and shade,

The happy winds upon her play’d,

Blowing the ringlet from the braid:

She look’d so lovely, as she sway’d

The rein with dainty finger-tips,

A man had given all other bliss,

And all his worldly worth for this,

To waste his whole heart in one kiss

Upon her perfect lips.

A Farewell

This poem was dedicated to the brook at Somersby described in the Ode to Memory and referred to so often in In Memoriam. Possibly it may have been written in 1837 when the Tennysons left Somersby. Cf. In Memoriam, sect. ci.

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea,

Thy tribute wave deliver:

No more by thee my steps shall be,

For ever and for ever.

Flow, softly flow, by lawn and lea,

A rivulet then a river:

No where by thee my steps shall be,

For ever and for ever.

But here will sigh thine alder tree,

And here thine aspen shiver;

And here by thee will hum the bee,

For ever and for ever.

A thousand suns  will stream on thee,

A thousand moons will quiver;

But not by thee my steps shall be,

For ever and for ever.

The Beggar Maid

Her arms across her breast she laid;

She was more fair than words can say:

Bare-footed came the beggar maid

Before the king Cophetua.

In robe and crown the king stept down,

To meet and greet her on her way;

“It is no wonder,” said the lords,

“She is more beautiful than day”.

As shines the moon in clouded skies,

She in her poor attire was seen:

One praised her ancles, one her eyes,

One her dark hair and lovesome mien:

So sweet a face, such angel grace,

In all that land had never been:

Cophetua sware a royal oath:

“This beggar maid shall be my queen!”

The Vision of Sin

This remarkable poem may be regarded as a sort of companion poem to The Palace of Art; the one traces the effect of callous indulgence in mere intellectual and aesthetic pleasures, the other of profligate indulgence in the grosser forms of sensual enjoyment. At first all is ecstasy and intoxication, then comes satiety, and all that satiety brings in its train, cynicism, pessimism, the drying up of the very springs of life.

1

I had a vision when the night was late:

A youth came riding toward a palace-gate.

He rode a horse with wings, that would have flown,

But that his heavy rider kept him down.

And from the palace came a child of sin,

And took him by the curls, and led him in,

Where sat a company with heated eyes,

Expecting when a fountain should arise:

A sleepy light upon their brows and lips

As when the sun, a crescent of eclipse,

Dreams over lake and lawn, and isles and capes

Suffused them, sitting, lying, languid shapes,

By heaps of gourds, and skins of wine, and piles of grapes.

2

Then methought I heard a mellow sound,

Gathering up from all the lower ground;

Narrowing in to where they sat assembled

Low voluptuous music winding trembled,

Wov’n in circles: they that heard it sigh’d,

Panted hand in hand with faces pale,

Swung themselves, and in low tones replied;

Till the fountain spouted, showering wide

Sleet of diamond-drift and pearly hail;

Then the music touch’d the gates and died;

Rose again from where it seem’d to fail,

Storm’d in orbs of song, a growing gale;

Till thronging in and in, to where they waited,

As ‘twere a hundred-throated nightingale,

The strong tempestuous treble throbb’d and palpitated;

Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound,

Caught the sparkles, and in circles,

Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes,

Flung the torrent rainbow round:

Then they started from their places,

Moved with violence, changed in hue,

Caught each other with wild grimaces,

Half-invisible to the view,

Wheeling with precipitate paces

To the melody, till they flew,

Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces,

Twisted hard in fierce embraces,

Like to Furies, like to Graces,

Dash’d together in blinding dew:

Till, kill’d with some luxurious agony,

The nerve-dissolving melody

Flutter’d headlong from the sky.

3

And then I look’d up toward a mountain-tract,

That girt the region with high cliff and lawn:

I saw that every morning, far withdrawn

Beyond the darkness and the cataract,

God made himself an awful rose of dawn,

Unheeded: and detaching, fold by fold,

From those still heights, and, slowly drawing near,

A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold,

Came floating on for many a month and year,

Unheeded: and I thought I would have spoken,

And warn’d that madman ere it grew too late:

But, as in dreams, I could not. Mine was broken,

When that cold vapour touch’d the palace-gate,

And link’d again. I saw within my head

A gray and gap-tooth’d man as lean as death,

Who slowly rode across a wither’d heath,

And lighted at a ruin’d inn, and said:

4

“Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin!

Here is custom come your way;

Take my brute, and lead him in,

Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.

“Bitter barmaid, waning fast!

See that sheets are on my bed;

What! the flower of life is past:

It is long before you wed.

“Slip-shod waiter, lank and sour,

At the Dragon on the heath!

Let us have a quiet hour,

Let us hob-and-nob with Death.

“I am old, but let me drink;

Bring me spices, bring me wine;

I remember, when I think,

That my youth was half divine.

“Wine is good for shrivell’d lips,

When a blanket wraps the day,

When the rotten woodland drips,

And the leaf is stamp’d in clay.

“Sit thee down, and have no shame,

Cheek by jowl, and knee by knee:

What care I for any name?

What for order or degree?

“Let me screw thee up a peg:

Let me loose thy tongue with wine:

Callest thou that thing a leg?

Which is thinnest? thine or mine?

“Thou shalt not be saved by works:

Thou hast been a sinner too:

Ruin’d trunks on wither’d forks,

Empty scarecrows, I and you!

“Fill the cup, and fill the can:

Have a rouse before the morn:

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.

“We are men of ruin’d blood;

Therefore comes it we are wise.

Fish are we that love the mud.

Rising to no fancy-flies.

“Name and fame! to fly sublime

Thro’ the courts, the camps, the schools,

Is to be the ball of Time,

Bandied by the hands of fools.

“Friendship!  to be two in one

Let the canting liar pack!

Well I know, when I am gone,

How she mouths behind my back.

“Virtue!  to be good and just

Every heart, when sifted well,

Is a clot of warmer dust,

Mix’d with cunning sparks of hell.

“O! we two as well can look

Whited thought and cleanly life

As the priest, above his book

Leering at his neighbour’s wife.

“Fill the cup, and fill the can:

Have a rouse before the morn:

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.

“Drink, and let the parties rave:

They are fill’d with idle spleen;

Rising, falling, like a wave,

For they know not what they mean.

“He that roars for liberty

Faster binds a tyrant’s  power;

And the tyrant’s cruel glee

Forces on the freer hour.

“Fill the can, and fill the cup:

All the windy ways of men

Are but dust that rises up,

And is lightly laid again.

“Greet her with applausive breath,

Freedom, gaily doth she tread;

In her right a civic wreath,

In her left a human head.

“No, I love not what is new;

She is of an ancient house:

And I think we know the hue

Of that cap upon her brows.

“Let her go! her thirst she slakes

Where the bloody conduit runs:

Then her sweetest meal she makes

On the first-born of her sons.

“Drink to lofty hopes that cool

Visions of a perfect State:

Drink we, last, the public fool,

Frantic love and frantic hate.

“Chant me now some wicked stave,

Till thy drooping courage rise,

And the glow-worm of the grave

Glimmer in thy rheumy eyes.

“Fear not thou to loose thy tongue;

Set thy hoary fancies free;

What is loathsome to the young

Savours well to thee and me.

“Change, reverting to the years,

When thy nerves could understand

What there is in loving tears,

And the warmth of hand in hand.

“Tell me tales of thy first love

April hopes, the fools of chance;

Till the graves begin to move,

And the dead begin to dance.

“Fill the can, and fill the cup:

All the windy ways of men

Are but dust that rises up,

And is lightly laid again.

“Trooping from their mouldy dens

The chap-fallen circle spreads:

Welcome, fellow-citizens,

Hollow hearts and empty heads!

“You are bones, and what of that?

Every face, however full,

Padded round with flesh and fat,

Is but modell’d on a skull.

“Death is king, and Vivat Rex!

Tread a measure on the stones,

Madam  if I know your sex,

From the fashion of your bones.

“No, I cannot praise the fire

In your eye  nor yet your lip:

All the more do I admire

Joints of cunning workmanship.

“Lo! God’s likeness  the ground-plan

Neither modell’d, glazed, or framed:

Buss me thou rough sketch of man,

Far too naked to be shamed!

“Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,

While we keep a little breath!

Drink to heavy Ignorance!

Hob-and-nob with brother Death!

“Thou art mazed, the night is long,

And the longer night is near:

What! I am not all as wrong

As a bitter jest is dear.

“Youthful hopes, by scores, to all,

When the locks are crisp and curl’d;

Unto me my maudlin gall

And my mockeries of the world.

“Fill the cup, and fill the can!

Mingle madness, mingle scorn!

Dregs of life, and lees of man:

Yet we will not die forlorn.”

5

The voice grew faint: there came a further change:

Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range:

Below were men and horses pierced with worms,

And slowly quickening into lower forms;

By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross,

Old plash of rains, and refuse patch’d with moss,

Then some one spake : “Behold! it was a crime

Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time”.

Another said: “The crime of sense became

The crime of malice, and is equal blame”.

And one: “He had not wholly quench’d his power;

A little grain of conscience made him sour”.

At last I heard a voice upon the slope

Cry to the summit, “Is there any hope?”

To which an answer peal’d from that high land.

But in a tongue no man could understand;

And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn

God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.

The Skipping Rope

Sure never yet was Antelope

Could skip so lightly by,

Stand off, or else my skipping-rope

Will hit you in the eye.

How lightly whirls the skipping-rope!

How fairy-like you fly!

Go, get you gone, you muse and mope

I hate that silly sigh.

Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope,

Or tell me how to die.

There, take it, take my skipping-rope,

And hang yourself thereby.

Move eastward, happy earth...

Move eastward, happy earth, and leave

Yon orange sunset waning slow:

From fringes of the faded eve,

O, happy planet, eastward go;

Till over thy dark shoulder glow

Thy silver sister-world, and rise

To glass herself in dewy eyes

That watch me from the glen below.

Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly  borne,

Dip forward under starry light,

And move me to my marriage-morn,

And round again to happy night.

Break, break, break...

This exquisite poem was composed in a very different scene from that to which it refers, namely in “a Lincolnshire lane at five o’clock in the morning between blossoming hedges”. See Life of Tennyson, vol. i., p. 223.

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman’s boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.

The Poet’s Song

The rain had fallen, the Poet arose,

He pass’d by the town and out of the street,

A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,

And waves of shadow went over the wheat,

And he sat him down in a lonely place,

And chanted a melody loud and sweet,

That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,

And the lark drop down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,

The snake slipt under a spray,

The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,

And stared, with his foot on the prey,

And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs,

But never a one so gay,

For he sings of what the world will be

When the years have died away”.

MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS, 1831-1868

CONTENTS

A Fragment

Anacreontics

Check every outflash, every ruder sally

Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh

There are three things that fill my heart with sighs

The Golden Year

To the Queen

Edwin Morris, or The Lake

Come not, when I am dead...

The Eagle

To E. L. on his travels in Greece.

The New Timon and the Poet.

After-Thought

Cambridge

The Germ of ‘Maud’

Bewick Fragment

The Skipping-Rope

The New Timon and the Poets

Mablethorpe

Here often, when a child, I lay reclined

What time I wasted youthful hours

Come Not, When I am Dead

Sonnet To W.C. Macready

Britons, Guard your Own

For the Penny-Wise

The Third of February, 1852

Hands all Round

Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper

God bless our Prince and Bride

The Ringlet

Song: Home they brought him slain with spears

Lines 1865-1866

A Welcome to Her Royal Highness Marie Alexandrovna, Duchess of Edinburgh.

Literary Squabbles

The Higher Pantheism

Crossing the Bar

Flower in the crannied wall

Child-Songs

The City Child.

Minnie and Winnie.

Lucretius

The Spiteful Letter

In the Garden at Swainston

The Third of February, 1852

The Victim

The Voice and the Peak

Wages

The Window, or, the Song of the Wrens

Chapel House, now No. 15, Montpelier Row, Twickenham — Alfred Tennyson and his family occupied Chapel House from 1851 to 1853.

A Fragment

[Published in The Gem: a Literary Annual. London: W. Marshall,

Holborn Bars, mdcccxxxi.]

Where is the Giant of the Sun, which stood

In the midnoon the glory of old Rhodes,

A perfect Idol, with profulgent brows

Far sheening down the purple seas to those

Who sailed from Mizraim underneath the star

Named of the Dragon — and between whose limbs

Of brassy vastness broad-blown Argosies

Drave into haven? Yet endure unscathed

Of changeful cycles the great Pyramids

Broad-based amid the fleeting sands, and sloped

Into the slumberous summer noon; but where,

Mysterious Egypt, are thine obelisks

Graven with gorgeous emblems undiscerned?

Thy placid Sphinxes brooding o’er the Nile?

Thy shadowy Idols in the solitudes,

Awful Memnonian countenances calm

Looking athwart the burning flats, far off

Seen by the high-necked camel on the verge

Journeying southward? Where are thy monuments

Piled by the strong and sunborn Anakim

Over their crowned brethren [Greek: ON] and [Greek: ORÊ]?

Thy Memnon, when his peaceful lips are kissed

With earliest rays, that from his mother’s eyes

Flow over the Arabian bay, no more

Breathes low into the charmed ears of morn

Clear melody flattering the crisped Nile

By columned Thebes. Old Memphis hath gone down:

The Pharaohs are no more: somewhere in death

They sleep with staring eyes and gilded lips,

Wrapped round with spiced cerements in old grots

Rock-hewn and sealed for ever.

Anacreontics

[Published in The Gem: a Literary Annual. London: W. Marshall,

Holborn Bars, mdcccxxxi.]

With roses musky breathed,

And drooping daffodilly,

And silverleaved lily,

And ivy darkly-wreathed,

I wove a crown before her,

For her I love so dearly,

A garland for Lenora.

With a silken cord I bound it.

Lenora, laughing clearly

A light and thrilling laughter,

About her forehead wound it,

And loved me ever after.

[Published in The Gem: a Literary Annual. London: W. Marshall,

Holborn Bars, mdcccxxxi.]

O sad No more! O sweet No more!

O strange No more!

By a mossed brookbank on a stone

I smelt a wildweed flower alone;

There was a ringing in my ears,

And both my eyes gushed out with tears.

Surely all pleasant things had gone before,

Low-buried fathom deep beneath with thee,

NO MORE!

Check every outflash, every ruder sally

[Published in the Englishman’s Magazine, August, 1831. London:

Edward Moxon, 64 New Bond Street. Reprinted in Friendship’s Offering:

a Literary Album for 1833. London; Smith and Elder.]

Check every outflash, every ruder sally

Of thought and speech; speak low, and give up wholly

Thy spirit to mild-minded Melancholy;

This is the place. Through yonder poplar alley

Below, the blue-green river windeth slowly;

But in the middle of the sombre valley

The crispèd waters whisper musically,

And all the haunted place is dark and holy.

The nightingale, with long and low preamble,

Warbled from yonder knoll of solemn larches,

And in and out the woodbine’s flowery arches

The summer midges wove their wanton gambol,

And all the white-stemmed pinewood slept above —

When in this valley first I told my love.

Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh

[Published in Friendships Offering: a Literary Album for 1832.

London: Smith and Elder.]

Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh:

Thy woes are birds of passage, transitory:

Thy spirit, circled with a living glory,

In summer still a summer joy resumeth.

Alone my hopeless melancholy gloometh,

Like a lone cypress, through the twilight hoary,

From an old garden where no flower bloometh,

One cypress on an inland promontory.

But yet my lonely spirit follows thine,

As round the rolling earth night follows day:

But yet thy lights on my horizon shine

Into my night when thou art far away;

I am so dark, alas! and thou so bright,

When we two meet there’s never perfect light.

There are three things that fill my heart with sighs

[Published in the Yorkshire Literary Annual for 1832. Edited by C.F.

Edgar, London: Longman and Co. Reprinted in the Athenæum, 4 May,

1867.]

There are three things that fill my heart with sighs

And steep my soul in laughter (when I view

Fair maiden forms moving like melodies),

Dimples, roselips, and eyes of any hue.

There are three things beneath the blessed skies

For which I live — black eyes, and brown and blue;

I hold them all most dear; but oh! black eyes,

I live and die, and only die for you.

Of late such eyes looked at me — while I mused

At sunset, underneath a shadowy plane

In old Bayona, nigh the Southern Sea —

From an half-open lattice looked at me.

I saw no more only those eyes — confused

And dazzled to the heart with glorious pain.

The Golden Year

This poem was first published in the fourth edition of the poems 1846. No alterations were made in it after 1851. The poem had a message for the time at which it was written. The country was in a very troubled state. The contest between the Protectionists and Free-traders was at its acutest stage. The Maynooth endowment and the “godless colleges” had brought into prominence questions of the gravest moment in religion and education, while the Corn Bill and the Coercion Bill had inflamed the passions of party politicians almost to madness. Tennyson, his son tells us, entered heartily into these questions, believing that the remedies for these distempers lay in the spread of education, a more catholic spirit in the press, a partial adoption of Free Trade principles, and union as far as possible among the different sections of Christianity.

Well, you shall have that song which Leonard wrote:

It was last summer on a tour in Wales:

Old James was with me: we that day had been

Up Snowdon; and I wish’d for Leonard there,

And found him in Llanberis:    then we crost

Between the lakes, and clamber’d half-way up

The counterside; and that same song of his

He told me; for I banter’d him, and swore

They said he lived shut up within himself,

A tongue-tied Poet in the feverous days,

That, setting the how much before the how,

Cry, like the daughters of the horseleech, “Give,

Cram us with all,” but count not me the herd!

To which “They call me what they will,” he said:

“But I was born too late: the fair new forms,

That float about the threshold of an age,

Like truths of Science waiting to be caught ¬

Catch me who can, and make the catcher crown’d ¬

Are taken by the forelock. Let it be.

But if you care indeed to listen, hear

These measured words, my work of yestermorn.

“We sleep and wake and sleep, but all things move;

The Sun flies forward to his brother Sun;

The dark Earth follows wheel’d in her ellipse;

And human things returning on themselves

Move onward, leading up the golden year.

“Ah, tho’ the times, when some new thought can bud,

Are but as poets’ seasons when they flower,

Yet seas, that daily gain upon the shore,

Have ebb and flow conditioning their march,

And slow and sure comes up the golden year.

“When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps,

But smit with freer light shall slowly melt

In many streams to fatten lower lands,

And light shall spread, and man be liker man

Thro’ all the season of the golden year.

“Shall eagles not be eagles? wrens be wrens?

If all the world were falcons, what of that?

The wonder of the eagle were the less,

But he not less the eagle. Happy days

Roll onward, leading up the golden year.

“Fly happy happy sails and bear the Press;

Fly happy with the mission of the Cross;

Knit land to land, and blowing havenward

With silks, and fruits, and spices, clear of toll,

Enrich the markets of the golden year.

“But we grow old! Ah! when shall 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,

Thro’ all the circle of the golden year?”

Thus far he flow’d, and ended; whereupon

“Ah, folly!” in mimic cadence answer’d James ¬

“Ah, folly! for it lies so far away.

Not in our time, nor in our children’s time,

‘Tis like the second world to us that live;

‘Twere all as one to fix our hopes on Heaven

As on this vision of the golden year.”

With that he struck his staff against the rocks

And broke it, ¬ James, ¬ you know him, ¬ old, but full

Of force and choler, and firm upon his feet,

And like an oaken stock in winter woods,

O’erflourished with the hoary clematis:

Then added, all in heat: “What stuff is this!

Old writers push’d the happy season back, ¬

The more fools they, ¬ we forward: dreamers both:

You most, that in an age, when every hour

Must sweat her sixty minutes to the death,

Live on, God love us, as if the seedsman, rapt

Upon the teeming harvest, should not dip

His hand into the bag: but well I know

That unto him who works, and feels he works,

This same grand year is ever at the doors.”

He spoke; and, high above, I heard them blast

The steep slate-quarry, and the great echo flap

And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff.

To the Queen

This dedication was first prefixed to the seventh edition of these poems in 1851, Tennyson having succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, 19th Nov., 1850.

Revered, beloved    ¬ O you that hold

A nobler office upon earth

Than arms, or power of brain, or birth

Could give the warrior kings of old,

Victoria,    ¬ since your Royal grace

To one of less desert allows

This laurel greener from the brows

Of him that utter’d nothing base;

And should your greatness, and the care

That yokes with empire, yield you time

To make demand of modern rhyme

If aught of ancient worth be there;

Then ¬ while    a sweeter music wakes,

And thro’ wild March the throstle calls,

Where all about your palace-walls

The sun-lit almond-blossom shakes ¬

Take, Madam, this poor book of song;

For tho’ the faults were thick as dust

In vacant chambers, I could trust

Your kindness.    May you rule us long.

And leave us rulers of your blood

As noble till the latest day!

May children of our children say,

“She wrought her people lasting good;

“Her court was pure; her life serene;

God gave her peace; her land reposed;

A thousand claims to reverence closed

In her as Mother, Wife and Queen;

“And statesmen at her council met

Who knew the seasons, when to take

Occasion by the hand, and make

The bounds of freedom wider yet

“By shaping some august decree,

Which kept her throne unshaken still,

Broad-based upon her people’s will,

And compass’d by the inviolate sea.”

MARCH, 1851.

Edwin Morris, or The Lake

This poem first appeared in the seventh edition of the Poems, 1851. It was written at Llanberis. Several alterations were made in the eighth edition of 1853, since then none, with the exception of “breath” for “breaths” in line 66.

O Me, my pleasant rambles by the lake,

My sweet, wild, fresh three-quarters of a year,

My one Oasis in the dust and drouth

Of city life! I was a sketcher then:

See here, my doing: curves of mountain, bridge,

Boat, island, ruins of a castle, built

When men knew how to build, upon a rock,

With turrets lichen-gilded like a rock:

And here, new-comers in an ancient hold,

New-comers from the Mersey, millionaires,

Here lived the Hills ¬ a Tudor-chimnied bulk

Of mellow brickwork on an isle of bowers.

O me, my pleasant rambles by the lake

With Edwin Morris and with Edward Bull

The curate; he was fatter than his cure.

But Edwin Morris, he that knew the names,

Long-learned names of agaric, moss and fern,

Who forged a thousand theories of the rocks,

Who taught me how to skate, to row, to swim,

Who read me rhymes elaborately good,

His own ¬ I call’d him Crichton, for he seem’d

All-perfect, finish’d to the finger nail.

And once I ask’d him of his early life,

And his first passion; and he answer’d me;

And well his words became him: was he not

A full-cell’d honeycomb of eloquence

Stored from all flowers? Poet-like he spoke.

“My love for Nature is as old as I;

But thirty moons, one honeymoon to that,

And three rich sennights more, my love for her.

My love for Nature and my love for her,

Of different ages, like twin-sisters grew,

Twin-sisters differently beautiful.

To some full music rose and sank the sun,

And some full music seem’d to move and change

With all the varied changes of the dark,

And either twilight and the day between;

For daily hope fulfill’d, to rise again

Revolving toward fulfilment, made it sweet

To walk, to sit, to sleep, to wake, to breathe.”

Or this or something like to this he spoke.

Then said the fat-faced curate Edward Bull,

“I take it, God made the woman for the man,

And for the good and increase of the world,

A pretty face is well, and this is well,

To have a dame indoors, that trims us up,

And keeps us tight; but these unreal ways

Seem but the theme of writers, and indeed

Worn threadbare. Man is made of solid stuff.

I say, God made the woman for the man,

And for the good and increase of the world.”

“Parson,” said I, “you pitch the pipe too low:

But I have sudden touches, and can run

My faith beyond my practice into his:

Tho’ if, in dancing after Letty Hill,

I do not hear the bells upon my cap,

I scarce hear    other music: yet say on.

What should one give to light on such a dream?”

I ask’d him half-sardonically.

“Give? Give all thou art,” he answer’d, and a light

Of laughter dimpled in his swarthy cheek;

“I would have hid her needle in my heart,

To save her little finger from a scratch

No deeper than the skin: my ears could hear

Her lightest breaths: her least remark was worth

The experience of the wise. I went and came;

Her voice fled always thro’ the summer land;

I spoke her name alone. Thrice-happy days!

The flower of each, those moments when we met,

The crown of all, we met to part no more.”

Were not his words delicious, I a beast

To take them as I did? but something jarr’d;

Whether he spoke too largely; that there seem’d

A touch of something false, some self-conceit,

Or over-smoothness: howsoe’er it was,

He scarcely hit my humour, and I said: ¬

“Friend Edwin, do not think yourself alone

Of all men happy. Shall not Love to me,

As in the Latin song I learnt at school,

Sneeze out a full God-bless-you right and left?

But you can talk: yours is a kindly vein:

I have I think ¬ Heaven knows ¬ as much within;

Have or should have, but for a thought or two,

That like a purple beech    among the greens

Looks out of place: ‘tis from no want in her:

It is my shyness, or my self-distrust,

Or something of a wayward modern mind

Dissecting passion. Time will set me right.”

So spoke I knowing not the things that were.

Then said the fat-faced curate, Edward Bull:

“God made the woman for the use of man,

And for the good and increase of the world”.

And I and Edwin laugh’d; and now we paused

About the windings of the marge to hear

The soft wind blowing over meadowy holms

And alders, garden-isles    ; and now we left

The clerk behind us, I and he, and ran

By ripply shallows of the lisping lake,

Delighted with the freshness and the sound.

But, when the bracken rusted on their crags,

My suit had wither’d, nipt to death by him

That was a God, and is a lawyer’s clerk,

The rentroll Cupid of our rainy isles.

‘ Tis true, we met; one hour I had, no more:

She sent a note, the seal an Elle vous suit,

The close “Your Letty, only yours”; and this

Thrice underscored. The friendly mist of morn

Clung to the lake. I boated over, ran

My craft aground, and heard with beating heart

The Sweet-Gale rustle round the shelving keel;

And out I stept, and up I crept: she moved,

Like Proserpine in Enna, gathering flowers:

Then low and sweet I whistled thrice; and she,

She turn’d, we closed, we kiss’d, swore faith, I breathed

In some new planet: a silent cousin stole

Upon us and departed: “Leave,” she cried,

“O leave me!” “Never, dearest, never: here

I brave the worst:” and while we stood like fools

Embracing, all at once a score of pugs

And poodles yell’d within, and out they came

Trustees and Aunts and Uncles. “What, with him!

“Go” (shrill’d the cottonspinning chorus) “him!”

I choked. Again they shriek’d the burthen “Him!”

Again with hands of wild rejection “Go! ¬

Girl, get you in!” She went ¬ and in one month

They wedded her to sixty thousand pounds,

To lands in Kent and messuages in York,

And slight Sir Robert with his watery smile

And educated whisker. But for me,

They set an ancient creditor to work:

It seems I broke a close with force and arms:

There came a mystic token from the king

To greet the sheriff, needless courtesy!

I read, and fled by night, and flying turn’d:

Her taper glimmer’d in the lake below:

I turn’d once more, close-button’d to the storm;

So left the place,    left Edwin, nor have seen

Him since, nor heard of her, nor cared to hear.

Nor cared to hear? perhaps; yet long ago

I have pardon’d little Letty; not indeed,

It may be, for her own dear sake but this,

She seems a part of those fresh days to me;

For in the dust and drouth of London life

She moves among my visions of the lake,

While the prime swallow dips his wing, or then

While the gold-lily blows, and overhead

The light cloud smoulders on the summer crag.

Come not, when I am dead...

First published in The Keepsake for 1851.

Come not, when I am dead,

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,

To trample round my fallen head,

And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.

There let the wind sweep and the plover cry;

But thou, go by.

Child, if it were thine error or thy crime

I care no longer, being all unblest:

Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time,

And I desire to rest.

Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie:

Go by, go by.

The Eagle

A FRAGMENT

He clasps the crag with hooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

To E. L. on his travels in Greece.

This was first printed in 1853. It has not been altered since. The poem was addressed to Edward Lear, the landscape painter, and refers to his travels.

Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls

Of water, sheets of summer glass,

The long divine Peneian pass,

The vast Akrokeraunian walls,

Tomohrit,   Athos, all things fair,

With such a pencil, such a pen,

You shadow forth to distant men,

I read and felt that I was there:

And trust me, while I turn’d the page,

And track’d you still on classic ground,

I grew in gladness till I found

My spirits in the golden age.

For me the torrent ever pour’d

And glisten’d ¬ here and there alone

The broad-limb’d Gods at random thrown

By fountain-urns;-and Naiads oar’d

A glimmering shoulder under gloom

Of cavern pillars; on the swell

The silver lily heaved and fell;

And many a slope was rich in bloom

From him that on the mountain lea

By dancing rivulets fed his flocks,

To him who sat upon the rocks,

And fluted to the morning sea.

The New Timon and the Poet.

We know him, out of Shakespeare’s art,

And those full curses which he spoke —

The old Timon, with his noble heart,

That strongly loathing, gently broke.

So died the Old: here comes the New.

Regard him: a familiar face —

I thought we knew him. What! it’s you, —

The padded man that wears the stays;

Who kill’d the girls and thrill’d the boys

With dandy pathos when you wrote;

O Lion! you that made a noise,

And shook a mane en papillotes!

And once you tried the Muses too —

You fail’d, sir; therefore, now you turn!

You fall on those who are to you

As captain is to subaltern.

But men of long-enduring hopes,

And careless what the hour may bring,

Can pardon little would-be Popes

And Brummels, when they try to sting.

An artist, sir, should rest in Art,

And waive a little of his claim;

To have a great poetic heart

Is more than all poetic fame.

But you, sir, you are hard to please,

You never look but half content,

Nor like a gentleman at ease,

With moral breadth of temperament.

And what with spites, and what with fears,

You cannot let a body be;

It’s always ringing in your ears,

‘They call this man as great as me!’

What profits how to understand

The merits of a spotless shirt,

A dapper boot, a little hand,

If half the little soul is dirt?

You talk of tinsel! Why, we see

Old marks of rouge upon your cheeks!

You prate of nature! You are he

That split his life upon the cliques.

A Timon you! Nay, nay, for shame —

It looks too arrogant a jest,

The fierce old man, to take his name!

You bandbox, off, and let him rest!’

After-Thought

Ah God! the petty fools of rhyme

That shriek and sweat in pigmy wars

Before the stony face of Time,

And look’d at by the silent stars;

Who hate each other for a song,

And do their little best to bite

And pinch their brethren in the throng,

And scratch the very dead for spite;

And strain to make an inch of room

For their sweet selves, and cannot hear

The sullen Lethe rolling doom

On them and theirs and all things here;

When one small touch of Charity

Could lift them nearer Godlike state

Than if the crowded Orb should cry

Like those who cried Diana great.

And I too talk, and lose the touch

I talk of. Surely, after all,

The noblest answer unto such

Is perfect stillness when they brawl.

Cambridge

This poem is written in pencil on the fly-leaf of a copy of Poems 1833 in the Dyce Collection in South Kensington Museum. Reprinted with many alterations in Life, vol. I, p. 67.

Therefore your halls, your ancient colleges,

Your portals statued with old kings and queens,

Your bridges and your busted libraries,

Wax-lighted chapels and rich carved screens,

Your doctors and your proctors and your deans

Shall not avail you when the day-beam sports

New-risen o’er awakened Albion — No,

Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow

Melodious thunders through your vacant courts

At morn and even; for your manner sorts

Not with this age, nor with the thoughts that roll,

Because the words of little children preach

Against you, — ye that did profess to teach

And have taught nothing, feeding on the soul.

The Germ of ‘Maud’

There was published in 1837 in The Tribute, (a collection of original poems by various authors, edited by Lord Northampton), a contribution by Tennyson entitled ‘Stanzas,’ consisting of xvi stanzas of varying lengths (110 lines in all). In 1855 the first xii stanzas were published as the fourth section of the second part of ‘Maud.’ Some verbal changes and transpositions of lines were made; a new stanza (the present sixth) and several new lines were introduced, and the xth stanza of 1837 became the xiiith of 1855. But stanzas xiii-xvi of 1837 have never been reprinted in any edition of Tennyson’s works, though quoted in whole or part in various critical studies of the poet. Swinburne refers to this poem as ‘the poem of deepest charm and fullest delight of pathos and melody ever written, even by Mr Tennyson.’ This poem in The Tribute gained Tennyson his first notice in the Edinburgh Review, which had till then ignored him.

XIII

But she tarries in her place

And I paint the beauteous face

Of the maiden, that I lost,

In my inner eyes again,

Lest my heart be overborne,

By the thing I hold in scorn,

By a dull mechanic ghost

And a juggle of the brain.

XIV

I can shadow forth my bride

As I knew her fair and kind

r for my wife;

She is lovely by my side

In the silence of my life —

‘Tis a phantom of the mind.

XV

‘Tis a phantom fair and good

I can call it to my side,

So to guard my life from ill,

Tho’ its ghastly sister glide

And be moved around me still

With the moving of the blood

That is moved not of the will.

XVI

Let it pass, the dreary brow,

Let the dismal face go by,

Will it lead me to the grave?

Then I lose it: it will fly:

Can it overlast the nerves?

Can it overlive the eye?

But the other, like a star,

Thro’ the channel windeth far

Till it fade and fail and die,

To its Archetype that waits

Clad in light by golden gates,

Clad in light the Spirit waits

To embrace me in the sky.

Bewick Fragment

On the fly-leaf of a book illustrated by Bewick, in the library of the late Lord Ravensworth, the following lines in Tennyson’s autograph were discovered in 1903.

A gate and a field half ploughed,

A solitary cow,

A child with a broken slate,

And a titmarsh in the bough.

But where, alack, is Bewick

To tell the meaning now?

The Skipping-Rope

This poem, published in the second volume of Poems by Alfred Tennyson (in two volumes, London, Edward Moxon, MDCCCXLII), was reprinted in every edition until 1851, when it was suppressed.

Sure never yet was Antelope

Could skip so lightly by.

Stand off, or else my skipping-rope

Will hit you in the eye.

How lightly whirls the skipping-rope!

How fairy-like you fly!

Go, get you gone, you muse and mope —

I hate that silly sigh.

Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope,

Or tell me how to die.

There, take it, take my skipping-rope

And hang yourself thereby.

The New Timon and the Poets

From Punch, February 28, 1846. Bulwer Lytton published in 1845 his satirical poem ‘New Timon: a Romance of London,’ in which he bitterly attacked Tennyson for the civil list pension granted the previous year, particularly referring to the poem ‘O Darling Room’ in the 1833 volume. Tennyson replied in the following vigorous verses, which made the literary sensation of the year. Tennyson afterwards declared: ‘I never sent my lines to Punch. John Forster did. They were too bitter. I do not think that I should ever have published them.’ — Life, vol. I, p. 245.

We know him, out of Shakespeare’s art,

And those fine curses which he spoke;

The old Timon, with his noble heart,

That, strongly loathing, greatly broke.

So died the Old: here comes the New:

Regard him: a familiar face:

I thought we knew him: What, it’s you

The padded man — that wears the stays —

Who killed the girls and thrill’d the boys

With dandy pathos when you wrote,

A Lion, you, that made a noise,

And shook a mane en papillotes.

And once you tried the Muses too:

You fail’d, Sir: therefore now you turn,

You fall on those who are to you

As captain is to subaltern.

But men of long enduring hopes,

And careless what this hour may bring,

Can pardon little would-be Popes

And Brummels, when they try to sting.

An artist, Sir, should rest in art,

And wave a little of his claim;

To have the deep poetic heart

Is more than all poetic fame.

But you, Sir, you are hard to please;

You never look but half content:

Nor like a gentleman at ease

With moral breadth of temperament.

And what with spites and what with fears,

You cannot let a body be:

It’s always ringing in your ears,

‘They call this man as good as me.’

What profits now to understand

The merits of a spotless shirt —

A dapper boot — a little hand —

If half the little soul is dirt?

You talk of tinsel! why we see

The old mark of rouge upon your cheeks.

You prate of nature! you are he

That spilt his life about the cliques.

A Timon you! Nay, nay, for shame:

It looks too arrogant a jest —

The fierce old man — to take his name

You bandbox. Off, and let him rest.

Mablethorpe

Published in Manchester Athænaum Album, 1850. Written, 1837. Republished, altered, in Life, vol. I, p. 161.

How often, when a child I lay reclined,

I took delight in this locality!

Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,

And here the Grecian ships did seem to be.

And here again I come and only find

The drain-cut levels of the marshy lea, —

Gray sand banks and pale sunsets — dreary wind,

Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy clouded sea.

Here often, when a child, I lay reclined

Here often when a child I lay reclined:

I took delight in this fair strand and free:

Here stood the infant Illion of my mind,

And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be,

And here again I come and only find

The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,

Gray sand-banks and pale sunsets, dreary wind,

Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.

Yet though perchance no tract of earth have more

Unlikeness to the fair Ionian plain,

I love the place that I have loved before,

I love the rolling cloud, the flying rain,

The brown sea lapsing back with sullen roar,

To travel leagues before he comes again,

The misty desert of the houseless shore,

The phantom-circle of the moaning main.

What time I wasted youthful hours

Published in The Keepsake for 1851: an illustrated annual, edited by Miss Power. London: David Bogue. To this issue of the Keepsake Tennyson also contributed ‘Come not when I am dead’ now included in the collected Works.

What time I wasted youthful hours

One of the shining wingèd powers,

Show’d me vast cliffs with crown of towers,

As towards the gracious light I bow’d,

They seem’d high palaces and proud,

Hid now and then with sliding cloud.

He said, ‘The labour is not small;

Yet winds the pathway free to all: —

Take care thou dost not fear to fall!’

Come Not, When I am Dead

Come not, when I am dead,

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,

To trample round my fallen head,

And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.

There let the wind sweep and the plover cry;

But thou, go by.

Child, if it were thine error or thy crime

I care no longer, being all unblest:

Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time,

And I desire to rest.

Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie:

Go by, go by.

Sonnet To W.C. Macready

FAREWELL, Macready, since to-night we part;

Full-handed thunders often have confessed

Thy power, well-used to move the public breast.

We thank thee with our voice, and from the heart.

Farewell, Macready, since this night we part,

Go, take thine honors home; rank with the best,

Garrick and statelier Kemble, and the rest

Who made a nation purer through their art.

Thine is it that our drama did not die,

Nor flicker down to brainless pantomine,

And those gilt gauds men-children swarm to see.

Farewell, Macready, moral, grave, sublime;

Our Shakespeare’s bland and universal eye

Dwells pleased, through twice a hundred years, on thee.

Britons, Guard your Own

Published in The Examiner, January 31, 1852.

Rise, Britons, rise, if manhood be not dead;

The world’s last tempest darkens overhead;

The Pope has bless’d him;

The Church caress’d him;

He triumphs; maybe, we shall stand alone:

Britons, guard your own.

His ruthless host is bought with plunder’d gold,

By lying priest’s the peasant’s votes controlled.

All freedom vanish’d,

The true men banished,

He triumphs; maybe, we shall stand alone.

Britons, guard your own.

Peace-lovers we&mdash;sweet Peace we all desire&mdash;

Peace-lovers we&mdash;but who can trust a liar?&mdash;

Peace-lovers, haters

Of shameless traitors,

We hate not France, but this man’s heart of stone.

Britons, guard your own.

We hate not France, but France has lost her voice

This man is France, the man they call her choice.

By tricks and spying,

By craft and lying,

And murder was her freedom overthrown.

Britons, guard your own.

‘Vive l’Empereur’ may follow by and bye;

‘God save the Queen’ is here a truer cry.

God save the Nation,

The toleration,

And the free speech that makes a Briton known.

Britons, guard your own.

Rome’s dearest daughter now is captive France,

The Jesuit laughs, and reckoning on his chance,

Would, unrelenting,

Kill all dissenting,

Till we were left to fight for truth alone.

Britons, guard your own.

Call home your ships across Biscayan tides,

To blow the battle from their oaken sides.

Why waste they yonder

Their idle thunder?

Why stay they there to guard a foreign throne?

Seamen, guard your own.

We were the best of marksmen long ago,

We won old battles with our strength, the bow.

Now practise, yeomen,

Like those bowmen,

Till your balls fly as their true shafts have flown.

Yeomen, guard your own.

His soldier-ridden Highness might incline

To take Sardinia, Belgium, or the Rhine:

Shall we stand idle,

Nor seek to bridle

His vile aggressions, till we stand alone?

Make their cause your own.

Should he land here, and for one hour prevail,

There must no man go back to bear the tale:

No man to bear it&mdash;

Swear it! We swear it!

Although we fought the banded world alone,

We swear to guard our own.

For the Penny-Wise

First published anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine in 1852.

We used to fight the French,

And beat them, says the story;

But now the cry retrench

Has a little dock’d our glory.

We meant to beat the Kaffirs,

We had the best intentions;

But the Kaffirs knock’d us over,

With the last inventions.

Poor little people, we,

And in the world belated!

Our musket, as it seems,

Is superannuated.

Friends! the soldier still

Is worthy of his calling,

But who are they that want

A little over-hauling?

The Third of February, 1852

First published in Examiner in 1852, signed under the name ‘Merlin’.

MY LORDS, we heard you speak: you told us all

That England’s honest censure went too far,

That our free press should cease to brawl,

Not sting the fiery Frenchman into war.

It was our ancient privilege, my Lords,

To fling whate’er we felt, not fearing, into words.

We love not this French God, the child of hell,

Wild War, who breaks the converse of the wise;

But though we love kind Peace so well,

We dare not even by silence sanction lies.

It might be safe our censures to withdraw,

And yet, my Lords, not well; there is a higher law.

As long as we remain, we must speak free,

Tho’ all the storm of Eurpoe on us break.

No little German state are we,

But the one voice in Europe; we must speak,

That if to-night our greatness were struck dead,

There might be left some record of the things we said.

If you be fearful, then must we be bold.

Our Britain cannot salve a tyrant o’er.

Better the waste Atlantic roll’d

On her and us and ours for evermore.

What? have we fought for Freedom from our prime,

At last to dodge and palter with a public crime?

Shall we fear him? our own we never fear’d.

From our first Charles by force we wrung our claims.

Prick’d by the Papal spur, we rear’d,

We flung the burthen of the second James.

I say, we never fear’d! and as for these,

We broke them on the land, we drove them on the seas.

And you, my Lords, you make the people muse

In doubt if you be of our Barons’ breed —

Were those your sires who fought at Lewes?

Is this the manly strain of Runnymede?

O fallen nobility that, overawed,

Would lisp in honey’d whispers of this monstrous fraud!

We feel, at least, that silence here were sin,

Not ours the fault if we have feeble hosts —

If easy patrons of their kin

Have left the last free race with naked coasts!

They knew the precious things they had to guard;

For us, we will not spare the tyrant one hard word.

Tho’ niggard throats of Manchester may bawl,

What England was, shall her true sons forget?

We are not cotton-spinners all,

But some love England and her honor yet.

And these in our Thermopylæ shall stand,

And hold against the world this honor of the land.

Hands all Round

Published in The Examiner, February 7, 1852. Reprinted, slightly altered, in Life, vol. I, p. 345. Included, almost entirely re-written, in collected Works.

FIRST drink a health, this solemn night,

A health to England, every guest;

That man’s the best cosmopolite

Who loves his native country best.

May Freedom’s oak for ever live

With stronger life from day to day;

That man’s the best Conservative

Who lops the mouldered branch away.

Hands all round!

God the tyrant’s hope confound!

To this great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,

And the great name of England round and round.

A health to Europe’s honest men!

Heaven guard them from her tyrants’ jails!

From wronged Poerio’s noisome den,

From iron limbs and tortured nails!

We curse the crimes of Southern kings,

The Russian whips and Austrian rods —

We likewise have our evil things;

Too much we make our Ledgers, Gods.

Yet hands all round!

God the tyrant’s cause confound!

To Europe’s better health we drink, my friends,

And the great name of England round and round.

What health to France, if France be she

Whom martial progress only charms?

Yet tell her — better to be free

Than vanquish all the world in arms.

Her frantic city’s flashing heats

But fire, to blast the hopes of men.

Why change the titles of your streets?

You fools, you’ll want them all again.

Hands all round!

God the tyrant’s cause confound!

To France, the wiser France, we drink, my friends,

And the great name of England round and round.

Gigantic daughter of the West,

We drink to thee across the flood,

We know thee most, we love thee best,

For art thou not of British blood?

Should war’s mad blast again be blown,

Permit not thou the tyrant powers

To fight thy mother here alone,

But let thy broadsides roar with ours.

Hands all round!

God the tyrant’s cause confound!

To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends,

And the great name of England round and round.

O rise, our strong Atlantic sons,

When war against our freedom springs!

O speak to Europe through your guns!

They can be understood by kings.

You must not mix our Queen with those

That wish to keep their people fools;

Our freedom’s foemen are her foes,

She comprehends the race she rules.

Hands all round!

God the tyrant’s cause confound!

To our dear kinsmen of the West, my friends,

And the great name of England round and round.

Suggested by Reading an Article in a Newspaper

Published in The Examiner, February 14, 1852, and never reprinted nor acknowledged. The proof sheets of the poem, with alterations in Tennyson’s autograph, were offered for public sale in 1906.

To the Editor of The Examiner.

SIR, — I have read with much interest the poems of Merlin. The enclosed is longer than either of those, and certainly not so good: yet as I flatter myself that it has a smack of Merlin’s style in it, and as I feel that it expresses forcibly enough some of the feelings of our time, perhaps you may be induced to admit it.

TALIESSEN.

HOW much I love this writer’s manly style!

By such men led, our press had ever been

The public conscience of our noble isle,

Severe and quick to feel a civic sin,

To raise the people and chastise the times

With such a heat as lives in great creative rhymes.

O you, the Press! what good from you might spring!

What power is yours to blast a cause or bless!

I fear for you, as for some youthful king,

Lest you go wrong from power in excess.

Take heed of your wide privileges! we

The thinking men of England, loathe a tyranny.

A freeman is, I doubt not, freest here;

The single voice may speak his mind aloud;

An honest isolation need not fear

The Court, the Church, the Parliament, the crowd.

No, nor the Press! and look you well to that —

We must not dread in you the nameless autocrat.

And you, dark Senate of the public pen,

You may not, like yon tyrant, deal in spies.

Yours are the public acts of public men,

But yours are not their household privacies.

I grant you one of the great Powers on earth,

But be not you the blatant traitors of the hearth.

You hide the hand that writes: it must be so,

For better so you fight for public ends;

But some you strike can scarce return the blow;

You should be all the nobler, O my friends.

Be noble, you! nor work with faction’s tools

To charm a lower sphere of fulminating fools.

But knowing all your power to heat or cool,

To soothe a civic wound or keep it raw,

Be loyal, if you wish for wholesome rule:

Our ancient boast is this — we reverence law.

We still were loyal in our wildest fights,

Or loyally disloyal battled for our rights.

O Grief and Shame if while I preach of laws

Whereby to guard our Freedom from offence —

And trust an ancient manhood and the cause

Of England and her health of commonsense —

There hang within the heavens a dark disgrace,

Some vast Assyrian doom to burst upon our race.

I feel the thousand cankers of our State,

I fain would shake their triple-folded ease,

The hogs who can believe in nothing great,

Sneering bedridden in the down of Peace

Over their scrips and shares, their meats and wine,

With stony smirks at all things human and divine!

I honour much, I say, this man’s appeal.

We drag so deep in our commercial mire,

We move so far from greatness, that I feel

Exception to be character’d in fire.

Who looks for Godlike greatness here shall see

The British Goddess, sleek Respectability.

Alas for her and all her small delights!

She feels not how the social frame is rack’d.

She loves a little scandal which excites;

A little feeling is a want of tact.

For her there lie in wait millions of foes,

And yet the ‘not too much’ is all the rule she knows.

Poor soul! behold her: what decorous calm!

She, with her week-day worldliness sufficed,

Stands in her pew and hums her decent psalm

With decent dippings at the name of Christ!

And she has mov’d in that smooth way so long,

She hardly can believe that she shall suffer wrong.

Alas, our Church! alas, her growing ills,

And those who tolerate not her tolerance,

But needs must sell the burthen of their wills

To that half-pagan harlot kept by France!

Free subjects of the kindliest of all thrones,

Headlong they plunge their doubts among old rags and bones.

Alas, Church writers, altercating tribes —

The vessel and your Church may sink in storms.

Christ cried: Woe, woe, to Pharisees and Scribes!

Like them, you bicker less for truth than forms.

I sorrow when I read the things you write,

What unheroic pertness! what un-Christian spite!

Alas, our youth, so clever yet so small,

Thin dilletanti deep in nature’s plan,

Who make the emphatic One, by whom is all,

An essence less concentred than a man!

Better wild Mahmoud’s war-cry once again!

O fools, we want a manlike God and Godlike men!

Go, frightful omens. Yet once more I turn

To you that mould men’s thoughts; I call on you

To make opinion warlike, lest we learn

A sharper lesson than we ever knew.

I hear a thunder though the skies are fair,

But shrill you, loud and long, the warning-note: Prepare!

God bless our Prince and Bride

Lord Tennyson wrote, by Royal request, two stanzas which were sung as part of God Save the Queen at a State concert in connection with the Princess Royal’s marriage: these were printed in the Times of January 26, 1858.

God bless our Prince and Bride!

God keep their lands allied,

God save the Queen!

Clothe them with righteousness,

Crown them with happiness,

Them with all blessings bless,

God save the Queen.

Fair fall this hallow’d hour,

Farewell our England’s flower,

God save the Queen!

Farewell, fair rose of May!

Let both the peoples say,

God bless thy marriage-day,

God bless the Queen.

The Ringlet

Published in Enoch Arden volume (London: E. Moxon & Co, 1864) and never reprinted.

‘Your ringlets, your ringlets,

That look so golden-gay,

If you will give me one, but one,

To kiss it night and day,

Then never chilling touch of Time

Will turn it silver-gray;

And then shall I know it is all true gold

To flame and sparkle and stream as of old,

Till all the comets in heaven are cold,

And all her stars decay.’

‘Then take it, love, and put it by;

This cannot change, nor yet can I.’

‘My ringlet, my ringlet,

That art so golden-gay,

Now never chilling touch of Time

Can turn thee silver-gray;

And a lad may wink, and a girl may hint,

And a fool may say his say;

For my doubts and fears were all amiss,

And I swear henceforth by this and this,

That a doubt will only come for a kiss,

And a fear to be kissed away.’

‘Then kiss it, love, and put it by:

If this can change, why so can I.’

O Ringlet, O Ringlet,

I kiss’d you night and day,

And Ringlet, O Ringlet,

You still are golden-gay,

But Ringlet, O Ringlet,

You should be silver-gray:

For what is this which now I’m told,

I that took you for true gold,

She that gave you’s bought and sold,

Sold, sold.

O Ringlet, O Ringlet,

She blush’d a rosy red,

When Ringlet, O Ringlet,

She clipt you from her head,

And Ringlet, O Ringlet,

She gave you me, and said,

‘Come, kiss it, love, and put it by:

If this can change, why so can I.’

O fie, you golden nothing, fie

You golden lie.

O Ringlet, O Ringlet,

I count you much to blame,

For Ringlet, O Ringlet,

You put me much to shame,

So Ringlet, O Ringlet,

I doom you to the flame.

For what is this which now I learn,

Has given all my faith a turn?

Burn, you glossy heretic, burn,

Burn, burn.

Song: Home they brought him slain with spears

This first form of the Song in The Princess (‘Home they brought her warrior dead’) was published only in Selections from Tennyson. London: E. Moxon & Co, 1864.

Home they brought him slain with spears.

They brought him home at even-fall:

All alone she sits and hears

Echoes in his empty hall,

Sounding on the morrow.

The Sun peeped in from open field,

The boy began to leap and prance,

Rode upon his father’s lance,

Beat upon his father’s shield —

‘Oh hush, my joy, my sorrow.’

Lines 1865-1866

Published in Good Words for March 1, 1868 as a decorative page, with an accompanying full page plate by T. Dalziel. The lines were never reprinted.

I stood on a tower in the wet,

And New Year and Old Year met,

And winds were roaring and blowing;

And I said, ‘O years that meet in tears,

Have ye aught that is worth the knowing?

‘Science enough and exploring

Wanderers coming and going

Matter enough for deploring

But aught that is worth the knowing?’

Seas at my feet were flowing

Waves on the shingle pouring,

Old Year roaring and blowing

And New Year blowing and roaring.

A Welcome to Her Royal Highness Marie Alexandrovna, Duchess of Edinburgh.

March 7, 1874.

I.

THE SON of him with whom we strove for power —

Whose will is lord thro’ all his world-domain —

Who made the serf a man, and burst his chain —

Has given our prince his own imperial Flower,

Alexandrovna.

And welcome, Russian flower, a people’s pride,

To Britain, when her flowers begin to blow !

From love to love, from home to home you go,

From mother unto mother, stately bride,

Marie Alexandrovna!

II.

The golden news along the steppes is blown,

And at thy name the Tartar tents are stirr’d ;

Elburz and all the Caucasus have heard ;

And all the sultry palms of India known,

Alexandrovna.

The voices of our universal sea

On capes of Afric as on cliffs of Kent,

The Maoris and that Isle of Continent,

And loyal pines of Canada mumur thee,

Marie Alexandrovna!

III.

Fair empires branching, both, in lusty life! —

Yet Harold’s England fell to Norman swords;

Yet thine own land has bow’d to Tartar hordes

Since English Harold gave its throne a wife,

Alexandrovna!

For thrones and peoples are as waifs that swing,

And float or fall, in endless ebb and flow;

But who love best have best the grace to know

That Love by right divine is deathless king,

Marie Alexandrovna!

IV.

And Love has led thee to the stranger land,

Where men are bold and strongly say their say; —

See, empire upon empire smiles to-day,

As thou with thy young lover hand in hand

Alexandrovna

So now thy fuller life is in the west,

Whose hand at home was gracious to thy poor:

Thy name was blest within the narrow door ;

Here also, Marie, shall thy name be blest,

Marie Alexandrovna!

V.

Shall fears and jealous hatreds flame again?

Or at thy coming, Princess, everywhere,

The blue heaven break, and some diviner air

Breathe thro’ the world and change the hearts of men,

Alexandrovna?

But hearts that change not, love that cannot cease,

And peace be yours, the peace of soul in soul!

And howsoever this wild world may roll,

Between your peoples truth and manful peace,

Alfred — Alexandrovna

Literary Squabbles

AH God! the petty fools of rhyme

That shriek and sweat in pigmy wars

Before the stony face of Time,

And look’d at by the silent stars:

Who hate each other for a song,

And do their little best to bite

And pinch their brethren in the throng,

And scratch the very dead for spite:

And strain to make an inch of room

For their sweet selves, and cannot hear

The sullen Lethe rolling doom

On them and theirs and all things here:

When one small touch of Charity

Could lift them nearer Godlike state

Than if the crowded Orb should cry

Like those who cried Diana great:

And I too talk, and lose the touch

I talk of. Surely, after all,

The noblest answer unto such

Is perfect stillness when they brawl.

The Higher Pantheism

THE SUN, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains —

Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?

Is not the Vision He? tho’ He be not that which He seems?

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,

Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?

Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why;

For is He not all but that which has power to feel ‘I am I’?

Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom

Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom.

Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet —

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.

God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice,

For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice.

Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool;

For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;

But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it not He?

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 bell,

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 flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

Flower in the crannied wall

FLOWER in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower — but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

Child-Songs

The City Child.

DAINTY little maiden, whither would you wander?

Whither from this pretty home, the home where mother dwells?

‘Far and far away,’ said the dainty little maiden,

‘All among the gardens, auriculas, anemones,

Roses and lilies and Canterbury-bells.’

Dainty little maiden, whither would you wander?

Whither from this pretty house, this city-house of ours?

‘Far and far away,’ said the dainty little maiden,

‘All among the meadows, the clover and the clematis,

Daisies and kingcups and honeysuckle-flowers.’

II.

Minnie and Winnie.

MINNIE and Winnie

Slept in a shell.

Sleep, little ladies!

And they slept well.

Pink was the shell within,

Silver without;

Sounds of the great sea

Wander’d about.

Sleep, little ladies!

Wake not soon!

Echo on echo

Dies to the moon.

Two bright stars

Peep’d into the shell.

‘What are they dreaming of?

Who can tell?’

Started a green linnet

Out of the croft;

Wake, little ladies,

The sun is aloft!

Lucretius

LUCILLA, wedded to Lucretius, found

Her master cold; for when the morning flush

Of passion and the first embrace had died

Between them, tho’ he loved her none the less,

Yet often when the woman heard his foot

Return from pacings in the field, and ran

To greet him with a kiss, the master took

Small notice, or austerely, for — his mind

Half buried in some weightier argument,

Or fancy-borne perhaps upon the rise

And long roll of the hexameter — he past

To turn and ponder those three hundred scrolls

Left by the Teacher, whom he held divine.

She brook’d it not; but wrathful, petulant

Dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch

Who brew’d the philtre which had power, they said

To lead an errant passion home again.

And this, at times, she mingled with his drink,

And this destroy’d him; for the wicked broth

Confused the chemic labor of the blood,

And tickling the brute brain within the man’s

Made havoc among those tender cells, and check’d

His power to shape: He loathed himself; and once

After a tempest woke upon a morn

That mock’d him with returning calm, and cried:

‘Storm in the night! for thrice I heard the rain

Rushing; and once the flash of a thunderbolt —

Methought I never saw so fierce a fork —

Struck out the streaming mountain-side, and show’d

A riotous confluence of watercourses

Blanching and billowing in a hollow of it,

Where all but yester-eve was dusty-dry.

‘Storm, and what dreams, ye holy Gods, what dreams!

For thrice I waken’d after dreams. Perchance

We do but recollect the dreams that come

Just ere the waking: terrible: for it seem’d

A void was made in Nature; all her bonds

Crack’d; and I saw the flaring atom-streams

And torrents of her myriad universe,

Ruining along the illimitable inane,

Fly on to clash together again, and make

Another and another frame of things

For ever: that was mine, my dream, I knew it —

Of and belonging to me, as the dog

With inward yelp and restless forefoot plies

His function of the woodland; but the next!

I thought that all the blood by Sylla shed

Came driving rainlike down again on earth,

And where it dash’d the reddening meadow, sprang

No dragon warriors from Cadmean teeth,

For these I thought my dream would show to me,

But girls, Hetairai, curious in their art,

Hired animalisms, vile as those that made

The mulberry-faced Dictator’s orgies worse

Than aught they fable of the quiet Gods.

And hands they mixt, and yell’d and round me drove

In narrowing circles till I yell’d again

Half-suffocated, and sprang up, and saw —

Was it the first beam of my latest day?

‘Then, then, from utter gloom stood out the

The breasts of Helen, and hoveringly a sword

Now over and now under, now direct,

Pointed itself to pierce, but sank down shamed

At all that beauty; and as I stared, a fire,

The fire that left a roofless Ilion,

Shot out of them, and scorch’d me that I woke.

‘Is this thy vengeance, holy Venus, thine,

Because I would not one of thine own doves,

Not ev’n a rose, were offered to thee? thine,

Forgetful how my rich proœmion makes

Thy glory fly along the Italian field,

In lays that will outlast thy deity?

‘Deity? nay, thy worshippers. My tongue

Trips, or I speak profanely. Which of these

Angers thee most, or angers thee at all?

Not if thou be’st of those who, far aloof

From envy, hate and pity, and spite and scorn,

Live the great life which all our greatest fain

Would follow, centred in eternal calm.

‘Nay, if thou canst, O Goddess, like ourselves

Touch, and be touch’d, then would I cry to thee

To kiss thy Mavors, roll thy tender arms

Round him, and keep him from the lust of blood

That makes a steaming slaughter-house of Rome.

‘Ay, but I meant not thee; I meant not her

Whom all the pines of Ida shook to see

Slide from that quiet heaven of hers, and tempt

The Trojan, while his neat-herds were abroad;

Nor her that o’er her wounded hunter wept

Her Deity false in human-amorous tears;

Nor whom her beardless apple-arbiter

Decided fairest. Rather, O ye Gods,

Poet-like, as the great Sicilian called

Calliope to grace his golden verse —

Ay, and this Kypris also — did I take

That popular name of thine to shadow forth

The all-generating powers and genial heat

Of Nature, when she strikes thro’ the thick blood

Of cattle, and light is large, and lambs are glad

Nosing the mother’s udder, and the bird

Makes his heart voice amid the blaze of flowers;

Which things appear the work of mighty Gods.

‘The Gods! and if I go my work is left

Unfinish’d — if I go. The Gods, who haunt

The lucid interspace of world and world,

Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,

Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,

Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,

Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar

Their sacred everlasting calm! and such,

Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm

Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain

Letting his own life go. The Gods, the Gods!

If all be atoms, how then should the Gods

Being atomic not be dissoluble,

Not follow the great law? My master held

That Gods there are, for all men so believe.

I prest my footsteps into his, and meant

Surely to lead my Memmius in a train

Of flowery clauses onward to the proof

That Gods there are, and deathless. Meant? I meant?

I have forgotten what I meant: my mind

Stumbles, and all my faculties are lamed.

‘Look where another of our Gods, the Sun

Apollo, Delius, or of older use

All-seeing Hyperion — what you will —

Has mounted yonder; since he never sware,

Except his wrath were wreak’d on wretched man,

That he would only shine among the dead

Hereafter; tales! for never yet on earth

Could dead flesh creep, or bits of roasting ox

Moan round the spit — nor knows he what he sees;

King of the East altho’ he seem, and girt

With song and flame and fragrance, slowly lifts

His golden feet on those empurpled stairs

That climb into the windy halls of heaven:

And here he glances on an eye new-born,

And gets for greeting but a wail of pain;

And here he stays upon a freezing orb

That fain would gaze upon him to the last;

And here upon a yellow eyelid fall’n

And closed by those who mourn a friend in vain,

Not thankful that his troubles are no more.

And me, altho’ his fire is on my face

Blinding, he sees not, nor at all can tell

Whether I mean this day to end myself.

Or lend an ear to Plato where he says,

That men like soldiers may not quit the post

Allotted by the Gods: but he that holds

The Gods are careless, wherefore need he care

Greatly for them, nor rather plunge at once,

Being troubled, wholly out of sight, and sink

Past earthquake — ay, and gout and stone, that break

Body toward death, and palsy, death-in-life,

And wretched age — and worst disease of all,

These prodigies of myriad nakednesses,

And twisted shapes of lust, unspeakable,

Abominable, strangers at my hearth

Not welcome, harpies miring every dish,

The phantom husks of something foully done,

And fleeting thro’ the boundless universe,

And blasting the long quiet of my breast

With animal heat and dire insanity?

‘How should the mind, except it loved them, clasp

These idols to herself? or do they fly

Now thinner, and now thicker, like the flakes

In a fall of snow, and so press in, perforce

Of multitude, as crowds that in an hour

Of civic tumult jam the doors, and bear

The keepers down, and throng, their rags and the

The basest, far into that council-hall

Where sit the best and stateliest of the land?

‘Can I not fling this horror off me again,

Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile

Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm,

At random ravage? and how easily

The mountain there has cast his cloudy slough,

Now towering o’er him in serenest air,

A mountain o’er a mountain, — ay, and within

All hollow as the hopes and fears of men?

‘But who was he that in the garden snared

Picus and Faunus, rustic Gods? a tale

To laugh at — more to laugh at in myself —

For look! what is it? there? yon arbutus

Totters; a noiseless riot underneath

Strikes through the wood, sets all the tops quivering —

The mountain quickens into Nymph and Faun,

And here an Oread — how the sun delights

To glance and shift about her slippery sides,

And rosy knees and supple roundedness,

And budded bosom-peaks — who this way runs

Before the rest! — A satyr, a satyr, see,

Follows; but him I proved impossible;

Twy-natured is no nature: yet he draws

Nearer and nearer, and I scan him now

Beastlier than any phantom of his kind

That ever butted his rough brother-brute

For lust or lusty blood or provender:

I hate, abhor, spit, sicken at him; and she

Loathes him as well; such a precipitate heel,

Fledged as it were with Mercury’s ankle-wing,

Whirls her to me: but will she fling herself

Shameless upon me? Catch her, goatfoot! nay,

Hide, hide them, million-myrtled wilderness,

And cavern-shadowing laurels, hide! do I wish —

What? — that the bush were leafless? or to whelm

All of them in one massacre? O ye Gods

I know you careless, yet, behold, to you

From childly wont and ancient use I call —

I thought I lived securely as yourselves —

No lewdness, narrowing envy, monkey-spite,

No madness of ambition, avarice, none:

No larger feast than under plane or pine

With neighbors laid along the grass, to take

Only such cups as left us friendly-warm,

Affirming each his own philosophy —

Nothing to mar the sober majesties

Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life.

But now it seems some unseen monster lays

His vast and filthy hands upon my will,

Wrenching it backward into his; and spoils

My bliss in being; and it was not great;

For save when shutting reasons up in rhythm,

Or Heliconian honey in living words,

To make a truth less harsh, I often grew

Tired of so much within our little life

Or of so little in our little life —

Poor little life that toddles half an hour

Crown’d with a flower or two, and there an end —

And since the nobler pleasure seems to fade,

Why should I, beastlike as I find myself,

Not manlike end myself? — our privilege — ;

What beast has heart to do it? And what man

What Roman would be dragg’d in triumph thus?

Not I; not he, who bears one name with her

Whose death-blow struck the dateless doom of kings,

When, brooking not the Tarquin in her veins,

She made her blood in sight of Collatine

And all his peers, flushing the guiltless air,

Spout from the maiden fountain in her heart.

And from it sprang the Commonwealth, which breaks

As I am breaking now!

‘And therefore now

Let her, that is the womb and tomb of all

Great Nature, take, and forcing far apart

Those blind beginnings that have made me man,

Dash them anew together at her will

Thro’ all her cycles — into man once more,

Or beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower.

But till this cosmic order everywhere

Shatter’d into one earthquake in one day

Cracks all to pieces, — and that hour perhaps

Is not so far when momentary man

Shall seem no more a something to himself,

But he, his hopes and hates, his homes and fanes

And even his bones long laid within the grave,

The very sides of the grave itself shall pass,

Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void,

Into the unseen for ever, — till that hour,

My golden work in which I told a truth

That stays the rolling Ixionian wheel,

And numbs the Fury’s ringlet-snake, and plucks

The mortal soul from out immortal hell

Shall stand: ay, surely: then it fails at last

And perishes as I must, for O Thou

Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity,

Yearn’d after by the wisest of the wise

Who fail to find thee, being as thou art

Without one pleasure and without one pain,

Howbeit I know thou surely must be mine

Or soon or late, yet out of season, thus

I woo thee roughly, for thou carest not

How roughly men may woo thee so they win —

Thus — thus: the soul flies out and dies in the air.’

With that he drove the knife into his side.

She heard him raging, heard him fall; ran in,

Beat breast, tore hair, cried out upon herself

As having fail’d in duty to him, shriek’d

That she but meant to win him back, fell on him

Clasp’d, kiss’d him, wail’d: he answer’d, ‘Care not thou!

Thy duty? What is duty? Fare thee well!’

The Spiteful Letter

HERE, it is here, the close of the year,

And with it a spiteful letter.

My name in song has done him much wrong,

For himself has done much better.

O little bard, is your lot so hard,

If men neglect your pages?

I think not much of yours or of mine,

I hear the roll of the ages.

Rhymes and rhymes in the range of the times!

Are mine for the moment stronger?

Yet hate me not, but abide your lot;

I last but a moment longer.

This faded leaf, our names are as brief;

What room is left for a hater?

Yet the yellow leaf hates the greener leaf,

For it hangs one moment later.

Greater than I — is that your cry?

And men will live to see it.

Well — if it be so — so it is, you know;

And if it be so, so be it.

Brief, brief is a summer leaf,

But this is the time of hollies.

O hollies and ivies and evergreens,

How I hate the spites and the follies!

In the Garden at Swainston

NIGHTINGALES warbled without,

Within was weeping for thee:

Shadows of three dead men

Walk’d in the walks with me,

Shadows of three dead men and thou wast one of the three.

Nightingales sang in his woods:

The Master was far away:

Nightingales warbled and sang

Of a passion that lasts but a day;

Still in the house in his coffin the Prince of courtesy lay.

Two dead men have I known

In courtesy like to thee:

Two dead men have I loved

With a love that ever will be:

Three dead men have I loved and thou art last of the three.

The Third of February, 1852

MY LORDS, we heard you speak: you told us all

That England’s honest censure went too far,

That our free press should cease to brawl,

Not sting the fiery Frenchman into war.

It was our ancient privilege, my Lords,

To fling whate’er we felt, not fearing, into words.

We love not this French God, the child of hell,

Wild War, who breaks the converse of the wise;

But though we love kind Peace so well,

We dare not even by silence sanction lies.

It might be safe our censures to withdraw,

And yet, my Lords, not well; there is a higher law.

As long as we remain, we must speak free,

Tho’ all the storm of Eurpoe on us break.

No little German state are we,

But the one voice in Europe; we must speak,

That if to-night our greatness were struck dead,

There might be left some record of the things we said.

If you be fearful, then must we be bold.

Our Britain cannot salve a tyrant o’er.

Better the waste Atlantic roll’d

On her and us and ours for evermore.

What? have we fought for Freedom from our prime,

At last to dodge and palter with a public crime?

Shall we fear him? our own we never fear’d.

From our first Charles by force we wrung our claims.

Prick’d by the Papal spur, we rear’d,

We flung the burthen of the second James.

I say, we never fear’d! and as for these,

We broke them on the land, we drove them on the seas.

And you, my Lords, you make the people muse

In doubt if you be of our Barons’ breed —

Were those your sires who fought at Lewes?

Is this the manly strain of Runnymede?

O fallen nobility that, overawed,

Would lisp in honey’d whispers of this monstrous fraud!

We feel, at least, that silence here were sin,

Not ours the fault if we have feeble hosts —

If easy patrons of their kin

Have left the last free race with naked coasts!

They knew the precious things they had to guard;

For us, we will not spare the tyrant one hard word.

Tho’ niggard throats of Manchester may bawl,

What England was, shall her true sons forget?

We are not cotton-spinners all,

But some love England and her honor yet.

And these in our Thermopylæ shall stand,

And hold against the world this honor of the land.

The Victim

I.

A PLAGUE upon the people fell,

A famine after laid them low;

Then thorpe and byre arose in fire,

For on them brake the sudden foe;

So thick they died the people cried,

‘The Gods are moved against the land.’

The Priest in horror about his altar

To Thor and Odin lifted a hand:

‘Help us from famine

And plague and strife!

What would you have of us?

Human life?

Were it our nearest,

Were it our dearest, —

(Answer, O answer)

We give you his life.’

II.

But still the foeman spoil’d and burn’d,

And cattle died, and deer in wood,

And bird in air, and fishes turn’d

And whiten’d all the rolling flood;

And dead men lay all over the way,

Or down in a furrow scathed with flame;

And ever and aye the Priesthood moan’d,

Till at last it seem’d that an answer came:

‘The King is happy

In child and wife;

Take you his dearest,

Give us a life.’

III.

The Priest went out by heath and hill;

The King was hunting in the wild;

They found the mother sitting still;

She cast her arms about the child.

The child was only eight summers old,

His beauty still with his years increased,

His face was ruddy, his hair was gold;

He seem’d a victim due to the priest.

The Priest beheld him,

And cried with joy,

‘The Gods have answer’d;

We give them the boy.’

IV.

The King return’d from out the wild,

He bore but little game in hand;

The mother said, ‘They have taken the child

To spill his blood and heal the land.

The land is sick, the people diseased,

And blight and famine on all the lea;

The holy Gods, they must be appeased,

So I pray you tell the truth to me.

They have taken our son,

They will have his life.

Is he your dearest?

Or I, the wife?’

V.

The King bent low, with hand on brow,

He stay’d his arms upon his knee:

‘O wife, what use to answer now?

For now the Priest has judged for me.’

The King was shaken with holy fear;

‘The Gods,’ he said, ‘would have chosen well;

Yet both are near, and both are dear,

And which the dearest I cannot tell!’

But the Priest was happy,

His victim won:

‘We have his dearest,

VI.

The rites prepared, the victim bared,

The knife uprising toward the blow,

To the altar-stone she sprang alone:

‘Me, not my darling, no!’

He caught her away with a sudden cry;

Suddenly from him brake his wife,

And shrieking, ‘I am his dearest, I —

I am his dearest!’ rush’d on the knife.

And the Priest was happy:

‘O Father Odin,

We give you a life.

Which was his nearest?

Who was his dearest?

The Gods have answer’d;

We give them the wife!’

The Voice and the Peak

I.

THE VOICE and the Peak

Far over summit and lawn,

The lone glow and long roar

Green-rushing from the rosy thrones of dawn!

II.

All night have I heard the voice

Rave over the rocky bar,

But thou wert silent in heaven,

Above thee glided the star.

III.

Hast thou no voice, O Peak,

That standest high above all?

‘I am the voice of the Peak,

I roar and rave, for I fall.

IV.

‘A thousand voices go

To North, South, East, and West;

They leave the heights and are troubled,

And moan and sink to their rest.

V.

‘The fields are fair beside them,

The chestnut towers in his bloom;

But they — they feel the desire of the deep —

Fall, and follow their doom.

VI.

‘The deep has power on the height,

And the height has power on the deep;

They are raised for ever and ever,

And sink again into sleep.’

VII.

Not raised for ever and ever,

But when their cycle is o’er,

The valley, the voice, the peak, the star

Pass, and are found no more.

VIII.

The Peak is high and flush’d

At his highest with sunrise fire;

The Peak is high, and the stars are high,

And the thought of a man is higher.

IX.

A deep below the deep,

And a height beyond the height!

Our hearing is not hearing,

And our seeing is not sight.

X.

The voice and the Peak

Far into heaven withdrawn,

The lone glow and long roar

Green-rushing from the rosy thrones of dawn!

Wages

GLORY of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,

Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea —

Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong —

Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she;

Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,

Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,

To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky;

Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.

The Window, or, the Song of the Wrens

FOUR years ago Mr. Sullivan requested me to write a little song-cycle, German fashion, for him to exercise his art upon. He had been very successful in setting such old songs as ‘Orpheus with his lute,’ and I drest up for him, partly in the old style, a puppet, whose almost only merit is, perhaps, that it can dance to Mr. Sullivan’s instrument. I am sorry that my four-year-old puppet should have to dance at all in the dark shadow of these days; but the music is now completed, and I am bound by my promise.

December, 1870

ON THE HILL.

THE LIGHTS and shadows fly!

Yonder it brightens and darkens down on the plain.

A jewel, a jewel dear to a lover’s eye!

Oh is it the brook, or a pool, or her window pane,

When the winds are up in the morning?

Clouds that are racing above,

And winds and lights and shadows that cannot be still,

All running on one way to the home of my love,

You are all running on, and I stand on the slope of the hill,

And the winds are up in the morning!

Follow, follow the chase!

And my thoughts are as quick and as quick, ever on, on, on.

O lights, are you flying over her sweet little face?

And my heart is there before you are come, and gone,

When the winds are up in the morning!

Follow them down the slope

And I follow them down to the window-pane of my dear,

And it brightens and darkens and brightens like my hope,

And it darkens and brightens and darkens like my fear,

And the winds are up in the morning.

AT THE WINDOW.

Vine, vine and eglantine,

Clasp her window, trail and twine!

Rose, rose and clematis,

Trail and twine and clasp and kiss,

Kiss, kiss; and make her a bower

All of flowers, and drop me a flower,

Drop me a flower.

Vine, vine and eglantine,

Cannot a flower, a flower, be mine?

Rose, rose and clematis,

Drop me a flower, a flower, to kiss,

Kiss, kiss — and out of her bower

All of flowers, a flower, a flower,

Dropt, a flower.

GONE.

Gone!

Gone, till the end of the year,

Gone, and the light gone with her, and left me in shadow here!

Gone-flitted away,

Taken the stars from the night and the sun from the day!

Gone, and a cloud in my heart, and a storm in the air!

Flown to the east or the west, flitted I know not where!

Down in the south is a flash and a groan: she is there! she is there!

WINTER.

The frost is here,

And fuel is clear,

And woods are sear,

And fires burn clear,

And frost is here

And has bitten the heel of the going year.

Bite, frost, bite!

You roll up away from the light

The blue wood-louse, and the plump dormouse,

And the bees are still’d, and the flies are kill’d,

And you bite far into the heart of the house,

But not into mine.

Bite, frost, bite!

The woods are all the searer,

The fuel is all the dearer,

The fires are all the clearer,

My spring is all the nearer,

You have bitten into the heart of the earth,

But not into mine

SPRING.

Birds’ love and birds’ song

Flying here and there,

Birds’ song and birds’ love,

And you with gold for hair!

Birds’ song and birds’ love.

Passing with the weather,

Men’s song and men’s love,

To love once and for ever.

Men’s love and birds’ love,

And women’s love and men’s!

And you my wren with a crown of gold,

You my queen of the wrens!

You the queen of the wrens —

We’ll be birds of a feather,

I’ll be King of the Queen of the wrens,

And all in a nest together.

THE LETTER.

Where is another sweet as my sweet,

Fine of the fine, and shy of the shy?

Fine little hands, fine little feet —

Dewy blue eye.

Shall I write to her? shall I go?

Ask her to marry me by and by?

Somebody said that she’d say no;

Somebody knows that she’ll say ay!

Ay or no, if ask’d to her face?

Ay or no, from shy of the shy?

Go, little letter, apace, apace,

Fly;

Fly to the light in the valley below —

Tell my wish to her dewy blue eye:

Somebody said that she’d say no;

Somebody knows that she’ll say ay!

NO ANSWER.

The mist and the rain, the mist and the rain!

Is it ay or no? is it ay or no?

And never a glimpse of her window pane!

And I may die but the grass will grow,

And the grass will grow when I am gone,

And the wet west wind and the world will go on.

Ay is the song of the wedded spheres,

No is trouble and cloud and storm.

Ay is life for a hundred years,

No will push me down to the worm,

And when I am there and dead and gone,

The wet west wind and the world will go on.

The wind and the wet, the wind and the wet!

Wet west wind how you blow, you blow!

And never a line from my lady yet!

Is it ay or no? is it ay or no?

Blow then, blow, and when I am gone,

The wet west wind and the world may go on.

NO ANSWER.

Winds are loud and you are dumb,

Take my love, for love will come,

Love will come but once a life.

Winds are loud and winds will pass!

Spring is here with leaf and grass:

Take my love and be my wife.

After-loves of maids and men

Are but dainties drest again:

Love me now, you’ll love me then:

Love can love but once a life,

THE ANSWER.

Two little hands that meet,

Claspt on her seal, my sweet!

Must I take you and break you,

Two little hands that meet?

I must take you, and break you,

And loving hands must part —

Take, take — break, break —

Break — you may break my heart.

Faint heart never won —

Break, break, and all’s done.

AY.

Be merry, all birds, to-day,

Be merry on earth as you never were merry before,

Be merry in heaven, O larks, and far away,

And merry for ever and ever, and one day more.

Why?

For it’s easy to find a rhyme.

Look, look, how he flits,

The fire-crown’d king of the wrens, from out of the pine!

Look how they tumble the blossom, the mad little tits!

‘Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo!’ was ever a May so fine?

Why?

For it’s easy to find a rhyme.

O merry the linnet and dove,

And swallow and sparrow and throstle, and have your desire!

O merry my heart, you have gotten the wings of love,

And flit like the king of the wrens with a crown of fire.

Why?

For it’s ay ay, ay ay.

WHEN.

Sun comes, moon comes,

Time slips away.

Sun sets, moon sets,

Love, fix a day.

‘A year hence, a year hence.’

‘We shall both be gray.’

‘A month hence, a month hence.

‘Far, far away.’

‘A week hence, a week hence.’

‘Ah, the long delay.’

‘Wait a little, wait a little,

You shall fix a day.’

‘To-morrow, love, to-morrow,

And that’s an age away.’

Blaze upon her window, sun,

And honour all the day.

MARRIAGE MORNING.

Light, so low upon earth,

You send a flash to the sun.

Here is the golden close of love,

All my wooing is done.

Oh, the woods and the meadows,

Woods where we hid from the wet,

Stiles where we stay’d to be kind,

Meadows in which we met!

Light, so low in the vale

You flash and lighten afar,

For this is the golden morning of love,

And you are his morning star.

Flash, I am coming, I come,

By meadow and stile and wood,

Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart,

Into my heart and my blood!

Heart, are you great enough

For a love that never tires?

O heart, are you great enough for love?

I have heard of thorns and briers.

Over the thorns and briers,

Over the meadows and stiles,

Over the world to the end of it

Flash for a million miles.

THE PRINCESS: A MEDLEY

This comic ballad appeared initially in 1847 and narrates the story of a heroic princess that forswears the world of men, founding a women’s university where men are forbidden to enter. The prince to whom she was betrothed in infancy enters the university with two friends, disguised as women students. They are discovered and flee, but eventually they fight a battle for the princess’s hand. They lose and are wounded, but the women nurse the men back to health. Eventually the princess returns the prince’s love.

Tennyson planned the poem in the late 1830s, after discussing the idea with Emily Sellwood, whom he later married in 1850. It seems to have been a response to the founding of Queen’s College, London, Britain’s first college for women, in 1847, especially as two of Tennyson’s friends were part-time professors there. Tennyson is reported as saying in the 1840s, that “the two great social questions impending in England were ‘the education of the poor man before making him our master, and the higher education of women’.”

Emily Sarah Tennyson, Lady Tennyson (1813–1896) was a creative poet in her own right.

CONTENTS

Princess: Prologue

Princess: I

Princess: II

Princess: III

Princess: IV

Princess: V

Princess: VI

Princess: VII

Princess: Conclusion

The first edition

Princess: Prologue

Sir Walter Vivian all a summer’s day

Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun

Up to the people:  thither flocked at noon

His tenants, wife and child, and thither half

The neighbouring borough with their Institute

Of which he was the patron.  I was there

From college, visiting the son, — the son

A Walter too, — with others of our set,

Five others:  we were seven at Vivian-place.

And me that morning Walter showed the house,

Greek, set with busts:  from vases in the hall

Flowers of all heavens, and lovelier than their names,

Grew side by side; and on the pavement lay

Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the park,

Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of Time;

And on the tables every clime and age

Jumbled together; celts and calumets,

Claymore and snowshoe, toys in lava, fans

Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries,

Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere,

The cursed Malayan crease, and battle-clubs

From the isles of palm:  and higher on the walls,

Betwixt the monstrous horns of elk and deer,

His own forefathers’ arms and armour hung.

And ‘this’ he said ‘was Hugh’s at Agincourt;

And that was old Sir Ralph’s at Ascalon:

A good knight he! we keep a chronicle

With all about him’ — which he brought, and I

Dived in a hoard of tales that dealt with knights,

Half-legend, half-historic, counts and kings

Who laid about them at their wills and died;

And mixt with these, a lady, one that armed

Her own fair head, and sallying through the gate,

Had beat her foes with slaughter from her walls.

‘O miracle of women,’ said the book,

‘O noble heart who, being strait-besieged

By this wild king to force her to his wish,

Nor bent, nor broke, nor shunned a soldier’s death,

But now when all was lost or seemed as lost —

Her stature more than mortal in the burst

Of sunrise, her arm lifted, eyes on fire —

Brake with a blast of trumpets from the gate,

And, falling on them like a thunderbolt,

She trampled some beneath her horses’ heels,

And some were whelmed with missiles of the wall,

And some were pushed with lances from the rock,

And part were drowned within the whirling brook:

O miracle of noble womanhood!’

So sang the gallant glorious chronicle;

And, I all rapt in this, ‘Come out,’ he said,

‘To the Abbey: there is Aunt Elizabeth

And sister Lilia with the rest.’  We went

(I kept the book and had my finger in it)

Down through the park:  strange was the sight to me;

For all the sloping pasture murmured, sown

With happy faces and with holiday.

There moved the multitude, a thousand heads:

The patient leaders of their Institute

Taught them with facts.  One reared a font of stone

And drew, from butts of water on the slope,

The fountain of the moment, playing, now

A twisted snake, and now a rain of pearls,

Or steep-up spout whereon the gilded ball

Danced like a wisp:  and somewhat lower down

A man with knobs and wires and vials fired

A cannon:  Echo answered in her sleep

From hollow fields:  and here were telescopes

For azure views; and there a group of girls

In circle waited, whom the electric shock

Dislinked with shrieks and laughter:  round the lake

A little clock-work steamer paddling plied

And shook the lilies:  perched about the knolls

A dozen angry models jetted steam:

A petty railway ran:  a fire-balloon

Rose gem-like up before the dusky groves

And dropt a fairy parachute and past:

And there through twenty posts of telegraph

They flashed a saucy message to and fro

Between the mimic stations; so that sport

Went hand in hand with Science; otherwhere

Pure sport; a herd of boys with clamour bowled

And stumped the wicket; babies rolled about

Like tumbled fruit in grass; and men and maids

Arranged a country dance, and flew through light

And shadow, while the twangling violin

Struck up with Soldier-laddie, and overhead

The broad ambrosial aisles of lofty lime

Made noise with bees and breeze from end to end.

Strange was the sight and smacking of the time;

And long we gazed, but satiated at length

Came to the ruins.  High-arched and ivy-claspt,

Of finest Gothic lighter than a fire,

Through one wide chasm of time and frost they gave

The park, the crowd, the house; but all within

The sward was trim as any garden lawn:

And here we lit on Aunt Elizabeth,

And Lilia with the rest, and lady friends

From neighbour seats:  and there was Ralph himself,

A broken statue propt against the wall,

As gay as any.  Lilia, wild with sport,

Half child half woman as she was, had wound

A scarf of orange round the stony helm,

And robed the shoulders in a rosy silk,

That made the old warrior from his ivied nook

Glow like a sunbeam:  near his tomb a feast

Shone, silver-set; about it lay the guests,

And there we joined them:  then the maiden Aunt

Took this fair day for text, and from it preached

An universal culture for the crowd,

And all things great; but we, unworthier, told

Of college:  he had climbed across the spikes,

And he had squeezed himself betwixt the bars,

And he had breathed the Proctor’s dogs; and one

Discussed his tutor, rough to common men,

But honeying at the whisper of a lord;

And one the Master, as a rogue in grain

Veneered with sanctimonious theory.

But while they talked, above their heads I saw

The feudal warrior lady-clad; which brought

My book to mind:  and opening this I read

Of old Sir Ralph a page or two that rang

With tilt and tourney; then the tale of her

That drove her foes with slaughter from her walls,

And much I praised her nobleness, and ‘Where,’

Asked Walter, patting Lilia’s head (she lay

Beside him) ‘lives there such a woman now?’

Quick answered Lilia ‘There are thousands now

Such women, but convention beats them down:

It is but bringing up; no more than that:

You men have done it:  how I hate you all!

Ah, were I something great!  I wish I were

Some might poetess, I would shame you then,

That love to keep us children!  O I wish

That I were some great princess, I would build

Far off from men a college like a man’s,

And I would teach them all that men are taught;

We are twice as quick!’  And here she shook aside

The hand that played the patron with her curls.

And one said smiling ‘Pretty were the sight

If our old halls could change their sex, and flaunt

With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,

And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.

I think they should not wear our rusty gowns,

But move as rich as Emperor-moths, or Ralph

Who shines so in the corner; yet I fear,

If there were many Lilias in the brood,

However deep you might embower the nest,

Some boy would spy it.’

At this upon the sward

She tapt her tiny silken-sandaled foot:

‘That’s your light way; but I would make it death

For any male thing but to peep at us.’

Petulant she spoke, and at herself she laughed;

A rosebud set with little wilful thorns,

And sweet as English air could make her, she:

But Walter hailed a score of names upon her,

And ‘petty Ogress’, and ‘ungrateful Puss’,

And swore he longed at college, only longed,

All else was well, for she-society.

They boated and they cricketed; they talked

At wine, in clubs, of art, of politics;

They lost their weeks; they vext the souls of deans;

They rode; they betted; made a hundred friends,

And caught the blossom of the flying terms,

But missed the mignonette of Vivian-place,

The little hearth-flower Lilia.  Thus he spoke,

Part banter, part affection.

‘True,’ she said,

‘We doubt not that.  O yes, you missed us much.

I’ll stake my ruby ring upon it you did.’

She held it out; and as a parrot turns

Up through gilt wires a crafty loving eye,

And takes a lady’s finger with all care,

And bites it for true heart and not for harm,

So he with Lilia’s.  Daintily she shrieked

And wrung it.  ‘Doubt my word again!’ he said.

‘Come, listen! here is proof that you were missed:

We seven stayed at Christmas up to read;

And there we took one tutor as to read:

The hard-grained Muses of the cube and square

Were out of season:  never man, I think,

So mouldered in a sinecure as he:

For while our cloisters echoed frosty feet,

And our long walks were stript as bare as brooms,

We did but talk you over, pledge you all

In wassail; often, like as many girls —

Sick for the hollies and the yews of home —

As many little trifling Lilias — played

Charades and riddles as at Christmas here,

And what’s my thought and when and where and how,

As here at Christmas.’

She remembered that:

A pleasant game, she thought:  she liked it more

Than magic music, forfeits, all the rest.

But these — what kind of tales did men tell men,

She wondered, by themselves?

A half-disdain

Perched on the pouted blossom of her lips:

And Walter nodded at me; ‘He began,

The rest would follow, each in turn; and so

We forged a sevenfold story.  Kind? what kind?

Chimeras, crotchets, Christmas solecisms,

Seven-headed monsters only made to kill

Time by the fire in winter.’

‘Kill him now,

The tyrant! kill him in the summer too,’

Said Lilia; ‘Why not now?’ the maiden Aunt.

‘Why not a summer’s as a winter’s tale?

A tale for summer as befits the time,

And something it should be to suit the place,

Heroic, for a hero lies beneath,

Grave, solemn!’

Walter warped his mouth at this

To something so mock-solemn, that I laughed

And Lilia woke with sudden-thrilling mirth

An echo like a ghostly woodpecker,

Hid in the ruins; till the maiden Aunt

(A little sense of wrong had touched her face

With colour) turned to me with ‘As you will;

Heroic if you will, or what you will,

Or be yourself you hero if you will.’

‘Take Lilia, then, for heroine’ clamoured he,

‘And make her some great Princess, six feet high,

Grand, epic, homicidal; and be you

The Prince to win her!’

‘Then follow me, the Prince,’

I answered, ‘each be hero in his turn!

Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream. —

Heroic seems our Princess as required —

But something made to suit with Time and place,

A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house,

A talk of college and of ladies’ rights,

A feudal knight in silken masquerade,

And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments

For which the good Sir Ralph had burnt them all —

This were a medley! we should have him back

Who told the “Winter’s tale” to do it for us.

No matter:  we will say whatever comes.

And let the ladies sing us, if they will,

From time to time, some ballad or a song

To give us breathing-space.’

So I began,

And the rest followed:  and the women sang

Between the rougher voices of the men,

Like linnets in the pauses of the wind:

And here I give the story and the songs.

Princess: I

A prince I was, blue-eyed, and fair in face,

Of temper amorous, as the first of May,

With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a girl,

For on my cradle shone the Northern star.

There lived an ancient legend in our house.

Some sorcerer, whom a far-off grandsire burnt

Because he cast no shadow, had foretold,

Dying, that none of all our blood should know

The shadow from the substance, and that one

Should come to fight with shadows and to fall.

For so, my mother said, the story ran.

And, truly, waking dreams were, more or less,

An old and strange affection of the house.

Myself too had weird seizures, Heaven knows what:

On a sudden in the midst of men and day,

And while I walked and talked as heretofore,

I seemed to move among a world of ghosts,

And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

Our great court-Galen poised his gilt-head cane,

And pawed his beard, and muttered ‘catalepsy’.

My mother pitying made a thousand prayers;

My mother was as mild as any saint,

Half-canonized by all that looked on her,

So gracious was her tact and tenderness:

But my good father thought a king a king;

He cared not for the affection of the house;

He held his sceptre like a pedant’s wand

To lash offence, and with long arms and hands

Reached out, and picked offenders from the mass

For judgment.

Now it chanced that I had been,

While life was yet in bud and blade, bethrothed

To one, a neighbouring Princess:  she to me

Was proxy-wedded with a bootless calf

At eight years old; and still from time to time

Came murmurs of her beauty from the South,

And of her brethren, youths of puissance;

And still I wore her picture by my heart,

And one dark tress; and all around them both

Sweet thoughts would swarm as bees about their queen.

But when the days drew nigh that I should wed,

My father sent ambassadors with furs

And jewels, gifts, to fetch her:  these brought back

A present, a great labour of the loom;

And therewithal an answer vague as wind:

Besides, they saw the king; he took the gifts;

He said there was a compact; that was true:

But then she had a will; was he to blame?

And maiden fancies; loved to live alone

Among her women; certain, would not wed.

That morning in the presence room I stood

With Cyril and with Florian, my two friends:

The first, a gentleman of broken means

(His father’s fault) but given to starts and bursts

Of revel; and the last, my other heart,

And almost my half-self, for still we moved

Together, twinned as horse’s ear and eye.

Now, while they spake, I saw my father’s face

Grow long and troubled like a rising moon,

Inflamed with wrath:  he started on his feet,

Tore the king’s letter, snowed it down, and rent

The wonder of the loom through warp and woof

From skirt to skirt; and at the last he sware

That he would send a hundred thousand men,

And bring her in a whirlwind:  then he chewed

The thrice-turned cud of wrath, and cooked his spleen,

Communing with his captains of the war.

At last I spoke.  ‘My father, let me go.

It cannot be but some gross error lies

In this report, this answer of a king,

Whom all men rate as kind and hospitable:

Or, maybe, I myself, my bride once seen,

Whate’er my grief to find her less than fame,

May rue the bargain made.’  And Florian said:

‘I have a sister at the foreign court,

Who moves about the Princess; she, you know,

Who wedded with a nobleman from thence:

He, dying lately, left her, as I hear,

The lady of three castles in that land:

Through her this matter might be sifted clean.’

And Cyril whispered:  ‘Take me with you too.’

Then laughing ‘what, if these weird seizures come

Upon you in those lands, and no one near

To point you out the shadow from the truth!

Take me:  I’ll serve you better in a strait;

I grate on rusty hinges here:’  but ‘No!’

Roared the rough king, ‘you shall not; we ourself

Will crush her pretty maiden fancies dead

In iron gauntlets:  break the council up.’

But when the council broke, I rose and past

Through the wild woods that hung about the town;

Found a still place, and plucked her likeness out;

Laid it on flowers, and watched it lying bathed

In the green gleam of dewy-tasselled trees:

What were those fancies? wherefore break her troth?

Proud looked the lips:  but while I meditated

A wind arose and rushed upon the South,

And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks

Of the wild woods together; and a Voice

Went with it, ‘Follow, follow, thou shalt win.’

Then, ere the silver sickle of that month

Became her golden shield, I stole from court

With Cyril and with Florian, unperceived,

Cat-footed through the town and half in dread

To hear my father’s clamour at our backs

With Ho! from some bay-window shake the night;

But all was quiet:  from the bastioned walls

Like threaded spiders, one by one, we dropt,

And flying reached the frontier:  then we crost

To a livelier land; and so by tilth and grange,

And vines, and blowing bosks of wilderness,

We gained the mother city thick with towers,

And in the imperial palace found the king.

His name was Gama; cracked and small his voice,

But bland the smile that like a wrinkling wind

On glassy water drove his cheek in lines;

A little dry old man, without a star,

Not like a king:  three days he feasted us,

And on the fourth I spake of why we came,

And my bethrothed.  ‘You do us, Prince,’ he said,

Airing a snowy hand and signet gem,

‘All honour.  We remember love ourselves

In our sweet youth:  there did a compact pass

Long summers back, a kind of ceremony —

I think the year in which our olives failed.

I would you had her, Prince, with all my heart,

With my full heart:  but there were widows here,

Two widows, Lady Psyche, Lady Blanche;

They fed her theories, in and out of place

Maintaining that with equal husbandry

The woman were an equal to the man.

They harped on this; with this our banquets rang;

Our dances broke and buzzed in knots of talk;

Nothing but this; my very ears were hot

To hear them:  knowledge, so my daughter held,

Was all in all:  they had but been, she thought,

As children; they must lose the child, assume

The woman:  then, Sir, awful odes she wrote,

Too awful, sure, for what they treated of,

But all she is and does is awful; odes

About this losing of the child; and rhymes

And dismal lyrics, prophesying change

Beyond all reason:  these the women sang;

And they that know such things — I sought but peace;

No critic I — would call them masterpieces:

They mastered me.  At last she begged a boon,

A certain summer-palace which I have

Hard by your father’s frontier:  I said no,

Yet being an easy man, gave it:  and there,

All wild to found an University

For maidens, on the spur she fled; and more

We know not, — only this:  they see no men,

Not even her brother Arac, nor the twins

Her brethren, though they love her, look upon her

As on a kind of paragon; and I

(Pardon me saying it) were much loth to breed

Dispute betwixt myself and mine:  but since

(And I confess with right) you think me bound

In some sort, I can give you letters to her;

And yet, to speak the truth, I rate your chance

Almost at naked nothing.’

Thus the king;

And I, though nettled that he seemed to slur

With garrulous ease and oily courtesies

Our formal compact, yet, not less (all frets

But chafing me on fire to find my bride)

Went forth again with both my friends.  We rode

Many a long league back to the North.  At last

From hills, that looked across a land of hope,

We dropt with evening on a rustic town

Set in a gleaming river’s crescent-curve,

Close at the boundary of the liberties;

There, entered an old hostel, called mine host

To council, plied him with his richest wines,

And showed the late-writ letters of the king.

He with a long low sibilation, stared

As blank as death in marble; then exclaimed

Averring it was clear against all rules

For any man to go:  but as his brain

Began to mellow, ‘If the king,’ he said,

‘Had given us letters, was he bound to speak?

The king would bear him out;’ and at the last —

The summer of the vine in all his veins —

‘No doubt that we might make it worth his while.

She once had past that way; he heard her speak;

She scared him; life! he never saw the like;

She looked as grand as doomsday and as grave:

And he, he reverenced his liege-lady there;

He always made a point to post with mares;

His daughter and his housemaid were the boys:

The land, he understood, for miles about

Was tilled by women; all the swine were sows,

And all the dogs’ —

But while he jested thus,

A thought flashed through me which I clothed in act,

Remembering how we three presented Maid

Or Nymph, or Goddess, at high tide of feast,

In masque or pageant at my father’s court.

We sent mine host to purchase female gear;

He brought it, and himself, a sight to shake

The midriff of despair with laughter, holp

To lace us up, till, each, in maiden plumes

We rustled:  him we gave a costly bribe

To guerdon silence, mounted our good steeds,

And boldly ventured on the liberties.

We followed up the river as we rode,

And rode till midnight when the college lights

Began to glitter firefly-like in copse

And linden alley:  then we past an arch,

Whereon a woman-statue rose with wings

From four winged horses dark against the stars;

And some inscription ran along the front,

But deep in shadow:  further on we gained

A little street half garden and half house;

But scarce could hear each other speak for noise

Of clocks and chimes, like silver hammers falling

On silver anvils, and the splash and stir

Of fountains spouted up and showering down

In meshes of the jasmine and the rose:

And all about us pealed the nightingale,

Rapt in her song, and careless of the snare.

There stood a bust of Pallas for a sign,

By two sphere lamps blazoned like Heaven and Earth

With constellation and with continent,

Above an entry:  riding in, we called;

A plump-armed Ostleress and a stable wench

Came running at the call, and helped us down.

Then stept a buxom hostess forth, and sailed,

Full-blown, before us into rooms which gave

Upon a pillared porch, the bases lost

In laurel:  her we asked of that and this,

And who were tutors.  ‘Lady Blanche’ she said,

‘And Lady Psyche.’  ‘Which was prettiest,

Best-natured?’  ‘Lady Psyche.’  ‘Hers are we,’

One voice, we cried; and I sat down and wrote,

In such a hand as when a field of corn

Bows all its ears before the roaring East;

‘Three ladies of the Northern empire pray

Your Highness would enroll them with your own,

As Lady Psyche’s pupils.’

This I sealed:

The seal was Cupid bent above a scroll,

And o’er his head Uranian Venus hung,

And raised the blinding bandage from his eyes:

I gave the letter to be sent with dawn;

And then to bed, where half in doze I seemed

To float about a glimmering night, and watch

A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight, swell

On some dark shore just seen that it was rich.

As through the land at eve we went,

And plucked the ripened ears,

We fell out, my wife and I,

O we fell out I know not why,

And kissed again with tears.

And blessings on the falling out

That all the more endears,

When we fall out with those we love

And kiss again with tears!

For when we came where lies the child

We lost in other years,

There above the little grave,

O there above the little grave,

We kissed again with tears.

Princess: II

At break of day the College Portress came:

She brought us Academic silks, in hue

The lilac, with a silken hood to each,

And zoned with gold; and now when these were on,

And we as rich as moths from dusk cocoons,

She, curtseying her obeisance, let us know

The Princess Ida waited:  out we paced,

I first, and following through the porch that sang

All round with laurel, issued in a court

Compact of lucid marbles, bossed with lengths

Of classic frieze, with ample awnings gay

Betwixt the pillars, and with great urns of flowers.

The Muses and the Graces, grouped in threes,

Enringed a billowing fountain in the midst;

And here and there on lattice edges lay

Or book or lute; but hastily we past,

And up a flight of stairs into the hall.

There at a board by tome and paper sat,

With two tame leopards couched beside her throne,

All beauty compassed in a female form,

The Princess; liker to the inhabitant

Of some clear planet close upon the Sun,

Than our man’s earth; such eyes were in her head,

And so much grace and power, breathing down

From over her arched brows, with every turn

Lived through her to the tips of her long hands,

And to her feet.  She rose her height, and said:

‘We give you welcome:  not without redound

Of use and glory to yourselves ye come,

The first-fruits of the stranger:  aftertime,

And that full voice which circles round the grave,

Will rank you nobly, mingled up with me.

What! are the ladies of your land so tall?’

‘We of the court’ said Cyril.  ‘From the court’

She answered, ‘then ye know the Prince?’ and he:

‘The climax of his age! as though there were

One rose in all the world, your Highness that,

He worships your ideal:’  she replied:

‘We scarcely thought in our own hall to hear

This barren verbiage, current among men,

Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment.

Your flight from out your bookless wilds would seem

As arguing love of knowledge and of power;

Your language proves you still the child.  Indeed,

We dream not of him:  when we set our hand

To this great work, we purposed with ourself

Never to wed.  You likewise will do well,

Ladies, in entering here, to cast and fling

The tricks, which make us toys of men, that so,

Some future time, if so indeed you will,

You may with those self-styled our lords ally

Your fortunes, justlier balanced, scale with scale.’

At those high words, we conscious of ourselves,

Perused the matting:  then an officer

Rose up, and read the statutes, such as these:

Not for three years to correspond with home;

Not for three years to cross the liberties;

Not for three years to speak with any men;

And many more, which hastily subscribed,

We entered on the boards:  and ‘Now,’ she cried,

‘Ye are green wood, see ye warp not.  Look, our hall!

Our statues! — not of those that men desire,

Sleek Odalisques, or oracles of mode,

Nor stunted squaws of West or East; but she

That taught the Sabine how to rule, and she

The foundress of the Babylonian wall,

The Carian Artemisia strong in war,

The Rhodope, that built the pyramid,

Clelia, Cornelia, with the Palmyrene

That fought Aurelian, and the Roman brows

Of Agrippina.  Dwell with these, and lose

Convention, since to look on noble forms

Makes noble through the sensuous organism

That which is higher.  O lift your natures up:

Embrace our aims:  work out your freedom.  Girls,

Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:

Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,

The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite

And slander, die.  Better not be at all

Than not be noble.  Leave us:  you may go:

Today the Lady Psyche will harangue

The fresh arrivals of the week before;

For they press in from all the provinces,

And fill the hive.’

She spoke, and bowing waved

Dismissal:  back again we crost the court

To Lady Psyche’s:  as we entered in,

There sat along the forms, like morning doves

That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch,

A patient range of pupils; she herself

Erect behind a desk of satin-wood,

A quick brunette, well-moulded, falcon-eyed,

And on the hither side, or so she looked,

Of twenty summers.  At her left, a child,

In shining draperies, headed like a star,

Her maiden babe, a double April old,

Aglaïa slept.  We sat:  the Lady glanced:

Then Florian, but not livelier than the dame

That whispered ‘Asses’ ears’, among the sedge,

‘My sister.’  ‘Comely, too, by all that’s fair,’

Said Cyril.  ‘Oh hush, hush!’ and she began.

‘This world was once a fluid haze of light,

Till toward the centre set the starry tides,

And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast

The planets:  then the monster, then the man;

Tattooed or woaded, winter-clad in skins,

Raw from the prime, and crushing down his mate;

As yet we find in barbarous isles, and here

Among the lowest.’

Thereupon she took

A bird’s-eye-view of all the ungracious past;

Glanced at the legendary Amazon

As emblematic of a nobler age;

Appraised the Lycian custom, spoke of those

That lay at wine with Lar and Lucumo;

Ran down the Persian, Grecian, Roman lines

Of empire, and the woman’s state in each,

How far from just; till warming with her theme

She fulmined out her scorn of laws Salique

And little-footed China, touched on Mahomet

With much contempt, and came to chivalry:

When some respect, however slight, was paid

To woman, superstition all awry:

However then commenced the dawn:  a beam

Had slanted forward, falling in a land

Of promise; fruit would follow.  Deep, indeed,

Their debt of thanks to her who first had dared

To leap the rotten pales of prejudice,

Disyoke their necks from custom, and assert

None lordlier than themselves but that which made

Woman and man.  She had founded; they must build.

Here might they learn whatever men were taught:

Let them not fear:  some said their heads were less:

Some men’s were small; not they the least of men;

For often fineness compensated size:

Besides the brain was like the hand, and grew

With using; thence the man’s, if more was more;

He took advantage of his strength to be

First in the field:  some ages had been lost;

But woman ripened earlier, and her life

Was longer; and albeit their glorious names

Were fewer, scattered stars, yet since in truth

The highest is the measure of the man,

And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay,

Nor those horn-handed breakers of the glebe,

But Homer, Plato, Verulam; even so

With woman:  and in arts of government

Elizabeth and others; arts of war

The peasant Joan and others; arts of grace

Sappho and others vied with any man:

And, last not least, she who had left her place,

And bowed her state to them, that they might grow

To use and power on this Oasis, lapt

In the arms of leisure, sacred from the blight

Of ancient influence and scorn.

At last

She rose upon a wind of prophecy

Dilating on the future; ‘everywhere

Who heads in council, two beside the hearth,

Two in the tangled business of the world,

Two in the liberal offices of life,

Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss

Of science, and the secrets of the mind:

Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more:

And everywhere the broad and bounteous Earth

Should bear a double growth of those rare souls,

Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world.’

She ended here, and beckoned us:  the rest

Parted; and, glowing full-faced welcome, she

Began to address us, and was moving on

In gratulation, till as when a boat

Tacks, and the slackened sail flaps, all her voice

Faltering and fluttering in her throat, she cried

‘My brother!’  ‘Well, my sister.’  ‘O,’ she said,

‘What do you here? and in this dress? and these?

Why who are these? a wolf within the fold!

A pack of wolves! the Lord be gracious to me!

A plot, a plot, a plot to ruin all!’

‘No plot, no plot,’ he answered.  ‘Wretched boy,

How saw you not the inscription on the gate,

LET NO MAN ENTER IN ON PAIN OF DEATH?’

‘And if I had,’ he answered, ‘who could think

The softer Adams of your Academe,

O sister, Sirens though they be, were such

As chanted on the blanching bones of men?’

‘But you will find it otherwise’ she said.

‘You jest:  ill jesting with edge-tools! my vow

Binds me to speak, and O that iron will,

That axelike edge unturnable, our Head,

The Princess.’  ‘Well then, Psyche, take my life,

And nail me like a weasel on a grange

For warning:  bury me beside the gate,

And cut this epitaph above my bones;

Here lies a brother by a sister slain,

All for the common good of womankind.’

‘Let me die too,’ said Cyril, ‘having seen

And heard the Lady Psyche.’

I struck in:

‘Albeit so masked, Madam, I love the truth;

Receive it; and in me behold the Prince

Your countryman, affianced years ago

To the Lady Ida:  here, for here she was,

And thus (what other way was left) I came.’

‘O Sir, O Prince, I have no country; none;

If any, this; but none.  Whate’er I was

Disrooted, what I am is grafted here.

Affianced, Sir? love-whispers may not breathe

Within this vestal limit, and how should I,

Who am not mine, say, live:  the thunderbolt

Hangs silent; but prepare:  I speak; it falls.’

‘Yet pause,’ I said: ‘for that inscription there,

I think no more of deadly lurks therein,

Than in a clapper clapping in a garth,

To scare the fowl from fruit:  if more there be,

If more and acted on, what follows? war;

Your own work marred:  for this your Academe,

Whichever side be Victor, in the halloo

Will topple to the trumpet down, and pass

With all fair theories only made to gild

A stormless summer.’  ‘Let the Princess judge

Of that’ she said:  ‘farewell, Sir — and to you.

I shudder at the sequel, but I go.’

‘Are you that Lady Psyche,’ I rejoined,

‘The fifth in line from that old Florian,

Yet hangs his portrait in my father’s hall

(The gaunt old Baron with his beetle brow

Sun-shaded in the heat of dusty fights)

As he bestrode my Grandsire, when he fell,

And all else fled? we point to it, and we say,

The loyal warmth of Florian is not cold,

But branches current yet in kindred veins.’

‘Are you that Psyche,’ Florian added; ‘she

With whom I sang about the morning hills,

Flung ball, flew kite, and raced the purple fly,

And snared the squirrel of the glen? are you

That Psyche, wont to bind my throbbing brow,

To smoothe my pillow, mix the foaming draught

Of fever, tell me pleasant tales, and read

My sickness down to happy dreams? are you

That brother-sister Psyche, both in one?

You were that Psyche, but what are you now?’

‘You are that Psyche,’ said Cyril, ‘for whom

I would be that for ever which I seem,

Woman, if I might sit beside your feet,

And glean your scattered sapience.’

Then once more,

‘Are you that Lady Psyche,’ I began,

‘That on her bridal morn before she past

From all her old companions, when the kind

Kissed her pale cheek, declared that ancient ties

Would still be dear beyond the southern hills;

That were there any of our people there

In want or peril, there was one to hear

And help them? look! for such are these and I.’

‘Are you that Psyche,’ Florian asked, ‘to whom,

In gentler days, your arrow-wounded fawn

Came flying while you sat beside the well?

The creature laid his muzzle on your lap,

And sobbed, and you sobbed with it, and the blood

Was sprinkled on your kirtle, and you wept.

That was fawn’s blood, not brother’s, yet you wept.

O by the bright head of my little niece,

You were that Psyche, and what are you now?’

‘You are that Psyche,’ Cyril said again,

‘The mother of the sweetest little maid,

That ever crowed for kisses.’

‘Out upon it!’

She answered, ‘peace! and why should I not play

The Spartan Mother with emotion, be

The Lucius Junius Brutus of my kind?

Him you call great:  he for the common weal,

The fading politics of mortal Rome,

As I might slay this child, if good need were,

Slew both his sons:  and I, shall I, on whom

The secular emancipation turns

Of half this world, be swerved from right to save

A prince, a brother? a little will I yield.

Best so, perchance, for us, and well for you.

O hard, when love and duty clash!  I fear

My conscience will not count me fleckless; yet —

Hear my conditions:  promise (otherwise

You perish) as you came, to slip away

Today, tomorrow, soon:  it shall be said,

These women were too barbarous, would not learn;

They fled, who might have shamed us:  promise, all.’

What could we else, we promised each; and she,

Like some wild creature newly-caged, commenced

A to-and-fro, so pacing till she paused

By Florian; holding out her lily arms

Took both his hands, and smiling faintly said:

‘I knew you at the first:  though you have grown

You scarce have altered:  I am sad and glad

To see you, Florian.  I give thee to death

My brother! it was duty spoke, not I.

My needful seeming harshness, pardon it.

Our mother, is she well?’

With that she kissed

His forehead, then, a moment after, clung

About him, and betwixt them blossomed up

From out a common vein of memory

Sweet household talk, and phrases of the hearth,

And far allusion, till the gracious dews

Began to glisten and to fall:  and while

They stood, so rapt, we gazing, came a voice,

‘I brought a message here from Lady Blanche.’

Back started she, and turning round we saw

The Lady Blanche’s daughter where she stood,

Melissa, with her hand upon the lock,

A rosy blonde, and in a college gown,

That clad her like an April daffodilly

(Her mother’s colour) with her lips apart,

And all her thoughts as fair within her eyes,

As bottom agates seen to wave and float

In crystal currents of clear morning seas.

So stood that same fair creature at the door.

Then Lady Psyche, ‘Ah — Melissa — you!

You heard us?’ and Melissa, ‘O pardon me

I heard, I could not help it, did not wish:

But, dearest Lady, pray you fear me not,

Nor think I bear that heart within my breast,

To give three gallant gentlemen to death.’

‘I trust you,’ said the other, ‘for we two

Were always friends, none closer, elm and vine:

But yet your mother’s jealous temperament —

Let not your prudence, dearest, drowse, or prove

The Danaïd of a leaky vase, for fear

This whole foundation ruin, and I lose

My honour, these their lives.’  ‘Ah, fear me not’

Replied Melissa; ‘no — I would not tell,

No, not for all Aspasia’s cleverness,

No, not to answer, Madam, all those hard things

That Sheba came to ask of Solomon.’

‘Be it so’ the other, ‘that we still may lead

The new light up, and culminate in peace,

For Solomon may come to Sheba yet.’

Said Cyril, ‘Madam, he the wisest man

Feasted the woman wisest then, in halls

Of Lebanonian cedar:  nor should you

(Though, Madam, you should answer, we would ask)

Less welcome find among us, if you came

Among us, debtors for our lives to you,

Myself for something more.’  He said not what,

But ‘Thanks,’ she answered ‘Go:  we have been too long

Together:  keep your hoods about the face;

They do so that affect abstraction here.

Speak little; mix not with the rest; and hold

Your promise:  all, I trust, may yet be well.’

We turned to go, but Cyril took the child,

And held her round the knees against his waist,

And blew the swollen cheek of a trumpeter,

While Psyche watched them, smiling, and the child

Pushed her flat hand against his face and laughed;

And thus our conference closed.

And then we strolled

For half the day through stately theatres

Benched crescent-wise.  In each we sat, we heard

The grave Professor.  On the lecture slate

The circle rounded under female hands

With flawless demonstration:  followed then

A classic lecture, rich in sentiment,

With scraps of thunderous Epic lilted out

By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies

And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long

That on the stretched forefinger of all Time

Sparkle for ever:  then we dipt in all

That treats of whatsoever is, the state,

The total chronicles of man, the mind,

The morals, something of the frame, the rock,

The star, the bird, the fish, the shell, the flower,

Electric, chemic laws, and all the rest,

And whatsoever can be taught and known;

Till like three horses that have broken fence,

And glutted all night long breast-deep in corn,

We issued gorged with knowledge, and I spoke:

‘Why, Sirs, they do all this as well as we.’

‘They hunt old trails’ said Cyril ‘very well;

But when did woman ever yet invent?’

‘Ungracious!’ answered Florian; ‘have you learnt

No more from Psyche’s lecture, you that talked

The trash that made me sick, and almost sad?’

‘O trash’ he said, ‘but with a kernel in it.

Should I not call her wise, who made me wise?

And learnt?  I learnt more from her in a flash,

Than in my brainpan were an empty hull,

And every Muse tumbled a science in.

A thousand hearts lie fallow in these halls,

And round these halls a thousand baby loves

Fly twanging headless arrows at the hearts,

Whence follows many a vacant pang; but O

With me, Sir, entered in the bigger boy,

The Head of all the golden-shafted firm,

The long-limbed lad that had a Psyche too;

He cleft me through the stomacher; and now

What think you of it, Florian? do I chase

The substance or the shadow? will it hold?

I have no sorcerer’s malison on me,

No ghostly hauntings like his Highness.  I

Flatter myself that always everywhere

I know the substance when I see it.  Well,

Are castles shadows?  Three of them?  Is she

The sweet proprietress a shadow?  If not,

Shall those three castles patch my tattered coat?

For dear are those three castles to my wants,

And dear is sister Psyche to my heart,

And two dear things are one of double worth,

And much I might have said, but that my zone

Unmanned me:  then the Doctors!  O to hear

The Doctors!  O to watch the thirsty plants

Imbibing! once or twice I thought to roar,

To break my chain, to shake my mane:  but thou,

Modulate me, Soul of mincing mimicry!

Make liquid treble of that bassoon, my throat;

Abase those eyes that ever loved to meet

Star-sisters answering under crescent brows;

Abate the stride, which speaks of man, and loose

A flying charm of blushes o’er this cheek,

Where they like swallows coming out of time

Will wonder why they came:  but hark the bell

For dinner, let us go!’

And in we streamed

Among the columns, pacing staid and still

By twos and threes, till all from end to end

With beauties every shade of brown and fair

In colours gayer than the morning mist,

The long hall glittered like a bed of flowers.

How might a man not wander from his wits

Pierced through with eyes, but that I kept mine own

Intent on her, who rapt in glorious dreams,

The second-sight of some Astræan age,

Sat compassed with professors:  they, the while,

Discussed a doubt and tost it to and fro:

A clamour thickened, mixt with inmost terms

Of art and science:  Lady Blanche alone

Of faded form and haughtiest lineaments,

With all her autumn tresses falsely brown,

Shot sidelong daggers at us, a tiger-cat

In act to spring.

At last a solemn grace

Concluded, and we sought the gardens:  there

One walked reciting by herself, and one

In this hand held a volume as to read,

And smoothed a petted peacock down with that:

Some to a low song oared a shallop by,

Or under arches of the marble bridge

Hung, shadowed from the heat:  some hid and sought

In the orange thickets:  others tost a ball

Above the fountain-jets, and back again

With laughter:  others lay about the lawns,

Of the older sort, and murmured that their May

Was passing:  what was learning unto them?

They wished to marry; they could rule a house;

Men hated learned women:  but we three

Sat muffled like the Fates; and often came

Melissa hitting all we saw with shafts

Of gentle satire, kin to charity,

That harmed not:  then day droopt; the chapel bells

Called us:  we left the walks; we mixt with those

Six hundred maidens clad in purest white,

Before two streams of light from wall to wall,

While the great organ almost burst his pipes,

Groaning for power, and rolling through the court

A long melodious thunder to the sound

Of solemn psalms, and silver litanies,

The work of Ida, to call down from Heaven

A blessing on her labours for the world.

Sweet and low, sweet and low,

Wind of the western sea,

Low, low, breathe and blow,

Wind of the western sea!

Over the rolling waters go,

Come from the dying moon, and blow,

Blow him again to me;

While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,

Father will come to thee soon;

Rest, rest, on mother’s breast,

Father will come to thee soon;

Father will come to his babe in the nest,

Silver sails all out of the west

Under the silver moon:

Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.

Princess: III

Morn in the wake of the morning star

Came furrowing all the orient into gold.

We rose, and each by other drest with care

Descended to the court that lay three parts

In shadow, but the Muses’ heads were touched

Above the darkness from their native East.

There while we stood beside the fount, and watched

Or seemed to watch the dancing bubble, approached

Melissa, tinged with wan from lack of sleep,

Or grief, and glowing round her dewy eyes

The circled Iris of a night of tears;

‘And fly,’ she cried, ‘O fly, while yet you may!

My mother knows:’  and when I asked her ‘how,’

‘My fault’ she wept ‘my fault! and yet not mine;

Yet mine in part.  O hear me, pardon me.

My mother, ‘tis her wont from night to night

To rail at Lady Psyche and her side.

She says the Princess should have been the Head,

Herself and Lady Psyche the two arms;

And so it was agreed when first they came;

But Lady Psyche was the right hand now,

And the left, or not, or seldom used;

Hers more than half the students, all the love.

And so last night she fell to canvass you:

Her countrywomen! she did not envy her.

“Who ever saw such wild barbarians?

Girls? — more like men!” and at these words the snake,

My secret, seemed to stir within my breast;

And oh, Sirs, could I help it, but my cheek

Began to burn and burn, and her lynx eye

To fix and make me hotter, till she laughed:

“O marvellously modest maiden, you!

Men! girls, like men! why, if they had been men

You need not set your thoughts in rubric thus

For wholesale comment.”  Pardon, I am shamed

That I must needs repeat for my excuse

What looks so little graceful:  “men” (for still

My mother went revolving on the word)

“And so they are, — very like men indeed —

And with that woman closeted for hours!”

Then came these dreadful words out one by one,

“Why — these — are — men:”  I shuddered:  “and you know it.”

“O ask me nothing,” I said:  “And she knows too,

And she conceals it.”  So my mother clutched

The truth at once, but with no word from me;

And now thus early risen she goes to inform

The Princess:  Lady Psyche will be crushed;

But you may yet be saved, and therefore fly;

But heal me with your pardon ere you go.’

‘What pardon, sweet Melissa, for a blush?’

Said Cyril:  ‘Pale one, blush again:  than wear

Those lilies, better blush our lives away.

Yet let us breathe for one hour more in Heaven’

He added, ‘lest some classic Angel speak

In scorn of us, “They mounted, Ganymedes,

To tumble, Vulcans, on the second morn.”

But I will melt this marble into wax

To yield us farther furlough:’  and he went.

Melissa shook her doubtful curls, and thought

He scarce would prosper.  ‘Tell us,’ Florian asked,

‘How grew this feud betwixt the right and left.’

‘O long ago,’ she said, ‘betwixt these two

Division smoulders hidden; ‘tis my mother,

Too jealous, often fretful as the wind

Pent in a crevice:  much I bear with her:

I never knew my father, but she says

(God help her) she was wedded to a fool;

And still she railed against the state of things.

She had the care of Lady Ida’s youth,

And from the Queen’s decease she brought her up.

But when your sister came she won the heart

Of Ida:  they were still together, grew

(For so they said themselves) inosculated;

Consonant chords that shiver to one note;

One mind in all things:  yet my mother still

Affirms your Psyche thieved her theories,

And angled with them for her pupil’s love:

She calls her plagiarist; I know not what:

But I must go:  I dare not tarry,’ and light,

As flies the shadow of a bird, she fled.

Then murmured Florian gazing after her,

‘An open-hearted maiden, true and pure.

If I could love, why this were she:  how pretty

Her blushing was, and how she blushed again,

As if to close with Cyril’s random wish:

Not like your Princess crammed with erring pride,

Nor like poor Psyche whom she drags in tow.’

‘The crane,’ I said, ‘may chatter of the crane,

The dove may murmur of the dove, but I

An eagle clang an eagle to the sphere.

My princess, O my princess! true she errs,

But in her own grand way:  being herself

Three times more noble than three score of men,

She sees herself in every woman else,

And so she wears her error like a crown

To blind the truth and me:  for her, and her,

Hebes are they to hand ambrosia, mix

The nectar; but — ah she — whene’er she moves

The Samian Herè rises and she speaks

A Memnon smitten with the morning Sun.’

So saying from the court we paced, and gained

The terrace ranged along the Northern front,

And leaning there on those balusters, high

Above the empurpled champaign, drank the gale

That blown about the foliage underneath,

And sated with the innumerable rose,

Beat balm upon our eyelids.  Hither came

Cyril, and yawning ‘O hard task,’ he cried;

‘No fighting shadows here!  I forced a way

Through opposition crabbed and gnarled.

Better to clear prime forests, heave and thump

A league of street in summer solstice down,

Than hammer at this reverend gentlewoman.

I knocked and, bidden, entered; found her there

At point to move, and settled in her eyes

The green malignant light of coming storm.

Sir, I was courteous, every phrase well-oiled,

As man’s could be; yet maiden-meek I prayed

Concealment:  she demanded who we were,

And why we came?  I fabled nothing fair,

But, your example pilot, told her all.

Up went the hushed amaze of hand and eye.

But when I dwelt upon your old affiance,

She answered sharply that I talked astray.

I urged the fierce inscription on the gate,

And our three lives.  True — we had limed ourselves

With open eyes, and we must take the chance.

But such extremes, I told her, well might harm

The woman’s cause.  “Not more than now,” she said,

“So puddled as it is with favouritism.”

I tried the mother’s heart.  Shame might befall

Melissa, knowing, saying not she knew:

Her answer was “Leave me to deal with that.”

I spoke of war to come and many deaths,

And she replied, her duty was to speak,

And duty duty, clear of consequences.

I grew discouraged, Sir; but since I knew

No rock so hard but that a little wave

May beat admission in a thousand years,

I recommenced; “Decide not ere you pause.

I find you here but in the second place,

Some say the third — the authentic foundress you.

I offer boldly:  we will seat you highest:

Wink at our advent:  help my prince to gain

His rightful bride, and here I promise you

Some palace in our land, where you shall reign

The head and heart of all our fair she-world,

And your great name flow on with broadening time

For ever.”  Well, she balanced this a little,

And told me she would answer us today,

meantime be mute:  thus much, nor more I gained.’

He ceasing, came a message from the Head.

‘That afternoon the Princess rode to take

The dip of certain strata to the North.

Would we go with her? we should find the land

Worth seeing; and the river made a fall

Out yonder:’  then she pointed on to where

A double hill ran up his furrowy forks

Beyond the thick-leaved platans of the vale.

Agreed to, this, the day fled on through all

Its range of duties to the appointed hour.

Then summoned to the porch we went.  She stood

Among her maidens, higher by the head,

Her back against a pillar, her foot on one

Of those tame leopards.  Kittenlike he rolled

And pawed about her sandal.  I drew near;

I gazed.  On a sudden my strange seizure came

Upon me, the weird vision of our house:

The Princess Ida seemed a hollow show,

Her gay-furred cats a painted fantasy,

Her college and her maidens, empty masks,

And I myself the shadow of a dream,

For all things were and were not.  Yet I felt

My heart beat thick with passion and with awe;

Then from my breast the involuntary sigh

Brake, as she smote me with the light of eyes

That lent my knee desire to kneel, and shook

My pulses, till to horse we got, and so

Went forth in long retinue following up

The river as it narrowed to the hills.

I rode beside her and to me she said:

‘O friend, we trust that you esteemed us not

Too harsh to your companion yestermorn;

Unwillingly we spake.’  ‘No — not to her,’

I answered, ‘but to one of whom we spake

Your Highness might have seemed the thing you say.’

‘Again?’ she cried, ‘are you ambassadresses

From him to me? we give you, being strange,

A license:  speak, and let the topic die.’

I stammered that I knew him — could have wished —

‘Our king expects — was there no precontract?

There is no truer-hearted — ah, you seem

All he prefigured, and he could not see

The bird of passage flying south but longed

To follow:  surely, if your Highness keep

Your purport, you will shock him even to death,

Or baser courses, children of despair.’

‘Poor boy,’ she said, ‘can he not read — no books?

Quoit, tennis, ball — no games? nor deals in that

Which men delight in, martial exercise?

To nurse a blind ideal like a girl,

Methinks he seems no better than a girl;

As girls were once, as we ourself have been:

We had our dreams; perhaps he mixt with them:

We touch on our dead self, nor shun to do it,

Being other — since we learnt our meaning here,

To lift the woman’s fallen divinity

Upon an even pedestal with man.’

She paused, and added with a haughtier smile

‘And as to precontracts, we move, my friend,

At no man’s beck, but know ourself and thee,

O Vashti, noble Vashti!  Summoned out

She kept her state, and left the drunken king

To brawl at Shushan underneath the palms.’

‘Alas your Highness breathes full East,’ I said,

‘On that which leans to you.  I know the Prince,

I prize his truth:  and then how vast a work

To assail this gray preëminence of man!

You grant me license; might I use it? think;

Ere half be done perchance your life may fail;

Then comes the feebler heiress of your plan,

And takes and ruins all; and thus your pains

May only make that footprint upon sand

Which old-recurring waves of prejudice

Resmooth to nothing:  might I dread that you,

With only Fame for spouse and your great deeds

For issue, yet may live in vain, and miss,

Meanwhile, what every woman counts her due,

Love, children, happiness?’

And she exclaimed,

‘Peace, you young savage of the Northern wild!

What! though your Prince’s love were like a God’s,

Have we not made ourself the sacrifice?

You are bold indeed:  we are not talked to thus:

Yet will we say for children, would they grew

Like field-flowers everywhere! we like them well:

But children die; and let me tell you, girl,

Howe’er you babble, great deeds cannot die;

They with the sun and moon renew their light

For ever, blessing those that look on them.

Children — that men may pluck them from our hearts,

Kill us with pity, break us with ourselves —

O — children — there is nothing upon earth

More miserable than she that has a son

And sees him err:  nor would we work for fame;

Though she perhaps might reap the applause of Great,

Who earns the one POU STO whence after-hands

May move the world, though she herself effect

But little:  wherefore up and act, nor shrink

For fear our solid aim be dissipated

By frail successors.  Would, indeed, we had been,

In lieu of many mortal flies, a race

Of giants living, each, a thousand years,

That we might see our own work out, and watch

The sandy footprint harden into stone.’

I answered nothing, doubtful in myself

If that strange Poet-princess with her grand

Imaginations might at all be won.

And she broke out interpreting my thoughts:

‘No doubt we seem a kind of monster to you;

We are used to that:  for women, up till this

Cramped under worse than South-sea-isle taboo,

Dwarfs of the gynæceum, fail so far

In high desire, they know not, cannot guess

How much their welfare is a passion to us.

If we could give them surer, quicker proof —

Oh if our end were less achievable

By slow approaches, than by single act

Of immolation, any phase of death,

We were as prompt to spring against the pikes,

Or down the fiery gulf as talk of it,

To compass our dear sisters’ liberties.’

She bowed as if to veil a noble tear;

And up we came to where the river sloped

To plunge in cataract, shattering on black blocks

A breadth of thunder.  O’er it shook the woods,

And danced the colour, and, below, stuck out

The bones of some vast bulk that lived and roared

Before man was.  She gazed awhile and said,

‘As these rude bones to us, are we to her

That will be.’  ‘Dare we dream of that,’ I asked,

‘Which wrought us, as the workman and his work,

That practice betters?’  ‘How,’ she cried, ‘you love

The metaphysics! read and earn our prize,

A golden brooch:  beneath an emerald plane

Sits Diotima, teaching him that died

Of hemlock; our device; wrought to the life;

She rapt upon her subject, he on her:

For there are schools for all.’  ‘And yet’ I said

‘Methinks I have not found among them all

One anatomic.’  ‘Nay, we thought of that,’

She answered, ‘but it pleased us not:  in truth

We shudder but to dream our maids should ape

Those monstrous males that carve the living hound,

And cram him with the fragments of the grave,

Or in the dark dissolving human heart,

And holy secrets of this microcosm,

Dabbling a shameless hand with shameful jest,

Encarnalize their spirits:  yet we know

Knowledge is knowledge, and this matter hangs:

Howbeit ourself, foreseeing casualty,

Nor willing men should come among us, learnt,

For many weary moons before we came,

This craft of healing.  Were you sick, ourself

Would tend upon you.  To your question now,

Which touches on the workman and his work.

Let there be light and there was light:  ‘tis so:

For was, and is, and will be, are but is;

And all creation is one act at once,

The birth of light:  but we that are not all,

As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that,

And live, perforce, from thought to thought, and make

One act a phantom of succession:  thus

Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time;

But in the shadow will we work, and mould

The woman to the fuller day.’

She spake

With kindled eyes; we rode a league beyond,

And, o’er a bridge of pinewood crossing, came

On flowery levels underneath the crag,

Full of all beauty.  ‘O how sweet’ I said

(For I was half-oblivious of my mask)

‘To linger here with one that loved us.’  ‘Yea,’

She answered, ‘or with fair philosophies

That lift the fancy; for indeed these fields

Are lovely, lovelier not the Elysian lawns,

Where paced the Demigods of old, and saw

The soft white vapour streak the crownèd towers

Built to the Sun:’  then, turning to her maids,

‘Pitch our pavilion here upon the sward;

Lay out the viands.’  At the word, they raised

A tent of satin, elaborately wrought

With fair Corinna’s triumph; here she stood,

Engirt with many a florid maiden-cheek,

The woman-conqueror; woman-conquered there

The bearded Victor of ten-thousand hymns,

And all the men mourned at his side:  but we

Set forth to climb; then, climbing, Cyril kept

With Psyche, with Melissa Florian, I

With mine affianced.  Many a little hand

Glanced like a touch of sunshine on the rocks,

Many a light foot shone like a jewel set

In the dark crag:  and then we turned, we wound

About the cliffs, the copses, out and in,

Hammering and clinking, chattering stony names

Of shales and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff,

Amygdaloid and trachyte, till the Sun

Grew broader toward his death and fell, and all

The rosy heights came out above the lawns.

The splendour falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story:

The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill or field or river:

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Princess: IV

‘There sinks the nebulous star we call the Sun,

If that hypothesis of theirs be sound’

Said Ida; ‘let us down and rest;’ and we

Down from the lean and wrinkled precipices,

By every coppice-feathered chasm and cleft,

Dropt through the ambrosial gloom to where below

No bigger than a glow-worm shone the tent

Lamp-lit from the inner.  Once she leaned on me,

Descending; once or twice she lent her hand,

And blissful palpitations in the blood,

Stirring a sudden transport rose and fell.

But when we planted level feet, and dipt

Beneath the satin dome and entered in,

There leaning deep in broidered down we sank

Our elbows:  on a tripod in the midst

A fragrant flame rose, and before us glowed

Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold.

Then she, ‘Let some one sing to us:  lightlier move

The minutes fledged with music:’ and a maid,

Of those beside her, smote her harp, and sang.

‘Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

‘Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

‘Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

‘Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more.’

She ended with such passion that the tear,

She sang of, shook and fell, an erring pearl

Lost in her bosom:  but with some disdain

Answered the Princess, ‘If indeed there haunt

About the mouldered lodges of the Past

So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men,

Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool

And so pace by:  but thine are fancies hatched

In silken-folded idleness; nor is it

Wiser to weep a true occasion lost,

But trim our sails, and let old bygones be,

While down the streams that float us each and all

To the issue, goes, like glittering bergs of ice,

Throne after throne, and molten on the waste

Becomes a cloud:  for all things serve their time

Toward that great year of equal mights and rights,

Nor would I fight with iron laws, in the end

Found golden:  let the past be past; let be

Their cancelled Babels:  though the rough kex break

The starred mosaic, and the beard-blown goat

Hang on the shaft, and the wild figtree split

Their monstrous idols, care not while we hear

A trumpet in the distance pealing news

Of better, and Hope, a poising eagle, burns

Above the unrisen morrow:’ then to me;

‘Know you no song of your own land,’ she said,

‘Not such as moans about the retrospect,

But deals with the other distance and the hues

Of promise; not a death’s-head at the wine.’

Then I remembered one myself had made,

What time I watched the swallow winging south

From mine own land, part made long since, and part

Now while I sang, and maidenlike as far

As I could ape their treble, did I sing.

‘O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,

Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,

And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.

‘O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,

That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,

And dark and true and tender is the North.

‘O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light

Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,

And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.

‘O were I thou that she might take me in,

And lay me on her bosom, and her heart

Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.

‘Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love,

Delaying as the tender ash delays

To clothe herself, when all the woods are green?

‘O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown:

Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,

But in the North long since my nest is made.

‘O tell her, brief is life but love is long,

And brief the sun of summer in the North,

And brief the moon of beauty in the South.

‘O Swallow, flying from the golden woods,

Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine,

And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee.’

I ceased, and all the ladies, each at each,

Like the Ithacensian suitors in old time,

Stared with great eyes, and laughed with alien lips,

And knew not what they meant; for still my voice

Rang false:  but smiling ‘Not for thee,’ she said,

O Bulbul, any rose of Gulistan

Shall burst her veil:  marsh-divers, rather, maid,

Shall croak thee sister, or the meadow-crake

Grate her harsh kindred in the grass:  and this

A mere love-poem!  O for such, my friend,

We hold them slight:  they mind us of the time

When we made bricks in Egypt.  Knaves are men,

That lute and flute fantastic tenderness,

And dress the victim to the offering up,

And paint the gates of Hell with Paradise,

And play the slave to gain the tyranny.

Poor soul!  I had a maid of honour once;

She wept her true eyes blind for such a one,

A rogue of canzonets and serenades.

I loved her.  Peace be with her.  She is dead.

So they blaspheme the muse!  But great is song

Used to great ends:  ourself have often tried

Valkyrian hymns, or into rhythm have dashed

The passion of the prophetess; for song

Is duer unto freedom, force and growth

Of spirit than to junketing and love.

Love is it?  Would this same mock-love, and this

Mock-Hymen were laid up like winter bats,

Till all men grew to rate us at our worth,

Not vassals to be beat, nor pretty babes

To be dandled, no, but living wills, and sphered

Whole in ourselves and owed to none.  Enough!

But now to leaven play with profit, you,

Know you no song, the true growth of your soil,

That gives the manners of your country-women?’

She spoke and turned her sumptuous head with eyes

Of shining expectation fixt on mine.

Then while I dragged my brains for such a song,

Cyril, with whom the bell-mouthed glass had wrought,

Or mastered by the sense of sport, began

To troll a careless, careless tavern-catch

Of Moll and Meg, and strange experiences

Unmeet for ladies.  Florian nodded at him,

I frowning; Psyche flushed and wanned and shook;

The lilylike Melissa drooped her brows;

‘Forbear,’ the Princess cried; ‘Forbear, Sir’ I;

And heated through and through with wrath and love,

I smote him on the breast; he started up;

There rose a shriek as of a city sacked;

Melissa clamoured ‘Flee the death;’ ‘To horse’

Said Ida; ‘home! to horse!’ and fled, as flies

A troop of snowy doves athwart the dusk,

When some one batters at the dovecote-doors,

Disorderly the women.  Alone I stood

With Florian, cursing Cyril, vext at heart,

In the pavilion:  there like parting hopes

I heard them passing from me:  hoof by hoof,

And every hoof a knell to my desires,

Clanged on the bridge; and then another shriek,

‘The Head, the Head, the Princess, O the Head!’

For blind with rage she missed the plank, and rolled

In the river.  Out I sprang from glow to gloom:

There whirled her white robe like a blossomed branch

Rapt to the horrible fall:  a glance I gave,

No more; but woman-vested as I was

Plunged; and the flood drew; yet I caught her; then

Oaring one arm, and bearing in my left

The weight of all the hopes of half the world,

Strove to buffet to land in vain.  A tree

Was half-disrooted from his place and stooped

To wrench his dark locks in the gurgling wave

Mid-channel.  Right on this we drove and caught,

And grasping down the boughs I gained the shore.

There stood her maidens glimmeringly grouped

In the hollow bank.  One reaching forward drew

My burthen from mine arms; they cried ‘she lives:’

They bore her back into the tent:  but I,

So much a kind of shame within me wrought,

Not yet endured to meet her opening eyes,

Nor found my friends; but pushed alone on foot

(For since her horse was lost I left her mine)

Across the woods, and less from Indian craft

Than beelike instinct hiveward, found at length

The garden portals.  Two great statues, Art

And Science, Caryatids, lifted up

A weight of emblem, and betwixt were valves

Of open-work in which the hunter rued

His rash intrusion, manlike, but his brows

Had sprouted, and the branches thereupon

Spread out at top, and grimly spiked the gates.

A little space was left between the horns,

Through which I clambered o’er at top with pain,

Dropt on the sward, and up the linden walks,

And, tost on thoughts that changed from hue to hue,

Now poring on the glowworm, now the star,

I paced the terrace, till the Bear had wheeled

Through a great arc his seven slow suns.

A step

Of lightest echo, then a loftier form

Than female, moving through the uncertain gloom,

Disturbed me with the doubt ‘if this were she,’

But it was Florian.  ‘Hist O Hist,’ he said,

‘They seek us:  out so late is out of rules.

Moreover “seize the strangers” is the cry.

How came you here?’ I told him:  ‘I’ said he,

‘Last of the train, a moral leper, I,

To whom none spake, half-sick at heart, returned.

Arriving all confused among the rest

With hooded brows I crept into the hall,

And, couched behind a Judith, underneath

The head of Holofernes peeped and saw.

Girl after girl was called to trial:  each

Disclaimed all knowledge of us:  last of all,

Melissa:  trust me, Sir, I pitied her.

She, questioned if she knew us men, at first

Was silent; closer prest, denied it not:

And then, demanded if her mother knew,

Or Psyche, she affirmed not, or denied:

From whence the Royal mind, familiar with her,

Easily gathered either guilt.  She sent

For Psyche, but she was not there; she called

For Psyche’s child to cast it from the doors;

She sent for Blanche to accuse her face to face;

And I slipt out:  but whither will you now?

And where are Psyche, Cyril? both are fled:

What, if together? that were not so well.

Would rather we had never come!  I dread

His wildness, and the chances of the dark.’

‘And yet,’ I said, ‘you wrong him more than I

That struck him:  this is proper to the clown,

Though smocked, or furred and purpled, still the clown,

To harm the thing that trusts him, and to shame

That which he says he loves:  for Cyril, howe’er

He deal in frolic, as tonight — the song

Might have been worse and sinned in grosser lips

Beyond all pardon — as it is, I hold

These flashes on the surface are not he.

He has a solid base of temperament:

But as the waterlily starts and slides

Upon the level in little puffs of wind,

Though anchored to the bottom, such is he.’

Scarce had I ceased when from a tamarisk near

Two Proctors leapt upon us, crying, ‘Names:’

He, standing still, was clutched; but I began

To thrid the musky-circled mazes, wind

And double in and out the boles, and race

By all the fountains:  fleet I was of foot:

Before me showered the rose in flakes; behind

I heard the puffed pursuer; at mine ear

Bubbled the nightingale and heeded not,

And secret laughter tickled all my soul.

At last I hooked my ankle in a vine,

That claspt the feet of a Mnemosyne,

And falling on my face was caught and known.

They haled us to the Princess where she sat

High in the hall:  above her drooped a lamp,

And made the single jewel on her brow

Burn like the mystic fire on a mast-head,

Prophet of storm:  a handmaid on each side

Bowed toward her, combing out her long black hair

Damp from the river; and close behind her stood

Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men,

Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain,

And labour.  Each was like a Druid rock;

Or like a spire of land that stands apart

Cleft from the main, and wailed about with mews.

Then, as we came, the crowd dividing clove

An advent to the throne:  and therebeside,

Half-naked as if caught at once from bed

And tumbled on the purple footcloth, lay

The lily-shining child; and on the left,

Bowed on her palms and folded up from wrong,

Her round white shoulder shaken with her sobs,

Melissa knelt; but Lady Blanche erect

Stood up and spake, an affluent orator.

‘It was not thus, O Princess, in old days:

You prized my counsel, lived upon my lips:

I led you then to all the Castalies;

I fed you with the milk of every Muse;

I loved you like this kneeler, and you me

Your second mother:  those were gracious times.

Then came your new friend:  you began to change —

I saw it and grieved — to slacken and to cool;

Till taken with her seeming openness

You turned your warmer currents all to her,

To me you froze:  this was my meed for all.

Yet I bore up in part from ancient love,

And partly that I hoped to win you back,

And partly conscious of my own deserts,

And partly that you were my civil head,

And chiefly you were born for something great,

In which I might your fellow-worker be,

When time should serve; and thus a noble scheme

Grew up from seed we two long since had sown;

In us true growth, in her a Jonah’s gourd,

Up in one night and due to sudden sun:

We took this palace; but even from the first

You stood in your own light and darkened mine.

What student came but that you planed her path

To Lady Psyche, younger, not so wise,

A foreigner, and I your countrywoman,

I your old friend and tried, she new in all?

But still her lists were swelled and mine were lean;

Yet I bore up in hope she would be known:

Then came these wolves:  they knew her:  they endured,

Long-closeted with her the yestermorn,

To tell her what they were, and she to hear:

And me none told:  not less to an eye like mine

A lidless watcher of the public weal,

Last night, their mask was patent, and my foot

Was to you:  but I thought again:  I feared

To meet a cold “We thank you, we shall hear of it

From Lady Psyche:” you had gone to her,

She told, perforce; and winning easy grace

No doubt, for slight delay, remained among us

In our young nursery still unknown, the stem

Less grain than touchwood, while my honest heat

Were all miscounted as malignant haste

To push my rival out of place and power.

But public use required she should be known;

And since my oath was ta’en for public use,

I broke the letter of it to keep the sense.

I spoke not then at first, but watched them well,

Saw that they kept apart, no mischief done;

And yet this day (though you should hate me for it)

I came to tell you; found that you had gone,

Ridden to the hills, she likewise:  now, I thought,

That surely she will speak; if not, then I:

Did she?  These monsters blazoned what they were,

According to the coarseness of their kind,

For thus I hear; and known at last (my work)

And full of cowardice and guilty shame,

I grant in her some sense of shame, she flies;

And I remain on whom to wreak your rage,

I, that have lent my life to build up yours,

I that have wasted here health, wealth, and time,

And talent, I — you know it — I will not boast:

Dismiss me, and I prophesy your plan,

Divorced from my experience, will be chaff

For every gust of chance, and men will say

We did not know the real light, but chased

The wisp that flickers where no foot can tread.’

She ceased:  the Princess answered coldly, ‘Good:

Your oath is broken:  we dismiss you:  go.

For this lost lamb (she pointed to the child)

Our mind is changed:  we take it to ourself.’

Thereat the Lady stretched a vulture throat,

And shot from crooked lips a haggard smile.

‘The plan was mine.  I built the nest’ she said

‘To hatch the cuckoo.  Rise!’ and stooped to updrag

Melissa:  she, half on her mother propt,

Half-drooping from her, turned her face, and cast

A liquid look on Ida, full of prayer,

Which melted Florian’s fancy as she hung,

A Niobëan daughter, one arm out,

Appealing to the bolts of Heaven; and while

We gazed upon her came a little stir

About the doors, and on a sudden rushed

Among us, out of breath as one pursued,

A woman-post in flying raiment.  Fear

Stared in her eyes, and chalked her face, and winged

Her transit to the throne, whereby she fell

Delivering sealed dispatches which the Head

Took half-amazed, and in her lion’s mood

Tore open, silent we with blind surmise

Regarding, while she read, till over brow

And cheek and bosom brake the wrathful bloom

As of some fire against a stormy cloud,

When the wild peasant rights himself, the rick

Flames, and his anger reddens in the heavens;

For anger most it seemed, while now her breast,

Beaten with some great passion at her heart,

Palpitated, her hand shook, and we heard

In the dead hush the papers that she held

Rustle:  at once the lost lamb at her feet

Sent out a bitter bleating for its dam;

The plaintive cry jarred on her ire; she crushed

The scrolls together, made a sudden turn

As if to speak, but, utterance failing her,

She whirled them on to me, as who should say

‘Read,’ and I read — two letters — one her sire’s.

‘Fair daughter, when we sent the Prince your way,

We knew not your ungracious laws, which learnt,

We, conscious of what temper you are built,

Came all in haste to hinder wrong, but fell

Into his father’s hands, who has this night,

You lying close upon his territory,

Slipt round and in the dark invested you,

And here he keeps me hostage for his son.’

The second was my father’s running thus:

‘You have our son:  touch not a hair of his head:

Render him up unscathed:  give him your hand:

Cleave to your contract:  though indeed we hear

You hold the woman is the better man;

A rampant heresy, such as if it spread

Would make all women kick against their Lords

Through all the world, and which might well deserve

That we this night should pluck your palace down;

And we will do it, unless you send us back

Our son, on the instant, whole.’

So far I read;

And then stood up and spoke impetuously.

‘O not to pry and peer on your reserve,

But led by golden wishes, and a hope

The child of regal compact, did I break

Your precinct; not a scorner of your sex

But venerator, zealous it should be

All that it might be:  hear me, for I bear,

Though man, yet human, whatsoe’er your wrongs,

From the flaxen curl to the gray lock a life

Less mine than yours:  my nurse would tell me of you;

I babbled for you, as babies for the moon,

Vague brightness; when a boy, you stooped to me

From all high places, lived in all fair lights,

Came in long breezes rapt from inmost south

And blown to inmost north; at eve and dawn

With Ida, Ida, Ida, rang the woods;

The leader wildswan in among the stars

Would clang it, and lapt in wreaths of glowworm light

The mellow breaker murmured Ida.  Now,

Because I would have reached you, had you been

Sphered up with Cassiopëia, or the enthroned

Persephonè in Hades, now at length,

Those winters of abeyance all worn out,

A man I came to see you:  but indeed,

Not in this frequence can I lend full tongue,

O noble Ida, to those thoughts that wait

On you, their centre:  let me say but this,

That many a famous man and woman, town

And landskip, have I heard of, after seen

The dwarfs of presage:  though when known, there grew

Another kind of beauty in detail

Made them worth knowing; but in your I found

My boyish dream involved and dazzled down

And mastered, while that after-beauty makes

Such head from act to act, from hour to hour,

Within me, that except you slay me here,

According to your bitter statute-book,

I cannot cease to follow you, as they say

The seal does music; who desire you more

Than growing boys their manhood; dying lips,

With many thousand matters left to do,

The breath of life; O more than poor men wealth,

Than sick men health — yours, yours, not mine — but half

Without you; with you, whole; and of those halves

You worthiest; and howe’er you block and bar

Your heart with system out from mine, I hold

That it becomes no man to nurse despair,

But in the teeth of clenched antagonisms

To follow up the worthiest till he die:

Yet that I came not all unauthorized

Behold your father’s letter.’

On one knee

Kneeling, I gave it, which she caught, and dashed

Unopened at her feet:  a tide of fierce

Invective seemed to wait behind her lips,

As waits a river level with the dam

Ready to burst and flood the world with foam:

And so she would have spoken, but there rose

A hubbub in the court of half the maids

Gathered together:  from the illumined hall

Long lanes of splendour slanted o’er a press

Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes,

And rainbow robes, and gems and gemlike eyes,

And gold and golden heads; they to and fro

Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale,

All open-mouthed, all gazing to the light,

Some crying there was an army in the land,

And some that men were in the very walls,

And some they cared not; till a clamour grew

As of a new-world Babel, woman-built,

And worse-confounded:  high above them stood

The placid marble Muses, looking peace.

Not peace she looked, the Head:  but rising up

Robed in the long night of her deep hair, so

To the open window moved, remaining there

Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves

Of tempest, when the crimson-rolling eye

Glares ruin, and the wild birds on the light

Dash themselves dead.  She stretched her arms and called

Across the tumult and the tumult fell.

‘What fear ye, brawlers? am not I your Head?

On me, me, me, the storm first breaks:  I dare

All these male thunderbolts:  what is it ye fear?

Peace! there are those to avenge us and they come:

If not, — myself were like enough, O girls,

To unfurl the maiden banner of our rights,

And clad in iron burst the ranks of war,

Or, falling, promartyr of our cause,

Die:  yet I blame you not so much for fear:

Six thousand years of fear have made you that

From which I would redeem you:  but for those

That stir this hubbub — you and you — I know

Your faces there in the crowd — tomorrow morn

We hold a great convention:  then shall they

That love their voices more than duty, learn

With whom they deal, dismissed in shame to live

No wiser than their mothers, household stuff,

Live chattels, mincers of each other’s fame,

Full of weak poison, turnspits for the clown,

The drunkard’s football, laughing-stocks of Time,

Whose brains are in their hands and in their heels

But fit to flaunt, to dress, to dance, to thrum,

To tramp, to scream, to burnish, and to scour,

For ever slaves at home and fools abroad.’

She, ending, waved her hands:  thereat the crowd

Muttering, dissolved:  then with a smile, that looked

A stroke of cruel sunshine on the cliff,

When all the glens are drowned in azure gloom

Of thunder-shower, she floated to us and said:

‘You have done well and like a gentleman,

And like a prince:  you have our thanks for all:

And you look well too in your woman’s dress:

Well have you done and like a gentleman.

You saved our life:  we owe you bitter thanks:

Better have died and spilt our bones in the flood —

Then men had said — but now — What hinders me

To take such bloody vengeance on you both? —

Yet since our father — Wasps in our good hive,

You would-be quenchers of the light to be,

Barbarians, grosser than your native bears —

O would I had his sceptre for one hour!

You that have dared to break our bound, and gulled

Our servants, wronged and lied and thwarted us —

I wed with thee!  I bound by precontract

Your bride, our bondslave! not though all the gold

That veins the world were packed to make your crown,

And every spoken tongue should lord you.  Sir,

Your falsehood and yourself are hateful to us:

I trample on your offers and on you:

Begone:  we will not look upon you more.

Here, push them out at gates.’

In wrath she spake.

Then those eight mighty daughters of the plough

Bent their broad faces toward us and addressed

Their motion:  twice I sought to plead my cause,

But on my shoulder hung their heavy hands,

The weight of destiny:  so from her face

They pushed us, down the steps, and through the court,

And with grim laughter thrust us out at gates.

We crossed the street and gained a petty mound

Beyond it, whence we saw the lights and heard the voices murmuring.

While I listened, came

On a sudden the weird seizure and the doubt:

I seemed to move among a world of ghosts;

The Princess with her monstrous woman-guard,

The jest and earnest working side by side,

The cataract and the tumult and the kings

Were shadows; and the long fantastic night

With all its doings had and had not been,

And all things were and were not.

This went by

As strangely as it came, and on my spirits

Settled a gentle cloud of melancholy;

Not long; I shook it off; for spite of doubts

And sudden ghostly shadowings I was one

To whom the touch of all mischance but came

As night to him that sitting on a hill

Sees the midsummer, midnight, Norway sun

Set into sunrise; then we moved away.

Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,

That beat to battle where he stands;

Thy face across his fancy comes,

And gives the battle to his hands:

A moment, while the trumpets blow,

He sees his brood about thy knee;

The next, like fire he meets the foe,

And strikes him dead for thine and thee.

So Lilia sang:  we thought her half-possessed,

She struck such warbling fury through the words;

And, after, feigning pique at what she called

The raillery, or grotesque, or false sublime —

Like one that wishes at a dance to change

The music — clapt her hands and cried for war,

Or some grand fight to kill and make an end:

And he that next inherited the tale

Half turning to the broken statue, said,

‘Sir Ralph has got your colours:  if I prove

Your knight, and fight your battle, what for me?’

It chanced, her empty glove upon the tomb

Lay by her like a model of her hand.

She took it and she flung it.  ‘Fight’ she said,

‘And make us all we would be, great and good.’

He knightlike in his cap instead of casque,

A cap of Tyrol borrowed from the hall,

Arranged the favour, and assumed the Prince.

Princess: V

Now, scarce three paces measured from the mound,

We stumbled on a stationary voice,

And ‘Stand, who goes?’  ‘Two from the palace’ I.

‘The second two:  they wait,’ he said, ‘pass on;

His Highness wakes:’ and one, that clashed in arms,

By glimmering lanes and walls of canvas led

Threading the soldier-city, till we heard

The drowsy folds of our great ensign shake

From blazoned lions o’er the imperial tent

Whispers of war.

Entering, the sudden light

Dazed me half-blind:  I stood and seemed to hear,

As in a poplar grove when a light wind wakes

A lisping of the innumerous leaf and dies,

Each hissing in his neighbour’s ear; and then

A strangled titter, out of which there brake

On all sides, clamouring etiquette to death,

Unmeasured mirth; while now the two old kings

Began to wag their baldness up and down,

The fresh young captains flashed their glittering teeth,

The huge bush-bearded Barons heaved and blew,

And slain with laughter rolled the gilded Squire.

At length my Sire, his rough cheek wet with tears,

Panted from weary sides ‘King, you are free!

We did but keep you surety for our son,

If this be he, — or a dragged mawkin, thou,

That tends to her bristled grunters in the sludge:’

For I was drenched with ooze, and torn with briers,

More crumpled than a poppy from the sheath,

And all one rag, disprinced from head to heel.

Then some one sent beneath his vaulted palm

A whispered jest to some one near him, ‘Look,

He has been among his shadows.’  ‘Satan take

The old women and their shadows! (thus the King

Roared) make yourself a man to fight with men.

Go:  Cyril told us all.’

As boys that slink

From ferule and the trespass-chiding eye,

Away we stole, and transient in a trice

From what was left of faded woman-slough

To sheathing splendours and the golden scale

Of harness, issued in the sun, that now

Leapt from the dewy shoulders of the Earth,

And hit the Northern hills.  Here Cyril met us.

A little shy at first, but by and by

We twain, with mutual pardon asked and given

For stroke and song, resoldered peace, whereon

Followed his tale.  Amazed he fled away

Through the dark land, and later in the night

Had come on Psyche weeping:  ‘then we fell

Into your father’s hand, and there she lies,

But will not speak, or stir.’

He showed a tent

A stone-shot off:  we entered in, and there

Among piled arms and rough accoutrements,

Pitiful sight, wrapped in a soldier’s cloak,

Like some sweet sculpture draped from head to foot,

And pushed by rude hands from its pedestal,

All her fair length upon the ground she lay:

And at her head a follower of the camp,

A charred and wrinkled piece of womanhood,

Sat watching like the watcher by the dead.

Then Florian knelt, and ‘Come’ he whispered to her,

‘Lift up your head, sweet sister:  lie not thus.

What have you done but right? you could not slay

Me, nor your prince:  look up:  be comforted:

Sweet is it to have done the thing one ought,

When fallen in darker ways.’  And likewise I:

‘Be comforted:  have I not lost her too,

In whose least act abides the nameless charm

That none has else for me?’  She heard, she moved,

She moaned, a folded voice; and up she sat,

And raised the cloak from brows as pale and smooth

As those that mourn half-shrouded over death

In deathless marble.  ‘Her,’ she said, ‘my friend —

Parted from her — betrayed her cause and mine —

Where shall I breathe? why kept ye not your faith?

O base and bad! what comfort? none for me!’

To whom remorseful Cyril, ‘Yet I pray

Take comfort:  live, dear lady, for your child!’

At which she lifted up her voice and cried.

‘Ah me, my babe, my blossom, ah, my child,

My one sweet child, whom I shall see no more!

For now will cruel Ida keep her back;

And either she will die from want of care,

Or sicken with ill-usage, when they say

The child is hers — for every little fault,

The child is hers; and they will beat my girl

Remembering her mother:  O my flower!

Or they will take her, they will make her hard,

And she will pass me by in after-life

With some cold reverence worse than were she dead.

Ill mother that I was to leave her there,

To lag behind, scared by the cry they made,

The horror of the shame among them all:

But I will go and sit beside the doors,

And make a wild petition night and day,

Until they hate to hear me like a wind

Wailing for ever, till they open to me,

And lay my little blossom at my feet,

My babe, my sweet Aglaïa, my one child:

And I will take her up and go my way,

And satisfy my soul with kissing her:

Ah! what might that man not deserve of me

Who gave me back my child?’  ‘Be comforted,’

Said Cyril, ‘you shall have it:’ but again

She veiled her brows, and prone she sank, and so

Like tender things that being caught feign death,

Spoke not, nor stirred.

By this a murmur ran

Through all the camp and inward raced the scouts

With rumour of Prince Arab hard at hand.

We left her by the woman, and without

Found the gray kings at parle:  and ‘Look you’ cried

My father ‘that our compact be fulfilled:

You have spoilt this child; she laughs at you and man:

She wrongs herself, her sex, and me, and him:

But red-faced war has rods of steel and fire;

She yields, or war.’

Then Gama turned to me:

‘We fear, indeed, you spent a stormy time

With our strange girl:  and yet they say that still

You love her.  Give us, then, your mind at large:

How say you, war or not?’

‘Not war, if possible,

O king,’ I said, ‘lest from the abuse of war,

The desecrated shrine, the trampled year,

The smouldering homestead, and the household flower

Torn from the lintel — all the common wrong —

A smoke go up through which I loom to her

Three times a monster:  now she lightens scorn

At him that mars her plan, but then would hate

(And every voice she talked with ratify it,

And every face she looked on justify it)

The general foe.  More soluble is this knot,

By gentleness than war.  I want her love.

What were I nigher this although we dashed

Your cities into shards with catapults,

She would not love; — or brought her chained, a slave,

The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord,

Not ever would she love; but brooding turn

The book of scorn, till all my flitting chance

Were caught within the record of her wrongs,

And crushed to death:  and rather, Sire, than this

I would the old God of war himself were dead,

Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills,

Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck,

Or like an old-world mammoth bulked in ice,

Not to be molten out.’

And roughly spake

My father, ‘Tut, you know them not, the girls.

Boy, when I hear you prate I almost think

That idiot legend credible.  Look you, Sir!

Man is the hunter; woman is his game:

The sleek and shining creatures of the chase,

We hunt them for the beauty of their skins;

They love us for it, and we ride them down.

Wheedling and siding with them!  Out! for shame!

Boy, there’s no rose that’s half so dear to them

As he that does the thing they dare not do,

Breathing and sounding beauteous battle, comes

With the air of the trumpet round him, and leaps in

Among the women, snares them by the score

Flattered and flustered, wins, though dashed with death

He reddens what he kisses:  thus I won

You mother, a good mother, a good wife,

Worth winning; but this firebrand — gentleness

To such as her! if Cyril spake her true,

To catch a dragon in a cherry net,

To trip a tigress with a gossamer

Were wisdom to it.’

‘Yea but Sire,’ I cried,

‘Wild natures need wise curbs.  The soldier?  No:

What dares not Ida do that she should prize

The soldier?  I beheld her, when she rose

The yesternight, and storming in extremes,

Stood for her cause, and flung defiance down

Gagelike to man, and had not shunned the death,

No, not the soldier’s:  yet I hold her, king,

True woman:  you clash them all in one,

That have as many differences as we.

The violet varies from the lily as far

As oak from elm:  one loves the soldier, one

The silken priest of peace, one this, one that,

And some unworthily; their sinless faith,

A maiden moon that sparkles on a sty,

Glorifying clown and satyr; whence they need

More breadth of culture:  is not Ida right?

They worth it? truer to the law within?

Severer in the logic of a life?

Twice as magnetic to sweet influences

Of earth and heaven? and she of whom you speak,

My mother, looks as whole as some serene

Creation minted in the golden moods

Of sovereign artists; not a thought, a touch,

But pure as lines of green that streak the white

Of the first snowdrop’s inner leaves; I say,

Not like the piebald miscellany, man,

Bursts of great heart and slips in sensual mire,

But whole and one:  and take them all-in-all,

Were we ourselves but half as good, as kind,

As truthful, much that Ida claims as right

Had ne’er been mooted, but as frankly theirs

As dues of Nature.  To our point:  not war:

Lest I lose all.’

‘Nay, nay, you spake but sense’

Said Gama.  ‘We remember love ourself

In our sweet youth; we did not rate him then

This red-hot iron to be shaped with blows.

You talk almost like Ida:  she can talk;

And there is something in it as you say:

But you talk kindlier:  we esteem you for it. —

He seems a gracious and a gallant Prince,

I would he had our daughter:  for the rest,

Our own detention, why, the causes weighed,

Fatherly fears — you used us courteously —

We would do much to gratify your Prince —

We pardon it; and for your ingress here

Upon the skirt and fringe of our fair land,

you did but come as goblins in the night,

Nor in the furrow broke the ploughman’s head,

Nor burnt the grange, nor bussed the milking-maid,

Nor robbed the farmer of his bowl of cream:

But let your Prince (our royal word upon it,

He comes back safe) ride with us to our lines,

And speak with Arac:  Arac’s word is thrice

As ours with Ida:  something may be done —

I know not what — and ours shall see us friends.

You, likewise, our late guests, if so you will,

Follow us:  who knows? we four may build some plan

Foursquare to opposition.’

Here he reached

White hands of farewell to my sire, who growled

An answer which, half-muffled in his beard,

Let so much out as gave us leave to go.

Then rode we with the old king across the lawns

Beneath huge trees, a thousand rings of Spring

In every bole, a song on every spray

Of birds that piped their Valentines, and woke

Desire in me to infuse my tale of love

In the old king’s ears, who promised help, and oozed

All o’er with honeyed answer as we rode

And blossom-fragrant slipt the heavy dews

Gathered by night and peace, with each light air

On our mailed heads:  but other thoughts than Peace

Burnt in us, when we saw the embattled squares,

And squadrons of the Prince, trampling the flowers

With clamour:  for among them rose a cry

As if to greet the king; they made a halt;

The horses yelled; they clashed their arms; the drum

Beat; merrily-blowing shrilled the martial fife;

And in the blast and bray of the long horn

And serpent-throated bugle, undulated

The banner:  anon to meet us lightly pranced

Three captains out; nor ever had I seen

Such thews of men:  the midmost and the highest

Was Arac:  all about his motion clung

The shadow of his sister, as the beam

Of the East, that played upon them, made them glance

Like those three stars of the airy Giant’s zone,

That glitter burnished by the frosty dark;

And as the fiery Sirius alters hue,

And bickers into red and emerald, shone

Their morions, washed with morning, as they came.

And I that prated peace, when first I heard

War-music, felt the blind wildbeast of force,

Whose home is in the sinews of a man,

Stir in me as to strike:  then took the king

His three broad sons; with now a wandering hand

And now a pointed finger, told them all:

A common light of smiles at our disguise

Broke from their lips, and, ere the windy jest

Had laboured down within his ample lungs,

The genial giant, Arac, rolled himself

Thrice in the saddle, then burst out in words.

‘Our land invaded, ‘sdeath! and he himself

Your captive, yet my father wills not war:

And, ‘sdeath! myself, what care I, war or no?

but then this question of your troth remains:

And there’s a downright honest meaning in her;

She flies too high, she flies too high! and yet

She asked but space and fairplay for her scheme;

She prest and prest it on me — I myself,

What know I of these things? but, life and soul!

I thought her half-right talking of her wrongs;

I say she flies too high, ‘sdeath! what of that?

I take her for the flower of womankind,

And so I often told her, right or wrong,

And, Prince, she can be sweet to those she loves,

And, right or wrong, I care not:  this is all,

I stand upon her side:  she made me swear it —

‘Sdeath — and with solemn rites by candle-light —

Swear by St something — I forget her name —

Her that talked down the fifty wisest men;

She was a princess too; and so I swore.

Come, this is all; she will not:  waive your claim:

If not, the foughten field, what else, at once

Decides it, ‘sdeath! against my father’s will.’

I lagged in answer loth to render up

My precontract, and loth by brainless war

To cleave the rift of difference deeper yet;

Till one of those two brothers, half aside

And fingering at the hair about his lip,

To prick us on to combat ‘Like to like!

The woman’s garment hid the woman’s heart.’

A taunt that clenched his purpose like a blow!

For fiery-short was Cyril’s counter-scoff,

And sharp I answered, touched upon the point

Where idle boys are cowards to their shame,

‘Decide it here:  why not? we are three to three.’

Then spake the third ‘But three to three? no more?

No more, and in our noble sister’s cause?

More, more, for honour:  every captain waits

Hungry for honour, angry for his king.

More, more some fifty on a side, that each

May breathe himself, and quick! by overthrow

Of these or those, the question settled die.’

‘Yea,’ answered I, ‘for this wreath of air,

This flake of rainbow flying on the highest

Foam of men’s deeds — this honour, if ye will.

It needs must be for honour if at all:

Since, what decision? if we fail, we fail,

And if we win, we fail:  she would not keep

Her compact.’  ‘‘Sdeath! but we will send to her,’

Said Arac, ‘worthy reasons why she should

Bide by this issue:  let our missive through,

And you shall have her answer by the word.’

‘Boys!’ shrieked the old king, but vainlier than a hen

To her false daughters in the pool; for none

Regarded; neither seemed there more to say:

Back rode we to my father’s camp, and found

He thrice had sent a herald to the gates,

To learn if Ida yet would cede our claim,

Or by denial flush her babbling wells

With her own people’s life:  three times he went:

The first, he blew and blew, but none appeared:

He battered at the doors; none came:  the next,

An awful voice within had warned him thence:

The third, and those eight daughters of the plough

Came sallying through the gates, and caught his hair,

And so belaboured him on rib and cheek

They made him wild:  not less one glance he caught

Through open doors of Ida stationed there

Unshaken, clinging to her purpose, firm

Though compassed by two armies and the noise

Of arms; and standing like a stately Pine

Set in a cataract on an island-crag,

When storm is on the heights, and right and left

Sucked from the dark heart of the long hills roll

The torrents, dashed to the vale:  and yet her will

Bred will in me to overcome it or fall.

But when I told the king that I was pledged

To fight in tourney for my bride, he clashed

His iron palms together with a cry;

Himself would tilt it out among the lads:

But overborne by all his bearded lords

With reasons drawn from age and state, perforce

He yielded, wroth and red, with fierce demur:

And many a bold knight started up in heat,

And sware to combat for my claim till death.

All on this side the palace ran the field

Flat to the garden-wall:  and likewise here,

Above the garden’s glowing blossom-belts,

A columned entry shone and marble stairs,

And great bronze valves, embossed with Tomyris

And what she did to Cyrus after fight,

But now fast barred:  so here upon the flat

All that long morn the lists were hammered up,

And all that morn the heralds to and fro,

With message and defiance, went and came;

Last, Ida’s answer, in a royal hand,

But shaken here and there, and rolling words

Oration-like.  I kissed it and I read.

‘O brother, you have known the pangs we felt,

What heats of indignation when we heard

Of those that iron-cramped their women’s feet;

Of lands in which at the altar the poor bride

Gives her harsh groom for bridal-gift a scourge;

Of living hearts that crack within the fire

Where smoulder their dead despots; and of those, —

Mothers, — that, with all prophetic pity, fling

Their pretty maids in the running flood, and swoops

The vulture, beak and talon, at the heart

Made for all noble motion:  and I saw

That equal baseness lived in sleeker times

With smoother men:  the old leaven leavened all:

Millions of throats would bawl for civil rights,

No woman named:  therefore I set my face

Against all men, and lived but for mine own.

Far off from men I built a fold for them:

I stored it full of rich memorial:

I fenced it round with gallant institutes,

And biting laws to scare the beasts of prey

And prospered; till a rout of saucy boys

Brake on us at our books, and marred our peace,

Masked like our maids, blustering I know not what

Of insolence and love, some pretext held

Of baby troth, invalid, since my will

Sealed not the bond — the striplings! for their sport! —

I tamed my leopards:  shall I not tame these?

Or you? or I? for since you think me touched

In honour — what, I would not aught of false —

Is not our case pure? and whereas I know

Your prowess, Arac, and what mother’s blood

You draw from, fight; you failing, I abide

What end soever:  fail you will not.  Still

Take not his life:  he risked it for my own;

His mother lives:  yet whatsoe’er you do,

Fight and fight well; strike and strike him.  O dear

Brothers, the woman’s Angel guards you, you

The sole men to be mingled with our cause,

The sole men we shall prize in the after-time,

Your very armour hallowed, and your statues

Reared, sung to, when, this gad-fly brushed aside,

We plant a solid foot into the Time,

And mould a generation strong to move

With claim on claim from right to right, till she

Whose name is yoked with children’s, know herself;

And Knowledge in our own land make her free,

And, ever following those two crownèd twins,

Commerce and conquest, shower the fiery grain

Of freedom broadcast over all the orbs

Between the Northern and the Southern morn.’

Then came a postscript dashed across the rest.

See that there be no traitors in your camp:

We seem a nest of traitors — none to trust

Since our arms failed — this Egypt-plague of men!

Almost our maids were better at their homes,

Than thus man-girdled here:  indeed I think

Our chiefest comfort is the little child

Of one unworthy mother; which she left:

She shall not have it back:  the child shall grow

To prize the authentic mother of her mind.

I took it for an hour in mine own bed

This morning:  there the tender orphan hands

Felt at my heart, and seemed to charm from thence

The wrath I nursed against the world:  farewell.’

I ceased; he said, ‘Stubborn, but she may sit

Upon a king’s right hand in thunder-storms,

And breed up warriors!  See now, though yourself

Be dazzled by the wildfire Love to sloughs

That swallow common sense, the spindling king,

This Gama swamped in lazy tolerance.

When the man wants weight, the woman takes it up,

And topples down the scales; but this is fixt

As are the roots of earth and base of all;

Man for the field and woman for the hearth:

Man for the sword and for the needle she:

Man with the head and woman with the heart:

Man to command and woman to obey;

All else confusion.  Look you! the gray mare

Is ill to live with, when her whinny shrills

From tile to scullery, and her small goodman

Shrinks in his arm-chair while the fires of Hell

Mix with his hearth:  but you — she’s yet a colt —

Take, break her:  strongly groomed and straitly curbed

She might not rank with those detestable

That let the bantling scald at home, and brawl

Their rights and wrongs like potherbs in the street.

They say she’s comely; there’s the fairer chance:

I like her none the less for rating at her!

Besides, the woman wed is not as we,

But suffers change of frame.  A lusty brace

Of twins may weed her of her folly.  Boy,

The bearing and the training of a child

Is woman’s wisdom.’

Thus the hard old king:

I took my leave, for it was nearly noon:

I pored upon her letter which I held,

And on the little clause ‘take not his life:’

I mused on that wild morning in the woods,

And on the ‘Follow, follow, thou shalt win:’

I thought on all the wrathful king had said,

And how the strange betrothment was to end:

Then I remembered that burnt sorcerer’s curse

That one should fight with shadows and should fall;

And like a flash the weird affection came:

King, camp and college turned to hollow shows;

I seemed to move in old memorial tilts,

And doing battle with forgotten ghosts,

To dream myself the shadow of a dream:

And ere I woke it was the point of noon,

The lists were ready.  Empanoplied and plumed

We entered in, and waited, fifty there

Opposed to fifty, till the trumpet blared

At the barrier like a wild horn in a land

Of echoes, and a moment, and once more

The trumpet, and again:  at which the storm

Of galloping hoofs bare on the ridge of spears

And riders front to front, until they closed

In conflict with the crash of shivering points,

And thunder.  Yet it seemed a dream, I dreamed

Of fighting.  On his haunches rose the steed,

And into fiery splinters leapt the lance,

And out of stricken helmets sprang the fire.

Part sat like rocks:  part reeled but kept their seats:

Part rolled on the earth and rose again and drew:

Part stumbled mixt with floundering horses.  Down

From those two bulks at Arac’s side, and down

From Arac’s arm, as from a giant’s flail,

The large blows rained, as here and everywhere

He rode the mellay, lord of the ringing lists,

And all the plain, — brand, mace, and shaft, and shield —

Shocked, like an iron-clanging anvil banged

With hammers; till I thought, can this be he

From Gama’s dwarfish loins? if this be so,

The mother makes us most — and in my dream

I glanced aside, and saw the palace-front

Alive with fluttering scarfs and ladies’ eyes,

And highest, among the statues, statuelike,

Between a cymballed Miriam and a Jael,

With Psyche’s babe, was Ida watching us,

A single band of gold about her hair,

Like a Saint’s glory up in heaven:  but she

No saint — inexorable — no tenderness —

Too hard, too cruel:  yet she sees me fight,

Yea, let her see me fall! and with that I drave

Among the thickest and bore down a Prince,

And Cyril, one.  Yea, let me make my dream

All that I would.  But that large-moulded man,

His visage all agrin as at a wake,

Made at me through the press, and, staggering back

With stroke on stroke the horse and horseman, came

As comes a pillar of electric cloud,

Flaying the roofs and sucking up the drains,

And shadowing down the champaign till it strikes

On a wood, and takes, and breaks, and cracks, and splits,

And twists the grain with such a roar that Earth

Reels, and the herdsmen cry; for everything

Game way before him:  only Florian, he

That loved me closer than his own right eye,

Thrust in between; but Arac rode him down:

And Cyril seeing it, pushed against the Prince,

With Psyche’s colour round his helmet, tough,

Strong, supple, sinew-corded, apt at arms;

But tougher, heavier, stronger, he that smote

And threw him:  last I spurred; I felt my veins

Stretch with fierce heat; a moment hand to hand,

And sword to sword, and horse to horse we hung,

Till I struck out and shouted; the blade glanced,

I did but shear a feather, and dream and truth

Flowed from me; darkness closed me; and I fell.

Home they brought her warrior dead:

She nor swooned, nor uttered cry:

All her maidens, watching, said,

‘She must weep or she will die.’

Then they praised him, soft and low,

Called him worthy to be loved,

Truest friend and noblest foe;

Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,

Lightly to the warrior stept,

Took the face-cloth from the face;

Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,

Set his child upon her knee —

Like summer tempest came her tears —

‘Sweet my child, I live for thee.’

Princess: VI

My dream had never died or lived again.

As in some mystic middle state I lay;

Seeing I saw not, hearing not I heard:

Though, if I saw not, yet they told me all

So often that I speak as having seen.

For so it seemed, or so they said to me,

That all things grew more tragic and more strange;

That when our side was vanquished and my cause

For ever lost, there went up a great cry,

The Prince is slain.  My father heard and ran

In on the lists, and there unlaced my casque

And grovelled on my body, and after him

Came Psyche, sorrowing for Aglaïa.

But high upon the palace Ida stood

With Psyche’s babe in arm:  there on the roofs

Like that great dame of Lapidoth she sang.

‘Our enemies have fallen, have fallen:  the seed,

The little seed they laughed at in the dark,

Has risen and cleft the soil, and grown a bulk

Of spanless girth, that lays on every side

A thousand arms and rushes to the Sun.

‘Our enemies have fallen, have fallen:  they came;

The leaves were wet with women’s tears:  they heard

A noise of songs they would not understand:

They marked it with the red cross to the fall,

And would have strown it, and are fallen themselves.

‘Our enemies have fallen, have fallen:  they came,

The woodmen with their axes:  lo the tree!

But we will make it faggots for the hearth,

And shape it plank and beam for roof and floor,

And boats and bridges for the use of men.

‘Our enemies have fallen, have fallen:  they struck;

With their own blows they hurt themselves, nor knew

There dwelt an iron nature in the grain:

The glittering axe was broken in their arms,

Their arms were shattered to the shoulder blade.

‘Our enemies have fallen, but this shall grow

A night of Summer from the heat, a breadth

Of Autumn, dropping fruits of power:  and rolled

With music in the growing breeze of Time,

The tops shall strike from star to star, the fangs

Shall move the stony bases of the world.

‘And now, O maids, behold our sanctuary

Is violate, our laws broken:  fear we not

To break them more in their behoof, whose arms

Championed our cause and won it with a day

Blanched in our annals, and perpetual feast,

When dames and heroines of the golden year

Shall strip a hundred hollows bare of Spring,

To rain an April of ovation round

Their statues, borne aloft, the three:  but come,

We will be liberal, since our rights are won.

Let them not lie in the tents with coarse mankind,

Ill nurses; but descend, and proffer these

The brethren of our blood and cause, that there

Lie bruised and maimed, the tender ministries

Of female hands and hospitality.’

She spoke, and with the babe yet in her arms,

Descending, burst the great bronze valves, and led

A hundred maids in train across the Park.

Some cowled, and some bare-headed, on they came,

Their feet in flowers, her loveliest:  by them went

The enamoured air sighing, and on their curls

From the high tree the blossom wavering fell,

And over them the tremulous isles of light

Slided, they moving under shade:  but Blanche

At distance followed:  so they came:  anon

Through open field into the lists they wound

Timorously; and as the leader of the herd

That holds a stately fretwork to the Sun,

And followed up by a hundred airy does,

Steps with a tender foot, light as on air,

The lovely, lordly creature floated on

To where her wounded brethren lay; there stayed;

Knelt on one knee, — the child on one, — and prest

Their hands, and called them dear deliverers,

And happy warriors, and immortal names,

And said ‘You shall not lie in the tents but here,

And nursed by those for whom you fought, and served

With female hands and hospitality.’

Then, whether moved by this, or was it chance,

She past my way.  Up started from my side

The old lion, glaring with his whelpless eye,

Silent; but when she saw me lying stark,

Dishelmed and mute, and motionlessly pale,

Cold even to her, she sighed; and when she saw

The haggard father’s face and reverend beard

Of grisly twine, all dabbled with the blood

Of his own son, shuddered, a twitch of pain

Tortured her mouth, and o’er her forehead past

A shadow, and her hue changed, and she said:

‘He saved my life:  my brother slew him for it.’

No more:  at which the king in bitter scorn

Drew from my neck the painting and the tress,

And held them up:  she saw them, and a day

Rose from the distance on her memory,

When the good Queen, her mother, shore the tress

With kisses, ere the days of Lady Blanche:

And then once more she looked at my pale face:

Till understanding all the foolish work

Of Fancy, and the bitter close of all,

Her iron will was broken in her mind;

Her noble heart was molten in her breast;

She bowed, she set the child on the earth; she laid

A feeling finger on my brows, and presently

‘O Sire,’ she said, ‘he lives:  he is not dead:

O let me have him with my brethren here

In our own palace:  we will tend on him

Like one of these; if so, by any means,

To lighten this great clog of thanks, that make

Our progress falter to the woman’s goal.’

She said:  but at the happy word ‘he lives’

My father stooped, re-fathered o’er my wounds.

So those two foes above my fallen life,

With brow to brow like night and evening mixt

Their dark and gray, while Psyche ever stole

A little nearer, till the babe that by us,

Half-lapt in glowing gauze and golden brede,

Lay like a new-fallen meteor on the grass,

Uncared for, spied its mother and began

A blind and babbling laughter, and to dance

Its body, and reach its fatling innocent arms

And lazy lingering fingers.  She the appeal

Brooked not, but clamouring out ‘Mine — mine — not yours,

It is not yours, but mine:  give me the child’

Ceased all on tremble:  piteous was the cry:

So stood the unhappy mother open-mouthed,

And turned each face her way:  wan was her cheek

With hollow watch, her blooming mantle torn,

Red grief and mother’s hunger in her eye,

And down dead-heavy sank her curls, and half

The sacred mother’s bosom, panting, burst

The laces toward her babe; but she nor cared

Nor knew it, clamouring on, till Ida heard,

Looked up, and rising slowly from me, stood

Erect and silent, striking with her glance

The mother, me, the child; but he that lay

Beside us, Cyril, battered as he was,

Trailed himself up on one knee:  then he drew

Her robe to meet his lips, and down she looked

At the armed man sideways, pitying as it seemed,

Or self-involved; but when she learnt his face,

Remembering his ill-omened song, arose

Once more through all her height, and o’er him grew

Tall as a figure lengthened on the sand

When the tide ebbs in sunshine, and he said:

‘O fair and strong and terrible!  Lioness

That with your long locks play the Lion’s mane!

But Love and Nature, these are two more terrible

And stronger.  See, your foot is on our necks,

We vanquished, you the Victor of your will.

What would you more? Give her the child! remain

Orbed in your isolation:  he is dead,

Or all as dead:  henceforth we let you be:

Win you the hearts of women; and beware

Lest, where you seek the common love of these,

The common hate with the revolving wheel

Should drag you down, and some great Nemesis

Break from a darkened future, crowned with fire,

And tread you out for ever:  but howso’er

Fixed in yourself, never in your own arms

To hold your own, deny not hers to her,

Give her the child!  O if, I say, you keep

One pulse that beats true woman, if you loved

The breast that fed or arm that dandled you,

Or own one port of sense not flint to prayer,

Give her the child! or if you scorn to lay it,

Yourself, in hands so lately claspt with yours,

Or speak to her, your dearest, her one fault,

The tenderness, not yours, that could not kill,

Give me it:  I will give it her.

He said:

At first her eye with slow dilation rolled

Dry flame, she listening; after sank and sank

And, into mournful twilight mellowing, dwelt

Full on the child; she took it:  ‘Pretty bud!

Lily of the vale! half opened bell of the woods!

Sole comfort of my dark hour, when a world

Of traitorous friend and broken system made

No purple in the distance, mystery,

Pledge of a love not to be mine, farewell;

These men are hard upon us as of old,

We two must part:  and yet how fain was I

To dream thy cause embraced in mine, to think

I might be something to thee, when I felt

Thy helpless warmth about my barren breast

In the dead prime:  but may thy mother prove

As true to thee as false, false, false to me!

And, if thou needs must needs bear the yoke, I wish it

Gentle as freedom’ — here she kissed it:  then —

‘All good go with thee! take it Sir,’ and so

Laid the soft babe in his hard-mailèd hands,

Who turned half-round to Psyche as she sprang

To meet it, with an eye that swum in thanks;

Then felt it sound and whole from head to foot,

And hugged and never hugged it close enough,

And in her hunger mouthed and mumbled it,

And hid her bosom with it; after that

Put on more calm and added suppliantly:

‘We two were friends:  I go to mine own land

For ever:  find some other:  as for me

I scarce am fit for your great plans:  yet speak to me,

Say one soft word and let me part forgiven.’

But Ida spoke not, rapt upon the child.

Then Arac.  ‘Ida—’sdeath! you blame the man;

You wrong yourselves — the woman is so hard

Upon the woman.  Come, a grace to me!

I am your warrior:  I and mine have fought

Your battle:  kiss her; take her hand, she weeps:

‘Sdeath!  I would sooner fight thrice o’er than see it.’

But Ida spoke not, gazing on the ground,

And reddening in the furrows of his chin,

And moved beyond his custom, Gama said:

‘I’ve heard that there is iron in the blood,

And I believe it.  Not one word? not one?

Whence drew you this steel temper? not from me,

Not from your mother, now a saint with saints.

She said you had a heart — I heard her say it —

“Our Ida has a heart” — just ere she died —

“But see that some on with authority

Be near her still” and I — I sought for one —

All people said she had authority —

The Lady Blanche:  much profit!  Not one word;

No! though your father sues:  see how you stand

Stiff as Lot’s wife, and all the good knights maimed,

I trust that there is no one hurt to death,

For our wild whim:  and was it then for this,

Was it for this we gave our palace up,

Where we withdrew from summer heats and state,

And had our wine and chess beneath the planes,

And many a pleasant hour with her that’s gone,

Ere you were born to vex us?  Is it kind?

Speak to her I say:  is this not she of whom,

When first she came, all flushed you said to me

Now had you got a friend of your own age,

Now could you share your thought; now should men see

Two women faster welded in one love

Than pairs of wedlock; she you walked with, she

You talked with, whole nights long, up in the tower,

Of sine and arc, spheroïd and azimuth,

And right ascension, Heaven knows what; and now

A word, but one, one little kindly word,

Not one to spare her:  out upon you, flint!

You love nor her, nor me, nor any; nay,

You shame your mother’s judgment too.  Not one?

You will not? well — no heart have you, or such

As fancies like the vermin in a nut

Have fretted all to dust and bitterness.’

So said the small king moved beyond his wont.

But Ida stood nor spoke, drained of her force

By many a varying influence and so long.

Down through her limbs a drooping languor wept:

Her head a little bent; and on her mouth

A doubtful smile dwelt like a clouded moon

In a still water:  then brake out my sire,

Lifted his grim head from my wounds.  ‘O you,

Woman, whom we thought woman even now,

And were half fooled to let you tend our son,

Because he might have wished it — but we see,

The accomplice of your madness unforgiven,

And think that you might mix his draught with death,

When your skies change again:  the rougher hand

Is safer:  on to the tents:  take up the Prince.’

He rose, and while each ear was pricked to attend

A tempest, through the cloud that dimmed her broke

A genial warmth and light once more, and shone

Through glittering drops on her sad friend.

‘Come hither.

O Psyche,’ she cried out, ‘embrace me, come,

Quick while I melt; make reconcilement sure

With one that cannot keep her mind an hour:

Come to the hollow hear they slander so!

Kiss and be friends, like children being chid!

I seem no more:  I want forgiveness too:

I should have had to do with none but maids,

That have no links with men.  Ah false but dear,

Dear traitor, too much loved, why? — why? — Yet see,

Before these kings we embrace you yet once more

With all forgiveness, all oblivion,

And trust, not love, you less.

And now, O sire,

Grant me your son, to nurse, to wait upon him,

Like mine own brother.  For my debt to him,

This nightmare weight of gratitude, I know it;

Taunt me no more:  yourself and yours shall have

Free adit; we will scatter all our maids

Till happier times each to her proper hearth:

What use to keep them here — now? grant my prayer.

Help, father, brother, help; speak to the king:

Thaw this male nature to some touch of that

Which kills me with myself, and drags me down

From my fixt height to mob me up with all

The soft and milky rabble of womankind,

Poor weakling even as they are.’

Passionate tears

Followed:  the king replied not:  Cyril said:

‘Your brother, Lady, — Florian, — ask for him

Of your great head — for he is wounded too —

That you may tend upon him with the prince.’

‘Ay so,’ said Ida with a bitter smile,

‘Our laws are broken:  let him enter too.’

Then Violet, she that sang the mournful song,

And had a cousin tumbled on the plain,

Petitioned too for him.  ‘Ay so,’ she said,

‘I stagger in the stream:  I cannot keep

My heart an eddy from the brawling hour:

We break our laws with ease, but let it be.’

‘Ay so?’ said Blanche:  ‘Amazed am I to her

Your Highness:  but your Highness breaks with ease

The law your Highness did not make:  ‘twas I.

I had been wedded wife, I knew mankind,

And blocked them out; but these men came to woo

Your Highness — verily I think to win.’

So she, and turned askance a wintry eye:

But Ida with a voice, that like a bell

Tolled by an earthquake in a trembling tower,

Rang ruin, answered full of grief and scorn.

‘Fling our doors wide! all, all, not one, but all,

Not only he, but by my mother’s soul,

Whatever man lies wounded, friend or foe,

Shall enter, if he will.  Let our girls flit,

Till the storm die! but had you stood by us,

The roar that breaks the Pharos from his base

Had left us rock.  She fain would sting us too,

But shall not.  Pass, and mingle with your likes.

We brook no further insult but are gone.’

She turned; the very nape of her white neck

Was rosed with indignation:  but the Prince

Her brother came; the king her father charmed

Her wounded soul with words:  nor did mine own

Refuse her proffer, lastly gave his hand.

Then us they lifted up, dead weights, and bare

Straight to the doors:  to them the doors gave way

Groaning, and in the Vestal entry shrieked

The virgin marble under iron heels:

And on they moved and gained the hall, and there

Rested:  but great the crush was, and each base,

To left and right, of those tall columns drowned

In silken fluctuation and the swarm

Of female whisperers:  at the further end

Was Ida by the throne, the two great cats

Close by her, like supporters on a shield,

Bow-backed with fear:  but in the centre stood

The common men with rolling eyes; amazed

They glared upon the women, and aghast

The women stared at these, all silent, save

When armour clashed or jingled, while the day,

Descending, struck athwart the hall, and shot

A flying splendour out of brass and steel,

That o’er the statues leapt from head to head,

Now fired an angry Pallas on the helm,

Now set a wrathful Dian’s moon on flame,

And now and then an echo started up,

And shuddering fled from room to room, and died

Of fright in far apartments.

Then the voice

Of Ida sounded, issuing ordinance:

And me they bore up the broad stairs, and through

The long-laid galleries past a hundred doors

To one deep chamber shut from sound, and due

To languid limbs and sickness; left me in it;

And others otherwhere they laid; and all

That afternoon a sound arose of hoof

And chariot, many a maiden passing home

Till happier times; but some were left of those

Held sagest, and the great lords out and in,

From those two hosts that lay beside the walls,

Walked at their will, and everything was changed.

Ask me no more:  the moon may draw the sea;

The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape

With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;

But O too fond, when have I answered thee?

Ask me no more.

Ask me no more:  what answer should I give?

I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:

Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!

Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;

Ask me no more.

Ask me no more:  thy fate and mine are sealed:

I strove against the stream and all in vain:

Let the great river take me to the main:

No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;

Ask me no more.

Princess: VII

So was their sanctuary violated,

So their fair college turned to hospital;

At first with all confusion:  by and by

Sweet order lived again with other laws:

A kindlier influence reigned; and everywhere

Low voices with the ministering hand

Hung round the sick:  the maidens came, they talked,

They sang, they read:  till she not fair began

To gather light, and she that was, became

Her former beauty treble; and to and fro

With books, with flowers, with Angel offices,

Like creatures native unto gracious act,

And in their own clear element, they moved.

But sadness on the soul of Ida fell,

And hatred of her weakness, blent with shame.

Old studies failed; seldom she spoke:  but oft

Clomb to the roofs, and gazed alone for hours

On that disastrous leaguer, swarms of men

Darkening her female field:  void was her use,

And she as one that climbs a peak to gaze

O’er land and main, and sees a great black cloud

Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night,

Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore,

And suck the blinding splendour from the sand,

And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn

Expunge the world:  so fared she gazing there;

So blackened all her world in secret, blank

And waste it seemed and vain; till down she came,

And found fair peace once more among the sick.

And twilight dawned; and morn by morn the lark

Shot up and shrilled in flickering gyres, but I

Lay silent in the muffled cage of life:

And twilight gloomed; and broader-grown the bowers

Drew the great night into themselves, and Heaven,

Star after Star, arose and fell; but I,

Deeper than those weird doubts could reach me, lay

Quite sundered from the moving Universe,

Nor knew what eye was on me, nor the hand

That nursed me, more than infants in their sleep.

But Psyche tended Florian:  with her oft,

Melissa came; for Blanche had gone, but left

Her child among us, willing she should keep

Court-favour:  here and there the small bright head,

A light of healing, glanced about the couch,

Or through the parted silks the tender face

Peeped, shining in upon the wounded man

With blush and smile, a medicine in themselves

To wile the length from languorous hours, and draw

The sting from pain; nor seemed it strange that soon

He rose up whole, and those fair charities

Joined at her side; nor stranger seemed that hears

So gentle, so employed, should close in love,

Than when two dewdrops on the petals shake

To the same sweet air, and tremble deeper down,

And slip at once all-fragrant into one.

Less prosperously the second suit obtained

At first with Psyche.  Not though Blanche had sworn

That after that dark night among the fields

She needs must wed him for her own good name;

Not though he built upon the babe restored;

Nor though she liked him, yielded she, but feared

To incense the Head once more; till on a day

When Cyril pleaded, Ida came behind

Seen but of Psyche:  on her foot she hung

A moment, and she heard, at which her face

A little flushed, and she past on; but each

Assumed from thence a half-consent involved

In stillness, plighted troth, and were at peace.

Nor only these:  Love in the sacred halls

Held carnival at will, and flying struck

With showers of random sweet on maid and man.

Nor did her father cease to press my claim,

Nor did mine own, now reconciled; nor yet

Did those twin-brothers, risen again and whole;

Nor Arac, satiate with his victory.

But I lay still, and with me oft she sat:

Then came a change; for sometimes I would catch

Her hand in wild delirium, gripe it hard,

And fling it like a viper off, and shriek

‘You are not Ida;’ clasp it once again,

And call her Ida, though I knew her not,

And call her sweet, as if in irony,

And call her hard and cold which seemed a truth:

And still she feared that I should lose my mind,

And often she believed that I should die:

Till out of long frustration of her care,

And pensive tendance in the all-weary noons,

And watches in the dead, the dark, when clocks

Throbbed thunder through the palace floors, or called

On flying Time from all their silver tongues —

And out of memories of her kindlier days,

And sidelong glances at my father’s grief,

And at the happy lovers heart in heart —

And out of hauntings of my spoken love,

And lonely listenings to my muttered dream,

And often feeling of the helpless hands,

And wordless broodings on the wasted cheek —

From all a closer interest flourished up,

Tenderness touch by touch, and last, to these,

Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears

By some cold morning glacier; frail at first

And feeble, all unconscious of itself,

But such as gathered colour day by day.

Last I woke sane, but well-nigh close to death

For weakness:  it was evening:  silent light

Slept on the painted walls, wherein were wrought

Two grand designs; for on one side arose

The women up in wild revolt, and stormed

At the Oppian Law.  Titanic shapes, they crammed

The forum, and half-crushed among the rest

A dwarf-like Cato cowered.  On the other side

Hortensia spoke against the tax; behind,

A train of dames:  by axe and eagle sat,

With all their foreheads drawn in Roman scowls,

And half the wolf’s-milk curdled in their veins,

The fierce triumvirs; and before them paused

Hortensia pleading:  angry was her face.

I saw the forms:  I knew not where I was:

They did but look like hollow shows; nor more

Sweet Ida:  palm to palm she sat:  the dew

Dwelt in her eyes, and softer all her shape

And rounder seemed:  I moved:  I sighed:  a touch

Came round my wrist, and tears upon my hand:

Then all for languor and self-pity ran

Mine down my face, and with what life I had,

And like a flower that cannot all unfold,

So drenched it is with tempest, to the sun,

Yet, as it may, turns toward him, I on her

Fixt my faint eyes, and uttered whisperingly:

‘If you be, what I think you, some sweet dream,

I would but ask you to fulfil yourself:

But if you be that Ida whom I knew,

I ask you nothing:  only, if a dream,

Sweet dream, be perfect.  I shall die tonight.

Stoop down and seem to kiss me ere I die.’

I could no more, but lay like one in trance,

That hears his burial talked of by his friends,

And cannot speak, nor move, nor make one sign,

But lies and dreads his doom.  She turned; she paused;

She stooped; and out of languor leapt a cry;

Leapt fiery Passion from the brinks of death;

And I believed that in the living world

My spirit closed with Ida’s at the lips;

Till back I fell, and from mine arms she rose

Glowing all over noble shame; and all

Her falser self slipt from her like a robe,

And left her woman, lovelier in her mood

Than in her mould that other, when she came

From barren deeps to conquer all with love;

And down the streaming crystal dropt; and she

Far-fleeted by the purple island-sides,

Naked, a double light in air and wave,

To meet her Graces, where they decked her out

For worship without end; nor end of mine,

Stateliest, for thee! but mute she glided forth,

Nor glanced behind her, and I sank and slept,

Filled through and through with Love, a happy sleep.

Deep in the night I woke:  she, near me, held

A volume of the Poets of her land:

There to herself, all in low tones, she read.

‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:

The fire-fly wakens:  wake thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now lies the silent meteor on, and leaves

A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake:

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.’

I heard her turn the page; she found a small

Sweet Idyl, and once more, as low, she read:

‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:

What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang)

In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?

But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease

To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine,

To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;

And come, for love is of the valley, come,

For love is of the valley, come thou down

And find him; by the happy threshold, he,

Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,

Or red with spirted purple of the vats,

Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk

With Death and Morning on the silver horns,

Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,

Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice,

That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls

To roll the torrent out of dusky doors:

But follow; let the torrent dance thee down

To find him in the valley; let the wild

Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave

The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill

Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,

That like a broken purpose waste in air:

So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales

Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth

Arise to thee; the children call, and I

Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,

Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;

Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmuring of innumerable bees.’

So she low-toned; while with shut eyes I lay

Listening; then looked.  Pale was the perfect face;

The bosom with long sighs laboured; and meek

Seemed the full lips, and mild the luminous eyes,

And the voice trembled and the hand.  She said

Brokenly, that she knew it, she had failed

In sweet humility; had failed in all;

That all her labour was but as a block

Left in the quarry; but she still were loth,

She still were loth to yield herself to one

That wholly scorned to help their equal rights

Against the sons of men, and barbarous laws.

She prayed me not to judge their cause from her

That wronged it, sought far less for truth than power

In knowledge:  something wild within her breast,

A greater than all knowledge, beat her down.

And she had nursed me there from week to week:

Much had she learnt in little time.  In part

It was ill counsel had misled the girl

To vex true hearts:  yet was she but a girl —

‘Ah fool, and made myself a Queen of farce!

When comes another such? never, I think,

Till the Sun drop, dead, from the signs.’

Her voice

choked, and her forehead sank upon her hands,

And her great heart through all the faultful Past

Went sorrowing in a pause I dared not break;

Till notice of a change in the dark world

Was lispt about the acacias, and a bird,

That early woke to feed her little ones,

Sent from a dewy breast a cry for light:

She moved, and at her feet the volume fell.

‘Blame not thyself too much,’ I said, ‘nor blame

Too much the sons of men and barbarous laws;

These were the rough ways of the world till now.

Henceforth thou hast a helper, me, that know

The woman’s cause is man’s:  they rise or sink

Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free:

For she that out of Lethe scales with man

The shining steps of Nature, shares with man

His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal,

Stays all the fair young planet in her hands —

If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,

How shall men grow? but work no more alone!

Our place is much:  as far as in us lies

We two will serve them both in aiding her —

Will clear away the parasitic forms

That seem to keep her up but drag her down —

Will leave her space to burgeon out of all

Within her — let her make herself her own

To give or keep, to live and learn and be

All that not harms distinctive womanhood.

For woman is not undevelopt man,

But diverse:  could we make her as the man,

Sweet Love were slain:  his dearest bond is this,

Not like to like, but like in difference.

Yet in the long years liker must they grow;

The man be more of woman, she of man;

He gain in sweetness and in moral height,

Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;

She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,

Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;

Till at the last she set herself to man,

Like perfect music unto noble words;

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,

Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers,

Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,

Self-reverent each and reverencing each,

Distinct in individualities,

But like each other even as those who love.

Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:

Then reign the world’s great bridals, chaste and calm:

Then springs the crowning race of humankind.

May these things be!’

Sighing she spoke ‘I fear

They will not.’

‘Dear, but let us type them now

In our own lives, and this proud watchword rest

Of equal; seeing either sex alone

Is half itself, and in true marriage lies

Nor equal, nor unequal:  each fulfils

Defect in each, and always thought in thought,

Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,

The single pure and perfect animal,

The two-celled heart beating, with one full stroke,

Life.’

And again sighing she spoke:  ‘A dream

That once was mind! what woman taught you this?’

‘Alone,’ I said, ‘from earlier than I know,

Immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world,

I loved the woman:  he, that doth not, lives

A drowning life, besotted in sweet self,

Or pines in sad experience worse than death,

Or keeps his winged affections clipt with crime:

Yet was there one through whom I loved her, one

Not learnèd, save in gracious household ways,

Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,

No Angel, but a dearer being, all dipt

In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise,

Interpreter between the Gods and men,

Who looked all native to her place, and yet

On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere

Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce

Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved,

And girdled her with music.  Happy he

With such a mother! faith in womankind

Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high

Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall

He shall not blind his soul with clay.’

‘But I,’

Said Ida, tremulously, ‘so all unlike —

It seems you love to cheat yourself with words:

This mother is your model.  I have heard

of your strange doubts:  they well might be:  I seem

A mockery to my own self.  Never, Prince;

You cannot love me.’

‘Nay but thee’ I said

‘From yearlong poring on thy pictured eyes,

Ere seen I loved, and loved thee seen, and saw

Thee woman through the crust of iron moods

That masked thee from men’s reverence up, and forced

Sweet love on pranks of saucy boyhood:  now,

Given back to life, to life indeed, through thee,

Indeed I love:  the new day comes, the light

Dearer for night, as dearer thou for faults

Lived over:  lift thine eyes; my doubts are dead,

My haunting sense of hollow shows:  the change,

This truthful change in thee has killed it.  Dear,

Look up, and let thy nature strike on mine,

Like yonder morning on the blind half-world;

Approach and fear not; breathe upon my brows;

In that fine air I tremble, all the past

Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this

Is morn to more, and all the rich to-come

Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels

Athwart the smoke of burning weeds.  Forgive me,

I waste my heart in signs:  let be.  My bride,

My wife, my life.  O we will walk this world,

Yoked in all exercise of noble end,

And so through those dark gates across the wild

That no man knows.  Indeed I love thee:  come,

Yield thyself up:  my hopes and thine are one:

Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself;

Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.’

Princess: Conclusion

So closed our tale, of which I give you all

The random scheme as wildly as it rose:

The words are mostly mine; for when we ceased

There came a minute’s pause, and Walter said,

‘I wish she had not yielded!’ then to me,

‘What, if you drest it up poetically?’

So prayed the men, the women:  I gave assent:

Yet how to bind the scattered scheme of seven

Together in one sheaf?  What style could suit?

The men required that I should give throughout

The sort of mock-heroic gigantesque,

With which we bantered little Lilia first:

The women — and perhaps they felt their power,

For something in the ballads which they sang,

Or in their silent influence as they sat,

Had ever seemed to wrestle with burlesque,

And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close —

They hated banter, wished for something real,

A gallant fight, a noble princess — why

Not make her true-heroic — true-sublime?

Or all, they said, as earnest as the close?

Which yet with such a framework scarce could be.

Then rose a little feud betwixt the two,

Betwixt the mockers and the realists:

And I, betwixt them both, to please them both,

And yet to give the story as it rose,

I moved as in a strange diagonal,

And maybe neither pleased myself nor them.

But Lilia pleased me, for she took no part

In our dispute:  the sequel of the tale

Had touched her; and she sat, she plucked the grass,

She flung it from her, thinking:  last, she fixt

A showery glance upon her aunt, and said,

‘You — tell us what we are’ who might have told,

For she was crammed with theories out of books,

But that there rose a shout:  the gates were closed

At sunset, and the crowd were swarming now,

To take their leave, about the garden rails.

So I and some went out to these:  we climbed

The slope to Vivian-place, and turning saw

The happy valleys, half in light, and half

Far-shadowing from the west, a land of peace;

Gray halls alone among their massive groves;

Trim hamlets; here and there a rustic tower

Half-lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat;

The shimmering glimpses of a stream; the seas;

A red sail, or a white; and far beyond,

Imagined more than seen, the skirts of France.

‘Look there, a garden!’ said my college friend,

The Tory member’s elder son, ‘and there!

God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,

And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,

A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled —

Some sense of duty, something of a faith,

Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,

Some patient force to change them when we will,

Some civic manhood firm against the crowd —

But yonder, whiff! there comes a sudden heat,

The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,

The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,

The little boys begin to shoot and stab,

A kingdom topples over with a shriek

Like an old woman, and down rolls the world

In mock heroics stranger than our own;

Revolts, republics, revolutions, most

No graver than a schoolboys’ barring out;

Too comic for the serious things they are,

Too solemn for the comic touches in them,

Like our wild Princess with as wise a dream

As some of theirs — God bless the narrow seas!

I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad.’

‘Have patience,’ I replied, ‘ourselves are full

Of social wrong; and maybe wildest dreams

Are but the needful preludes of the truth:

For me, the genial day, the happy crowd,

The sport half-science, fill me with a faith.

This fine old world of ours is but a child

Yet in the go-cart.  Patience!  Give it time

To learn its limbs:  there is a hand that guides.’

In such discourse we gained the garden rails,

And there we saw Sir Walter where he stood,

Before a tower of crimson holly-hoaks,

Among six boys, head under head, and looked

No little lily-handed Baronet he,

A great broad-shouldered genial Englishman,

A lord of fat prize-oxen and of sheep,

A raiser of huge melons and of pine,

A patron of some thirty charities,

A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,

A quarter-sessions chairman, abler none;

Fair-haired and redder than a windy morn;

Now shaking hands with him, now him, of those

That stood the nearest — now addressed to speech —

Who spoke few words and pithy, such as closed

Welcome, farewell, and welcome for the year

To follow:  a shout rose again, and made

The long line of the approaching rookery swerve

From the elms, and shook the branches of the deer

From slope to slope through distant ferns, and rang

Beyond the bourn of sunset; O, a shout

More joyful than the city-roar that hails

Premier or king!  Why should not these great Sirs

Give up their parks some dozen times a year

To let the people breathe?  So thrice they cried,

I likewise, and in groups they streamed away.

But we went back to the Abbey, and sat on,

So much the gathering darkness charmed:  we sat

But spoke not, rapt in nameless reverie,

Perchance upon the future man:  the walls

Blackened about us, bats wheeled, and owls whooped,

And gradually the powers of the night,

That range above the region of the wind,

Deepening the courts of twilight broke them up

Through all the silent spaces of the worlds,

Beyond all thought into the Heaven of Heavens.

Last little Lilia, rising quietly,

Disrobed the glimmering statue of Sir Ralph

From those rich silks, and home well-pleased we went.

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.

In 1850, the same year that he was appointed Poet Laureate, Tennyson reached the pinnacle of his career, finally publishing his masterpiece, In Memoriam. A. H. H., dedicated to his close friend Arthur Hallam, who had died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833, aged 22.  As the ‘requiem’ was written over a period of seventeen years, its meditation on the search for hope after great loss has established the poem as one of the greatest works to convey the experience of grief. It contains some of Tennyson’s most accomplished lyrical work and is an unusually sustained exercise in lyric verse. The poem was a great favourite of Queen Victoria, who found solace in reading it after the death of Prince Albert in 1861:  In 1862, Victoria actually requested a meeting with Tennyson because she was so impressed by the poem.

Composed in four-line ABBA stanzas of iambic tetrameter, the poem is metrically irregular, noted for its mourning, almost monotonous tone. In Memoriam. A. H. H. is divided into 133 cantos, including the Prologue and Epilogue, and in contrast to its constant and regulated metrical form, encompasses many different subjects: profound spiritual experiences, nostalgic reminiscence and philosophical speculation. Nevertheless, the death of Hallam and Tennyson’s attempts to cope with his loss, remain the strand that ties all these together.

Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833) is now best known as the subject of Tennyson’s major work, In Memoriam A.H.H..

CONTENTS

In Memoriam A. H. H.: Preface

In Memoriam A. H. H.:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

LX

LXI

LXII

LXIII

LXIV

LXV

LXVI

LXVII

LXVIII

LXIX

LXX

LXXI

LXXII

LXXIII

LXXIV

LXXV

LXXVI

LXXVII

LXXVIII

LXXIX

LXXX

LXXXI

LXXXII

LXXXIII

LXXXIV

LXXXV

LXXXVI

LXXXVII

LXXXVIII

LXXXIX

XC

XCI

XCII

XCIII

XCIV

XCV

XCVI

XCVII

XCVIII

XCIX

C

CI

CII

CIII

CIV

CV

CVI

CVII

CVIII

CIX

CX

CXI

CXII

CXIII

CXIV

CXV

CXVI

CXVII

CXVIII

CXIX

CXX

CXXI

CXXII

CXXIII

CXXIV

CXXV

CXXVI

CXXVII

CXXVIII

CXXIX

CXXX

CXXXI

In Memoriam A. H. H.: Epilogue

Tennyson, close to the time of publication

In Memoriam A. H. H.: Preface

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

Whom we, that have not seen thy face,

By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;

Thou madest Life in man and brute;

Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot

Is on the skull which thou hast made.

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

Thou madest man, he knows not why,

He thinks he was not made to die;

And thou hast made him: thou art just.

Thou seemest human and divine,

The highest, holiest manhood, thou.

Our wills are ours, we know not how;

Our wills are ours, to make them thine.

Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be:

They are but broken lights of thee,

And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;

For knowledge is of things we see

And yet we trust it comes from thee,

A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell;

That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster. We are fools and slight;

We mock thee when we do not fear:

But help thy foolish ones to bear;

Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

Forgive what seem’d my sin in me;

What seem’d my worth since I began;

For merit lives from man to man,

And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

Forgive my grief for one removed,

Thy creature, whom I found so fair.

I trust he lives in thee, and there

I find him worthier to be loved.

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,

Confusions of a wasted youth;

Forgive them where they fail in truth,

And in thy wisdom make me wise.

1849.

In Memoriam A. H. H.:

I

I held it truth, with him who sings

To one clear harp in divers tones,

That men may rise on stepping-stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.

But who shall so forecast the years

And find in loss a gain to match?

Or reach a hand thro’ time to catch

The far-off interest of tears?

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,

Let darkness keep her raven gloss:

Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,

To dance with death, to beat the ground,

Than that the victor Hours should scorn

The long result of love, and boast,

‘Behold the man that loved and lost,

But all he was is overworn.’

II

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones

That name the under-lying dead,

Thy fibres net the dreamless head,

Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

The seasons bring the flower again,

And bring the firstling to the flock;

And in the dusk of thee, the clock

Beats out the little lives of men.

O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,

Who changest not in any gale,

Nor branding summer suns avail

To touch thy thousand years of gloom:

And gazing on thee, sullen tree,

Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,

I seem to fail from out my blood

And grow incorporate into thee.

III

O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,

O Priestess in the vaults of Death,

O sweet and bitter in a breath,

What whispers from thy lying lip?

‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run;

A web is wov’n across the sky;

From out waste places comes a cry,

And murmurs from the dying sun:

‘And all the phantom, Nature, stands?

With all the music in her tone,

A hollow echo of my own,?

A hollow form with empty hands.’

And shall I take a thing so blind,

Embrace her as my natural good;

Or crush her, like a vice of blood,

Upon the threshold of the mind?

IV

To Sleep I give my powers away;

My will is bondsman to the dark;

I sit within a helmless bark,

And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now,

That thou should’st fail from thy desire,

Who scarcely darest to inquire,

‘What is it makes me beat so low?’

Something it is which thou hast lost,

Some pleasure from thine early years.

Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,

That grief hath shaken into frost!

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross

All night below the darken’d eyes;

With morning wakes the will, and cries,

‘Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.’

V

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

A use in measured language lies;

The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,

Like coarsest clothes against the cold:

But that large grief which these enfold

Is given in outline and no more.

VI

One writes, that ‘Other friends remain,’

That ‘Loss is common to the race’?

And common is the commonplace,

And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

That loss is common would not make

My own less bitter, rather more:

Too common! Never morning wore

To evening, but some heart did break.

O father, wheresoe’er thou be,

Who pledgest now thy gallant son;

A shot, ere half thy draught be done,

Hath still’d the life that beat from thee.

O mother, praying God will save

Thy sailor, — while thy head is bow’d,

His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud

Drops in his vast and wandering grave.

Ye know no more than I who wrought

At that last hour to please him well;

Who mused on all I had to tell,

And something written, something thought;

Expecting still his advent home;

And ever met him on his way

With wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’

Or ‘here to-morrow will he come.’

O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,

That sittest ranging golden hair;

And glad to find thyself so fair,

Poor child, that waitest for thy love!

For now her father’s chimney glows

In expectation of a guest;

And thinking ‘this will please him best,’

She takes a riband or a rose;

For he will see them on to-night;

And with the thought her colour burns;

And, having left the glass, she turns

Once more to set a ringlet right;

And, even when she turn’d, the curse

Had fallen, and her future Lord

Was drown’d in passing thro’ the ford,

Or kill’d in falling from his horse.

O what to her shall be the end?

And what to me remains of good?

To her, perpetual maidenhood,

And unto me no second friend.

VII

Dark house, by which once more I stand

Here in the long unlovely street,

Doors, where my heart was used to beat

So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more?

Behold me, for I cannot sleep,

And like a guilty thing I creep

At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away

The noise of life begins again,

And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

VIII

A happy lover who has come

To look on her that loves him well,

Who ‘lights and rings the gateway bell,

And learns her gone and far from home;

He saddens, all the magic light

Dies off at once from bower and hall,

And all the place is dark, and all

The chambers emptied of delight:

So find I every pleasant spot

In which we two were wont to meet,

The field, the chamber, and the street,

For all is dark where thou art not.

Yet as that other, wandering there

In those deserted walks, may find

A flower beat with rain and wind,

Which once she foster’d up with care;

So seems it in my deep regret,

O my forsaken heart, with thee

And this poor flower of poesy

Which little cared for fades not yet.

But since it pleased a vanish’d eye,

I go to plant it on his tomb,

That if it can it there may bloom,

Or, dying, there at least may die.

IX

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore

Sailest the placid ocean-plains

With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,

Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.

So draw him home to those that mourn

In vain; a favourable speed

Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead

Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex

Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright

As our pure love, thro’ early light

Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;

Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;

Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,

My friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see

Till all my widow’d race be run;

Dear as the mother to the son,

More than my brothers are to me.

X

I hear the noise about thy keel;

I hear the bell struck in the night:

I see the cabin-window bright;

I see the sailor at the wheel.

Thou bring’st the sailor to his wife,

And travell’d men from foreign lands;

And letters unto trembling hands;

And, thy dark freight, a vanish’d life.

So bring him; we have idle dreams:

This look of quiet flatters thus

Our home-bred fancies. O to us,

The fools of habit, sweeter seems

To rest beneath the clover sod,

That takes the sunshine and the rains,

Or where the kneeling hamlet drains

The chalice of the grapes of God;

Than if with thee the roaring wells

Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;

And hands so often clasp’d in mine,

Should toss with tangle and with shells.

XI

Calm is the morn without a sound,

Calm as to suit a calmer grief,

And only thro’ the faded leaf

The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high world,

And on these dews that drench the furze,

And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

These leaves that redden to the fall;

And in my heart, if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

And waves that sway themselves in rest,

And dead calm in that noble breast

Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

XII

Lo, as a dove when up she springs

To bear thro’ Heaven a tale of woe,

Some dolorous message knit below

The wild pulsation of her wings;

Like her I go; I cannot stay;

I leave this mortal ark behind,

A weight of nerves without a mind,

And leave the cliffs, and haste away

O’er ocean-mirrors rounded large,

And reach the glow of southern skies,

And see the sails at distance rise,

And linger weeping on the marge,

And saying; ‘Comes he thus, my friend?

Is this the end of all my care?’

And circle moaning in the air:

‘Is this the end? Is this the end?’

And forward dart again, and play

About the prow, and back return

To where the body sits, and learn

That I have been an hour away.

XIII

Tears of the widower, when he sees

A late-lost form that sleep reveals,

And moves his doubtful arms, and feels

Her place is empty, fall like these;

Which weep a loss for ever new,

A void where heart on heart reposed;

And, where warm hands have prest and closed,

Silence, till I be silent too.

Which weep the comrade of my choice,

An awful thought, a life removed,

The human-hearted man I loved,

A Spirit, not a breathing voice.

Come, Time, and teach me, many years,

I do not suffer in a dream;

For now so strange do these things seem,

Mine eyes have leisure for their tears;

My fancies time to rise on wing,

And glance about the approaching sails,

As tho’ they brought but merchants’ bales,

And not the burthen that they bring.

XIV

If one should bring me this report,

That thou hadst touch’d the land to-day,

And I went down unto the quay,

And found thee lying in the port;

And standing, muffled round with woe,

Should see thy passengers in rank

Come stepping lightly down the plank,

And beckoning unto those they know;

And if along with these should come

The man I held as half-divine;

Should strike a sudden hand in mine,

And ask a thousand things of home;

And I should tell him all my pain,

And how my life had droop’d of late,

And he should sorrow o’er my state

And marvel what possess’d my brain;

And I perceived no touch of change,

No hint of death in all his frame,

But found him all in all the same,

I should not feel it to be strange.

XV

To-night the winds begin to rise

And roar from yonder dropping day:

The last red leaf is whirl’d away,

The rooks are blown about the skies;

The forest crack’d, the waters curl’d,

The cattle huddled on the lea;

And wildly dash’d on tower and tree

The sunbeam strikes along the world:

And but for fancies, which aver

That all thy motions gently pass

Athwart a plane of molten glass,

I scarce could brook the strain and stir

That makes the barren branches loud;

And but for fear it is not so,

The wild unrest that lives in woe

Would dote and pore on yonder cloud

That rises upward always higher,

And onward drags a labouring breast,

And topples round the dreary west,

A looming bastion fringed with fire.

XVI

What words are these have falle’n from me?

Can calm despair and wild unrest

Be tenants of a single breast,

Or sorrow such a changeling be?

Or cloth she only seem to take

The touch of change in calm or storm;

But knows no more of transient form

In her deep self, than some dead lake

That holds the shadow of a lark

Hung in the shadow of a heaven?

Or has the shock, so harshly given,

Confused me like the unhappy bark

That strikes by night a craggy shelf,

And staggers blindly ere she sink?

And stunn’d me from my power to think

And all my knowledge of myself;

And made me that delirious man

Whose fancy fuses old and new,

And flashes into false and true,

And mingles all without a plan?

XVII

Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze

Compell’d thy canvas, and my prayer

Was as the whisper of an air

To breathe thee over lonely seas.

For I in spirit saw thee move

Thro’ circles of the bounding sky,

Week after week: the days go by:

Come quick, thou bringest all I love.

Henceforth, wherever thou may’st roam,

My blessing, like a line of light,

Is on the waters day and night,

And like a beacon guards thee home.

So may whatever tempest mars

Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark;

And balmy drops in summer dark

Slide from the bosom of the stars.

So kind an office hath been done,

Such precious relics brought by thee;

The dust of him I shall not see

Till all my widow’d race be run.

XVIII

‘Tis well; ‘tis something; we may stand

Where he in English earth is laid,

And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

‘Tis little; but it looks in truth

As if the quiet bones were blest

Among familiar names to rest

And in the places of his youth.

Come then, pure hands, and bear the head

That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep,

And come, whatever loves to weep,

And hear the ritual of the dead.

Ah yet, ev’n yet, if this might be,

I, falling on his faithful heart,

Would breathing thro’ his lips impart

The life that almost dies in me;

That dies not, but endures with pain,

And slowly forms the firmer mind,

Treasuring the look it cannot find,

The words that are not heard again.

XIX

The Danube to the Severn gave

The darken’d heart that beat no more;

They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave.

There twice a day the Severn fills;

The salt sea-water passes by,

And hushes half the babbling Wye,

And makes a silence in the hills.

The Wye is hush’d nor moved along,

And hush’d my deepest grief of all,

When fill’d with tears that cannot fall,

I brim with sorrow drowning song.

The tide flows down, the wave again

Is vocal in its wooded walls;

My deeper anguish also falls,

And I can speak a little then.

XX

The lesser griefs that may be said,

That breathe a thousand tender vows,

Are but as servants in a house

Where lies the master newly dead;

Who speak their feeling as it is,

And weep the fulness from the mind:

‘It will be hard,’ they say, ‘to find

Another service such as this.’

My lighter moods are like to these,

That out of words a comfort win;

But there are other griefs within,

And tears that at their fountain freeze;

For by the hearth the children sit

Cold in that atmosphere of Death,

And scarce endure to draw the breath,

Or like to noiseless phantoms flit;

But open converse is there none,

So much the vital spirits sink

To see the vacant chair, and think,

‘How good! how kind! and he is gone.’

XXI

I sing to him that rests below,

And, since the grasses round me wave,

I take the grasses of the grave,

And make them pipes whereon to blow.

The traveller hears me now and then,

And sometimes harshly will he speak:

‘This fellow would make weakness weak,

And melt the waxen hearts of men.’

Another answers, ‘Let him be,

He loves to make parade of pain

That with his piping he may gain

The praise that comes to constancy.’

A third is wroth: ‘Is this an hour

For private sorrow’s barren song,

When more and more the people throng

The chairs and thrones of civil power?

‘A time to sicken and to swoon,

When Science reaches forth her arms

To feel from world to world, and charms

Her secret from the latest moon?’

Behold, ye speak an idle thing:

Ye never knew the sacred dust:

I do but sing because I must,

And pipe but as the linnets sing:

And one is glad; her note is gay,

For now her little ones have ranged;

And one is sad; her note is changed,

Because her brood is stol’n away.

XXII

The path by which we twain did go,

Which led by tracts that pleased us well,

Thro’ four sweet years arose and fell,

From flower to flower, from snow to snow:

And we with singing cheer’d the way,

And, crown’d with all the season lent,

From April on to April went,

And glad at heart from May to May:

But where the path we walk’d began

To slant the fifth autumnal slope,

As we descended following Hope,

There sat the Shadow fear’d of man;

Who broke our fair companionship,

And spread his mantle dark and cold,

And wrapt thee formless in the fold,

And dull’d the murmur on thy lip,

And bore thee where I could not see

Nor follow, tho’ I walk in haste,

And think, that somewhere in the waste

The Shadow sits and waits for me.

XXIII

Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut,

Or breaking into song by fits,

Alone, alone, to where he sits,

The Shadow cloak’d from head to foot,

Who keeps the keys of all the creeds,

I wander, often falling lame,

And looking back to whence I came,

Or on to where the pathway leads;

And crying, How changed from where it ran

Thro’ lands where not a leaf was dumb;

But all the lavish hills would hum

The murmur of a happy Pan:

When each by turns was guide to each,

And Fancy light from Fancy caught,

And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought

Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech;

And all we met was fair and good,

And all was good that Time could bring,

And all the secret of the Spring

Moved in the chambers of the blood;

And many an old philosophy

On Argive heights divinely sang,

And round us all the thicket rang

To many a flute of Arcady.

XXIV

And was the day of my delight

As pure and perfect as I say?

The very source and fount of Day

Is dash’d with wandering isles of night.

If all was good and fair we met,

This earth had been the Paradise

It never look’d to human eyes

Since our first Sun arose and set.

And is it that the haze of grief

Makes former gladness loom so great?

The lowness of the present state,

That sets the past in this relief?

Or that the past will always win

A glory from its being far;

And orb into the perfect star

We saw not, when we moved therein?

XXV

I know that this was Life, the track

Whereon with equal feet we fared;

And then, as now, the day prepared

The daily burden for the back.

But this it was that made me move

As light as carrier-birds in air;

I loved the weight I had to bear,

Because it needed help of Love:

Nor could I weary, heart or limb,

When mighty Love would cleave in twain

The lading of a single pain,

And part it, giving half to him.

XXVI

Still onward winds the dreary way;

I with it; for I long to prove

No lapse of moons can canker Love,

Whatever fickle tongues may say.

And if that eye which watches guilt

And goodness, and hath power to see

Within the green the moulder’d tree,

And towers fall’n as soon as built?

Oh, if indeed that eye foresee

Or see (in Him is no before)

In more of life true life no more

And Love the indifference to be,

Then might I find, ere yet the morn

Breaks hither over Indian seas,

That Shadow waiting with the keys,

To shroud me from my proper scorn.

XXVII

I envy not in any moods

The captive void of noble rage,

The linnet born within the cage,

That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes

His license in the field of time,

Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,

To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,

The heart that never plighted troth

But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;

Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate’er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;

‘Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

XXVIII

The time draws near the birth of Christ:

The moon is hid; the night is still;

The Christmas bells from hill to hill

Answer each other in the mist.

Four voices of four hamlets round,

From far and near, on mead and moor,

Swell out and fail, as if a door

Were shut between me and the sound:

Each voice four changes on the wind,

That now dilate, and now decrease,

Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,

Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.

This year I slept and woke with pain,

I almost wish’d no more to wake,

And that my hold on life would break

Before I heard those bells again:

But they my troubled spirit rule,

For they controll’d me when a boy;

They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,

The merry merry bells of Yule.

XXIX

With such compelling cause to grieve

As daily vexes household peace,

And chains regret to his decease,

How dare we keep our Christmas-eve;

Which brings no more a welcome guest

To enrich the threshold of the night

With shower’d largess of delight

In dance and song and game and jest?

Yet go, and while the holly boughs

Entwine the cold baptismal font,

Make one wreath more for Use and Wont,

That guard the portals of the house;

Old sisters of a day gone by,

Gray nurses, loving nothing new;

Why should they miss their yearly due

Before their time? They too will die.

XXX

With trembling fingers did we weave

The holly round the Chrismas hearth;

A rainy cloud possess’d the earth,

And sadly fell our Christmas-eve.

At our old pastimes in the hall

We gambol’d, making vain pretence

Of gladness, with an awful sense

Of one mute Shadow watching all.

We paused: the winds were in the beech:

We heard them sweep the winter land;

And in a circle hand-in-hand

Sat silent, looking each at each.

Then echo-like our voices rang;

We sung, tho’ every eye was dim,

A merry song we sang with him

Last year: impetuously we sang:

We ceased:a gentler feeling crept

Upon us: surely rest is meet:

‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet,’

And silence follow’d, and we wept.

Our voices took a higher range;

Once more we sang: ‘They do not die

Nor lose their mortal sympathy,

Nor change to us, although they change;

‘Rapt from the fickle and the frail

With gather’d power, yet the same,

Pierces the keen seraphic flame

From orb to orb, from veil to veil.’

Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,

Draw forth the cheerful day from night:

O Father, touch the east, and light

The light that shone when Hope was born.

XXXI

When Lazarus left his charnel-cave,

And home to Mary’s house return’d,

Was this demanded — if he yearn’d

To hear her weeping by his grave?

‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’

There lives no record of reply,

Which telling what it is to die

Had surely added praise to praise.

From every house the neighbours met,

The streets were fill’d with joyful sound,

A solemn gladness even crown’d

The purple brows of Olivet.

Behold a man raised up by Christ!

The rest remaineth unreveal’d;

He told it not; or something seal’d

The lips of that Evangelist.

XXXII

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer,

Nor other thought her mind admits

But, he was dead, and there he sits,

And he that brought him back is there.

Then one deep love doth supersede

All other, when her ardent gaze

Roves from the living brother’s face,

And rests upon the Life indeed.

All subtle thought, all curious fears,

Borne down by gladness so complete,

She bows, she bathes the Saviour’s feet

With costly spikenard and with tears.

Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,

Whose loves in higher love endure;

What souls possess themselves so pure,

Or is there blessedness like theirs?

XXXIII

O thou that after toil and storm

Mayst seem to have reach’d a purer air,

Whose faith has centre everywhere,

Nor cares to fix itself to form,

Leave thou thy sister when she prays,

Her early Heaven, her happy views;

Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse

A life that leads melodious days.

Her faith thro’ form is pure as thine,

Her hands are quicker unto good:

Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood

To which she links a truth divine!

See thou, that countess reason ripe

In holding by the law within,

Thou fail not in a world of sin,

And ev’n for want of such a type.

XXXIV

My own dim life should teach me this,

That life shall live for evermore,

Else earth is darkness at the core,

And dust and ashes all that is;

This round of green, this orb of flame,

Fantastic beauty such as lurks

In some wild Poet, when he works

Without a conscience or an aim.

What then were God to such as I?

‘Twere hardly worth my while to choose

Of things all mortal, or to use

A tattle patience ere I die;

‘Twere best at once to sink to peace,

Like birds the charming serpent draws,

To drop head-foremost in the jaws

Of vacant darkness and to cease.

XXXV

Yet if some voice that man could trust

Should murmur from the narrow house,

‘The cheeks drop in; the body bows;

Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:’

Might I not say? ‘Yet even here,

But for one hour, O Love, I strive

To keep so sweet a thing alive:’

But I should turn mine ears and hear

The moanings of the homeless sea,

The sound of streams that swift or slow

Draw down Æonian hills, and sow

The dust of continents to be;

And Love would answer with a sigh,

‘The sound of that forgetful shore

Will change my sweetness more and more,

Half-dead to know that I shall die.’

O me, what profits it to put

An idle case? If Death were seen

At first as Death, Love had not been,

Or been in narrowest working shut,

Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape

Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,

And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.

XXXVI

Tho’ truths in manhood darkly join,

Deep-seated in our mystic frame,

We yield all blessing to the name

Of Him that made them current coin;

For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers,

Where truth in closest words shall fail,

When truth embodied in a tale

Shall enter in at lowly doors.

And so the Word had breath, and wrought

With human hands the creed of creeds

In loveliness of perfect deeds,

More strong than all poetic thought;

Which he may read that binds the sheaf,

Or builds the house, or digs the grave,

And those wild eyes that watch the wave

In roarings round the coral reef.

XXXVII

Urania speaks with darken’d brow:

‘Thou pratest here where thou art least;

This faith has many a purer priest,

And many an abler voice than thou.

‘Go down beside thy native rill,

On thy Parnassus set thy feet,

And hear thy laurel whisper sweet

About the ledges of the hill.’

And my Melpomene replies,

A touch of shame upon her cheek:

‘I am not worthy ev’n to speak

Of thy prevailing mysteries;

‘For I am but an earthly Muse,

And owning but a little art

To lull with song an aching heart,

And render human love his dues;

‘But brooding on the dear one dead,

And all he said of things divine,

(And dear to me as sacred wine

To dying lips is all he said),

‘I murmur’d, as I came along,

Of comfort clasp’d in truth reveal’d;

And loiter’d in the master’s field,

And darken’d sanctities with song.’

XXXVIII

With weary steps I loiter on,

Tho’ always under alter’d skies

The purple from the distance dies,

My prospect and horizon gone.

No joy the blowing season gives,

The herald melodies of spring,

But in the songs I love to sing

A doubtful gleam of solace lives.

If any care for what is here

Survive in spirits render’d free,

Then are these songs I sing of thee

Not all ungrateful to thine ear.

XXXIX

Old warder of these buried bones,

And answering now my random stroke

With fruitful cloud and living smoke,

Dark yew, that graspest at the stones

And dippest toward the dreamless head,

To thee too comes the golden hour

When flower is feeling after flower;

But Sorrow?fixt upon the dead,

And darkening the dark graves of men,?

What whisper’d from her lying lips?

Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,

And passes into gloom again.

XL

Could we forget the widow’d hour

And look on Spirits breathed away,

As on a maiden in the day

When first she wears her orange-flower!

When crown’d with blessing she doth rise

To take her latest leave of home,

And hopes and light regrets that come

Make April of her tender eyes;

And doubtful joys the father move,

And tears are on the mother’s face,

As parting with a long embrace

She enters other realms of love;

Her office there to rear, to teach,

Becoming as is meet and fit

A link among the days, to knit

The generations each with each;

And, doubtless, unto thee is given

A life that bears immortal fruit

In those great offices that suit

The full-grown energies of heaven.

Ay me, the difference I discern!

How often shall her old fireside

Be cheer’d with tidings of the bride,

How often she herself return,

And tell them all they would have told,

And bring her babe, and make her boast,

Till even those that miss’d her most

Shall count new things as dear as old:

But thou and I have shaken hands,

Till growing winters lay me low;

My paths are in the fields I know.

And thine in undiscover’d lands.

XLI

Thy spirit ere our fatal loss

Did ever rise from high to higher;

As mounts the heavenward altar-fire,

As flies the lighter thro’ the gross.

But thou art turn’d to something strange,

And I have lost the links that bound

Thy changes; here upon the ground,

No more partaker of thy change.

Deep folly! yet that this could be?

That I could wing my will with might

To leap the grades of life and light,

And flash at once, my friend, to thee.

For tho’ my nature rarely yields

To that vague fear implied in death;

Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath,

The howlings from forgotten fields;

Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor

An inner trouble I behold,

A spectral doubt which makes me cold,

That I shall be thy mate no more,

Tho’ following with an upward mind

The wonders that have come to thee,

Thro’ all the secular to-be,

But evermore a life behind.

XLII

I vex my heart with fancies dim:

He still outstript me in the race;

It was but unity of place

That made me dream I rank’d with him.

And so may Place retain us still,

And he the much-beloved again,

A lord of large experience, train

To riper growth the mind and will:

And what delights can equal those

That stir the spirit’s inner deeps,

When one that loves but knows not, reaps

A truth from one that loves and knows?

XLIII

If Sleep and Death be truly one,

And every spirit’s folded bloom

Thro’ all its intervital gloom

In some long trance should slumber on;

Unconscious of the sliding hour,

Bare of the body, might it last,

And silent traces of the past

Be all the colour of the flower:

So then were nothing lost to man;

So that still garden of the souls

In many a figured leaf enrolls

The total world since life began;

And love will last as pure and whole

As when he loved me here in Time,

And at the spiritual prime

Rewaken with the dawning soul.

XLIV

How fares it with the happy dead?

For here the man is more and more;

But he forgets the days before

God shut the doorways of his head.

The days have vanish’d, tone and tint,

And yet perhaps the hoarding sense

Gives out at times (he knows not whence)

A little flash, a mystic hint;

And in the long harmonious years

(If Death so taste Lethean springs

May some dim touch of earthly things)

Surprise thee ranging with thy peers.

If such a dreamy touch should fall,

O, turn thee round, resolve the doubt;

My guardian angel will speak out

In that high place, and tell thee all.

XLV

The baby new to earth and sky,

What time his tender palm is prest

Against the circle of the breast,

Has never thought that ‘this is I:’

But as he grows he gathers much,

And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’

And finds ‘I am not what I see,

And other than the things I touch.’

So rounds he to a separate mind

From whence clear memory may begin,

As thro’ the frame that binds him in

His isolation grows defined.

This use may lie in blood and breath,

Which else were fruitless of their due,

Had man to learn himself anew

Beyond the second birth of Death.

XLVI

We ranging down this lower track,

The path we came by, thorn and flower,

Is shadow’d by the growing hour,

Lest life should fail in looking back.

So be it: there no shade can last

In that deep dawn behind the tomb,

But clear from marge to marge shall bloom

The eternal landscape of the past;

A lifelong tract of time reveal’d;

The fruitful hours of still increase;

Days order’d in a wealthy peace,

And those five years its richest field.

O Love, thy province were not large,

A bounded field, nor stretching far;

Look also, Love, a brooding star,

A rosy warmth from marge to marge.

XLVII

That each, who seems a separate whole,

Should move his rounds, and fusing all

The skirts of self again, should fall

Remerging in the general Soul,

Is faith as vague as all unsweet:

Eternal form shall still divide

The eternal soul from all beside;

And I shall know him when we meet:

And we shall sit at endless feast,

Enjoying each the other’s good:

What vaster dream can hit the mood

Of Love on earth? He seeks at least

Upon the last and sharpest height,

Before the spirits fade away,

Some landing-place, to clasp and say,

‘Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.’

XLVIII

If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,

Were taken to be such as closed

Grave doubts and answers here proposed,

Then these were such as men might scorn:

Her care is not to part and prove;

She takes, when harsher moods remit,

What slender shade of doubt may flit,

And makes it vassal unto love:

And hence, indeed, she sports with words,

But better serves a wholesome law,

And holds it sin and shame to draw

The deepest measure from the chords:

Nor dare she trust a larger lay,

But rather loosens from the lip

Short swallow-flights of song, that dip

Their wings in tears, and skim away.

XLIX

From art, from nature, from the schools,

Let random influences glance,

Like light in many a shiver’d lance

That breaks about the dappled pools:

The lightest wave of thought shall lisp,

The fancy’s tenderest eddy wreathe,

The slightest air of song shall breathe

To make the sullen surface crisp.

And look thy look, and go thy way,

But blame not thou the winds that make

The seeming-wanton ripple break,

The tender-pencil’d shadow play.

Beneath all fancied hopes and fears

Ay me, the sorrow deepens down.

Whose muffled motions blindly drown

The bases of my life in tears.

L

Be near me when my light is low,

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

And tingle; and the heart is sick,

And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust,

And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,

And men the flies of latter spring,

That lay their eggs, and sting and sing

And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,

To point the term of human strife,

And on the low dark verge of life

The twilight of eternal day.

LI

Do we indeed desire the dead

Should still be near us at our side?

Is there no baseness we would hide?

No inner vileness that we dread?

Shall he for whose applause I strove,

I had such reverence for his blame,

See with clear eye some hidden shame

And I be lessen’d in his love?

I wrong the grave with fears untrue:

Shall love be blamed for want of faith?

There must be wisdom with great Death:

The dead shall look me thro’ and thro’.

Be near us when we climb or fall:

Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours

With larger other eyes than ours,

To make allowance for us all.

LII

I cannot love thee as I ought,

For love reflects the thing beloved;

My words are only words, and moved

Upon the topmost froth of thought.

‘Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song,’

The Spirit of true love replied;

‘Thou canst not move me from thy side,

Nor human frailty do me wrong.

‘What keeps a spirit wholly true

To that ideal which he bears?

What record? not the sinless years

That breathed beneath the Syrian blue:

‘So fret not, like an idle girl,

That life is dash’d with flecks of sin.

Abide: thy wealth is gather’d in,

When Time hath sunder’d shell from pearl.’

LIII

How many a father have I seen,

A sober man, among his boys,

Whose youth was full of foolish noise,

Who wears his manhood hale and green:

And dare we to this fancy give,

That had the wild oat not been sown,

The soil, left barren, scarce had grown

The grain by which a man may live?

Or, if we held the doctrine sound

For life outliving heats of youth,

Yet who would preach it as a truth

To those that eddy round and round?

Hold thou the good: define it well:

For fear divine Philosophy

Should push beyond her mark, and be

Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

LIV

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

That not one life shall be destroy’d,

Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;

That not a moth with vain desire

Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,

Or but subserves another’s gain.

Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall

At last — far off — at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?

An infant crying in the night:

An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

LV

The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world’s altar-stairs

That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

LVI

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law?

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed?

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match’d with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

LVII

Peace; come away: the song of woe

Is after all an earthly song:

Peace; come away: we do him wrong

To sing so wildly: let us go.

Come; let us go: your cheeks are pale;

But half my life I leave behind:

Methinks my friend is richly shrined;

But I shall pass; my work will fail.

Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,

One set slow bell will seem to toll

The passing of the sweetest soul

That ever look’d with human eyes.

I hear it now, and o’er and o’er,

Eternal greetings to the dead;

And ‘Ave, Ave, Ave,’ said,

‘Adieu, adieu,’ for evermore.

LVIII

In those sad words I took farewell:

Like echoes in sepulchral halls,

As drop by drop the water falls

In vaults and catacombs, they fell;

And, falling, idly broke the peace

Of hearts that beat from day to day,

Half-conscious of their dying clay,

And those cold crypts where they shall cease.

The high Muse answer’d: ‘Wherefore grieve

Thy brethren with a fruitless tear?

Abide a little longer here,

And thou shalt take a nobler leave.’

LIX

O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me

No casual mistress, but a wife,

My bosom-friend and half of life;

As I confess it needs must be;

O Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,

Be sometimes lovely like a bride,

And put thy harsher moods aside,

If thou wilt have me wise and good.

My centred passion cannot move,

Nor will it lessen from to-day;

But I’ll have leave at times to play

As with the creature of my love;

And set thee forth, for thou art mine,

With so much hope for years to come,

That, howsoe’er I know thee, some

Could hardly tell what name were thine.

LX

He past; a soul of nobler tone:

My spirit loved and loves him yet,

Like some poor girl whose heart is set

On one whose rank exceeds her own.

He mixing with his proper sphere,

She finds the baseness of her lot,

Half jealous of she knows not what,

And envying all that meet him there.

The little village looks forlorn;

She sighs amid her narrow days,

Moving about the household ways,

In that dark house where she was born.

The foolish neighbors come and go,

And tease her till the day draws by:

At night she weeps, ‘How vain am I!’

How should he love a thing so low?’

LXI

If, in thy second state sublime,

Thy ransom’d reason change replies

With all the circle of the wise,

The perfect flower of human time;

And if thou cast thine eyes below,

How dimly character’d and slight,

How dwarf’d a growth of cold and night,

How blanch’d with darkness must I grow!

Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,

Where thy first form was made a man;

I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can

The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.

LXII

Tho’ if an eye that’s downward cast

Could make thee somewhat blench or fail,

Then be my love an idle tale,

And fading legend of the past;

And thou, as one that once declined,

When he was little more than boy,

On some unworthy heart with joy,

But lives to wed an equal mind;

And breathes a novel world, the while

His other passion wholly dies,

Or in the light of deeper eyes

Is matter for a flying smile.

LXIII

Yet pity for a horse o’er-driven,

And love in which my hound has part,

Can hang no weight upon my heart

In its assumptions up to heaven;

And I am so much more than these,

As thou, perchance, art more than I,

And yet I spare them sympathy,

And I would set their pains at ease.

So mayst thou watch me where I weep,

As, unto vaster motions bound,

The circuits of thine orbit round

A higher height, a deeper deep.

LXIV

Dost thou look back on what hath been,

As some divinely gifted man,

Whose life in low estate began

And on a simple village green;

Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar,

And grasps the skirts of happy chance,

And breasts the blows of circumstance,

And grapples with his evil star;

Who makes by force his merit known

And lives to clutch the golden keys,

To mould a mighty state’s decrees,

And shape the whisper of the throne;

And moving up from high to higher,

Becomes on Fortune’s crowning slope

The pillar of a people’s hope,

The centre of a world’s desire;

Yet feels, as in a pensive dream,

When all his active powers are still,

A distant dearness in the hill,

A secret sweetness in the stream,

The limit of his narrower fate,

While yet beside its vocal springs

He play’d at counsellors and kings,

With one that was his earliest mate;

Who ploughs with pain his native lea

And reaps the labour of his hands,

Or in the furrow musing stands;

‘Does my old friend remember me?’

LXV

Sweet soul, do with me as thou wilt;

I lull a fancy trouble-tost

With ‘Love’s too precious to be lost,

A little grain shall not be spilt.’

And in that solace can I sing,

Till out of painful phases wrought

There flutters up a happy thought,

Self-balanced on a lightsome wing:

Since we deserved the name of friends,

And thine effect so lives in me,

A part of mine may live in thee

And move thee on to noble ends.

LXVI

You thought my heart too far diseased;

You wonder when my fancies play

To find me gay among the gay,

Like one with any trifle pleased.

The shade by which my life was crost,

Which makes a desert in the mind,

Has made me kindly with my kind,

And like to him whose sight is lost;

Whose feet are guided thro’ the land,

Whose jest among his friends is free,

Who takes the children on his knee,

And winds their curls about his hand:

He plays with threads, he beats his chair

For pastime, dreaming of the sky;

His inner day can never die,

His night of loss is always there.

LXVII

When on my bed the moonlight falls,

I know that in thy place of rest

By that broad water of the west,

There comes a glory on the walls;

Thy marble bright in dark appears,

As slowly steals a silver flame

Along the letters of thy name,

And o’er the number of thy years.

The mystic glory swims away;

From off my bed the moonlight dies;

And closing eaves of wearied eyes

I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray;

And then I know the mist is drawn

A lucid veil from coast to coast,

And in the dark church like a ghost

Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

LXVIII

When in the down I sink my head,

Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath;

Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death,

Nor can I dream of thee as dead:

I walk as ere I walk’d forlorn,

When all our path was fresh with dew,

And all the bugle breezes blew

Reveillée to the breaking morn.

But what is this? I turn about,

I find a trouble in thine eye,

Which makes me sad I know not why,

Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:

But ere the lark hath left the lea

I wake, and I discern the truth;

It is the trouble of my youth

That foolish sleep transfers to thee.

LXIX

I dream’d there would be Spring no more,

That Nature’s ancient power was lost:

The streets were black with smoke and frost,

They chatter’d trifles at the door:

I wander’d from the noisy town,

I found a wood with thorny boughs:

I took the thorns to bind my brows,

I wore them like a civic crown:

I met with scoffs, I met with scorns

From youth and babe and hoary hairs:

They call’d me in the public squares

The fool that wears a crown of thorns:

They call’d me fool, they call’d me child:

I found an angel of the night;

The voice was low, the look was bright;

He look’d upon my crown and smiled:

He reach’d the glory of a hand,

That seem’d to touch it into leaf:

The voice was not the voice of grief,

The words were hard to understand.

LXX

I cannot see the features right,

When on the gloom I strive to paint

The face I know; the hues are faint

And mix with hollow masks of night;

Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,

A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,

A hand that points, and palled shapes

In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;

And crowds that stream from yawning doors,

And shoals of pucker’d faces drive;

Dark bulks that tumble half alive,

And lazy lengths on boundless shores;

Till all at once beyond the will

I hear a wizard music roll,

And thro’ a lattice on the soul

Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

LXXI

Sleep, kinsman thou to death and trance

And madness, thou hast forged at last

A night-long Present of the Past

In which we went thro’ summer France.

Hadst thou such credit with the soul?

Then bring an opiate trebly strong,

Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong

That so my pleasure may be whole;

While now we talk as once we talk’d

Of men and minds, the dust of change,

The days that grow to something strange,

In walking as of old we walk’d

Beside the river’s wooded reach,

The fortress, and the mountain ridge,

The cataract flashing from the bridge,

The breaker breaking on the beach.

LXXII

Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,

And howlest, issuing out of night,

With blasts that blow the poplar white,

And lash with storm the streaming pane?

Day, when my crown’d estate begun

To pine in that reverse of doom,

Which sicken’d every living bloom,

And blurr’d the splendour of the sun;

Who usherest in the dolorous hour

With thy quick tears that make the rose

Pull sideways, and the daisy close

Her crimson fringes to the shower;

Who might’st have heaved a windless flame

Up the deep East, or, whispering, play’d

A chequer-work of beam and shade

Along the hills, yet look’d the same.

As wan, as chill, as wild as now;

Day, mark’d as with some hideous crime,

When the dark hand struck down thro’ time,

And cancell’d nature’s best: but thou,

Lift as thou may’st thy burthen’d brows

Thro’ clouds that drench the morning star,

And whirl the ungarner’d sheaf afar,

And sow the sky with flying boughs,

And up thy vault with roaring sound

Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;

Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,

And hide thy shame beneath the ground.

LXXIII

So many worlds, so much to do,

So little done, such things to be,

How know I what had need of thee,

For thou wert strong as thou wert true?

The fame is quench’d that I foresaw,

The head hath miss’d an earthly wreath:

I curse not Nature, no, nor Death;

For nothing is that errs from law.

We pass; the path that each man trod

Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds:

What fame is left for human deeds

In endless age? It rests with God.

O hollow wraith of dying fame,

Fade wholly, while the soul exults,

And self-infolds the large results

Of force that would have forged a name.

LXXIV

As sometimes in a dead man’s face,

To those that watch it more and more,

A likeness, hardly seen before,

Comes out — to some one of his race:

So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,

I see thee what thou art, and know

Thy likeness to the wise below,

Thy kindred with the great of old.

But there is more than I can see,

And what I see I leave unsaid,

Nor speak it, knowing Death has made

His darkness beautiful with thee.

LXXV

I leave thy praises unexpress’d

In verse that brings myself relief,

And by the measure of my grief

I leave thy greatness to be guess’d;

What practice howsoe’er expert

In fitting aptest words to things,

Or voice the richest-toned that sings,

Hath power to give thee as thou wert?

I care not in these fading days

To raise a cry that lasts not long,

And round thee with the breeze of song

To stir a little dust of praise.

Thy leaf has perish’d in the green,

And, while we breathe beneath the sun,

The world which credits what is done

Is cold to all that might have been.

So here shall silence guard thy fame;

But somewhere, out of human view,

Whate’er thy hands are set to do

Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

LXXVI

Take wings of fancy, and ascend,

And in a moment set thy face

Where all the starry heavens of space

Are sharpen’d to a needle’s end;

Take wings of foresight; lighten thro’

The secular abyss to come,

And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb

Before the mouldering of a yew;

And if the matin songs, that woke

The darkness of our planet, last,

Thine own shall wither in the vast,

Ere half the lifetime of an oak.

Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers

With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain;

And what are they when these remain

The ruin’d shells of hollow towers?

LXXVII

What hope is here for modern rhyme

To him, who turns a musing eye

On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie

Foreshorten’d in the tract of time?

These mortal lullabies of pain

May bind a book, may line a box,

May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;

Or when a thousand moons shall wane

A man upon a stall may find,

And, passing, turn the page that tells

A grief, then changed to something else,

Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

But what of that? My darken’d ways

Shall ring with music all the same;

To breathe my loss is more than fame,

To utter love more sweet than praise.

LXXVIII

Again at Christmas did we weave

The holly round the Christmas hearth;

The silent snow possess’d the earth,

And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,

No wing of wind the region swept,

But over all things brooding slept

The quiet sense of something lost.

As in the winters left behind,

Again our ancient games had place,

The mimic picture’s breathing grace,

And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

Who show’d a token of distress?

No single tear, no mark of pain:

O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?

O grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!

No — mixt with all this mystic frame,

Her deep relations are the same,

But with long use her tears are dry.

LXXIX

‘More than my brothers are to me,’?

Let this not vex thee, noble heart!

I know thee of what force thou art

To hold the costliest love in fee.

But thou and I are one in kind,

As moulded like in Nature’s mint;

And hill and wood and field did print

The same sweet forms in either mind.

For us the same cold streamlet curl’d

Thro’ all his eddying coves, the same

All winds that roam the twilight came

In whispers of the beauteous world.

At one dear knee we proffer’d vows,

One lesson from one book we learn’d,

Ere childhood’s flaxen ringlet turn’d

To black and brown on kindred brows.

And so my wealth resembles thine,

But he was rich where I was poor,

And he supplied my want the more

As his unlikeness fitted mine.

LXXX

If any vague desire should rise,

That holy Death ere Arthur died

Had moved me kindly from his side,

And dropt the dust on tearless eyes;

Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,

The grief my loss in him had wrought,

A grief as deep as life or thought,

But stay’d in peace with God and man.

I make a picture in the brain;

I hear the sentence that he speaks;

He bears the burthen of the weeks

But turns his burthen into gain.

His credit thus shall set me free;

And, influence-rich to soothe and save,

Unused example from the grave

Reach out dead hands to comfort me.

LXXXI

Could I have said while he was here,

‘My love shall now no further range;

There cannot come a mellower change,

For now is love mature in ear’?

Love, then, had hope of richer store:

What end is here to my complaint?

This haunting whisper makes me faint,

‘More years had made me love thee more.’

But Death returns an answer sweet:

‘My sudden frost was sudden gain,

And gave all ripeness to the grain,

It might have drawn from after-heat.’

LXXXII

I wage not any feud with Death

For changes wrought on form and face;

No lower life that earth’s embrace

May breed with him, can fright my faith.

Eternal process moving on,

From state to state the spirit walks;

And these are but the shatter’d stalks,

Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.

Nor blame I Death, because he bare

The use of virtue out of earth:

I know transplanted human worth

Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

For this alone on Death I wreak

The wrath that garners in my heart;

He put our lives so far apart

We cannot hear each other speak.

LXXXIII

Dip down upon the northern shore,

O sweet new-year delaying long;

Thou doest expectant nature wrong;

Delaying long, delay no more.

What stays thee from the clouded noons,

Thy sweetness from its proper place?

Can trouble live with April days,

Or sadness in the summer moons?

Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire,

The little speedwell’s darling blue,

Deep tulips dash’d with fiery dew,

Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.

O thou, new-year, delaying long,

Delayest the sorrow in my blood,

That longs to burst a frozen bud

And flood a fresher throat with song.

LXXXIV

When I contemplate all alone

The life that had been thine below,

And fix my thoughts on all the glow

To which thy crescent would have grown;

I see thee sitting crown’d with good,

A central warmth diffusing bliss

In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss,

On all the branches of thy blood;

Thy blood, my friend, and partly mine;

For now the day was drawing on,

When thou should’st link thy life with one

Of mine own house, and boys of thine

Had babbled ‘Uncle’ on my knee;

But that remorseless iron hour

Made cypress of her orange flower,

Despair of Hope, and earth of thee.

I seem to meet their least desire,

To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.

I see their unborn faces shine

Beside the never-lighted fire.

I see myself an honor’d guest,

Thy partner in the flowery walk

Of letters, genial table-talk,

Or deep dispute, and graceful jest;

While now thy prosperous labor fills

The lips of men with honest praise,

And sun by sun the happy days

Descend below the golden hills

With promise of a morn as fair;

And all the train of bounteous hours

Conduct by paths of growing powers,

To reverence and the silver hair;

Till slowly worn her earthly robe,

Her lavish mission richly wrought,

Leaving great legacies of thought,

Thy spirit should fail from off the globe;

What time mine own might also flee,

As link’d with thine in love and fate,

And, hovering o’er the dolorous strait

To the other shore, involved in thee,

Arrive at last the blessed goal,

And He that died in Holy Land

Would reach us out the shining hand,

And take us as a single soul.

What reed was that on which I leant?

Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake

The old bitterness again, and break

The low beginnings of content.

LXXXV

This truth came borne with bier and pall,

I felt it, when I sorrow’d most,

‘Tis better to have loved and lost,

Than never to have loved at all —

O true in word, and tried in deed,

Demanding, so to bring relief

To this which is our common grief,

What kind of life is that I lead;

And whether trust in things above

Be dimm’d of sorrow, or sustain’d;

And whether love for him have drain’d

My capabilities of love;

Your words have virtue such as draws

A faithful answer from the breast,

Thro’ light reproaches, half exprest,

And loyal unto kindly laws.

My blood an even tenor kept,

Till on mine ear this message falls,

That in Vienna’s fatal walls

God’s finger touch’d him, and he slept.

The great Intelligences fair

That range above our mortal state,

In circle round the blessed gate,

Received and gave him welcome there;

And led him thro’ the blissful climes,

And show’d him in the fountain fresh

All knowledge that the sons of flesh

Shall gather in the cycled times.

But I remain’d, whose hopes were dim,

Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth,

To wander on a darken’d earth,

Where all things round me breathed of him.’

O friendship, equal-poised control,

O heart, with kindliest motion warm,

O sacred essence, other form,

O solemn ghost, O crowned soul!

Yet none could better know than I,

How much of act at human hands

The sense of human will demands

By which we dare to live or die.

Whatever way my days decline,

I felt and feel, tho’ left alone,

His being working in mine own,

The footsteps of his life in mine;

A life that all the Muses deck’d

With gifts of grace, that might express

All-comprehensive tenderness,

All-subtilising intellect:

And so my passion hath not swerved

To works of weakness, but I find

An image comforting the mind,

And in my grief a strength reserved.

Likewise the imaginative woe,

That loved to handle spiritual strife

Diffused the shock thro’ all my life,

But in the present broke the blow.

My pulses therefore beat again

For other friends that once I met;

Nor can it suit me to forget

The mighty hopes that make us men.

I woo your love: I count it crime

To mourn for any overmuch;

I, the divided half of such

A friendship as had master’d Time;

Which masters Time indeed, and is

Eternal, separate from fears:

The all-assuming months and years

Can take no part away from this:

But Summer on the steaming floods,

And Spring that swells the narrow brooks,

And Autumn, with a noise of rooks,

That gather in the waning woods,

And every pulse of wind and wave

Recalls, in change of light or gloom,

My old affection of the tomb,

And my prime passion in the grave:

My old affection of the tomb,

A part of stillness, yearns to speak:

‘Arise, and get thee forth and seek

A friendship for the years to come.

‘I watch thee from the quiet shore;

Thy spirit up to mine can reach;

But in dear words of human speech

We two communicate no more.’

And I, ‘Can clouds of nature stain

The starry clearness of the free?

How is it? Canst thou feel for me

Some painless sympathy with pain?’

And lightly does the whisper fall:

‘Tis hard for thee to fathom this;

I triumph in conclusive bliss,

And that serene result of all.’

So hold I commerce with the dead;

Or so methinks the dead would say;

Or so shall grief with symbols play

And pining life be fancy-fed.

Now looking to some settled end,

That these things pass, and I shall prove

A meeting somewhere, love with love,

I crave your pardon, O my friend;

If not so fresh, with love as true,

I, clasping brother-hands, aver

I could not, if I would, transfer

The whole I felt for him to you.

For which be they that hold apart

The promise of the golden hours?

First love, first friendship, equal powers,

That marry with the virgin heart.

Still mine, that cannot but deplore,

That beats within a lonely place,

That yet remembers his embrace,

But at his footstep leaps no more,

My heart, tho’ widow’d, may not rest

Quite in the love of what is gone,

But seeks to beat in time with one

That warms another living breast.

Ah, take the imperfect gift I bring,

Knowing the primrose yet is dear,

The primrose of the later year,

As not unlike to that of Spring.

LXXXVI

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom

Of evening over brake and bloom

And meadow, slowly breathing bare

The round of space, and rapt below

Thro’ all the dewy-tassell’d wood,

And shadowing down the horned flood

In ripples, fan my brows and blow

The fever from my cheek, and sigh

The full new life that feeds thy breath

Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,

Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

From belt to belt of crimson seas

On leagues of odour streaming far,

To where in yonder orient star

A hundred spirits whisper ‘Peace.’

LXXXVII

I past beside the reverend walls

In which of old I wore the gown;

I roved at random thro’ the town,

And saw the tumult of the halls;

And heard once more in college fanes

The storm their high-built organs make,

And thunder-music, rolling, shake

The prophet blazon’d on the panes;

And caught once more the distant shout,

The measured pulse of racing oars

Among the willows; paced the shores

And many a bridge, and all about

The same gray flats again, and felt

The same, but not the same; and last

Up that long walk of limes I past

To see the rooms in which he dwelt.

Another name was on the door:

I linger’d; all within was noise

Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys

That crash’d the glass and beat the floor;

Where once we held debate, a band

Of youthful friends, on mind and art,

And labour, and the changing mart,

And all the framework of the land;

When one would aim an arrow fair,

But send it slackly from the string;

And one would pierce an outer ring,

And one an inner, here and there;

And last the master-bowman, he,

Would cleave the mark. A willing ear

We lent him. Who, but hung to hear

The rapt oration flowing free

From point to point, with power and grace

And music in the bounds of law,

To those conclusions when we saw

The God within him light his face,

And seem to lift the form, and glow

In azure orbits heavenly-wise;

And over those ethereal eyes

The bar of Michael Angelo?

LXXXVIII

Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,

Rings Eden thro’ the budded quicks,

O tell me where the senses mix,

O tell me where the passions meet,

Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ

Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,

And in the midmost heart of grief

Thy passion clasps a secret joy:

And I — my harp would prelude woe —

I cannot all command the strings;

The glory of the sum of things

Will flash along the chords and go.

LXXXIX

Witch-elms that counterchange the floor

Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;

And thou, with all thy breadth and height

Of foliage, towering sycamore;

How often, hither wandering down,

My Arthur found your shadows fair,

And shook to all the liberal air

The dust and din and steam of town:

He brought an eye for all he saw;

He mixt in all our simple sports;

They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts

And dusty purlieus of the law.

O joy to him in this retreat,

Inmantled in ambrosial dark,

To drink the cooler air, and mark

The landscape winking thro’ the heat:

O sound to rout the brood of cares,

The sweep of scythe in morning dew,

The gust that round the garden flew,

And tumbled half the mellowing pears!

O bliss, when all in circle drawn

About him, heart and ear were fed

To hear him, as he lay and read

The Tuscan poets on the lawn:

Or in the all-golden afternoon

A guest, or happy sister, sung,

Or here she brought the harp and flung

A ballad to the brightening moon:

Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,

Beyond the bounding hill to stray,

And break the livelong summer day

With banquet in the distant woods;

Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,

Discuss’d the books to love or hate,

Or touch’d the changes of the state,

Or threaded some Socratic dream;

But if I praised the busy town,

He loved to rail against it still,

For ‘ground in yonder social mill

We rub each other’s angles down,

‘And merge,’ he said, ‘in form and gloss

The picturesque of man and man.’

We talk’d: the stream beneath us ran,

The wine-flask lying couch’d in moss,

Or cool’d within the glooming wave;

And last, returning from afar,

Before the crimson-circled star

Had fall’n into her father’s grave,

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,

We heard behind the woodbine veil

The milk that bubbled in the pail,

And buzzings of the honied hours.

XC

He tasted love with half his mind,

Nor ever drank the inviolate spring

Where nighest heaven, who first could fling

This bitter seed among mankind;

That could the dead, whose dying eyes

Were closed with wail, resume their life,

They would but find in child and wife

An iron welcome when they rise:

‘Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine,

To pledge them with a kindly tear,

To talk them o’er, to wish them here,

To count their memories half divine;

But if they came who past away,

Behold their brides in other hands;

The hard heir strides about their lands,

And will not yield them for a day.

Yea, tho’ their sons were none of these,

Not less the yet-loved sire would make

Confusion worse than death, and shake

The pillars of domestic peace.

Ah dear, but come thou back to me:

Whatever change the years have wrought,

I find not yet one lonely thought

That cries against my wish for thee.

XCI

When rosy plumelets tuft the larch,

And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;

Or underneath the barren bush

Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;

Come, wear the form by which I know

Thy spirit in time among thy peers;

The hope of unaccomplish’d years

Be large and lucid round thy brow.

When summer’s hourly-mellowing change

May breathe, with many roses sweet,

Upon the thousand waves of wheat,

That ripple round the lonely grange;

Come: not in watches of the night,

But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,

Come, beauteous in thine after form,

And like a finer light in light.

XCII

If any vision should reveal

Thy likeness, I might count it vain

As but the canker of the brain;

Yea, tho’ it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast

Together in the days behind,

I might but say, I hear a wind

Of memory murmuring the past.

Yea, tho’ it spake and bared to view

A fact within the coming year;

And tho’ the months, revolving near,

Should prove the phantom-warning true,

They might not seem thy prophecies,

But spiritual presentiments,

And such refraction of events

As often rises ere they rise.

XCIII

I shall not see thee. Dare I say

No spirit ever brake the band

That stays him from the native land

Where first he walk’d when claspt in clay?

No visual shade of some one lost,

But he, the Spirit himself, may come

Where all the nerve of sense is numb;

Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.

O, therefore from thy sightless range

With gods in unconjectured bliss,

O, from the distance of the abyss

Of tenfold-complicated change,

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear

The wish too strong for words to name;

That in this blindness of the frame

My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

XCIV

How pure at heart and sound in head,

With what divine affections bold

Should be the man whose thought would hold

An hour’s communion with the dead.

In vain shalt thou, or any, call

The spirits from their golden day,

Except, like them, thou too canst say,

My spirit is at peace with all.

They haunt the silence of the breast,

Imaginations calm and fair,

The memory like a cloudless air,

The conscience as a sea at rest:

But when the heart is full of din,

And doubt beside the portal waits,

They can but listen at the gates

And hear the household jar within.

XCV

By night we linger’d on the lawn,

For underfoot the herb was dry;

And genial warmth; and o’er the sky

The silvery haze of summer drawn;

And calm that let the tapers burn

Unwavering: not a cricket chirr’d:

The brook alone far-off was heard,

And on the board the fluttering urn:

And bats went round in fragrant skies,

And wheel’d or lit the filmy shapes

That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes

And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;

While now we sang old songs that peal’d

From knoll to knoll, where, couch’d at ease,

The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field.

But when those others, one by one,

Withdrew themselves from me and night,

And in the house light after light

Went out, and I was all alone,

A hunger seized my heart; I read

Of that glad year which once had been,

In those fall’n leaves which kept their green,

The noble letters of the dead:

And strangely on the silence broke

The silent-speaking words, and strange

Was love’s dumb cry defying change

To test his worth; and strangely spoke

The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell

On doubts that drive the coward back,

And keen thro’ wordy snares to track

Suggestion to her inmost cell.

So word by word, and line by line,

The dead man touch’d me from the past,

And all at once it seem’d at last

The living soul was flash’d on mine,

And mine in his was wound, and whirl’d

About empyreal heights of thought,

And came on that which is, and caught

The deep pulsations of the world,

Ćonian music measuring out

The steps of Time — the shocks of Chance —

The blows of Death. At length my trance

Was cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt.

Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame

In matter-moulded forms of speech,

Or ev’n for intellect to reach

Thro’ memory that which I became:

Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d

The knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,

The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field;

And suck’d from out the distant gloom

A breeze began to tremble o’er

The large leaves of the sycamore,

And fluctuate all the still perfume,

And gathering freshlier overhead,

Rock’d the full-foliaged elms, and swung

The heavy-folded rose, and flung

The lilies to and fro, and said,

‘The dawn, the dawn,’ and died away;

And East and West, without a breath,

Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,

To broaden into boundless day.

XCVI

You say, but with no touch of scorn,

Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes

Are tender over drowning flies,

You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.

I know not: one indeed I knew

In many a subtle question versed,

Who touch’d a jarring lyre at first,

But ever strove to make it true:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,

At last he beat his music out.

There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

He fought his doubts and gather’d strength,

He would not make his judgment blind,

He faced the spectres of the mind

And laid them: thus he came at length

To find a stronger faith his own;

And Power was with him in the night,

Which makes the darkness and the light,

And dwells not in the light alone,

But in the darkness and the cloud,

As over Sinai’s peaks of old,

While Israel made their gods of gold,

Altho’ the trumpet blew so loud.

XCVII

My love has talk’d with rocks and trees;

He finds on misty mountain-ground

His own vast shadow glory-crown’d;

He sees himself in all he sees.

Two partners of a married life —

I look’d on these and thought of thee

In vastness and in mystery,

And of my spirit as of a wife.

These two — they dwelt with eye on eye,

Their hearts of old have beat in tune,

Their meetings made December June

Their every parting was to die.

Their love has never past away;

The days she never can forget

Are earnest that he loves her yet,

Whate’er the faithless people say.

Her life is lone, he sits apart,

He loves her yet, she will not weep,

Tho’ rapt in matters dark and deep

He seems to slight her simple heart.

He thrids the labyrinth of the mind,

He reads the secret of the star,

He seems so near and yet so far,

He looks so cold: she thinks him kind.

She keeps the gift of years before

A wither’d violet is her bliss

She knows not what his greatness is,

For that, for all, she loves him more.

For him she plays, to him she sings

Of early faith and plighted vows;

She knows but matters of the house,

And he, he knows a thousand things.

Her faith is fixt and cannot move,

She darkly feels him great and wise,

She dwells on him with faithful eyes,

‘I cannot understand: I love.’

XCVIII

You leave us: you will see the Rhine,

And those fair hills I sail’d below,

When I was there with him; and go

By summer belts of wheat and vine

To where he breathed his latest breath,

That City. All her splendour seems

No livelier than the wisp that gleams

On Lethe in the eyes of Death.

Let her great Danube rolling fair

Enwind her isles, unmark’d of me:

I have not seen, I will not see

Vienna; rather dream that there,

A treble darkness, Evil haunts

The birth, the bridal; friend from friend

Is oftener parted, fathers bend

Above more graves, a thousand wants

Gnarr at the heels of men, and prey

By each cold hearth, and sadness flings

Her shadow on the blaze of kings:

And yet myself have heard him say,

That not in any mother town

With statelier progress to and fro

The double tides of chariots flow

By park and suburb under brown

Of lustier leaves; nor more content,

He told me, lives in any crowd,

When all is gay with lamps, and loud

With sport and song, in booth and tent,

Imperial halls, or open plain;

And wheels the circled dance, and breaks

The rocket molten into flakes

Of crimson or in emerald rain.

XCIX

Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,

So loud with voices of the birds,

So thick with lowings of the herds,

Day, when I lost the flower of men;

Who tremblest thro’ thy darkling red

On yon swoll’n brook that bubbles fast

By meadows breathing of the past,

And woodlands holy to the dead;

Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves

A song that slights the coming care,

And Autumn laying here and there

A fiery finger on the leaves;

Who wakenest with thy balmy breath

To myriads on the genial earth,

Memories of bridal, or of birth,

And unto myriads more, of death.

O, wheresoever those may be,

Betwixt the slumber of the poles,

To-day they count as kindred souls;

They know me not, but mourn with me.

C

I climb the hill: from end to end

Of all the landscape underneath,

I find no place that does not breathe

Some gracious memory of my friend;

No gray old grange, or lonely fold,

Or low morass and whispering reed,

Or simple stile from mead to mead,

Or sheepwalk up the windy wold;

Nor hoary knoll of ash and haw

That hears the latest linnet trill,

Nor quarry trench’d along the hill

And haunted by the wrangling daw;

Nor runlet tinkling from the rock;

Nor pastoral rivulet that swerves

To left and right thro’ meadowy curves,

That feed the mothers of the flock;

But each has pleased a kindred eye,

And each reflects a kindlier day;

And, leaving these, to pass away,

I think once more he seems to die.

CI

Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway,

The tender blossom flutter down,

Unloved, that beech will gather brown,

This maple burn itself away;

Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,

Ray round with flames her disk of seed,

And many a rose-carnation feed

With summer spice the humming air;

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain,

At noon or when the lesser wain

Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,

And flood the haunts of hern and crake;

Or into silver arrows break

The sailing moon in creek and cove;

Till from the garden and the wild

A fresh association blow,

And year by year the landscape grow

Familiar to the stranger’s child;

As year by year the labourer tills

His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;

And year by year our memory fades

From all the circle of the hills.

CII

We leave the well-beloved place

Where first we gazed upon the sky;

The roofs, that heard our earliest cry,

Will shelter one of stranger race.

We go, but ere we go from home,

As down the garden-walks I move,

Two spirits of a diverse love

Contend for loving masterdom.

One whispers, ‘Here thy boyhood sung

Long since its matin song, and heard

The low love-language of the bird

In native hazels tassel-hung.’

The other answers, ‘Yea, but here

Thy feet have stray’d in after hours

With thy lost friend among the bowers,

And this hath made them trebly dear.’

These two have striven half the day,

And each prefers his separate claim,

Poor rivals in a losing game,

That will not yield each other way.

I turn to go: my feet are set

To leave the pleasant fields and farms;

They mix in one another’s arms

To one pure image of regret.

CIII

On that last night before we went

From out the doors where I was bred,

I dream’d a vision of the dead,

Which left my after-morn content.

Methought I dwelt within a hall,

And maidens with me: distant hills

From hidden summits fed with rills

A river sliding by the wall.

The hall with harp and carol rang.

They sang of what is wise and good

And graceful. In the centre stood

A statue veil’d, to which they sang;

And which, tho’ veil’d, was known to me,

The shape of him I loved, and love

For ever: then flew in a dove

And brought a summons from the sea:

And when they learnt that I must go

They wept and wail’d, but led the way

To where a little shallop lay

At anchor in the flood below;

And on by many a level mead,

And shadowing bluff that made the banks,

We glided winding under ranks

Of iris, and the golden reed;

And still as vaster grew the shore

And roll’d the floods in grander space,

The maidens gather’d strength and grace

And presence, lordlier than before;

And I myself, who sat apart

And watch’d them, wax’d in every limb;

I felt the thews of Anakim,

The pulses of a Titan’s heart;

As one would sing the death of war,

And one would chant the history

Of that great race, which is to be,

And one the shaping of a star;

Until the forward-creeping tides

Began to foam, and we to draw

From deep to deep, to where we saw

A great ship lift her shining sides.

The man we loved was there on deck,

But thrice as large as man he bent

To greet us. Up the side I went,

And fell in silence on his neck;

Whereat those maidens with one mind

Bewail’d their lot; I did them wrong:

‘We served thee here,’ they said, ‘so long,

And wilt thou leave us now behind?’

So rapt I was, they could not win

An answer from my lips, but he

Replying, ‘Enter likewise ye

And go with us:’ they enter’d in.

And while the wind began to sweep

A music out of sheet and shroud,

We steer’d her toward a crimson cloud

That landlike slept along the deep.

CIV

The time draws near the birth of Christ;

The moon is hid, the night is still;

A single church below the hill

Is pealing, folded in the mist.

A single peal of bells below,

That wakens at this hour of rest

A single murmur in the breast,

That these are not the bells I know.

Like strangers’ voices here they sound,

In lands where not a memory strays,

Nor landmark breathes of other days,

But all is new unhallow’d ground.

CV

To-night ungather’d let us leave

This laurel, let this holly stand:

We live within the stranger’s land,

And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.

Our father’s dust is left alone

And silent under other snows:

There in due time the woodbine blows,

The violet comes, but we are gone.

No more shall wayward grief abuse

The genial hour with mask and mime,

For change of place, like growth of time,

Has broke the bond of dying use.

Let cares that petty shadows cast,

By which our lives are chiefly proved,

A little spare the night I loved,

And hold it solemn to the past.

But let no footstep beat the floor,

Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;

For who would keep an ancient form

Thro’ which the spirit breathes no more?

Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;

Nor harp be touch’d, nor flute be blown;

No dance, no motion, save alone

What lightens in the lucid east

Of rising worlds by yonder wood.

Long sleeps the summer in the seed;

Run out your measured arcs, and lead

The closing cycle rich in good.

CVI

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more;

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

CVII

It is the day when he was born,

A bitter day that early sank

Behind a purple-frosty bank

Of vapour, leaving night forlorn.

The time admits not flowers or leaves

To deck the banquet. Fiercely flies

The blast of North and East, and ice

Makes daggers at the sharpen’d eaves,

And bristles all the brakes and thorns

To yon hard crescent, as she hangs

Above the wood which grides and clangs

Its leafless ribs and iron horns

Together, in the drifts that pass

To darken on the rolling brine

That breaks the coast. But fetch the wine,

Arrange the board and brim the glass;

Bring in great logs and let them lie,

To make a solid core of heat;

Be cheerful-minded, talk and treat

Of all things ev’n as he were by;

We keep the day. With festal cheer,

With books and music, surely we

Will drink to him, whate’er he be,

And sing the songs he loved to hear.

CVIII

I will not shut me from my kind,

And, lest I stiffen into stone,

I will not eat my heart alone,

Nor feed with sighs a passing wind:

What profit lies in barren faith,

And vacant yearning, tho’ with might

To scale the heaven’s highest height,

Or dive below the wells of Death?

What find I in the highest place,

But mine own phantom chanting hymns?

And on the depths of death there swims

The reflex of a human face.

I’ll rather take what fruit may be

Of sorrow under human skies:

‘Tis held that sorrow makes us wise,

Whatever wisdom sleep with thee.

CIX

Heart-affluence in discursive talk

From household fountains never dry;

The critic clearness of an eye,

That saw thro’ all the Muses’ walk;

Seraphic intellect and force

To seize and throw the doubts of man;

Impassion’d logic, which outran

The hearer in its fiery course;

High nature amorous of the good,

But touch’d with no ascetic gloom;

And passion pure in snowy bloom

Thro’ all the years of April blood;

A love of freedom rarely felt,

Of freedom in her regal seat

Of England; not the schoolboy heat,

The blind hysterics of the Celt;

And manhood fused with female grace

In such a sort, the child would twine

A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine,

And find his comfort in thy face;

All these have been, and thee mine eyes

Have look’d on: if they look’d in vain,

My shame is greater who remain,

Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.

CX

Thy converse drew us with delight,

The men of rathe and riper years:

The feeble soul, a haunt of fears,

Forgot his weakness in thy sight.

On thee the loyal-hearted hung,

The proud was half disarm’d of pride,

Nor cared the serpent at thy side

To flicker with his double tongue.

The stern were mild when thou wert by,

The flippant put himself to school

And heard thee, and the brazen fool

Was soften’d, and he knew not why;

While I, thy nearest, sat apart,

And felt thy triumph was as mine;

And loved them more, that they were thine,

The graceful tact, the Christian art;

Nor mine the sweetness or the skill,

But mine the love that will not tire,

And, born of love, the vague desire

That spurs an imitative will.

CXI

The churl in spirit, up or down

Along the scale of ranks, thro’ all,

To him who grasps a golden ball,

By blood a king, at heart a clown;

The churl in spirit, howe’er he veil

His want in forms for fashion’s sake,

Will let his coltish nature break

At seasons thro’ the gilded pale:

For who can always act? but he,

To whom a thousand memories call,

Not being less but more than all

The gentleness he seem’d to be,

Best seem’d the thing he was, and join’d

Each office of the social hour

To noble manners, as the flower

And native growth of noble mind;

Nor ever narrowness or spite,

Or villain fancy fleeting by,

Drew in the expression of an eye,

Where God and Nature met in light;

And thus he bore without abuse

The grand old name of gentleman,

Defamed by every charlatan,

And soil’d with all ignoble use.

CXII

High wisdom holds my wisdom less,

That I, who gaze with temperate eyes

On glorious insufficiencies,

Set light by narrower perfectness.

But thou, that fillest all the room

Of all my love, art reason why

I seem to cast a careless eye

On souls, the lesser lords of doom.

For what wert thou? some novel power

Sprang up for ever at a touch,

And hope could never hope too much,

In watching thee from hour to hour,

Large elements in order brought,

And tracts of calm from tempest made,

And world-wide fluctuation sway’d

In vassal tides that follow’d thought.

CXIII

‘Tis held that sorrow makes us wise;

Yet how much wisdom sleeps with thee

Which not alone had guided me,

But served the seasons that may rise;

For can I doubt, who knew thee keen

In intellect, with force and skill

To strive, to fashion, to fulfil —

I doubt not what thou wouldst have been:

A life in civic action warm,

A soul on highest mission sent,

A potent voice of Parliament,

A pillar steadfast in the storm,

Should licensed boldness gather force,

Becoming, when the time has birth,

A lever to uplift the earth

And roll it in another course,

With thousand shocks that come and go,

With agonies, with energies,

With overthrowings, and with cries

And undulations to and fro.

CXIV

Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail

Against her beauty? May she mix

With men and prosper! Who shall fix

Her pillars? Let her work prevail.

But on her forehead sits a fire:

She sets her forward countenance

And leaps into the future chance,

Submitting all things to desire.

Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain?

She cannot fight the fear of death.

What is she, cut from love and faith,

But some wild Pallas from the brain

Of Demons? fiery-hot to burst

All barriers in her onward race

For power. Let her know her place;

She is the second, not the first.

A higher hand must make her mild,

If all be not in vain; and guide

Her footsteps, moving side by side

With wisdom, like the younger child:

For she is earthly of the mind,

But Wisdom heavenly of the soul.

O, friend, who camest to thy goal

So early, leaving me behind,

I would the great world grew like thee,

Who grewest not alone in power

And knowledge, but by year and hour

In reverence and in charity.

CXV

Now fades the last long streak of snow,

Now burgeons every maze of quick

About the flowering squares, and thick

By ashen roots the violets blow.

Now rings the woodland loud and long,

The distance takes a lovelier hue,

And drown’d in yonder living blue

The lark becomes a sightless song.

Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,

The flocks are whiter down the vale,

And milkier every milky sail

On winding stream or distant sea;

Where now the seamew pipes, or dives

In yonder greening gleam, and fly

The happy birds, that change their sky

To build and brood; that live their lives

From land to land; and in my breast

Spring wakens too; and my regret

Becomes an April violet,

And buds and blossoms like the rest.

CXVI

Is it, then, regret for buried time

That keenlier in sweet April wakes,

And meets the year, and gives and takes

The colours of the crescent prime?

Not all: the songs, the stirring air,

The life re-orient out of dust

Cry thro’ the sense to hearten trust

In that which made the world so fair.

Not all regret: the face will shine

Upon me, while I muse alone;

And that dear voice, I once have known,

Still speak to me of me and mine:

Yet less of sorrow lives in me

For days of happy commune dead;

Less yearning for the friendship fled,

Than some strong bond which is to be.

CXVII

O days and hours, your work is this

To hold me from my proper place,

A little while from his embrace,

For fuller gain of after bliss:

That out of distance might ensue

Desire of nearness doubly sweet;

And unto meeting when we meet,

Delight a hundredfold accrue,

For every grain of sand that runs,

And every span of shade that steals,

And every kiss of toothed wheels,

And all the courses of the suns.

CXVIII

Contemplate all this work of Time,

The giant labouring in his youth;

Nor dream of human love and truth,

As dying Nature’s earth and lime;

But trust that those we call the dead

Are breathers of an ampler day

For ever nobler ends. They say,

The solid earth whereon we tread

In tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming-random forms,

The seeming prey of cyclic storms,

Till at the last arose the man;

Who throve and branch’d from clime to clime,

The herald of a higher race,

And of himself in higher place,

If so he type this work of time

Within himself, from more to more;

Or, crown’d with attributes of woe

Like glories, move his course, and show

That life is not as idle ore,

But iron dug from central gloom,

And heated hot with burning fears,

And dipt in baths of hissing tears,

And batter’d with the shocks of doom

To shape and use. Arise and fly

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;

Move upward, working out the beast,

And let the ape and tiger die.

CXIX

Doors, where my heart was used to beat

So quickly, not as one that weeps

I come once more; the city sleeps;

I smell the meadow in the street;

I hear a chirp of birds; I see

Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn

A light-blue lane of early dawn,

And think of early days and thee,

And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,

And bright the friendship of thine eye;

And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh

I take the pressure of thine hand.

CXX

I trust I have not wasted breath:

I think we are not wholly brain,

Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,

Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;

Not only cunning casts in clay:

Let Science prove we are, and then

What matters Science unto men,

At least to me? I would not stay.

Let him, the wiser man who springs

Hereafter, up from childhood shape

His action like the greater ape,

But I was born to other things.

CXXI

Sad Hesper o’er the buried sun

And ready, thou, to die with him,

Thou watchest all things ever dim

And dimmer, and a glory done.

The team is loosen’d from the wain,

The boat is drawn upon the shore;

Thou listenest to the closing door,

And life is darken’d in the brain.

Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night,

By thee the world’s great work is heard

Beginning, and the wakeful bird;

Behind thee comes the greater light.

The market boat is on the stream,

And voices hail it from the brink;

Thou hear’st the village hammer clink,

And see’st the moving of the team.

Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name

For what is one, the first, the last,

Thou, like my present and my past,

Thy place is changed; thou art the same.

CXXII

Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then,

While I rose up against my doom,

And yearn’d to burst the folded gloom,

To bare the eternal Heavens again,

To feel once more, in placid awe,

The strong imagination roll

A sphere of stars about my soul,

In all her motion one with law?

If thou wert with me, and the grave

Divide us not, be with me now,

And enter in at breast and brow,

Till all my blood, a fuller wave,

Be quicken’d with a livelier breath,

And like an inconsiderate boy,

As in the former flash of joy,

I slip the thoughts of life and death;

And all the breeze of Fancy blows,

And every dew-drop paints a bow,

The wizard lightnings deeply glow,

And every thought breaks out a rose.

CXXIII

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

But in my spirit will I dwell,

And dream my dream, and hold it true;

For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,

I cannot think the thing farewell.

CXXIV

That which we dare invoke to bless;

Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;

He, They, One, All; within, without;

The Power in darkness whom we guess, —

I found Him not in world or sun,

Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye,

Nor thro’ the questions men may try,

The petty cobwebs we have spun.

If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,

I heard a voice ‘believe no more,’

And heard an ever-breaking shore

That tumbled in the Godless deep,

A warmth within the breast would melt

The freezing reason’s colder part,

And like a man in wrath the heart

Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’

No, like a child in doubt and fear:

But that blind clamour made me wise;

Then was I as a child that cries,

But, crying, knows his father near;

And what I am beheld again

What is, and no man understands;

And out of darkness came the hands

That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.

CXXV

Whatever I have said or sung,

Some bitter notes my harp would give,

Yea, tho’ there often seem’d to live

A contradiction on the tongue,

Yet Hope had never lost her youth,

She did but look through dimmer eyes;

Or Love but play’d with gracious lies,

Because he felt so fix’d in truth;

And if the song were full of care,

He breathed the spirit of the song;

And if the words were sweet and strong

He set his royal signet there;

Abiding with me till I sail

To seek thee on the mystic deeps,

And this electric force, that keeps

A thousand pulses dancing, fail.

CXXVI

Love is and was my Lord and King,

And in his presence I attend

To hear the tidings of my friend,

Which every hour his couriers bring.

Love is and was my King and Lord,

And will be, tho’ as yet I keep

Within his court on earth, and sleep

Encompass’d by his faithful guard,

And hear at times a sentinel

Who moves about from place to place,

And whispers to the worlds of space,

In the deep night, that all is well.

CXXVII

And all is well, tho’ faith and form

Be sunder’d in the night of fear;

Well roars the storm to those that hear

A deeper voice across the storm,

Proclaiming social truth shall spread,

And justice, ev’n tho’ thrice again

The red fool-fury of the Seine

Should pile her barricades with dead.

But ill for him that wears a crown,

And him, the lazar, in his rags:

They tremble, the sustaining crags;

The spires of ice are toppled down,

And molten up, and roar in flood;

The fortress crashes from on high,

The brute earth lightens to the sky,

And the great Æon sinks in blood,

And compass’d by the fires of Hell;

While thou, dear spirit, happy star,

O’erlook’st the tumult from afar,

And smilest, knowing all is well.

CXXVIII

The love that rose on stronger wings,

Unpalsied when he met with Death,

Is comrade of the lesser faith

That sees the course of human things.

No doubt vast eddies in the flood

Of onward time shall yet be made,

And throned races may degrade;

Yet, O ye mysteries of good,

Wild Hours that fly with Hope and Fear,

If all your office had to do

With old results that look like new;

If this were all your mission here,

To draw, to sheathe a useless sword,

To fool the crowd with glorious lies,

To cleave a creed in sects and cries,

To change the bearing of a word,

To shift an arbitrary power,

To cramp the student at his desk,

To make old bareness picturesque

And tuft with grass a feudal tower;

Why then my scorn might well descend

On you and yours. I see in part

That all, as in some piece of art,

Is toil cöoperant to an end.

CXXIX

Dear friend, far off, my lost desire,

So far, so near in woe and weal,

O loved the most, when most I feel

There is a lower and a higher;

Known and unknown, human, divine;

Sweet human hand and lips and eye;

Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,

Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine;

Strange friend, past, present, and to be;

Loved deeplier, darklier understood;

Behold, I dream a dream of good,

And mingle all the world with thee.

CXXX

Thy voice is on the rolling air;

I hear thee where the waters run;

Thou standest in the rising sun,

And in the setting thou art fair.

What art thou then? I cannot guess;

But tho’ I seem in star and flower

To feel thee some diffusive power,

I do not therefore love thee less.

My love involves the love before;

My love is vaster passion now;

Tho’ mix’d with God and Nature thou,

I seem to love thee more and more.

Far off thou art, but ever nigh;

I have thee still, and I rejoice;

I prosper, circled with thy voice;

I shall not lose thee tho’ I die.

CXXXI

O living will that shalt endure

When all that seems shall suffer shock,

Rise in the spiritual rock,

Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure,

That we may lift from out of dust

A voice as unto him that hears,

A cry above the conquer’d years

To one that with us works, and trust,

With faith that comes of self-control,

The truths that never can be proved

Until we close with all we loved,

And all we flow from, soul in soul.

In Memoriam A. H. H.: Epilogue

O true and tried, so well and long,

Demand not thou a marriage lay;

In that it is thy marriage day

Is music more than any song.

Nor have I felt so much of bliss

Since first he told me that he loved

A daughter of our house, nor proved

Since that dark day a day like this;

Tho’ I since then have number’d o’er

Some thrice three years: they went and came,

Remade the blood and changed the frame,

And yet is love not less, but more;

No longer caring to embalm

In dying songs a dead regret,

But like a statue solid-set,

And moulded in colossal calm.

Regret is dead, but love is more

Than in the summers that are flown,

For I myself with these have grown

To something greater than before;

Which makes appear the songs I made

As echoes out of weaker times,

As half but idle brawling rhymes,

The sport of random sun and shade.

But where is she, the bridal flower,

That must be made a wife ere noon?

She enters, glowing like the moon

Of Eden on its bridal bower:

On me she bends her blissful eyes

And then on thee; they meet thy look

And brighten like the star that shook

Betwixt the palms of paradise.

O when her life was yet in bud,

He too foretold the perfect rose.

For thee she grew, for thee she grows

For ever, and as fair as good.

And thou art worthy; full of power;

As gentle; liberal-minded, great,

Consistent; wearing all that weight

Of learning lightly like a flower.

But now set out: the noon is near,

And I must give away the bride;

She fears not, or with thee beside

And me behind her, will not fear.

For I that danced her on my knee,

That watch’d her on her nurse’s arm,

That shielded all her life from harm

At last must part with her to thee;

Now waiting to be made a wife,

Her feet, my darling, on the dead

Their pensive tablets round her head,

And the most living words of life

Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,

The ‘wilt thou’ answer’d, and again

The ‘wilt thou’ ask’d, till out of twain

Her sweet ‘I will’ has made you one.

Now sign your names, which shall be read,

Mute symbols of a joyful morn,

By village eyes as yet unborn;

The names are sign’d, and overhead

Begins the clash and clang that tells

The joy to every wandering breeze;

The blind wall rocks, and on the trees

The dead leaf trembles to the bells.

O happy hour, and happier hours

Await them. Many a merry face

Salutes them — maidens of the place,

That pelt us in the porch with flowers.

O happy hour, behold the bride

With him to whom her hand I gave.

They leave the porch, they pass the grave

That has to-day its sunny side.

To-day the grave is bright for me,

For them the light of life increased,

Who stay to share the morning feast,

Who rest to-night beside the sea.

Let all my genial spirits advance

To meet and greet a whiter sun;

My drooping memory will not shun

The foaming grape of eastern France.

It circles round, and fancy plays,

And hearts are warm’d and faces bloom,

As drinking health to bride and groom

We wish them store of happy days.

Nor count me all to blame if I

Conjecture of a stiller guest,

Perchance, perchance, among the rest,

And, tho’ in silence, wishing joy.

But they must go, the time draws on,

And those white-favour’d horses wait;

They rise, but linger; it is late;

Farewell, we kiss, and they are gone.

A shade falls on us like the dark

From little cloudlets on the grass,

But sweeps away as out we pass

To range the woods, to roam the park,

Discussing how their courtship grew,

And talk of others that are wed,

And how she look’d, and what he said,

And back we come at fall of dew.

Again the feast, the speech, the glee,

The shade of passing thought, the wealth

Of words and wit, the double health,

The crowning cup, the three-times-three,

And last the dance; — till I retire:

Dumb is that tower which spake so loud,

And high in heaven the streaming cloud,

And on the downs a rising fire:

And rise, O moon, from yonder down,

Till over down and over dale

All night the shining vapour sail

And pass the silent-lighted town,

The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,

And catch at every mountain head,

And o’er the friths that branch and spread

Their sleeping silver thro’ the hills;

And touch with shade the bridal doors,

With tender gloom the roof, the wall;

And breaking let the splendour fall

To spangle all the happy shores

By which they rest, and ocean sounds,

And, star and system rolling past,

A soul shall draw from out the vast

And strike his being into bounds,

And, moved thro’ life of lower phase,

Result in man, be born and think,

And act and love, a closer link

Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look

On knowledge, under whose command

Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand

Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,

For all we thought and loved and did,

And hoped, and suffer’d, is but seed

Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod

This planet, was a noble type

Appearing ere the times were ripe,

That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

MAUD, AND OTHER POEMS

Published in 1855, this was Tennyson’s first collection after succeeding William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850. As well as the title poem, the collection is noted for containing The Charge of the Light Brigade, which had already been published in the Examiner a few months before.

Maud was inspired by Charlotte Rosa Baring, the younger daughter of William Baring and Frances Poulett-Thomson. The first part of the poem concerns the funeral of Maud’s father, conveying a sense of loss and sorrow; then Maud is the prevailing theme. At first the narrator is somewhat antagonistic towards Maud and is unsure if she is teasing him, he feels Maud is unfit to be a wife. Later the narrator falls passionately in love with Maud and this transforms the narrative into a pastoral, dwelling on her beauty. The poem is complicated by the shifting position of the narrator, mirroring perhaps the emotional instability of the poet. A variety of poetic metres and images also give the poem an unusual atmosphere. In Maud, Tennyson returns to the poetry of sensation, dwelling on a consciousness constituted of fragments of feeling.

The Charge of the Light Brigade relates events at the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War. The narrator appears to praise the heroic actions of the Brigade, whilst mourning the futility of their charge and subsequent deaths. According to the poet’s grandson, Tennyson wrote the poem in only a few minutes after reading an account of the battle in The Times. As Poet Laureate he often wrote verses about public events and this particular poem became immediately popular, even reaching the troops in the Crimea, where it was distributed in pamphlet form at the behest of Jane, Lady Franklin.

The first edition

CONTENTS

Maud: Part I

Maud: Part II

Maud: Part III

The Brook

The Letters

The Daisy

To the Rev. F.D. Maurice

Will

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Charge of the Light Brigade by Richard Caton Woodville, Jr.

Maud: Part I

I.

I.

I HATE the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death.’

II.

For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found,

His who had given me life — O father! O God! was it well? —

Mangled, and flatten’d, and crush’d, and dinted into the ground:

There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.

III.

Did he fling himself down? who knows? for a vast speculation had fail’d,

And ever he mutter’d and madden’d, and ever wann’d with despair,

And out he walk’d when the wind like a broken worlding wail’d,

And the flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands drove thro’ the air.

IV.

I remember the time, for the roots of my hair were stirr’d

By a shuffled step, by a dead weight trail’d, by a whisper’d fright,

And my pulses closed their gates with a shock on my heart as I heard

The shrill-edged shriek of a mother divide the shuddering night.

V.

Villainy somewhere! whose? One says, we are villains all.

Not he: his honest fame should at least by me be maintained:

But that old man, now lord of the broad estate and the Hall,

Dropt off gorged from a scheme that had left us flaccid and drain’d.

VI.

Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace? we have made them a curse,

Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own;

And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse

Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearthstone?

VII.

But these are the days of advance, the works of the men of mind,

When who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman’s ware or his word?

Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a kind

The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.

VIII.

Sooner or later I too may passively take the print

Of the golden age — why not? I have neither hope nor trust;

May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint,

Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.

IX.

Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by,

When the poor are hovell’d and hustled together, each sex, like swine,

When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie;

Peace in her vineyard — yes! — but a company forges the wine.

X.

And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian’s head,

Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,

And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread,

And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life,

XI.

And Sleep must lie down arm’d, for the villainous centre-bits

Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless nights,

While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as he sits

To pestle a poison’d poison behind his crimson lights.

XII.

When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,

And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children’s bones,

Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea,

War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones.

XIII.

For I trust if an enemy’s fleet came yonder round by the hill,

And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out of the foam,

That the smooth-faced snubnosed rogue would leap from his counter and till,

And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yardwand, home. —

XIV.

What! am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood?

Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself down and die

Rather than hold by the law that I made, nevermore to brood

On a horror of shatter’d limbs and a wretched swindler’s lie?

XV.

Would there be sorrow for me? there was love in the passionate shriek,

Love for the silent thing that had made false haste to the grave —

Wrapt in a cloak, as I saw him, and thought he would rise and speak

And rave at the lie and the liar, ah God, as he used to rave.

XVI.

I am sick of the Hall and the hill, I am sick of the moor and the main.

Why should I stay? can a sweeter chance ever come to me here?

O, having the nerves of motion as well as the nerves of pain,

Were it not wise if I fled from the place and the pit and the fear?

XVII.

Workmen up at the Hall! — they are coming back from abroad;

The dark old place will be gilt by the touch of a millionaire:

I have heard, I know not whence, of the singular beauty of Maud;

I play’d with the girl when a child; she promised then to be fair.

XVIII.

Maud with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes,

Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall,

Maud with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dangled the grapes,

Maud the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all, —

XIX.

What is she now? My dreams are bad. She may bring me a curse.

No, there is fatter game on the moor; she will let me alone.

Thanks, for the fiend best knows whether woman or man be the worse.

I will bury myself in myself, and the Devil may pipe to his own.

II.

Long have I sigh’d for a calm: God grant I may find it at last!

It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savour nor salt,

But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past,

Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault?

All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen)

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had not been

For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour’s defect of the rose,

Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too full,

Or the least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensitive nose,

From which I escaped heart-free, with the least little touch of spleen.

III.

Cold and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek,

Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown’d,

Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek,

Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound;

Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong

Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before

Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound,

Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long

Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more,

But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground,

Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar,

Now to the scream of a madden’d beach dragg’d down by the wave,

Walk’d in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found

The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.

IV.

I.

A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime

In the little grove where I sit — ah, wherefore cannot I be

Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland,

When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime,

Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,

The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land?

II.

Below me, there, is the village, and looks how quiet and small!

And yet bubbles o’er like a city, with gossip, scandal, and spite;

And Jack on his ale-house bench has as many lies as a Czar;

And here on the landward side, by a red rock, glimmers the Hall

And up in the high Hall-garden I see her pass like a light;

But sorrow seize me if ever that light be my leading star!

III.

When have I bow’d to her father, the wrinkled head of the race?

I met her to-day with her brother, but not to her brother I bow’d:

I bow’d to his lady-sister as she rode by on the moor;

But the fire of a foolish pride flash’d over her beautiful face.

O child, you wrong your beauty, believe it, in being so proud;

Your father has wealth well-gotten, and I am nameless and poor.

IV.

I keep but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal;

I know it, and smile a hard-set smile, like a stoic, or like

A wiser epicurean, and let the world have its way:

For nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;

The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear’d by the shrike,

And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.

V.

We are puppets, Man in his pride, and Beauty fair in her flower;

Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a game

That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed?

Ah yet, we cannot be kind to each other here for an hour;

We whisper, and hint, and chuckle, and grin at a brother’s shame;

However we brave it out, we men are a little breed.

VI.

A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth,

For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran,

And he felt himself in his force to be Nature’s crowning race.

As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth,

So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man:

He now is first, but is he the last? is he not too base?

VII.

The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain,

An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor;

The passionate heart of the poet is whirl’d into folly and vice.

I would not marvel at either, but keep a temperate brain;

For not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more

Than to walk all day like the sultan of old in a garden of spice.

VIII.

For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil.

Who knows the ways of the world, how God will bring them about?

Our planet is one, the suns are many, the world is wide.

Shall I weep if a Poland fall? shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?

Or an infant civilisation be ruled with rod or with knout?

I have not made the world, and He that made it will guide.

IX.

Be mine a philosopher’s life in the quiet woodland ways,

Where if I cannot be gay let a passionless peace be my lot,

Far-off from the clamour of liars belied in the hubbub of lies;

From the long-neck’d geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise

Because their natures are little, and, whether he heed it or not,

Where each man walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies.

X.

And most of all would I flee from the cruel madness of love,

The honey of poison-flowers and all the measureless ill.

Ah Maud, you milkwhite fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife.

Your mother is mute in her grave as her image in marble above;

Your father is ever in London, you wander about at your will;

You have but fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life.

V.

I.

A voice by the cedar tree

In the meadow under the Hall!

She is singing an air that is known to me,

A passionate ballad gallant and gay,

A martial song like a trumpet’s call!

Singing alone in the morning of life,

In the happy morning of life and of May,

Singing of men that in battle array,

Ready in heart and ready in hand,

March with banner and bugle and fife

To the death, for their native land.

II.

Maud with her exquisite face,

And wild voice pealing up to the sunny sky,

And feet like sunny gems on an English green,

Maud in the light of her youth and her grace,

Singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die,

Till I well could weep for a time so sordid and mean,

And myself so languid and base.

III.

Silence, beautiful voice!

Be still, for you only trouble the mind

With a joy in which I cannot rejoice,

A glory I shall not find.

Still! I will hear you no more,

For your sweetness hardly leaves me a choice

But to move to the meadow and fall before

Her feet on the meadow grass, and adore,

Not her, who is neither courtly nor kind,

Not her, not her, but a voice.

VI.

I.

Morning arises stormy and pale,

No sun, but a wannish glare

In fold upon fold of hueless cloud,

And the budded peaks of the wood are bow’d

Caught and cuff’d by the gale:

I had fancied it would be fair.

II.

Whom but Maud should I meet

Last night, when the sunset burn’d

On the blossom’d gable-ends

At the head of the village street,

Whom but Maud should I meet?

And she touch’d my hand with a smile so sweet,

She made me divine amends

For a courtesy not return’d.

III.

And thus a delicate spark

Of glowing and growing light

Thro’ the livelong hours of the dark

Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams,

Ready to burst in a colour’d flame;

Till at last when the morning came

In a cloud, it faded, and seems

But an ashen-gray delight.

IV.

What if with her sunny hair,

And smile as sunny as cold,

She meant to weave me a snare

Of some coquettish deceit,

Cleopatra-like as of old

To entangle me when we met,

To have her lion roll in a silken net

And fawn at a victor’s feet.

V.

Ah, what shall I be at fifty

Should Nature keep me alive,

If I find the world so bitter

When I am but twenty-five?

Yet, if she were not a cheat,

If Maud were all that she seem’d,

And her smile were all that I dream’d,

Then the world were not so bitter

But a smile could make it sweet.

VI.

What if tho’ her eye seem’d full

Of a kind intent to me,

What if that dandy-despot, he,

That jewell’d mass of millinery,

That oil’d and curl’d Assyrian Bull

Smelling of musk and of insolence,

Her brother, from whom I keep aloof,

Who wants the finer politic sense

To mask, tho’ but in his own behoof,

With a glassy smile his brutal scorn —

What if he had told her yestermorn

How prettily for his own sweet sake

A face of tenderness might be feign’d,

And a moist mirage in desert eyes,

That so, when the rotten hustings shake

In another month to his brazen lies,

A wretched vote may be gain’d.

VII.

For a raven ever croaks, at my side,

Keep watch and ward, keep watch and ward,

Or thou wilt prove their tool.

Yea, too, myself from myself I guard,

For often a man’s own angry pride

Is cap and bells for a fool.

VIII.

Perhaps the smile and tender tone

Came out of her pitying womanhood,

For am I not, am I not, here alone

So many a summer since she died,

My mother, who was so gentle and good?

Living alone in an empty house,

Here half-hid in the gleaming wood,

Where I hear the dead at midday moan,

And the shrieking rush of the wainscot mouse,

And my own sad name in corners cried,

When the shiver of dancing leaves is thrown

About its echoing chambers wide,

Till a morbid hate and horror have grown

Of a world in which I have hardly mixt,

And a morbid eating lichen fixt

On a heart half-turn’d to stone.

IX.

O heart of stone, are you flesh, and caught

By that you swore to withstand?

For what was it else within me wrought

But, I fear, the new strong wine of love,

That made my tongue so stammer and trip

When I saw the treasured splendour, her hand,

Come sliding out of her sacred glove,

And the sunlight broke from her lip?

X.

I have play’d with her when a child;

She remembers it now we meet.

Ah well, well, well, I may be beguiled

By some coquettish deceit.

Yet, if she were not a cheat,

If Maud were all that she seem’d,

And her smile had all that I dream’d,

Then the world were not so bitter

But a smile could make it sweet.

VII.

I.

Did I hear it half in a doze

Long since, I know not where?

Did I dream it an hour ago,

When asleep in this arm-chair?

II.

Men were drinking together,

Drinking and talking of me;

‘Well, if it prove a girl, the boy

Will have plenty: so let it be.’

III.

Is it an echo of something

Read with a boy’s delight,

Viziers nodding together

In some Arabian night?

IV.

Strange, that I hear two men,

Somewhere, talking of me;

‘Well, if it prove a girl, my boy

Will have plenty: so let it be.’

VIII.

She came to the village church,

And sat by a pillar alone;

An angel watching an urn

Wept over her, carved in stone;

And once, but once, she lifted her eyes,

And suddenly, sweetly, strangely blush’d

To find they were met by my own;

And suddenly, sweetly, my heart beat stronger

And thicker, until I heard no longer

The snowy-banded, dilettante,

Delicate-handed priest intone;

And thought, is it pride, and mused and sigh’d

‘No surely, now it cannot be pride.’

IX.

I was walking a mile,

More than a mile from the shore,

The sun look’d out with a smile

Betwixt the cloud and the moor,

And riding at set of day

Over the dark moor land,

Rapidly riding far away,

She waved to me with her hand.

There were two at her side,

Something flash’d in the sun,

Down by the hill I saw them ride,

In a moment they were gone:

Like a sudden spark

Struck vainly in the night,

Then returns the dark

With no more hope of light.

X.

I.

Sick, am I sick of a jealous dread?

Was not one of the two at her side

This new-made lord, whose splendour plucks

The slavish hat from the villager’s head?

Whose old grandfather has lately died,

Gone to a blacker pit, for whom

Grimy nakedness dragging his trucks

And laying his trams in a poison’d gloom

Wrought, till he crept from a gutted mine

Master of half a servile shire,

And left his coal all turn’d into gold

To a grandson, first of his noble line,

Rich in the grace all women desire,

Strong in the power that all men adore,

And simper and set their voices lower,

And soften as if to a girl, and hold

Awe-stricken breaths at a work divine,

Seeing his gewgaw castle shine,

New as his title, built last year,

There amid perky larches and pine,

And over the sullen-purple moor

(Look at it) pricking a cockney ear.

II.

What, has he found my jewel out?

For one of the two that rode at her side

Bound for the Hall, I am sure was he:

Bound for the Hall, and I think for a bride.

Blithe would her brother’s acceptance be.

Maud could be gracious too, no doubt

To a lord, a captain, a padded shape,

A bought commission, a waxen face,

A rabbit mouth that is ever agape —

Bought? what is it he cannot buy?

And therefore splenetic, personal, base,

A wounded thing with a rancorous cry,

At war with myself and a wretched race,

Sick, sick to the heart of life, am I.

III.

Last week came one to the county town,

To preach our poor little army down,

And play the game of the despot kings,

Tho’ the state has done it and thrice as well:

This broad-brimm’d hawker of holy things,

Whose ear is cramm’d with his cotton, and rings

Even in dreams to the chink of his pence,

This huckster put down war! can he tell

Whether war be a cause or a consequence?

Put down the passions that make earth Hell!

Down with ambition, avarice, pride,

Jealousy, down! cut off from the mind

The bitter springs of anger and fear;

Down too, down at your own fireside,

With the evil tongue and the evil ear,

For each is at war with mankind.

IV.

I wish I could hear again

The chivalrous battle-song

That she warbled alone in her joy!

I might persuade myself then

She would not do herself this great wrong,

To take a wanton dissolute boy

For a man and leader of men.

V.

Ah God, for a man with heart, head, hand,

Like some of the simple great ones gone

For ever and ever by,

One still strong man in a blatant land,

Whatever they call him, what care I,

Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat — one

Who can rule and dare not lie.

VI.

And ah for a man to arise in me,

That the man I am may cease to be!

XI.

I.

O let the solid ground

Not fail beneath my feet

Before my life has found

What some have found so sweet;

Then let come what come may,

What matter if I go mad,

I shall have had my day.

II.

Let the sweet heavens endure,

Not close and darken above me

Before I am quite quite sure

That there is one to love me;

Then let come what come may

To a life that has been so sad,

I shall have had my day.

XII.

I.

Birds in the high Hall-garden

When twilight was falling,

Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,

They were crying and calling.

II.

Where was Maud? in our wood;

And I, who else, was with her,

Gathering woodland lilies,

Myriads blow together.

III.

Birds in our wood sang

Ringing thro’ the valleys,

Maud is here, here, here

In among the lilies.

IV.

I kiss’d her slender hand,

She took the kiss sedately;

Maud is not seventeen,

But she is tall and stately.

V.

I to cry out on pride

Who have won her favour!

O Maud were sure of Heaven

If lowliness could save her.

VI.

I know the way she went

Home with her maiden posy,

For her feet have touch’d the meadows

And left the daisies rosy.

VII.

Birds in the high Hall-garden

Were crying and calling to her,

Where is Maud, Maud, Maud?

One is come to woo her.

VIII.

Look, a horse at the door,

And little King Charley snarling,

Go back, my lord, across the moor,

You are not her darling.

XIII.

I.

Scorn’d, to be scorn’d by one that I scorn,

Is that a matter to make me fret?

That a calamity hard to be borne?

Well, he may live to hate me yet.

Fool that I am to be vext with his pride!

I past him, I was crossing his lands;

He stood on the path a little aside;

His face, as I grant, in spite of spite,

Has a broad-blown comeliness, red and white,

And six feet two, as I think, he stands;

But his essences turn’d the live air sick,

And barbarous opulence jewel-thick

Sunn’d itself on his breast and his hands.

II.

Who shall call me ungentle, unfair,

I long’d so heartily then and there

To give him the grasp of fellowship;

But while I past he was humming an air,

Stopt, and then with a riding whip

Leisurely tapping a glossy boot,

And curving a contumelious lip,

Gorgonised me from head to foot

With a stony British stare.

III.

Why sits he here in his father’s chair?

That old man never comes to his place:

Shall I believe him ashamed to be seen?

For only once, in the village street,

Last year, I caught a glimpse of his face,

A gray old wolf and a lean.

Scarcely, now, would I call him a cheat;

For then, perhaps, as a child of deceit,

She might by a true descent be untrue;

And Maud is as true as Maud is sweet:

Tho’ I fancy her sweetness only due

To the sweeter blood by the other side;

Her mother has been a thing complete,

However she came to be so allied.

And fair without, faithful within,

Maud to him is nothing akin:

Some peculiar mystic grace

Made her only the child of her mother,

And heap’d the whole inherited sin

On that huge scapegoat of the race,

All, all upon the brother.

IV.

Peace, angry spirit, and let him be!

Has not his sister smiled on me?

XIV.

I.

Maud has a garden of roses

And lilies fair on a lawn;

There she walks in her state

And tends upon bed and bower,

And thither I climb’d at dawn

And stood by her garden-gate;

A lion ramps at the top,

He is claspt by a passion-flower.

II.

Maud’s own little oak-room

(Which Maud, like a precious stone

Set in the heart of the carven gloom,

Lights with herself, when alone

She sits by her music and books

And her brother lingers late

With a roystering company) looks

Upon Maud’s own garden-gate:

And I thought as I stood, if a hand, as white

As ocean-foam in the moon, were laid

On the hasp of the window, and my Delight

Had a sudden desire, like a glorious ghost, to glide,

Like a beam of the seventh Heaven, down to my side,

There were but a step to be made.

III.

The fancy flatter’d my mind,

And again seem’d overbold;

Now I thought that she cared for me,

Now I thought she was kind

Only because she was cold.

IV.

I heard no sound where I stood

But the rivulet on from the lawn

Running down to my own dark wood;

Or the voice of the long sea-wave as it swell’d

Now and then in the dim-gray dawn;

But I look’d, and round, all round the house I beheld

The death-white curtain drawn;

Felt a horror over me creep,

Prickle my skin and catch my breath,

Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep,

Yet I shudder’d and thought like a fool of the sleep of death.

XV.

So dark a mind within me dwells,

And I make myself such evil cheer,

That if I be dear to some one else,

Then some one else may have much to fear;

But if I be dear to some one else,

Then I should be to myself more dear.

Shall I not take care of all that I think,

Yea ev’n of wretched meat and drink,

If I be dear,

If I be dear to some one else.

XVI.

I.

This lump of earth has left his estate

The lighter by the loss of his weight;

And so that he find what he went to seek,

And fulsome Pleasure clog him, and drown

His heart in the gross mud-honey of town,

He may stay for a year who has gone for a week:

But this is the day when I must speak,

And I see my Oread coming down,

O this is the day!

O beautiful creature, what am I

That I dare to look her way;

Think I may hold dominion sweet,

Lord of the pulse that is lord of her breast,

And dream of her beauty with tender dread,

From the delicate Arab arch of her feet

To the grace that, bright and light as the crest

Of a peacock, sits on her shining head,

And she knows it not: O, if she knew it,

To know her beauty might half undo it.

I know it the one bright thing to save

My yet young life in the wilds of Time,

Perhaps from madness, perhaps from crime,

Perhaps from a selfish grave.

II.

What, if she be fasten’d to this fool lord,

Dare I bid her abide by her word?

Should I love her so well if she

Had given her word to a thing so low?

Shall I love her as well if she

Can break her word were it even for me?

I trust that it is not so.

III.

Catch not my breath, O clamorous heart,

Let not my tongue be a thrall to my eye,

For I must tell her before we part,

I must tell her, or die.

XVII.

Go not, happy day,

From the shining fields

Go not, happy day,

Till the maiden yields.

Rosy is the West,

Rosy is the South,

Roses are her cheeks,

And a rose her mouth

When the happy Yes

Falters from her lips,

Pass and blush the news

Over glowing ships;

Over blowing seas,

Over seas at rest,

Pass the happy news,

Blush it thro’ the West;

Till the red man dance

By his red cedar-tree,

And the red man’s babe

Leap, beyond the sea.

Blush from West to East,

Blush from East to West,

Till the West is East,

Blush it thro’ the West.

Rosy is the West,

Rosy is the South,

Roses are her cheeks,

And a rose her mouth.

XVIII.

I.

I have led her home, my love, my only friend.

There is none like her, none.

And never yet so warmly ran my blood

And sweetly, on and on

Calming itself to the long-wish’d-for end,

Full to the banks, close on the promised good.

II.

None like her, none.

Just now the dry-tongued laurels’ pattering talk

Seem’d her light foot along the garden walk,

And shook my heart to think she comes once more;

But even then I heard her close the door,

The gates of Heaven are closed, and she is gone.

III.

There is none like her, none.

Nor will be when our summers have deceased.

O, art thou sighing for Lebanon

In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East,

Sighing for Lebanon,

Dark cedar, tho’ thy limbs have here increased,

Upon a pastoral slope as fair,

And looking to the South, and fed

With honey’d rain and delicate air,

And haunted by the starry head

Of her whose gentle will has changed my fate,

And made my life a perfumed altar-flame;

And over whom thy darkness must have spread

With such delight as theirs of old, thy great

Forefathers of the thornless garden, there

Shadowing the snow-limb’d Eve from whom she came.

IV.

Here will I lie, while these long branches sway,

And you fair stars that crown a happy day

Go in and out as if at merry play,

Who am no more so all forlorn,

As when it seem’d far better to be born

To labour and the mattock-harden’d hand,

Than nursed at ease and brought to understand

A sad astrology, the boundless plan

That makes you tyrants in your iron skies,

Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,

Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand

His nothingness into man.

V.

But now shine on, and what care I,

Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl

The countercharm of space and hollow sky,

And do accept my madness, and would die

To save from some slight shame one simple girl.

VI.

Would die; for sullen-seeming Death may give

More life to Love than is or ever was

In our low world, where yet ‘tis sweet to live.

Let no one ask me how it came to pass;

It seems that I am happy, that to me

A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass,

A purer sapphire melts into the sea.

VII.

Not die; but live a life of truest breath,

And teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs.

O, why should Love, like men in drinking-songs,

Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death?

Make answer, Maud my bliss,

Maud made my Maud by that long loving kiss,

Life of my life, wilt thou not answer this?

‘The dusky strand of Death inwoven here

With dear Love’s tie, makes Love himself more dear.’

VIII.

Is that enchanted moan only the swell

Of the long waves that roll in yonder bay?

And hark the clock within, the silver knell

Of twelve sweet hours that past in bridal white,

And died to live, long as my pulses play;

But now by this my love has closed her sight

And given false death her hand, and stol’n away

To dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell

Among the fragments of the golden day.

May nothing there her maiden grace affright!

Dear heart, I feel with thee the drowsy spell.

My bride to be, my evermore delight,

My own heart’s heart, my ownest own, farewell;

It is but for a little space I go:

And ye meanwhile far over moor and fell

Beat to the noiseless music of the night!

Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow

Of your soft splendours that you look so bright?

I have climb’d nearer out of lonely Hell.

Beat, happy stars, timing with things below,

Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell,

Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe

That seems to draw — but it shall not be so:

Let all be well, be well.

XIX.

I.

Her brother is coming back to-night,

Breaking up my dream of delight.

II.

My dream? do I dream of bliss?

I have walk’d awake with Truth.

O when did a morning shine

So rich in atonement as this

For my dark-dawning youth,

Darken’d watching a mother decline

And that dead man at her heart and mine:

For who was left to watch her but I?

Yet so did I let my freshness die.

III.

I trust that I did not talk

To gentle Maud in our walk

(For often in lonely wanderings

I have cursed him even to lifeless things)

But I trust that I did not talk,

Not touch on her father’s sin:

I am sure I did but speak

Of my mother’s faded cheek

When it slowly grew so thin,

That I felt she was slowly dying

Vext with lawyers and harass’d with debt:

For how often I caught her with eyes all wet,

Shaking her head at her son and sighing

A world of trouble within!

IV.

And Maud too, Maud was moved

To speak of the mother she loved

As one scarce less forlorn,

Dying abroad and it seems apart

From him who had ceased to share her heart,

And ever mourning over the feud,

The household Fury sprinkled with blood

By which our houses are torn:

How strange was what she said,

When only Maud and the brother

Hung over her dying bed —

That Maud’s dark father and mine

Had bound us one to the other,

Betrothed us over their wine,

On the day when Maud was born;

Seal’d her mine from her first sweet breath.

Mine, mine by a right, from birth till death.

Mine, mine — our fathers have sworn.

V.

But the true blood spilt had in it a heat

To dissolve the precious seal on a bond,

That, if left uncancell’d, had been so sweet:

And none of us thought of a something beyond,

A desire that awoke in the heart of the child,

As it were a duty done to the tomb,

To be friends for her sake, to be reconciled;

And I was cursing them and my doom,

And letting a dangerous thought run wild

While often abroad in the fragrant gloom

Of foreign churches — I see her there,

Bright English lily, breathing a prayer

To be friends, to be reconciled!

VI.

But then what a flint is he!

Abroad, at Florence, at Rome,

I find whenever she touch’d on me

This brother had laugh’d her down,

And at last, when each came home,

He had darken’d into a frown,

Chid her, and forbid her to speak

To me, her friend of the years before;

And this was what had redden’d her cheek

When I bow’d to her on the moor.

VII.

Yet Maud, altho’ not blind

To the faults of his heart and mind,

I see she cannot but love him,

And says he is rough but kind,

And wishes me to approve him,

And tells me, when she lay

Sick once, with a fear of worse,

That he left his wine and horses and play,

Sat with her, read to her, night and day,

And tended her like a nurse.

VIII.

Kind? but the deathbed desire

Spurn’d by this heir of the liar —

Rough but kind? yet I know

He has plotted against me in this,

That he plots against me still.

Kind to Maud? that were not amiss.

Well, rough but kind; why let it be so:

For shall not Maud have her will?

IX.

For, Maud, so tender and true,

As long as my life endures

I feel I shall owe you a debt,

That I never can hope to pay;

And if ever I should forget

That I owe this debt to you

And for your sweet sake to yours;

O then, what then shall I say? —

If ever I should forget,

May God make me more wretched

Than ever I have been yet!

X.

So now I have sworn to bury

All this dead body of hate,

I feel so free and so clear

By the loss of that dead weight,

That I should grow light-headed, I fear,

Fantastically merry;

But that her brother comes, like a blight

On my fresh hope, to the Hall to-night.

XX.

I.

Strange, that I felt so gay,

Strange, that I tried to-day

To beguile her melancholy;

The Sultan, as we name him, —

She did not wish to blame him —

But he vext her and perplext her

With his worldly talk and folly:

Was it gentle to reprove her

For stealing out of view

From a little lazy lover

Who but claims her as his due?

Or for chilling his caresses

By the coldness of her manners,

Nay, the plainness of her dresses?

Now I know her but in two,

Nor can pronounce upon it

If one should ask me whether

The habit, hat, and feather,

Or the frock and gipsy bonnet

Be the neater and completer;

For nothing can be sweeter

Than maiden Maud in either.

II.

But to-morrow, if we live,

Our ponderous squire will give

A grand political dinner

To half the squirelings near;

And Maud will wear her jewels,

And the bird of prey will hover,

And the titmouse hope to win her

With his chirrup at her ear.

III.

A grand political dinner

To the men of many acres,

A gathering of the Tory,

A dinner and then a dance

For the maids and marriage-makers,

And every eye but mine will glance

At Maud in all her glory.

IV.

For I am not invited,

But, with the Sultan’s pardon,

I am all as well delighted,

For I know her own rose-garden,

And mean to linger in it

Till the dancing will be over;

And then, oh then, come out to me

For a minute, but for a minute,

Come out to your own true lover,

That your true lover may see

Your glory also, and render

All homage to his own darling,

Queen Maud in all her splendour.

XXI.

Rivulet crossing my ground,

And bringing me down from the Hall

This garden-rose that I found,

Forgetful of Maud and me,

And lost in trouble and moving round

Here at the head of a tinkling fall,

And trying to pass to the sea;

O Rivulet, born at the Hall,

My Maud has sent it by thee

(If I read her sweet will right)

On a blushing mission to me,

Saying in odour and colour, ‘Ah, be

Among the roses to-night.’

XXII.

I.

Come into the garden, Maud,

For the black bat, night, has flown,

Come into the garden, Maud,

I am here at the gate alone;

And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,

And the musk of the rose is blown.

II.

For a breeze of morning moves,

And the planet of Love is on high,

Beginning to faint in the light that she loves

On a bed of daffodil sky,

To faint in the light of the sun she loves,

To faint in his light, and to die.

III.

All night have the roses heard

The flute, violin, bassoon;

All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d

To the dancers dancing in tune;

Till a silence fell with the waking bird,

And a hush with the setting moon.

IV.

I said to the lily, ‘There is but one

With whom she has heart to be gay.

When will the dancers leave her alone?

She is weary of dance and play.’

Now half to the setting moon are gone,

And half to the rising day;

Low on the sand and loud on the stone

The last wheel echoes away.

V.

I said to the rose, ‘The brief night goes

In babble and revel and wine.

O young lord-lover, what sighs are those,

For one that will never be thine?

But mine, but mine,’ so I sware to the rose,

‘For ever and ever, mine.’

VI.

And the soul of the rose went into my blood,

As the music clash’d in the hall;

And long by the garden lake I stood,

For I heard your rivulet fall

From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood,

Our wood, that is dearer than all;

VII.

From the meadow your walks have left so sweet

That whenever a March-wind sighs

He sets the jewel-print of your feet

In violets blue as your eyes,

To the woody hollows in which we meet

And the valleys of Paradise.

VIII.

The slender acacia would not shake

One long milk-bloom on the tree;

The white lake-blossom fell into the lake

As the pimpernel dozed on the lea;

But the rose was awake all night for your sake,

Knowing your promise to me;

The lilies and roses were all awake,

They sigh’d for the dawn and thee.

IX.

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,

Come hither, the dances are done,

In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,

Queen lily and rose in one;

Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,

To the flowers, and be their sun.

X.

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

XI.

She is coming, my own, my sweet;

Were it ever so airy a tread,

My heart would hear her and beat,

Were it earth in an earthy bed;

My dust would hear her and beat,

Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble under her feet,

And blossom in purple and red.

Maud: Part II

I.

I.

‘The fault was mine, the fault was mine’ —

Why am I sitting here so stunn’d and still,

Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill? —

It is this guilty hand! —

And there rises ever a passionate cry

From underneath in the darkening land —

What is it, that has been done?

O dawn of Eden bright over earth and sky,

The fires of Hell brake out of thy rising sun,

The fires of Hell and of Hate;

For she, sweet soul, had hardly spoken a word,

When her brother ran in his rage to the gate,

He came with the babe-faced lord;

Heap’d on her terms of disgrace,

And while she wept, and I strove to be cool,

He fiercely gave me the lie,

Till I with as fierce an anger spoke,

And he struck me, madman, over the face,

Struck me before the languid fool,

Who was gaping and grinning by:

Struck for himself an evil stroke;

Wrought for his house an irredeemable woe;

For front to front in an hour we stood,

And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke

From the red-ribb’d hollow behind the wood,

And thunder’d up into Heaven the Christless code,

That must have life for a blow.

Ever and ever afresh they seem’d to grow.

Was it he lay there with a fading eye?

‘The fault was mine,’ he whisper’d, ‘fly!’

Then glided out of the joyous wood

The ghastly Wraith of one that I know;

And there rang on a sudden a passionate cry,

A cry for a brother’s blood:

It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die.

II.

Is it gone? my pulses beat —

What was it? a lying trick of the brain?

Yet I thought I saw her stand,

A shadow there at my feet,

High over the shadowy land.

It is gone; and the heavens fall in a gentle rain,

When they should burst and drown with deluging storms

The feeble vassals of wine and anger and lust,

The little hearts that know not how to forgive:

Arise, my God, and strike, for we hold Thee just,

Strike dead the whole weak race of venomous worms,

That sting each other here in the dust;

We are not worthy to live.

II.

I.

See what a lovely shell,

Small and pure as a pearl,

Lying close to my foot,

Frail, but a work divine,

Made so fairily well

With delicate spire and whorl,

How exquisitely minute,

A miracle of design!

II.

What is it? a learned man

Could give it a clumsy name.

Let him name it who can,

The beauty would be the same.

III.

The tiny cell is forlorn,

Void of the little living will

That made it stir on the shore.

Did he stand at the diamond door

Of his house in a rainbow frill?

Did he push, when he was uncurl’d,

A golden foot or a fairy horn

Thro’ his dim water-world?

IV.

Slight, to he crush’d with a tap

Of my finger-nail on the sand,

Small, but a work divine,

Frail, but of force to withstand,

Year upon year, the shock

Of cataract seas that snap

The three decker’s oaken spine

Athwart the ledges of rock,

Here on the Breton strand!

V.

Breton, not Briton; here

Like a shipwreck’d man on a coast

Of ancient fable and fear —

Plagued with a flitting to and fro,

A disease, a hard mechanic ghost

That never came from on high

Nor ever arose from below,

But only moves with the moving eye,

Flying along the land and the main —

Why should it look like Maud?

Am I to be overawed

By what I cannot but know

Is a juggle born of the brain?

VI.

Back from the Breton coast,

Sick of a nameless fear,

Back to the dark sea-line

Looking, thinking of all I have lost;

An old song vexes my ear;

But that of Lamech is mine.

VII.

For years, a measureless ill,

For years, for ever, to part —

But she, she would love me still;

And as long, O God, as she

Have a grain of love for me,

So long, no doubt, no doubt,

Shall I nurse in my dark heart,

However weary, a spark of will

Not to be trampled out.

VIII.

Strange, that the mind, when fraught

With a passion so intense

One would think that it well

Might drown all life in the eye, —

That it should, by being so overwrought,

Suddenly strike on a sharper sense

For a shell, or a flower, little things

Which else would have been past by!

And now I remember, I,

When he lay dying there,

I noticed one of his many rings

(For he had many, poor worm) and thought

It is his mother’s hair.

IX.

Who knows if he be dead?

Whether I need have fled?

Am I guilty of blood?

However this may be,

Comfort her, comfort her, all things good,

While I am over the sea!

Let me and my passionate love go by,

But speak to her all things holy and high,

Whatever happen to me!

Me and my harmful love go by;

But come to her waking, find her asleep,

Powers of the height, Powers of the deep,

And comfort her tho’ I die.

III.

Courage, poor heart of stone!

I will not ask thee why

Thou canst not understand

That thou art left for ever alone:

Courage, poor stupid heart of stone. —

Or if I ask thee why,

Care not thou to reply:

She is but dead, and the time is at hand

When thou shalt more than die.

IV.

I.

O that ‘twere possible

After long grief and pain

To find the arms of my true love

Round me once again!

II.

When I was wont to meet her

In the silent woody places

By the home that gave me birth,

We stood tranced in long embraces

Mixt with kisses sweeter sweeter

Than anything on earth.

III.

A shadow flits before me,

Not thou, but like to thee:

Ah Christ, that it were possible

For one short hour to see

The souls we loved, that they might tell us

What and where they be.

IV.

It leads me forth at evening,

It lightly winds and steals

In a cold white robe before me,

When all my spirit reels

At the shouts, the leagues of lights,

And the roaring of the wheels.

V.

Half the night I waste in sighs,

Half in dreams I sorrow after

The delight of early skies;

In a wakeful doze I sorrow

For the hand, the lips, the eyes,

For the meeting of the morrow,

The delight of happy laughter,

The delight of low replies.

VI.

‘Tis a morning pure and sweet,

And a dewy splendour falls

On the little flower that clings

To the turrets and the walls;

‘Tis a morning pure and sweet,

And the light and shadow fleet;

She is walking in the meadow,

And the woodland echo rings;

In a moment we shall meet;

She is singing in the meadow

And the rivulet at her feet

Ripples on in light and shadow

To the ballad that she sings.

VII.

Do I hear her sing as of old,

My bird with the shining head,

My own dove with the tender eye?

But there rings on a sudden a passionate cry,

There is some one dying or dead,

And a sullen thunder is roll’d;

For a tumult shakes the city,

And I wake, my dream is fled;

In the shuddering dawn, behold,

Without knowledge, without pity,

By the curtains of my bed

That abiding phantom cold.

VIII.

Get thee hence, nor come again,

Mix not memory with doubt,

Pass, thou deathlike type of pain,

Pass and cease to move about!

‘Tis the blot upon the brain

That will show itself without.

IX.

Then I rise, the eavedrops fall,

And the yellow vapours choke

The great city sounding wide;

The day comes, a dull red ball

Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke

On the misty river-tide.

X.

Thro’ the hubbub of the market

I steal, a wasted frame,

It crosses here, it crosses there,

Thro’ all that crowd confused and loud,

The shadow still the same;

And on my heavy eyelids

My anguish hangs like shame.

XI.

Alas for her that met me,

That heard me softly call,

Came glimmering thro’ the laurels

At the quiet evenfall,

In the garden by the turrets

Of the old manorial hall.

XII.

Would the happy spirit descend,

From the realms of light and song,

In the chamber or the street,

As she looks among the blest,

Should I fear to greet my friend

Or to say ‘Forgive the wrong,’

Or to ask her, ‘Take me, sweet,

To the regions of thy rest’?

XIII.

But the broad light glares and beats,

And the shadow flits and fleets

And will not let me be;

And I loathe the squares and streets,

And the faces that one meets,

Hearts with no love for me:

Always I long to creep

Into some still cavern deep,

There to weep, and weep, and weep

My whole soul out to thee.

V.

I.

Dead, long dead,

Long dead!

And my heart is a handful of dust,

And the wheels go over my head,

And my bones are shaken with pain,

For into a shallow grave they are thrust,

Only a yard beneath the street,

And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,

The hoofs of the horses beat,

Beat into my scalp and my brain,

With never an end to the stream of passing feet,

Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying,

Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter,

And here beneath it is all as bad,

For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;

To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?

But up and down and to and fro,

Ever about me the dead men go;

And then to hear a dead man chatter

Is enough to drive one mad.

II.

Wretchedest age, since Time began,

They cannot even bury a man;

And tho’ we paid our tithes in the days that are gone,

Not a bell was rung, not a prayer was read;

It is that which makes us loud in the world of the dead;

There is none that does his work, not one;

A touch of their office might have sufficed,

But the churchmen fain would kill their church,

As the churches have kill’d their Christ.

III.

See, there is one of us sobbing,

No limit to his distress;

And another, a lord of all things, praying

To his own great self, as I guess;

And another, a statesman there, betraying

His party-secret, fool, to the press;

And yonder a vile physician, blabbing

The case of his patient — all for what?

To tickle the maggot born in an empty head,

And wheedle a world that loves him not,

For it is but a world of the dead.

IV.

Nothing but idiot gabble!

For the prophecy given of old

And then not understood,

Has come to pass as foretold;

Not let any man think for the public good,

But babble, merely for babble.

For I never whisper’d a private affair

Within the hearing of cat or mouse,

No, not to myself in the closet alone,

But I heard it shouted at once from the top of the house;

Everything came to be known.

Who told him we were there?

V.

Not that gray old wolf, for he came not back

From the wilderness, full of wolves, where he used to lie;

He has gather’d the bones for his o’ergrown whelp to crack;

Crack them now for yourself, and howl, and die.

VI.

Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,

And curse me the British vermin, the rat;

I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship,

But I know that he lies and listens mute

In an ancient mansion’s crannies and holes:

Arsenic, arsenic, sure, would do it,

Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls!

It is all used up for that.

VII.

Tell him now: she is standing here at my head;

Not beautiful now, not even kind;

He may take her now; for she never speaks her mind,

But is ever the one thing silent here.

She is not of us, as I divine;

She comes from another stiller world of the dead,

Stiller, not fairer than mine.

VIII.

But I know where a garden grows,

Fairer than aught in the world beside,

All made up of the lily and rose

That blow by night, when the season is good,

To the sound of dancing music and flutes:

It is only flowers, they had no fruits,

And I almost fear they are not roses, but blood;

For the keeper was one, so full of pride,

He linkt a dead man there to a spectral bride;

For he, if he had not been a Sultan of brutes,

Would he have that hole in his side?

IX.

But what will the old man say?

He laid a cruel snare in a pit

To catch a friend of mine one stormy day;

Yet now I could even weep to think of it;

For what will the old man say

When he comes to the second corpse in the pit?

X.

Friend, to be struck by the public foe,

Then to strike him and lay him low,

That were a public merit, far,

Whatever the Quaker holds, from sin;

But the red life spilt for a private blow —

I swear to you, lawful and lawless war

Are scarcely even akin.

XI.

O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?

Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,

Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?

Maybe still I am but half-dead;

Then I cannot be wholly dumb;

I will cry to the steps above my head

And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come

To bury me, bury me

Deeper, ever so little deeper.

Maud: Part III

VI.

I.

My life has crept so long on a broken wing

Thro’ cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear,

That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing:

My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year

When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs,

And the shining daffodil dies, and the Charioteer

And starry Gemini hang like glorious crowns

Over Orion’s grave low down in the west,

That like a silent lightning under the stars

She seem’d to divide in a dream from a band of the blest,

And spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars —

‘And in that hope, dear soul, let trouble have rest,

Knowing I tarry for thee,’ and pointed to Mars

As he glow’d like a ruddy shield on the Lion’s breast.

II.

And it was but a dream, yet it yielded a dear delight

To have look’d, tho’ but in a dream, upon eyes so fair,

That had been in a weary world my one thing bright;

And it was but a dream, yet it lighten’d my despair

When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right,

That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease,

The glory of manhood stand on his ancient height,

Nor Britain’s one sole God be the millionaire:

No more shall commerce be all in all, and Peace

Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note,

And watch her harvest ripen, her herd increase,

Nor the cannon-bullet rust on a slothful shore,

And the cobweb woven across the cannon’s throat

Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more.

III.

And as months ran on and rumour of battle grew,

‘It is time, it is time, O passionate heart,’ said I

(For I cleaved to a cause that I felt to be pure and true),

‘It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye,

That old hysterical mock-disease should die.’

And I stood on a giant deck and mix’d my breath

With a loyal people shouting a battle cry,

Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly

Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death.

IV.

Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims

Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,

And a love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,

Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;

And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!

Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep

For those that are crush’d in the clash of jarring claims,

Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant liar;

And many a darkness into the light shall leap,

And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,

And noble thought be freër under the sun,

And the heart of a people beat with one desire;

For the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done,

And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,

And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames

The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

V.

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,

We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,

And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;

It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;

I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,

I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.

The Brook

HERE, by this brook, we parted; I to the East

And he for Italy — too late — too late:

One whom the strong sons of the world despise;

For lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share,

And mellow metres more than cent for cent;

Nor could he understand how money breeds,

Thought it a dead thing; yet himself could make

The thing that is not as the thing that is.

O had he lived! In our schoolbooks we say,

Of those that held their heads above the crowd,

They flourish’d then or then; but life in him

Could scarce be said to flourish, only touch’d

On such a time as goes before the leaf,

When all the wood stands in a mist of green,

And nothing perfect: yet the brook he loved,

For which, in branding summers of Bengal,

Or ev’n the sweet half-English Neilgherry air

I panted, seems, as I re-listen to it,

Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,

To me that loved him; for ‘O brook,’ he says,

‘O babbling brook,’ says Edmund in his rhyme,

‘Whence come you?’ and the brook, why not? replies.

I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally,

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,

Or slip between the ridges,

By twenty thorps, a little town,

And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip’s farm I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

‘Poor lad, he died at Florence, quite worn out,

Travelling to Naples. There is Darnley bridge,

It has more ivy; there the river; and there

Stands Philip’s farm where brook and river meet.

I chatter over stony ways,

In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,

I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret

By many a field and fallow,

And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

‘But Philip chatter’d more than brook or bird;

Old Philip; all about the fields you caught

His weary daylong chirping, like the dry

High-elbow’d grigs that leap in summer grass.

I wind about, and in and out,

With here a blossom sailing,

And here and there a lusty trout,

And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake

Upon me, as I travel

With many a silvery waterbreak

Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

‘O darling Katie Willows, his one child!

A maiden of our century, yet most meek;

A daughter of our meadows, yet not coarse;

Straight, but as lissome as a hazel wand;

Her eyes a bashful azure, and her hair

In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell

Divides threefold to show the fruit within.

‘Sweet Katie, once I did her a good turn,

Her and her far-off cousin and betrothed,

James Willows, of one name and heart with her.

For here I came, twenty years back — the week

Before I parted with poor Edmund; crost

By that old bridge which, half in ruins then,

Still makes a hoary eyebrow for the gleam

Beyond it, where the waters marry — crost,

Whistling a random bar of Bonny Doon,

And push’d at Philip’s garden-gate. The gate,

Half-parted from a weak and scolding hinge,

Stuck; and he clamour’d from a casement, “Run”

To Katie somewhere in the walks below,

“Run, Katie!” Katie never ran: she moved

To meet me, winding under woodbine bowers,

A little flutter’d, with her eyelids down,

Fresh apple-blossom, blushing for a boon.

‘What was it? less of sentiment than sense

Had Katie; not illiterate; nor of those

Who dabbling in the fount of fictive tears,

And nursed by mealy-mouth’d philanthropies,

Divorce the Feeling from her mate the Deed.

‘She told me. She and James had quarrell’d. Why?

What cause of quarrel? None, she said, no cause;

James had no cause: but when I prest the cause,

I learnt that James had flickering jealousies

Which anger’d her. Who anger’d James? I said.

But Katie snatch’d her eyes at once from mine,

And sketching with her slender pointed foot

Some figure like a wizard pentagram

On garden gravel, let my query pass

Unclaim’d, in flushing silence, till I ask’d

If James were coming. “Coming every day,”

She answer’d, “ever longing to explain,

But evermore her father came across

With some long-winded tale, and broke him short;

And James departed vext with him and her.”

How could I help her? “Would I — was it wrong?”

(Claspt hands and that petitionary grace

Of sweet seventeen subdued me ere she spoke)

“O would I take her father for one hour,

For one half-hour, and let him talk to me!”

And even while she spoke, I saw where James

Made toward us, like a wader in the surf,

Beyond the brook, waist-deep in meadow-sweet.

‘O Katie, what I suffer’d for your sake!

For in I went, and call’d old Philip out

To show the farm: full willingly he rose

He led me thro’ the short sweet-smelling lanes

Of his wheat-suburb, babbling as he went.

He praised his land, his horses, his machines;

He praised his ploughs, his cows, his hogs, his dogs;

He praised his hens, his geese, his guinea-hens;

His pigeons, who in session on their roofs

Approved him, bowing at their own deserts:

Then from the plaintive mother’s teat he took

Her blind and shuddering puppies, naming each,

And naming those, his friends, for whom they were:

Then crost the common into Darnley chase

To show Sir Arthur’s deer. In copse and fern

Twinkled the innumerable ear and tail.

Then, seated on a serpent-rooted beech,

He pointed out a pasturing colt, and said:

“That was the four-year-old I sold the Squire.”

And there he told a long long-winded tale

Of how the Squire had seen the colt at grass,

And how it was the thing his daughter wish’d,

And how he sent the bailiff to the farm

To learn the price, and what the price he ask’d,

And how the bailiff swore that he was mad,

But he stood firm; and so the matter hung;

He gave them line: and five days after that

He met the bailiff at the Golden Fleece,

Who then and there had offer’d something more,

But he stood firm; and so the matter hung;

He knew the man; the colt would fetch its price;

He gave them line: and how by chance at last

(It might be May or April, he forgot,

The last of April or the first of May)

He found the bailiff riding by the farm,

And, talking from the point, he drew him in,

And there he mellow’d all his heart with ale,

Until they closed a bargain, hand in hand.

‘Then, while I breathed in sight of haven, he,

Poor fellow, could he help it? recommenced,

And ran thro’ all the coltish chronicle,

Wild Will, Black Bess, Tantivy, Tallyho,

Reform, White Rose, Bellerophon, the Jilt,

Arbaces, and Phenomenon, and the rest,

Till, not to die a listener, I arose,

And with me Philip, talking still; and so

We turn’d our foreheads from the falling sun,

And following our own shadows thrice as long

As when they follow’d us from Philip’s door,

Arrived, and found the sun of sweet content

Re-risen in Katie’s eyes, and all things well.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,

I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots

That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,

Among my skimming swallows;

I make the netted sunbeam dance

Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and star:

In brambly wildernesses:

I linger by my shingly bars;

I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.

Yes, men may come and go; and these are gone,

All gone. My dearest brother, Edmund, sleeps,

Not by the well-known stream and rustic spire,

But unfamiliar Arno, and the dome

Of Brunelleschi; sleeps in peace: and he,

Poor Philip, of all his lavish waste of words

Remains the lean P. W. on his tomb:

I scraped the lichen from it: Katie walks

By the long wash of Australasian seas

Far off, and holds her head to other stars,

And breathes in April-autumns. All are gone.’

So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a stile

In the long hedge, and rolling in his mind

Old waifs of rhyme, and bowing o’er the brook

A tonsured head in middle age forlorn,

Mused, and was mute. On a sudden a low breath

Of tender air made tremble in the hedge

The fragile bindweed-bells and briony rings;

And he look’d up. There stood a maiden near,

Waiting to pass. In much amaze he stared

On eyes a bashful azure, and on hair

In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell

Divides threefold to show the fruit within:

Then, wondering, ask’d her ‘Are you from the farm?’

‘Yes’ answer’d she. ‘Pray stay a little pardon me;

What do they call you?’ ‘Katie.’ ‘That were strange.

What surname?’ ‘Willows.’ ‘No!’ ‘That is my name.’

‘Indeed!’ and here he look’d so self-perplext,

That Katie laugh’d, and laughing blush’d, till he

Laugh’d also, but as one before he wakes,

Who feels a glimmering strangeness in his dream.

Then looking at her; ‘Too happy, fresh and fair,

Too fresh and fair in our sad world’s best bloom,

To be the ghost of one who bore your name

About these meadows, twenty years ago.’

‘Have you not heard?’ said Katie, ‘we came back.

We bought the farm we tenanted before.

Am I so like her? so they said on board.

Sir, if you knew her in her English days,

My mother, as it seems you did, the days

That most she loves to talk of, come with me.

My brother James is in the harvest-field

But she — you will be welcome — O, come in!’

The Letters

Still on the tower stood the vane,

A black yew gloomed the stagnant air,

I peered athwart the chancel pane

And saw the altar cold and bare.

A clog of lead was round my feet,

A band of pain across my brow;

“Cold altar, Heaven and earth shall meet

Before you hear my marriage vow.”

I turned and hummed a bitter song

That mocked the wholesome human heart,

And then we met in wrath and wrong,

We met, but only met to part.

Full cold my greeting was and dry;

She faintly smiled, she hardly moved;

I saw with half-unconscious eye

She wore the colours I approved.

She took the little ivory chest,

With half a sigh she turned the key,

Then raised her head with lips comprest,

And gave my letters back to me.

And gave the trinkets and the rings,

My gifts, when gifts of mine could please;

As looks a father on the things

Of his dead son, I looked on these.

She told me all her friends had said;

I raged against the public liar;

She talked as if her love were dead,

But in my words were seeds of fire.

“No more of love; your sex is known:

I never will be twice deceived.

Henceforth I trust the man alone,

The woman cannot be believed.

Through slander, meanest spawn of Hell -

And woman’s slander is the worst,

And you, whom once I loved so well,

Through you, my life will be accurst.”

I spoke with heart, and heat and force,

I shook her breast with vague alarms -

Like torrents from a mountain’s source

We rushed into each other’s arms.

We parted: sweetly gleamed the stars,

And sweet the vapour-braided blue,

Low breezes fanned the belfry bars,

As homeward by the church I drew.

The very graves appeared to smile,

So fresh they rose in shadowed swells;

“Dark porch,” I said, “and silent aisle,

There comes a sound of marriage bells.”

The Daisy

Written at Edinburgh

O LOVE, what hours were thine and mine,

In lands of palm and southern pine;

In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,

Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.

What Roman strength Turbia show’d

In ruin, by the mountain road;

How like a gem, beneath, the city

Of little Monaco, basking, glow’d.

How richly down the rocky dell

The torrent vineyard streaming fell

To meet the sun and sunny waters,

That only heaved with a summer swell.

What slender campanili grew

By bays, the peacock’s neck in hue;

Where, here and there, on sandy beaches

A milky-bell’d amaryllis blew.

How young Columbus seem’d to rove,

Yet present in his natal grove,

Now watching high on mountain cornice,

And steering, now, from a purple cove,

Now pacing mute by ocean’s rim;

Till, in a narrow street and dim,

I stay’d the wheels at Cogoletto,

And drank, and loyally drank to him.

Nor knew we well what pleased us most,

Not the clipt palm of which they boast;

But distant colour, happy hamlet,

A moulder’d citadel on the coast,

Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen

A light amid its olives green;

Or olive-hoary cape in ocean;

Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,

Where oleanders flush’d the bed

Of silent torrents, gravel-spread;

And, crossing, oft we saw the glisten

Of ice, far up on a mountain head.

We loved that hall, tho’ white and cold,

Those niched shapes of noble mould,

A princely people’s awful princes,

The grave, severe Genovese of old.

At Florence too what golden hours,

In those long galleries, were ours;

What drives about the fresh Cascinè

Or walks in Boboli’s ducal bowers.

In bright vignettes, and each complete,

Of tower or duomo, sunny-sweet,

Or palace, how the city glitter’d,

Thro’ cypress avenues, at our feet.

But when we crost the Lombard plain

Remember what a plague of rain;

Of rain at Reggio, rain at Parma;

At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain.

And stern and sad (so rare the smiles

Of sunlight) look’d the Lombard piles;

Porch-pillars on the lion resting,

And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles.

O Milan, O the chanting quires,

The giant windows’ blazon’d fires,

The height, the space, the gloom, the glory!

A mount of marble, a hundred spires!

I climb’d the roofs at break of day;

Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.

I stood among the silent statues,

And statued pinnacles, mute as they.

How faintly-flush’d, how phantom-fair,

Was Monte Rosa, hanging there

A thousand shadowy-pencill’d valleys

And snowy dells in a golden air.

Remember how we came at last

To Como; shower and storm and blast

Had blown the lake beyond his limit,

And all was flooded; and how we past

From Como, when the light was gray,

And in my head, for half the day,

The rich Virgilian rustic measure

Of Lari Maxume, all the way,

Like ballad-burthen music, kept,

As on The Lariano crept

To that fair port below the castle

Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept;

Or hardly slept, but watch’d awake

A cypress in the moonlight shake,

The moonlight touching o’er a terrace

One tall Agavè above the lake.

What more? we took our last adieu,

And up the snowy Splugen drew,

But ere we reach’d the highest summit

I pluck’d a daisy, I gave it you.

It told of England then to me,

And now it tells of Italy.

O love, we two shall go no longer

To lands of summer across the sea;

So dear a life your arms enfold

Whose crying is a cry for gold:

Yet here to-night in this dark city,

When ill and weary, alone and cold,

I found, tho’ crush’d to hard and dry,

This nurseling of another sky

Still in the little book you lent me,

And where you tenderly laid it by:

And I forgot the clouded Forth,

The gloom that saddens Heaven and Earth,

The bitter east, the misty summer

And gray metropolis of the North.

Perchance, to lull the throbs of pain,

Perchance, to charm a vacant brain,

Perchance, to dream you still beside me,

My fancy fled to the South again.

To the Rev. F.D. Maurice

COME, when no graver cares employ,

Godfather, come and see your boy:

Your presence will be sun in winter,

Making the little one leap for joy.

For, being of that honest few,

Who give the Fiend himself his due,

Should eighty-thousand college-councils

Thunder ‘Anathema,’ friend, at you;

Should all our churchmen foam in spite

At you, so careful of the right,

Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome

(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight;

Where, far from noise and smoke of town,

I watch the twilight falling brown

All round a careless-order’d garden

Close to the ridge of a noble down.

You’ll have no scandal while you dine,

But honest talk and wholesome wine,

And only hear the magpie gossip

Garrulous under a roof of pine:

For groves of pine on either hand,

To break the blast of winter, stand;

And further on, the hoary Channel

Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand;

Where, if below the milky steep

Some ship of battle slowly creep,

And on thro’ zones of light and shadow

Glimmer away to the lonely deep,

We might discuss the Northern sin

Which made a selfish war begin;

Dispute the claims, arrange the chances;

Emperor, Ottoman, which shall win:

Or whether war’s avenging rod

Shall lash all Europe into blood;

Till you should turn to dearer matters,

Dear to the man that is dear to God;

How best to help the slender store,

How mend the dwellings, of the poor;

How gain in life, as life advances,

Valour and charity more and more.

Come, Maurice, come: the lawn as yet

Is hoar with rime, or spongy-wet;

But when the wreath of March has blossom’d,

Crocus, anemone, violet,

Or later, pay one visit here,

For those are few we hold as dear;

Nor pay but one, but come for many,

Many and many a happy year.

January, 1854.

Will

I.

O WELL for him whose will is strong!

He suffers, but he will not suffer long;

He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong:

For him nor moves the loud world’s random mock,

Nor all Calamity’s hugest waves confound,

Who seems a promontory of rock,

That, compass’d round with turbulent sound,

In middle ocean meets the surging shock,

Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crown’d.

II.

But ill for him who, bettering not with time,

Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,

And ever weaker grows thro’ acted crime,

Or seeming-genial venial fault,

Recurring and suggesting still!

He seems as one whose footsteps halt,

Toiling in immeasurable sand,

And o’er a weary sultry land,

Far beneath a blazing vault,

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,

The city sparkles like a grain of salt.

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington

I.

BURY the Great Duke

With an empire’s lamentation;

Let us bury the Great Duke

To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation;

Mourning when their leaders fall,

Warriors carry the warrior’s pall,

And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall.

II.

Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?

Here, in streaming London’s central roar.

Let the sound of those he wrought for,

And the feet of those he fought for,

Echo round his bones for evermore.

III.

Lead out the pageant: sad and slow,

As fits an universal woe,

Let the long, long procession go,

And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,

And let the mournful martial music blow;

The last great Englishman is low.

IV.

Mourn, for to us he seems the last,

Remembering all his greatness in the Past.

No more in soldier fashion will he greet

With lifted hand the gazer in the street.

O friends, our chief state-oracle is mute:

Mourn for the man of long-enduring blood,

The statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute,

Whole in himself, a common good.

Mourn for the man of amplest influence,

Yet clearest of ambitious crime,

Our greatest yet with least pretence,

Great in council and great in war,

Foremost captain of his time,

Rich in saving common-sense,

And, as the greatest only are,

In his simplicity sublime.

O good gray head which all men knew,

O voice from which their omens all men drew,

O iron nerve to true occasion true,

O fallen at length that tower of strength

Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew!

Such was he whom we deplore.

The long self-sacrifice of life is o’er.

The great World-victor’s victor will be seen no more.

V.

All is over and done:

Render thanks to the Giver,

England, for thy son.

Let the bell be toll’d.

Render thanks to the Giver,

And render him to the mould.

Under the cross of gold

That shines over city and river,

There he shall rest for ever

Among the wise and the bold.

Let the bell be toll’d,

And a reverent people behold

The towerwing car, the sable steeds.

Bright let it be with its blazon’d deeds,

Dark in its funeral fold.

Let the bell be toll’d,

And a deeper knell in the heart be knoll’d;

And the sound of the sorrowing anthem roll’d

Thro’ the dome of the golden cross;

And the volleying cannon thunder his loss;

He knew their voices of old.

For many a time in many a clime

His captain’s-ear has heard them boom

Bellowing victory, bellowing doom:

When he with those deep voices wrought,

Guarding realms and kings from shame;

With those deep voices our dead captain taught

The tyrant, and asserts his claim

In that dread sound to the great name

Which he has worn so pure of blame,

In praise and in dispraise the same,

A man of well-attemper’d frame.

O civic muse, to such a name,

To such a name for ages long,

To such a name,

Preserve a broad approach of fame,

And ever-echoing avenues of song!

VI.

Who is he that cometh, like an honor’d guest,

With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest,

With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest?

Mighty Seaman, this is he

Was great by land as thou by sea.

Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man,

The greatest sailor since our world began.

Now, to the roll of muffled drums,

To thee the greatest soldier comes;

For this is he

Was great by land as thou by sea.

His foes were thine; he kept us free;

O, give him welcome, this is he

Worthy of our gorgeous rites,

And worthy to be laid by thee;

For this is England’s greatest son,

He that gain’d a hundred fights,

Nor ever lost an English gun;

This is he that far away

Against the myriads of Assaye

Clash’d with his fiery few and won;

And underneath another sun,

Warring on a later day,

Round affrighted Lisbon drew

The treble works, the vast designs

Of his labor’d rampart-lines,

Where he greatly stood at bay,

Whence he issued forth anew,

And ever great and greater grew,

Beating from the wasted vines

Back to France her banded swarms,

Back to France with countless blows,

Till o’er the hills her eagles flew

Beyond the Pyrenean pines,

Follow’d up in valley and glen

With blare of bugle, clamor of men,

Roll of cannon and clash of arms,

And England pouring on her foes.

Such a war had such a close.

Again their ravening eagle rose

In anger, wheel’d on Europe-shadowing wings,

And barking for the thrones of kings;

Till one that sought but Duty’s iron crown

On that loud Sabbath shook the spoiler down;

A day of onsets of despair!

Dash’d on every rocky square,

Their surging charges foam’d themselves away;

Last, the Prussian trumpet blew;

Thro’ the long-tormented air

Heaven flash’d a sudden jubilant ray,

And down we swept and charged and overthrew.

So great a soldier taught us there

What long-enduring hearts could do

In that world-earthquake, Waterloo!

Mighty Seaman, tender and true,

And pure as he from taint of craven guile,

O saviour of the silver-coasted isle,

O shaker of the Baltic and the Nile,

If aught of things that here befall

Touch a spirit among things divine,

If love of country move thee there at all,

Be glad, because his bones are laid by thine.

And thro’ the centuries let a people’s voice

In full acclaim,

A people’s voice,

The proof and echo of all human fame,

A people’s voice, when they rejoice

At civic revel and pomp and game,

Attest their great commander’s claim

With honor, honor, honor, honor to him,

Eternal honor to his name.

VII.

A people’s voice! we are a people yet.

Tho’ all men else their nobler dreams forget,

Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers,

Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set

His Briton in blown seas and storming showers,

We have a voice with which to pay the debt

Of boundless love and reverence and regret

To those great men who fought, and kept it ours.

And keep it ours, O God, from brute control!

O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul

Of Europe, keep our noble England whole,

And save the one true seed of freedom sown

Betwixt a people and their ancient throne,

That sober freedom out of which there springs

Our loyal passion for our temperate kings!

For, saving that, ye help to save mankind

Till public wrong be crumbled into dust,

And drill the raw world for the march of mind,

Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just.

But wink no more in slothful overtrust.

Remember him who led your hosts;

He bade you guard the sacred coasts.

Your cannons moulder on the seaward wall;

His voice is silent in your council-hall

For ever; and whatever tempests lour

For ever silent; even if they broke

In thunder, silent; yet remember all

He spoke among you, and the Man who spoke;

Who never sold the truth to serve the hour,

Nor palter’d with Eternal God for power;

Who let the turbid streams of rumor flow

Thro’ either babbling world of high and low;

Whose life was work, whose language rife

With rugged maxims hewn from life;

Who never spoke against a foe;

Whose eighty winters freeze with one rebuke

All great self-seekers trampling on the right.

Truth-teller was our England’s Alfred named;

Truth-lover was our English Duke;

Whatever record leap to light

He never shall be shamed.

VIII.

Lo, the leader in these glorious wars

Now to glorious burial slowly borne,

Follow’d by the brave of other lands,

He, on whom from both her open hands

Lavish Honor shower’d all her stars,

And affluent Fortune emptied all her horn.

Yea, let all good things await

Him who cares not to be great

But as he saves or serves the state.

Not once or twice in our rough island-story

The path of duty was the way to glory.

He that walks it, only thirsting

For the right, and learns to deaden

Love of self, before his journey closes,

He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting

Into glossy purples, which outredden

All voluptuous garden-roses.

Not once or twice in our fair island-story

The path of duty was the way to glory.

He, that ever following her commands,

On with toil of heart and knees and hands,

Thro’ the long gorge to the far light has won

His path upward, and prevail’d,

Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled

Are close upon the shining table-lands

To which our God Himself is moon and sun.

Such was he: his work is done.

But while the races of mankind endure

Let his great example stand

Colossal, seen of every land,

And keep the soldier firm, the statesman pure;

Till in all lands and thro’ all human story

The path of duty be the way to glory.

And let the land whose hearths he saved from shame

For many and many an age proclaim

At civic revel and pomp and game,

And when the long-illumined cities flame,

Their ever-loyal iron leader’s fame,

With honor, honor, honor, honor to him,

Eternal honor to his name.

IX.

Peace, his triumph will be sung

By some yet unmoulded tongue

Far on in summers that we shall not see.

Peace, it is a day of pain

For one about whose patriarchal knee

Late the little children clung.

O peace, it is a day of pain

For one upon whose hand and heart and brain

Once the weight and fate of Europe hung.

Ours the pain, be his the gain!

More than is of man’s degree

Must be with us, watching here

At this, our great solemnity.

Whom we see not we revere;

We revere, and we refrain

From talk of battles loud and vain,

And brawling memories all too free

For such a wise humility

As befits a solemn fane:

We revere, and while we hear

The tides of Music’s golden sea

Setting toward eternity,

Uplifted high in heart and hope are we,

Until we doubt not that for one so true

There must be other nobler work to do

Than when he fought at Waterloo,

And Victor he must ever be.

For tho’ the Giant Ages heave the hill

And break the shore, and evermore

Make and break, and work their will,

Tho’ world on world in myriad myriads roll

Round us, each with different powers,

And other forms of life than ours,

What know we greater than the soul?

On God and Godlike men we build our trust.

Hush, the Dead March wails in the people’s ears;

The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears;

The black earth yawns; the mortal disappears;

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;

He is gone who seem’d so great. —

Gone, but nothing can bereave him

Of the force he made his own

Being here, and we believe him

Something far advanced in State,

And that he wears a truer crown

Than any wreath that man can weave him.

Speak no more of his renown,

Lay your earthly fancies down,

And in the vast cathedral leave him,

God accept him, Christ receive him!

1852.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

I.

HALF a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!’ he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

II.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismay’d ?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Their’s not to make reply,

Their’s not to reason why,

Their’s but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

III.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

IV.

Flash’d all their sabres bare,

Flash’d as they turn’d in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wonder’d:

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro’ the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reel’d from the sabre-stroke

Shatter’d and sunder’d.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

V.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro’ the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

VI.

When can their glory fade ?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder’d.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

IDYLLS OF THE KING

Published between 1856 and 1885, this is a cycle of twelve narrative poems retelling the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal. The collection also concerns Arthur’s attempt and subsequent failure to raise mankind to the ‘perfect kingdom’, from his coming to power to his death at the hands of the traitor Mordred. Throughout the work, individual poems relate the deeds of various knights, including Lancelot, Geraint, Galahad, Merlin and the Lady of the Lake. Although there is little transition between the Idylls, the central figure of Arthur links all the narratives. Dedicated to the late Albert, Prince Consort, the Idylls are written in blank verse and notable for their descriptions of nature, derived from Tennyson’s detailed observations of his own surroundings.

Largely inspired by Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and the Mabinogion, though including many additions and new events, the most notable narrative concerns the fate of Guinevere. In Malory’s work, she is sentenced to be burnt at the stake, but is rescued by Lancelot; while in Tennyson’s poem she flees to a convent, where she repents and is forgiven by Arthur, remaining in the convent until she dies.

The first set of idylls, Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere, was published in 1859, but Enid was later divided into The Marriage of Geraint and Geraint and Enid, and Guinevere was expanded. The final idyll, Balin and Balan, was published in Tiresias and Other Poems in 1885. The Dedication was published in 1862, a year after the Prince Consort had died; the epilogue, To the Queen, was published in 1873.

The first of the Idylls covers the period following Arthur’s coronation, his accession and marriage. The besieged Leodogran, King of Cameliard, appeals to Arthur for help against the beasts and heathen hordes. Arthur vanquishes these and then the Barons who challenge his legitimacy. Afterwards he requests the hand of Leodogran’s daughter, Guinevere, whom he loves. Leodogran, grateful but also doubtful of Arthur’s lineage, questions his chamberlain, Arthur’s emissaries, and Arthur’s half sister Bellicent (the character known as Anna or Morgause in other versions), receiving a different account from each. He is persuaded at last by a dream of Arthur crowned in heaven. Lancelot is sent to bring Guinevere, and she and Arthur wed in May. At the wedding feast, Arthur refuses to pay the customary tribute to the Lords from Rome, declaring, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”

The collection was an immediate success, inspiring a renewed interest in the theme of courtly love in later Victorian works of literature.

The first edition

CONTENTS

Dedication

The Coming of Arthur

THE ROUND TABLE

Gareth and Lynette

The Marriage of Geraint

Geraint and Enid

Balin and Balan

Merlin and Vivien

Lancelot and Elaine

The Holy Grail

Pelleas and Ettarre

The Last Tournament

Guinevere

The Passing of Arthur

To the Queen

Tennyson with his wife Emily and his sons Hallam and Lionel, 1862

Dedication

THESE to His Memory — since he held them dear,

Perchance as finding there unconsciously

Some image of himself — I dedicate,

I dedicate, I consecrate with tears —

These Idylls.

And indeed He seems to me

Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight,

‘Who reverenced his conscience as his king;

Whose glory was, redressing human wrong;

Who spake no slander, no, nor listened to it;

Who loved one only and who clave to her—’

Her — over all whose realms to their last isle,

Commingled with the gloom of imminent war,

The shadow of His loss drew like eclipse,

Darkening the world. We have lost him: he is gone:

We know him now: all narrow jealousies

Are silent; and we see him as he moved,

How modest, kindly, all-accomplished, wise,

With what sublime repression of himself,

And in what limits, and how tenderly;

Not swaying to this faction or to that;

Not making his high place the lawless perch

Of winged ambitions, nor a vantage-ground

For pleasure; but through all this tract of years

Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,

Before a thousand peering littlenesses,

In that fierce light which beats upon a throne,

And blackens every blot: for where is he,

Who dares foreshadow for an only son

A lovelier life, a more unstained, than his?

Or how should England dreaming of his sons

Hope more for these than some inheritance

Of such a life, a heart, a mind as thine,

Thou noble Father of her Kings to be,

Laborious for her people and her poor —

Voice in the rich dawn of an ampler day —

Far-sighted summoner of War and Waste

To fruitful strifes and rivalries of peace —

Sweet nature gilded by the gracious gleam

Of letters, dear to Science, dear to Art,

Dear to thy land and ours, a Prince indeed,

Beyond all titles, and a household name,

Hereafter, through all times, Albert the Good.

Break not, O woman’s-heart, but still endure;

Break not, for thou art Royal, but endure,

Remembering all the beauty of that star

Which shone so close beside Thee that ye made

One light together, but has past and leaves

The Crown a lonely splendour.

May all love,

His love, unseen but felt, o’ershadow Thee,

The love of all Thy sons encompass Thee,

The love of all Thy daughters cherish Thee,

The love of all Thy people comfort Thee,

Till God’s love set Thee at his side again!

The Coming of Arthur

1869

LEODOGRAN, the King of Cameliard,

Had one fair daughter, and none other child;

And she was the fairest of all flesh on earth,

Guinevere, and in her his one delight.

For many a petty king ere Arthur came

Ruled in this isle, and ever waging war

Each upon other, wasted all the land;

And still from time to time the heathen host

Swarmed overseas, and harried what was left.

And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,

Wherein the beast was ever more and more,

But man was less and less, till Arthur came.

For first Aurelius lived and fought and died,

And after him King Uther fought and died,

But either failed to make the kingdom one.

And after these King Arthur for a space,

And through the puissance of his Table Round,

Drew all their petty princedoms under him.

Their king and head, and made a realm, and reigned.

And thus the land of Cameliard was waste,

Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,

And none or few to scare or chase the beast;

So that wild dog, and wolf and boar and bear

Came night and day, and rooted in the fields,

And wallowed in the gardens of the King.

And ever and anon the wolf would steal

The children and devour, but now and then,

Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat

To human sucklings; and the children, housed

In her foul den, there at their meat would growl,

And mock their foster mother on four feet,

Till, straightened, they grew up to wolf-like men,

Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran

Groaned for the Roman legions here again,

And Cæsar’s eagle: then his brother king,

Urien, assailed him: last a heathen horde,

Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood,

And on the spike that split the mother’s heart

Spitting the child, brake on him, till, amazed,

He knew not whither he should turn for aid.

But — for he heard of Arthur newly crowned,

Though not without an uproar made by those

Who cried, ‘He is not Uther’s son’ — the King

Sent to him, saying, ‘Arise, and help us thou!

For here between the man and beast we die.’

And Arthur yet had done no deed of arms,

But heard the call, and came: and Guinevere

Stood by the castle walls to watch him pass;

But since he neither wore on helm or shield

The golden symbol of his kinglihood,

But rode a simple knight among his knights,

And many of these in richer arms than he,

She saw him not, or marked not, if she saw,

One among many, though his face was bare.

But Arthur, looking downward as he past,

Felt the light of her eyes into his life

Smite on the sudden, yet rode on, and pitched

His tents beside the forest. Then he drave

The heathen; after, slew the beast, and felled

The forest, letting in the sun, and made

Broad pathways for the hunter and the knight

And so returned.

For while he lingered there,

A doubt that ever smouldered in the hearts

Of those great Lords and Barons of his realm

Flashed forth and into war: for most of these,

Colleaguing with a score of petty kings,

Made head against him, crying, ‘Who is he

That he should rule us? who hath proven him

King Uther’s son? for lo! we look at him,

And find nor face nor bearing, limbs nor voice,

Are like to those of Uther whom we knew.

This is the son of Gorlois, not the King;

This is the son of Anton, not the King.’

And Arthur, passing thence to battle, felt

Travail, and throes and agonies of the life,

Desiring to be joined with Guinevere;

And thinking as he rode, ‘Her father said

That there between the man and beast they die.

Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts

Up to my throne, and side by side with me?

What happiness to reign a lonely king,

Vext — O ye stars that shudder over me,

O earth that soundest hollow under me,

Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be joined

To her that is the fairest under heaven,

I seem as nothing in the mighty world,

And cannot will my will, nor work my work

Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm

Victor and lord. But were I joined with her,

Then might we live together as one life,

And reigning with one will in everything

Have power on this dark land to lighten it,

And power on this dead world to make it live.’

Thereafter — as he speaks who tells the tale —

When Arthur reached a field-of-battle bright

With pitched pavilions of his foe, the world

Was all so clear about him, that he saw

The smallest rock far on the faintest hill,

And even in high day the morning star.

So when the King had set his banner broad,

At once from either side, with trumpet-blast,

And shouts, and clarions shrilling unto blood,

The long-lanced battle let their horses run.

And now the Barons and the kings prevailed,

And now the King, as here and there that war

Went swaying; but the Powers who walk the world

Made lightnings and great thunders over him,

And dazed all eyes, till Arthur by main might,

And mightier of his hands with every blow,

And leading all his knighthood threw the kings

Carados, Urien, Cradlemont of Wales,

Claudias, and Clariance of Northumberland,

The King Brandagoras of Latangor,

With Anguisant of Erin, Morganore,

And Lot of Orkney. Then, before a voice

As dreadful as the shout of one who sees

To one who sins, and deems himself alone

And all the world asleep, they swerved and brake

Flying, and Arthur called to stay the brands

That hacked among the flyers, ‘Ho! they yield!’

So like a painted battle the war stood

Silenced, the living quiet as the dead,

And in the heart of Arthur joy was lord.

He laughed upon his warrior whom he loved

And honoured most. ‘Thou dost not doubt me King,

So well thine arm hath wrought for me today.’

‘Sir and my liege,’ he cried, ‘the fire of God

Descends upon thee in the battle-field:

I know thee for my King!’ Whereat the two,

For each had warded either in the fight,

Sware on the field of death a deathless love.

And Arthur said, ‘Man’s word is God in man:

Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death.’

Then quickly from the foughten field he sent

Ulfius, and Brastias, and Bedivere,

His new-made knights, to King Leodogran,

Saying, ‘If I in aught have served thee well,

Give me thy daughter Guinevere to wife.’

Whom when he heard, Leodogran in heart

Debating—’How should I that am a king,

However much he holp me at my need,

Give my one daughter saving to a king,

And a king’s son?’ — lifted his voice, and called

A hoary man, his chamberlain, to whom

He trusted all things, and of him required

His counsel: ‘Knowest thou aught of Arthur’s birth?’

Then spake the hoary chamberlain and said,

‘Sir King, there be but two old men that know:

And each is twice as old as I; and one

Is Merlin, the wise man that ever served

King Uther through his magic art; and one

Is Merlin’s master (so they call him) Bleys,

Who taught him magic, but the scholar ran

Before the master, and so far, that Bleys,

Laid magic by, and sat him down, and wrote

All things and whatsoever Merlin did

In one great annal-book, where after-years

Will learn the secret of our Arthur’s birth.’

To whom the King Leodogran replied,

‘O friend, had I been holpen half as well

By this King Arthur as by thee today,

Then beast and man had had their share of me:

But summon here before us yet once more

Ulfius, and Brastias, and Bedivere.’

Then, when they came before him, the King said,

‘I have seen the cuckoo chased by lesser fowl,

And reason in the chase: but wherefore now

Do these your lords stir up the heat of war,

Some calling Arthur born of Gorlois,

Others of Anton? Tell me, ye yourselves,

Hold ye this Arthur for King Uther’s son?’

And Ulfius and Brastias answered, ‘Ay.’

Then Bedivere, the first of all his knights

Knighted by Arthur at his crowning, spake —

For bold in heart and act and word was he,

Whenever slander breathed against the King —

‘Sir, there be many rumours on this head:

For there be those who hate him in their hearts,

Call him baseborn, and since his ways are sweet,

And theirs are bestial, hold him less than man:

And there be those who deem him more than man,

And dream he dropt from heaven: but my belief

In all this matter — so ye care to learn —

Sir, for ye know that in King Uther’s time

The prince and warrior Gorlois, he that held

Tintagil castle by the Cornish sea,

Was wedded with a winsome wife, Ygerne:

And daughters had she borne him, — one whereof,

Lot’s wife, the Queen of Orkney, Bellicent,

Hath ever like a loyal sister cleaved

To Arthur, — but a son she had not borne.

And Uther cast upon her eyes of love:

But she, a stainless wife to Gorlois,

So loathed the bright dishonour of his love,

That Gorlois and King Uther went to war:

And overthrown was Gorlois and slain.

Then Uther in his wrath and heat besieged

Ygerne within Tintagil, where her men,

Seeing the mighty swarm about their walls,

Left her and fled, and Uther entered in,

And there was none to call to but himself.

So, compassed by the power of the King,

Enforced was she to wed him in her tears,

And with a shameful swiftness: afterward,

Not many moons, King Uther died himself,

Moaning and wailing for an heir to rule

After him, lest the realm should go to wrack.

And that same night, the night of the new year,

By reason of the bitterness and grief

That vext his mother, all before his time

Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born

Delivered at a secret postern-gate

To Merlin, to be holden far apart

Until his hour should come; because the lords

Of that fierce day were as the lords of this,

Wild beasts, and surely would have torn the child

Piecemeal among them, had they known; for each

But sought to rule for his own self and hand,

And many hated Uther for the sake

Of Gorlois. Wherefore Merlin took the child,

And gave him to Sir Anton, an old knight

And ancient friend of Uther; and his wife

Nursed the young prince, and reared him with her own;

And no man knew. And ever since the lords

Have foughten like wild beasts among themselves,

So that the realm has gone to wrack: but now,

This year, when Merlin (for his hour had come)

Brought Arthur forth, and set him in the hall,

Proclaiming, “Here is Uther’s heir, your king,”

A hundred voices cried, “Away with him!

No king of ours! a son of Gorlois he,

Or else the child of Anton, and no king,

Or else baseborn.” Yet Merlin through his craft,

And while the people clamoured for a king,

Had Arthur crowned; but after, the great lords

Banded, and so brake out in open war.’

Then while the King debated with himself

If Arthur were the child of shamefulness,

Or born the son of Gorlois, after death,

Or Uther’s son, and born before his time,

Or whether there were truth in anything

Said by these three, there came to Cameliard,

With Gawain and young Modred, her two sons,

Lot’s wife, the Queen of Orkney, Bellicent;

Whom as he could, not as he would, the King

Made feast for, saying, as they sat at meat,

‘A doubtful throne is ice on summer seas.

Ye come from Arthur’s court. Victor his men

Report him! Yea, but ye — think ye this king —

So many those that hate him, and so strong,

So few his knights, however brave they be —

Hath body enow to hold his foemen down?’

‘O King,’ she cried, ‘and I will tell thee: few,

Few, but all brave, all of one mind with him;

For I was near him when the savage yells

Of Uther’s peerage died, and Arthur sat

Crowned on the dais, and his warriors cried,

“Be thou the king, and we will work thy will

Who love thee.” Then the King in low deep tones,

And simple words of great authority,

Bound them by so strait vows to his own self,

That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some

Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,

Some flushed, and others dazed, as one who wakes

Half-blinded at the coming of a light.

‘But when he spake and cheered his Table Round

With large, divine, and comfortable words,

Beyond my tongue to tell thee — I beheld

From eye to eye through all their Order flash

A momentary likeness of the King:

And ere it left their faces, through the cross

And those around it and the Crucified,

Down from the casement over Arthur, smote

Flame-colour, vert and azure, in three rays,

One falling upon each of three fair queens,

Who stood in silence near his throne, the friends

Of Arthur, gazing on him, tall, with bright

Sweet faces, who will help him at his need.

‘And there I saw mage Merlin, whose vast wit

And hundred winters are but as the hands

Of loyal vassals toiling for their liege.

‘And near him stood the Lady of the Lake,

Who knows a subtler magic than his own —

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.

She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword,

Whereby to drive the heathen out: a mist

Of incense curled about her, and her face

Wellnigh was hidden in the minster gloom;

But there was heard among the holy hymns

A voice as of the waters, for she dwells

Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms

May shake the world, and when the surface rolls,

Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.

‘There likewise I beheld Excalibur

Before him at his crowning borne, the sword

That rose from out the bosom of the lake,

And Arthur rowed across and took it — rich

With jewels, elfin Urim, on the hilt,

Bewildering heart and eye — the blade so bright

That men are blinded by it — on one side,

Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world,

“Take me,” but turn the blade and ye shall see,

And written in the speech ye speak yourself,

“Cast me away!” And sad was Arthur’s face

Taking it, but old Merlin counselled him,

“Take thou and strike! the time to cast away

Is yet far-off.” So this great brand the king

Took, and by this will beat his foemen down.’

Thereat Leodogran rejoiced, but thought

To sift his doubtings to the last, and asked,

Fixing full eyes of question on her face,

‘The swallow and the swift are near akin,

But thou art closer to this noble prince,

Being his own dear sister;’ and she said,

‘Daughter of Gorlois and Ygerne am I;’

‘And therefore Arthur’s sister?’ asked the King.

She answered, ‘These be secret things,’ and signed

To those two sons to pass, and let them be.

And Gawain went, and breaking into song

Sprang out, and followed by his flying hair

Ran like a colt, and leapt at all he saw:

But Modred laid his ear beside the doors,

And there half-heard; the same that afterward

Struck for the throne, and striking found his doom.

And then the Queen made answer, ‘What know I?

For dark my mother was in eyes and hair,

And dark in hair and eyes am I; and dark

Was Gorlois, yea and dark was Uther too,

Wellnigh to blackness; but this King is fair

Beyond the race of Britons and of men.

Moreover, always in my mind I hear

A cry from out the dawning of my life,

A mother weeping, and I hear her say,

“O that ye had some brother, pretty one,

To guard thee on the rough ways of the world.”’

‘Ay,’ said the King, ‘and hear ye such a cry?

But when did Arthur chance upon thee first?’

‘O King!’ she cried, ‘and I will tell thee true:

He found me first when yet a little maid:

Beaten I had been for a little fault

Whereof I was not guilty; and out I ran

And flung myself down on a bank of heath,

And hated this fair world and all therein,

And wept, and wished that I were dead; and he —

I know not whether of himself he came,

Or brought by Merlin, who, they say, can walk

Unseen at pleasure — he was at my side,

And spake sweet words, and comforted my heart,

And dried my tears, being a child with me.

And many a time he came, and evermore

As I grew greater grew with me; and sad

At times he seemed, and sad with him was I,

Stern too at times, and then I loved him not,

But sweet again, and then I loved him well.

And now of late I see him less and less,

But those first days had golden hours for me,

For then I surely thought he would be king.

‘But let me tell thee now another tale:

For Bleys, our Merlin’s master, as they say,

Died but of late, and sent his cry to me,

To hear him speak before he left his life.

Shrunk like a fairy changeling lay the mage;

And when I entered told me that himself

And Merlin ever served about the King,

Uther, before he died; and on the night

When Uther in Tintagil past away

Moaning and wailing for an heir, the two

Left the still King, and passing forth to breathe,

Then from the castle gateway by the chasm

Descending through the dismal night — a night

In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost —

Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps

It seemed in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof

A dragon winged, and all from stern to stern

Bright with a shining people on the decks,

And gone as soon as seen. And then the two

Dropt to the cove, and watched the great sea fall,

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,

Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep

And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged

Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:

And down the wave and in the flame was borne

A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,

Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried “The King!

Here is an heir for Uther!” And the fringe

Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand,

Lashed at the wizard as he spake the word,

And all at once all round him rose in fire,

So that the child and he were clothed in fire.

And presently thereafter followed calm,

Free sky and stars: “And this the same child,” he said,

“Is he who reigns; nor could I part in peace

Till this were told.” And saying this the seer

Went through the strait and dreadful pass of death,

Not ever to be questioned any more

Save on the further side; but when I met

Merlin, and asked him if these things were truth —

The shining dragon and the naked child

Descending in the glory of the seas —

He laughed as is his wont, and answered me

In riddling triplets of old time, and said: —

‘“Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow in the sky!

A young man will be wiser by and by;

An old man’s wit may wander ere he die.

Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow on the lea!

And truth is this to me, and that to thee;

And truth or clothed or naked let it be.

Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows:

Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows?

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”

‘So Merlin riddling angered me; but thou

Fear not to give this King thy only child,

Guinevere: so great bards of him will sing

Hereafter; and dark sayings from of old

Ranging and ringing through the minds of men,

And echoed by old folk beside their fires

For comfort after their wage-work is done,

Speak of the King; and Merlin in our time

Hath spoken also, not in jest, and sworn

Though men may wound him that he will not die,

But pass, again to come; and then or now

Utterly smite the heathen underfoot,

Till these and all men hail him for their king.’

She spake and King Leodogran rejoiced,

But musing, ‘Shall I answer yea or nay?’

Doubted, and drowsed, nodded and slept, and saw,

Dreaming, a slope of land that ever grew,

Field after field, up to a height, the peak

Haze-hidden, and thereon a phantom king,

Now looming, and now lost; and on the slope

The sword rose, the hind fell, the herd was driven,

Fire glimpsed; and all the land from roof and rick,

In drifts of smoke before a rolling wind,

Streamed to the peak, and mingled with the haze

And made it thicker; while the phantom king

Sent out at times a voice; and here or there

Stood one who pointed toward the voice, the rest

Slew on and burnt, crying, ‘No king of ours,

No son of Uther, and no king of ours;’

Till with a wink his dream was changed, the haze

Descended, and the solid earth became

As nothing, but the King stood out in heaven,

Crowned. And Leodogran awoke, and sent

Ulfius, and Brastias and Bedivere,

Back to the court of Arthur answering yea.

Then Arthur charged his warrior whom he loved

And honoured most, Sir Lancelot, to ride forth

And bring the Queen; — and watched him from the gates:

And Lancelot past away among the flowers,

(For then was latter April) and returned

Among the flowers, in May, with Guinevere.

To whom arrived, by Dubric the high saint,

Chief of the church in Britain, and before

The stateliest of her altar-shrines, the King

That morn was married, while in stainless white,

The fair beginners of a nobler time,

And glorying in their vows and him, his knights

Stood around him, and rejoicing in his joy.

Far shone the fields of May through open door,

The sacred altar blossomed white with May,

The Sun of May descended on their King,

They gazed on all earth’s beauty in their Queen,

Rolled incense, and there past along the hymns

A voice as of the waters, while the two

Sware at the shrine of Christ a deathless love:

And Arthur said, ‘Behold, thy doom is mine.

Let chance what will, I love thee to the death!’

To whom the Queen replied with drooping eyes,

‘King and my lord, I love thee to the death!’

And holy Dubric spread his hands and spake,

‘Reign ye, and live and love, and make the world

Other, and may thy Queen be one with thee,

And all this Order of thy Table Round

Fulfil the boundless purpose of their King!’

So Dubric said; but when they left the shrine

Great Lords from Rome before the portal stood,

In scornful stillness gazing as they past;

Then while they paced a city all on fire

With sun and cloth of gold, the trumpets blew,

And Arthur’s knighthood sang before the King: —

‘Blow, trumpet, for the world is white with May;

Blow trumpet, the long night hath rolled away!

Blow through the living world—”Let the King reign.”

‘Shall Rome or Heathen rule in Arthur’s realm?

Flash brand and lance, fall battleaxe upon helm,

Fall battleaxe, and flash brand! Let the King reign.

‘Strike for the King and live! his knights have heard

That God hath told the King a secret word.

Fall battleaxe, and flash brand! Let the King reign.

‘Blow trumpet! he will lift us from the dust.

Blow trumpet! live the strength and die the lust!

Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

‘Strike for the King and die! and if thou diest,

The King is King, and ever wills the highest.

Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

‘Blow, for our Sun is mighty in his May!

Blow, for our Sun is mightier day by day!

Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

‘The King will follow Christ, and we the King

In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing.

Fall battleaxe, and flash brand! Let the King reign.’

So sang the knighthood, moving to their hall.

There at the banquet those great Lords from Rome,

The slowly-fading mistress of the world,

Strode in, and claimed their tribute as of yore.

But Arthur spake, ‘Behold, for these have sworn

To wage my wars, and worship me their King;

The old order changeth, yielding place to new;

And we that fight for our fair father Christ,

Seeing that ye be grown too weak and old

To drive the heathen from your Roman wall,

No tribute will we pay:’ so those great lords

Drew back in wrath, and Arthur strove with Rome.

And Arthur and his knighthood for a space

Were all one will, and through that strength the King

Drew in the petty princedoms under him,

Fought, and in twelve great battles overcame

The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reigned.

THE ROUND TABLE

Gareth and Lynette

1872

THE LAST tall son of Lot and Bellicent,

And tallest, Gareth, in a showerful spring

Stared at the spate. A slender-shafted Pine

Lost footing, fell, and so was whirled away.

‘How he went down,’ said Gareth, ‘as a false knight

Or evil king before my lance if lance

Were mine to use — O senseless cataract,

Bearing all down in thy precipitancy —

And yet thou art but swollen with cold snows

And mine is living blood: thou dost His will,

The Maker’s, and not knowest, and I that know,

Have strength and wit, in my good mother’s hall

Linger with vacillating obedience,

Prisoned, and kept and coaxed and whistled to —

Since the good mother holds me still a child!

Good mother is bad mother unto me!

A worse were better; yet no worse would I.

Heaven yield her for it, but in me put force

To weary her ears with one continuous prayer,

Until she let me fly discaged to sweep

In ever-highering eagle-circles up

To the great Sun of Glory, and thence swoop

Down upon all things base, and dash them dead,

A knight of Arthur, working out his will,

To cleanse the world. Why, Gawain, when he came

With Modred hither in the summertime,

Asked me to tilt with him, the proven knight.

Modred for want of worthier was the judge.

Then I so shook him in the saddle, he said,

“Thou hast half prevailed against me,” said so — he —

Though Modred biting his thin lips was mute,

For he is alway sullen: what care I?’

And Gareth went, and hovering round her chair

Asked, ‘Mother, though ye count me still the child,

Sweet mother, do ye love the child?’ She laughed,

‘Thou art but a wild-goose to question it.’

‘Then, mother, an ye love the child,’ he said,

‘Being a goose and rather tame than wild,

Hear the child’s story.’ ‘Yea, my well-beloved,

An ‘twere but of the goose and golden eggs.’

And Gareth answered her with kindling eyes,

‘Nay, nay, good mother, but this egg of mine

Was finer gold than any goose can lay;

For this an Eagle, a royal Eagle, laid

Almost beyond eye-reach, on such a palm

As glitters gilded in thy Book of Hours.

And there was ever haunting round the palm

A lusty youth, but poor, who often saw

The splendour sparkling from aloft, and thought

“An I could climb and lay my hand upon it,

Then were I wealthier than a leash of kings.”

But ever when he reached a hand to climb,

One, that had loved him from his childhood, caught

And stayed him, “Climb not lest thou break thy neck,

I charge thee by my love,” and so the boy,

Sweet mother, neither clomb, nor brake his neck,

But brake his very heart in pining for it,

And past away.’

To whom the mother said,

‘True love, sweet son, had risked himself and climbed,

And handed down the golden treasure to him.’

And Gareth answered her with kindling eyes,

‘Gold?’ said I gold? — ay then, why he, or she,

Or whosoe’er it was, or half the world

Had ventured — had the thing I spake of been

Mere gold — but this was all of that true steel,

Whereof they forged the brand Excalibur,

And lightnings played about it in the storm,

And all the little fowl were flurried at it,

And there were cries and clashings in the nest,

That sent him from his senses: let me go.’

Then Bellicent bemoaned herself and said,

‘Hast thou no pity upon my loneliness?

Lo, where thy father Lot beside the hearth

Lies like a log, and all but smouldered out!

For ever since when traitor to the King

He fought against him in the Barons’ war,

And Arthur gave him back his territory,

His age hath slowly droopt, and now lies there

A yet-warm corpse, and yet unburiable,

No more; nor sees, nor hears, nor speaks, nor knows.

And both thy brethren are in Arthur’s hall,

Albeit neither loved with that full love

I feel for thee, nor worthy such a love:

Stay therefore thou; red berries charm the bird,

And thee, mine innocent, the jousts, the wars,

Who never knewest finger-ache, nor pang

Of wrenched or broken limb — an often chance

In those brain-stunning shocks, and tourney-falls,

Frights to my heart; but stay: follow the deer

By these tall firs and our fast-falling burns;

So make thy manhood mightier day by day;

Sweet is the chase: and I will seek thee out

Some comfortable bride and fair, to grace

Thy climbing life, and cherish my prone year,

Till falling into Lot’s forgetfulness

I know not thee, myself, nor anything.

Stay, my best son! ye are yet more boy than man.’

Then Gareth, ‘An ye hold me yet for child,

Hear yet once more the story of the child.

For, mother, there was once a King, like ours.

The prince his heir, when tall and marriageable,

Asked for a bride; and thereupon the King

Set two before him. One was fair, strong, armed —

But to be won by force — and many men

Desired her; one good lack, no man desired.

And these were the conditions of the King:

That save he won the first by force, he needs

Must wed that other, whom no man desired,

A red-faced bride who knew herself so vile,

That evermore she longed to hide herself,

Nor fronted man or woman, eye to eye —

Yea — some she cleaved to, but they died of her.

And one — they called her Fame; and one, — O Mother,

How can ye keep me tethered to you — Shame.

Man am I grown, a man’s work must I do.

Follow the deer? follow the Christ, the King,

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King —

Else, wherefore born?’

To whom the mother said

‘Sweet son, for there be many who deem him not,

Or will not deem him, wholly proven King —

Albeit in mine own heart I knew him King,

When I was frequent with him in my youth,

And heard him Kingly speak, and doubted him

No more than he, himself; but felt him mine,

Of closest kin to me: yet — wilt thou leave

Thine easeful biding here, and risk thine all,

Life, limbs, for one that is not proven King?

Stay, till the cloud that settles round his birth

Hath lifted but a little. Stay, sweet son.’

And Gareth answered quickly, ‘Not an hour,

So that ye yield me — I will walk through fire,

Mother, to gain it — your full leave to go.

Not proven, who swept the dust of ruined Rome

From off the threshold of the realm, and crushed

The Idolaters, and made the people free?

Who should be King save him who makes us free?’

So when the Queen, who long had sought in vain

To break him from the intent to which he grew,

Found her son’s will unwaveringly one,

She answered craftily, ‘Will ye walk through fire?

Who walks through fire will hardly heed the smoke.

Ay, go then, an ye must: only one proof,

Before thou ask the King to make thee knight,

Of thine obedience and thy love to me,

Thy mother, — I demand.

And Gareth cried,

‘A hard one, or a hundred, so I go.

Nay — quick! the proof to prove me to the quick!’

But slowly spake the mother looking at him,

‘Prince, thou shalt go disguised to Arthur’s hall,

And hire thyself to serve for meats and drinks

Among the scullions and the kitchen-knaves,

And those that hand the dish across the bar.

Nor shalt thou tell thy name to anyone.

And thou shalt serve a twelvemonth and a day.’

For so the Queen believed that when her son

Beheld his only way to glory lead

Low down through villain kitchen-vassalage,

Her own true Gareth was too princely-proud

To pass thereby; so should he rest with her,

Closed in her castle from the sound of arms.

Silent awhile was Gareth, then replied,

‘The thrall in person may be free in soul,

And I shall see the jousts. Thy son am I,

And since thou art my mother, must obey.

I therefore yield me freely to thy will;

For hence will I, disguised, and hire myself

To serve with scullions and with kitchen-knaves;

Nor tell my name to any — no, not the King.’

Gareth awhile lingered. The mother’s eye

Full of the wistful fear that he would go,

And turning toward him wheresoe’er he turned,

Perplext his outward purpose, till an hour,

When wakened by the wind which with full voice

Swept bellowing through the darkness on to dawn,

He rose, and out of slumber calling two

That still had tended on him from his birth,

Before the wakeful mother heard him, went.

The three were clad like tillers of the soil.

Southward they set their faces. The birds made

Melody on branch, and melody in mid air.

The damp hill-slopes were quickened into green,

And the live green had kindled into flowers,

For it was past the time of Easterday.

So, when their feet were planted on the plain

That broadened toward the base of Camelot,

Far off they saw the silver-misty morn

Rolling her smoke about the Royal mount,

That rose between the forest and the field.

At times the summit of the high city flashed;

At times the spires and turrets half-way down

Pricked through the mist; at times the great gate shone

Only, that opened on the field below:

Anon, the whole fair city had disappeared.

Then those who went with Gareth were amazed,

One crying, ‘Let us go no further, lord.

Here is a city of Enchanters, built

By fairy Kings.’ The second echoed him,

‘Lord, we have heard from our wise man at home

To Northward, that this King is not the King,

But only changeling out of Fairyland,

Who drave the heathen hence by sorcery

And Merlin’s glamour.’ Then the first again,

‘Lord, there is no such city anywhere,

But all a vision.’

Gareth answered them

With laughter, swearing he had glamour enow

In his own blood, his princedom, youth and hopes,

To plunge old Merlin in the Arabian sea;

So pushed them all unwilling toward the gate.

And there was no gate like it under heaven.

For barefoot on the keystone, which was lined

And rippled like an ever-fleeting wave,

The Lady of the Lake stood: all her dress

Wept from her sides as water flowing away;

But like the cross her great and goodly arms

Stretched under the cornice and upheld:

And drops of water fell from either hand;

And down from one a sword was hung, from one

A censer, either worn with wind and storm;

And o’er her breast floated the sacred fish;

And in the space to left of her, and right,

Were Arthur’s wars in weird devices done,

New things and old co-twisted, as if Time

Were nothing, so inveterately, that men

Were giddy gazing there; and over all

High on the top were those three Queens, the friends

Of Arthur, who should help him at his need.

Then those with Gareth for so long a space

Stared at the figures, that at last it seemed

The dragon-boughts and elvish emblemings

Began to move, seethe, twine and curl: they called

To Gareth, ‘Lord, the gateway is alive.’

And Gareth likewise on them fixt his eyes

So long, that even to him they seemed to move.

Out of the city a blast of music pealed.

Back from the gate started the three, to whom

From out thereunder came an ancient man,

Long-bearded, saying, ‘Who be ye, my sons?’

Then Gareth, ‘We be tillers of the soil,

Who leaving share in furrow come to see

The glories of our King: but these, my men,

(Your city moved so weirdly in the mist)

Doubt if the King be King at all, or come

From Fairyland; and whether this be built

By magic, and by fairy Kings and Queens;

Or whether there be any city at all,

Or all a vision: and this music now

Hath scared them both, but tell thou these the truth.’

Then that old Seer made answer playing on him

And saying, ‘Son, I have seen the good ship sail

Keel upward, and mast downward, in the heavens,

And solid turrets topsy-turvy in air:

And here is truth; but an it please thee not,

Take thou the truth as thou hast told it me.

For truly as thou sayest, a Fairy King

And Fairy Queens have built the city, son;

They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft

Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand,

And built it to the music of their harps.

And, as thou sayest, it is enchanted, son,

For there is nothing in it as it seems

Saving the King; though some there be that hold

The King a shadow, and the city real:

Yet take thou heed of him, for, so thou pass

Beneath this archway, then wilt thou become

A thrall to his enchantments, for the King

Will bind thee by such vows, as is a shame

A man should not be bound by, yet the which

No man can keep; but, so thou dread to swear,

Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide

Without, among the cattle of the field.

For an ye heard a music, like enow

They are building still, seeing the city is built

To music, therefore never built at all,

And therefore built for ever.’

Gareth spake

Angered, ‘Old master, reverence thine own beard

That looks as white as utter truth, and seems

Wellnigh as long as thou art statured tall!

Why mockest thou the stranger that hath been

To thee fair-spoken?’

But the Seer replied,

‘Know ye not then the Riddling of the Bards?

“Confusion, and illusion, and relation,

Elusion, and occasion, and evasion”?

I mock thee not but as thou mockest me,

And all that see thee, for thou art not who

Thou seemest, but I know thee who thou art.

And now thou goest up to mock the King,

Who cannot brook the shadow of any lie.’

Unmockingly the mocker ending here

Turned to the right, and past along the plain;

Whom Gareth looking after said, ‘My men,

Our one white lie sits like a little ghost

Here on the threshold of our enterprise.

Let love be blamed for it, not she, nor I:

Well, we will make amends.’

With all good cheer

He spake and laughed, then entered with his twain

Camelot, a city of shadowy palaces

And stately, rich in emblem and the work

Of ancient kings who did their days in stone;

Which Merlin’s hand, the Mage at Arthur’s court,

Knowing all arts, had touched, and everywhere

At Arthur’s ordinance, tipt with lessening peak

And pinnacle, and had made it spire to heaven.

And ever and anon a knight would pass

Outward, or inward to the hall: his arms

Clashed; and the sound was good to Gareth’s ear.

And out of bower and casement shyly glanced

Eyes of pure women, wholesome stars of love;

And all about a healthful people stept

As in the presence of a gracious king.

Then into hall Gareth ascending heard

A voice, the voice of Arthur, and beheld

Far over heads in that long-vaulted hall

The splendour of the presence of the King

Throned, and delivering doom — and looked no more —

But felt his young heart hammering in his ears,

And thought, ‘For this half-shadow of a lie

The truthful King will doom me when I speak.’

Yet pressing on, though all in fear to find

Sir Gawain or Sir Modred, saw nor one

Nor other, but in all the listening eyes

Of those tall knights, that ranged about the throne,

Clear honour shining like the dewy star

Of dawn, and faith in their great King, with pure

Affection, and the light of victory,

And glory gained, and evermore to gain.

Then came a widow crying to the King,

‘A boon, Sir King! Thy father, Uther, reft

From my dead lord a field with violence:

For howsoe’er at first he proffered gold,

Yet, for the field was pleasant in our eyes,

We yielded not; and then he reft us of it

Perforce, and left us neither gold nor field.’

Said Arthur, ‘Whether would ye? gold or field?’

To whom the woman weeping, ‘Nay, my lord,

The field was pleasant in my husband’s eye.’

And Arthur, ‘Have thy pleasant field again,

And thrice the gold for Uther’s use thereof,

According to the years. No boon is here,

But justice, so thy say be proven true.

Accursed, who from the wrongs his father did

Would shape himself a right!’

And while she past,

Came yet another widow crying to him,

‘A boon, Sir King! Thine enemy, King, am I.

With thine own hand thou slewest my dear lord,

A knight of Uther in the Barons’ war,

When Lot and many another rose and fought

Against thee, saying thou wert basely born.

I held with these, and loathe to ask thee aught.

Yet lo! my husband’s brother had my son

Thralled in his castle, and hath starved him dead;

And standeth seized of that inheritance

Which thou that slewest the sire hast left the son.

So though I scarce can ask it thee for hate,

Grant me some knight to do the battle for me,

Kill the foul thief, and wreak me for my son.’

Then strode a good knight forward, crying to him,

‘A boon, Sir King! I am her kinsman, I.

Give me to right her wrong, and slay the man.’

Then came Sir Kay, the seneschal, and cried,

‘A boon, Sir King! even that thou grant her none,

This railer, that hath mocked thee in full hall —

None; or the wholesome boon of gyve and gag.’

But Arthur, ‘We sit King, to help the wronged

Through all our realm. The woman loves her lord.

Peace to thee, woman, with thy loves and hates!

The kings of old had doomed thee to the flames,

Aurelius Emrys would have scourged thee dead,

And Uther slit thy tongue: but get thee hence —

Lest that rough humour of the kings of old

Return upon me! Thou that art her kin,

Go likewise; lay him low and slay him not,

But bring him here, that I may judge the right,

According to the justice of the King:

Then, be he guilty, by that deathless King

Who lived and died for men, the man shall die.’

Then came in hall the messenger of Mark,

A name of evil savour in the land,

The Cornish king. In either hand he bore

What dazzled all, and shone far-off as shines

A field of charlock in the sudden sun

Between two showers, a cloth of palest gold,

Which down he laid before the throne, and knelt,

Delivering, that his lord, the vassal king,

Was even upon his way to Camelot;

For having heard that Arthur of his grace

Had made his goodly cousin, Tristram, knight,

And, for himself was of the greater state,

Being a king, he trusted his liege-lord

Would yield him this large honour all the more;

So prayed him well to accept this cloth of gold,

In token of true heart and fealty.

Then Arthur cried to rend the cloth, to rend

In pieces, and so cast it on the hearth.

An oak-tree smouldered there. ‘The goodly knight!

What! shall the shield of Mark stand among these?’

For, midway down the side of that long hall

A stately pile, — whereof along the front,

Some blazoned, some but carven, and some blank,

There ran a treble range of stony shields, —

Rose, and high-arching overbrowed the hearth.

And under every shield a knight was named:

For this was Arthur’s custom in his hall;

When some good knight had done one noble deed,

His arms were carven only; but if twain

His arms were blazoned also; but if none,

The shield was blank and bare without a sign

Saving the name beneath; and Gareth saw

The shield of Gawain blazoned rich and bright,

And Modred’s blank as death; and Arthur cried

To rend the cloth and cast it on the hearth.

‘More like are we to reave him of his crown

Than make him knight because men call him king.

The kings we found, ye know we stayed their hands

From war among themselves, but left them kings;

Of whom were any bounteous, merciful,

Truth-speaking, brave, good livers, them we enrolled

Among us, and they sit within our hall.

But as Mark hath tarnished the great name of king,

As Mark would sully the low state of churl:

And, seeing he hath sent us cloth of gold,

Return, and meet, and hold him from our eyes,

Lest we should lap him up in cloth of lead,

Silenced for ever — craven — a man of plots,

Craft, poisonous counsels, wayside ambushings —

No fault of thine: let Kay the seneschal

Look to thy wants, and send thee satisfied —

Accursed, who strikes nor lets the hand be seen!’

And many another suppliant crying came

With noise of ravage wrought by beast and man,

And evermore a knight would ride away.

Last, Gareth leaning both hands heavily

Down on the shoulders of the twain, his men,

Approached between them toward the King, and asked,

‘A boon, Sir King (his voice was all ashamed),

For see ye not how weak and hungerworn

I seem — leaning on these? grant me to serve

For meat and drink among thy kitchen-knaves

A twelvemonth and a day, nor seek my name.

Hereafter I will fight.’

To him the King,

‘A goodly youth and worth a goodlier boon!

But so thou wilt no goodlier, then must Kay,

The master of the meats and drinks, be thine.’

He rose and past; then Kay, a man of mien

Wan-sallow as the plant that feels itself

Root-bitten by white lichen,

‘Lo ye now!

This fellow hath broken from some Abbey, where,

God wot, he had not beef and brewis enow,

However that might chance! but an he work,

Like any pigeon will I cram his crop,

And sleeker shall he shine than any hog.’

Then Lancelot standing near, ‘Sir Seneschal,

Sleuth-hound thou knowest, and gray, and all the hounds;

A horse thou knowest, a man thou dost not know:

Broad brows and fair, a fluent hair and fine,

High nose, a nostril large and fine, and hands

Large, fair and fine! — Some young lad’s mystery —

But, or from sheepcot or king’s hall, the boy

Is noble-natured. Treat him with all grace,

Lest he should come to shame thy judging of him.’

Then Kay, ‘What murmurest thou of mystery?

Think ye this fellow will poison the King’s dish?

Nay, for he spake too fool-like: mystery!

Tut, an the lad were noble, he had asked

For horse and armour: fair and fine, forsooth!

Sir Fine-face, Sir Fair-hands? but see thou to it

That thine own fineness, Lancelot, some fine day

Undo thee not — and leave my man to me.’

So Gareth all for glory underwent

The sooty yoke of kitchen-vassalage;

Ate with young lads his portion by the door,

And couched at night with grimy kitchen-knaves.

And Lancelot ever spake him pleasantly,

But Kay the seneschal, who loved him not,

Would hustle and harry him, and labour him

Beyond his comrade of the hearth, and set

To turn the broach, draw water, or hew wood,

Or grosser tasks; and Gareth bowed himself

With all obedience to the King, and wrought

All kind of service with a noble ease

That graced the lowliest act in doing it.

And when the thralls had talk among themselves,

And one would praise the love that linkt the King

And Lancelot — how the King had saved his life

In battle twice, and Lancelot once the King’s —

For Lancelot was the first in Tournament,

But Arthur mightiest on the battle-field —

Gareth was glad. Or if some other told,

How once the wandering forester at dawn,

Far over the blue tarns and hazy seas,

On Caer-Eryri’s highest found the King,

A naked babe, of whom the Prophet spake,

‘He passes to the Isle Avilion,

He passes and is healed and cannot die’ —

Gareth was glad. But if their talk were foul,

Then would he whistle rapid as any lark,

Or carol some old roundelay, and so loud

That first they mocked, but, after, reverenced him.

Or Gareth telling some prodigious tale

Of knights, who sliced a red life-bubbling way

Through twenty folds of twisted dragon, held

All in a gap-mouthed circle his good mates

Lying or sitting round him, idle hands,

Charmed; till Sir Kay, the seneschal, would come

Blustering upon them, like a sudden wind

Among dead leaves, and drive them all apart.

Or when the thralls had sport among themselves,

So there were any trial of mastery,

He, by two yards in casting bar or stone

Was counted best; and if there chanced a joust,

So that Sir Kay nodded him leave to go,

Would hurry thither, and when he saw the knights

Clash like the coming and retiring wave,

And the spear spring, and good horse reel, the boy

Was half beyond himself for ecstasy.

So for a month he wrought among the thralls;

But in the weeks that followed, the good Queen,

Repentant of the word she made him swear,

And saddening in her childless castle, sent,

Between the in-crescent and de-crescent moon,

Arms for her son, and loosed him from his vow.

This, Gareth hearing from a squire of Lot

With whom he used to play at tourney once,

When both were children, and in lonely haunts

Would scratch a ragged oval on the sand,

And each at either dash from either end —

Shame never made girl redder than Gareth joy.

He laughed; he sprang. ‘Out of the smoke, at once

I leap from Satan’s foot to Peter’s knee —

These news be mine, none other’s — nay, the King’s —

Descend into the city:’ whereon he sought

The King alone, and found, and told him all.

‘I have staggered thy strong Gawain in a tilt

For pastime; yea, he said it: joust can I.

Make me thy knight — in secret! let my name

Be hidden, and give me the first quest, I spring

Like flame from ashes.’

Here the King’s calm eye

Fell on, and checked, and made him flush, and bow

Lowly, to kiss his hand, who answered him,

‘Son, the good mother let me know thee here,

And sent her wish that I would yield thee thine.

Make thee my knight? my knights are sworn to vows

Of utter hardihood, utter gentleness,

And, loving, utter faithfulness in love,

And uttermost obedience to the King.’

Then Gareth, lightly springing from his knees,

‘My King, for hardihood I can promise thee.

For uttermost obedience make demand

Of whom ye gave me to, the Seneschal,

No mellow master of the meats and drinks!

And as for love, God wot, I love not yet,

But love I shall, God willing.’

And the King

‘Make thee my knight in secret? yea, but he,

Our noblest brother, and our truest man,

And one with me in all, he needs must know.’

‘Let Lancelot know, my King, let Lancelot know,

Thy noblest and thy truest!’

And the King —

‘But wherefore would ye men should wonder at you?

Nay, rather for the sake of me, their King,

And the deed’s sake my knighthood do the deed,

Than to be noised of.’

Merrily Gareth asked,

‘Have I not earned my cake in baking of it?

Let be my name until I make my name!

My deeds will speak: it is but for a day.’

So with a kindly hand on Gareth’s arm

Smiled the great King, and half-unwillingly

Loving his lusty youthhood yielded to him.

Then, after summoning Lancelot privily,

‘I have given him the first quest: he is not proven.

Look therefore when he calls for this in hall,

Thou get to horse and follow him far away.

Cover the lions on thy shield, and see

Far as thou mayest, he be nor ta’en nor slain.’

Then that same day there past into the hall

A damsel of high lineage, and a brow

May-blossom, and a cheek of apple-blossom,

Hawk-eyes; and lightly was her slender nose

Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower;

She into hall past with her page and cried,

‘O King, for thou hast driven the foe without,

See to the foe within! bridge, ford, beset

By bandits, everyone that owns a tower

The Lord for half a league. Why sit ye there?

Rest would I not, Sir King, an I were king,

Till even the lonest hold were all as free

From cursed bloodshed, as thine altar-cloth

From that best blood it is a sin to spill.’

‘Comfort thyself,’ said Arthur. ‘I nor mine

Rest: so my knighthood keep the vows they swore,

The wastest moorland of our realm shall be

Safe, damsel, as the centre of this hall.

What is thy name? thy need?’

‘My name?’ she said —

‘Lynette my name; noble; my need, a knight

To combat for my sister, Lyonors,

A lady of high lineage, of great lands,

And comely, yea, and comelier than myself.

She lives in Castle Perilous: a river

Runs in three loops about her living-place;

And o’er it are three passings, and three knights

Defend the passings, brethren, and a fourth

And of that four the mightiest, holds her stayed

In her own castle, and so besieges her

To break her will, and make her wed with him:

And but delays his purport till thou send

To do the battle with him, thy chief man

Sir Lancelot whom he trusts to overthrow,

Then wed, with glory: but she will not wed

Save whom she loveth, or a holy life.

Now therefore have I come for Lancelot.’

Then Arthur mindful of Sir Gareth asked,

‘Damsel, ye know this Order lives to crush

All wrongers of the Realm. But say, these four,

Who be they? What the fashion of the men?’

‘They be of foolish fashion, O Sir King,

The fashion of that old knight-errantry

Who ride abroad, and do but what they will;

Courteous or bestial from the moment, such

As have nor law nor king; and three of these

Proud in their fantasy call themselves the Day,

Morning-Star, and Noon-Sun, and Evening-Star,

Being strong fools; and never a whit more wise

The fourth, who alway rideth armed in black,

A huge man-beast of boundless savagery.

He names himself the Night and oftener Death,

And wears a helmet mounted with a skull,

And bears a skeleton figured on his arms,

To show that who may slay or scape the three,

Slain by himself, shall enter endless night.

And all these four be fools, but mighty men,

And therefore am I come for Lancelot.’

Hereat Sir Gareth called from where he rose,

A head with kindling eyes above the throng,

‘A boon, Sir King — this quest!’ then — for he marked

Kay near him groaning like a wounded bull —

‘Yea, King, thou knowest thy kitchen-knave am I,

And mighty through thy meats and drinks am I,

And I can topple over a hundred such.

Thy promise, King,’ and Arthur glancing at him,

Brought down a momentary brow. ‘Rough, sudden,

And pardonable, worthy to be knight —

Go therefore,’ and all hearers were amazed.

But on the damsel’s forehead shame, pride, wrath

Slew the May-white: she lifted either arm,

‘Fie on thee, King! I asked for thy chief knight,

And thou hast given me but a kitchen-knave.’

Then ere a man in hall could stay her, turned,

Fled down the lane of access to the King,

Took horse, descended the slope street, and past

The weird white gate, and paused without, beside

The field of tourney, murmuring ‘kitchen-knave.’

Now two great entries opened from the hall,

At one end one, that gave upon a range

Of level pavement where the King would pace

At sunrise, gazing over plain and wood;

And down from this a lordly stairway sloped

Till lost in blowing trees and tops of towers;

And out by this main doorway past the King.

But one was counter to the hearth, and rose

High that the highest-crested helm could ride

Therethrough nor graze: and by this entry fled

The damsel in her wrath, and on to this

Sir Gareth strode, and saw without the door

King Arthur’s gift, the worth of half a town,

A warhorse of the best, and near it stood

The two that out of north had followed him:

This bare a maiden shield, a casque; that held

The horse, the spear; whereat Sir Gareth loosed

A cloak that dropt from collar-bone to heel,

A cloth of roughest web, and cast it down,

And from it like a fuel-smothered fire,

That lookt half-dead, brake bright, and flashed as those

Dull-coated things, that making slide apart

Their dusk wing-cases, all beneath there burns

A jewelled harness, ere they pass and fly.

So Gareth ere he parted flashed in arms.

Then as he donned the helm, and took the shield

And mounted horse and graspt a spear, of grain

Storm-strengthened on a windy site, and tipt

With trenchant steel, around him slowly prest

The people, while from out of kitchen came

The thralls in throng, and seeing who had worked

Lustier than any, and whom they could but love,

Mounted in arms, threw up their caps and cried,

‘God bless the King, and all his fellowship!’

And on through lanes of shouting Gareth rode

Down the slope street, and past without the gate.

So Gareth past with joy; but as the cur

Pluckt from the cur he fights with, ere his cause

Be cooled by fighting, follows, being named,

His owner, but remembers all, and growls

Remembering, so Sir Kay beside the door

Muttered in scorn of Gareth whom he used

To harry and hustle.

‘Bound upon a quest

With horse and arms — the King hath past his time —

My scullion knave! Thralls to your work again,

For an your fire be low ye kindle mine!

Will there be dawn in West and eve in East?

Begone! — my knave! — belike and like enow

Some old head-blow not heeded in his youth

So shook his wits they wander in his prime —

Crazed! How the villain lifted up his voice,

Nor shamed to bawl himself a kitchen-knave.

Tut: he was tame and meek enow with me,

Till peacocked up with Lancelot’s noticing.

Well — I will after my loud knave, and learn

Whether he know me for his master yet.

Out of the smoke he came, and so my lance

Hold, by God’s grace, he shall into the mire —

Thence, if the King awaken from his craze,

Into the smoke again.’

But Lancelot said,

‘Kay, wherefore wilt thou go against the King,

For that did never he whereon ye rail,

But ever meekly served the King in thee?

Abide: take counsel; for this lad is great

And lusty, and knowing both of lance and sword.’

‘Tut, tell not me,’ said Kay, ‘ye are overfine

To mar stout knaves with foolish courtesies:’

Then mounted, on through silent faces rode

Down the slope city, and out beyond the gate.

But by the field of tourney lingering yet

Muttered the damsel, ‘Wherefore did the King

Scorn me? for, were Sir Lancelot lackt, at least

He might have yielded to me one of those

Who tilt for lady’s love and glory here,

Rather than — O sweet heaven! O fie upon him —

His kitchen-knave.’

To whom Sir Gareth drew

(And there were none but few goodlier than he)

Shining in arms, ‘Damsel, the quest is mine.

Lead, and I follow.’ She thereat, as one

That smells a foul-fleshed agaric in the holt,

And deems it carrion of some woodland thing,

Or shrew, or weasel, nipt her slender nose

With petulant thumb and finger, shrilling, ‘Hence!

Avoid, thou smellest all of kitchen-grease.

And look who comes behind,’ for there was Kay.

‘Knowest thou not me? thy master? I am Kay.

We lack thee by the hearth.’

And Gareth to him,

‘Master no more! too well I know thee, ay —

The most ungentle knight in Arthur’s hall.’

‘Have at thee then,’ said Kay: they shocked, and Kay

Fell shoulder-slipt, and Gareth cried again,

‘Lead, and I follow,’ and fast away she fled.

But after sod and shingle ceased to fly

Behind her, and the heart of her good horse

Was nigh to burst with violence of the beat,

Perforce she stayed, and overtaken spoke.

‘What doest thou, scullion, in my fellowship?

Deem’st thou that I accept thee aught the more

Or love thee better, that by some device

Full cowardly, or by mere unhappiness,

Thou hast overthrown and slain thy master — thou! —

Dish-washer and broach-turner, loon! — to me

Thou smellest all of kitchen as before.’

‘Damsel,’ Sir Gareth answered gently, ‘say

Whate’er ye will, but whatsoe’er ye say,

I leave not till I finish this fair quest,

Or die therefore.’

‘Ay, wilt thou finish it?

Sweet lord, how like a noble knight he talks!

The listening rogue hath caught the manner of it.

But, knave, anon thou shalt be met with, knave,

And then by such a one that thou for all

The kitchen brewis that was ever supt

Shalt not once dare to look him in the face.’

‘I shall assay,’ said Gareth with a smile

That maddened her, and away she flashed again

Down the long avenues of a boundless wood,

And Gareth following was again beknaved.

‘Sir Kitchen-knave, I have missed the only way

Where Arthur’s men are set along the wood;

The wood is nigh as full of thieves as leaves:

If both be slain, I am rid of thee; but yet,

Sir Scullion, canst thou use that spit of thine?

Fight, an thou canst: I have missed the only way.’

So till the dusk that followed evensong

Rode on the two, reviler and reviled;

Then after one long slope was mounted, saw,

Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines

A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink

To westward — in the deeps whereof a mere,

Round as the red eye of an Eagle-owl,

Under the half-dead sunset glared; and shouts

Ascended, and there brake a servingman

Flying from out of the black wood, and crying,

‘They have bound my lord to cast him in the mere.’

Then Gareth, ‘Bound am I to right the wronged,

But straitlier bound am I to bide with thee.’

And when the damsel spake contemptuously,

‘Lead, and I follow,’ Gareth cried again,

‘Follow, I lead!’ so down among the pines

He plunged; and there, blackshadowed nigh the mere,

And mid-thigh-deep in bulrushes and reed,

Saw six tall men haling a seventh along,

A stone about his neck to drown him in it.

Three with good blows he quieted, but three

Fled through the pines; and Gareth loosed the stone

From off his neck, then in the mere beside

Tumbled it; oilily bubbled up the mere.

Last, Gareth loosed his bonds and on free feet

Set him, a stalwart Baron, Arthur’s friend.

‘Well that ye came, or else these caitiff rogues

Had wreaked themselves on me; good cause is theirs

To hate me, for my wont hath ever been

To catch my thief, and then like vermin here

Drown him, and with a stone about his neck;

And under this wan water many of them

Lie rotting, but at night let go the stone,

And rise, and flickering in a grimly light

Dance on the mere. Good now, ye have saved a life

Worth somewhat as the cleanser of this wood.

And fain would I reward thee worshipfully.

What guerdon will ye?’

Gareth sharply spake,

‘None! for the deed’s sake have I done the deed,

In uttermost obedience to the King.

But wilt thou yield this damsel harbourage?’

Whereat the Baron saying, ‘I well believe

You be of Arthur’s Table,’ a light laugh

Broke from Lynette, ‘Ay, truly of a truth,

And in a sort, being Arthur’s kitchen-knave! —

But deem not I accept thee aught the more,

Scullion, for running sharply with thy spit

Down on a rout of craven foresters.

A thresher with his flail had scattered them.

Nay — for thou smellest of the kitchen still.

But an this lord will yield us harbourage,

Well.’

So she spake. A league beyond the wood,

All in a full-fair manor and a rich,

His towers where that day a feast had been

Held in high hall, and many a viand left,

And many a costly cate, received the three.

And there they placed a peacock in his pride

Before the damsel, and the Baron set

Gareth beside her, but at once she rose.

‘Meseems, that here is much discourtesy,

Setting this knave, Lord Baron, at my side.

Hear me — this morn I stood in Arthur’s hall,

And prayed the King would grant me Lancelot

To fight the brotherhood of Day and Night —

The last a monster unsubduable

Of any save of him for whom I called —

Suddenly bawls this frontless kitchen-knave,

“The quest is mine; thy kitchen-knave am I,

And mighty through thy meats and drinks am I.”

Then Arthur all at once gone mad replies,

“Go therefore,” and so gives the quest to him —

Him — here — a villain fitter to stick swine

Than ride abroad redressing women’s wrong,

Or sit beside a noble gentlewoman.’

Then half-ashamed and part-amazed, the lord

Now looked at one and now at other, left

The damsel by the peacock in his pride,

And, seating Gareth at another board,

Sat down beside him, ate and then began.

‘Friend, whether thou be kitchen-knave, or not,

Or whether it be the maiden’s fantasy,

And whether she be mad, or else the King,

Or both or neither, or thyself be mad,

I ask not: but thou strikest a strong stroke,

For strong thou art and goodly therewithal,

And saver of my life; and therefore now,

For here be mighty men to joust with, weigh

Whether thou wilt not with thy damsel back

To crave again Sir Lancelot of the King.

Thy pardon; I but speak for thine avail,

The saver of my life.’

And Gareth said,

‘Full pardon, but I follow up the quest,

Despite of Day and Night and Death and Hell.’

So when, next morn, the lord whose life he saved

Had, some brief space, conveyed them on their way

And left them with God-speed, Sir Gareth spake,

‘Lead, and I follow.’ Haughtily she replied.

‘I fly no more: I allow thee for an hour.

Lion and stout have isled together, knave,

In time of flood. Nay, furthermore, methinks

Some ruth is mine for thee. Back wilt thou, fool?

For hard by here is one will overthrow

And slay thee: then will I to court again,

And shame the King for only yielding me

My champion from the ashes of his hearth.’

To whom Sir Gareth answered courteously,

‘Say thou thy say, and I will do my deed.

Allow me for mine hour, and thou wilt find

My fortunes all as fair as hers who lay

Among the ashes and wedded the King’s son.’

Then to the shore of one of those long loops

Wherethrough the serpent river coiled, they came.

Rough-thicketed were the banks and steep; the stream

Full, narrow; this a bridge of single arc

Took at a leap; and on the further side

Arose a silk pavilion, gay with gold

In streaks and rays, and all Lent-lily in hue,

Save that the dome was purple, and above,

Crimson, a slender banneret fluttering.

And therebefore the lawless warrior paced

Unarmed, and calling, ‘Damsel, is this he,

The champion thou hast brought from Arthur’s hall?

For whom we let thee pass.’ ‘Nay, nay,’ she said,

‘Sir Morning-Star. The King in utter scorn

Of thee and thy much folly hath sent thee here

His kitchen-knave: and look thou to thyself:

See that he fall not on thee suddenly,

And slay thee unarmed: he is not knight but knave.’

Then at his call, ‘O daughters of the Dawn,

And servants of the Morning-Star, approach,

Arm me,’ from out the silken curtain-folds

Bare-footed and bare-headed three fair girls

In gilt and rosy raiment came: their feet

In dewy grasses glistened; and the hair

All over glanced with dewdrop or with gem

Like sparkles in the stone Avanturine.

These armed him in blue arms, and gave a shield

Blue also, and thereon the morning star.

And Gareth silent gazed upon the knight,

Who stood a moment, ere his horse was brought,

Glorying; and in the stream beneath him, shone

Immingled with Heaven’s azure waveringly,

The gay pavilion and the naked feet,

His arms, the rosy raiment, and the star.

Then she that watched him, ‘Wherefore stare ye so?

Thou shakest in thy fear: there yet is time:

Flee down the valley before he get to horse.

Who will cry shame? Thou art not knight but knave.’

Said Gareth, ‘Damsel, whether knave or knight,

Far liefer had I fight a score of times

Than hear thee so missay me and revile.

Fair words were best for him who fights for thee;

But truly foul are better, for they send

That strength of anger through mine arms, I know

That I shall overthrow him.’

And he that bore

The star, when mounted, cried from o’er the bridge,

‘A kitchen-knave, and sent in scorn of me!

Such fight not I, but answer scorn with scorn.

For this were shame to do him further wrong

Than set him on his feet, and take his horse

And arms, and so return him to the King.

Come, therefore, leave thy lady lightly, knave.

Avoid: for it beseemeth not a knave

To ride with such a lady.’

‘Dog, thou liest.

I spring from loftier lineage than thine own.’

He spake; and all at fiery speed the two

Shocked on the central bridge, and either spear

Bent but not brake, and either knight at once,

Hurled as a stone from out of a catapult

Beyond his horse’s crupper and the bridge,

Fell, as if dead; but quickly rose and drew,

And Gareth lashed so fiercely with his brand

He drave his enemy backward down the bridge,

The damsel crying, ‘Well-stricken, kitchen-knave!’

Till Gareth’s shield was cloven; but one stroke

Laid him that clove it grovelling on the ground.

Then cried the fallen, ‘Take not my life: I yield.’

And Gareth, ‘So this damsel ask it of me

Good — I accord it easily as a grace.’

She reddening, ‘Insolent scullion: I of thee?

I bound to thee for any favour asked!’

‘Then he shall die.’ And Gareth there unlaced

His helmet as to slay him, but she shrieked,

‘Be not so hardy, scullion, as to slay

One nobler than thyself.’ ‘Damsel, thy charge

Is an abounding pleasure to me. Knight,

Thy life is thine at her command. Arise

And quickly pass to Arthur’s hall, and say

His kitchen-knave hath sent thee. See thou crave

His pardon for thy breaking of his laws.

Myself, when I return, will plead for thee.

Thy shield is mine — farewell; and, damsel, thou,

Lead, and I follow.’

And fast away she fled.

Then when he came upon her, spake, ‘Methought,

Knave, when I watched thee striking on the bridge

The savour of thy kitchen came upon me

A little faintlier: but the wind hath changed:

I scent it twenty-fold.’ And then she sang,

‘“O morning star” (not that tall felon there

Whom thou by sorcery or unhappiness

Or some device, hast foully overthrown),

“O morning star that smilest in the blue,

O star, my morning dream hath proven true,

Smile sweetly, thou! my love hath smiled on me.”

‘But thou begone, take counsel, and away,

For hard by here is one that guards a ford —

The second brother in their fool’s parable —

Will pay thee all thy wages, and to boot.

Care not for shame: thou art not knight but knave.’

To whom Sir Gareth answered, laughingly,

‘Parables? Hear a parable of the knave.

When I was kitchen-knave among the rest

Fierce was the hearth, and one of my co-mates

Owned a rough dog, to whom he cast his coat,

“Guard it,” and there was none to meddle with it.

And such a coat art thou, and thee the King

Gave me to guard, and such a dog am I,

To worry, and not to flee — and — knight or knave —

The knave that doth thee service as full knight

Is all as good, meseems, as any knight

Toward thy sister’s freeing.’

‘Ay, Sir Knave!

Ay, knave, because thou strikest as a knight,

Being but knave, I hate thee all the more.’

‘Fair damsel, you should worship me the more,

That, being but knave, I throw thine enemies.’

‘Ay, ay,’ she said, ‘but thou shalt meet thy match.’

So when they touched the second river-loop,

Huge on a huge red horse, and all in mail

Burnished to blinding, shone the Noonday Sun

Beyond a raging shallow. As if the flower,

That blows a globe of after arrowlets,

Ten thousand-fold had grown, flashed the fierce shield,

All sun; and Gareth’s eyes had flying blots

Before them when he turned from watching him.

He from beyond the roaring shallow roared,

‘What doest thou, brother, in my marches here?’

And she athwart the shallow shrilled again,

‘Here is a kitchen-knave from Arthur’s hall

Hath overthrown thy brother, and hath his arms.’

‘Ugh!’ cried the Sun, and vizoring up a red

And cipher face of rounded foolishness,

Pushed horse across the foamings of the ford,

Whom Gareth met midstream: no room was there

For lance or tourney-skill: four strokes they struck

With sword, and these were mighty; the new knight

Had fear he might be shamed; but as the Sun

Heaved up a ponderous arm to strike the fifth,

The hoof of his horse slipt in the stream, the stream

Descended, and the Sun was washed away.

Then Gareth laid his lance athwart the ford;

So drew him home; but he that fought no more,

As being all bone-battered on the rock,

Yielded; and Gareth sent him to the King,

‘Myself when I return will plead for thee.’

‘Lead, and I follow.’ Quietly she led.

‘Hath not the good wind, damsel, changed again?’

‘Nay, not a point: nor art thou victor here.

There lies a ridge of slate across the ford;

His horse thereon stumbled — ay, for I saw it.

‘“O Sun” (not this strong fool whom thou, Sir Knave,

Hast overthrown through mere unhappiness),

“O Sun, that wakenest all to bliss or pain,

O moon, that layest all to sleep again,

Shine sweetly: twice my love hath smiled on me.”

What knowest thou of lovesong or of love?

Nay, nay, God wot, so thou wert nobly born,

Thou hast a pleasant presence. Yea, perchance, —

‘“O dewy flowers that open to the sun,

O dewy flowers that close when day is done,

Blow sweetly: twice my love hath smiled on me.”

‘What knowest thou of flowers, except, belike,

To garnish meats with? hath not our good King

Who lent me thee, the flower of kitchendom,

A foolish love for flowers? what stick ye round

The pasty? wherewithal deck the boar’s head?

Flowers? nay, the boar hath rosemaries and bay.

‘“O birds, that warble to the morning sky,

O birds that warble as the day goes by,

Sing sweetly: twice my love hath smiled on me.”

‘What knowest thou of birds, lark, mavis, merle,

Linnet? what dream ye when they utter forth

May-music growing with the growing light,

Their sweet sun-worship? these be for the snare

(So runs thy fancy) these be for the spit,

Larding and basting. See thou have not now

Larded thy last, except thou turn and fly.

There stands the third fool of their allegory.’

For there beyond a bridge of treble bow,

All in a rose-red from the west, and all

Naked it seemed, and glowing in the broad

Deep-dimpled current underneath, the knight,

That named himself the Star of Evening, stood.

And Gareth, ‘Wherefore waits the madman there

Naked in open dayshine?’ ‘Nay,’ she cried,

‘Not naked, only wrapt in hardened skins

That fit him like his own; and so ye cleave

His armour off him, these will turn the blade.’

Then the third brother shouted o’er the bridge,

‘O brother-star, why shine ye here so low?

Thy ward is higher up: but have ye slain

The damsel’s champion?’ and the damsel cried,

‘No star of thine, but shot from Arthur’s heaven

With all disaster unto thine and thee!

For both thy younger brethren have gone down

Before this youth; and so wilt thou, Sir Star;

Art thou not old?’

‘Old, damsel, old and hard,

Old, with the might and breath of twenty boys.’

Said Gareth, ‘Old, and over-bold in brag!

But that same strength which threw the Morning Star

Can throw the Evening.’

Then that other blew

A hard and deadly note upon the horn.

‘Approach and arm me!’ With slow steps from out

An old storm-beaten, russet, many-stained

Pavilion, forth a grizzled damsel came,

And armed him in old arms, and brought a helm

With but a drying evergreen for crest,

And gave a shield whereon the Star of Even

Half-tarnished and half-bright, his emblem, shone.

But when it glittered o’er the saddle-bow,

They madly hurled together on the bridge;

And Gareth overthrew him, lighted, drew,

There met him drawn, and overthrew him again,

But up like fire he started: and as oft

As Gareth brought him grovelling on his knees,

So many a time he vaulted up again;

Till Gareth panted hard, and his great heart,

Foredooming all his trouble was in vain,

Laboured within him, for he seemed as one

That all in later, sadder age begins

To war against ill uses of a life,

But these from all his life arise, and cry,

‘Thou hast made us lords, and canst not put us down!’

He half despairs; so Gareth seemed to strike

Vainly, the damsel clamouring all the while,

‘Well done, knave-knight, well-stricken, O good knight-knave —

O knave, as noble as any of all the knights —

Shame me not, shame me not. I have prophesied —

Strike, thou art worthy of the Table Round —

His arms are old, he trusts the hardened skin —

Strike — strike — the wind will never change again.’

And Gareth hearing ever stronglier smote,

And hewed great pieces of his armour off him,

But lashed in vain against the hardened skin,

And could not wholly bring him under, more

Than loud Southwesterns, rolling ridge on ridge,

The buoy that rides at sea, and dips and springs

For ever; till at length Sir Gareth’s brand

Clashed his, and brake it utterly to the hilt.

‘I have thee now;’ but forth that other sprang,

And, all unknightlike, writhed his wiry arms

Around him, till he felt, despite his mail,

Strangled, but straining even his uttermost

Cast, and so hurled him headlong o’er the bridge

Down to the river, sink or swim, and cried,

‘Lead, and I follow.’

But the damsel said,

‘I lead no longer; ride thou at my side;

Thou art the kingliest of all kitchen-knaves.

‘“O trefoil, sparkling on the rainy plain,

O rainbow with three colours after rain,

Shine sweetly: thrice my love hath smiled on me.”

‘Sir, — and, good faith, I fain had added — Knight,

But that I heard thee call thyself a knave, —

Shamed am I that I so rebuked, reviled,

Missaid thee; noble I am; and thought the King

Scorned me and mine; and now thy pardon, friend,

For thou hast ever answered courteously,

And wholly bold thou art, and meek withal

As any of Arthur’s best, but, being knave,

Hast mazed my wit: I marvel what thou art.’

‘Damsel,’ he said, ‘you be not all to blame,

Saving that you mistrusted our good King

Would handle scorn, or yield you, asking, one

Not fit to cope your quest. You said your say;

Mine answer was my deed. Good sooth! I hold

He scarce is knight, yea but half-man, nor meet

To fight for gentle damsel, he, who lets

His heart be stirred with any foolish heat

At any gentle damsel’s waywardness.

Shamed? care not! thy foul sayings fought for me:

And seeing now thy words are fair, methinks

There rides no knight, not Lancelot, his great self,

Hath force to quell me.’

Nigh upon that hour

When the lone hern forgets his melancholy,

Lets down his other leg, and stretching, dreams

Of goodly supper in the distant pool,

Then turned the noble damsel smiling at him,

And told him of a cavern hard at hand,

Where bread and baken meats and good red wine

Of Southland, which the Lady Lyonors

Had sent her coming champion, waited him.

Anon they past a narrow comb wherein

Where slabs of rock with figures, knights on horse

Sculptured, and deckt in slowly-waning hues.

‘Sir Knave, my knight, a hermit once was here,

Whose holy hand hath fashioned on the rock

The war of Time against the soul of man.

And yon four fools have sucked their allegory

From these damp walls, and taken but the form.

Know ye not these?’ and Gareth lookt and read —

In letters like to those the vexillary

Hath left crag-carven o’er the streaming Gelt —

‘PHOSPHORUS,’ then ‘MERIDIES’—’HESPERUS’ —

‘NOX’—’MORS,’ beneath five figures, armed men,

Slab after slab, their faces forward all,

And running down the Soul, a Shape that fled

With broken wings, torn raiment and loose hair,

For help and shelter to the hermit’s cave.

‘Follow the faces, and we find it. Look,

Who comes behind?’

For one — delayed at first

Through helping back the dislocated Kay

To Camelot, then by what thereafter chanced,

The damsel’s headlong error through the wood —

Sir Lancelot, having swum the river-loops —

His blue shield-lions covered — softly drew

Behind the twain, and when he saw the star

Gleam, on Sir Gareth’s turning to him, cried,

‘Stay, felon knight, I avenge me for my friend.’

And Gareth crying pricked against the cry;

But when they closed — in a moment — at one touch

Of that skilled spear, the wonder of the world —

Went sliding down so easily, and fell,

That when he found the grass within his hands

He laughed; the laughter jarred upon Lynette:

Harshly she asked him, ‘Shamed and overthrown,

And tumbled back into the kitchen-knave,

Why laugh ye? that ye blew your boast in vain?’

‘Nay, noble damsel, but that I, the son

Of old King Lot and good Queen Bellicent,

And victor of the bridges and the ford,

And knight of Arthur, here lie thrown by whom

I know not, all through mere unhappiness —

Device and sorcery and unhappiness —

Out, sword; we are thrown!’ And Lancelot answered, ‘Prince,

O Gareth — through the mere unhappiness

Of one who came to help thee, not to harm,

Lancelot, and all as glad to find thee whole,

As on the day when Arthur knighted him.’

Then Gareth, ‘Thou — Lancelot! — thine the hand

That threw me? An some chance to mar the boast

Thy brethren of thee make — which could not chance —

Had sent thee down before a lesser spear,

Shamed had I been, and sad — O Lancelot — thou!’

Whereat the maiden, petulant, ‘Lancelot,

Why came ye not, when called? and wherefore now

Come ye, not called? I gloried in my knave,

Who being still rebuked, would answer still

Courteous as any knight — but now, if knight,

The marvel dies, and leaves me fooled and tricked,

And only wondering wherefore played upon:

And doubtful whether I and mine be scorned.

Where should be truth if not in Arthur’s hall,

In Arthur’s presence? Knight, knave, prince and fool,

I hate thee and for ever.’

And Lancelot said,

‘Blessed be thou, Sir Gareth! knight art thou

To the King’s best wish. O damsel, be you wise

To call him shamed, who is but overthrown?

Thrown have I been, nor once, but many a time.

Victor from vanquished issues at the last,

And overthrower from being overthrown.

With sword we have not striven; and thy good horse

And thou are weary; yet not less I felt

Thy manhood through that wearied lance of thine.

Well hast thou done; for all the stream is freed,

And thou hast wreaked his justice on his foes,

And when reviled, hast answered graciously,

And makest merry when overthrown. Prince, Knight

Hail, Knight and Prince, and of our Table Round!’

And then when turning to Lynette he told

The tale of Gareth, petulantly she said,

‘Ay well — ay well — for worse than being fooled

Of others, is to fool one’s self. A cave,

Sir Lancelot, is hard by, with meats and drinks

And forage for the horse, and flint for fire.

But all about it flies a honeysuckle.

Seek, till we find.’ And when they sought and found,

Sir Gareth drank and ate, and all his life

Past into sleep; on whom the maiden gazed.

‘Sound sleep be thine! sound cause to sleep hast thou.

Wake lusty! Seem I not as tender to him

As any mother? Ay, but such a one

As all day long hath rated at her child,

And vext his day, but blesses him asleep —

Good lord, how sweetly smells the honeysuckle

In the hushed night, as if the world were one

Of utter peace, and love, and gentleness!

O Lancelot, Lancelot’ — and she clapt her hands —

‘Full merry am I to find my goodly knave

Is knight and noble. See now, sworn have I,

Else yon black felon had not let me pass,

To bring thee back to do the battle with him.

Thus an thou goest, he will fight thee first;

Who doubts thee victor? so will my knight-knave

Miss the full flower of this accomplishment.’

Said Lancelot, ‘Peradventure he, you name,

May know my shield. Let Gareth, an he will,

Change his for mine, and take my charger, fresh,

Not to be spurred, loving the battle as well

As he that rides him.’ ‘Lancelot-like,’ she said,

‘Courteous in this, Lord Lancelot, as in all.’

And Gareth, wakening, fiercely clutched the shield;

‘Ramp ye lance-splintering lions, on whom all spears

Are rotten sticks! ye seem agape to roar!

Yea, ramp and roar at leaving of your lord! —

Care not, good beasts, so well I care for you.

O noble Lancelot, from my hold on these

Streams virtue — fire — through one that will not shame

Even the shadow of Lancelot under shield.

Hence: let us go.’

Silent the silent field

They traversed. Arthur’s harp though summer-wan,

In counter motion to the clouds, allured

The glance of Gareth dreaming on his liege.

A star shot: ‘Lo,’ said Gareth, ‘the foe falls!’

An owl whoopt: ‘Hark the victor pealing there!’

Suddenly she that rode upon his left

Clung to the shield that Lancelot lent him, crying,

‘Yield, yield him this again: ‘tis he must fight:

I curse the tongue that all through yesterday

Reviled thee, and hath wrought on Lancelot now

To lend thee horse and shield: wonders ye have done;

Miracles ye cannot: here is glory enow

In having flung the three: I see thee maimed,

Mangled: I swear thou canst not fling the fourth.’

‘And wherefore, damsel? tell me all ye know.

You cannot scare me; nor rough face, or voice,

Brute bulk of limb, or boundless savagery

Appal me from the quest.’

‘Nay, Prince,’ she cried,

‘God wot, I never looked upon the face,

Seeing he never rides abroad by day;

But watched him have I like a phantom pass

Chilling the night: nor have I heard the voice.

Always he made his mouthpiece of a page

Who came and went, and still reported him

As closing in himself the strength of ten,

And when his anger tare him, massacring

Man, woman, lad and girl — yea, the soft babe!

Some hold that he hath swallowed infant flesh,

Monster! O Prince, I went for Lancelot first,

The quest is Lancelot’s: give him back the shield.’

Said Gareth laughing, ‘An he fight for this,

Belike he wins it as the better man:

Thus — and not else!’

But Lancelot on him urged

All the devisings of their chivalry

When one might meet a mightier than himself;

How best to manage horse, lance, sword and shield,

And so fill up the gap where force might fail

With skill and fineness. Instant were his words.

Then Gareth, ‘Here be rules. I know but one —

To dash against mine enemy and win.

Yet have I seen thee victor in the joust,

And seen thy way.’ ‘Heaven help thee,’ sighed Lynette.

Then for a space, and under cloud that grew

To thunder-gloom palling all stars, they rode

In converse till she made her palfrey halt,

Lifted an arm, and softly whispered, ‘There.’

And all the three were silent seeing, pitched

Beside the Castle Perilous on flat field,

A huge pavilion like a mountain peak

Sunder the glooming crimson on the marge,

Black, with black banner, and a long black horn

Beside it hanging; which Sir Gareth graspt,

And so, before the two could hinder him,

Sent all his heart and breath through all the horn.

Echoed the walls; a light twinkled; anon

Came lights and lights, and once again he blew;

Whereon were hollow tramplings up and down

And muffled voices heard, and shadows past;

Till high above him, circled with her maids,

The Lady Lyonors at a window stood,

Beautiful among lights, and waving to him

White hands, and courtesy; but when the Prince

Three times had blown — after long hush — at last —

The huge pavilion slowly yielded up,

Through those black foldings, that which housed therein.

High on a nightblack horse, in nightblack arms,

With white breast-bone, and barren ribs of Death,

And crowned with fleshless laughter — some ten steps —

In the half-light — through the dim dawn — advanced

The monster, and then paused, and spake no word.

But Gareth spake and all indignantly,

‘Fool, for thou hast, men say, the strength of ten,

Canst thou not trust the limbs thy God hath given,

But must, to make the terror of thee more,

Trick thyself out in ghastly imageries

Of that which Life hath done with, and the clod,

Less dull than thou, will hide with mantling flowers

As if for pity?’ But he spake no word;

Which set the horror higher: a maiden swooned;

The Lady Lyonors wrung her hands and wept,

As doomed to be the bride of Night and Death;

Sir Gareth’s head prickled beneath his helm;

And even Sir Lancelot through his warm blood felt

Ice strike, and all that marked him were aghast.

At once Sir Lancelot’s charger fiercely neighed,

And Death’s dark war-horse bounded forward with him.

Then those that did not blink the terror, saw

That Death was cast to ground, and slowly rose.

But with one stroke Sir Gareth split the skull.

Half fell to right and half to left and lay.

Then with a stronger buffet he clove the helm

As throughly as the skull; and out from this

Issued the bright face of a blooming boy

Fresh as a flower new-born, and crying, ‘Knight,

Slay me not: my three brethren bad me do it,

To make a horror all about the house,

And stay the world from Lady Lyonors.

They never dreamed the passes would be past.’

Answered Sir Gareth graciously to one

Not many a moon his younger, ‘My fair child,

What madness made thee challenge the chief knight

Of Arthur’s hall?’ ‘Fair Sir, they bad me do it.

They hate the King, and Lancelot, the King’s friend,

They hoped to slay him somewhere on the stream,

They never dreamed the passes could be past.’

Then sprang the happier day from underground;

And Lady Lyonors and her house, with dance

And revel and song, made merry over Death,

As being after all their foolish fears

And horrors only proven a blooming boy.

So large mirth lived and Gareth won the quest.

And he that told the tale in older times

Says that Sir Gareth wedded Lyonors,

But he, that told it later, says Lynette.

The Marriage of Geraint

1857

Gustave Doré’s illustration of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”, 1868.

THE BRAVE Geraint, a knight of Arthur’s court,

A tributary prince of Devon, one

Of that great Order of the Table Round,

Had married Enid, Yniol’s only child,

And loved her, as he loved the light of Heaven.

And as the light of Heaven varies, now

At sunrise, now at sunset, now by night

With moon and trembling stars, so loved Geraint

To make her beauty vary day by day,

In crimsons and in purples and in gems.

And Enid, but to please her husband’s eye,

Who first had found and loved her in a state

Of broken fortunes, daily fronted him

In some fresh splendour; and the Queen herself,

Grateful to Prince Geraint for service done,

Loved her, and often with her own white hands

Arrayed and decked her, as the loveliest,

Next after her own self, in all the court.

And Enid loved the Queen, and with true heart

Adored her, as the stateliest and the best

And loveliest of all women upon earth.

And seeing them so tender and so close,

Long in their common love rejoiced Geraint.

But when a rumour rose about the Queen,

Touching her guilty love for Lancelot,

Though yet there lived no proof, nor yet was heard

The world’s loud whisper breaking into storm,

Not less Geraint believed it; and there fell

A horror on him, lest his gentle wife,

Through that great tenderness for Guinevere,

Had suffered, or should suffer any taint

In nature: wherefore going to the King,

He made this pretext, that his princedom lay

Close on the borders of a territory,

Wherein were bandit earls, and caitiff knights,

Assassins, and all flyers from the hand

Of Justice, and whatever loathes a law:

And therefore, till the King himself should please

To cleanse this common sewer of all his realm,

He craved a fair permission to depart,

And there defend his marches; and the King

Mused for a little on his plea, but, last,

Allowing it, the Prince and Enid rode,

And fifty knights rode with them, to the shores

Of Severn, and they past to their own land;

Where, thinking, that if ever yet was wife

True to her lord, mine shall be so to me,

He compassed her with sweet observances

And worship, never leaving her, and grew

Forgetful of his promise to the King,

Forgetful of the falcon and the hunt,

Forgetful of the tilt and tournament,

Forgetful of his glory and his name,

Forgetful of his princedom and its cares.

And this forgetfulness was hateful to her.

And by and by the people, when they met

In twos and threes, or fuller companies,

Began to scoff and jeer and babble of him

As of a prince whose manhood was all gone,

And molten down in mere uxoriousness.

And this she gathered from the people’s eyes:

This too the women who attired her head,

To please her, dwelling on his boundless love,

Told Enid, and they saddened her the more:

And day by day she thought to tell Geraint,

But could not out of bashful delicacy;

While he that watched her sadden, was the more

Suspicious that her nature had a taint.

At last, it chanced that on a summer morn

(They sleeping each by either) the new sun

Beat through the blindless casement of the room,

And heated the strong warrior in his dreams;

Who, moving, cast the coverlet aside,

And bared the knotted column of his throat,

The massive square of his heroic breast,

And arms on which the standing muscle sloped,

As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,

Running too vehemently to break upon it.

And Enid woke and sat beside the couch,

Admiring him, and thought within herself,

Was ever man so grandly made as he?

Then, like a shadow, past the people’s talk

And accusation of uxoriousness

Across her mind, and bowing over him,

Low to her own heart piteously she said:

‘O noble breast and all-puissant arms,

Am I the cause, I the poor cause that men

Reproach you, saying all your force is gone?

I am the cause, because I dare not speak

And tell him what I think and what they say.

And yet I hate that he should linger here;

I cannot love my lord and not his name.

Far liefer had I gird his harness on him,

And ride with him to battle and stand by,

And watch his mightful hand striking great blows

At caitiffs and at wrongers of the world.

Far better were I laid in the dark earth,

Not hearing any more his noble voice,

Not to be folded more in these dear arms,

And darkened from the high light in his eyes,

Than that my lord through me should suffer shame.

Am I so bold, and could I so stand by,

And see my dear lord wounded in the strife,

And maybe pierced to death before mine eyes,

And yet not dare to tell him what I think,

And how men slur him, saying all his force

Is melted into mere effeminacy?

O me, I fear that I am no true wife.’

Half inwardly, half audibly she spoke,

And the strong passion in her made her weep

True tears upon his broad and naked breast,

And these awoke him, and by great mischance

He heard but fragments of her later words,

And that she feared she was not a true wife.

And then he thought, ‘In spite of all my care,

For all my pains, poor man, for all my pains,

She is not faithful to me, and I see her

Weeping for some gay knight in Arthur’s hall.’

Then though he loved and reverenced her too much

To dream she could be guilty of foul act,

Right through his manful breast darted the pang

That makes a man, in the sweet face of her

Whom he loves most, lonely and miserable.

At this he hurled his huge limbs out of bed,

And shook his drowsy squire awake and cried,

‘My charger and her palfrey;’ then to her,

‘I will ride forth into the wilderness;

For though it seems my spurs are yet to win,

I have not fallen so low as some would wish.

And thou, put on thy worst and meanest dress

And ride with me.’ And Enid asked, amazed,

‘If Enid errs, let Enid learn her fault.’

But he, ‘I charge thee, ask not, but obey.’

Then she bethought her of a faded silk,

A faded mantle and a faded veil,

And moving toward a cedarn cabinet,

Wherein she kept them folded reverently

With sprigs of summer laid between the folds,

She took them, and arrayed herself therein,

Remembering when first he came on her

Drest in that dress, and how he loved her in it,

And all her foolish fears about the dress,

And all his journey to her, as himself

Had told her, and their coming to the court.

For Arthur on the Whitsuntide before

Held court at old Caerleon upon Usk.

There on a day, he sitting high in hall,

Before him came a forester of Dean,

Wet from the woods, with notice of a hart

Taller than all his fellows, milky-white,

First seen that day: these things he told the King.

Then the good King gave order to let blow

His horns for hunting on the morrow morn.

And when the King petitioned for his leave

To see the hunt, allowed it easily.

So with the morning all the court were gone.

But Guinevere lay late into the morn,

Lost in sweet dreams, and dreaming of her love

For Lancelot, and forgetful of the hunt;

But rose at last, a single maiden with her,

Took horse, and forded Usk, and gained the wood;

There, on a little knoll beside it, stayed

Waiting to hear the hounds; but heard instead

A sudden sound of hoofs, for Prince Geraint,

Late also, wearing neither hunting-dress

Nor weapon, save a golden-hilted brand,

Came quickly flashing through the shallow ford

Behind them, and so galloped up the knoll.

A purple scarf, at either end whereof

There swung an apple of the purest gold,

Swayed round about him, as he galloped up

To join them, glancing like a dragon-fly

In summer suit and silks of holiday.

Low bowed the tributary Prince, and she,

Sweet and statelily, and with all grace

Of womanhood and queenhood, answered him:

‘Late, late, Sir Prince,’ she said, ‘later than we!’

‘Yea, noble Queen,’ he answered, ‘and so late

That I but come like you to see the hunt,

Not join it.’ ‘Therefore wait with me,’ she said;

‘For on this little knoll, if anywhere,

There is good chance that we shall hear the hounds:

Here often they break covert at our feet.’

And while they listened for the distant hunt,

And chiefly for the baying of Cavall,

King Arthur’s hound of deepest mouth, there rode

Full slowly by a knight, lady, and dwarf;

Whereof the dwarf lagged latest, and the knight

Had vizor up, and showed a youthful face,

Imperious, and of haughtiest lineaments.

And Guinevere, not mindful of his face

In the King’s hall, desired his name, and sent

Her maiden to demand it of the dwarf;

Who being vicious, old and irritable,

And doubling all his master’s vice of pride,

Made answer sharply that she should not know.

‘Then will I ask it of himself,’ she said.

‘Nay, by my faith, thou shalt not,’ cried the dwarf;

‘Thou art not worthy even to speak of him;’

And when she put her horse toward the knight,

Struck at her with his whip, and she returned

Indignant to the Queen; whereat Geraint

Exclaiming, ‘Surely I will learn the name,’

Made sharply to the dwarf, and asked it of him,

Who answered as before; and when the Prince

Had put his horse in motion toward the knight,

Struck at him with his whip, and cut his cheek.

The Prince’s blood spirted upon the scarf,

Dyeing it; and his quick, instinctive hand

Caught at the hilt, as to abolish him:

But he, from his exceeding manfulness

And pure nobility of temperament,

Wroth to be wroth at such a worm, refrained

From even a word, and so returning said:

‘I will avenge this insult, noble Queen,

Done in your maiden’s person to yourself:

And I will track this vermin to their earths:

For though I ride unarmed, I do not doubt

To find, at some place I shall come at, arms

On loan, or else for pledge; and, being found,

Then will I fight him, and will break his pride,

And on the third day will again be here,

So that I be not fallen in fight. Farewell.’

‘Farewell, fair Prince,’ answered the stately Queen.

‘Be prosperous in this journey, as in all;

And may you light on all things that you love,

And live to wed with her whom first you love:

But ere you wed with any, bring your bride,

And I, were she the daughter of a king,

Yea, though she were a beggar from the hedge,

Will clothe her for her bridals like the sun.’

And Prince Geraint, now thinking that he heard

The noble hart at bay, now the far horn,

A little vext at losing of the hunt,

A little at the vile occasion, rode,

By ups and downs, through many a grassy glade

And valley, with fixt eye following the three.

At last they issued from the world of wood,

And climbed upon a fair and even ridge,

And showed themselves against the sky, and sank.

And thither there came Geraint, and underneath

Beheld the long street of a little town

In a long valley, on one side whereof,

White from the mason’s hand, a fortress rose;

And on one side a castle in decay,

Beyond a bridge that spanned a dry ravine:

And out of town and valley came a noise

As of a broad brook o’er a shingly bed

Brawling, or like a clamour of the rooks

At distance, ere they settle for the night.

And onward to the fortress rode the three,

And entered, and were lost behind the walls.

‘So,’ thought Geraint, ‘I have tracked him to his earth.’

And down the long street riding wearily,

Found every hostel full, and everywhere

Was hammer laid to hoof, and the hot hiss

And bustling whistle of the youth who scoured

His master’s armour; and of such a one

He asked, ‘What means the tumult in the town?’

Who told him, scouring still, ‘The sparrow-hawk!’

Then riding close behind an ancient churl,

Who, smitten by the dusty sloping beam,

Went sweating underneath a sack of corn,

Asked yet once more what meant the hubbub here?

Who answered gruffly, ‘Ugh! the sparrow-hawk.’

Then riding further past an armourer’s,

Who, with back turned, and bowed above his work,

Sat riveting a helmet on his knee,

He put the self-same query, but the man

Not turning round, nor looking at him, said:

‘Friend, he that labours for the sparrow-hawk

Has little time for idle questioners.’

Whereat Geraint flashed into sudden spleen:

‘A thousand pips eat up your sparrow-hawk!

Tits, wrens, and all winged nothings peck him dead!

Ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg

The murmur of the world! What is it to me?

O wretched set of sparrows, one and all,

Who pipe of nothing but of sparrow-hawks!

Speak, if ye be not like the rest, hawk-mad,

Where can I get me harbourage for the night?

And arms, arms, arms to fight my enemy? Speak!’

Whereat the armourer turning all amazed

And seeing one so gay in purple silks,

Came forward with the helmet yet in hand

And answered, ‘Pardon me, O stranger knight;

We hold a tourney here tomorrow morn,

And there is scantly time for half the work.

Arms? truth! I know not: all are wanted here.

Harbourage? truth, good truth, I know not, save,

It may be, at Earl Yniol’s, o’er the bridge

Yonder.’ He spoke and fell to work again.

Then rode Geraint, a little spleenful yet,

Across the bridge that spanned the dry ravine.

There musing sat the hoary-headed Earl,

(His dress a suit of frayed magnificence,

Once fit for feasts of ceremony) and said:

‘Whither, fair son?’ to whom Geraint replied,

‘O friend, I seek a harbourage for the night.’

Then Yniol, ‘Enter therefore and partake

The slender entertainment of a house

Once rich, now poor, but ever open-doored.’

‘Thanks, venerable friend,’ replied Geraint;

‘So that ye do not serve me sparrow-hawks

For supper, I will enter, I will eat

With all the passion of a twelve hours’ fast.’

Then sighed and smiled the hoary-headed Earl,

And answered, ‘Graver cause than yours is mine

To curse this hedgerow thief, the sparrow-hawk:

But in, go in; for save yourself desire it,

We will not touch upon him even in jest.’

Then rode Geraint into the castle court,

His charger trampling many a prickly star

Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones.

He looked and saw that all was ruinous.

Here stood a shattered archway plumed with fern;

And here had fallen a great part of a tower,

Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff,

And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers:

And high above a piece of turret stair,

Worn by the feet that now were silent, wound

Bare to the sun, and monstrous ivy-stems

Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibred arms,

And sucked the joining of the stones, and looked

A knot, beneath, of snakes, aloft, a grove.

And while he waited in the castle court,

The voice of Enid, Yniol’s daughter, rang

Clear through the open casement of the hall,

Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird,

Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,

Moves him to think what kind of bird it is

That sings so delicately clear, and make

Conjecture of the plumage and the form;

So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint;

And made him like a man abroad at morn

When first the liquid note beloved of men

Comes flying over many a windy wave

To Britain, and in April suddenly

Breaks from a coppice gemmed with green and red,

And he suspends his converse with a friend,

Or it may be the labour of his hands,

To think or say, ‘There is the nightingale;’

So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said,

‘Here, by God’s grace, is the one voice for me.’

It chanced the song that Enid sang was one

Of Fortune and her wheel, and Enid sang:

‘Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud;

Turn thy wild wheel through sunshine, storm, and cloud;

Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.

‘Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown;

With that wild wheel we go not up or down;

Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.

‘Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands;

Frown and we smile, the lords of our own hands;

For man is man and master of his fate.

‘Turn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd;

Thy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud;

Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.’

‘Hark, by the bird’s song ye may learn the nest,’

Said Yniol; ‘enter quickly.’ Entering then,

Right o’er a mount of newly-fallen stones,

The dusky-raftered many-cobwebbed hall,

He found an ancient dame in dim brocade;

And near her, like a blossom vermeil-white,

That lightly breaks a faded flower-sheath,

Moved the fair Enid, all in faded silk,

Her daughter. In a moment thought Geraint,

‘Here by God’s rood is the one maid for me.’

But none spake word except the hoary Earl:

‘Enid, the good knight’s horse stands in the court;

Take him to stall, and give him corn, and then

Go to the town and buy us flesh and wine;

And we will make us merry as we may.

Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great.’

He spake: the Prince, as Enid past him, fain

To follow, strode a stride, but Yniol caught

His purple scarf, and held, and said, ‘Forbear!

Rest! the good house, though ruined, O my son,

Endures not that her guest should serve himself.’

And reverencing the custom of the house

Geraint, from utter courtesy, forbore.

So Enid took his charger to the stall;

And after went her way across the bridge,

And reached the town, and while the Prince and Earl

Yet spoke together, came again with one,

A youth, that following with a costrel bore

The means of goodly welcome, flesh and wine.

And Enid brought sweet cakes to make them cheer,

And in her veil enfolded, manchet bread.

And then, because their hall must also serve

For kitchen, boiled the flesh, and spread the board,

And stood behind, and waited on the three.

And seeing her so sweet and serviceable,

Geraint had longing in him evermore

To stoop and kiss the tender little thumb,

That crost the trencher as she laid it down:

But after all had eaten, then Geraint,

For now the wine made summer in his veins,

Let his eye rove in following, or rest

On Enid at her lowly handmaid-work,

Now here, now there, about the dusky hall;

Then suddenly addrest the hoary Earl:

‘Fair Host and Earl, I pray your courtesy;

This sparrow-hawk, what is he? tell me of him.

His name? but no, good faith, I will not have it:

For if he be the knight whom late I saw

Ride into that new fortress by your town,

White from the mason’s hand, then have I sworn

From his own lips to have it — I am Geraint

Of Devon — for this morning when the Queen

Sent her own maiden to demand the name,

His dwarf, a vicious under-shapen thing,

Struck at her with his whip, and she returned

Indignant to the Queen; and then I swore

That I would track this caitiff to his hold,

And fight and break his pride, and have it of him.

And all unarmed I rode, and thought to find

Arms in your town, where all the men are mad;

They take the rustic murmur of their bourg

For the great wave that echoes round the world;

They would not hear me speak: but if ye know

Where I can light on arms, or if yourself

Should have them, tell me, seeing I have sworn

That I will break his pride and learn his name,

Avenging this great insult done the Queen.’

Then cried Earl Yniol, ‘Art thou he indeed,

Geraint, a name far-sounded among men

For noble deeds? and truly I, when first

I saw you moving by me on the bridge,

Felt ye were somewhat, yea, and by your state

And presence might have guessed you one of those

That eat in Arthur’s hall in Camelot.

Nor speak I now from foolish flattery;

For this dear child hath often heard me praise

Your feats of arms, and often when I paused

Hath asked again, and ever loved to hear;

So grateful is the noise of noble deeds

To noble hearts who see but acts of wrong:

O never yet had woman such a pair

Of suitors as this maiden: first Limours,

A creature wholly given to brawls and wine,

Drunk even when he wooed; and be he dead

I know not, but he past to the wild land.

The second was your foe, the sparrow-hawk,

My curse, my nephew — I will not let his name

Slip from my lips if I can help it — he,

When that I knew him fierce and turbulent

Refused her to him, then his pride awoke;

And since the proud man often is the mean,

He sowed a slander in the common ear,

Affirming that his father left him gold,

And in my charge, which was not rendered to him;

Bribed with large promises the men who served

About my person, the more easily

Because my means were somewhat broken into

Through open doors and hospitality;

Raised my own town against me in the night

Before my Enid’s birthday, sacked my house;

From mine own earldom foully ousted me;

Built that new fort to overawe my friends,

For truly there are those who love me yet;

And keeps me in this ruinous castle here,

Where doubtless he would put me soon to death,

But that his pride too much despises me:

And I myself sometimes despise myself;

For I have let men be, and have their way;

Am much too gentle, have not used my power:

Nor know I whether I be very base

Or very manful, whether very wise

Or very foolish; only this I know,

That whatsoever evil happen to me,

I seem to suffer nothing heart or limb,

But can endure it all most patiently.’

‘Well said, true heart,’ replied Geraint, ‘but arms,

That if the sparrow-hawk, this nephew, fight

In next day’s tourney I may break his pride.’

And Yniol answered, ‘Arms, indeed, but old

And rusty, old and rusty, Prince Geraint,

Are mine, and therefore at thy asking, thine.

But in this tournament can no man tilt,

Except the lady he loves best be there.

Two forks are fixt into the meadow ground,

And over these is placed a silver wand,

And over that a golden sparrow-hawk,

The prize of beauty for the fairest there.

And this, what knight soever be in field

Lays claim to for the lady at his side,

And tilts with my good nephew thereupon,

Who being apt at arms and big of bone

Has ever won it for the lady with him,

And toppling over all antagonism

Has earned himself the name of sparrow-hawk.’

But thou, that hast no lady, canst not fight.’

To whom Geraint with eyes all bright replied,

Leaning a little toward him, ‘Thy leave!

Let me lay lance in rest, O noble host,

For this dear child, because I never saw,

Though having seen all beauties of our time,

Nor can see elsewhere, anything so fair.

And if I fall her name will yet remain

Untarnished as before; but if I live,

So aid me Heaven when at mine uttermost,

As I will make her truly my true wife.’

Then, howsoever patient, Yniol’s heart

Danced in his bosom, seeing better days,

And looking round he saw not Enid there,

(Who hearing her own name had stolen away)

But that old dame, to whom full tenderly

And folding all her hand in his he said,

‘Mother, a maiden is a tender thing,

And best by her that bore her understood.

Go thou to rest, but ere thou go to rest

Tell her, and prove her heart toward the Prince.’

So spake the kindly-hearted Earl, and she

With frequent smile and nod departing found,

Half disarrayed as to her rest, the girl;

Whom first she kissed on either cheek, and then

On either shining shoulder laid a hand,

And kept her off and gazed upon her face,

And told them all their converse in the hall,

Proving her heart: but never light and shade

Coursed one another more on open ground

Beneath a troubled heaven, than red and pale

Across the face of Enid hearing her;

While slowly falling as a scale that falls,

When weight is added only grain by grain,

Sank her sweet head upon her gentle breast;

Nor did she lift an eye nor speak a word,

Rapt in the fear and in the wonder of it;

So moving without answer to her rest

She found no rest, and ever failed to draw

The quiet night into her blood, but lay

Contemplating her own unworthiness;

And when the pale and bloodless east began

To quicken to the sun, arose, and raised

Her mother too, and hand in hand they moved

Down to the meadow where the jousts were held,

And waited there for Yniol and Geraint.

And thither came the twain, and when Geraint

Beheld her first in field, awaiting him,

He felt, were she the prize of bodily force,

Himself beyond the rest pushing could move

The chair of Idris. Yniol’s rusted arms

Were on his princely person, but through these

Princelike his bearing shone; and errant knights

And ladies came, and by and by the town

Flowed in, and settling circled all the lists.

And there they fixt the forks into the ground,

And over these they placed the silver wand,

And over that the golden sparrow-hawk.

Then Yniol’s nephew, after trumpet blown,

Spake to the lady with him and proclaimed,

‘Advance and take, as fairest of the fair,

What I these two years past have won for thee,

The prize of beauty.’ Loudly spake the Prince,

‘Forbear: there is a worthier,’ and the knight

With some surprise and thrice as much disdain

Turned, and beheld the four, and all his face

Glowed like the heart of a great fire at Yule,

So burnt he was with passion, crying out,

‘Do battle for it then,’ no more; and thrice

They clashed together, and thrice they brake their spears.

Then each, dishorsed and drawing, lashed at each

So often and with such blows, that all the crowd

Wondered, and now and then from distant walls

There came a clapping as of phantom hands.

So twice they fought, and twice they breathed, and still

The dew of their great labour, and the blood

Of their strong bodies, flowing, drained their force.

But either’s force was matched till Yniol’s cry,

‘Remember that great insult done the Queen,’

Increased Geraint’s, who heaved his blade aloft,

And cracked the helmet through, and bit the bone,

And felled him, and set foot upon his breast,

And said, ‘Thy name?’ To whom the fallen man

Made answer, groaning, ‘Edyrn, son of Nudd!

Ashamed am I that I should tell it thee.

My pride is broken: men have seen my fall.’

‘Then, Edyrn, son of Nudd,’ replied Geraint,

‘These two things shalt thou do, or else thou diest.

First, thou thyself, with damsel and with dwarf,

Shalt ride to Arthur’s court, and coming there,

Crave pardon for that insult done the Queen,

And shalt abide her judgment on it; next,

Thou shalt give back their earldom to thy kin.

These two things shalt thou do, or thou shalt die.’

And Edyrn answered, ‘These things will I do,

For I have never yet been overthrown,

And thou hast overthrown me, and my pride

Is broken down, for Enid sees my fall!’

And rising up, he rode to Arthur’s court,

And there the Queen forgave him easily.

And being young, he changed and came to loathe

His crime of traitor, slowly drew himself

Bright from his old dark life, and fell at last

In the great battle fighting for the King.

But when the third day from the hunting-morn

Made a low splendour in the world, and wings

Moved in her ivy, Enid, for she lay

With her fair head in the dim-yellow light,

Among the dancing shadows of the birds,

Woke and bethought her of her promise given

No later than last eve to Prince Geraint —

So bent he seemed on going the third day,

He would not leave her, till her promise given —

To ride with him this morning to the court,

And there be made known to the stately Queen,

And there be wedded with all ceremony.

At this she cast her eyes upon her dress,

And thought it never yet had looked so mean.

For as a leaf in mid-November is

To what it is in mid-October, seemed

The dress that now she looked on to the dress

She looked on ere the coming of Geraint.

And still she looked, and still the terror grew

Of that strange bright and dreadful thing, a court,

All staring at her in her faded silk:

And softly to her own sweet heart she said:

‘This noble prince who won our earldom back,

So splendid in his acts and his attire,

Sweet heaven, how much I shall discredit him!

Would he could tarry with us here awhile,

But being so beholden to the Prince,

It were but little grace in any of us,

Bent as he seemed on going this third day,

To seek a second favour at his hands.

Yet if he could but tarry a day or two,

Myself would work eye dim, and finger lame,

Far liefer than so much discredit him.’

And Enid fell in longing for a dress

All branched and flowered with gold, a costly gift

Of her good mother, given her on the night

Before her birthday, three sad years ago,

That night of fire, when Edyrn sacked their house,

And scattered all they had to all the winds:

For while the mother showed it, and the two

Were turning and admiring it, the work

To both appeared so costly, rose a cry

That Edyrn’s men were on them, and they fled

With little save the jewels they had on,

Which being sold and sold had bought them bread:

And Edyrn’s men had caught them in their flight,

And placed them in this ruin; and she wished

The Prince had found her in her ancient home;

Then let her fancy flit across the past,

And roam the goodly places that she knew;

And last bethought her how she used to watch,

Near that old home, a pool of golden carp;

And one was patched and blurred and lustreless

Among his burnished brethren of the pool;

And half asleep she made comparison

Of that and these to her own faded self

And the gay court, and fell asleep again;

And dreamt herself was such a faded form

Among her burnished sisters of the pool;

But this was in the garden of a king;

And though she lay dark in the pool, she knew

That all was bright; that all about were birds

Of sunny plume in gilded trellis-work;

That all the turf was rich in plots that looked

Each like a garnet or a turkis in it;

And lords and ladies of the high court went

In silver tissue talking things of state;

And children of the King in cloth of gold

Glanced at the doors or gamboled down the walks;

And while she thought ‘They will not see me,’ came

A stately queen whose name was Guinevere,

And all the children in their cloth of gold

Ran to her, crying, ‘If we have fish at all

Let them be gold; and charge the gardeners now

To pick the faded creature from the pool,

And cast it on the mixen that it die.’

And therewithal one came and seized on her,

And Enid started waking, with her heart

All overshadowed by the foolish dream,

And lo! it was her mother grasping her

To get her well awake; and in her hand

A suit of bright apparel, which she laid

Flat on the couch, and spoke exultingly:

‘See here, my child, how fresh the colours look,

How fast they hold like colours of a shell

That keeps the wear and polish of the wave.

Why not? It never yet was worn, I trow:

Look on it, child, and tell me if ye know it.’

And Enid looked, but all confused at first,

Could scarce divide it from her foolish dream:

Then suddenly she knew it and rejoiced,

And answered, ‘Yea, I know it; your good gift,

So sadly lost on that unhappy night;

Your own good gift!’ ‘Yea, surely,’ said the dame,

‘And gladly given again this happy morn.

For when the jousts were ended yesterday,

Went Yniol through the town, and everywhere

He found the sack and plunder of our house

All scattered through the houses of the town;

And gave command that all which once was ours

Should now be ours again: and yester-eve,

While ye were talking sweetly with your Prince,

Came one with this and laid it in my hand,

For love or fear, or seeking favour of us,

Because we have our earldom back again.

And yester-eve I would not tell you of it,

But kept it for a sweet surprise at morn.

Yea, truly is it not a sweet surprise?

For I myself unwillingly have worn

My faded suit, as you, my child, have yours,

And howsoever patient, Yniol his.

Ah, dear, he took me from a goodly house,

With store of rich apparel, sumptuous fare,

And page, and maid, and squire, and seneschal,

And pastime both of hawk and hound, and all

That appertains to noble maintenance.

Yea, and he brought me to a goodly house;

But since our fortune swerved from sun to shade,

And all through that young traitor, cruel need

Constrained us, but a better time has come;

So clothe yourself in this, that better fits

Our mended fortunes and a Prince’s bride:

For though ye won the prize of fairest fair,

And though I heard him call you fairest fair,

Let never maiden think, however fair,

She is not fairer in new clothes than old.

And should some great court-lady say, the Prince

Hath picked a ragged-robin from the hedge,

And like a madman brought her to the court,

Then were ye shamed, and, worse, might shame the Prince

To whom we are beholden; but I know,

That when my dear child is set forth at her best,

That neither court nor country, though they sought

Through all the provinces like those of old

That lighted on Queen Esther, has her match.’

Here ceased the kindly mother out of breath;

And Enid listened brightening as she lay;

Then, as the white and glittering star of morn

Parts from a bank of snow, and by and by

Slips into golden cloud, the maiden rose,

And left her maiden couch, and robed herself,

Helped by the mother’s careful hand and eye,

Without a mirror, in the gorgeous gown;

Who, after, turned her daughter round, and said,

She never yet had seen her half so fair;

And called her like that maiden in the tale,

Whom Gwydion made by glamour out of flowers

And sweeter than the bride of Cassivelaun,

Flur, for whose love the Roman Cæsar first

Invaded Britain, ‘But we beat him back,

As this great Prince invaded us, and we,

Not beat him back, but welcomed him with joy

And I can scarcely ride with you to court,

For old am I, and rough the ways and wild;

But Yniol goes, and I full oft shall dream

I see my princess as I see her now,

Clothed with my gift, and gay among the gay.’

But while the women thus rejoiced, Geraint

Woke where he slept in the high hall, and called

For Enid, and when Yniol made report

Of that good mother making Enid gay

In such apparel as might well beseem

His princess, or indeed the stately Queen,

He answered: ‘Earl, entreat her by my love,

Albeit I give no reason but my wish,

That she ride with me in her faded silk.’

Yniol with that hard message went; it fell

Like flaws in summer laying lusty corn:

For Enid, all abashed she knew not why,

Dared not to glance at her good mother’s face,

But silently, in all obedience,

Her mother silent too, nor helping her,

Laid from her limbs the costly-broidered gift,

And robed them in her ancient suit again,

And so descended. Never man rejoiced

More than Geraint to greet her thus attired;

And glancing all at once as keenly at her

As careful robins eye the delver’s toil,

Made her cheek burn and either eyelid fall,

But rested with her sweet face satisfied;

Then seeing cloud upon the mother’s brow,

Her by both hands she caught, and sweetly said,

‘O my new mother, be not wroth or grieved

At thy new son, for my petition to her.

When late I left Caerleon, our great Queen,

In words whose echo lasts, they were so sweet,

Made promise, that whatever bride I brought,

Herself would clothe her like the sun in Heaven.

Thereafter, when I reached this ruined hall,

Beholding one so bright in dark estate,

I vowed that could I gain her, our fair Queen,

No hand but hers, should make your Enid burst

Sunlike from cloud — and likewise thought perhaps,

That service done so graciously would bind

The two together; fain I would the two

Should love each other: how can Enid find

A nobler friend? Another thought was mine;

I came among you here so suddenly,

That though her gentle presence at the lists

Might well have served for proof that I was loved,

I doubted whether daughter’s tenderness,

Or easy nature, might not let itself

Be moulded by your wishes for her weal;

Or whether some false sense in her own self

Of my contrasting brightness, overbore

Her fancy dwelling in this dusky hall;

And such a sense might make her long for court

And all its perilous glories: and I thought,

That could I someway prove such force in her

Linked with such love for me, that at a word

(No reason given her) she could cast aside

A splendour dear to women, new to her,

And therefore dearer; or if not so new,

Yet therefore tenfold dearer by the power

Of intermitted usage; then I felt

That I could rest, a rock in ebbs and flows,

Fixt on her faith. Now, therefore, I do rest,

A prophet certain of my prophecy,

That never shadow of mistrust can cross

Between us. Grant me pardon for my thoughts:

And for my strange petition I will make

Amends hereafter by some gaudy-day,

When your fair child shall wear your costly gift

Beside your own warm hearth, with, on her knees,

Who knows? another gift of the high God,

Which, maybe, shall have learned to lisp you thanks.’

He spoke: the mother smiled, but half in tears,

Then brought a mantle down and wrapt her in it,

And claspt and kissed her, and they rode away.

Now thrice that morning Guinevere had climbed

The giant tower, from whose high crest, they say,

Men saw the goodly hills of Somerset,

And white sails flying on the yellow sea;

But not to goodly hill or yellow sea

Looked the fair Queen, but up the vale of Usk,

By the flat meadow, till she saw them come;

And then descending met them at the gates,

Embraced her with all welcome as a friend,

And did her honour as the Prince’s bride,

And clothed her for her bridals like the sun;

And all that week was old Caerleon gay,

For by the hands of Dubric, the high saint,

They twain were wedded with all ceremony.

And this was on the last year’s Whitsuntide.

But Enid ever kept the faded silk,

Remembering how first he came on her,

Drest in that dress, and how he loved her in it,

And all her foolish fears about the dress,

And all his journey toward her, as himself

Had told her, and their coming to the court.

And now this morning when he said to her,

‘Put on your worst and meanest dress,’ she found

And took it, and arrayed herself therein.

Geraint and Enid

1857

O PURBLIND race of miserable men,

How many among us at this very hour

Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves,

By taking true for false, or false for true;

Here, through the feeble twilight of this world

Groping, how many, until we pass and reach

That other, where we see as we are seen!

So fared it with Geraint, who issuing forth

That morning, when they both had got to horse,

Perhaps because he loved her passionately,

And felt that tempest brooding round his heart,

Which, if he spoke at all, would break perforce

Upon a head so dear in thunder, said:

‘Not at my side. I charge thee ride before,

Ever a good way on before; and this

I charge thee, on thy duty as a wife,

Whatever happens, not to speak to me,

No, not a word!’ and Enid was aghast;

And forth they rode, but scarce three paces on,

When crying out, ‘Effeminate as I am,

I will not fight my way with gilded arms,

All shall be iron;’ he loosed a mighty purse,

Hung at his belt, and hurled it toward the squire.

So the last sight that Enid had of home

Was all the marble threshold flashing, strown

With gold and scattered coinage, and the squire

Chafing his shoulder: then he cried again,

‘To the wilds!’ and Enid leading down the tracks

Through which he bad her lead him on, they past

The marches, and by bandit-haunted holds,

Gray swamps and pools, waste places of the hern,

And wildernesses, perilous paths, they rode:

Round was their pace at first, but slackened soon:

A stranger meeting them had surely thought

They rode so slowly and they looked so pale,

That each had suffered some exceeding wrong.

For he was ever saying to himself,

‘O I that wasted time to tend upon her,

To compass her with sweet observances,

To dress her beautifully and keep her true’ —

And there he broke the sentence in his heart

Abruptly, as a man upon his tongue

May break it, when his passion masters him.

And she was ever praying the sweet heavens

To save her dear lord whole from any wound.

And ever in her mind she cast about

For that unnoticed failing in herself,

Which made him look so cloudy and so cold;

Till the great plover’s human whistle amazed

Her heart, and glancing round the waste she feared

In ever wavering brake an ambuscade.

Then thought again, ‘If there be such in me,

I might amend it by the grace of Heaven,

If he would only speak and tell me of it.’

But when the fourth part of the day was gone,

Then Enid was aware of three tall knights

On horseback, wholly armed, behind a rock

In shadow, waiting for them, caitiffs all;

And heard one crying to his fellow, ‘Look,

Here comes a laggard hanging down his head,

Who seems no bolder than a beaten hound;

Come, we will slay him and will have his horse

And armour, and his damsel shall be ours.’

Then Enid pondered in her heart, and said:

‘I will go back a little to my lord,

And I will tell him all their caitiff talk;

For, be he wroth even to slaying me,

Far liefer by his dear hand had I die,

Than that my lord should suffer loss or shame.’

Then she went back some paces of return,

Met his full frown timidly firm, and said;

‘My lord, I saw three bandits by the rock

Waiting to fall on you, and heard them boast

That they would slay you, and possess your horse

And armour, and your damsel should be theirs.’

He made a wrathful answer: ‘Did I wish

Your warning or your silence? one command

I laid upon you, not to speak to me,

And thus ye keep it! Well then, look — for now,

Whether ye wish me victory or defeat,

Long for my life, or hunger for my death,

Yourself shall see my vigour is not lost.’

Then Enid waited pale and sorrowful,

And down upon him bare the bandit three.

And at the midmost charging, Prince Geraint

Drave the long spear a cubit through his breast

And out beyond; and then against his brace

Of comrades, each of whom had broken on him

A lance that splintered like an icicle,

Swung from his brand a windy buffet out

Once, twice, to right, to left, and stunned the twain

Or slew them, and dismounting like a man

That skins the wild beast after slaying him,

Stript from the three dead wolves of woman born

The three gay suits of armour which they wore,

And let the bodies lie, but bound the suits

Of armour on their horses, each on each,

And tied the bridle-reins of all the three

Together, and said to her, ‘Drive them on

Before you;’ and she drove them through the waste.

He followed nearer; ruth began to work

Against his anger in him, while he watched

The being he loved best in all the world,

With difficulty in mild obedience

Driving them on: he fain had spoken to her,

And loosed in words of sudden fire the wrath

And smouldered wrong that burnt him all within;

But evermore it seemed an easier thing

At once without remorse to strike her dead,

Than to cry ‘Halt,’ and to her own bright face

Accuse her of the least immodesty:

And thus tongue-tied, it made him wroth the more

That she could speak whom his own ear had heard

Call herself false: and suffering thus he made

Minutes an age: but in scarce longer time

Than at Caerleon the full-tided Usk,

Before he turn to fall seaward again,

Pauses, did Enid, keeping watch, behold

In the first shallow shade of a deep wood,

Before a gloom of stubborn-shafted oaks,

Three other horsemen waiting, wholly armed,

Whereof one seemed far larger than her lord,

And shook her pulses, crying, ‘Look, a prize!

Three horses and three goodly suits of arms,

And all in charge of whom? a girl: set on.’

‘Nay,’ said the second, ‘yonder comes a knight.’

The third, ‘A craven; how he hangs his head.’

The giant answered merrily, ‘Yea, but one?

Wait here, and when he passes fall upon him.’

And Enid pondered in her heart and said,

‘I will abide the coming of my lord,

And I will tell him all their villainy.

My lord is weary with the fight before,

And they will fall upon him unawares.

I needs must disobey him for his good;

How should I dare obey him to his harm?

Needs must I speak, and though he kill me for it,

I save a life dearer to me than mine.’

And she abode his coming, and said to him

With timid firmness, ‘Have I leave to speak?’

He said, ‘Ye take it, speaking,’ and she spoke.

‘There lurk three villains yonder in the wood,

And each of them is wholly armed, and one

Is larger-limbed than you are, and they say

That they will fall upon you while ye pass.’

To which he flung a wrathful answer back:

‘And if there were an hundred in the wood,

And every man were larger-limbed than I,

And all at once should sally out upon me,

I swear it would not ruffle me so much

As you that not obey me. Stand aside,

And if I fall, cleave to the better man.’

And Enid stood aside to wait the event,

Not dare to watch the combat, only breathe

Short fits of prayer, at every stroke a breath.

And he, she dreaded most, bare down upon him.

Aimed at the helm, his lance erred; but Geraint’s,

A little in the late encounter strained,

Struck through the bulky bandit’s corselet home,

And then brake short, and down his enemy rolled,

And there lay still; as he that tells the tale

Saw once a great piece of a promontory,

That had a sapling growing on it, slide

From the long shore-cliff’s windy walls to the beach,

And there lie still, and yet the sapling grew:

So lay the man transfixt. His craven pair

Of comrades making slowlier at the Prince,

When now they saw their bulwark fallen, stood;

On whom the victor, to confound them more,

Spurred with his terrible war-cry; for as one,

That listens near a torrent mountain-brook,

All through the crash of the near cataract hears

The drumming thunder of the huger fall

At distance, were the soldiers wont to hear

His voice in battle, and be kindled by it,

And foemen scared, like that false pair who turned

Flying, but, overtaken, died the death

Themselves had wrought on many an innocent.

Thereon Geraint, dismounting, picked the lance

That pleased him best, and drew from those dead wolves

Their three gay suits of armour, each from each,

And bound them on their horses, each on each,

And tied the bridle-reins of all the three

Together, and said to her, ‘Drive them on

Before you,’ and she drove them through the wood.

He followed nearer still: the pain she had

To keep them in the wild ways of the wood,

Two sets of three laden with jingling arms,

Together, served a little to disedge

The sharpness of that pain about her heart:

And they themselves, like creatures gently born

But into bad hands fallen, and now so long

By bandits groomed, pricked their light ears, and felt

Her low firm voice and tender government.

So through the green gloom of the wood they past,

And issuing under open heavens beheld

A little town with towers, upon a rock,

And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased

In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it:

And down a rocky pathway from the place

There came a fair-haired youth, that in his hand

Bare victual for the mowers: and Geraint

Had ruth again on Enid looking pale:

Then, moving downward to the meadow ground,

He, when the fair-haired youth came by him, said,

‘Friend, let her eat; the damsel is so faint.’

‘Yea, willingly,’ replied the youth; ‘and thou,

My lord, eat also, though the fare is coarse,

And only meet for mowers;’ then set down

His basket, and dismounting on the sward

They let the horses graze, and ate themselves.

And Enid took a little delicately,

Less having stomach for it than desire

To close with her lord’s pleasure; but Geraint

Ate all the mowers’ victual unawares,

And when he found all empty, was amazed;

And ‘Boy,’ said he, ‘I have eaten all, but take

A horse and arms for guerdon; choose the best.’

He, reddening in extremity of delight,

‘My lord, you overpay me fifty-fold.’

‘Ye will be all the wealthier,’ cried the Prince.

‘I take it as free gift, then,’ said the boy,

‘Not guerdon; for myself can easily,

While your good damsel rests, return, and fetch

Fresh victual for these mowers of our Earl;

For these are his, and all the field is his,

And I myself am his; and I will tell him

How great a man thou art: he loves to know

When men of mark are in his territory:

And he will have thee to his palace here,

And serve thee costlier than with mowers’ fare.’

Then said Geraint, ‘I wish no better fare:

I never ate with angrier appetite

Than when I left your mowers dinnerless.

And into no Earl’s palace will I go.

I know, God knows, too much of palaces!

And if he want me, let him come to me.

But hire us some fair chamber for the night,

And stalling for the horses, and return

With victual for these men, and let us know.’

‘Yea, my kind lord,’ said the glad youth, and went,

Held his head high, and thought himself a knight,

And up the rocky pathway disappeared,

Leading the horse, and they were left alone.

But when the Prince had brought his errant eyes

Home from the rock, sideways he let them glance

At Enid, where she droopt: his own false doom,

That shadow of mistrust should never cross

Betwixt them, came upon him, and he sighed;

Then with another humorous ruth remarked

The lusty mowers labouring dinnerless,

And watched the sun blaze on the turning scythe,

And after nodded sleepily in the heat.

But she, remembering her old ruined hall,

And all the windy clamour of the daws

About her hollow turret, plucked the grass

There growing longest by the meadow’s edge,

And into many a listless annulet,

Now over, now beneath her marriage ring,

Wove and unwove it, till the boy returned

And told them of a chamber, and they went;

Where, after saying to her, ‘If ye will,

Call for the woman of the house,’ to which

She answered, ‘Thanks, my lord;’ the two remained

Apart by all the chamber’s width, and mute

As two creatures voiceless through the fault of birth,

Or two wild men supporters of a shield,

Painted, who stare at open space, nor glance

The one at other, parted by the shield.

On a sudden, many a voice along the street,

And heel against the pavement echoing, burst

Their drowse; and either started while the door,

Pushed from without, drave backward to the wall,

And midmost of a rout of roisterers,

Femininely fair and dissolutely pale,

Her suitor in old years before Geraint,

Entered, the wild lord of the place, Limours.

He moving up with pliant courtliness,

Greeted Geraint full face, but stealthily,

In the mid-warmth of welcome and graspt hand,

Found Enid with the corner of his eye,

And knew her sitting sad and solitary.

Then cried Geraint for wine and goodly cheer

To feed the sudden guest, and sumptuously

According to his fashion, bad the host

Call in what men soever were his friends,

And feast with these in honour of their Earl;

‘And care not for the cost; the cost is mine.’

And wine and food were brought, and Earl Limours

Drank till he jested with all ease, and told

Free tales, and took the word and played upon it,

And made it of two colours; for his talk,

When wine and free companions kindled him,

Was wont to glance and sparkle like a gem

Of fifty facets; thus he moved the Prince

To laughter and his comrades to applause.

Then, when the Prince was merry, asked Limours,

‘Your leave, my lord, to cross the room, and speak

To your good damsel there who sits apart,

And seems so lonely?’ ‘My free leave,’ he said;

‘Get her to speak: she doth not speak to me.’

Then rose Limours, and looking at his feet,

Like him who tries the bridge he fears may fail,

Crost and came near, lifted adoring eyes,

Bowed at her side and uttered whisperingly:

‘Enid, the pilot star of my lone life,

Enid, my early and my only love,

Enid, the loss of whom hath turned me wild —

What chance is this? how is it I see you here?

Ye are in my power at last, are in my power.

Yet fear me not: I call mine own self wild,

But keep a touch of sweet civility

Here in the heart of waste and wilderness.

I thought, but that your father came between,

In former days you saw me favourably.

And if it were so do not keep it back:

Make me a little happier: let me know it:

Owe you me nothing for a life half-lost?

Yea, yea, the whole dear debt of all you are.

And, Enid, you and he, I see with joy,

Ye sit apart, you do not speak to him,

You come with no attendance, page or maid,

To serve you — doth he love you as of old?

For, call it lovers’ quarrels, yet I know

Though men may bicker with the things they love,

They would not make them laughable in all eyes,

Not while they loved them; and your wretched dress,

A wretched insult on you, dumbly speaks

Your story, that this man loves you no more.

Your beauty is no beauty to him now:

A common chance — right well I know it — palled —

For I know men: nor will ye win him back,

For the man’s love once gone never returns.

But here is one who loves you as of old;

With more exceeding passion than of old:

Good, speak the word: my followers ring him round:

He sits unarmed; I hold a finger up;

They understand: nay; I do not mean blood:

Nor need ye look so scared at what I say:

My malice is no deeper than a moat,

No stronger than a wall: there is the keep;

He shall not cross us more; speak but the word:

Or speak it not; but then by Him that made me

The one true lover whom you ever owned,

I will make use of all the power I have.

O pardon me! the madness of that hour,

When first I parted from thee, moves me yet.’

At this the tender sound of his own voice

And sweet self-pity, or the fancy of it,

Made his eye moist; but Enid feared his eyes,

Moist as they were, wine-heated from the feast;

And answered with such craft as women use,

Guilty or guiltless, to stave off a chance

That breaks upon them perilously, and said:

‘Earl, if you love me as in former years,

And do not practise on me, come with morn,

And snatch me from him as by violence;

Leave me tonight: I am weary to the death.’

Low at leave-taking, with his brandished plume

Brushing his instep, bowed the all-amorous Earl,

And the stout Prince bad him a loud good-night.

He moving homeward babbled to his men,

How Enid never loved a man but him,

Nor cared a broken egg-shell for her lord.

But Enid left alone with Prince Geraint,

Debating his command of silence given,

And that she now perforce must violate it,

Held commune with herself, and while she held

He fell asleep, and Enid had no heart

To wake him, but hung o’er him, wholly pleased

To find him yet unwounded after fight,

And hear him breathing low and equally.

Anon she rose, and stepping lightly, heaped

The pieces of his armour in one place,

All to be there against a sudden need;

Then dozed awhile herself, but overtoiled

By that day’s grief and travel, evermore

Seemed catching at a rootless thorn, and then

Went slipping down horrible precipices,

And strongly striking out her limbs awoke;

Then thought she heard the wild Earl at the door,

With all his rout of random followers,

Sound on a dreadful trumpet, summoning her;

Which was the red cock shouting to the light,

As the gray dawn stole o’er the dewy world,

And glimmered on his armour in the room.

And once again she rose to look at it,

But touched it unawares: jangling, the casque

Fell, and he started up and stared at her.

Then breaking his command of silence given,

She told him all that Earl Limours had said,

Except the passage that he loved her not;

Nor left untold the craft herself had used;

But ended with apology so sweet,

Low-spoken, and of so few words, and seemed

So justified by that necessity,

That though he thought ‘was it for him she wept

In Devon?’ he but gave a wrathful groan,

Saying, ‘Your sweet faces make good fellows fools

And traitors. Call the host and bid him bring

Charger and palfrey.’ So she glided out

Among the heavy breathings of the house,

And like a household Spirit at the walls

Beat, till she woke the sleepers, and returned:

Then tending her rough lord, though all unasked,

In silence, did him service as a squire;

Till issuing armed he found the host and cried,

‘Thy reckoning, friend?’ and ere he learnt it, ‘Take

Five horses and their armours;’ and the host

Suddenly honest, answered in amaze,

‘My lord, I scarce have spent the worth of one!’

‘Ye will be all the wealthier,’ said the Prince,

And then to Enid, ‘Forward! and today

I charge you, Enid, more especially,

What thing soever ye may hear, or see,

Or fancy (though I count it of small use

To charge you) that ye speak not but obey.’

And Enid answered, ‘Yea, my lord, I know

Your wish, and would obey; but riding first,

I hear the violent threats you do not hear,

I see the danger which you cannot see:

Then not to give you warning, that seems hard;

Almost beyond me: yet I would obey.’

‘Yea so,’ said he, ‘do it: be not too wise;

Seeing that ye are wedded to a man,

Not all mismated with a yawning clown,

But one with arms to guard his head and yours,

With eyes to find you out however far,

And ears to hear you even in his dreams.’

With that he turned and looked as keenly at her

As careful robins eye the delver’s toil;

And that within her, which a wanton fool,

Or hasty judger would have called her guilt,

Made her cheek burn and either eyelid fall.

And Geraint looked and was not satisfied.

Then forward by a way which, beaten broad,

Led from the territory of false Limours

To the waste earldom of another earl,

Doorm, whom his shaking vassals called the Bull,

Went Enid with her sullen follower on.

Once she looked back, and when she saw him ride

More near by many a rood than yestermorn,

It wellnigh made her cheerful; till Geraint

Waving an angry hand as who should say

‘Ye watch me,’ saddened all her heart again.

But while the sun yet beat a dewy blade,

The sound of many a heavily-galloping hoof

Smote on her ear, and turning round she saw

Dust, and the points of lances bicker in it.

Then not to disobey her lord’s behest,

And yet to give him warning, for he rode

As if he heard not, moving back she held

Her finger up, and pointed to the dust.

At which the warrior in his obstinacy,

Because she kept the letter of his word,

Was in a manner pleased, and turning, stood.

And in the moment after, wild Limours,

Borne on a black horse, like a thunder-cloud

Whose skirts are loosened by the breaking storm,

Half ridden off with by the thing he rode,

And all in passion uttering a dry shriek,

Dashed down on Geraint, who closed with him, and bore

Down by the length of lance and arm beyond

The crupper, and so left him stunned or dead,

And overthrew the next that followed him,

And blindly rushed on all the rout behind.

But at the flash and motion of the man

They vanished panic-stricken, like a shoal

Of darting fish, that on a summer morn

Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot

Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand,

But if a man who stands upon the brink

But lift a shining hand against the sun,

There is not left the twinkle of a fin

Betwixt the cressy islets white in flower;

So, scared but at the motion of the man,

Fled all the boon companions of the Earl,

And left him lying in the public way;

So vanish friendships only made in wine.

Then like a stormy sunlight smiled Geraint,

Who saw the chargers of the two that fell

Start from their fallen lords, and wildly fly,

Mixt with the flyers. ‘Horse and man,’ he said,

‘All of one mind and all right-honest friends!

Not a hoof left: and I methinks till now

Was honest — paid with horses and with arms;

I cannot steal or plunder, no nor beg:

And so what say ye, shall we strip him there

Your lover? has your palfrey heart enough

To bear his armour? shall we fast, or dine?

No? — then do thou, being right honest, pray

That we may meet the horsemen of Earl Doorm,

I too would still be honest.’ Thus he said:

And sadly gazing on her bridle-reins,

And answering not one word, she led the way.

But as a man to whom a dreadful loss

Falls in a far land and he knows it not,

But coming back he learns it, and the loss

So pains him that he sickens nigh to death;

So fared it with Geraint, who being pricked

In combat with the follower of Limours,

Bled underneath his armour secretly,

And so rode on, nor told his gentle wife

What ailed him, hardly knowing it himself,

Till his eye darkened and his helmet wagged;

And at a sudden swerving of the road,

Though happily down on a bank of grass,

The Prince, without a word, from his horse fell.

And Enid heard the clashing of his fall,

Suddenly came, and at his side all pale

Dismounting, loosed the fastenings of his arms,

Nor let her true hand falter, nor blue eye

Moisten, till she had lighted on his wound,

And tearing off her veil of faded silk

Had bared her forehead to the blistering sun,

And swathed the hurt that drained her dear lord’s life.

Then after all was done that hand could do,

She rested, and her desolation came

Upon her, and she wept beside the way.

And many past, but none regarded her,

For in that realm of lawless turbulence,

A woman weeping for her murdered mate

Was cared as much for as a summer shower:

One took him for a victim of Earl Doorm,

Nor dared to waste a perilous pity on him:

Another hurrying past, a man-at-arms,

Rode on a mission to the bandit Earl;

Half whistling and half singing a coarse song,

He drove the dust against her veilless eyes:

Another, flying from the wrath of Doorm

Before an ever-fancied arrow, made

The long way smoke beneath him in his fear;

At which her palfrey whinnying lifted heel,

And scoured into the coppices and was lost,

While the great charger stood, grieved like a man.

But at the point of noon the huge Earl Doorm,

Broad-faced with under-fringe of russet beard,

Bound on a foray, rolling eyes of prey,

Came riding with a hundred lances up;

But ere he came, like one that hails a ship,

Cried out with a big voice, ‘What, is he dead?’

‘No, no, not dead!’ she answered in all haste.

‘Would some of your people take him up,

And bear him hence out of this cruel sun?

Most sure am I, quite sure, he is not dead.’

Then said Earl Doorm: ‘Well, if he be not dead,

Why wail ye for him thus? ye seem a child.

And be he dead, I count you for a fool;

Your wailing will not quicken him: dead or not,

Ye mar a comely face with idiot tears.

Yet, since the face is comely — some of you,

Here, take him up, and bear him to our hall:

An if he live, we will have him of our band;

And if he die, why earth has earth enough

To hide him. See ye take the charger too,

A noble one.’

He spake, and past away,

But left two brawny spearmen, who advanced,

Each growling like a dog, when his good bone

Seems to be plucked at by the village boys

Who love to vex him eating, and he fears

To lose his bone, and lays his foot upon it,

Gnawing and growling: so the ruffians growled,

Fearing to lose, and all for a dead man,

Their chance of booty from the morning’s raid,

Yet raised and laid him on a litter-bier,

Such as they brought upon their forays out

For those that might be wounded; laid him on it

All in the hollow of his shield, and took

And bore him to the naked hall of Doorm,

(His gentle charger following him unled)

And cast him and the bier in which he lay

Down on an oaken settle in the hall,

And then departed, hot in haste to join

Their luckier mates, but growling as before,

And cursing their lost time, and the dead man,

And their own Earl, and their own souls, and her.

They might as well have blest her: she was deaf

To blessing or to cursing save from one.

So for long hours sat Enid by her lord,

There in the naked hall, propping his head,

And chafing his pale hands, and calling to him.

Till at the last he wakened from his swoon,

And found his own dear bride propping his head,

And chafing his faint hands, and calling to him;

And felt the warm tears falling on his face;

And said to his own heart, ‘She weeps for me:’

And yet lay still, and feigned himself as dead,

That he might prove her to the uttermost,

And say to his own heart, ‘She weeps for me.’

But in the falling afternoon returned

The huge Earl Doorm with plunder to the hall.

His lusty spearmen followed him with noise:

Each hurling down a heap of things that rang

Against his pavement, cast his lance aside,

And doffed his helm: and then there fluttered in,

Half-bold, half-frighted, with dilated eyes,

A tribe of women, dressed in many hues,

And mingled with the spearmen: and Earl Doorm

Struck with a knife’s haft hard against the board,

And called for flesh and wine to feed his spears.

And men brought in whole hogs and quarter beeves,

And all the hall was dim with steam of flesh:

And none spake word, but all sat down at once,

And ate with tumult in the naked hall,

Feeding like horses when you hear them feed;

Till Enid shrank far back into herself,

To shun the wild ways of the lawless tribe.

But when Earl Doorm had eaten all he would,

He rolled his eyes about the hall, and found

A damsel drooping in a corner of it.

Then he remembered her, and how she wept;

And out of her there came a power upon him;

And rising on the sudden he said, ‘Eat!

I never yet beheld a thing so pale.

God’s curse, it makes me mad to see you weep.

Eat! Look yourself. Good luck had your good man,

For were I dead who is it would weep for me?

Sweet lady, never since I first drew breath

Have I beheld a lily like yourself.

And so there lived some colour in your cheek,

There is not one among my gentlewomen

Were fit to wear your slipper for a glove.

But listen to me, and by me be ruled,

And I will do the thing I have not done,

For ye shall share my earldom with me, girl,

And we will live like two birds in one nest,

And I will fetch you forage from all fields,

For I compel all creatures to my will.’

He spoke: the brawny spearman let his cheek

Bulge with the unswallowed piece, and turning stared;

While some, whose souls the old serpent long had drawn

Down, as the worm draws in the withered leaf

And makes it earth, hissed each at other’s ear

What shall not be recorded — women they,

Women, or what had been those gracious things,

But now desired the humbling of their best,

Yea, would have helped him to it: and all at once

They hated her, who took no thought of them,

But answered in low voice, her meek head yet

Drooping, ‘I pray you of your courtesy,

He being as he is, to let me be.’

She spake so low he hardly heard her speak,

But like a mighty patron, satisfied

With what himself had done so graciously,

Assumed that she had thanked him, adding, ‘Yea,

Eat and be glad, for I account you mine.’

She answered meekly, ‘How should I be glad

Henceforth in all the world at anything,

Until my lord arise and look upon me?’

Here the huge Earl cried out upon her talk,

As all but empty heart and weariness

And sickly nothing; suddenly seized on her,

And bare her by main violence to the board,

And thrust the dish before her, crying, ‘Eat.’

‘No, no,’ said Enid, vext, ‘I will not eat

Till yonder man upon the bier arise,

And eat with me.’ ‘Drink, then,’ he answered. ‘Here!’

(And filled a horn with wine and held it to her,)

‘Lo! I, myself, when flushed with fight, or hot,

God’s curse, with anger — often I myself,

Before I well have drunken, scarce can eat:

Drink therefore and the wine will change thy will.’

‘Not so,’ she cried, ‘by Heaven, I will not drink

Till my dear lord arise and bid me do it,

And drink with me; and if he rise no more,

I will not look at wine until I die.’

At this he turned all red and paced his hall,

Now gnawed his under, now his upper lip,

And coming up close to her, said at last:

‘Girl, for I see ye scorn my courtesies,

Take warning: yonder man is surely dead;

And I compel all creatures to my will.

Not eat nor drink? And wherefore wail for one,

Who put your beauty to this flout and scorn

By dressing it in rags? Amazed am I,

Beholding how ye butt against my wish,

That I forbear you thus: cross me no more.

At least put off to please me this poor gown,

This silken rag, this beggar-woman’s weed:

I love that beauty should go beautifully:

For see ye not my gentlewomen here,

How gay, how suited to the house of one

Who loves that beauty should go beautifully?

Rise therefore; robe yourself in this: obey.’

He spoke, and one among his gentlewomen

Displayed a splendid silk of foreign loom,

Where like a shoaling sea the lovely blue

Played into green, and thicker down the front

With jewels than the sward with drops of dew,

When all night long a cloud clings to the hill,

And with the dawn ascending lets the day

Strike where it clung: so thickly shone the gems.

But Enid answered, harder to be moved

Than hardest tyrants in their day of power,

With life-long injuries burning unavenged,

And now their hour has come; and Enid said:

‘In this poor gown my dear lord found me first,

And loved me serving in my father’s hall:

In this poor gown I rode with him to court,

And there the Queen arrayed me like the sun:

In this poor gown he bad me clothe myself,

When now we rode upon this fatal quest

Of honour, where no honour can be gained:

And this poor gown I will not cast aside

Until himself arise a living man,

And bid me cast it. I have griefs enough:

Pray you be gentle, pray you let me be:

I never loved, can never love but him:

Yea, God, I pray you of your gentleness,

He being as he is, to let me be.’

Then strode the brute Earl up and down his hall,

And took his russet beard between his teeth;

Last, coming up quite close, and in his mood

Crying, ‘I count it of no more avail,

Dame, to be gentle than ungentle with you;

Take my salute,’ unknightly with flat hand,

However lightly, smote her on the cheek.

Then Enid, in her utter helplessness,

And since she thought, ‘He had not dared to do it,

Except he surely knew my lord was dead,’

Sent forth a sudden sharp and bitter cry,

As of a wild thing taken in the trap,

Which sees the trapper coming through the wood.

This heard Geraint, and grasping at his sword,

(It lay beside him in the hollow shield),

Made but a single bound, and with a sweep of it

Shore through the swarthy neck, and like a ball

The russet-bearded head rolled on the floor.

So died Earl Doorm by him he counted dead.

And all the men and women in the hall

Rose when they saw the dead man rise, and fled

Yelling as from a spectre, and the two

Were left alone together, and he said:

‘Enid, I have used you worse than that dead man;

Done you more wrong: we both have undergone

That trouble which has left me thrice your own:

Henceforward I will rather die than doubt.

And here I lay this penance on myself,

Not, though mine own ears heard you yestermorn —

You thought me sleeping, but I heard you say,

I heard you say, that you were no true wife:

I swear I will not ask your meaning in it:

I do believe yourself against yourself,

And will henceforward rather die than doubt.’

And Enid could not say one tender word,

She felt so blunt and stupid at the heart:

She only prayed him, ‘Fly, they will return

And slay you; fly, your charger is without,

My palfrey lost.’ ‘Then, Enid, shall you ride

Behind me.’ ‘Yea,’ said Enid, ‘let us go.’

And moving out they found the stately horse,

Who now no more a vassal to the thief,

But free to stretch his limbs in lawful fight,

Neighed with all gladness as they came, and stooped

With a low whinny toward the pair: and she

Kissed the white star upon his noble front,

Glad also; then Geraint upon the horse

Mounted, and reached a hand, and on his foot

She set her own and climbed; he turned his face

And kissed her climbing, and she cast her arms

About him, and at once they rode away.

And never yet, since high in Paradise

O’er the four rivers the first roses blew,

Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind

Than lived through her, who in that perilous hour

Put hand to hand beneath her husband’s heart,

And felt him hers again: she did not weep,

But o’er her meek eyes came a happy mist

Like that which kept the heart of Eden green

Before the useful trouble of the rain:

Yet not so misty were her meek blue eyes

As not to see before them on the path,

Right in the gateway of the bandit hold,

A knight of Arthur’s court, who laid his lance

In rest, and made as if to fall upon him.

Then, fearing for his hurt and loss of blood,

She, with her mind all full of what had chanced,

Shrieked to the stranger ‘Slay not a dead man!’

‘The voice of Enid,’ said the knight; but she,

Beholding it was Edyrn son of Nudd,

Was moved so much the more, and shrieked again,

‘O cousin, slay not him who gave you life.’

And Edyrn moving frankly forward spake:

‘My lord Geraint, I greet you with all love;

I took you for a bandit knight of Doorm;

And fear not, Enid, I should fall upon him,

Who love you, Prince, with something of the love

Wherewith we love the Heaven that chastens us.

For once, when I was up so high in pride

That I was halfway down the slope to Hell,

By overthrowing me you threw me higher.

Now, made a knight of Arthur’s Table Round,

And since I knew this Earl, when I myself

Was half a bandit in my lawless hour,

I come the mouthpiece of our King to Doorm

(The King is close behind me) bidding him

Disband himself, and scatter all his powers,

Submit, and hear the judgment of the King.’

‘He hears the judgment of the King of kings,’

Cried the wan Prince; ‘and lo, the powers of Doorm

Are scattered,’ and he pointed to the field,

Where, huddled here and there on mound and knoll,

Were men and women staring and aghast,

While some yet fled; and then he plainlier told

How the huge Earl lay slain within his hall.

But when the knight besought him, ‘Follow me,

Prince, to the camp, and in the King’s own ear

Speak what has chanced; ye surely have endured

Strange chances here alone;’ that other flushed,

And hung his head, and halted in reply,

Fearing the mild face of the blameless King,

And after madness acted question asked:

Till Edyrn crying, ‘If ye will not go

To Arthur, then will Arthur come to you,’

‘Enough,’ he said, ‘I follow,’ and they went.

But Enid in their going had two fears,

One from the bandit scattered in the field,

And one from Edyrn. Every now and then,

When Edyrn reined his charger at her side,

She shrank a little. In a hollow land,

From which old fires have broken, men may fear

Fresh fire and ruin. He, perceiving, said:

‘Fair and dear cousin, you that most had cause

To fear me, fear no longer, I am changed.

Yourself were first the blameless cause to make

My nature’s prideful sparkle in the blood

Break into furious flame; being repulsed

By Yniol and yourself, I schemed and wrought

Until I overturned him; then set up

(With one main purpose ever at my heart)

My haughty jousts, and took a paramour;

Did her mock-honour as the fairest fair,

And, toppling over all antagonism,

So waxed in pride, that I believed myself

Unconquerable, for I was wellnigh mad:

And, but for my main purpose in these jousts,

I should have slain your father, seized yourself.

I lived in hope that sometime you would come

To these my lists with him whom best you loved;

And there, poor cousin, with your meek blue eyes

The truest eyes that ever answered Heaven,

Behold me overturn and trample on him.

Then, had you cried, or knelt, or prayed to me,

I should not less have killed him. And so you came, —

But once you came, — and with your own true eyes

Beheld the man you loved (I speak as one

Speaks of a service done him) overthrow

My proud self, and my purpose three years old,

And set his foot upon me, and give me life.

There was I broken down; there was I saved:

Though thence I rode all-shamed, hating the life

He gave me, meaning to be rid of it.

And all the penance the Queen laid upon me

Was but to rest awhile within her court;

Where first as sullen as a beast new-caged,

And waiting to be treated like a wolf,

Because I knew my deeds were known, I found,

Instead of scornful pity or pure scorn,

Such fine reserve and noble reticence,

Manners so kind, yet stately, such a grace

Of tenderest courtesy, that I began

To glance behind me at my former life,

And find that it had been the wolf’s indeed:

And oft I talked with Dubric, the high saint,

Who, with mild heat of holy oratory,

Subdued me somewhat to that gentleness,

Which, when it weds with manhood, makes a man.

And you were often there about the Queen,

But saw me not, or marked not if you saw;

Nor did I care or dare to speak with you,

But kept myself aloof till I was changed;

And fear not, cousin; I am changed indeed.’

He spoke, and Enid easily believed,

Like simple noble natures, credulous

Of what they long for, good in friend or foe,

There most in those who most have done them ill.

And when they reached the camp the King himself

Advanced to greet them, and beholding her

Though pale, yet happy, asked her not a word,

But went apart with Edyrn, whom he held

In converse for a little, and returned,

And, gravely smiling, lifted her from horse,

And kissed her with all pureness, brother-like,

And showed an empty tent allotted her,

And glancing for a minute, till he saw her

Pass into it, turned to the Prince, and said:

‘Prince, when of late ye prayed me for my leave

To move to your own land, and there defend

Your marches, I was pricked with some reproof,

As one that let foul wrong stagnate and be,

By having looked too much through alien eyes,

And wrought too long with delegated hands,

Not used mine own: but now behold me come

To cleanse this common sewer of all my realm,

With Edyrn and with others: have ye looked

At Edyrn? have ye seen how nobly changed?

This work of his is great and wonderful.

His very face with change of heart is changed.

The world will not believe a man repents:

And this wise world of ours is mainly right.

Full seldom doth a man repent, or use

Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch

Of blood and custom wholly out of him,

And make all clean, and plant himself afresh.

Edyrn has done it, weeding all his heart

As I will weed this land before I go.

I, therefore, made him of our Table Round,

Not rashly, but have proved him everyway

One of our noblest, our most valorous,

Sanest and most obedient: and indeed

This work of Edyrn wrought upon himself

After a life of violence, seems to me

A thousand-fold more great and wonderful

Than if some knight of mine, risking his life,

My subject with my subjects under him,

Should make an onslaught single on a realm

Of robbers, though he slew them one by one,

And were himself nigh wounded to the death.’

So spake the King; low bowed the Prince, and felt

His work was neither great nor wonderful,

And past to Enid’s tent; and thither came

The King’s own leech to look into his hurt;

And Enid tended on him there; and there

Her constant motion round him, and the breath

Of her sweet tendance hovering over him,

Filled all the genial courses of his blood

With deeper and with ever deeper love,

As the south-west that blowing Bala lake

Fills all the sacred Dee. So past the days.

But while Geraint lay healing of his hurt,

The blameless King went forth and cast his eyes

On each of all whom Uther left in charge

Long since, to guard the justice of the King:

He looked and found them wanting; and as now

Men weed the white horse on the Berkshire hills

To keep him bright and clean as heretofore,

He rooted out the slothful officer

Or guilty, which for bribe had winked at wrong,

And in their chairs set up a stronger race

With hearts and hands, and sent a thousand men

To till the wastes, and moving everywhere

Cleared the dark places and let in the law,

And broke the bandit holds and cleansed the land.

Then, when Geraint was whole again, they past

With Arthur to Caerleon upon Usk.

There the great Queen once more embraced her friend,

And clothed her in apparel like the day.

And though Geraint could never take again

That comfort from their converse which he took

Before the Queen’s fair name was breathed upon,

He rested well content that all was well.

Thence after tarrying for a space they rode,

And fifty knights rode with them to the shores

Of Severn, and they past to their own land.

And there he kept the justice of the King

So vigorously yet mildly, that all hearts

Applauded, and the spiteful whisper died:

And being ever foremost in the chase,

And victor at the tilt and tournament,

They called him the great Prince and man of men.

But Enid, whom her ladies loved to call

Enid the Fair, a grateful people named

Enid the Good; and in their halls arose

The cry of children, Enids and Geraints

Of times to be; nor did he doubt her more,

But rested in her fealty, till he crowned

A happy life with a fair death, and fell

Against the heathen of the Northern Sea

In battle, fighting for the blameless King.

Balin and Balan

1885

PELLAM the King, who held and lost with Lot

In that first war, and had his realm restored

But rendered tributary, failed of late

To send his tribute; wherefore Arthur called

His treasurer, one of many years, and spake,

‘Go thou with him and him and bring it to us,

Lest we should set one truer on his throne.

Man’s word is God in man.’

His Baron said

‘We go but harken: there be two strange knights

Who sit near Camelot at a fountain-side,

A mile beneath the forest, challenging

And overthrowing every knight who comes.

Wilt thou I undertake them as we pass,

And send them to thee?’

Arthur laughed upon him.

‘Old friend, too old to be so young, depart,

Delay not thou for aught, but let them sit,

Until they find a lustier than themselves.’

So these departed. Early, one fair dawn,

The light-winged spirit of his youth returned

On Arthur’s heart; he armed himself and went,

So coming to the fountain-side beheld

Balin and Balan sitting statuelike,

Brethren, to right and left the spring, that down,

From underneath a plume of lady-fern,

Sang, and the sand danced at the bottom of it.

And on the right of Balin Balin’s horse

Was fast beside an alder, on the left

Of Balan Balan’s near a poplartree.

‘Fair Sirs,’ said Arthur, ‘wherefore sit ye here?’

Balin and Balan answered ‘For the sake

Of glory; we be mightier men than all

In Arthur’s court; that also have we proved;

For whatsoever knight against us came

Or I or he have easily overthrown.’

‘I too,’ said Arthur, ‘am of Arthur’s hall,

But rather proven in his Paynim wars

Than famous jousts; but see, or proven or not,

Whether me likewise ye can overthrow.’

And Arthur lightly smote the brethren down,

And lightly so returned, and no man knew.

Then Balin rose, and Balan, and beside

The carolling water set themselves again,

And spake no word until the shadow turned;

When from the fringe of coppice round them burst

A spangled pursuivant, and crying ‘Sirs,

Rise, follow! ye be sent for by the King,’

They followed; whom when Arthur seeing asked

‘Tell me your names; why sat ye by the well?’

Balin the stillness of a minute broke

Saying ‘An unmelodious name to thee,

Balin, “the Savage” — that addition thine —

My brother and my better, this man here,

Balan. I smote upon the naked skull

A thrall of thine in open hall, my hand

Was gauntleted, half slew him; for I heard

He had spoken evil of me; thy just wrath

Sent me a three-years’ exile from thine eyes.

I have not lived my life delightsomely:

For I that did that violence to thy thrall,

Had often wrought some fury on myself,

Saving for Balan: those three kingless years

Have past — were wormwood-bitter to me. King,

Methought that if we sat beside the well,

And hurled to ground what knight soever spurred

Against us, thou would’st take me gladlier back,

And make, as ten-times worthier to be thine

Than twenty Balins, Balan knight. I have said.

Not so — not all. A man of thine today

Abashed us both, and brake my boast. Thy will?’

Said Arthur ‘Thou hast ever spoken truth;

Thy too fierce manhood would not let thee lie.

Rise, my true knight. As children learn, be thou

Wiser for falling! walk with me, and move

To music with thine Order and the King.

Thy chair, a grief to all the brethren, stands

Vacant, but thou retake it, mine again!’

Thereafter, when Sir Balin entered hall,

The Lost one Found was greeted as in Heaven

With joy that blazed itself in woodland wealth

Of leaf, and gayest garlandage of flowers,

Along the walls and down the board; they sat,

And cup clashed cup; they drank and some one sang,

Sweet-voiced, a song of welcome, whereupon

Their common shout in chorus, mounting, made

Those banners of twelve battles overhead

Stir, as they stirred of old, when Arthur’s host

Proclaimed him Victor, and the day was won.

Then Balan added to their Order lived

A wealthier life than heretofore with these

And Balin, till their embassage returned.

‘Sir King’ they brought report ‘we hardly found,

So bushed about it is with gloom, the hall

Of him to whom ye sent us, Pellam, once

A Christless foe of thine as ever dashed

Horse against horse; but seeing that thy realm

Hath prospered in the name of Christ, the King

Took, as in rival heat, to holy things;

And finds himself descended from the Saint

Arimathaean Joseph; him who first

Brought the great faith to Britain over seas;

He boasts his life as purer than thine own;

Eats scarce enow to keep his pulse abeat;

Hath pushed aside his faithful wife, nor lets

Or dame or damsel enter at his gates

Lest he should be polluted. This gray King

Showed us a shrine wherein were wonders — yea —

Rich arks with priceless bones of martyrdom,

Thorns of the crown and shivers of the cross,

And therewithal (for thus he told us) brought

By holy Joseph thither, that same spear

Wherewith the Roman pierced the side of Christ.

He much amazed us; after, when we sought

The tribute, answered “I have quite foregone

All matters of this world: Garlon, mine heir,

Of him demand it,” which this Garlon gave

With much ado, railing at thine and thee.

‘But when we left, in those deep woods we found

A knight of thine spear-stricken from behind,

Dead, whom we buried; more than one of us

Cried out on Garlon, but a woodman there

Reported of some demon in the woods

Was once a man, who driven by evil tongues

From all his fellows, lived alone, and came

To learn black magic, and to hate his kind

With such a hate, that when he died, his soul

Became a Fiend, which, as the man in life

Was wounded by blind tongues he saw not whence,

Strikes from behind. This woodman showed the cave

From which he sallies, and wherein he dwelt.

We saw the hoof-print of a horse, no more.’

Then Arthur, ‘Let who goes before me, see

He do not fall behind me: foully slain

And villainously! who will hunt for me

This demon of the woods?’ Said Balan, ‘I’!

So claimed the quest and rode away, but first,

Embracing Balin, ‘Good my brother, hear!

Let not thy moods prevail, when I am gone

Who used to lay them! hold them outer fiends,

Who leap at thee to tear thee; shake them aside,

Dreams ruling when wit sleeps! yea, but to dream

That any of these would wrong thee, wrongs thyself.

Witness their flowery welcome. Bound are they

To speak no evil. Truly save for fears,

My fears for thee, so rich a fellowship

Would make me wholly blest: thou one of them,

Be one indeed: consider them, and all

Their bearing in their common bond of love,

No more of hatred than in Heaven itself,

No more of jealousy than in Paradise.’

So Balan warned, and went; Balin remained:

Who — for but three brief moons had glanced away

From being knighted till he smote the thrall,

And faded from the presence into years

Of exile — now would strictlier set himself

To learn what Arthur meant by courtesy,

Manhood, and knighthood; wherefore hovered round

Lancelot, but when he marked his high sweet smile

In passing, and a transitory word

Make knight or churl or child or damsel seem

From being smiled at happier in themselves —

Sighed, as a boy lame-born beneath a height,

That glooms his valley, sighs to see the peak

Sun-flushed, or touch at night the northern star;

For one from out his village lately climed

And brought report of azure lands and fair,

Far seen to left and right; and he himself

Hath hardly scaled with help a hundred feet

Up from the base: so Balin marvelling oft

How far beyond him Lancelot seemed to move,

Groaned, and at times would mutter, ‘These be gifts,

Born with the blood, not learnable, divine,

Beyond my reach. Well had I foughten — well —

In those fierce wars, struck hard — and had I crowned

With my slain self the heaps of whom I slew —

So — better! — But this worship of the Queen,

That honour too wherein she holds him — this,

This was the sunshine that hath given the man

A growth, a name that branches o’er the rest,

And strength against all odds, and what the King

So prizes — overprizes — gentleness.

Her likewise would I worship an I might.

I never can be close with her, as he

That brought her hither. Shall I pray the King

To let me bear some token of his Queen

Whereon to gaze, remembering her — forget

My heats and violences? live afresh?

What, if the Queen disdained to grant it! nay

Being so stately-gentle, would she make

My darkness blackness? and with how sweet grace

She greeted my return! Bold will I be —

Some goodly cognizance of Guinevere,

In lieu of this rough beast upon my shield,

Langued gules, and toothed with grinning savagery.’

And Arthur, when Sir Balin sought him, said

‘What wilt thou bear?’ Balin was bold, and asked

To bear her own crown-royal upon shield,

Whereat she smiled and turned her to the King,

Who answered ‘Thou shalt put the crown to use.

The crown is but the shadow of the King,

And this a shadow’s shadow, let him have it,

So this will help him of his violences!’

‘No shadow’ said Sir Balin ‘O my Queen,

But light to me! no shadow, O my King,

But golden earnest of a gentler life!’

So Balin bare the crown, and all the knights

Approved him, and the Queen, and all the world

Made music, and he felt his being move

In music with his Order, and the King.

The nightingale, full-toned in middle May,

Hath ever and anon a note so thin

It seems another voice in other groves;

Thus, after some quick burst of sudden wrath,

The music in him seemed to change, and grow

Faint and far-off.

And once he saw the thrall

His passion half had gauntleted to death,

That causer of his banishment and shame,

Smile at him, as he deemed, presumptuously:

His arm half rose to strike again, but fell:

The memory of that cognizance on shield

Weighted it down, but in himself he moaned:

‘Too high this mount of Camelot for me:

These high-set courtesies are not for me.

Shall I not rather prove the worse for these?

Fierier and stormier from restraining, break

Into some madness even before the Queen?’

Thus, as a hearth lit in a mountain home,

And glancing on the window, when the gloom

Of twilight deepens round it, seems a flame

That rages in the woodland far below,

So when his moods were darkened, court and King

And all the kindly warmth of Arthur’s hall

Shadowed an angry distance: yet he strove

To learn the graces of their Table, fought

Hard with himself, and seemed at length in peace.

Then chanced, one morning, that Sir Balin sat

Close-bowered in that garden nigh the hall.

A walk of roses ran from door to door;

A walk of lilies crost it to the bower:

And down that range of roses the great Queen

Came with slow steps, the morning on her face;

And all in shadow from the counter door

Sir Lancelot as to meet her, then at once,

As if he saw not, glanced aside, and paced

The long white walk of lilies toward the bower.

Followed the Queen; Sir Balin heard her ‘Prince,

Art thou so little loyal to thy Queen,

As pass without good morrow to thy Queen?’

To whom Sir Lancelot with his eyes on earth,

‘Fain would I still be loyal to the Queen.’

‘Yea so’ she said ‘but so to pass me by —

So loyal scarce is loyal to thyself,

Whom all men rate the king of courtesy.

Let be: ye stand, fair lord, as in a dream.’

Then Lancelot with his hand among the flowers

‘Yea — for a dream. Last night methought I saw

That maiden Saint who stands with lily in hand

In yonder shrine. All round her prest the dark,

And all the light upon her silver face

Flowed from the spiritual lily that she held.

Lo! these her emblems drew mine eyes — away:

For see, how perfect-pure! As light a flush

As hardly tints the blossom of the quince

Would mar their charm of stainless maidenhood.’

‘Sweeter to me’ she said ‘this garden rose

Deep-hued and many-folded! sweeter still

The wild-wood hyacinth and the bloom of May.

Prince, we have ridden before among the flowers

In those fair days — not all as cool as these,

Though season-earlier. Art thou sad? or sick?

Our noble King will send thee his own leech —

Sick? or for any matter angered at me?’

Then Lancelot lifted his large eyes; they dwelt

Deep-tranced on hers, and could not fall: her hue

Changed at his gaze: so turning side by side

They past, and Balin started from his bower.

‘Queen? subject? but I see not what I see.

Damsel and lover? hear not what I hear.

My father hath begotten me in his wrath.

I suffer from the things before me, know,

Learn nothing; am not worthy to be knight;

A churl, a clown!’ and in him gloom on gloom

Deepened: he sharply caught his lance and shield,

Nor stayed to crave permission of the King,

But, mad for strange adventure, dashed away.

He took the selfsame track as Balan, saw

The fountain where they sat together, sighed

‘Was I not better there with him?’ and rode

The skyless woods, but under open blue

Came on the hoarhead woodman at a bough

Wearily hewing. ‘Churl, thine axe!’ he cried,

Descended, and disjointed it at a blow:

To whom the woodman uttered wonderingly

‘Lord, thou couldst lay the Devil of these woods

If arm of flesh could lay him.’ Balin cried

‘Him, or the viler devil who plays his part,

To lay that devil would lay the Devil in me.’

‘Nay’ said the churl, ‘our devil is a truth,

I saw the flash of him but yestereven.

And some do say that our Sir Garlon too

Hath learned black magic, and to ride unseen.

Look to the cave.’ But Balin answered him

‘Old fabler, these be fancies of the churl,

Look to thy woodcraft,’ and so leaving him,

Now with slack rein and careless of himself,

Now with dug spur and raving at himself,

Now with droopt brow down the long glades he rode;

So marked not on his right a cavern-chasm

Yawn over darkness, where, nor far within,

The whole day died, but, dying, gleamed on rocks

Roof-pendent, sharp; and others from the floor,

Tusklike, arising, made that mouth of night

Whereout the Demon issued up from Hell.

He marked not this, but blind and deaf to all

Save that chained rage, which ever yelpt within,

Past eastward from the falling sun. At once

He felt the hollow-beaten mosses thud

And tremble, and then the shadow of a spear,

Shot from behind him, ran along the ground.

Sideways he started from the path, and saw,

With pointed lance as if to pierce, a shape,

A light of armour by him flash, and pass

And vanish in the woods; and followed this,

But all so blind in rage that unawares

He burst his lance against a forest bough,

Dishorsed himself, and rose again, and fled

Far, till the castle of a King, the hall

Of Pellam, lichen-bearded, grayly draped

With streaming grass, appeared, low-built but strong;

The ruinous donjon as a knoll of moss,

The battlement overtopt with ivytods,

A home of bats, in every tower an owl.

Then spake the men of Pellam crying ‘Lord,

Why wear ye this crown-royal upon shield?’

Said Balin ‘For the fairest and the best

Of ladies living gave me this to bear.’

So stalled his horse, and strode across the court,

But found the greetings both of knight and King

Faint in the low dark hall of banquet: leaves

Laid their green faces flat against the panes,

Sprays grated, and the cankered boughs without

Whined in the wood; for all was hushed within,

Till when at feast Sir Garlon likewise asked

‘Why wear ye that crown-royal?’ Balin said

‘The Queen we worship, Lancelot, I, and all,

As fairest, best and purest, granted me

To bear it!’ Such a sound (for Arthur’s knights

Were hated strangers in the hall) as makes

The white swan-mother, sitting, when she hears

A strange knee rustle through her secret reeds,

Made Garlon, hissing; then he sourly smiled.

‘Fairest I grant her: I have seen; but best,

Best, purest? thou from Arthur’s hall, and yet

So simple! hast thou eyes, or if, are these

So far besotted that they fail to see

This fair wife-worship cloaks a secret shame?

Truly, ye men of Arthur be but babes.’

A goblet on the board by Balin, bossed

With holy Joseph’s legend, on his right

Stood, all of massiest bronze: one side had sea

And ship and sail and angels blowing on it:

And one was rough with wattling, and the walls

Of that low church he built at Glastonbury.

This Balin graspt, but while in act to hurl,

Through memory of that token on the shield

Relaxed his hold: ‘I will be gentle’ he thought

‘And passing gentle’ caught his hand away,

Then fiercely to Sir Garlon ‘Eyes have I

That saw today the shadow of a spear,

Shot from behind me, run along the ground;

Eyes too that long have watched how Lancelot draws

From homage to the best and purest, might,

Name, manhood, and a grace, but scantly thine,

Who, sitting in thine own hall, canst endure

To mouth so huge a foulness — to thy guest,

Me, me of Arthur’s Table. Felon talk!

Let be! no more!’

But not the less by night

The scorn of Garlon, poisoning all his rest,

Stung him in dreams. At length, and dim through leaves

Blinkt the white morn, sprays grated, and old boughs

Whined in the wood. He rose, descended, met

The scorner in the castle court, and fain,

For hate and loathing, would have past him by;

But when Sir Garlon uttered mocking-wise;

‘What, wear ye still that same crown-scandalous?’

His countenance blackened, and his forehead veins

Bloated, and branched; and tearing out of sheath

The brand, Sir Balin with a fiery ‘Ha!

So thou be shadow, here I make thee ghost,’

Hard upon helm smote him, and the blade flew

Splintering in six, and clinkt upon the stones.

Then Garlon, reeling slowly backward, fell,

And Balin by the banneret of his helm

Dragged him, and struck, but from the castle a cry

Sounded across the court, and — men-at-arms,

A score with pointed lances, making at him —

He dashed the pummel at the foremost face,

Beneath a low door dipt, and made his feet

Wings through a glimmering gallery, till he marked

The portal of King Pellam’s chapel wide

And inward to the wall; he stept behind;

Thence in a moment heard them pass like wolves

Howling; but while he stared about the shrine,

In which he scarce could spy the Christ for Saints,

Beheld before a golden altar lie

The longest lance his eyes had ever seen,

Point-painted red; and seizing thereupon

Pushed through an open casement down, leaned on it,

Leapt in a semicircle, and lit on earth;

Then hand at ear, and harkening from what side

The blindfold rummage buried in the walls

Might echo, ran the counter path, and found

His charger, mounted on him and away.

An arrow whizzed to the right, one to the left,

One overhead; and Pellam’s feeble cry

‘Stay, stay him! he defileth heavenly things

With earthly uses’ — made him quickly dive

Beneath the boughs, and race through many a mile

Of dense and open, till his goodly horse,

Arising wearily at a fallen oak,

Stumbled headlong, and cast him face to ground.

Half-wroth he had not ended, but all glad,

Knightlike, to find his charger yet unlamed,

Sir Balin drew the shield from off his neck,

Stared at the priceless cognizance, and thought

‘I have shamed thee so that now thou shamest me,

Thee will I bear no more,’ high on a branch

Hung it, and turned aside into the woods,

And there in gloom cast himself all along,

Moaning ‘My violences, my violences!’

But now the wholesome music of the wood

Was dumbed by one from out the hall of Mark,

A damsel-errant, warbling, as she rode

The woodland alleys, Vivien, with her Squire.

‘The fire of Heaven has killed the barren cold,

And kindled all the plain and all the wold.

The new leaf ever pushes off the old.

The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell.

‘Old priest, who mumble worship in your quire —

Old monk and nun, ye scorn the world’s desire,

Yet in your frosty cells ye feel the fire!

The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell.

‘The fire of Heaven is on the dusty ways.

The wayside blossoms open to the blaze.

The whole wood-world is one full peal of praise.

The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell.

‘The fire of Heaven is lord of all things good,

And starve not thou this fire within thy blood,

But follow Vivien through the fiery flood!

The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell!’

Then turning to her Squire ‘This fire of Heaven,

This old sun-worship, boy, will rise again,

And beat the cross to earth, and break the King

And all his Table.’

Then they reached a glade,

Where under one long lane of cloudless air

Before another wood, the royal crown

Sparkled, and swaying upon a restless elm

Drew the vague glance of Vivien, and her Squire;

Amazed were these; ‘Lo there’ she cried—’a crown —

Borne by some high lord-prince of Arthur’s hall,

And there a horse! the rider? where is he?

See, yonder lies one dead within the wood.

Not dead; he stirs! — but sleeping. I will speak.

Hail, royal knight, we break on thy sweet rest,

Not, doubtless, all unearned by noble deeds.

But bounden art thou, if from Arthur’s hall,

To help the weak. Behold, I fly from shame,

A lustful King, who sought to win my love

Through evil ways: the knight, with whom I rode,

Hath suffered misadventure, and my squire

Hath in him small defence; but thou, Sir Prince,

Wilt surely guide me to the warrior King,

Arthur the blameless, pure as any maid,

To get me shelter for my maidenhood.

I charge thee by that crown upon thy shield,

And by the great Queen’s name, arise and hence.’

And Balin rose, ‘Thither no more! nor Prince

Nor knight am I, but one that hath defamed

The cognizance she gave me: here I dwell

Savage among the savage woods, here die —

Die: let the wolves’ black maws ensepulchre

Their brother beast, whose anger was his lord.

O me, that such a name as Guinevere’s,

Which our high Lancelot hath so lifted up,

And been thereby uplifted, should through me,

My violence, and my villainy, come to shame.’

Thereat she suddenly laughed and shrill, anon

Sighed all as suddenly. Said Balin to her

‘Is this thy courtesy — to mock me, ha?

Hence, for I will not with thee.’ Again she sighed

‘Pardon, sweet lord! we maidens often laugh

When sick at heart, when rather we should weep.

I knew thee wronged. I brake upon thy rest,

And now full loth am I to break thy dream,

But thou art man, and canst abide a truth,

Though bitter. Hither, boy — and mark me well.

Dost thou remember at Caerleon once —

A year ago — nay, then I love thee not —

Ay, thou rememberest well — one summer dawn —

By the great tower — Caerleon upon Usk —

Nay, truly we were hidden: this fair lord,

The flower of all their vestal knighthood, knelt

In amorous homage — knelt — what else? — O ay

Knelt, and drew down from out his night-black hair

And mumbled that white hand whose ringed caress

Had wandered from her own King’s golden head,

And lost itself in darkness, till she cried —

I thought the great tower would crash down on both —

“Rise, my sweet King, and kiss me on the lips,

Thou art my King.” This lad, whose lightest word

Is mere white truth in simple nakedness,

Saw them embrace: he reddens, cannot speak,

So bashful, he! but all the maiden Saints,

The deathless mother-maidenhood of Heaven,

Cry out upon her. Up then, ride with me!

Talk not of shame! thou canst not, an thou would’st,

Do these more shame than these have done themselves.’

She lied with ease; but horror-stricken he,

Remembering that dark bower at Camelot,

Breathed in a dismal whisper ‘It is truth.’

Sunnily she smiled ‘And even in this lone wood,

Sweet lord, ye do right well to whisper this.

Fools prate, and perish traitors. Woods have tongues,

As walls have ears: but thou shalt go with me,

And we will speak at first exceeding low.

Meet is it the good King be not deceived.

See now, I set thee high on vantage ground,

From whence to watch the time, and eagle-like

Stoop at thy will on Lancelot and the Queen.’

She ceased; his evil spirit upon him leapt,

He ground his teeth together, sprang with a yell,

Tore from the branch, and cast on earth, the shield,

Drove his mailed heel athwart the royal crown,

Stampt all into defacement, hurled it from him

Among the forest weeds, and cursed the tale,

The told-of, and the teller.

That weird yell,

Unearthlier than all shriek of bird or beast,

Thrilled through the woods; and Balan lurking there

(His quest was unaccomplished) heard and thought

‘The scream of that Wood-devil I came to quell!’

Then nearing ‘Lo! he hath slain some brother-knight,

And tramples on the goodly shield to show

His loathing of our Order and the Queen.

My quest, meseems, is here. Or devil or man

Guard thou thine head.’ Sir Balin spake not word,

But snatched a sudden buckler from the Squire,

And vaulted on his horse, and so they crashed

In onset, and King Pellam’s holy spear,

Reputed to be red with sinless blood,

Redded at once with sinful, for the point

Across the maiden shield of Balan pricked

The hauberk to the flesh; and Balin’s horse

Was wearied to the death, and, when they clashed,

Rolling back upon Balin, crushed the man

Inward, and either fell, and swooned away.

Then to her Squire muttered the damsel ‘Fools!

This fellow hath wrought some foulness with his Queen:

Else never had he borne her crown, nor raved

And thus foamed over at a rival name:

But thou, Sir Chick, that scarce hast broken shell,

Art yet half-yolk, not even come to down —

Who never sawest Caerleon upon Usk —

And yet hast often pleaded for my love —

See what I see, be thou where I have been,

Or else Sir Chick — dismount and loose their casques

I fain would know what manner of men they be.’

And when the Squire had loosed them, ‘Goodly! — look!

They might have cropt the myriad flower of May,

And butt each other here, like brainless bulls,

Dead for one heifer!

Then the gentle Squire

‘I hold them happy, so they died for love:

And, Vivien, though ye beat me like your dog,

I too could die, as now I live, for thee.’

‘Live on, Sir Boy,’ she cried. ‘I better prize

The living dog than the dead lion: away!

I cannot brook to gaze upon the dead.’

Then leapt her palfrey o’er the fallen oak,

And bounding forward ‘Leave them to the wolves.’

But when their foreheads felt the cooling air,

Balin first woke, and seeing that true face,

Familiar up from cradle-time, so wan,

Crawled slowly with low moans to where he lay,

And on his dying brother cast himself

Dying; and he lifted faint eyes; he felt

One near him; all at once they found the world,

Staring wild-wide; then with a childlike wail

And drawing down the dim disastrous brow

That o’er him hung, he kissed it, moaned and spake;

‘O Balin, Balin, I that fain had died

To save thy life, have brought thee to thy death.

Why had ye not the shield I knew? and why

Trampled ye thus on that which bare the Crown?’

Then Balin told him brokenly, and in gasps,

All that had chanced, and Balan moaned again.

‘Brother, I dwelt a day in Pellam’s hall:

This Garlon mocked me, but I heeded not.

And one said “Eat in peace! a liar is he,

And hates thee for the tribute!” this good knight

Told me, that twice a wanton damsel came,

And sought for Garlon at the castle-gates,

Whom Pellam drove away with holy heat.

I well believe this damsel, and the one

Who stood beside thee even now, the same.

“She dwells among the woods” he said “and meets

And dallies with him in the Mouth of Hell.”

Foul are their lives; foul are their lips; they lied.

Pure as our own true Mother is our Queen.”

‘O brother’ answered Balin ‘woe is me!

My madness all thy life has been thy doom,

Thy curse, and darkened all thy day; and now

The night has come. I scarce can see thee now.

Goodnight! for we shall never bid again

Goodmorrow — Dark my doom was here, and dark

It will be there. I see thee now no more.

I would not mine again should darken thine,

Goodnight, true brother.

Balan answered low

‘Goodnight, true brother here! goodmorrow there!

We two were born together, and we die

Together by one doom:’ and while he spoke

Closed his death-drowsing eyes, and slept the sleep

With Balin, either locked in either’s arm.

Merlin and Vivien

1857

A STORM was coming, but the winds were still,

And in the wild woods of Broceliande,

Before an oak, so hollow, huge and old

It looked a tower of ivied masonwork,

At Merlin’s feet the wily Vivien lay.

For he that always bare in bitter grudge

The slights of Arthur and his Table, Mark

The Cornish King, had heard a wandering voice,

A minstrel of Caerlon by strong storm

Blown into shelter at Tintagil, say

That out of naked knightlike purity

Sir Lancelot worshipt no unmarried girl

But the great Queen herself, fought in her name,

Sware by her — vows like theirs, that high in heaven

Love most, but neither marry, nor are given

In marriage, angels of our Lord’s report.

He ceased, and then — for Vivien sweetly said

(She sat beside the banquet nearest Mark),

‘And is the fair example followed, Sir,

In Arthur’s household?’ — answered innocently:

‘Ay, by some few — ay, truly — youths that hold

It more beseems the perfect virgin knight

To worship woman as true wife beyond

All hopes of gaining, than as maiden girl.

They place their pride in Lancelot and the Queen.

So passionate for an utter purity

Beyond the limit of their bond, are these,

For Arthur bound them not to singleness.

Brave hearts and clean! and yet — God guide them — young.’

Then Mark was half in heart to hurl his cup

Straight at the speaker, but forbore: he rose

To leave the hall, and, Vivien following him,

Turned to her: ‘Here are snakes within the grass;

And you methinks, O Vivien, save ye fear

The monkish manhood, and the mask of pure

Worn by this court, can stir them till they sting.’

And Vivien answered, smiling scornfully,

‘Why fear? because that fostered at thy court

I savour of thy — virtues? fear them? no.

As Love, if Love is perfect, casts out fear,

So Hate, if Hate is perfect, casts out fear.

My father died in battle against the King,

My mother on his corpse in open field;

She bore me there, for born from death was I

Among the dead and sown upon the wind —

And then on thee! and shown the truth betimes,

That old true filth, and bottom of the well

Where Truth is hidden. Gracious lessons thine

And maxims of the mud! “This Arthur pure!

Great Nature through the flesh herself hath made

Gives him the lie! There is no being pure,

My cherub; saith not Holy Writ the same?” —

If I were Arthur, I would have thy blood.

Thy blessing, stainless King! I bring thee back,

When I have ferreted out their burrowings,

The hearts of all this Order in mine hand —

Ay — so that fate and craft and folly close,

Perchance, one curl of Arthur’s golden beard.

To me this narrow grizzled fork of thine

Is cleaner-fashioned — Well, I loved thee first,

That warps the wit.’

Loud laughed the graceless Mark,

But Vivien, into Camelot stealing, lodged

Low in the city, and on a festal day

When Guinevere was crossing the great hall

Cast herself down, knelt to the Queen, and wailed.

‘Why kneel ye there? What evil hath ye wrought?

Rise!’ and the damsel bidden rise arose

And stood with folded hands and downward eyes

Of glancing corner, and all meekly said,

‘None wrought, but suffered much, an orphan maid!

My father died in battle for thy King,

My mother on his corpse — in open field,

The sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonnesse —

Poor wretch — no friend! — and now by Mark the King

For that small charm of feature mine, pursued —

If any such be mine — I fly to thee.

Save, save me thou — Woman of women — thine

The wreath of beauty, thine the crown of power,

Be thine the balm of pity, O Heaven’s own white

Earth-angel, stainless bride of stainless King —

Help, for he follows! take me to thyself!

O yield me shelter for mine innocency

Among thy maidens!

Here her slow sweet eyes

Fear-tremulous, but humbly hopeful, rose

Fixt on her hearer’s, while the Queen who stood

All glittering like May sunshine on May leaves

In green and gold, and plumed with green replied,

‘Peace, child! of overpraise and overblame

We choose the last. Our noble Arthur, him

Ye scarce can overpraise, will hear and know.

Nay — we believe all evil of thy Mark —

Well, we shall test thee farther; but this hour

We ride a-hawking with Sir Lancelot.

He hath given us a fair falcon which he trained;

We go to prove it. Bide ye here the while.’

She past; and Vivien murmured after ‘Go!

I bide the while.’ Then through the portal-arch

Peering askance, and muttering broken-wise,

As one that labours with an evil dream,

Beheld the Queen and Lancelot get to horse.

‘Is that the Lancelot? goodly — ay, but gaunt:

Courteous — amends for gauntness — takes her hand —

That glance of theirs, but for the street, had been

A clinging kiss — how hand lingers in hand!

Let go at last! — they ride away — to hawk

For waterfowl. Royaller game is mine.

For such a supersensual sensual bond

As that gray cricket chirpt of at our hearth —

Touch flax with flame — a glance will serve — the liars!

Ah little rat that borest in the dyke

Thy hole by night to let the boundless deep

Down upon far-off cities while they dance —

Or dream — of thee they dreamed not — nor of me

These — ay, but each of either: ride, and dream

The mortal dream that never yet was mine —

Ride, ride and dream until ye wake — to me!

Then, narrow court and lubber King, farewell!

For Lancelot will be gracious to the rat,

And our wise Queen, if knowing that I know,

Will hate, loathe, fear — but honour me the more.’

Yet while they rode together down the plain,

Their talk was all of training, terms of art,

Diet and seeling, jesses, leash and lure.

‘She is too noble’ he said ‘to check at pies,

Nor will she rake: there is no baseness in her.’

Here when the Queen demanded as by chance

‘Know ye the stranger woman?’ ‘Let her be,’

Said Lancelot and unhooded casting off

The goodly falcon free; she towered; her bells,

Tone under tone, shrilled; and they lifted up

Their eager faces, wondering at the strength,

Boldness and royal knighthood of the bird

Who pounced her quarry and slew it. Many a time

As once — of old — among the flowers — they rode.

But Vivien half-forgotten of the Queen

Among her damsels broidering sat, heard, watched

And whispered: through the peaceful court she crept

And whispered: then as Arthur in the highest

Leavened the world, so Vivien in the lowest,

Arriving at a time of golden rest,

And sowing one ill hint from ear to ear,

While all the heathen lay at Arthur’s feet,

And no quest came, but all was joust and play,

Leavened his hall. They heard and let her be.

Thereafter as an enemy that has left

Death in the living waters, and withdrawn,

The wily Vivien stole from Arthur’s court.

She hated all the knights, and heard in thought

Their lavish comment when her name was named.

For once, when Arthur walking all alone,

Vext at a rumour issued from herself

Of some corruption crept among his knights,

Had met her, Vivien, being greeted fair,

Would fain have wrought upon his cloudy mood

With reverent eyes mock-loyal, shaken voice,

And fluttered adoration, and at last

With dark sweet hints of some who prized him more

Than who should prize him most; at which the King

Had gazed upon her blankly and gone by:

But one had watched, and had not held his peace:

It made the laughter of an afternoon

That Vivien should attempt the blameless King.

And after that, she set herself to gain

Him, the most famous man of all those times,

Merlin, who knew the range of all their arts,

Had built the King his havens, ships, and halls,

Was also Bard, and knew the starry heavens;

The people called him Wizard; whom at first

She played about with slight and sprightly talk,

And vivid smiles, and faintly-venomed points

Of slander, glancing here and grazing there;

And yielding to his kindlier moods, the Seer

Would watch her at her petulance, and play,

Even when they seemed unloveable, and laugh

As those that watch a kitten; thus he grew

Tolerant of what he half disdained, and she,

Perceiving that she was but half disdained,

Began to break her sports with graver fits,

Turn red or pale, would often when they met

Sigh fully, or all-silent gaze upon him

With such a fixt devotion, that the old man,

Though doubtful, felt the flattery, and at times

Would flatter his own wish in age for love,

And half believe her true: for thus at times

He wavered; but that other clung to him,

Fixt in her will, and so the seasons went.

Then fell on Merlin a great melancholy;

He walked with dreams and darkness, and he found

A doom that ever poised itself to fall,

An ever-moaning battle in the mist,

World-war of dying flesh against the life,

Death in all life and lying in all love,

The meanest having power upon the highest,

And the high purpose broken by the worm.

So leaving Arthur’s court he gained the beach;

There found a little boat, and stept into it;

And Vivien followed, but he marked her not.

She took the helm and he the sail; the boat

Drave with a sudden wind across the deeps,

And touching Breton sands, they disembarked.

And then she followed Merlin all the way,

Even to the wild woods of Broceliande.

For Merlin once had told her of a charm,

The which if any wrought on anyone

With woven paces and with waving arms,

The man so wrought on ever seemed to lie

Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower,

From which was no escape for evermore;

And none could find that man for evermore,

Nor could he see but him who wrought the charm

Coming and going, and he lay as dead

And lost to life and use and name and fame.

And Vivien ever sought to work the charm

Upon the great Enchanter of the Time,

As fancying that her glory would be great

According to his greatness whom she quenched.

There lay she all her length and kissed his feet,

As if in deepest reverence and in love.

A twist of gold was round her hair; a robe

Of samite without price, that more exprest

Than hid her, clung about her lissome limbs,

In colour like the satin-shining palm

On sallows in the windy gleams of March:

And while she kissed them, crying, ‘Trample me,

Dear feet, that I have followed through the world,

And I will pay you worship; tread me down

And I will kiss you for it;’ he was mute:

So dark a forethought rolled about his brain,

As on a dull day in an Ocean cave

The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall

In silence: wherefore, when she lifted up

A face of sad appeal, and spake and said,

‘O Merlin, do ye love me?’ and again,

‘O Merlin, do ye love me?’ and once more,

‘Great Master, do ye love me?’ he was mute.

And lissome Vivien, holding by his heel,

Writhed toward him, slided up his knee and sat,

Behind his ankle twined her hollow feet

Together, curved an arm about his neck,

Clung like a snake; and letting her left hand

Droop from his mighty shoulder, as a leaf,

Made with her right a comb of pearl to part

The lists of such a board as youth gone out

Had left in ashes: then he spoke and said,

Not looking at her, ‘Who are wise in love

Love most, say least,’ and Vivien answered quick,

‘I saw the little elf-god eyeless once

In Arthur’s arras hall at Camelot:

But neither eyes nor tongue — O stupid child!

Yet you are wise who say it; let me think

Silence is wisdom: I am silent then,

And ask no kiss;’ then adding all at once,

‘And lo, I clothe myself with wisdom,’ drew

The vast and shaggy mantle of his beard

Across her neck and bosom to her knee,

And called herself a gilded summer fly

Caught in a great old tyrant spider’s web,

Who meant to eat her up in that wild wood

Without one word. So Vivien called herself,

But rather seemed a lovely baleful star

Veiled in gray vapour; till he sadly smiled:

‘To what request for what strange boon,’ he said,

‘Are these your pretty tricks and fooleries,

O Vivien, the preamble? yet my thanks,

For these have broken up my melancholy.’

And Vivien answered smiling saucily,

‘What, O my Master, have ye found your voice?

I bid the stranger welcome. Thanks at last!

But yesterday you never opened lip,

Except indeed to drink: no cup had we:

In mine own lady palms I culled the spring

That gathered trickling dropwise from the cleft,

And made a pretty cup of both my hands

And offered you it kneeling: then you drank

And knew no more, nor gave me one poor word;

O no more thanks than might a goat have given

With no more sign of reverence than a beard.

And when we halted at that other well,

And I was faint to swooning, and you lay

Foot-gilt with all the blossom-dust of those

Deep meadows we had traversed, did you know

That Vivien bathed your feet before her own?

And yet no thanks: and all through this wild wood

And all this morning when I fondled you:

Boon, ay, there was a boon, one not so strange —

How had I wronged you? surely ye are wise,

But such a silence is more wise than kind.’

And Merlin locked his hand in hers and said:

‘O did ye never lie upon the shore,

And watch the curled white of the coming wave

Glassed in the slippery sand before it breaks?

Even such a wave, but not so pleasurable,

Dark in the glass of some presageful mood,

Had I for three days seen, ready to fall.

And then I rose and fled from Arthur’s court

To break the mood. You followed me unasked;

And when I looked, and saw you following me still,

My mind involved yourself the nearest thing

In that mind-mist: for shall I tell you truth?

You seemed that wave about to break upon me

And sweep me from my hold upon the world,

My use and name and fame. Your pardon, child.

Your pretty sports have brightened all again.

And ask your boon, for boon I owe you thrice,

Once for wrong done you by confusion, next

For thanks it seems till now neglected, last

For these your dainty gambols: wherefore ask;

And take this boon so strange and not so strange.’

And Vivien answered smiling mournfully:

‘O not so strange as my long asking it,

Not yet so strange as you yourself are strange,

Nor half so strange as that dark mood of yours.

I ever feared ye were not wholly mine;

And see, yourself have owned ye did me wrong.

The people call you prophet: let it be:

But not of those that can expound themselves.

Take Vivien for expounder; she will call

That three-days-long presageful gloom of yours

No presage, but the same mistrustful mood

That makes you seem less noble than yourself,

Whenever I have asked this very boon,

Now asked again: for see you not, dear love,

That such a mood as that, which lately gloomed

Your fancy when ye saw me following you,

Must make me fear still more you are not mine,

Must make me yearn still more to prove you mine,

And make me wish still more to learn this charm

Of woven paces and of waving hands,

As proof of trust. O Merlin, teach it me.

The charm so taught will charm us both to rest.

For, grant me some slight power upon your fate,

I, feeling that you felt me worthy trust,

Should rest and let you rest, knowing you mine.

And therefore be as great as ye are named,

Not muffled round with selfish reticence.

How hard you look and how denyingly!

O, if you think this wickedness in me,

That I should prove it on you unawares,

That makes me passing wrathful; then our bond

Had best be loosed for ever: but think or not,

By Heaven that hears I tell you the clean truth,

As clean as blood of babes, as white as milk:

O Merlin, may this earth, if ever I,

If these unwitty wandering wits of mine,

Even in the jumbled rubbish of a dream,

Have tript on such conjectural treachery —

May this hard earth cleave to the Nadir hell

Down, down, and close again, and nip me flat,

If I be such a traitress. Yield my boon,

Till which I scarce can yield you all I am;

And grant my re-reiterated wish,

The great proof of your love: because I think,

However wise, ye hardly know me yet.’

And Merlin loosed his hand from hers and said,

‘I never was less wise, however wise,

Too curious Vivien, though you talk of trust,

Than when I told you first of such a charm.

Yea, if ye talk of trust I tell you this,

Too much I trusted when I told you that,

And stirred this vice in you which ruined man

Through woman the first hour; for howsoe’er

In children a great curiousness be well,

Who have to learn themselves and all the world,

In you, that are no child, for still I find

Your face is practised when I spell the lines,

I call it, — well, I will not call it vice:

But since you name yourself the summer fly,

I well could wish a cobweb for the gnat,

That settles, beaten back, and beaten back

Settles, till one could yield for weariness:

But since I will not yield to give you power

Upon my life and use and name and fame,

Why will ye never ask some other boon?

Yea, by God’s rood, I trusted you too much.’

And Vivien, like the tenderest-hearted maid

That ever bided tryst at village stile,

Made answer, either eyelid wet with tears:

‘Nay, Master, be not wrathful with your maid;

Caress her: let her feel herself forgiven

Who feels no heart to ask another boon.

I think ye hardly know the tender rhyme

Of “trust me not at all or all in all.”

I heard the great Sir Lancelot sing it once,

And it shall answer for me. Listen to it.

“In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,

Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:

Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

“It is the little rift within the lute,

That by and by will make the music mute,

And ever widening slowly silence all.

“The little rift within the lover’s lute

Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit,

That rotting inward slowly moulders all.

“It is not worth the keeping: let it go:

But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.

And trust me not at all or all in all.”

O Master, do ye love my tender rhyme?’

And Merlin looked and half believed her true,

So tender was her voice, so fair her face,

So sweetly gleamed her eyes behind her tears

Like sunlight on the plain behind a shower:

And yet he answered half indignantly:

‘Far other was the song that once I heard

By this huge oak, sung nearly where we sit:

For here we met, some ten or twelve of us,

To chase a creature that was current then

In these wild woods, the hart with golden horns.

It was the time when first the question rose

About the founding of a Table Round,

That was to be, for love of God and men

And noble deeds, the flower of all the world.

And each incited each to noble deeds.

And while we waited, one, the youngest of us,

We could not keep him silent, out he flashed,

And into such a song, such fire for fame,

Such trumpet-glowings in it, coming down

To such a stern and iron-clashing close,

That when he stopt we longed to hurl together,

And should have done it; but the beauteous beast

Scared by the noise upstarted at our feet,

And like a silver shadow slipt away

Through the dim land; and all day long we rode

Through the dim land against a rushing wind,

That glorious roundel echoing in our ears,

And chased the flashes of his golden horns

Till they vanished by the fairy well

That laughs at iron — as our warriors did —

Where children cast their pins and nails, and cry,

“Laugh, little well!” but touch it with a sword,

It buzzes fiercely round the point; and there

We lost him: such a noble song was that.

But, Vivien, when you sang me that sweet rhyme,

I felt as though you knew this cursed charm,

Were proving it on me, and that I lay

And felt them slowly ebbing, name and fame.’

And Vivien answered smiling mournfully:

‘O mine have ebbed away for evermore,

And all through following you to this wild wood,

Because I saw you sad, to comfort you.

Lo now, what hearts have men! they never mount

As high as woman in her selfless mood.

And touching fame, howe’er ye scorn my song,

Take one verse more — the lady speaks it — this:

‘“My name, once mine, now thine, is closelier mine,

For fame, could fame be mine, that fame were thine,

And shame, could shame be thine, that shame were mine.

So trust me not at all or all in all.”

‘Says she not well? and there is more — this rhyme

Is like the fair pearl-necklace of the Queen,

That burst in dancing, and the pearls were spilt;

Some lost, some stolen, some as relics kept.

But nevermore the same two sister pearls

Ran down the silken thread to kiss each other

On her white neck — so is it with this rhyme:

It lives dispersedly in many hands,

And every minstrel sings it differently;

Yet is there one true line, the pearl of pearls:

“Man dreams of Fame while woman wakes to love.”

Yea! Love, though Love were of the grossest, carves

A portion from the solid present, eats

And uses, careless of the rest; but Fame,

The Fame that follows death is nothing to us;

And what is Fame in life but half-disfame,

And counterchanged with darkness? ye yourself

Know well that Envy calls you Devil’s son,

And since ye seem the Master of all Art,

They fain would make you Master of all vice.’

And Merlin locked his hand in hers and said,

‘I once was looking for a magic weed,

And found a fair young squire who sat alone,

Had carved himself a knightly shield of wood,

And then was painting on it fancied arms,

Azure, an Eagle rising or, the Sun

In dexter chief; the scroll “I follow fame.”

And speaking not, but leaning over him

I took his brush and blotted out the bird,

And made a Gardener putting in a graff,

With this for motto, “Rather use than fame.”

You should have seen him blush; but afterwards

He made a stalwart knight. O Vivien,

For you, methinks you think you love me well;

For me, I love you somewhat; rest: and Love

Should have some rest and pleasure in himself,

Not ever be too curious for a boon,

Too prurient for a proof against the grain

Of him ye say ye love: but Fame with men,

Being but ampler means to serve mankind,

Should have small rest or pleasure in herself,

But work as vassal to the larger love,

That dwarfs the petty love of one to one.

Use gave me Fame at first, and Fame again

Increasing gave me use. Lo, there my boon!

What other? for men sought to prove me vile,

Because I fain had given them greater wits:

And then did Envy call me Devil’s son:

The sick weak beast seeking to help herself

By striking at her better, missed, and brought

Her own claw back, and wounded her own heart.

Sweet were the days when I was all unknown,

But when my name was lifted up, the storm

Brake on the mountain and I cared not for it.

Right well know I that Fame is half-disfame,

Yet needs must work my work. That other fame,

To one at least, who hath not children, vague,

The cackle of the unborn about the grave,

I cared not for it: a single misty star,

Which is the second in a line of stars

That seem a sword beneath a belt of three,

I never gazed upon it but I dreamt

Of some vast charm concluded in that star

To make fame nothing. Wherefore, if I fear,

Giving you power upon me through this charm,

That you might play me falsely, having power,

However well ye think ye love me now

(As sons of kings loving in pupilage

Have turned to tyrants when they came to power)

I rather dread the loss of use than fame;

If you — and not so much from wickedness,

As some wild turn of anger, or a mood

Of overstrained affection, it may be,

To keep me all to your own self, — or else

A sudden spurt of woman’s jealousy, —

Should try this charm on whom ye say ye love.’

And Vivien answered smiling as in wrath:

‘Have I not sworn? I am not trusted. Good!

Well, hide it, hide it; I shall find it out;

And being found take heed of Vivien.

A woman and not trusted, doubtless I

Might feel some sudden turn of anger born

Of your misfaith; and your fine epithet

Is accurate too, for this full love of mine

Without the full heart back may merit well

Your term of overstrained. So used as I,

My daily wonder is, I love at all.

And as to woman’s jealousy, O why not?

O to what end, except a jealous one,

And one to make me jealous if I love,

Was this fair charm invented by yourself?

I well believe that all about this world

Ye cage a buxom captive here and there,

Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower

From which is no escape for evermore.’

Then the great Master merrily answered her:

‘Full many a love in loving youth was mine;

I needed then no charm to keep them mine

But youth and love; and that full heart of yours

Whereof ye prattle, may now assure you mine;

So live uncharmed. For those who wrought it first,

The wrist is parted from the hand that waved,

The feet unmortised from their ankle-bones

Who paced it, ages back: but will ye hear

The legend as in guerdon for your rhyme?

‘There lived a king in the most Eastern East,

Less old than I, yet older, for my blood

Hath earnest in it of far springs to be.

A tawny pirate anchored in his port,

Whose bark had plundered twenty nameless isles;

And passing one, at the high peep of dawn,

He saw two cities in a thousand boats

All fighting for a woman on the sea.

And pushing his black craft among them all,

He lightly scattered theirs and brought her off,

With loss of half his people arrow-slain;

A maid so smooth, so white, so wonderful,

They said a light came from her when she moved:

And since the pirate would not yield her up,

The King impaled him for his piracy;

Then made her Queen: but those isle-nurtured eyes

Waged such unwilling though successful war

On all the youth, they sickened; councils thinned,

And armies waned, for magnet-like she drew

The rustiest iron of old fighters’ hearts;

And beasts themselves would worship; camels knelt

Unbidden, and the brutes of mountain back

That carry kings in castles, bowed black knees

Of homage, ringing with their serpent hands,

To make her smile, her golden ankle-bells.

What wonder, being jealous, that he sent

His horns of proclamation out through all

The hundred under-kingdoms that he swayed

To find a wizard who might teach the King

Some charm, which being wrought upon the Queen

Might keep her all his own: to such a one

He promised more than ever king has given,

A league of mountain full of golden mines,

A province with a hundred miles of coast,

A palace and a princess, all for him:

But on all those who tried and failed, the King

Pronounced a dismal sentence, meaning by it

To keep the list low and pretenders back,

Or like a king, not to be trifled with —

Their heads should moulder on the city gates.

And many tried and failed, because the charm

Of nature in her overbore their own:

And many a wizard brow bleached on the walls:

And many weeks a troop of carrion crows

Hung like a cloud above the gateway towers.’

And Vivien breaking in upon him, said:

‘I sit and gather honey; yet, methinks,

Thy tongue has tript a little: ask thyself.

The lady never made unwilling war

With those fine eyes: she had her pleasure in it,

And made her good man jealous with good cause.

And lived there neither dame nor damsel then

Wroth at a lover’s loss? were all as tame,

I mean, as noble, as the Queen was fair?

Not one to flirt a venom at her eyes,

Or pinch a murderous dust into her drink,

Or make her paler with a poisoned rose?

Well, those were not our days: but did they find

A wizard? Tell me, was he like to thee?

She ceased, and made her lithe arm round his neck

Tighten, and then drew back, and let her eyes

Speak for her, glowing on him, like a bride’s

On her new lord, her own, the first of men.

He answered laughing, ‘Nay, not like to me.

At last they found — his foragers for charms —

A little glassy-headed hairless man,

Who lived alone in a great wild on grass;

Read but one book, and ever reading grew

So grated down and filed away with thought,

So lean his eyes were monstrous; while the skin

Clung but to crate and basket, ribs and spine.

And since he kept his mind on one sole aim,

Nor ever touched fierce wine, nor tasted flesh,

Nor owned a sensual wish, to him the wall

That sunders ghosts and shadow-casting men

Became a crystal, and he saw them through it,

And heard their voices talk behind the wall,

And learnt their elemental secrets, powers

And forces; often o’er the sun’s bright eye

Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud,

And lashed it at the base with slanting storm;

Or in the noon of mist and driving rain,

When the lake whitened and the pinewood roared,

And the cairned mountain was a shadow, sunned

The world to peace again: here was the man.

And so by force they dragged him to the King.

And then he taught the King to charm the Queen

In such-wise, that no man could see her more,

Nor saw she save the King, who wrought the charm,

Coming and going, and she lay as dead,

And lost all use of life: but when the King

Made proffer of the league of golden mines,

The province with a hundred miles of coast,

The palace and the princess, that old man

Went back to his old wild, and lived on grass,

And vanished, and his book came down to me.’

And Vivien answered smiling saucily:

‘Ye have the book: the charm is written in it:

Good: take my counsel: let me know it at once:

For keep it like a puzzle chest in chest,

With each chest locked and padlocked thirty-fold,

And whelm all this beneath as vast a mound

As after furious battle turfs the slain

On some wild down above the windy deep,

I yet should strike upon a sudden means

To dig, pick, open, find and read the charm:

Then, if I tried it, who should blame me then?’

And smiling as a master smiles at one

That is not of his school, nor any school

But that where blind and naked Ignorance

Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed,

On all things all day long, he answered her:

‘Thou read the book, my pretty Vivien!

O ay, it is but twenty pages long,

But every page having an ample marge,

And every marge enclosing in the midst

A square of text that looks a little blot,

The text no larger than the limbs of fleas;

And every square of text an awful charm,

Writ in a language that has long gone by.

So long, that mountains have arisen since

With cities on their flanks — thou read the book!

And ever margin scribbled, crost, and crammed

With comment, densest condensation, hard

To mind and eye; but the long sleepless nights

Of my long life have made it easy to me.

And none can read the text, not even I;

And none can read the comment but myself;

And in the comment did I find the charm.

O, the results are simple; a mere child

Might use it to the harm of anyone,

And never could undo it: ask no more:

For though you should not prove it upon me,

But keep that oath ye sware, ye might, perchance,

Assay it on some one of the Table Round,

And all because ye dream they babble of you.’

And Vivien, frowning in true anger, said:

‘What dare the full-fed liars say of me?

They ride abroad redressing human wrongs!

They sit with knife in meat and wine in horn!

They bound to holy vows of chastity!

Were I not woman, I could tell a tale.

But you are man, you well can understand

The shame that cannot be explained for shame.

Not one of all the drove should touch me: swine!’

Then answered Merlin careless of her words:

‘You breathe but accusation vast and vague,

Spleen-born, I think, and proofless. If ye know,

Set up the charge ye know, to stand or fall!’

And Vivien answered frowning wrathfully:

‘O ay, what say ye to Sir Valence, him

Whose kinsman left him watcher o’er his wife

And two fair babes, and went to distant lands;

Was one year gone, and on returning found

Not two but three? there lay the reckling, one

But one hour old! What said the happy sire?’

A seven-months’ babe had been a truer gift.

Those twelve sweet moons confused his fatherhood.’

Then answered Merlin, ‘Nay, I know the tale.

Sir Valence wedded with an outland dame:

Some cause had kept him sundered from his wife:

One child they had: it lived with her: she died:

His kinsman travelling on his own affair

Was charged by Valence to bring home the child.

He brought, not found it therefore: take the truth.’

‘O ay,’ said Vivien, ‘overtrue a tale.

What say ye then to sweet Sir Sagramore,

That ardent man? “to pluck the flower in season,”

So says the song, “I trow it is no treason.”

O Master, shall we call him overquick

To crop his own sweet rose before the hour?’

And Merlin answered, ‘Overquick art thou

To catch a loathly plume fallen from the wing

Of that foul bird of rapine whose whole prey

Is man’s good name: he never wronged his bride.

I know the tale. An angry gust of wind

Puffed out his torch among the myriad-roomed

And many-corridored complexities

Of Arthur’s palace: then he found a door,

And darkling felt the sculptured ornament

That wreathen round it made it seem his own;

And wearied out made for the couch and slept,

A stainless man beside a stainless maid;

And either slept, nor knew of other there;

Till the high dawn piercing the royal rose

In Arthur’s casement glimmered chastely down,

Blushing upon them blushing, and at once

He rose without a word and parted from her:

But when the thing was blazed about the court,

The brute world howling forced them into bonds,

And as it chanced they are happy, being pure.’

‘O ay,’ said Vivien, ‘that were likely too.

What say ye then to fair Sir Percivale

And of the horrid foulness that he wrought,

The saintly youth, the spotless lamb of Christ,

Or some black wether of St Satan’s fold.

What, in the precincts of the chapel-yard,

Among the knightly brasses of the graves,

And by the cold Hic Jacets of the dead!’

And Merlin answered careless of her charge,

‘A sober man is Percivale and pure;

But once in life was flustered with new wine,

Then paced for coolness in the chapel-yard;

Where one of Satan’s shepherdesses caught

And meant to stamp him with her master’s mark;

And that he sinned is not believable;

For, look upon his face! — but if he sinned,

The sin that practice burns into the blood,

And not the one dark hour which brings remorse,

Will brand us, after, of whose fold we be:

Or else were he, the holy king, whose hymns

Are chanted in the minster, worse than all.

But is your spleen frothed out, or have ye more?’

And Vivien answered frowning yet in wrath:

‘O ay; what say ye to Sir Lancelot, friend

Traitor or true? that commerce with the Queen,

I ask you, is it clamoured by the child,

Or whispered in the corner? do ye know it?’

To which he answered sadly, ‘Yea, I know it.

Sir Lancelot went ambassador, at first,

To fetch her, and she watched him from her walls.

A rumour runs, she took him for the King,

So fixt her fancy on him: let them be.

But have ye no one word of loyal praise

For Arthur, blameless King and stainless man?’

She answered with a low and chuckling laugh:

‘Man! is he man at all, who knows and winks?

Sees what his fair bride is and does, and winks?

By which the good King means to blind himself,

And blinds himself and all the Table Round

To all the foulness that they work. Myself

Could call him (were it not for womanhood)

The pretty, popular cause such manhood earns,

Could call him the main cause of all their crime;

Yea, were he not crowned King, coward, and fool.’

Then Merlin to his own heart, loathing, said:

‘O true and tender! O my liege and King!

O selfless man and stainless gentleman,

Who wouldst against thine own eye-witness fain

Have all men true and leal, all women pure;

How, in the mouths of base interpreters,

From over-fineness not intelligible

To things with every sense as false and foul

As the poached filth that floods the middle street,

Is thy white blamelessness accounted blame!’

But Vivien, deeming Merlin overborne

By instance, recommenced, and let her tongue

Rage like a fire among the noblest names,

Polluting, and imputing her whole self,

Defaming and defacing, till she left

Not even Lancelot brave, nor Galahad clean.

Her words had issue other than she willed.

He dragged his eyebrow bushes down, and made

A snowy penthouse for his hollow eyes,

And muttered in himself, ‘Tell her the charm!

So, if she had it, would she rail on me

To snare the next, and if she have it not

So will she rail. What did the wanton say?

“Not mount as high;” we scarce can sink as low:

For men at most differ as Heaven and earth,

But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.

I know the Table Round, my friends of old;

All brave, and many generous, and some chaste.

She cloaks the scar of some repulse with lies;

I well believe she tempted them and failed,

Being so bitter: for fine plots may fail,

Though harlots paint their talk as well as face

With colours of the heart that are not theirs.

I will not let her know: nine tithes of times

Face-flatterer and backbiter are the same.

And they, sweet soul, that most impute a crime

Are pronest to it, and impute themselves,

Wanting the mental range; or low desire

Not to feel lowest makes them level all;

Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain,

To leave an equal baseness; and in this

Are harlots like the crowd, that if they find

Some stain or blemish in a name of note,

Not grieving that their greatest are so small,

Inflate themselves with some insane delight,

And judge all nature from her feet of clay,

Without the will to lift their eyes, and see

Her godlike head crowned with spiritual fire,

And touching other worlds. I am weary of her.’

He spoke in words part heard, in whispers part,

Half-suffocated in the hoary fell

And many-wintered fleece of throat and chin.

But Vivien, gathering somewhat of his mood,

And hearing ‘harlot’ muttered twice or thrice,

Leapt from her session on his lap, and stood

Stiff as a viper frozen; loathsome sight,

How from the rosy lips of life and love,

Flashed the bare-grinning skeleton of death!

White was her cheek; sharp breaths of anger puffed

Her fairy nostril out; her hand half-clenched

Went faltering sideways downward to her belt,

And feeling; had she found a dagger there

(For in a wink the false love turns to hate)

She would have stabbed him; but she found it not:

His eye was calm, and suddenly she took

To bitter weeping like a beaten child,

A long, long weeping, not consolable.

Then her false voice made way, broken with sobs:

‘O crueller than was ever told in tale,

Or sung in song! O vainly lavished love!

O cruel, there was nothing wild or strange,

Or seeming shameful — for what shame in love,

So love be true, and not as yours is — nothing

Poor Vivien had not done to win his trust

Who called her what he called her — all her crime,

All — all — the wish to prove him wholly hers.’

She mused a little, and then clapt her hands

Together with a wailing shriek, and said:

‘Stabbed through the heart’s affections to the heart!

Seethed like the kid in its own mother’s milk!

Killed with a word worse than a life of blows!

I thought that he was gentle, being great:

O God, that I had loved a smaller man!

I should have found in him a greater heart.

O, I, that flattering my true passion, saw

The knights, the court, the King, dark in your light,

Who loved to make men darker than they are,

Because of that high pleasure which I had

To seat you sole upon my pedestal

Of worship — I am answered, and henceforth

The course of life that seemed so flowery to me

With you for guide and master, only you,

Becomes the sea-cliff pathway broken short,

And ending in a ruin — nothing left,

But into some low cave to crawl, and there,

If the wolf spare me, weep my life away,

Killed with inutterable unkindliness.’

She paused, she turned away, she hung her head,

The snake of gold slid from her hair, the braid

Slipt and uncoiled itself, she wept afresh,

And the dark wood grew darker toward the storm

In silence, while his anger slowly died

Within him, till he let his wisdom go

For ease of heart, and half believed her true:

Called her to shelter in the hollow oak,

‘Come from the storm,’ and having no reply,

Gazed at the heaving shoulder, and the face

Hand-hidden, as for utmost grief or shame;

Then thrice essayed, by tenderest-touching terms,

To sleek her ruffled peace of mind, in vain.

At last she let herself be conquered by him,

And as the cageling newly flown returns,

The seeming-injured simple-hearted thing

Came to her old perch back, and settled there.

There while she sat, half-falling from his knees,

Half-nestled at his heart, and since he saw

The slow tear creep from her closed eyelid yet,

About her, more in kindness than in love,

The gentle wizard cast a shielding arm.

But she dislinked herself at once and rose,

Her arms upon her breast across, and stood,

A virtuous gentlewoman deeply wronged,

Upright and flushed before him: then she said:

‘There must now be no passages of love

Betwixt us twain henceforward evermore;

Since, if I be what I am grossly called,

What should be granted which your own gross heart

Would reckon worth the taking? I will go.

In truth, but one thing now — better have died

Thrice than have asked it once — could make me stay —

That proof of trust — so often asked in vain!

How justly, after that vile term of yours,

I find with grief! I might believe you then,

Who knows? once more. Lo! what was once to me

Mere matter of the fancy, now hath grown

The vast necessity of heart and life.

Farewell; think gently of me, for I fear

My fate or folly, passing gayer youth

For one so old, must be to love thee still.

But ere I leave thee let me swear once more

That if I schemed against thy peace in this,

May yon just heaven, that darkens o’er me, send

One flash, that, missing all things else, may make

My scheming brain a cinder, if I lie.’

Scarce had she ceased, when out of heaven a bolt

(For now the storm was close above them) struck,

Furrowing a giant oak, and javelining

With darted spikes and splinters of the wood

The dark earth round. He raised his eyes and saw

The tree that shone white-listed through the gloom.

But Vivien, fearing heaven had heard her oath,

And dazzled by the livid-flickering fork,

And deafened with the stammering cracks and claps

That followed, flying back and crying out,

‘O Merlin, though you do not love me, save,

Yet save me!’ clung to him and hugged him close;

And called him dear protector in her fright,

Nor yet forgot her practice in her fright,

But wrought upon his mood and hugged him close.

The pale blood of the wizard at her touch

Took gayer colours, like an opal warmed.

She blamed herself for telling hearsay tales:

She shook from fear, and for her fault she wept

Of petulancy; she called him lord and liege,

Her seer, her bard, her silver star of eve,

Her God, her Merlin, the one passionate love

Of her whole life; and ever overhead

Bellowed the tempest, and the rotten branch

Snapt in the rushing of the river-rain

Above them; and in change of glare and gloom

Her eyes and neck glittering went and came;

Till now the storm, its burst of passion spent,

Moaning and calling out of other lands,

Had left the ravaged woodland yet once more

To peace; and what should not have been had been,

For Merlin, overtalked and overworn,

Had yielded, told her all the charm, and slept.

Then, in one moment, she put forth the charm

Of woven paces and of waving hands,

And in the hollow oak he lay as dead,

And lost to life and use and name and fame.

Then crying ‘I have made his glory mine,’

And shrieking out ‘O fool!’ the harlot leapt

Adown the forest, and the thicket closed

Behind her, and the forest echoed ‘fool.’

Lancelot and Elaine

1859

ELAINE the fair, Elaine the loveable,

Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat,

High in her chamber up a tower to the east

Guarded the sacred shield of Lancelot;

Which first she placed where the morning’s earliest ray

Might strike it, and awake her with the gleam;

Then fearing rust or soilure fashioned for it

A case of silk, and braided thereupon

All the devices blazoned on the shield

In their own tinct, and added, of her wit,

A border fantasy of branch and flower,

And yellow-throated nestling in the nest.

Nor rested thus content, but day by day,

Leaving her household and good father, climbed

That eastern tower, and entering barred her door,

Stript off the case, and read the naked shield,

Now guessed a hidden meaning in his arms,

Now made a pretty history to herself

Of every dint a sword had beaten in it,

And every scratch a lance had made upon it,

Conjecturing when and where: this cut is fresh;

That ten years back; this dealt him at Caerlyle;

That at Caerleon; this at Camelot:

And ah God’s mercy, what a stroke was there!

And here a thrust that might have killed, but God

Broke the strong lance, and rolled his enemy down,

And saved him: so she lived in fantasy.

How came the lily maid by that good shield

Of Lancelot, she that knew not even his name?

He left it with her, when he rode to tilt

For the great diamond in the diamond jousts,

Which Arthur had ordained, and by that name

Had named them, since a diamond was the prize.

For Arthur, long before they crowned him King,

Roving the trackless realms of Lyonnesse,

Had found a glen, gray boulder and black tarn.

A horror lived about the tarn, and clave

Like its own mists to all the mountain side:

For here two brothers, one a king, had met

And fought together; but their names were lost;

And each had slain his brother at a blow;

And down they fell and made the glen abhorred:

And there they lay till all their bones were bleached,

And lichened into colour with the crags:

And he, that once was king, had on a crown

Of diamonds, one in front, and four aside.

And Arthur came, and labouring up the pass,

All in a misty moonshine, unawares

Had trodden that crowned skeleton, and the skull

Brake from the nape, and from the skull the crown

Rolled into light, and turning on its rims

Fled like a glittering rivulet to the tarn:

And down the shingly scaur he plunged, and caught,

And set it on his head, and in his heart

Heard murmurs, ‘Lo, thou likewise shalt be King.’

Thereafter, when a King, he had the gems

Plucked from the crown, and showed them to his knights,

Saying, ‘These jewels, whereupon I chanced

Divinely, are the kingdom’s, not the King’s —

For public use: henceforward let there be,

Once every year, a joust for one of these:

For so by nine years’ proof we needs must learn

Which is our mightiest, and ourselves shall grow

In use of arms and manhood, till we drive

The heathen, who, some say, shall rule the land

Hereafter, which God hinder.’ Thus he spoke:

And eight years past, eight jousts had been, and still

Had Lancelot won the diamond of the year,

With purpose to present them to the Queen,

When all were won; but meaning all at once

To snare her royal fancy with a boon

Worth half her realm, had never spoken word.

Now for the central diamond and the last

And largest, Arthur, holding then his court

Hard on the river nigh the place which now

Is this world’s hugest, let proclaim a joust

At Camelot, and when the time drew nigh

Spake (for she had been sick) to Guinevere,

‘Are you so sick, my Queen, you cannot move

To these fair jousts?’ ‘Yea, lord,’ she said, ‘ye know it.’

‘Then will ye miss,’ he answered, ‘the great deeds

Of Lancelot, and his prowess in the lists,

A sight ye love to look on.’ And the Queen

Lifted her eyes, and they dwelt languidly

On Lancelot, where he stood beside the King.

He thinking that he read her meaning there,

‘Stay with me, I am sick; my love is more

Than many diamonds,’ yielded; and a heart

Love-loyal to the least wish of the Queen

(However much he yearned to make complete

The tale of diamonds for his destined boon)

Urged him to speak against the truth, and say,

‘Sir King, mine ancient wound is hardly whole,

And lets me from the saddle;’ and the King

Glanced first at him, then her, and went his way.

No sooner gone than suddenly she began:

‘To blame, my lord Sir Lancelot, much to blame!

Why go ye not to these fair jousts? the knights

Are half of them our enemies, and the crowd

Will murmur, “Lo the shameless ones, who take

Their pastime now the trustful King is gone!”’

Then Lancelot vext at having lied in vain:

‘Are ye so wise? ye were not once so wise,

My Queen, that summer, when ye loved me first.

Then of the crowd ye took no more account

Than of the myriad cricket of the mead,

When its own voice clings to each blade of grass,

And every voice is nothing. As to knights,

Them surely can I silence with all ease.

But now my loyal worship is allowed

Of all men: many a bard, without offence,

Has linked our names together in his lay,

Lancelot, the flower of bravery, Guinevere,

The pearl of beauty: and our knights at feast

Have pledged us in this union, while the King

Would listen smiling. How then? is there more?

Has Arthur spoken aught? or would yourself,

Now weary of my service and devoir,

Henceforth be truer to your faultless lord?’

She broke into a little scornful laugh:

‘Arthur, my lord, Arthur, the faultless King,

That passionate perfection, my good lord —

But who can gaze upon the Sun in heaven?

He never spake word of reproach to me,

He never had a glimpse of mine untruth,

He cares not for me: only here today

There gleamed a vague suspicion in his eyes:

Some meddling rogue has tampered with him — else

Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round,

And swearing men to vows impossible,

To make them like himself: but, friend, to me

He is all fault who hath no fault at all:

For who loves me must have a touch of earth;

The low sun makes the colour: I am yours,

Not Arthur’s, as ye know, save by the bond.

And therefore hear my words: go to the jousts:

The tiny-trumpeting gnat can break our dream

When sweetest; and the vermin voices here

May buzz so loud — we scorn them, but they sting.’

Then answered Lancelot, the chief of knights:

‘And with what face, after my pretext made,

Shall I appear, O Queen, at Camelot, I

Before a King who honours his own word,

As if it were his God’s?’

‘Yea,’ said the Queen,

‘A moral child without the craft to rule,

Else had he not lost me: but listen to me,

If I must find you wit: we hear it said

That men go down before your spear at a touch,

But knowing you are Lancelot; your great name,

This conquers: hide it therefore; go unknown:

Win! by this kiss you will: and our true King

Will then allow your pretext, O my knight,

As all for glory; for to speak him true,

Ye know right well, how meek soe’er he seem,

No keener hunter after glory breathes.

He loves it in his knights more than himself:

They prove to him his work: win and return.’

Then got Sir Lancelot suddenly to horse,

Wroth at himself. Not willing to be known,

He left the barren-beaten thoroughfare,

Chose the green path that showed the rarer foot,

And there among the solitary downs,

Full often lost in fancy, lost his way;

Till as he traced a faintly-shadowed track,

That all in loops and links among the dales

Ran to the Castle of Astolat, he saw

Fired from the west, far on a hill, the towers.

Thither he made, and blew the gateway horn.

Then came an old, dumb, myriad-wrinkled man,

Who let him into lodging and disarmed.

And Lancelot marvelled at the wordless man;

And issuing found the Lord of Astolat

With two strong sons, Sir Torre and Sir Lavaine,

Moving to meet him in the castle court;

And close behind them stept the lily maid

Elaine, his daughter: mother of the house

There was not: some light jest among them rose

With laughter dying down as the great knight

Approached them: then the Lord of Astolat:

‘Whence comes thou, my guest, and by what name

Livest thou between the lips? for by thy state

And presence I might guess thee chief of those,

After the King, who eat in Arthur’s halls.

Him have I seen: the rest, his Table Round,

Known as they are, to me they are unknown.’

Then answered Sir Lancelot, the chief of knights:

‘Known am I, and of Arthur’s hall, and known,

What I by mere mischance have brought, my shield.

But since I go to joust as one unknown

At Camelot for the diamond, ask me not,

Hereafter ye shall know me — and the shield —

I pray you lend me one, if such you have,

Blank, or at least with some device not mine.’

Then said the Lord of Astolat, ‘Here is Torre’s:

Hurt in his first tilt was my son, Sir Torre.

And so, God wot, his shield is blank enough.

His ye can have.’ Then added plain Sir Torre,

‘Yea, since I cannot use it, ye may have it.’

Here laughed the father saying, ‘Fie, Sir Churl,

Is that answer for a noble knight?

Allow him! but Lavaine, my younger here,

He is so full of lustihood, he will ride,

Joust for it, and win, and bring it in an hour,

And set it in this damsel’s golden hair,

To make her thrice as wilful as before.’

‘Nay, father, nay good father, shame me not

Before this noble knight,’ said young Lavaine,

‘For nothing. Surely I but played on Torre:

He seemed so sullen, vext he could not go:

A jest, no more! for, knight, the maiden dreamt

That some one put this diamond in her hand,

And that it was too slippery to be held,

And slipt and fell into some pool or stream,

The castle-well, belike; and then I said

That if I went and if I fought and won it

(But all was jest and joke among ourselves)

Then must she keep it safelier. All was jest.

But, father, give me leave, an if he will,

To ride to Camelot with this noble knight:

Win shall I not, but do my best to win:

Young as I am, yet would I do my best.’

‘So will ye grace me,’ answered Lancelot,

Smiling a moment, ‘with your fellowship

O’er these waste downs whereon I lost myself,

Then were I glad of you as guide and friend:

And you shall win this diamond, — as I hear

It is a fair large diamond, — if ye may,

And yield it to this maiden, if ye will.’

‘A fair large diamond,’ added plain Sir Torre,

‘Such be for queens, and not for simple maids.’

Then she, who held her eyes upon the ground,

Elaine, and heard her name so tost about,

Flushed slightly at the slight disparagement

Before the stranger knight, who, looking at her,

Full courtly, yet not falsely, thus returned:

‘If what is fair be but for what is fair,

And only queens are to be counted so,

Rash were my judgment then, who deem this maid

Might wear as fair a jewel as is on earth,

Not violating the bond of like to like.’

He spoke and ceased: the lily maid Elaine,

Won by the mellow voice before she looked,

Lifted her eyes, and read his lineaments.

The great and guilty love he bare the Queen,

In battle with the love he bare his lord,

Had marred his face, and marked it ere his time.

Another sinning on such heights with one,

The flower of all the west and all the world,

Had been the sleeker for it: but in him

His mood was often like a fiend, and rose

And drove him into wastes and solitudes

For agony, who was yet a living soul.

Marred as he was, he seemed the goodliest man

That ever among ladies ate in hall,

And noblest, when she lifted up her eyes.

However marred, of more than twice her years,

Seamed with an ancient swordcut on the cheek,

And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes

And loved him, with that love which was her doom.

Then the great knight, the darling of the court,

Loved of the loveliest, into that rude hall

Stept with all grace, and not with half disdain

Hid under grace, as in a smaller time,

But kindly man moving among his kind:

Whom they with meats and vintage of their best

And talk and minstrel melody entertained.

And much they asked of court and Table Round,

And ever well and readily answered he:

But Lancelot, when they glanced at Guinevere,

Suddenly speaking of the wordless man,

Heard from the Baron that, ten years before,

The heathen caught and reft him of his tongue.

‘He learnt and warned me of their fierce design

Against my house, and him they caught and maimed;

But I, my sons, and little daughter fled

From bonds or death, and dwelt among the woods

By the great river in a boatman’s hut.

Dull days were those, till our good Arthur broke

The Pagan yet once more on Badon hill.’

‘O there, great lord, doubtless,’ Lavaine said, rapt

By all the sweet and sudden passion of youth

Toward greatness in its elder, ‘you have fought.

O tell us — for we live apart — you know

Of Arthur’s glorious wars.’ And Lancelot spoke

And answered him at full, as having been

With Arthur in the fight which all day long

Rang by the white mouth of the violent Glem;

And in the four loud battles by the shore

Of Duglas; that on Bassa; then the war

That thundered in and out the gloomy skirts

Of Celidon the forest; and again

By castle Gurnion, where the glorious King

Had on his cuirass worn our Lady’s Head,

Carved of one emerald centered in a sun

Of silver rays, that lightened as he breathed;

And at Caerleon had he helped his lord,

When the strong neighings of the wild white Horse

Set every gilded parapet shuddering;

And up in Agned-Cathregonion too,

And down the waste sand-shores of Trath Treroit,

Where many a heathen fell; ‘and on the mount

Of Badon I myself beheld the King

Charge at the head of all his Table Round,

And all his legions crying Christ and him,

And break them; and I saw him, after, stand

High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume

Red as the rising sun with heathen blood,

And seeing me, with a great voice he cried,

“They are broken, they are broken!” for the King,

However mild he seems at home, nor cares

For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts —

For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs

Saying, his knights are better men than he —

Yet in this heathen war the fire of God

Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives

No greater leader.’

While he uttered this,

Low to her own heart said the lily maid,

‘Save your own great self, fair lord;’ and when he fell

From talk of war to traits of pleasantry —

Being mirthful he, but in a stately kind —

She still took note that when the living smile

Died from his lips, across him came a cloud

Of melancholy severe, from which again,

Whenever in her hovering to and fro

The lily maid had striven to make him cheer,

There brake a sudden-beaming tenderness

Of manners and of nature: and she thought

That all was nature, all, perchance, for her.

And all night long his face before her lived,

As when a painter, poring on a face,

Divinely through all hindrance finds the man

Behind it, and so paints him that his face,

The shape and colour of a mind and life,

Lives for his children, ever at its best

And fullest; so the face before her lived,

Dark-splendid, speaking in the silence, full

Of noble things, and held her from her sleep.

Till rathe she rose, half-cheated in the thought

She needs must bid farewell to sweet Lavaine.

First in fear, step after step, she stole

Down the long tower-stairs, hesitating:

Anon, she heard Sir Lancelot cry in the court,

‘This shield, my friend, where is it?’ and Lavaine

Past inward, as she came from out the tower.

There to his proud horse Lancelot turned, and smoothed

The glossy shoulder, humming to himself.

Half-envious of the flattering hand, she drew

Nearer and stood. He looked, and more amazed

Than if seven men had set upon him, saw

The maiden standing in the dewy light.

He had not dreamed she was so beautiful.

Then came on him a sort of sacred fear,

For silent, though he greeted her, she stood

Rapt on his face as if it were a God’s.

Suddenly flashed on her a wild desire,

That he should wear her favour at the tilt.

She braved a riotous heart in asking for it.

‘Fair lord, whose name I know not — noble it is,

I well believe, the noblest — will you wear

My favour at this tourney?’ ‘Nay,’ said he,

‘Fair lady, since I never yet have worn

Favour of any lady in the lists.

Such is my wont, as those, who know me, know.’

‘Yea, so,’ she answered; ‘then in wearing mine

Needs must be lesser likelihood, noble lord,

That those who know should know you.’ And he turned

Her counsel up and down within his mind,

And found it true, and answered, ‘True, my child.

Well, I will wear it: fetch it out to me:

What is it?’ and she told him ‘A red sleeve

Broidered with pearls,’ and brought it: then he bound

Her token on his helmet, with a smile

Saying, ‘I never yet have done so much

For any maiden living,’ and the blood

Sprang to her face and filled her with delight;

But left her all the paler, when Lavaine

Returning brought the yet-unblazoned shield,

His brother’s; which he gave to Lancelot,

Who parted with his own to fair Elaine:

‘Do me this grace, my child, to have my shield

In keeping till I come.’ ‘A grace to me,’

She answered, ‘twice today. I am your squire!’

Whereat Lavaine said, laughing, ‘Lily maid,

For fear our people call you lily maid

In earnest, let me bring your colour back;

Once, twice, and thrice: now get you hence to bed:’

So kissed her, and Sir Lancelot his own hand,

And thus they moved away: she stayed a minute,

Then made a sudden step to the gate, and there —

Her bright hair blown about the serious face

Yet rosy-kindled with her brother’s kiss —

Paused by the gateway, standing near the shield

In silence, while she watched their arms far-off

Sparkle, until they dipt below the downs.

Then to her tower she climbed, and took the shield,

There kept it, and so lived in fantasy.

Meanwhile the new companions past away

Far o’er the long backs of the bushless downs,

To where Sir Lancelot knew there lived a knight

Not far from Camelot, now for forty years

A hermit, who had prayed, laboured and prayed,

And ever labouring had scooped himself

In the white rock a chapel and a hall

On massive columns, like a shorecliff cave,

And cells and chambers: all were fair and dry;

The green light from the meadows underneath

Struck up and lived along the milky roofs;

And in the meadows tremulous aspen-trees

And poplars made a noise of falling showers.

And thither wending there that night they bode.

But when the next day broke from underground,

And shot red fire and shadows through the cave,

They rose, heard mass, broke fast, and rode away:

Then Lancelot saying, ‘Hear, but hold my name

Hidden, you ride with Lancelot of the Lake,’

Abashed young Lavaine, whose instant reverence,

Dearer to true young hearts than their own praise,

But left him leave to stammer, ‘Is it indeed?’

And after muttering ‘The great Lancelot,

At last he got his breath and answered, ‘One,

One have I seen — that other, our liege lord,

The dread Pendragon, Britain’s King of kings,

Of whom the people talk mysteriously,

He will be there — then were I stricken blind

That minute, I might say that I had seen.’

So spake Lavaine, and when they reached the lists

By Camelot in the meadow, let his eyes

Run through the peopled gallery which half round

Lay like a rainbow fallen upon the grass,

Until they found the clear-faced King, who sat

Robed in red samite, easily to be known,

Since to his crown the golden dragon clung,

And down his robe the dragon writhed in gold,

And from the carven-work behind him crept

Two dragons gilded, sloping down to make

Arms for his chair, while all the rest of them

Through knots and loops and folds innumerable

Fled ever through the woodwork, till they found

The new design wherein they lost themselves,

Yet with all ease, so tender was the work:

And, in the costly canopy o’er him set,

Blazed the last diamond of the nameless king.

Then Lancelot answered young Lavaine and said,

‘Me you call great: mine is the firmer seat,

The truer lance: but there is many a youth

Now crescent, who will come to all I am

And overcome it; and in me there dwells

No greatness, save it be some far-off touch

Of greatness to know well I am not great:

There is the man.’ And Lavaine gaped upon him

As on a thing miraculous, and anon

The trumpets blew; and then did either side,

They that assailed, and they that held the lists,

Set lance in rest, strike spur, suddenly move,

Meet in the midst, and there so furiously

Shock, that a man far-off might well perceive,

If any man that day were left afield,

The hard earth shake, and a low thunder of arms.

And Lancelot bode a little, till he saw

Which were the weaker; then he hurled into it

Against the stronger: little need to speak

Of Lancelot in his glory! King, duke, earl,

Count, baron — whom he smote, he overthrew.

But in the field were Lancelot’s kith and kin,

Ranged with the Table Round that held the lists,

Strong men, and wrathful that a stranger knight

Should do and almost overdo the deeds

Of Lancelot; and one said to the other, ‘Lo!

What is he? I do not mean the force alone —

The grace and versatility of the man!

Is it not Lancelot?’ ‘When has Lancelot worn

Favour of any lady in the lists?

Not such his wont, as we, that know him, know.’

‘How then? who then?’ a fury seized them all,

A fiery family passion for the name

Of Lancelot, and a glory one with theirs.

They couched their spears and pricked their steeds, and thus,

Their plumes driven backward by the wind they made

In moving, all together down upon him

Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North-sea,

Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all

Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies,

Down on a bark, and overbears the bark,

And him that helms it, so they overbore

Sir Lancelot and his charger, and a spear

Down-glancing lamed the charger, and a spear

Pricked sharply his own cuirass, and the head

Pierced through his side, and there snapt, and remained.

Then Sir Lavaine did well and worshipfully;

He bore a knight of old repute to the earth,

And brought his horse to Lancelot where he lay.

He up the side, sweating with agony, got,

But thought to do while he might yet endure,

And being lustily holpen by the rest,

His party, — though it seemed half-miracle

To those he fought with, — drave his kith and kin,

And all the Table Round that held the lists,

Back to the barrier; then the trumpets blew

Proclaiming his the prize, who wore the sleeve

Of scarlet, and the pearls; and all the knights,

His party, cried ‘Advance and take thy prize

The diamond;’ but he answered, ‘Diamond me

No diamonds! for God’s love, a little air!

Prize me no prizes, for my prize is death!

Hence will I, and I charge you, follow me not.’

He spoke, and vanished suddenly from the field

With young Lavaine into the poplar grove.

There from his charger down he slid, and sat,

Gasping to Sir Lavaine, ‘Draw the lance-head:’

‘Ah my sweet lord Sir Lancelot,’ said Lavaine,

‘I dread me, if I draw it, you will die.’

But he, ‘I die already with it: draw —

Draw,’ — and Lavaine drew, and Sir Lancelot gave

A marvellous great shriek and ghastly groan,

And half his blood burst forth, and down he sank

For the pure pain, and wholly swooned away.

Then came the hermit out and bare him in,

There stanched his wound; and there, in daily doubt

Whether to live or die, for many a week

Hid from the wide world’s rumour by the grove

Of poplars with their noise of falling showers,

And ever-tremulous aspen-trees, he lay.

But on that day when Lancelot fled the lists,

His party, knights of utmost North and West,

Lords of waste marches, kings of desolate isles,

Came round their great Pendragon, saying to him,

‘Lo, Sire, our knight, through whom we won the day,

Hath gone sore wounded, and hath left his prize

Untaken, crying that his prize is death.’

‘Heaven hinder,’ said the King, ‘that such an one,

So great a knight as we have seen today —

He seemed to me another Lancelot —

Yea, twenty times I thought him Lancelot —

He must not pass uncared for. Wherefore, rise,

O Gawain, and ride forth and find the knight.

Wounded and wearied needs must he be near.

I charge you that you get at once to horse.

And, knights and kings, there breathes not one of you

Will deem this prize of ours is rashly given:

His prowess was too wondrous. We will do him

No customary honour: since the knight

Came not to us, of us to claim the prize,

Ourselves will send it after. Rise and take

This diamond, and deliver it, and return,

And bring us where he is, and how he fares,

And cease not from your quest until ye find.’

So saying, from the carven flower above,

To which it made a restless heart, he took,

And gave, the diamond: then from where he sat

At Arthur’s right, with smiling face arose,

With smiling face and frowning heart, a Prince

In the mid might and flourish of his May,

Gawain, surnamed The Courteous, fair and strong,

And after Lancelot, Tristram, and Geraint

And Gareth, a good knight, but therewithal

Sir Modred’s brother, and the child of Lot,

Nor often loyal to his word, and now

Wroth that the King’s command to sally forth

In quest of whom he knew not, made him leave

The banquet, and concourse of knights and kings.

So all in wrath he got to horse and went;

While Arthur to the banquet, dark in mood,

Past, thinking ‘Is it Lancelot who hath come

Despite the wound he spake of, all for gain

Of glory, and hath added wound to wound,

And ridden away to die?’ So feared the King,

And, after two days’ tarriance there, returned.

Then when he saw the Queen, embracing asked,

‘Love, are you yet so sick?’ ‘Nay, lord,’ she said.

‘And where is Lancelot?’ Then the Queen amazed,

‘Was he not with you? won he not your prize?’

‘Nay, but one like him.’ ‘Why that like was he.’

And when the King demanded how she knew,

Said, ‘Lord, no sooner had ye parted from us,

Than Lancelot told me of a common talk

That men went down before his spear at a touch,

But knowing he was Lancelot; his great name

Conquered; and therefore would he hide his name

From all men, even the King, and to this end

Had made a pretext of a hindering wound,

That he might joust unknown of all, and learn

If his old prowess were in aught decayed;

And added, “Our true Arthur, when he learns,

Will well allow me pretext, as for gain

Of purer glory.”’

Then replied the King:

‘Far lovelier in our Lancelot had it been,

In lieu of idly dallying with the truth,

To have trusted me as he hath trusted thee.

Surely his King and most familiar friend

Might well have kept his secret. True, indeed,

Albeit I know my knights fantastical,

So fine a fear in our large Lancelot

Must needs have moved my laughter: now remains

But little cause for laughter: his own kin —

Ill news, my Queen, for all who love him, this! —

His kith and kin, not knowing, set upon him;

So that he went sore wounded from the field:

Yet good news too: for goodly hopes are mine

That Lancelot is no more a lonely heart.

He wore, against his wont, upon his helm

A sleeve of scarlet, broidered with great pearls,

Some gentle maiden’s gift.’

‘Yea, lord,’ she said,

‘Thy hopes are mine,’ and saying that, she choked,

And sharply turned about to hide her face,

Past to her chamber, and there flung herself

Down on the great King’s couch, and writhed upon it,

And clenched her fingers till they bit the palm,

And shrieked out ‘Traitor’ to the unhearing wall,

Then flashed into wild tears, and rose again,

And moved about her palace, proud and pale.

Gawain the while through all the region round

Rode with his diamond, wearied of the quest,

Touched at all points, except the poplar grove,

And came at last, though late, to Astolat:

Whom glittering in enamelled arms the maid

Glanced at, and cried, ‘What news from Camelot, lord?

What of the knight with the red sleeve?’ ‘He won.’

‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘But parted from the jousts

Hurt in the side,’ whereat she caught her breath;

Through her own side she felt the sharp lance go;

Thereon she smote her hand: wellnigh she swooned:

And, while he gazed wonderingly at her, came

The Lord of Astolat out, to whom the Prince

Reported who he was, and on what quest

Sent, that he bore the prize and could not find

The victor, but had ridden a random round

To seek him, and had wearied of the search.

To whom the Lord of Astolat, ‘Bide with us,

And ride no more at random, noble Prince!

Here was the knight, and here he left a shield;

This will he send or come for: furthermore

Our son is with him; we shall hear anon,

Needs must hear.’ To this the courteous Prince

Accorded with his wonted courtesy,

Courtesy with a touch of traitor in it,

And stayed; and cast his eyes on fair Elaine:

Where could be found face daintier? then her shape

From forehead down to foot, perfect — again

From foot to forehead exquisitely turned:

‘Well — if I bide, lo! this wild flower for me!’

And oft they met among the garden yews,

And there he set himself to play upon her

With sallying wit, free flashes from a height

Above her, graces of the court, and songs,

Sighs, and slow smiles, and golden eloquence

And amorous adulation, till the maid

Rebelled against it, saying to him, ‘Prince,

O loyal nephew of our noble King,

Why ask you not to see the shield he left,

Whence you might learn his name? Why slight your King,

And lose the quest he sent you on, and prove

No surer than our falcon yesterday,

Who lost the hern we slipt her at, and went

To all the winds?’ ‘Nay, by mine head,’ said he,

‘I lose it, as we lose the lark in heaven,

O damsel, in the light of your blue eyes;

But an ye will it let me see the shield.’

And when the shield was brought, and Gawain saw

Sir Lancelot’s azure lions, crowned with gold,

Ramp in the field, he smote his thigh, and mocked:

‘Right was the King! our Lancelot! that true man!’

‘And right was I,’ she answered merrily, ‘I,

Who dreamed my knight the greatest knight of all.’

‘And if I dreamed,’ said Gawain, ‘that you love

This greatest knight, your pardon! lo, ye know it!

Speak therefore: shall I waste myself in vain?’

Full simple was her answer, ‘What know I?

My brethren have been all my fellowship;

And I, when often they have talked of love,

Wished it had been my mother, for they talked,

Meseemed, of what they knew not; so myself —

I know not if I know what true love is,

But if I know, then, if I love not him,

I know there is none other I can love.’

‘Yea, by God’s death,’ said he, ‘ye love him well,

But would not, knew ye what all others know,

And whom he loves.’ ‘So be it,’ cried Elaine,

And lifted her fair face and moved away:

But he pursued her, calling, ‘Stay a little!

One golden minute’s grace! he wore your sleeve:

Would he break faith with one I may not name?

Must our true man change like a leaf at last?

Nay — like enow: why then, far be it from me

To cross our mighty Lancelot in his loves!

And, damsel, for I deem you know full well

Where your great knight is hidden, let me leave

My quest with you; the diamond also: here!

For if you love, it will be sweet to give it;

And if he love, it will be sweet to have it

From your own hand; and whether he love or not,

A diamond is a diamond. Fare you well

A thousand times! — a thousand times farewell!

Yet, if he love, and his love hold, we two

May meet at court hereafter: there, I think,

So ye will learn the courtesies of the court,

We two shall know each other.’

Then he gave,

And slightly kissed the hand to which he gave,

The diamond, and all wearied of the quest

Leapt on his horse, and carolling as he went

A true-love ballad, lightly rode away.

Thence to the court he past; there told the King

What the King knew, ‘Sir Lancelot is the knight.’

And added, ‘Sire, my liege, so much I learnt;

But failed to find him, though I rode all round

The region: but I lighted on the maid

Whose sleeve he wore; she loves him; and to her,

Deeming our courtesy is the truest law,

I gave the diamond: she will render it;

For by mine head she knows his hiding-place.’

The seldom-frowning King frowned, and replied,

‘Too courteous truly! ye shall go no more

On quest of mine, seeing that ye forget

Obedience is the courtesy due to kings.’

He spake and parted. Wroth, but all in awe,

For twenty strokes of the blood, without a word,

Lingered that other, staring after him;

Then shook his hair, strode off, and buzzed abroad

About the maid of Astolat, and her love.

All ears were pricked at once, all tongues were loosed:

‘The maid of Astolat loves Sir Lancelot,

Sir Lancelot loves the maid of Astolat.’

Some read the King’s face, some the Queen’s, and all

Had marvel what the maid might be, but most

Predoomed her as unworthy. One old dame

Came suddenly on the Queen with the sharp news.

She, that had heard the noise of it before,

But sorrowing Lancelot should have stooped so low,

Marred her friend’s aim with pale tranquillity.

So ran the tale like fire about the court,

Fire in dry stubble a nine-days’ wonder flared:

Till even the knights at banquet twice or thrice

Forgot to drink to Lancelot and the Queen,

And pledging Lancelot and the lily maid

Smiled at each other, while the Queen, who sat

With lips severely placid, felt the knot

Climb in her throat, and with her feet unseen

Crushed the wild passion out against the floor

Beneath the banquet, where all the meats became

As wormwood, and she hated all who pledged.

But far away the maid in Astolat,

Her guiltless rival, she that ever kept

The one-day-seen Sir Lancelot in her heart,

Crept to her father, while he mused alone,

Sat on his knee, stroked his gray face and said,

‘Father, you call me wilful, and the fault

Is yours who let me have my will, and now,

Sweet father, will you let me lose my wits?’

‘Nay,’ said he, ‘surely.’ ‘Wherefore, let me hence,’

She answered, ‘and find out our dear Lavaine.’

‘Ye will not lose your wits for dear Lavaine:

Bide,’ answered he: ‘we needs must hear anon

Of him, and of that other.’ ‘Ay,’ she said,

‘And of that other, for I needs must hence

And find that other, wheresoe’er he be,

And with mine own hand give his diamond to him,

Lest I be found as faithless in the quest

As yon proud Prince who left the quest to me.

Sweet father, I behold him in my dreams

Gaunt as it were the skeleton of himself,

Death-pale, for lack of gentle maiden’s aid.

The gentler-born the maiden, the more bound,

My father, to be sweet and serviceable

To noble knights in sickness, as ye know

When these have worn their tokens: let me hence

I pray you.’ Then her father nodding said,

‘Ay, ay, the diamond: wit ye well, my child,

Right fain were I to learn this knight were whole,

Being our greatest: yea, and you must give it —

And sure I think this fruit is hung too high

For any mouth to gape for save a queen’s —

Nay, I mean nothing: so then, get you gone,

Being so very wilful you must go.’

Lightly, her suit allowed, she slipt away,

And while she made her ready for her ride,

Her father’s latest word hummed in her ear,

‘Being so very wilful you must go,’

And changed itself and echoed in her heart,

‘Being so very wilful you must die.’

But she was happy enough and shook it off,

As we shake off the bee that buzzes at us;

And in her heart she answered it and said,

‘What matter, so I help him back to life?’

Then far away with good Sir Torre for guide

Rode o’er the long backs of the bushless downs

To Camelot, and before the city-gates

Came on her brother with a happy face

Making a roan horse caper and curvet

For pleasure all about a field of flowers:

Whom when she saw, ‘Lavaine,’ she cried, ‘Lavaine,

How fares my lord Sir Lancelot?’ He amazed,

‘Torre and Elaine! why here? Sir Lancelot!

How know ye my lord’s name is Lancelot?’

But when the maid had told him all her tale,

Then turned Sir Torre, and being in his moods

Left them, and under the strange-statued gate,

Where Arthur’s wars were rendered mystically,

Past up the still rich city to his kin,

His own far blood, which dwelt at Camelot;

And her, Lavaine across the poplar grove

Led to the caves: there first she saw the casque

Of Lancelot on the wall: her scarlet sleeve,

Though carved and cut, and half the pearls away,

Streamed from it still; and in her heart she laughed,

Because he had not loosed it from his helm,

But meant once more perchance to tourney in it.

And when they gained the cell wherein he slept,

His battle-writhen arms and mighty hands

Lay naked on the wolfskin, and a dream

Of dragging down his enemy made them move.

Then she that saw him lying unsleek, unshorn,

Gaunt as it were the skeleton of himself,

Uttered a little tender dolorous cry.

The sound not wonted in a place so still

Woke the sick knight, and while he rolled his eyes

Yet blank from sleep, she started to him, saying,

‘Your prize the diamond sent you by the King:’

His eyes glistened: she fancied ‘Is it for me?’

And when the maid had told him all the tale

Of King and Prince, the diamond sent, the quest

Assigned to her not worthy of it, she knelt

Full lowly by the corners of his bed,

And laid the diamond in his open hand.

Her face was near, and as we kiss the child

That does the task assigned, he kissed her face.

At once she slipt like water to the floor.

‘Alas,’ he said, ‘your ride hath wearied you.

Rest must you have.’ ‘No rest for me,’ she said;

‘Nay, for near you, fair lord, I am at rest.’

What might she mean by that? his large black eyes,

Yet larger through his leanness, dwelt upon her,

Till all her heart’s sad secret blazed itself

In the heart’s colours on her simple face;

And Lancelot looked and was perplext in mind,

And being weak in body said no more;

But did not love the colour; woman’s love,

Save one, he not regarded, and so turned

Sighing, and feigned a sleep until he slept.

Then rose Elaine and glided through the fields,

And past beneath the weirdly-sculptured gates

Far up the dim rich city to her kin;

There bode the night: but woke with dawn, and past

Down through the dim rich city to the fields,

Thence to the cave: so day by day she past

In either twilight ghost-like to and fro

Gliding, and every day she tended him,

And likewise many a night: and Lancelot

Would, though he called his wound a little hurt

Whereof he should be quickly whole, at times

Brain-feverous in his heat and agony, seem

Uncourteous, even he: but the meek maid

Sweetly forbore him ever, being to him

Meeker than any child to a rough nurse,

Milder than any mother to a sick child,

And never woman yet, since man’s first fall,

Did kindlier unto man, but her deep love

Upbore her; till the hermit, skilled in all

The simples and the science of that time,

Told him that her fine care had saved his life.

And the sick man forgot her simple blush,

Would call her friend and sister, sweet Elaine,

Would listen for her coming and regret

Her parting step, and held her tenderly,

And loved her with all love except the love

Of man and woman when they love their best,

Closest and sweetest, and had died the death

In any knightly fashion for her sake.

And peradventure had he seen her first

She might have made this and that other world

Another world for the sick man; but now

The shackles of an old love straitened him,

His honour rooted in dishonour stood,

And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

Yet the great knight in his mid-sickness made

Full many a holy vow and pure resolve.

These, as but born of sickness, could not live:

For when the blood ran lustier in him again,

Full often the bright image of one face,

Making a treacherous quiet in his heart,

Dispersed his resolution like a cloud.

Then if the maiden, while that ghostly grace

Beamed on his fancy, spoke, he answered not,

Or short and coldly, and she knew right well

What the rough sickness meant, but what this meant

She knew not, and the sorrow dimmed her sight,

And drave her ere her time across the fields

Far into the rich city, where alone

She murmured, ‘Vain, in vain: it cannot be.

He will not love me: how then? must I die?’

Then as a little helpless innocent bird,

That has but one plain passage of few notes,

Will sing the simple passage o’er and o’er

For all an April morning, till the ear

Wearies to hear it, so the simple maid

Went half the night repeating, ‘Must I die?’

And now to right she turned, and now to left,

And found no ease in turning or in rest;

And ‘Him or death,’ she muttered, ‘death or him,’

Again and like a burthen, ‘Him or death.’

But when Sir Lancelot’s deadly hurt was whole,

To Astolat returning rode the three.

There morn by morn, arraying her sweet self

In that wherein she deemed she looked her best,

She came before Sir Lancelot, for she thought

‘If I be loved, these are my festal robes,

If not, the victim’s flowers before he fall.’

And Lancelot ever prest upon the maid

That she should ask some goodly gift of him

For her own self or hers; ‘and do not shun

To speak the wish most near to your true heart;

Such service have ye done me, that I make

My will of yours, and Prince and Lord am I

In mine own land, and what I will I can.’

Then like a ghost she lifted up her face,

But like a ghost without the power to speak.

And Lancelot saw that she withheld her wish,

And bode among them yet a little space

Till he should learn it; and one morn it chanced

He found her in among the garden yews,

And said, ‘Delay no longer, speak your wish,

Seeing I go today:’ then out she brake:

‘Going? and we shall never see you more.

And I must die for want of one bold word.’

‘Speak: that I live to hear,’ he said, ‘is yours.’

Then suddenly and passionately she spoke:

‘I have gone mad. I love you: let me die.’

‘Ah, sister,’ answered Lancelot, ‘what is this?’

And innocently extending her white arms,

‘Your love,’ she said, ‘your love — to be your wife.’

And Lancelot answered, ‘Had I chosen to wed,

I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine:

But now there never will be wife of mine.’

‘No, no,’ she cried, ‘I care not to be wife,

But to be with you still, to see your face,

To serve you, and to follow you through the world.’

And Lancelot answered, ‘Nay, the world, the world,

All ear and eye, with such a stupid heart

To interpret ear and eye, and such a tongue

To blare its own interpretation — nay,

Full ill then should I quit your brother’s love,

And your good father’s kindness.’ And she said,

‘Not to be with you, not to see your face —

Alas for me then, my good days are done.’

‘Nay, noble maid,’ he answered, ‘ten times nay!

This is not love: but love’s first flash in youth,

Most common: yea, I know it of mine own self:

And you yourself will smile at your own self

Hereafter, when you yield your flower of life

To one more fitly yours, not thrice your age:

And then will I, for true you are and sweet

Beyond mine old belief in womanhood,

More specially should your good knight be poor,

Endow you with broad land and territory

Even to the half my realm beyond the seas,

So that would make you happy: furthermore,

Even to the death, as though ye were my blood,

In all your quarrels will I be your knight.

This I will do, dear damsel, for your sake,

And more than this I cannot.’

While he spoke

She neither blushed nor shook, but deathly-pale

Stood grasping what was nearest, then replied:

‘Of all this will I nothing;’ and so fell,

And thus they bore her swooning to her tower.

Then spake, to whom through those black walls of yew

Their talk had pierced, her father: ‘Ay, a flash,

I fear me, that will strike my blossom dead.

Too courteous are ye, fair Lord Lancelot.

I pray you, use some rough discourtesy

To blunt or break her passion.’

Lancelot said,

‘That were against me: what I can I will;’

And there that day remained, and toward even

Sent for his shield: full meekly rose the maid,

Stript off the case, and gave the naked shield;

Then, when she heard his horse upon the stones,

Unclasping flung the casement back, and looked

Down on his helm, from which her sleeve had gone.

And Lancelot knew the little clinking sound;

And she by tact of love was well aware

That Lancelot knew that she was looking at him.

And yet he glanced not up, nor waved his hand,

Nor bad farewell, but sadly rode away.

This was the one discourtesy that he used.

So in her tower alone the maiden sat:

His very shield was gone; only the case,

Her own poor work, her empty labour, left.

But still she heard him, still his picture formed

And grew between her and the pictured wall.

Then came her father, saying in low tones,

‘Have comfort,’ whom she greeted quietly.

Then came her brethren saying, ‘Peace to thee,

Sweet sister,’ whom she answered with all calm.

But when they left her to herself again,

Death, like a friend’s voice from a distant field

Approaching through the darkness, called; the owls

Wailing had power upon her, and she mixt

Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms

Of evening, and the moanings of the wind.

And in those days she made a little song,

And called her song ‘The Song of Love and Death,’

And sang it: sweetly could she make and sing.

‘Sweet is true love though given in vain, in vain;

And sweet is death who puts an end to pain:

I know not which is sweeter, no, not I.

‘Love, art thou sweet? then bitter death must be:

Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me.

O Love, if death be sweeter, let me die.

‘Sweet love, that seems not made to fade away,

Sweet death, that seems to make us loveless clay,

I know not which is sweeter, no, not I.

‘I fain would follow love, if that could be;

I needs must follow death, who calls for me;

Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.’

High with the last line scaled her voice, and this,

All in a fiery dawning wild with wind

That shook her tower, the brothers heard, and thought

With shuddering, ‘Hark the Phantom of the house

That ever shrieks before a death,’ and called

The father, and all three in hurry and fear

Ran to her, and lo! the blood-red light of dawn

Flared on her face, she shrilling, ‘Let me die!’

As when we dwell upon a word we know,

Repeating, till the word we know so well

Becomes a wonder, and we know not why,

So dwelt the father on her face, and thought

‘Is this Elaine?’ till back the maiden fell,

Then gave a languid hand to each, and lay,

Speaking a still good-morrow with her eyes.

At last she said, ‘Sweet brothers, yesternight

I seemed a curious little maid again,

As happy as when we dwelt among the woods,

And when ye used to take me with the flood

Up the great river in the boatman’s boat.

Only ye would not pass beyond the cape

That has the poplar on it: there ye fixt

Your limit, oft returning with the tide.

And yet I cried because ye would not pass

Beyond it, and far up the shining flood

Until we found the palace of the King.

And yet ye would not; but this night I dreamed

That I was all alone upon the flood,

And then I said, “Now shall I have my will:”

And there I woke, but still the wish remained.

So let me hence that I may pass at last

Beyond the poplar and far up the flood,

Until I find the palace of the King.

There will I enter in among them all,

And no man there will dare to mock at me;

But there the fine Gawain will wonder at me,

And there the great Sir Lancelot muse at me;

Gawain, who bad a thousand farewells to me,

Lancelot, who coldly went, nor bad me one:

And there the King will know me and my love,

And there the Queen herself will pity me,

And all the gentle court will welcome me,

And after my long voyage I shall rest!’

‘Peace,’ said her father, ‘O my child, ye seem

Light-headed, for what force is yours to go

So far, being sick? and wherefore would ye look

On this proud fellow again, who scorns us all?’

Then the rough Torre began to heave and move,

And bluster into stormy sobs and say,

‘I never loved him: an I meet with him,

I care not howsoever great he be,

Then will I strike at him and strike him down,

Give me good fortune, I will strike him dead,

For this discomfort he hath done the house.’

To whom the gentle sister made reply,

‘Fret not yourself, dear brother, nor be wroth,

Seeing it is no more Sir Lancelot’s fault

Not to love me, than it is mine to love

Him of all men who seems to me the highest.’

‘Highest?’ the father answered, echoing ‘highest?’

(He meant to break the passion in her) ‘nay,

Daughter, I know not what you call the highest;

But this I know, for all the people know it,

He loves the Queen, and in an open shame:

And she returns his love in open shame;

If this be high, what is it to be low?’

Then spake the lily maid of Astolat:

‘Sweet father, all too faint and sick am I

For anger: these are slanders: never yet

Was noble man but made ignoble talk.

He makes no friend who never made a foe.

But now it is my glory to have loved

One peerless, without stain: so let me pass,

My father, howsoe’er I seem to you,

Not all unhappy, having loved God’s best

And greatest, though my love had no return:

Yet, seeing you desire your child to live,

Thanks, but you work against your own desire;

For if I could believe the things you say

I should but die the sooner; wherefore cease,

Sweet father, and bid call the ghostly man

Hither, and let me shrive me clean, and die.’

So when the ghostly man had come and gone,

She with a face, bright as for sin forgiven,

Besought Lavaine to write as she devised

A letter, word for word; and when he asked

‘Is it for Lancelot, is it for my dear lord?

Then will I bear it gladly;’ she replied,

‘For Lancelot and the Queen and all the world,

But I myself must bear it.’ Then he wrote

The letter she devised; which being writ

And folded, ‘O sweet father, tender and true,

Deny me not,’ she said—’ye never yet

Denied my fancies — this, however strange,

My latest: lay the letter in my hand

A little ere I die, and close the hand

Upon it; I shall guard it even in death.

And when the heat is gone from out my heart,

Then take the little bed on which I died

For Lancelot’s love, and deck it like the Queen’s

For richness, and me also like the Queen

In all I have of rich, and lay me on it.

And let there be prepared a chariot-bier

To take me to the river, and a barge

Be ready on the river, clothed in black.

I go in state to court, to meet the Queen.

There surely I shall speak for mine own self,

And none of you can speak for me so well.

And therefore let our dumb old man alone

Go with me, he can steer and row, and he

Will guide me to that palace, to the doors.’

She ceased: her father promised; whereupon

She grew so cheerful that they deemed her death

Was rather in the fantasy than the blood.

But ten slow mornings past, and on the eleventh

Her father laid the letter in her hand,

And closed the hand upon it, and she died.

So that day there was dole in Astolat.

But when the next sun brake from underground,

Then, those two brethren slowly with bent brows

Accompanying, the sad chariot-bier

Past like a shadow through the field, that shone

Full-summer, to that stream whereon the barge,

Palled all its length in blackest samite, lay.

There sat the lifelong creature of the house,

Loyal, the dumb old servitor, on deck,

Winking his eyes, and twisted all his face.

So those two brethren from the chariot took

And on the black decks laid her in her bed,

Set in her hand a lily, o’er her hung

The silken case with braided blazonings,

And kissed her quiet brows, and saying to her

‘Sister, farewell for ever,’ and again

‘Farewell, sweet sister,’ parted all in tears.

Then rose the dumb old servitor, and the dead,

Oared by the dumb, went upward with the flood —

In her right hand the lily, in her left

The letter — all her bright hair streaming down —

And all the coverlid was cloth of gold

Drawn to her waist, and she herself in white

All but her face, and that clear-featured face

Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead,

But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled.

That day Sir Lancelot at the palace craved

Audience of Guinevere, to give at last,

The price of half a realm, his costly gift,

Hard-won and hardly won with bruise and blow,

With deaths of others, and almost his own,

The nine-years-fought-for diamonds: for he saw

One of her house, and sent him to the Queen

Bearing his wish, whereto the Queen agreed

With such and so unmoved a majesty

She might have seemed her statue, but that he,

Low-drooping till he wellnigh kissed her feet

For loyal awe, saw with a sidelong eye

The shadow of some piece of pointed lace,

In the Queen’s shadow, vibrate on the walls,

And parted, laughing in his courtly heart.

All in an oriel on the summer side,

Vine-clad, of Arthur’s palace toward the stream,

They met, and Lancelot kneeling uttered, ‘Queen,

Lady, my liege, in whom I have my joy,

Take, what I had not won except for you,

These jewels, and make me happy, making them

An armlet for the roundest arm on earth,

Or necklace for a neck to which the swan’s

Is tawnier than her cygnet’s: these are words:

Your beauty is your beauty, and I sin

In speaking, yet O grant my worship of it

Words, as we grant grief tears. Such sin in words

Perchance, we both can pardon: but, my Queen,

I hear of rumours flying through your court.

Our bond, as not the bond of man and wife,

Should have in it an absoluter trust

To make up that defect: let rumours be:

When did not rumours fly? these, as I trust

That you trust me in your own nobleness,

I may not well believe that you believe.’

While thus he spoke, half turned away, the Queen

Brake from the vast oriel-embowering vine

Leaf after leaf, and tore, and cast them off,

Till all the place whereon she stood was green;

Then, when he ceased, in one cold passive hand

Received at once and laid aside the gems

There on a table near her, and replied:

‘It may be, I am quicker of belief

Than you believe me, Lancelot of the Lake.

Our bond is not the bond of man and wife.

This good is in it, whatsoe’er of ill,

It can be broken easier. I for you

This many a year have done despite and wrong

To one whom ever in my heart of hearts

I did acknowledge nobler. What are these?

Diamonds for me! they had been thrice their worth

Being your gift, had you not lost your own.

To loyal hearts the value of all gifts

Must vary as the giver’s. Not for me!

For her! for your new fancy. Only this

Grant me, I pray you: have your joys apart.

I doubt not that however changed, you keep

So much of what is graceful: and myself

Would shun to break those bounds of courtesy

In which as Arthur’s Queen I move and rule:

So cannot speak my mind. An end to this!

A strange one! yet I take it with Amen.

So pray you, add my diamonds to her pearls;

Deck her with these; tell her, she shines me down:

An armlet for an arm to which the Queen’s

Is haggard, or a necklace for a neck

O as much fairer — as a faith once fair

Was richer than these diamonds — hers not mine —

Nay, by the mother of our Lord himself,

Or hers or mine, mine now to work my will —

She shall not have them.’

Saying which she seized,

And, through the casement standing wide for heat,

Flung them, and down they flashed, and smote the stream.

Then from the smitten surface flashed, as it were,

Diamonds to meet them, and they past away.

Then while Sir Lancelot leant, in half disdain

At love, life, all things, on the window ledge,

Close underneath his eyes, and right across

Where these had fallen, slowly past the barge.

Whereon the lily maid of Astolat

Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night.

But the wild Queen, who saw not, burst away

To weep and wail in secret; and the barge,

On to the palace-doorway sliding, paused.

There two stood armed, and kept the door; to whom,

All up the marble stair, tier over tier,

Were added mouths that gaped, and eyes that asked

‘What is it?’ but that oarsman’s haggard face,

As hard and still as is the face that men

Shape to their fancy’s eye from broken rocks

On some cliff-side, appalled them, and they said

‘He is enchanted, cannot speak — and she,

Look how she sleeps — the Fairy Queen, so fair!

Yea, but how pale! what are they? flesh and blood?

Or come to take the King to Fairyland?

For some do hold our Arthur cannot die,

But that he passes into Fairyland.’

While thus they babbled of the King, the King

Came girt with knights: then turned the tongueless man

From the half-face to the full eye, and rose

And pointed to the damsel, and the doors.

So Arthur bad the meek Sir Percivale

And pure Sir Galahad to uplift the maid;

And reverently they bore her into hall.

Then came the fine Gawain and wondered at her,

And Lancelot later came and mused at her,

And last the Queen herself, and pitied her:

But Arthur spied the letter in her hand,

Stoopt, took, brake seal, and read it; this was all:

‘Most noble lord, Sir Lancelot of the Lake,

I, sometime called the maid of Astolat,

Come, for you left me taking no farewell,

Hither, to take my last farewell of you.

I loved you, and my love had no return,

And therefore my true love has been my death.

And therefore to our Lady Guinevere,

And to all other ladies, I make moan:

Pray for my soul, and yield me burial.

Pray for my soul thou too, Sir Lancelot,

As thou art a knight peerless.’

Thus he read;

And ever in the reading, lords and dames

Wept, looking often from his face who read

To hers which lay so silent, and at times,

So touched were they, half-thinking that her lips,

Who had devised the letter, moved again.

Then freely spoke Sir Lancelot to them all:

‘My lord liege Arthur, and all ye that hear,

Know that for this most gentle maiden’s death

Right heavy am I; for good she was and true,

But loved me with a love beyond all love

In women, whomsoever I have known.

Yet to be loved makes not to love again;

Not at my years, however it hold in youth.

I swear by truth and knighthood that I gave

No cause, not willingly, for such a love:

To this I call my friends in testimony,

Her brethren, and her father, who himself

Besought me to be plain and blunt, and use,

To break her passion, some discourtesy

Against my nature: what I could, I did.

I left her and I bad her no farewell;

Though, had I dreamt the damsel would have died,

I might have put my wits to some rough use,

And helped her from herself.’

Then said the Queen

(Sea was her wrath, yet working after storm)

‘Ye might at least have done her so much grace,

Fair lord, as would have helped her from her death.’

He raised his head, their eyes met and hers fell,

He adding,

‘Queen, she would not be content

Save that I wedded her, which could not be.

Then might she follow me through the world, she asked;

It could not be. I told her that her love

Was but the flash of youth, would darken down

To rise hereafter in a stiller flame

Toward one more worthy of her — then would I,

More specially were he, she wedded, poor,

Estate them with large land and territory

In mine own realm beyond the narrow seas,

To keep them in all joyance: more than this

I could not; this she would not, and she died.’

He pausing, Arthur answered, ‘O my knight,

It will be to thy worship, as my knight,

And mine, as head of all our Table Round,

To see that she be buried worshipfully.’

So toward that shrine which then in all the realm

Was richest, Arthur leading, slowly went

The marshalled Order of their Table Round,

And Lancelot sad beyond his wont, to see

The maiden buried, not as one unknown,

Nor meanly, but with gorgeous obsequies,

And mass, and rolling music, like a queen.

And when the knights had laid her comely head

Low in the dust of half-forgotten kings,

Then Arthur spake among them, ‘Let her tomb

Be costly, and her image thereupon,

And let the shield of Lancelot at her feet

Be carven, and her lily in her hand.

And let the story of her dolorous voyage

For all true hearts be blazoned on her tomb

In letters gold and azure!’ which was wrought

Thereafter; but when now the lords and dames

And people, from the high door streaming, brake

Disorderly, as homeward each, the Queen,

Who marked Sir Lancelot where he moved apart,

Drew near, and sighed in passing, ‘Lancelot,

Forgive me; mine was jealousy in love.’

He answered with his eyes upon the ground,

‘That is love’s curse; pass on, my Queen, forgiven.’

But Arthur, who beheld his cloudy brows,

Approached him, and with full affection said,

‘Lancelot, my Lancelot, thou in whom I have

Most joy and most affiance, for I know

What thou hast been in battle by my side,

And many a time have watched thee at the tilt

Strike down the lusty and long practised knight,

And let the younger and unskilled go by

To win his honour and to make his name,

And loved thy courtesies and thee, a man

Made to be loved; but now I would to God,

Seeing the homeless trouble in thine eyes,

Thou couldst have loved this maiden, shaped, it seems,

By God for thee alone, and from her face,

If one may judge the living by the dead,

Delicately pure and marvellously fair,

Who might have brought thee, now a lonely man

Wifeless and heirless, noble issue, sons

Born to the glory of thine name and fame,

My knight, the great Sir Lancelot of the Lake.’

Then answered Lancelot, ‘Fair she was, my King,

Pure, as you ever wish your knights to be.

To doubt her fairness were to want an eye,

To doubt her pureness were to want a heart —

Yea, to be loved, if what is worthy love

Could bind him, but free love will not be bound.’

‘Free love, so bound, were freest,’ said the King.

‘Let love be free; free love is for the best:

And, after heaven, on our dull side of death,

What should be best, if not so pure a love

Clothed in so pure a loveliness? yet thee

She failed to bind, though being, as I think,

Unbound as yet, and gentle, as I know.’

And Lancelot answered nothing, but he went,

And at the inrunning of a little brook

Sat by the river in a cove, and watched

The high reed wave, and lifted up his eyes

And saw the barge that brought her moving down,

Far-off, a blot upon the stream, and said

Low in himself, ‘Ah simple heart and sweet,

Ye loved me, damsel, surely with a love

Far tenderer than my Queen’s. Pray for thy soul?

Ay, that will I. Farewell too — now at last —

Farewell, fair lily. “Jealousy in love?”

Not rather dead love’s harsh heir, jealous pride?

Queen, if I grant the jealousy as of love,

May not your crescent fear for name and fame

Speak, as it waxes, of a love that wanes?

Why did the King dwell on my name to me?

Mine own name shames me, seeming a reproach,

Lancelot, whom the Lady of the Lake

Caught from his mother’s arms — the wondrous one

Who passes through the vision of the night —

She chanted snatches of mysterious hymns

Heard on the winding waters, eve and morn

She kissed me saying, “Thou art fair, my child,

As a king’s son,” and often in her arms

She bare me, pacing on the dusky mere.

Would she had drowned me in it, where’er it be!

For what am I? what profits me my name

Of greatest knight? I fought for it, and have it:

Pleasure to have it, none; to lose it, pain;

Now grown a part of me: but what use in it?

To make men worse by making my sin known?

Or sin seem less, the sinner seeming great?

Alas for Arthur’s greatest knight, a man

Not after Arthur’s heart! I needs must break

These bonds that so defame me: not without

She wills it: would I, if she willed it? nay,

Who knows? but if I would not, then may God,

I pray him, send a sudden Angel down

To seize me by the hair and bear me far,

And fling me deep in that forgotten mere,

Among the tumbled fragments of the hills.’

So groaned Sir Lancelot in remorseful pain,

Not knowing he should die a holy man.

The Holy Grail

1869

FROM noiseful arms, and acts of prowess done

In tournament or tilt, Sir Percivale,

Whom Arthur and his knighthood called The Pure,

Had passed into the silent life of prayer,

Praise, fast, and alms; and leaving for the cowl

The helmet in an abbey far away

From Camelot, there, and not long after, died.

And one, a fellow-monk among the rest,

Ambrosius, loved him much beyond the rest,

And honoured him, and wrought into his heart

A way by love that wakened love within,

To answer that which came: and as they sat

Beneath a world-old yew-tree, darkening half

The cloisters, on a gustful April morn

That puffed the swaying branches into smoke

Above them, ere the summer when he died

The monk Ambrosius questioned Percivale:

‘O brother, I have seen this yew-tree smoke,

Spring after spring, for half a hundred years:

For never have I known the world without,

Nor ever strayed beyond the pale: but thee,

When first thou camest — such a courtesy

Spake through the limbs and in the voice — I knew

For one of those who eat in Arthur’s hall;

For good ye are and bad, and like to coins,

Some true, some light, but every one of you

Stamped with the image of the King; and now

Tell me, what drove thee from the Table Round,

My brother? was it earthly passion crost?’

‘Nay,’ said the knight; ‘for no such passion mine.

But the sweet vision of the Holy Grail

Drove me from all vainglories, rivalries,

And earthly heats that spring and sparkle out

Among us in the jousts, while women watch

Who wins, who falls; and waste the spiritual strength

Within us, better offered up to Heaven.’

To whom the monk: ‘The Holy Grail! — I trust

We are green in Heaven’s eyes; but here too much

We moulder — as to things without I mean —

Yet one of your own knights, a guest of ours,

Told us of this in our refectory,

But spake with such a sadness and so low

We heard not half of what he said. What is it?

The phantom of a cup that comes and goes?’

‘Nay, monk! what phantom?’ answered Percivale.

‘The cup, the cup itself, from which our Lord

Drank at the last sad supper with his own.

This, from the blessed land of Aromat —

After the day of darkness, when the dead

Went wandering o’er Moriah — the good saint

Arimathaean Joseph, journeying brought

To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn

Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.

And there awhile it bode; and if a man

Could touch or see it, he was healed at once,

By faith, of all his ills. But then the times

Grew to such evil that the holy cup

Was caught away to Heaven, and disappeared.’

To whom the monk: ‘From our old books I know

That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury,

And there the heathen Prince, Arviragus,

Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build;

And there he built with wattles from the marsh

A little lonely church in days of yore,

For so they say, these books of ours, but seem

Mute of this miracle, far as I have read.

But who first saw the holy thing today?’

‘A woman,’ answered Percivale, ‘a nun,

And one no further off in blood from me

Than sister; and if ever holy maid

With knees of adoration wore the stone,

A holy maid; though never maiden glowed,

But that was in her earlier maidenhood,

With such a fervent flame of human love,

Which being rudely blunted, glanced and shot

Only to holy things; to prayer and praise

She gave herself, to fast and alms. And yet,

Nun as she was, the scandal of the Court,

Sin against Arthur and the Table Round,

And the strange sound of an adulterous race,

Across the iron grating of her cell

Beat, and she prayed and fasted all the more.

‘And he to whom she told her sins, or what

Her all but utter whiteness held for sin,

A man wellnigh a hundred winters old,

Spake often with her of the Holy Grail,

A legend handed down through five or six,

And each of these a hundred winters old,

From our Lord’s time. And when King Arthur made

His Table Round, and all men’s hearts became

Clean for a season, surely he had thought

That now the Holy Grail would come again;

But sin broke out. Ah, Christ, that it would come,

And heal the world of all their wickedness!

“O Father!” asked the maiden, “might it come

To me by prayer and fasting?” “Nay,” said he,

“I know not, for thy heart is pure as snow.”

And so she prayed and fasted, till the sun

Shone, and the wind blew, through her, and I thought

She might have risen and floated when I saw her.

‘For on a day she sent to speak with me.

And when she came to speak, behold her eyes

Beyond my knowing of them, beautiful,

Beyond all knowing of them, wonderful,

Beautiful in the light of holiness.

And “O my brother Percivale,” she said,

“Sweet brother, I have seen the Holy Grail:

For, waked at dead of night, I heard a sound

As of a silver horn from o’er the hills

Blown, and I thought, ‘It is not Arthur’s use

To hunt by moonlight;’ and the slender sound

As from a distance beyond distance grew

Coming upon me — O never harp nor horn,

Nor aught we blow with breath, or touch with hand,

Was like that music as it came; and then

Streamed through my cell a cold and silver beam,

And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail,

Rose-red with beatings in it, as if alive,

Till all the white walls of my cell were dyed

With rosy colours leaping on the wall;

And then the music faded, and the Grail

Past, and the beam decayed, and from the walls

The rosy quiverings died into the night.

So now the Holy Thing is here again

Among us, brother, fast thou too and pray,

And tell thy brother knights to fast and pray,

That so perchance the vision may be seen

By thee and those, and all the world be healed.”

‘Then leaving the pale nun, I spake of this

To all men; and myself fasted and prayed

Always, and many among us many a week

Fasted and prayed even to the uttermost,

Expectant of the wonder that would be.

‘And one there was among us, ever moved

Among us in white armour, Galahad.

“God make thee good as thou art beautiful,”

Said Arthur, when he dubbed him knight; and none,

In so young youth, was ever made a knight

Till Galahad; and this Galahad, when he heard

My sister’s vision, filled me with amaze;

His eyes became so like her own, they seemed

Hers, and himself her brother more than I.

‘Sister or brother none had he; but some

Called him a son of Lancelot, and some said

Begotten by enchantment — chatterers they,

Like birds of passage piping up and down,

That gape for flies — we know not whence they come;

For when was Lancelot wanderingly lewd?

‘But she, the wan sweet maiden, shore away

Clean from her forehead all that wealth of hair

Which made a silken mat-work for her feet;

And out of this she plaited broad and long

A strong sword-belt, and wove with silver thread

And crimson in the belt a strange device,

A crimson grail within a silver beam;

And saw the bright boy-knight, and bound it on him,

Saying, “My knight, my love, my knight of heaven,

O thou, my love, whose love is one with mine,

I, maiden, round thee, maiden, bind my belt.

Go forth, for thou shalt see what I have seen,

And break through all, till one will crown thee king

Far in the spiritual city:” and as she spake

She sent the deathless passion in her eyes

Through him, and made him hers, and laid her mind

On him, and he believed in her belief.

‘Then came a year of miracle: O brother,

In our great hall there stood a vacant chair,

Fashioned by Merlin ere he past away,

And carven with strange figures; and in and out

The figures, like a serpent, ran a scroll

Of letters in a tongue no man could read.

And Merlin called it “The Siege perilous,”

Perilous for good and ill; “for there,” he said,

“No man could sit but he should lose himself:”

And once by misadvertence Merlin sat

In his own chair, and so was lost; but he,

Galahad, when he heard of Merlin’s doom,

Cried, “If I lose myself, I save myself!”

‘Then on a summer night it came to pass,

While the great banquet lay along the hall,

That Galahad would sit down in Merlin’s chair.

‘And all at once, as there we sat, we heard

A cracking and a riving of the roofs,

And rending, and a blast, and overhead

Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry.

And in the blast there smote along the hall

A beam of light seven times more clear than day:

And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail

All over covered with a luminous cloud.

And none might see who bare it, and it past.

But every knight beheld his fellow’s face

As in a glory, and all the knights arose,

And staring each at other like dumb men

Stood, till I found a voice and sware a vow.

‘I sware a vow before them all, that I,

Because I had not seen the Grail, would ride

A twelvemonth and a day in quest of it,

Until I found and saw it, as the nun

My sister saw it; and Galahad sware the vow,

And good Sir Bors, our Lancelot’s cousin, sware,

And Lancelot sware, and many among the knights,

And Gawain sware, and louder than the rest.’

Then spake the monk Ambrosius, asking him,

‘What said the King? Did Arthur take the vow?’

‘Nay, for my lord,’ said Percivale, ‘the King,

Was not in hall: for early that same day,

Scaped through a cavern from a bandit hold,

An outraged maiden sprang into the hall

Crying on help: for all her shining hair

Was smeared with earth, and either milky arm

Red-rent with hooks of bramble, and all she wore

Torn as a sail that leaves the rope is torn

In tempest: so the King arose and went

To smoke the scandalous hive of those wild bees

That made such honey in his realm. Howbeit

Some little of this marvel he too saw,

Returning o’er the plain that then began

To darken under Camelot; whence the King

Looked up, calling aloud, “Lo, there! the roofs

Of our great hall are rolled in thunder-smoke!

Pray Heaven, they be not smitten by the bolt.”

For dear to Arthur was that hall of ours,

As having there so oft with all his knights

Feasted, and as the stateliest under heaven.

‘O brother, had you known our mighty hall,

Which Merlin built for Arthur long ago!

For all the sacred mount of Camelot,

And all the dim rich city, roof by roof,

Tower after tower, spire beyond spire,

By grove, and garden-lawn, and rushing brook,

Climbs to the mighty hall that Merlin built.

And four great zones of sculpture, set betwixt

With many a mystic symbol, gird the hall:

And in the lowest beasts are slaying men,

And in the second men are slaying beasts,

And on the third are warriors, perfect men,

And on the fourth are men with growing wings,

And over all one statue in the mould

Of Arthur, made by Merlin, with a crown,

And peaked wings pointed to the Northern Star.

And eastward fronts the statue, and the crown

And both the wings are made of gold, and flame

At sunrise till the people in far fields,

Wasted so often by the heathen hordes,

Behold it, crying, “We have still a King.”

‘And, brother, had you known our hall within,

Broader and higher than any in all the lands!

Where twelve great windows blazon Arthur’s wars,

And all the light that falls upon the board

Streams through the twelve great battles of our King.

Nay, one there is, and at the eastern end,

Wealthy with wandering lines of mount and mere,

Where Arthur finds the brand Excalibur.

And also one to the west, and counter to it,

And blank: and who shall blazon it? when and how? —

O there, perchance, when all our wars are done,

The brand Excalibur will be cast away.

‘So to this hall full quickly rode the King,

In horror lest the work by Merlin wrought,

Dreamlike, should on the sudden vanish, wrapt

In unremorseful folds of rolling fire.

And in he rode, and up I glanced, and saw

The golden dragon sparkling over all:

And many of those who burnt the hold, their arms

Hacked, and their foreheads grimed with smoke, and seared,

Followed, and in among bright faces, ours,

Full of the vision, prest: and then the King

Spake to me, being nearest, “Percivale,”

(Because the hall was all in tumult — some

Vowing, and some protesting), “what is this?”

‘O brother, when I told him what had chanced,

My sister’s vision, and the rest, his face

Darkened, as I have seen it more than once,

When some brave deed seemed to be done in vain,

Darken; and “Woe is me, my knights,” he cried,

“Had I been here, ye had not sworn the vow.”

Bold was mine answer, “Had thyself been here,

My King, thou wouldst have sworn.” “Yea, yea,” said he,

“Art thou so bold and hast not seen the Grail?”

‘“Nay, lord, I heard the sound, I saw the light,

But since I did not see the Holy Thing,

I sware a vow to follow it till I saw.”

‘Then when he asked us, knight by knight, if any

Had seen it, all their answers were as one:

“Nay, lord, and therefore have we sworn our vows.”

‘“Lo now,” said Arthur, “have ye seen a cloud?

What go ye into the wilderness to see?”

‘Then Galahad on the sudden, and in a voice

Shrilling along the hall to Arthur, called,

“But I, Sir Arthur, saw the Holy Grail,

I saw the Holy Grail and heard a cry —

‘O Galahad, and O Galahad, follow me.’”

‘“Ah, Galahad, Galahad,” said the King, “for such

As thou art is the vision, not for these.

Thy holy nun and thou have seen a sign —

Holier is none, my Percivale, than she —

A sign to maim this Order which I made.

But ye, that follow but the leader’s bell”

(Brother, the King was hard upon his knights)

“Taliessin is our fullest throat of song,

And one hath sung and all the dumb will sing.

Lancelot is Lancelot, and hath overborne

Five knights at once, and every younger knight,

Unproven, holds himself as Lancelot,

Till overborne by one, he learns — and ye,

What are ye? Galahads? — no, nor Percivales”

(For thus it pleased the King to range me close

After Sir Galahad); “nay,” said he, “but men

With strength and will to right the wronged, of power

To lay the sudden heads of violence flat,

Knights that in twelve great battles splashed and dyed

The strong White Horse in his own heathen blood —

But one hath seen, and all the blind will see.

Go, since your vows are sacred, being made:

Yet — for ye know the cries of all my realm

Pass through this hall — how often, O my knights,

Your places being vacant at my side,

This chance of noble deeds will come and go

Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires

Lost in the quagmire! Many of you, yea most,

Return no more: ye think I show myself

Too dark a prophet: come now, let us meet

The morrow morn once more in one full field

Of gracious pastime, that once more the King,

Before ye leave him for this Quest, may count

The yet-unbroken strength of all his knights,

Rejoicing in that Order which he made.”

‘So when the sun broke next from under ground,

All the great table of our Arthur closed

And clashed in such a tourney and so full,

So many lances broken — never yet

Had Camelot seen the like, since Arthur came;

And I myself and Galahad, for a strength

Was in us from this vision, overthrew

So many knights that all the people cried,

And almost burst the barriers in their heat,

Shouting, “Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale!”

‘But when the next day brake from under ground —

O brother, had you known our Camelot,

Built by old kings, age after age, so old

The King himself had fears that it would fall,

So strange, and rich, and dim; for where the roofs

Tottered toward each other in the sky,

Met foreheads all along the street of those

Who watched us pass; and lower, and where the long

Rich galleries, lady-laden, weighed the necks

Of dragons clinging to the crazy walls,

Thicker than drops from thunder, showers of flowers

Fell as we past; and men and boys astride

On wyvern, lion, dragon, griffin, swan,

At all the corners, named us each by name,

Calling, “God speed!” but in the ways below

The knights and ladies wept, and rich and poor

Wept, and the King himself could hardly speak

For grief, and all in middle street the Queen,

Who rode by Lancelot, wailed and shrieked aloud,

“This madness has come on us for our sins.”

So to the Gate of the three Queens we came,

Where Arthur’s wars are rendered mystically,

And thence departed every one his way.

‘And I was lifted up in heart, and thought

Of all my late-shown prowess in the lists,

How my strong lance had beaten down the knights,

So many and famous names; and never yet

Had heaven appeared so blue, nor earth so green,

For all my blood danced in me, and I knew

That I should light upon the Holy Grail.

‘Thereafter, the dark warning of our King,

That most of us would follow wandering fires,

Came like a driving gloom across my mind.

Then every evil word I had spoken once,

And every evil thought I had thought of old,

And every evil deed I ever did,

Awoke and cried, “This Quest is not for thee.”

And lifting up mine eyes, I found myself

Alone, and in a land of sand and thorns,

And I was thirsty even unto death;

And I, too, cried, “This Quest is not for thee.”

‘And on I rode, and when I thought my thirst

Would slay me, saw deep lawns, and then a brook,

With one sharp rapid, where the crisping white

Played ever back upon the sloping wave,

And took both ear and eye; and o’er the brook

Were apple-trees, and apples by the brook

Fallen, and on the lawns. “I will rest here,”

I said, “I am not worthy of the Quest;”

But even while I drank the brook, and ate

The goodly apples, all these things at once

Fell into dust, and I was left alone,

And thirsting, in a land of sand and thorns.

‘And then behold a woman at a door

Spinning; and fair the house whereby she sat,

And kind the woman’s eyes and innocent,

And all her bearing gracious; and she rose

Opening her arms to meet me, as who should say,

“Rest here;” but when I touched her, lo! she, too,

Fell into dust and nothing, and the house

Became no better than a broken shed,

And in it a dead babe; and also this

Fell into dust, and I was left alone.

‘And on I rode, and greater was my thirst.

Then flashed a yellow gleam across the world,

And where it smote the plowshare in the field,

The plowman left his plowing, and fell down

Before it; where it glittered on her pail,

The milkmaid left her milking, and fell down

Before it, and I knew not why, but thought

“The sun is rising,” though the sun had risen.

Then was I ware of one that on me moved

In golden armour with a crown of gold

About a casque all jewels; and his horse

In golden armour jewelled everywhere:

And on the splendour came, flashing me blind;

And seemed to me the Lord of all the world,

Being so huge. But when I thought he meant

To crush me, moving on me, lo! he, too,

Opened his arms to embrace me as he came,

And up I went and touched him, and he, too,

Fell into dust, and I was left alone

And wearying in a land of sand and thorns.

‘And I rode on and found a mighty hill,

And on the top, a city walled: the spires

Pricked with incredible pinnacles into heaven.

And by the gateway stirred a crowd; and these

Cried to me climbing, “Welcome, Percivale!

Thou mightiest and thou purest among men!”

And glad was I and clomb, but found at top

No man, nor any voice. And thence I past

Far through a ruinous city, and I saw

That man had once dwelt there; but there I found

Only one man of an exceeding age.

“Where is that goodly company,” said I,

“That so cried out upon me?” and he had

Scarce any voice to answer, and yet gasped,

“Whence and what art thou?” and even as he spoke

Fell into dust, and disappeared, and I

Was left alone once more, and cried in grief,

“Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself

And touch it, it will crumble into dust.”

‘And thence I dropt into a lowly vale,

Low as the hill was high, and where the vale

Was lowest, found a chapel, and thereby

A holy hermit in a hermitage,

To whom I told my phantoms, and he said:

‘“O son, thou hast not true humility,

The highest virtue, mother of them all;

For when the Lord of all things made Himself

Naked of glory for His mortal change,

‘Take thou my robe,’ she said, ‘for all is thine,’

And all her form shone forth with sudden light

So that the angels were amazed, and she

Followed Him down, and like a flying star

Led on the gray-haired wisdom of the east;

But her thou hast not known: for what is this

Thou thoughtest of thy prowess and thy sins?

Thou hast not lost thyself to save thyself

As Galahad.” When the hermit made an end,

In silver armour suddenly Galahad shone

Before us, and against the chapel door

Laid lance, and entered, and we knelt in prayer.

And there the hermit slaked my burning thirst,

And at the sacring of the mass I saw

The holy elements alone; but he,

“Saw ye no more? I, Galahad, saw the Grail,

The Holy Grail, descend upon the shrine:

I saw the fiery face as of a child

That smote itself into the bread, and went;

And hither am I come; and never yet

Hath what thy sister taught me first to see,

This Holy Thing, failed from my side, nor come

Covered, but moving with me night and day,

Fainter by day, but always in the night

Blood-red, and sliding down the blackened marsh

Blood-red, and on the naked mountain top

Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below

Blood-red. And in the strength of this I rode,

Shattering all evil customs everywhere,

And past through Pagan realms, and made them mine,

And clashed with Pagan hordes, and bore them down,

And broke through all, and in the strength of this

Come victor. But my time is hard at hand,

And hence I go; and one will crown me king

Far in the spiritual city; and come thou, too,

For thou shalt see the vision when I go.”

‘While thus he spake, his eye, dwelling on mine,

Drew me, with power upon me, till I grew

One with him, to believe as he believed.

Then, when the day began to wane, we went.

‘There rose a hill that none but man could climb,

Scarred with a hundred wintry water-courses —

Storm at the top, and when we gained it, storm

Round us and death; for every moment glanced

His silver arms and gloomed: so quick and thick

The lightnings here and there to left and right

Struck, till the dry old trunks about us, dead,

Yea, rotten with a hundred years of death,

Sprang into fire: and at the base we found

On either hand, as far as eye could see,

A great black swamp and of an evil smell,

Part black, part whitened with the bones of men,

Not to be crost, save that some ancient king

Had built a way, where, linked with many a bridge,

A thousand piers ran into the great Sea.

And Galahad fled along them bridge by bridge,

And every bridge as quickly as he crost

Sprang into fire and vanished, though I yearned

To follow; and thrice above him all the heavens

Opened and blazed with thunder such as seemed

Shoutings of all the sons of God: and first

At once I saw him far on the great Sea,

In silver-shining armour starry-clear;

And o’er his head the Holy Vessel hung

Clothed in white samite or a luminous cloud.

And with exceeding swiftness ran the boat,

If boat it were — I saw not whence it came.

And when the heavens opened and blazed again

Roaring, I saw him like a silver star —

And had he set the sail, or had the boat

Become a living creature clad with wings?

And o’er his head the Holy Vessel hung

Redder than any rose, a joy to me,

For now I knew the veil had been withdrawn.

Then in a moment when they blazed again

Opening, I saw the least of little stars

Down on the waste, and straight beyond the star

I saw the spiritual city and all her spires

And gateways in a glory like one pearl —

No larger, though the goal of all the saints —

Strike from the sea; and from the star there shot

A rose-red sparkle to the city, and there

Dwelt, and I knew it was the Holy Grail,

Which never eyes on earth again shall see.

Then fell the floods of heaven drowning the deep.

And how my feet recrost the deathful ridge

No memory in me lives; but that I touched

The chapel-doors at dawn I know; and thence

Taking my war-horse from the holy man,

Glad that no phantom vext me more, returned

To whence I came, the gate of Arthur’s wars.’

‘O brother,’ asked Ambrosius,—’for in sooth

These ancient books — and they would win thee — teem,

Only I find not there this Holy Grail,

With miracles and marvels like to these,

Not all unlike; which oftentime I read,

Who read but on my breviary with ease,

Till my head swims; and then go forth and pass

Down to the little thorpe that lies so close,

And almost plastered like a martin’s nest

To these old walls — and mingle with our folk;

And knowing every honest face of theirs

As well as ever shepherd knew his sheep,

And every homely secret in their hearts,

Delight myself with gossip and old wives,

And ills and aches, and teethings, lyings-in,

And mirthful sayings, children of the place,

That have no meaning half a league away:

Or lulling random squabbles when they rise,

Chafferings and chatterings at the market-cross,

Rejoice, small man, in this small world of mine,

Yea, even in their hens and in their eggs —

O brother, saving this Sir Galahad,

Came ye on none but phantoms in your quest,

No man, no woman?’

Then Sir Percivale:

‘All men, to one so bound by such a vow,

And women were as phantoms. O, my brother,

Why wilt thou shame me to confess to thee

How far I faltered from my quest and vow?

For after I had lain so many nights

A bedmate of the snail and eft and snake,

In grass and burdock, I was changed to wan

And meagre, and the vision had not come;

And then I chanced upon a goodly town

With one great dwelling in the middle of it;

Thither I made, and there was I disarmed

By maidens each as fair as any flower:

But when they led me into hall, behold,

The Princess of that castle was the one,

Brother, and that one only, who had ever

Made my heart leap; for when I moved of old

A slender page about her father’s hall,

And she a slender maiden, all my heart

Went after her with longing: yet we twain

Had never kissed a kiss, or vowed a vow.

And now I came upon her once again,

And one had wedded her, and he was dead,

And all his land and wealth and state were hers.

And while I tarried, every day she set

A banquet richer than the day before

By me; for all her longing and her will

Was toward me as of old; till one fair morn,

I walking to and fro beside a stream

That flashed across her orchard underneath

Her castle-walls, she stole upon my walk,

And calling me the greatest of all knights,

Embraced me, and so kissed me the first time,

And gave herself and all her wealth to me.

Then I remembered Arthur’s warning word,

That most of us would follow wandering fires,

And the Quest faded in my heart. Anon,

The heads of all her people drew to me,

With supplication both of knees and tongue:

“We have heard of thee: thou art our greatest knight,

Our Lady says it, and we well believe:

Wed thou our Lady, and rule over us,

And thou shalt be as Arthur in our land.”

O me, my brother! but one night my vow

Burnt me within, so that I rose and fled,

But wailed and wept, and hated mine own self,

And even the Holy Quest, and all but her;

Then after I was joined with Galahad

Cared not for her, nor anything upon earth.’

Then said the monk, ‘Poor men, when yule is cold,

Must be content to sit by little fires.

And this am I, so that ye care for me

Ever so little; yea, and blest be Heaven

That brought thee here to this poor house of ours

Where all the brethren are so hard, to warm

My cold heart with a friend: but O the pity

To find thine own first love once more — to hold,

Hold her a wealthy bride within thine arms,

Or all but hold, and then — cast her aside,

Foregoing all her sweetness, like a weed.

For we that want the warmth of double life,

We that are plagued with dreams of something sweet

Beyond all sweetness in a life so rich, —

Ah, blessed Lord, I speak too earthlywise,

Seeing I never strayed beyond the cell,

But live like an old badger in his earth,

With earth about him everywhere, despite

All fast and penance. Saw ye none beside,

None of your knights?’

‘Yea so,’ said Percivale:

‘One night my pathway swerving east, I saw

The pelican on the casque of our Sir Bors

All in the middle of the rising moon:

And toward him spurred, and hailed him, and he me,

And each made joy of either; then he asked,

“Where is he? hast thou seen him — Lancelot? — Once,”

Said good Sir Bors, “he dashed across me — mad,

And maddening what he rode: and when I cried,

‘Ridest thou then so hotly on a quest

So holy,’ Lancelot shouted, ‘Stay me not!

I have been the sluggard, and I ride apace,

For now there is a lion in the way.’

So vanished.”

‘Then Sir Bors had ridden on

Softly, and sorrowing for our Lancelot,

Because his former madness, once the talk

And scandal of our table, had returned;

For Lancelot’s kith and kin so worship him

That ill to him is ill to them; to Bors

Beyond the rest: he well had been content

Not to have seen, so Lancelot might have seen,

The Holy Cup of healing; and, indeed,

Being so clouded with his grief and love,

Small heart was his after the Holy Quest:

If God would send the vision, well: if not,

The Quest and he were in the hands of Heaven.

‘And then, with small adventure met, Sir Bors

Rode to the lonest tract of all the realm,

And found a people there among their crags,

Our race and blood, a remnant that were left

Paynim amid their circles, and the stones

They pitch up straight to heaven: and their wise men

Were strong in that old magic which can trace

The wandering of the stars, and scoffed at him

And this high Quest as at a simple thing:

Told him he followed — almost Arthur’s words —

A mocking fire: “what other fire than he,

Whereby the blood beats, and the blossom blows,

And the sea rolls, and all the world is warmed?”

And when his answer chafed them, the rough crowd,

Hearing he had a difference with their priests,

Seized him, and bound and plunged him into a cell

Of great piled stones; and lying bounden there

In darkness through innumerable hours

He heard the hollow-ringing heavens sweep

Over him till by miracle — what else? —

Heavy as it was, a great stone slipt and fell,

Such as no wind could move: and through the gap

Glimmered the streaming scud: then came a night

Still as the day was loud; and through the gap

The seven clear stars of Arthur’s Table Round —

For, brother, so one night, because they roll

Through such a round in heaven, we named the stars,

Rejoicing in ourselves and in our King —

And these, like bright eyes of familiar friends,

In on him shone: “And then to me, to me,”

Said good Sir Bors, “beyond all hopes of mine,

Who scarce had prayed or asked it for myself —

Across the seven clear stars — O grace to me —

In colour like the fingers of a hand

Before a burning taper, the sweet Grail

Glided and past, and close upon it pealed

A sharp quick thunder.” Afterwards, a maid,

Who kept our holy faith among her kin

In secret, entering, loosed and let him go.’

To whom the monk: ‘And I remember now

That pelican on the casque: Sir Bors it was

Who spake so low and sadly at our board;

And mighty reverent at our grace was he:

A square-set man and honest; and his eyes,

An out-door sign of all the warmth within,

Smiled with his lips — a smile beneath a cloud,

But heaven had meant it for a sunny one:

Ay, ay, Sir Bors, who else? But when ye reached

The city, found ye all your knights returned,

Or was there sooth in Arthur’s prophecy,

Tell me, and what said each, and what the King?’

Then answered Percivale: ‘And that can I,

Brother, and truly; since the living words

Of so great men as Lancelot and our King

Pass not from door to door and out again,

But sit within the house. O, when we reached

The city, our horses stumbling as they trode

On heaps of ruin, hornless unicorns,

Cracked basilisks, and splintered cockatrices,

And shattered talbots, which had left the stones

Raw, that they fell from, brought us to the hall.

‘And there sat Arthur on the dais-throne,

And those that had gone out upon the Quest,

Wasted and worn, and but a tithe of them,

And those that had not, stood before the King,

Who, when he saw me, rose, and bad me hail,

Saying, “A welfare in thine eye reproves

Our fear of some disastrous chance for thee

On hill, or plain, at sea, or flooding ford.

So fierce a gale made havoc here of late

Among the strange devices of our kings;

Yea, shook this newer, stronger hall of ours,

And from the statue Merlin moulded for us

Half-wrenched a golden wing; but now — the Quest,

This vision — hast thou seen the Holy Cup,

That Joseph brought of old to Glastonbury?”

‘So when I told him all thyself hast heard,

Ambrosius, and my fresh but fixt resolve

To pass away into the quiet life,

He answered not, but, sharply turning, asked

Of Gawain, “Gawain, was this Quest for thee?”

‘“Nay, lord,” said Gawain, “not for such as I.

Therefore I communed with a saintly man,

Who made me sure the Quest was not for me;

For I was much awearied of the Quest:

But found a silk pavilion in a field,

And merry maidens in it; and then this gale

Tore my pavilion from the tenting-pin,

And blew my merry maidens all about

With all discomfort; yea, and but for this,

My twelvemonth and a day were pleasant to me.”

‘He ceased; and Arthur turned to whom at first

He saw not, for Sir Bors, on entering, pushed

Athwart the throng to Lancelot, caught his hand,

Held it, and there, half-hidden by him, stood,

Until the King espied him, saying to him,

“Hail, Bors! if ever loyal man and true

Could see it, thou hast seen the Grail;” and Bors,

“Ask me not, for I may not speak of it:

I saw it;” and the tears were in his eyes.

‘Then there remained but Lancelot, for the rest

Spake but of sundry perils in the storm;

Perhaps, like him of Cana in Holy Writ,

Our Arthur kept his best until the last;

“Thou, too, my Lancelot,” asked the king, “my friend,

Our mightiest, hath this Quest availed for thee?”

‘“Our mightiest!” answered Lancelot, with a groan;

“O King!” — and when he paused, methought I spied

A dying fire of madness in his eyes —

“O King, my friend, if friend of thine I be,

Happier are those that welter in their sin,

Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime,

Slime of the ditch: but in me lived a sin

So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure,

Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung

Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower

And poisonous grew together, each as each,

Not to be plucked asunder; and when thy knights

Sware, I sware with them only in the hope

That could I touch or see the Holy Grail

They might be plucked asunder. Then I spake

To one most holy saint, who wept and said,

That save they could be plucked asunder, all

My quest were but in vain; to whom I vowed

That I would work according as he willed.

And forth I went, and while I yearned and strove

To tear the twain asunder in my heart,

My madness came upon me as of old,

And whipt me into waste fields far away;

There was I beaten down by little men,

Mean knights, to whom the moving of my sword

And shadow of my spear had been enow

To scare them from me once; and then I came

All in my folly to the naked shore,

Wide flats, where nothing but coarse grasses grew;

But such a blast, my King, began to blow,

So loud a blast along the shore and sea,

Ye could not hear the waters for the blast,

Though heapt in mounds and ridges all the sea

Drove like a cataract, and all the sand

Swept like a river, and the clouded heavens

Were shaken with the motion and the sound.

And blackening in the sea-foam swayed a boat,

Half-swallowed in it, anchored with a chain;

And in my madness to myself I said,

‘I will embark and I will lose myself,

And in the great sea wash away my sin.’

I burst the chain, I sprang into the boat.

Seven days I drove along the dreary deep,

And with me drove the moon and all the stars;

And the wind fell, and on the seventh night

I heard the shingle grinding in the surge,

And felt the boat shock earth, and looking up,

Behold, the enchanted towers of Carbonek,

A castle like a rock upon a rock,

With chasm-like portals open to the sea,

And steps that met the breaker! there was none

Stood near it but a lion on each side

That kept the entry, and the moon was full.

Then from the boat I leapt, and up the stairs.

There drew my sword. With sudden-flaring manes

Those two great beasts rose upright like a man,

Each gript a shoulder, and I stood between;

And, when I would have smitten them, heard a voice,

‘Doubt not, go forward; if thou doubt, the beasts

Will tear thee piecemeal.’ Then with violence

The sword was dashed from out my hand, and fell.

And up into the sounding hall I past;

But nothing in the sounding hall I saw,

No bench nor table, painting on the wall

Or shield of knight; only the rounded moon

Through the tall oriel on the rolling sea.

But always in the quiet house I heard,

Clear as a lark, high o’er me as a lark,

A sweet voice singing in the topmost tower

To the eastward: up I climbed a thousand steps

With pain: as in a dream I seemed to climb

For ever: at the last I reached a door,

A light was in the crannies, and I heard,

‘Glory and joy and honour to our Lord

And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail.’

Then in my madness I essayed the door;

It gave; and through a stormy glare, a heat

As from a seventimes-heated furnace, I,

Blasted and burnt, and blinded as I was,

With such a fierceness that I swooned away —

O, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail,

All palled in crimson samite, and around

Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes.

And but for all my madness and my sin,

And then my swooning, I had sworn I saw

That which I saw; but what I saw was veiled

And covered; and this Quest was not for me.”

‘So speaking, and here ceasing, Lancelot left

The hall long silent, till Sir Gawain — nay,

Brother, I need not tell thee foolish words, —

A reckless and irreverent knight was he,

Now boldened by the silence of his King, —

Well, I will tell thee: “O King, my liege,” he said,

“Hath Gawain failed in any quest of thine?

When have I stinted stroke in foughten field?

But as for thine, my good friend Percivale,

Thy holy nun and thou have driven men mad,

Yea, made our mightiest madder than our least.

But by mine eyes and by mine ears I swear,

I will be deafer than the blue-eyed cat,

And thrice as blind as any noonday owl,

To holy virgins in their ecstasies,

Henceforward.”

‘“Deafer,” said the blameless King,

“Gawain, and blinder unto holy things

Hope not to make thyself by idle vows,

Being too blind to have desire to see.

But if indeed there came a sign from heaven,

Blessed are Bors, Lancelot and Percivale,

For these have seen according to their sight.

For every fiery prophet in old times,

And all the sacred madness of the bard,

When God made music through them, could but speak

His music by the framework and the chord;

And as ye saw it ye have spoken truth.

‘“Nay — but thou errest, Lancelot: never yet

Could all of true and noble in knight and man

Twine round one sin, whatever it might be,

With such a closeness, but apart there grew,

Save that he were the swine thou spakest of,

Some root of knighthood and pure nobleness;

Whereto see thou, that it may bear its flower.

‘“And spake I not too truly, O my knights?

Was I too dark a prophet when I said

To those who went upon the Holy Quest,

That most of them would follow wandering fires,

Lost in the quagmire? — lost to me and gone,

And left me gazing at a barren board,

And a lean Order — scarce returned a tithe —

And out of those to whom the vision came

My greatest hardly will believe he saw;

Another hath beheld it afar off,

And leaving human wrongs to right themselves,

Cares but to pass into the silent life.

And one hath had the vision face to face,

And now his chair desires him here in vain,

However they may crown him otherwhere.

‘“And some among you held, that if the King

Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow:

Not easily, seeing that the King must guard

That which he rules, and is but as the hind

To whom a space of land is given to plow.

Who may not wander from the allotted field

Before his work be done; but, being done,

Let visions of the night or of the day

Come, as they will; and many a time they come,

Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,

This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,

This air that smites his forehead is not air

But vision — yea, his very hand and foot —

In moments when he feels he cannot die,

And knows himself no vision to himself,

Nor the high God a vision, nor that One

Who rose again: ye have seen what ye have seen.”

‘So spake the King: I knew not all he meant.’

Pelleas and Ettarre

1869

KING ARTHUR made new knights to fill the gap

Left by the Holy Quest; and as he sat

In hall at old Caerleon, the high doors

Were softly sundered, and through these a youth,

Pelleas, and the sweet smell of the fields

Past, and the sunshine came along with him.

‘Make me thy knight, because I know, Sir King,

All that belongs to knighthood, and I love.’

Such was his cry: for having heard the King

Had let proclaim a tournament — the prize

A golden circlet and a knightly sword,

Full fain had Pelleas for his lady won

The golden circlet, for himself the sword:

And there were those who knew him near the King,

And promised for him: and Arthur made him knight.

And this new knight, Sir Pelleas of the isles —

But lately come to his inheritance,

And lord of many a barren isle was he —

Riding at noon, a day or twain before,

Across the forest called of Dean, to find

Caerleon and the King, had felt the sun

Beat like a strong knight on his helm, and reeled

Almost to falling from his horse; but saw

Near him a mound of even-sloping side,

Whereon a hundred stately beeches grew,

And here and there great hollies under them;

But for a mile all round was open space,

And fern and heath: and slowly Pelleas drew

To that dim day, then binding his good horse

To a tree, cast himself down; and as he lay

At random looking over the brown earth

Through that green-glooming twilight of the grove,

It seemed to Pelleas that the fern without

Burnt as a living fire of emeralds,

So that his eyes were dazzled looking at it.

Then o’er it crost the dimness of a cloud

Floating, and once the shadow of a bird

Flying, and then a fawn; and his eyes closed.

And since he loved all maidens, but no maid

In special, half-awake he whispered, ‘Where?

O where? I love thee, though I know thee not.

For fair thou art and pure as Guinevere,

And I will make thee with my spear and sword

As famous — O my Queen, my Guinevere,

For I will be thine Arthur when we meet.’

Suddenly wakened with a sound of talk

And laughter at the limit of the wood,

And glancing through the hoary boles, he saw,

Strange as to some old prophet might have seemed

A vision hovering on a sea of fire,

Damsels in divers colours like the cloud

Of sunset and sunrise, and all of them

On horses, and the horses richly trapt

Breast-high in that bright line of bracken stood:

And all the damsels talked confusedly,

And one was pointing this way, and one that,

Because the way was lost.

And Pelleas rose,

And loosed his horse, and led him to the light.

There she that seemed the chief among them said,

‘In happy time behold our pilot-star!

Youth, we are damsels-errant, and we ride,

Armed as ye see, to tilt against the knights

There at Caerleon, but have lost our way:

To right? to left? straight forward? back again?

Which? tell us quickly.’

Pelleas gazing thought,

‘Is Guinevere herself so beautiful?’

For large her violet eyes looked, and her bloom

A rosy dawn kindled in stainless heavens,

And round her limbs, mature in womanhood;

And slender was her hand and small her shape;

And but for those large eyes, the haunts of scorn,

She might have seemed a toy to trifle with,

And pass and care no more. But while he gazed

The beauty of her flesh abashed the boy,

As though it were the beauty of her soul:

For as the base man, judging of the good,

Puts his own baseness in him by default

Of will and nature, so did Pelleas lend

All the young beauty of his own soul to hers,

Believing her; and when she spake to him,

Stammered, and could not make her a reply.

For out of the waste islands had he come,

Where saving his own sisters he had known

Scarce any but the women of his isles,

Rough wives, that laughed and screamed against the gulls,

Makers of nets, and living from the sea.

Then with a slow smile turned the lady round

And looked upon her people; and as when

A stone is flung into some sleeping tarn,

The circle widens till it lip the marge,

Spread the slow smile through all her company.

Three knights were thereamong; and they too smiled,

Scorning him; for the lady was Ettarre,

And she was a great lady in her land.

Again she said, ‘O wild and of the woods,

Knowest thou not the fashion of our speech?

Or have the Heavens but given thee a fair face,

Lacking a tongue?’

‘O damsel,’ answered he,

‘I woke from dreams; and coming out of gloom

Was dazzled by the sudden light, and crave

Pardon: but will ye to Caerleon? I

Go likewise: shall I lead you to the King?’

‘Lead then,’ she said; and through the woods they went.

And while they rode, the meaning in his eyes,

His tenderness of manner, and chaste awe,

His broken utterances and bashfulness,

Were all a burthen to her, and in her heart

She muttered, ‘I have lighted on a fool,

Raw, yet so stale!’ But since her mind was bent

On hearing, after trumpet blown, her name

And title, ‘Queen of Beauty,’ in the lists

Cried — and beholding him so strong, she thought

That peradventure he will fight for me,

And win the circlet: therefore flattered him,

Being so gracious, that he wellnigh deemed

His wish by hers was echoed; and her knights

And all her damsels too were gracious to him,

For she was a great lady.

And when they reached

Caerleon, ere they past to lodging, she,

Taking his hand, ‘O the strong hand,’ she said,

‘See! look at mine! but wilt thou fight for me,

And win me this fine circlet, Pelleas,

That I may love thee?’

Then his helpless heart

Leapt, and he cried, ‘Ay! wilt thou if I win?’

‘Ay, that will I,’ she answered, and she laughed,

And straitly nipt the hand, and flung it from her;

Then glanced askew at those three knights of hers,

Till all her ladies laughed along with her.

‘O happy world,’ thought Pelleas, ‘all, meseems,

Are happy; I the happiest of them all.’

Nor slept that night for pleasure in his blood,

And green wood-ways, and eyes among the leaves;

Then being on the morrow knighted, sware

To love one only. And as he came away,

The men who met him rounded on their heels

And wondered after him, because his face

Shone like the countenance of a priest of old

Against the flame about a sacrifice

Kindled by fire from heaven: so glad was he.

Then Arthur made vast banquets, and strange knights

From the four winds came in: and each one sat,

Though served with choice from air, land, stream, and sea,

Oft in mid-banquet measuring with his eyes

His neighbour’s make and might: and Pelleas looked

Noble among the noble, for he dreamed

His lady loved him, and he knew himself

Loved of the King: and him his new-made knight

Worshipt, whose lightest whisper moved him more

Than all the ranged reasons of the world.

Then blushed and brake the morning of the jousts,

And this was called ‘The Tournament of Youth:’

For Arthur, loving his young knight, withheld

His older and his mightier from the lists,

That Pelleas might obtain his lady’s love,

According to her promise, and remain

Lord of the tourney. And Arthur had the jousts

Down in the flat field by the shore of Usk

Holden: the gilded parapets were crowned

With faces, and the great tower filled with eyes

Up to the summit, and the trumpets blew.

There all day long Sir Pelleas kept the field

With honour: so by that strong hand of his

The sword and golden circlet were achieved.

Then rang the shout his lady loved: the heat

Of pride and glory fired her face; her eye

Sparkled; she caught the circlet from his lance,

And there before the people crowned herself:

So for the last time she was gracious to him.

Then at Caerleon for a space — her look

Bright for all others, cloudier on her knight —

Lingered Ettarre: and seeing Pelleas droop,

Said Guinevere, ‘We marvel at thee much,

O damsel, wearing this unsunny face

To him who won thee glory!’ And she said,

‘Had ye not held your Lancelot in your bower,

My Queen, he had not won.’ Whereat the Queen,

As one whose foot is bitten by an ant,

Glanced down upon her, turned and went her way.

But after, when her damsels, and herself,

And those three knights all set their faces home,

Sir Pelleas followed. She that saw him cried,

‘Damsels — and yet I should be shamed to say it —

I cannot bide Sir Baby. Keep him back

Among yourselves. Would rather that we had

Some rough old knight who knew the worldly way,

Albeit grizzlier than a bear, to ride

And jest with: take him to you, keep him off,

And pamper him with papmeat, if ye will,

Old milky fables of the wolf and sheep,

Such as the wholesome mothers tell their boys.

Nay, should ye try him with a merry one

To find his mettle, good: and if he fly us,

Small matter! let him.’ This her damsels heard,

And mindful of her small and cruel hand,

They, closing round him through the journey home,

Acted her hest, and always from her side

Restrained him with all manner of device,

So that he could not come to speech with her.

And when she gained her castle, upsprang the bridge,

Down rang the grate of iron through the groove,

And he was left alone in open field.

‘These be the ways of ladies,’ Pelleas thought,

‘To those who love them, trials of our faith.

Yea, let her prove me to the uttermost,

For loyal to the uttermost am I.’

So made his moan; and darkness falling, sought

A priory not far off, there lodged, but rose

With morning every day, and, moist or dry,

Full-armed upon his charger all day long

Sat by the walls, and no one opened to him.

And this persistence turned her scorn to wrath.

Then calling her three knights, she charged them, ‘Out!

And drive him from the walls.’ And out they came

But Pelleas overthrew them as they dashed

Against him one by one; and these returned,

But still he kept his watch beneath the wall.

Thereon her wrath became a hate; and once,

A week beyond, while walking on the walls

With her three knights, she pointed downward, ‘Look,

He haunts me — I cannot breathe — besieges me;

Down! strike him! put my hate into your strokes,

And drive him from my walls.’ And down they went,

And Pelleas overthrew them one by one;

And from the tower above him cried Ettarre,

‘Bind him, and bring him in.’

He heard her voice;

Then let the strong hand, which had overthrown

Her minion-knights, by those he overthrew

Be bounden straight, and so they brought him in.

Then when he came before Ettarre, the sight

Of her rich beauty made him at one glance

More bondsman in his heart than in his bonds.

Yet with good cheer he spake, ‘Behold me, Lady,

A prisoner, and the vassal of thy will;

And if thou keep me in thy donjon here,

Content am I so that I see thy face

But once a day: for I have sworn my vows,

And thou hast given thy promise, and I know

That all these pains are trials of my faith,

And that thyself, when thou hast seen me strained

And sifted to the utmost, wilt at length

Yield me thy love and know me for thy knight.’

Then she began to rail so bitterly,

With all her damsels, he was stricken mute;

But when she mocked his vows and the great King,

Lighted on words: ‘For pity of thine own self,

Peace, Lady, peace: is he not thine and mine?’

‘Thou fool,’ she said, ‘I never heard his voice

But longed to break away. Unbind him now,

And thrust him out of doors; for save he be

Fool to the midmost marrow of his bones,

He will return no more.’ And those, her three,

Laughed, and unbound, and thrust him from the gate.

And after this, a week beyond, again

She called them, saying, ‘There he watches yet,

There like a dog before his master’s door!

Kicked, he returns: do ye not hate him, ye?

Ye know yourselves: how can ye bide at peace,

Affronted with his fulsome innocence?

Are ye but creatures of the board and bed,

No men to strike? Fall on him all at once,

And if ye slay him I reck not: if ye fail,

Give ye the slave mine order to be bound,

Bind him as heretofore, and bring him in:

It may be ye shall slay him in his bonds.’

She spake; and at her will they couched their spears,

Three against one: and Gawain passing by,

Bound upon solitary adventure, saw

Low down beneath the shadow of those towers

A villainy, three to one: and through his heart

The fire of honour and all noble deeds

Flashed, and he called, ‘I strike upon thy side —

The caitiffs!’ ‘Nay,’ said Pelleas, ‘but forbear;

He needs no aid who doth his lady’s will.’

So Gawain, looking at the villainy done,

Forbore, but in his heat and eagerness

Trembled and quivered, as the dog, withheld

A moment from the vermin that he sees

Before him, shivers, ere he springs and kills.

And Pelleas overthrew them, one to three;

And they rose up, and bound, and brought him in.

Then first her anger, leaving Pelleas, burned

Full on her knights in many an evil name

Of craven, weakling, and thrice-beaten hound:

‘Yet, take him, ye that scarce are fit to touch,

Far less to bind, your victor, and thrust him out,

And let who will release him from his bonds.

And if he comes again’ — there she brake short;

And Pelleas answered, ‘Lady, for indeed

I loved you and I deemed you beautiful,

I cannot brook to see your beauty marred

Through evil spite: and if ye love me not,

I cannot bear to dream you so forsworn:

I had liefer ye were worthy of my love,

Than to be loved again of you — farewell;

And though ye kill my hope, not yet my love,

Vex not yourself: ye will not see me more.’

While thus he spake, she gazed upon the man

Of princely bearing, though in bonds, and thought,

‘Why have I pushed him from me? this man loves,

If love there be: yet him I loved not. Why?

I deemed him fool? yea, so? or that in him

A something — was it nobler than myself?

Seemed my reproach? He is not of my kind.

He could not love me, did he know me well.

Nay, let him go — and quickly.’ And her knights

Laughed not, but thrust him bounden out of door.

Forth sprang Gawain, and loosed him from his bonds,

And flung them o’er the walls; and afterward,

Shaking his hands, as from a lazar’s rag,

‘Faith of my body,’ he said, ‘and art thou not —

Yea thou art he, whom late our Arthur made

Knight of his table; yea and he that won

The circlet? wherefore hast thou so defamed

Thy brotherhood in me and all the rest,

As let these caitiffs on thee work their will?’

And Pelleas answered, ‘O, their wills are hers

For whom I won the circlet; and mine, hers,

Thus to be bounden, so to see her face,

Marred though it be with spite and mockery now,

Other than when I found her in the woods;

And though she hath me bounden but in spite,

And all to flout me, when they bring me in,

Let me be bounden, I shall see her face;

Else must I die through mine unhappiness.’

And Gawain answered kindly though in scorn,

‘Why, let my lady bind me if she will,

And let my lady beat me if she will:

But an she send her delegate to thrall

These fighting hands of mine — Christ kill me then

But I will slice him handless by the wrist,

And let my lady sear the stump for him,

Howl as he may. But hold me for your friend:

Come, ye know nothing: here I pledge my troth,

Yea, by the honour of the Table Round,

I will be leal to thee and work thy work,

And tame thy jailing princess to thine hand.

Lend me thine horse and arms, and I will say

That I have slain thee. She will let me in

To hear the manner of thy fight and fall;

Then, when I come within her counsels, then

From prime to vespers will I chant thy praise

As prowest knight and truest lover, more

Than any have sung thee living, till she long

To have thee back in lusty life again,

Not to be bound, save by white bonds and warm,

Dearer than freedom. Wherefore now thy horse

And armour: let me go: be comforted:

Give me three days to melt her fancy, and hope

The third night hence will bring thee news of gold.’

Then Pelleas lent his horse and all his arms,

Saving the goodly sword, his prize, and took

Gawain’s, and said, ‘Betray me not, but help —

Art thou not he whom men call light-of-love?’

‘Ay,’ said Gawain, ‘for women be so light.’

Then bounded forward to the castle walls,

And raised a bugle hanging from his neck,

And winded it, and that so musically

That all the old echoes hidden in the wall

Rang out like hollow woods at hunting-tide.

Up ran a score of damsels to the tower;

‘Avaunt,’ they cried, ‘our lady loves thee not.’

But Gawain lifting up his vizor said,

‘Gawain am I, Gawain of Arthur’s court,

And I have slain this Pelleas whom ye hate:

Behold his horse and armour. Open gates,

And I will make you merry.’

And down they ran,

Her damsels, crying to their lady, ‘Lo!

Pelleas is dead — he told us — he that hath

His horse and armour: will ye let him in?

He slew him! Gawain, Gawain of the court,

Sir Gawain — there he waits below the wall,

Blowing his bugle as who should say him nay.’

And so, leave given, straight on through open door

Rode Gawain, whom she greeted courteously.

‘Dead, is it so?’ she asked. ‘Ay, ay,’ said he,

‘And oft in dying cried upon your name.’

‘Pity on him,’ she answered, ‘a good knight,

But never let me bide one hour at peace.’

‘Ay,’ thought Gawain, ‘and you be fair enow:

But I to your dead man have given my troth,

That whom ye loathe, him will I make you love.’

So those three days, aimless about the land,

Lost in a doubt, Pelleas wandering

Waited, until the third night brought a moon

With promise of large light on woods and ways.

Hot was the night and silent; but a sound

Of Gawain ever coming, and this lay —

Which Pelleas had heard sung before the Queen,

And seen her sadden listening — vext his heart,

And marred his rest—’A worm within the rose.’

‘A rose, but one, none other rose had I,

A rose, one rose, and this was wondrous fair,

One rose, a rose that gladdened earth and sky,

One rose, my rose, that sweetened all mine air —

I cared not for the thorns; the thorns were there.

‘One rose, a rose to gather by and by,

One rose, a rose, to gather and to wear,

No rose but one — what other rose had I?

One rose, my rose; a rose that will not die, —

He dies who loves it, — if the worm be there.’

This tender rhyme, and evermore the doubt,

‘Why lingers Gawain with his golden news?’

So shook him that he could not rest, but rode

Ere midnight to her walls, and bound his horse

Hard by the gates. Wide open were the gates,

And no watch kept; and in through these he past,

And heard but his own steps, and his own heart

Beating, for nothing moved but his own self,

And his own shadow. Then he crost the court,

And spied not any light in hall or bower,

But saw the postern portal also wide

Yawning; and up a slope of garden, all

Of roses white and red, and brambles mixt

And overgrowing them, went on, and found,

Here too, all hushed below the mellow moon,

Save that one rivulet from a tiny cave

Came lightening downward, and so spilt itself

Among the roses, and was lost again.

Then was he ware of three pavilions reared

Above the bushes, gilden-peakt: in one,

Red after revel, droned her lurdane knights

Slumbering, and their three squires across their feet:

In one, their malice on the placid lip

Frozen by sweet sleep, four of her damsels lay:

And in the third, the circlet of the jousts

Bound on her brow, were Gawain and Ettarre.

Back, as a hand that pushes through the leaf

To find a nest and feels a snake, he drew:

Back, as a coward slinks from what he fears

To cope with, or a traitor proven, or hound

Beaten, did Pelleas in an utter shame

Creep with his shadow through the court again,

Fingering at his sword-handle until he stood

There on the castle-bridge once more, and thought,

‘I will go back, and slay them where they lie.’

And so went back, and seeing them yet in sleep

Said, ‘Ye, that so dishallow the holy sleep,

Your sleep is death,’ and drew the sword, and thought,

‘What! slay a sleeping knight? the King hath bound

And sworn me to this brotherhood;’ again,

‘Alas that ever a knight should be so false.’

Then turned, and so returned, and groaning laid

The naked sword athwart their naked throats,

There left it, and them sleeping; and she lay,

The circlet of her tourney round her brows,

And the sword of the tourney across her throat.

And forth he past, and mounting on his horse

Stared at her towers that, larger than themselves

In their own darkness, thronged into the moon.

Then crushed the saddle with his thighs, and clenched

His hands, and maddened with himself and moaned:

‘Would they have risen against me in their blood

At the last day? I might have answered them

Even before high God. O towers so strong,

Huge, solid, would that even while I gaze

The crack of earthquake shivering to your base

Split you, and Hell burst up your harlot roofs

Bellowing, and charred you through and through within,

Black as the harlot’s heart — hollow as a skull!

Let the fierce east scream through your eyelet-holes,

And whirl the dust of harlots round and round

In dung and nettles! hiss, snake — I saw him there —

Let the fox bark, let the wolf yell. Who yells

Here in the still sweet summer night, but I —

I, the poor Pelleas whom she called her fool?

Fool, beast — he, she, or I? myself most fool;

Beast too, as lacking human wit — disgraced,

Dishonoured all for trial of true love —

Love? — we be all alike: only the King

Hath made us fools and liars. O noble vows!

O great and sane and simple race of brutes

That own no lust because they have no law!

For why should I have loved her to my shame?

I loathe her, as I loved her to my shame.

I never loved her, I but lusted for her —

Away—’

He dashed the rowel into his horse,

And bounded forth and vanished through the night.

Then she, that felt the cold touch on her throat,

Awaking knew the sword, and turned herself

To Gawain: ‘Liar, for thou hast not slain

This Pelleas! here he stood, and might have slain

Me and thyself.’ And he that tells the tale

Says that her ever-veering fancy turned

To Pelleas, as the one true knight on earth,

And only lover; and through her love her life

Wasted and pined, desiring him in vain.

But he by wild and way, for half the night,

And over hard and soft, striking the sod

From out the soft, the spark from off the hard,

Rode till the star above the wakening sun,

Beside that tower where Percivale was cowled,

Glanced from the rosy forehead of the dawn.

For so the words were flashed into his heart

He knew not whence or wherefore: ‘O sweet star,

Pure on the virgin forehead of the dawn!’

And there he would have wept, but felt his eyes

Harder and drier than a fountain bed

In summer: thither came the village girls

And lingered talking, and they come no more

Till the sweet heavens have filled it from the heights

Again with living waters in the change

Of seasons: hard his eyes; harder his heart

Seemed; but so weary were his limbs, that he,

Gasping, ‘Of Arthur’s hall am I, but here,

Here let me rest and die,’ cast himself down,

And gulfed his griefs in inmost sleep; so lay,

Till shaken by a dream, that Gawain fired

The hall of Merlin, and the morning star

Reeled in the smoke, brake into flame, and fell.

He woke, and being ware of some one nigh,

Sent hands upon him, as to tear him, crying,

‘False! and I held thee pure as Guinevere.’

But Percivale stood near him and replied,

‘Am I but false as Guinevere is pure?

Or art thou mazed with dreams? or being one

Of our free-spoken Table hast not heard

That Lancelot’ — there he checked himself and paused.

Then fared it with Sir Pelleas as with one

Who gets a wound in battle, and the sword

That made it plunges through the wound again,

And pricks it deeper: and he shrank and wailed,

‘Is the Queen false?’ and Percivale was mute.

‘Have any of our Round Table held their vows?’

And Percivale made answer not a word.

‘Is the King true?’ ‘The King!’ said Percivale.

‘Why then let men couple at once with wolves.

What! art thou mad?’

But Pelleas, leaping up,

Ran through the doors and vaulted on his horse

And fled: small pity upon his horse had he,

Or on himself, or any, and when he met

A cripple, one that held a hand for alms —

Hunched as he was, and like an old dwarf-elm

That turns its back upon the salt blast, the boy

Paused not, but overrode him, shouting, ‘False,

And false with Gawain!’ and so left him bruised

And battered, and fled on, and hill and wood

Went ever streaming by him till the gloom,

That follows on the turning of the world,

Darkened the common path: he twitched the reins,

And made his beast that better knew it, swerve

Now off it and now on; but when he saw

High up in heaven the hall that Merlin built,

Blackening against the dead-green stripes of even,

‘Black nest of rats,’ he groaned, ‘ye build too high.’

Not long thereafter from the city gates

Issued Sir Lancelot riding airily,

Warm with a gracious parting from the Queen,

Peace at his heart, and gazing at a star

And marvelling what it was: on whom the boy,

Across the silent seeded meadow-grass

Borne, clashed: and Lancelot, saying, ‘What name hast thou

That ridest here so blindly and so hard?’

‘No name, no name,’ he shouted, ‘a scourge am I

To lash the treasons of the Table Round.’

‘Yea, but thy name?’ ‘I have many names,’ he cried:

‘I am wrath and shame and hate and evil fame,

And like a poisonous wind I pass to blast

And blaze the crime of Lancelot and the Queen.’

‘First over me,’ said Lancelot, ‘shalt thou pass.’

‘Fight therefore,’ yelled the youth, and either knight

Drew back a space, and when they closed, at once

The weary steed of Pelleas floundering flung

His rider, who called out from the dark field,

‘Thou art as false as Hell: slay me: I have no sword.’

Then Lancelot, ‘Yea, between thy lips — and sharp;

But here I will disedge it by thy death.’

‘Slay then,’ he shrieked, ‘my will is to be slain,’

And Lancelot, with his heel upon the fallen,

Rolling his eyes, a moment stood, then spake:

‘Rise, weakling; I am Lancelot; say thy say.’

And Lancelot slowly rode his warhorse back

To Camelot, and Sir Pelleas in brief while

Caught his unbroken limbs from the dark field,

And followed to the city. It chanced that both

Brake into hall together, worn and pale.

There with her knights and dames was Guinevere.

Full wonderingly she gazed on Lancelot

So soon returned, and then on Pelleas, him

Who had not greeted her, but cast himself

Down on a bench, hard-breathing. ‘Have ye fought?’

She asked of Lancelot. ‘Ay, my Queen,’ he said.

‘And hast thou overthrown him?’ ‘Ay, my Queen.’

Then she, turning to Pelleas, ‘O young knight,

Hath the great heart of knighthood in thee failed

So far thou canst not bide, unfrowardly,

A fall from him?’ Then, for he answered not,

‘Or hast thou other griefs? If I, the Queen,

May help them, loose thy tongue, and let me know.’

But Pelleas lifted up an eye so fierce

She quailed; and he, hissing ‘I have no sword,’

Sprang from the door into the dark. The Queen

Looked hard upon her lover, he on her;

And each foresaw the dolorous day to be:

And all talk died, as in a grove all song

Beneath the shadow of some bird of prey;

Then a long silence came upon the hall,

And Modred thought, ‘The time is hard at hand.’

The Last Tournament

1871

DAGONET, the fool, whom Gawain in his mood

Had made mock-knight of Arthur’s Table Round,

At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods,

Danced like a withered leaf before the hall.

And toward him from the hall, with harp in hand,

And from the crown thereof a carcanet

Of ruby swaying to and fro, the prize

Of Tristram in the jousts of yesterday,

Came Tristram, saying, ‘Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?’

For Arthur and Sir Lancelot riding once

Far down beneath a winding wall of rock

Heard a child wail. A stump of oak half-dead,

From roots like some black coil of carven snakes,

Clutched at the crag, and started through mid air

Bearing an eagle’s nest: and through the tree

Rushed ever a rainy wind, and through the wind

Pierced ever a child’s cry: and crag and tree

Scaling, Sir Lancelot from the perilous nest,

This ruby necklace thrice around her neck,

And all unscarred from beak or talon, brought

A maiden babe; which Arthur pitying took,

Then gave it to his Queen to rear: the Queen

But coldly acquiescing, in her white arms

Received, and after loved it tenderly,

And named it Nestling; so forgot herself

A moment, and her cares; till that young life

Being smitten in mid heaven with mortal cold

Past from her; and in time the carcanet

Vext her with plaintive memories of the child:

So she, delivering it to Arthur, said,

‘Take thou the jewels of this dead innocence,

And make them, an thou wilt, a tourney-prize.’

To whom the King, ‘Peace to thine eagle-borne

Dead nestling, and this honour after death,

Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse

Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone

Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,

And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear.’

‘Would rather you had let them fall,’ she cried,

‘Plunge and be lost — ill-fated as they were,

A bitterness to me! — ye look amazed,

Not knowing they were lost as soon as given —

Slid from my hands, when I was leaning out

Above the river — that unhappy child

Past in her barge: but rosier luck will go

With these rich jewels, seeing that they came

Not from the skeleton of a brother-slayer,

But the sweet body of a maiden babe.

Perchance — who knows? — the purest of thy knights

May win them for the purest of my maids.’

She ended, and the cry of a great jousts

With trumpet-blowings ran on all the ways

From Camelot in among the faded fields

To furthest towers; and everywhere the knights

Armed for a day of glory before the King.

But on the hither side of that loud morn

Into the hall staggered, his visage ribbed

From ear to ear with dogwhip-weals, his nose

Bridge-broken, one eye out, and one hand off,

And one with shattered fingers dangling lame,

A churl, to whom indignantly the King,

‘My churl, for whom Christ died, what evil beast

Hath drawn his claws athwart thy face? or fiend?

Man was it who marred heaven’s image in thee thus?’

Then, sputtering through the hedge of splintered teeth,

Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt stump

Pitch-blackened sawing the air, said the maimed churl,

‘He took them and he drave them to his tower —

Some hold he was a table-knight of thine —

A hundred goodly ones — the Red Knight, he —

Lord, I was tending swine, and the Red Knight

Brake in upon me and drave them to his tower;

And when I called upon thy name as one

That doest right by gentle and by churl,

Maimed me and mauled, and would outright have slain,

Save that he sware me to a message, saying,

“Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I

Have founded my Round Table in the North,

And whatsoever his own knights have sworn

My knights have sworn the counter to it — and say

My tower is full of harlots, like his court,

But mine are worthier, seeing they profess

To be none other than themselves — and say

My knights are all adulterers like his own,

But mine are truer, seeing they profess

To be none other; and say his hour is come,

The heathen are upon him, his long lance

Broken, and his Excalibur a straw.”’

Then Arthur turned to Kay the seneschal,

‘Take thou my churl, and tend him curiously

Like a king’s heir, till all his hurts be whole.

The heathen — but that ever-climbing wave,

Hurled back again so often in empty foam,

Hath lain for years at rest — and renegades,

Thieves, bandits, leavings of confusion, whom

The wholesome realm is purged of otherwhere,

Friends, through your manhood and your fealty, — now

Make their last head like Satan in the North.

My younger knights, new-made, in whom your flower

Waits to be solid fruit of golden deeds,

Move with me toward their quelling, which achieved,

The loneliest ways are safe from shore to shore.

But thou, Sir Lancelot, sitting in my place

Enchaired tomorrow, arbitrate the field;

For wherefore shouldst thou care to mingle with it,

Only to yield my Queen her own again?

Speak, Lancelot, thou art silent: is it well?’

Thereto Sir Lancelot answered, ‘It is well:

Yet better if the King abide, and leave

The leading of his younger knights to me.

Else, for the King has willed it, it is well.’

Then Arthur rose and Lancelot followed him,

And while they stood without the doors, the King

Turned to him saying, ‘Is it then so well?

Or mine the blame that oft I seem as he

Of whom was written, “A sound is in his ears”?

The foot that loiters, bidden go, — the glance

That only seems half-loyal to command, —

A manner somewhat fallen from reverence —

Or have I dreamed the bearing of our knights

Tells of a manhood ever less and lower?

Or whence the fear lest this my realm, upreared,

By noble deeds at one with noble vows,

From flat confusion and brute violences,

Reel back into the beast, and be no more?’

He spoke, and taking all his younger knights,

Down the slope city rode, and sharply turned

North by the gate. In her high bower the Queen,

Working a tapestry, lifted up her head,

Watched her lord pass, and knew not that she sighed.

Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme

Of bygone Merlin, ‘Where is he who knows?

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.’

But when the morning of a tournament,

By these in earnest those in mockery called

The Tournament of the Dead Innocence,

Brake with a wet wind blowing, Lancelot,

Round whose sick head all night, like birds of prey,

The words of Arthur flying shrieked, arose,

And down a streetway hung with folds of pure

White samite, and by fountains running wine,

Where children sat in white with cups of gold,

Moved to the lists, and there, with slow sad steps

Ascending, filled his double-dragoned chair.

He glanced and saw the stately galleries,

Dame, damsel, each through worship of their Queen

White-robed in honour of the stainless child,

And some with scattered jewels, like a bank

Of maiden snow mingled with sparks of fire.

He looked but once, and vailed his eyes again.

The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream

To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll

Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began:

And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf

And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume

Went down it. Sighing weariedly, as one

Who sits and gazes on a faded fire,

When all the goodlier guests are past away,

Sat their great umpire, looking o’er the lists.

He saw the laws that ruled the tournament

Broken, but spake not; once, a knight cast down

Before his throne of arbitration cursed

The dead babe and the follies of the King;

And once the laces of a helmet cracked,

And showed him, like a vermin in its hole,

Modred, a narrow face: anon he heard

The voice that billowed round the barriers roar

An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight,

But newly-entered, taller than the rest,

And armoured all in forest green, whereon

There tript a hundred tiny silver deer,

And wearing but a holly-spray for crest,

With ever-scattering berries, and on shield

A spear, a harp, a bugle — Tristram — late

From overseas in Brittany returned,

And marriage with a princess of that realm,

Isolt the White — Sir Tristram of the Woods —

Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain

His own against him, and now yearned to shake

The burthen off his heart in one full shock

With Tristram even to death: his strong hands gript

And dinted the gilt dragons right and left,

Until he groaned for wrath — so many of those,

That ware their ladies’ colours on the casque,

Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds,

And there with gibes and flickering mockeries

Stood, while he muttered, ‘Craven crests! O shame!

What faith have these in whom they sware to love?

The glory of our Round Table is no more.’

So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems,

Not speaking other word than ‘Hast thou won?

Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand

Wherewith thou takest this, is red!’ to whom

Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot’s languorous mood,

Made answer, ‘Ay, but wherefore toss me this

Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound?

Lest be thy fair Queen’s fantasy. Strength of heart

And might of limb, but mainly use and skill,

Are winners in this pastime of our King.

My hand — belike the lance hath dript upon it —

No blood of mine, I trow; but O chief knight,

Right arm of Arthur in the battlefield,

Great brother, thou nor I have made the world;

Be happy in thy fair Queen as I in mine.’

And Tristram round the gallery made his horse

Caracole; then bowed his homage, bluntly saying,

‘Fair damsels, each to him who worships each

Sole Queen of Beauty and of love, behold

This day my Queen of Beauty is not here.’

And most of these were mute, some angered, one

Murmuring, ‘All courtesy is dead,’ and one,

‘The glory of our Round Table is no more.’

Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung,

And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day

Went glooming down in wet and weariness:

But under her black brows a swarthy one

Laughed shrilly, crying, ‘Praise the patient saints,

Our one white day of Innocence hath past,

Though somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it.

The snowdrop only, flowering through the year,

Would make the world as blank as Winter-tide.

Come — let us gladden their sad eyes, our Queen’s

And Lancelot’s, at this night’s solemnity

With all the kindlier colours of the field.’

So dame and damsel glittered at the feast

Variously gay: for he that tells the tale

Likened them, saying, as when an hour of cold

Falls on the mountain in midsummer snows,

And all the purple slopes of mountain flowers

Pass under white, till the warm hour returns

With veer of wind, and all are flowers again;

So dame and damsel cast the simple white,

And glowing in all colours, the live grass,

Rose-campion, bluebell, kingcup, poppy, glanced

About the revels, and with mirth so loud

Beyond all use, that, half-amazed, the Queen,

And wroth at Tristram and the lawless jousts,

Brake up their sports, then slowly to her bower

Parted, and in her bosom pain was lord.

And little Dagonet on the morrow morn,

High over all the yellowing Autumn-tide,

Danced like a withered leaf before the hall.

Then Tristram saying, ‘Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?’

Wheeled round on either heel, Dagonet replied,

‘Belike for lack of wiser company;

Or being fool, and seeing too much wit

Makes the world rotten, why, belike I skip

To know myself the wisest knight of all.’

‘Ay, fool,’ said Tristram, ‘but ‘tis eating dry

To dance without a catch, a roundelay

To dance to.’ Then he twangled on his harp,

And while he twangled little Dagonet stood

Quiet as any water-sodden log

Stayed in the wandering warble of a brook;

But when the twangling ended, skipt again;

And being asked, ‘Why skipt ye not, Sir Fool?’

Made answer, ‘I had liefer twenty years

Skip to the broken music of my brains

Than any broken music thou canst make.’

Then Tristram, waiting for the quip to come,

‘Good now, what music have I broken, fool?’

And little Dagonet, skipping, ‘Arthur, the King’s;

For when thou playest that air with Queen Isolt,

Thou makest broken music with thy bride,

Her daintier namesake down in Brittany —

And so thou breakest Arthur’s music too.’

‘Save for that broken music in thy brains,

Sir Fool,’ said Tristram, ‘I would break thy head.

Fool, I came too late, the heathen wars were o’er,

The life had flown, we sware but by the shell —

I am but a fool to reason with a fool —

Come, thou art crabbed and sour: but lean me down,

Sir Dagonet, one of thy long asses’ ears,

And harken if my music be not true.

‘“Free love — free field — we love but while we may:

The woods are hushed, their music is no more:

The leaf is dead, the yearning past away:

New leaf, new life — the days of frost are o’er:

New life, new love, to suit the newer day:

New loves are sweet as those that went before:

Free love — free field — we love but while we may.”

‘Ye might have moved slow-measure to my tune,

Not stood stockstill. I made it in the woods,

And heard it ring as true as tested gold.’

But Dagonet with one foot poised in his hand,

‘Friend, did ye mark that fountain yesterday

Made to run wine? — but this had run itself

All out like a long life to a sour end —

And them that round it sat with golden cups

To hand the wine to whosoever came —

The twelve small damosels white as Innocence,

In honour of poor Innocence the babe,

Who left the gems which Innocence the Queen

Lent to the King, and Innocence the King

Gave for a prize — and one of those white slips

Handed her cup and piped, the pretty one,

“Drink, drink, Sir Fool,” and thereupon I drank,

Spat — pish — the cup was gold, the draught was mud.’

And Tristram, ‘Was it muddier than thy gibes?

Is all the laughter gone dead out of thee? —

Not marking how the knighthood mock thee, fool —

“Fear God: honour the King — his one true knight —

Sole follower of the vows” — for here be they

Who knew thee swine enow before I came,

Smuttier than blasted grain: but when the King

Had made thee fool, thy vanity so shot up

It frighted all free fool from out thy heart;

Which left thee less than fool, and less than swine,

A naked aught — yet swine I hold thee still,

For I have flung thee pearls and find thee swine.’

And little Dagonet mincing with his feet,

‘Knight, an ye fling those rubies round my neck

In lieu of hers, I’ll hold thou hast some touch

Of music, since I care not for thy pearls.

Swine? I have wallowed, I have washed — the world

Is flesh and shadow — I have had my day.

The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind

Hath fouled me — an I wallowed, then I washed —

I have had my day and my philosophies —

And thank the Lord I am King Arthur’s fool.

Swine, say ye? swine, goats, asses, rams and geese

Trooped round a Paynim harper once, who thrummed

On such a wire as musically as thou

Some such fine song — but never a king’s fool.’

And Tristram, ‘Then were swine, goats, asses, geese

The wiser fools, seeing thy Paynim bard

Had such a mastery of his mystery

That he could harp his wife up out of hell.’

Then Dagonet, turning on the ball of his foot,

‘And whither harp’st thou thine? down! and thyself

Down! and two more: a helpful harper thou,

That harpest downward! Dost thou know the star

We call the harp of Arthur up in heaven?’

And Tristram, ‘Ay, Sir Fool, for when our King

Was victor wellnigh day by day, the knights,

Glorying in each new glory, set his name

High on all hills, and in the signs of heaven.’

And Dagonet answered, ‘Ay, and when the land

Was freed, and the Queen false, ye set yourself

To babble about him, all to show your wit —

And whether he were King by courtesy,

Or King by right — and so went harping down

The black king’s highway, got so far, and grew

So witty that ye played at ducks and drakes

With Arthur’s vows on the great lake of fire.

Tuwhoo! do ye see it? do ye see the star?’

‘Nay, fool,’ said Tristram, ‘not in open day.’

And Dagonet, ‘Nay, nor will: I see it and hear.

It makes a silent music up in heaven,

And I, and Arthur and the angels hear,

And then we skip.’ ‘Lo, fool,’ he said, ‘ye talk

Fool’s treason: is the King thy brother fool?’

Then little Dagonet clapt his hands and shrilled,

‘Ay, ay, my brother fool, the king of fools!

Conceits himself as God that he can make

Figs out of thistles, silk from bristles, milk

From burning spurge, honey from hornet-combs,

And men from beasts — Long live the king of fools!’

And down the city Dagonet danced away;

But through the slowly-mellowing avenues

And solitary passes of the wood

Rode Tristram toward Lyonnesse and the west.

Before him fled the face of Queen Isolt

With ruby-circled neck, but evermore

Past, as a rustle or twitter in the wood

Made dull his inner, keen his outer eye

For all that walked, or crept, or perched, or flew.

Anon the face, as, when a gust hath blown,

Unruffling waters re-collect the shape

Of one that in them sees himself, returned;

But at the slot or fewmets of a deer,

Or even a fallen feather, vanished again.

So on for all that day from lawn to lawn

Through many a league-long bower he rode. At length

A lodge of intertwisted beechen-boughs

Furze-crammed, and bracken-rooft, the which himself

Built for a summer day with Queen Isolt

Against a shower, dark in the golden grove

Appearing, sent his fancy back to where

She lived a moon in that low lodge with him:

Till Mark her lord had past, the Cornish King,

With six or seven, when Tristram was away,

And snatched her thence; yet dreading worse than shame

Her warrior Tristram, spake not any word,

But bode his hour, devising wretchedness.

And now that desert lodge to Tristram lookt

So sweet, that halting, in he past, and sank

Down on a drift of foliage random-blown;

But could not rest for musing how to smoothe

And sleek his marriage over to the Queen.

Perchance in lone Tintagil far from all

The tonguesters of the court she had not heard.

But then what folly had sent him overseas

After she left him lonely here? a name?

Was it the name of one in Brittany,

Isolt, the daughter of the King? ‘Isolt

Of the white hands’ they called her: the sweet name

Allured him first, and then the maid herself,

Who served him well with those white hands of hers,

And loved him well, until himself had thought

He loved her also, wedded easily,

But left her all as easily, and returned.

The black-blue Irish hair and Irish eyes

Had drawn him home — what marvel? then he laid

His brows upon the drifted leaf and dreamed.

He seemed to pace the strand of Brittany

Between Isolt of Britain and his bride,

And showed them both the ruby-chain, and both

Began to struggle for it, till his Queen

Graspt it so hard, that all her hand was red.

Then cried the Breton, ‘Look, her hand is red!

These be no rubies, this is frozen blood,

And melts within her hand — her hand is hot

With ill desires, but this I gave thee, look,

Is all as cool and white as any flower.’

Followed a rush of eagle’s wings, and then

A whimpering of the spirit of the child,

Because the twain had spoiled her carcanet.

He dreamed; but Arthur with a hundred spears

Rode far, till o’er the illimitable reed,

And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle,

The wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh

Glared on a huge machicolated tower

That stood with open doors, whereout was rolled

A roar of riot, as from men secure

Amid their marshes, ruffians at their ease

Among their harlot-brides, an evil song.

‘Lo there,’ said one of Arthur’s youth, for there,

High on a grim dead tree before the tower,

A goodly brother of the Table Round

Swung by the neck: and on the boughs a shield

Showing a shower of blood in a field noir,

And therebeside a horn, inflamed the knights

At that dishonour done the gilded spur,

Till each would clash the shield, and blow the horn.

But Arthur waved them back. Alone he rode.

Then at the dry harsh roar of the great horn,

That sent the face of all the marsh aloft

An ever upward-rushing storm and cloud

Of shriek and plume, the Red Knight heard, and all,

Even to tipmost lance and topmost helm,

In blood-red armour sallying, howled to the King,

‘The teeth of Hell flay bare and gnash thee flat! —

Lo! art thou not that eunuch-hearted King

Who fain had clipt free manhood from the world —

The woman-worshipper? Yea, God’s curse, and I!

Slain was the brother of my paramour

By a knight of thine, and I that heard her whine

And snivel, being eunuch-hearted too,

Sware by the scorpion-worm that twists in hell,

And stings itself to everlasting death,

To hang whatever knight of thine I fought

And tumbled. Art thou King? — Look to thy life!’

He ended: Arthur knew the voice; the face

Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name

Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind.

And Arthur deigned not use of word or sword,

But let the drunkard, as he stretched from horse

To strike him, overbalancing his bulk,

Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp

Fall, as the crest of some slow-arching wave,

Heard in dead night along that table-shore,

Drops flat, and after the great waters break

Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,

Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,

From less and less to nothing; thus he fell

Head-heavy; then the knights, who watched him, roared

And shouted and leapt down upon the fallen;

There trampled out his face from being known,

And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves:

Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang

Through open doors, and swording right and left

Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurled

The tables over and the wines, and slew

Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells,

And all the pavement streamed with massacre:

Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower,

Which half that autumn night, like the live North,

Red-pulsing up through Alioth and Alcor,

Made all above it, and a hundred meres

About it, as the water Moab saw

Came round by the East, and out beyond them flushed

The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea.

So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,

But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord.

Then, out of Tristram waking, the red dream

Fled with a shout, and that low lodge returned,

Mid-forest, and the wind among the boughs.

He whistled his good warhorse left to graze

Among the forest greens, vaulted upon him,

And rode beneath an ever-showering leaf,

Till one lone woman, weeping near a cross,

Stayed him. ‘Why weep ye?’ ‘Lord,’ she said, ‘my man

Hath left me or is dead;’ whereon he thought —

‘What, if she hate me now? I would not this.

What, if she love me still? I would not that.

I know not what I would’ — but said to her,

‘Yet weep not thou, lest, if thy mate return,

He find thy favour changed and love thee not’ —

Then pressing day by day through Lyonnesse

Last in a roky hollow, belling, heard

The hounds of Mark, and felt the goodly hounds

Yelp at his heart, but turning, past and gained

Tintagil, half in sea, and high on land,

A crown of towers.

Down in a casement sat,

A low sea-sunset glorying round her hair

And glossy-throated grace, Isolt the Queen.

And when she heard the feet of Tristram grind

The spiring stone that scaled about her tower,

Flushed, started, met him at the doors, and there

Belted his body with her white embrace,

Crying aloud, ‘Not Mark — not Mark, my soul!

The footstep fluttered me at first: not he:

Catlike through his own castle steals my Mark,

But warrior-wise thou stridest through his halls

Who hates thee, as I him — even to the death.

My soul, I felt my hatred for my Mark

Quicken within me, and knew that thou wert nigh.’

To whom Sir Tristram smiling, ‘I am here.

Let be thy Mark, seeing he is not thine.’

And drawing somewhat backward she replied,

‘Can he be wronged who is not even his own,

But save for dread of thee had beaten me,

Scratched, bitten, blinded, marred me somehow — Mark?

What rights are his that dare not strike for them?

Not lift a hand — not, though he found me thus!

But harken! have ye met him? hence he went

Today for three days’ hunting — as he said —

And so returns belike within an hour.

Mark’s way, my soul! — but eat not thou with Mark,

Because he hates thee even more than fears;

Nor drink: and when thou passest any wood

Close vizor, lest an arrow from the bush

Should leave me all alone with Mark and hell.

My God, the measure of my hate for Mark

Is as the measure of my love for thee.’

So, plucked one way by hate and one by love,

Drained of her force, again she sat, and spake

To Tristram, as he knelt before her, saying,

‘O hunter, and O blower of the horn,

Harper, and thou hast been a rover too,

For, ere I mated with my shambling king,

Ye twain had fallen out about the bride

Of one — his name is out of me — the prize,

If prize she were — (what marvel — she could see) —

Thine, friend; and ever since my craven seeks

To wreck thee villainously: but, O Sir Knight,

What dame or damsel have ye kneeled to last?’

And Tristram, ‘Last to my Queen Paramount,

Here now to my Queen Paramount of love

And loveliness — ay, lovelier than when first

Her light feet fell on our rough Lyonnesse,

Sailing from Ireland.’

Softly laughed Isolt;

‘Flatter me not, for hath not our great Queen

My dole of beauty trebled?’ and he said,

‘Her beauty is her beauty, and thine thine,

And thine is more to me — soft, gracious, kind —

Save when thy Mark is kindled on thy lips

Most gracious; but she, haughty, even to him,

Lancelot; for I have seen him wan enow

To make one doubt if ever the great Queen

Have yielded him her love.’

To whom Isolt,

‘Ah then, false hunter and false harper, thou

Who brakest through the scruple of my bond,

Calling me thy white hind, and saying to me

That Guinevere had sinned against the highest,

And I — misyoked with such a want of man —

That I could hardly sin against the lowest.’

He answered, ‘O my soul, be comforted!

If this be sweet, to sin in leading-strings,

If here be comfort, and if ours be sin,

Crowned warrant had we for the crowning sin

That made us happy: but how ye greet me — fear

And fault and doubt — no word of that fond tale —

Thy deep heart-yearnings, thy sweet memories

Of Tristram in that year he was away.’

And, saddening on the sudden, spake Isolt,

‘I had forgotten all in my strong joy

To see thee — yearnings? — ay! for, hour by hour,

Here in the never-ended afternoon,

O sweeter than all memories of thee,

Deeper than any yearnings after thee

Seemed those far-rolling, westward-smiling seas,

Watched from this tower. Isolt of Britain dashed

Before Isolt of Brittany on the strand,

Would that have chilled her bride-kiss? Wedded her?

Fought in her father’s battles? wounded there?

The King was all fulfilled with gratefulness,

And she, my namesake of the hands, that healed

Thy hurt and heart with unguent and caress —

Well — can I wish her any huger wrong

Than having known thee? her too hast thou left

To pine and waste in those sweet memories.

O were I not my Mark’s, by whom all men

Are noble, I should hate thee more than love.’

And Tristram, fondling her light hands, replied,

‘Grace, Queen, for being loved: she loved me well.

Did I love her? the name at least I loved.

Isolt? — I fought his battles, for Isolt!

The night was dark; the true star set. Isolt!

The name was ruler of the dark — Isolt?

Care not for her! patient, and prayerful, meek,

Pale-blooded, she will yield herself to God.’

And Isolt answered, ‘Yea, and why not I?

Mine is the larger need, who am not meek,

Pale-blooded, prayerful. Let me tell thee now.

Here one black, mute midsummer night I sat,

Lonely, but musing on thee, wondering where,

Murmuring a light song I had heard thee sing,

And once or twice I spake thy name aloud.

Then flashed a levin-brand; and near me stood,

In fuming sulphur blue and green, a fiend —

Mark’s way to steal behind one in the dark —

For there was Mark: “He has wedded her,” he said,

Not said, but hissed it: then this crown of towers

So shook to such a roar of all the sky,

That here in utter dark I swooned away,

And woke again in utter dark, and cried,

“I will flee hence and give myself to God” —

And thou wert lying in thy new leman’s arms.’

Then Tristram, ever dallying with her hand,

‘May God be with thee, sweet, when old and gray,

And past desire!’ a saying that angered her.

‘“May God be with thee, sweet, when thou art old,

And sweet no more to me!” I need Him now.

For when had Lancelot uttered aught so gross

Even to the swineherd’s malkin in the mast?

The greater man, the greater courtesy.

Far other was the Tristram, Arthur’s knight!

But thou, through ever harrying thy wild beasts —

Save that to touch a harp, tilt with a lance

Becomes thee well — art grown wild beast thyself.

How darest thou, if lover, push me even

In fancy from thy side, and set me far

In the gray distance, half a life away,

Her to be loved no more? Unsay it, unswear!

Flatter me rather, seeing me so weak,

Broken with Mark and hate and solitude,

Thy marriage and mine own, that I should suck

Lies like sweet wines: lie to me: I believe.

Will ye not lie? not swear, as there ye kneel,

And solemnly as when ye sware to him,

The man of men, our King — My God, the power

Was once in vows when men believed the King!

They lied not then, who sware, and through their vows

The King prevailing made his realm: — I say,

Swear to me thou wilt love me even when old,

Gray-haired, and past desire, and in despair.’

Then Tristram, pacing moodily up and down,

‘Vows! did you keep the vow you made to Mark

More than I mine? Lied, say ye? Nay, but learnt,

The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself —

My knighthood taught me this — ay, being snapt —

We run more counter to the soul thereof

Than had we never sworn. I swear no more.

I swore to the great King, and am forsworn.

For once — even to the height — I honoured him.

“Man, is he man at all?” methought, when first

I rode from our rough Lyonnesse, and beheld

That victor of the Pagan throned in hall —

His hair, a sun that rayed from off a brow

Like hillsnow high in heaven, the steel-blue eyes,

The golden beard that clothed his lips with light —

Moreover, that weird legend of his birth,

With Merlin’s mystic babble about his end

Amazed me; then, his foot was on a stool

Shaped as a dragon; he seemed to me no man,

But Michael trampling Satan; so I sware,

Being amazed: but this went by — The vows!

O ay — the wholesome madness of an hour —

They served their use, their time; for every knight

Believed himself a greater than himself,

And every follower eyed him as a God;

Till he, being lifted up beyond himself,

Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done,

And so the realm was made; but then their vows —

First mainly through that sullying of our Queen —

Began to gall the knighthood, asking whence

Had Arthur right to bind them to himself?

Dropt down from heaven? washed up from out the deep?

They failed to trace him through the flesh and blood

Of our old kings: whence then? a doubtful lord

To bind them by inviolable vows,

Which flesh and blood perforce would violate:

For feel this arm of mine — the tide within

Red with free chase and heather-scented air,

Pulsing full man; can Arthur make me pure

As any maiden child? lock up my tongue

From uttering freely what I freely hear?

Bind me to one? The wide world laughs at it.

And worldling of the world am I, and know

The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour

Woos his own end; we are not angels here

Nor shall be: vows — I am woodman of the woods,

And hear the garnet-headed yaffingale

Mock them: my soul, we love but while we may;

And therefore is my love so large for thee,

Seeing it is not bounded save by love.’

Here ending, he moved toward her, and she said,

‘Good: an I turned away my love for thee

To some one thrice as courteous as thyself —

For courtesy wins woman all as well

As valour may, but he that closes both

Is perfect, he is Lancelot — taller indeed,

Rosier and comelier, thou — but say I loved

This knightliest of all knights, and cast thee back

Thine own small saw, “We love but while we may,”

Well then, what answer?’

He that while she spake,

Mindful of what he brought to adorn her with,

The jewels, had let one finger lightly touch

The warm white apple of her throat, replied,

‘Press this a little closer, sweet, until —

Come, I am hungered and half-angered — meat,

Wine, wine — and I will love thee to the death,

And out beyond into the dream to come.’

So then, when both were brought to full accord,

She rose, and set before him all he willed;

And after these had comforted the blood

With meats and wines, and satiated their hearts —

Now talking of their woodland paradise,

The deer, the dews, the fern, the founts, the lawns;

Now mocking at the much ungainliness,

And craven shifts, and long crane legs of Mark —

Then Tristram laughing caught the harp, and sang:

‘Ay, ay, O ay — the winds that bend the brier!

A star in heaven, a star within the mere!

Ay, ay, O ay — a star was my desire,

And one was far apart, and one was near:

Ay, ay, O ay — the winds that bow the grass!

And one was water and one star was fire,

And one will ever shine and one will pass.

Ay, ay, O ay — the winds that move the mere.’

Then in the light’s last glimmer Tristram showed

And swung the ruby carcanet. She cried,

‘The collar of some Order, which our King

Hath newly founded, all for thee, my soul,

For thee, to yield thee grace beyond thy peers.’

‘Not so, my Queen,’ he said, ‘but the red fruit

Grown on a magic oak-tree in mid-heaven,

And won by Tristram as a tourney-prize,

And hither brought by Tristram for his last

Love-offering and peace-offering unto thee.’

He spoke, he turned, then, flinging round her neck,

Claspt it, and cried, ‘Thine Order, O my Queen!’

But, while he bowed to kiss the jewelled throat,

Out of the dark, just as the lips had touched,

Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek —

‘Mark’s way,’ said Mark, and clove him through the brain.

That night came Arthur home, and while he climbed,

All in a death-dumb autumn-dripping gloom,

The stairway to the hall, and looked and saw

The great Queen’s bower was dark, — about his feet

A voice clung sobbing till he questioned it,

‘What art thou?’ and the voice about his feet

Sent up an answer, sobbing, ‘I am thy fool,

And I shall never make thee smile again.’

Guinevere

1859

QUEEN GUINEVERE had fled the court, and sat

There in the holy house at Almesbury

Weeping, none with her save a little maid,

A novice: one low light betwixt them burned

Blurred by the creeping mist, for all abroad,

Beneath a moon unseen albeit at full,

The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face,

Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still.

For hither had she fled, her cause of flight

Sir Modred; he that like a subtle beast

Lay couchant with his eyes upon the throne,

Ready to spring, waiting a chance: for this

He chilled the popular praises of the King

With silent smiles of slow disparagement;

And tampered with the Lords of the White Horse,

Heathen, the brood by Hengist left; and sought

To make disruption in the Table Round

Of Arthur, and to splinter it into feuds

Serving his traitorous end; and all his aims

Were sharpened by strong hate for Lancelot.

For thus it chanced one morn when all the court,

Green-suited, but with plumes that mocked the may,

Had been, their wont, a-maying and returned,

That Modred still in green, all ear and eye,

Climbed to the high top of the garden-wall

To spy some secret scandal if he might,

And saw the Queen who sat betwixt her best

Enid, and lissome Vivien, of her court

The wiliest and the worst; and more than this

He saw not, for Sir Lancelot passing by

Spied where he couched, and as the gardener’s hand

Picks from the colewort a green caterpillar,

So from the high wall and the flowering grove

Of grasses Lancelot plucked him by the heel,

And cast him as a worm upon the way;

But when he knew the Prince though marred with dust,

He, reverencing king’s blood in a bad man,

Made such excuses as he might, and these

Full knightly without scorn; for in those days

No knight of Arthur’s noblest dealt in scorn;

But, if a man were halt or hunched, in him

By those whom God had made full-limbed and tall,

Scorn was allowed as part of his defect,

And he was answered softly by the King

And all his Table. So Sir Lancelot holp

To raise the Prince, who rising twice or thrice

Full sharply smote his knees, and smiled, and went:

But, ever after, the small violence done

Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart,

As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long

A little bitter pool about a stone

On the bare coast.

But when Sir Lancelot told

This matter to the Queen, at first she laughed

Lightly, to think of Modred’s dusty fall,

Then shuddered, as the village wife who cries

‘I shudder, some one steps across my grave;’

Then laughed again, but faintlier, for indeed

She half-foresaw that he, the subtle beast,

Would track her guilt until he found, and hers

Would be for evermore a name of scorn.

Henceforward rarely could she front in hall,

Or elsewhere, Modred’s narrow foxy face,

Heart-hiding smile, and gray persistent eye:

Henceforward too, the Powers that tend the soul,

To help it from the death that cannot die,

And save it even in extremes, began

To vex and plague her. Many a time for hours,

Beside the placid breathings of the King,

In the dead night, grim faces came and went

Before her, or a vague spiritual fear —

Like to some doubtful noise of creaking doors,

Heard by the watcher in a haunted house,

That keeps the rust of murder on the walls —

Held her awake: or if she slept, she dreamed

An awful dream; for then she seemed to stand

On some vast plain before a setting sun,

And from the sun there swiftly made at her

A ghastly something, and its shadow flew

Before it, till it touched her, and she turned —

When lo! her own, that broadening from her feet,

And blackening, swallowed all the land, and in it

Far cities burnt, and with a cry she woke.

And all this trouble did not pass but grew;

Till even the clear face of the guileless King,

And trustful courtesies of household life,

Became her bane; and at the last she said,

‘O Lancelot, get thee hence to thine own land,

For if thou tarry we shall meet again,

And if we meet again, some evil chance

Will make the smouldering scandal break and blaze

Before the people, and our lord the King.’

And Lancelot ever promised, but remained,

And still they met and met. Again she said,

‘O Lancelot, if thou love me get thee hence.’

And then they were agreed upon a night

(When the good King should not be there) to meet

And part for ever. Vivien, lurking, heard.

She told Sir Modred. Passion-pale they met

And greeted. Hands in hands, and eye to eye,

Low on the border of her couch they sat

Stammering and staring. It was their last hour,

A madness of farewells. And Modred brought

His creatures to the basement of the tower

For testimony; and crying with full voice

‘Traitor, come out, ye are trapt at last,’ aroused

Lancelot, who rushing outward lionlike

Leapt on him, and hurled him headlong, and he fell

Stunned, and his creatures took and bare him off,

And all was still: then she, ‘The end is come,

And I am shamed for ever;’ and he said,

‘Mine be the shame; mine was the sin: but rise,

And fly to my strong castle overseas:

There will I hide thee, till my life shall end,

There hold thee with my life against the world.’

She answered, ‘Lancelot, wilt thou hold me so?

Nay, friend, for we have taken our farewells.

Would God that thou couldst hide me from myself!

Mine is the shame, for I was wife, and thou

Unwedded: yet rise now, and let us fly,

For I will draw me into sanctuary,

And bide my doom.’ So Lancelot got her horse,

Set her thereon, and mounted on his own,

And then they rode to the divided way,

There kissed, and parted weeping: for he past,

Love-loyal to the least wish of the Queen,

Back to his land; but she to Almesbury

Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald,

And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald

Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan:

And in herself she moaned ‘Too late, too late!’

Till in the cold wind that foreruns the morn,

A blot in heaven, the Raven, flying high,

Croaked, and she thought, ‘He spies a field of death;

For now the Heathen of the Northern Sea,

Lured by the crimes and frailties of the court,

Begin to slay the folk, and spoil the land.’

And when she came to Almesbury she spake

There to the nuns, and said, ‘Mine enemies

Pursue me, but, O peaceful Sisterhood,

Receive, and yield me sanctuary, nor ask

Her name to whom ye yield it, till her time

To tell you:’ and her beauty, grace and power,

Wrought as a charm upon them, and they spared

To ask it.

So the stately Queen abode

For many a week, unknown, among the nuns;

Nor with them mixed, nor told her name, nor sought,

Wrapt in her grief, for housel or for shrift,

But communed only with the little maid,

Who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness

Which often lured her from herself; but now,

This night, a rumour wildly blown about

Came, that Sir Modred had usurped the realm,

And leagued him with the heathen, while the King

Was waging war on Lancelot: then she thought,

‘With what a hate the people and the King

Must hate me,’ and bowed down upon her hands

Silent, until the little maid, who brooked

No silence, brake it, uttering, ‘Late! so late!

What hour, I wonder, now?’ and when she drew

No answer, by and by began to hum

An air the nuns had taught her; ‘Late, so late!’

Which when she heard, the Queen looked up, and said,

‘O maiden, if indeed ye list to sing,

Sing, and unbind my heart that I may weep.’

Whereat full willingly sang the little maid.

‘Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill!

Late, late, so late! but we can enter still.

Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now.

‘No light had we: for that we do repent;

And learning this, the bridegroom will relent.

Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now.

‘No light: so late! and dark and chill the night!

O let us in, that we may find the light!

Too late, too late: ye cannot enter now.

‘Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet?

O let us in, though late, to kiss his feet!

No, no, too late! ye cannot enter now.’

So sang the novice, while full passionately,

Her head upon her hands, remembering

Her thought when first she came, wept the sad Queen.

Then said the little novice prattling to her,

‘O pray you, noble lady, weep no more;

But let my words, the words of one so small,

Who knowing nothing knows but to obey,

And if I do not there is penance given —

Comfort your sorrows; for they do not flow

From evil done; right sure am I of that,

Who see your tender grace and stateliness.

But weigh your sorrows with our lord the King’s,

And weighing find them less; for gone is he

To wage grim war against Sir Lancelot there,

Round that strong castle where he holds the Queen;

And Modred whom he left in charge of all,

The traitor — Ah sweet lady, the King’s grief

For his own self, and his own Queen, and realm,

Must needs be thrice as great as any of ours.

For me, I thank the saints, I am not great.

For if there ever come a grief to me

I cry my cry in silence, and have done.

None knows it, and my tears have brought me good:

But even were the griefs of little ones

As great as those of great ones, yet this grief

Is added to the griefs the great must bear,

That howsoever much they may desire

Silence, they cannot weep behind a cloud:

As even here they talk at Almesbury

About the good King and his wicked Queen,

And were I such a King with such a Queen,

Well might I wish to veil her wickedness,

But were I such a King, it could not be.’

Then to her own sad heart muttered the Queen,

‘Will the child kill me with her innocent talk?’

But openly she answered, ‘Must not I,

If this false traitor have displaced his lord,

Grieve with the common grief of all the realm?’

‘Yea,’ said the maid, ‘this is all woman’s grief,

That she is woman, whose disloyal life

Hath wrought confusion in the Table Round

Which good King Arthur founded, years ago,

With signs and miracles and wonders, there

At Camelot, ere the coming of the Queen.’

Then thought the Queen within herself again,

‘Will the child kill me with her foolish prate?’

But openly she spake and said to her,

‘O little maid, shut in by nunnery walls,

What canst thou know of Kings and Tables Round,

Or what of signs and wonders, but the signs

And simple miracles of thy nunnery?’

To whom the little novice garrulously,

‘Yea, but I know: the land was full of signs

And wonders ere the coming of the Queen.

So said my father, and himself was knight

Of the great Table — at the founding of it;

And rode thereto from Lyonnesse, and he said

That as he rode, an hour or maybe twain

After the sunset, down the coast, he heard

Strange music, and he paused, and turning — there,

All down the lonely coast of Lyonnesse,

Each with a beacon-star upon his head,

And with a wild sea-light about his feet,

He saw them — headland after headland flame

Far on into the rich heart of the west:

And in the light the white mermaiden swam,

And strong man-breasted things stood from the sea,

And sent a deep sea-voice through all the land,

To which the little elves of chasm and cleft

Made answer, sounding like a distant horn.

So said my father — yea, and furthermore,

Next morning, while he past the dim-lit woods,

Himself beheld three spirits mad with joy

Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower,

That shook beneath them, as the thistle shakes

When three gray linnets wrangle for the seed:

And still at evenings on before his horse

The flickering fairy-circle wheeled and broke

Flying, and linked again, and wheeled and broke

Flying, for all the land was full of life.

And when at last he came to Camelot,

A wreath of airy dancers hand-in-hand

Swung round the lighted lantern of the hall;

And in the hall itself was such a feast

As never man had dreamed; for every knight

Had whatsoever meat he longed for served

By hands unseen; and even as he said

Down in the cellars merry bloated things

Shouldered the spigot, straddling on the butts

While the wine ran: so glad were spirits and men

Before the coming of the sinful Queen.’

Then spake the Queen and somewhat bitterly,

‘Were they so glad? ill prophets were they all,

Spirits and men: could none of them foresee,

Not even thy wise father with his signs

And wonders, what has fallen upon the realm?’

To whom the novice garrulously again,

‘Yea, one, a bard; of whom my father said,

Full many a noble war-song had he sung,

Even in the presence of an enemy’s fleet,

Between the steep cliff and the coming wave;

And many a mystic lay of life and death

Had chanted on the smoky mountain-tops,

When round him bent the spirits of the hills

With all their dewy hair blown back like flame:

So said my father — and that night the bard

Sang Arthur’s glorious wars, and sang the King

As wellnigh more than man, and railed at those

Who called him the false son of Gorlois:

For there was no man knew from whence he came;

But after tempest, when the long wave broke

All down the thundering shores of Bude and Bos,

There came a day as still as heaven, and then

They found a naked child upon the sands

Of dark Tintagil by the Cornish sea;

And that was Arthur; and they fostered him

Till he by miracle was approven King:

And that his grave should be a mystery

From all men, like his birth; and could he find

A woman in her womanhood as great

As he was in his manhood, then, he sang,

The twain together well might change the world.

But even in the middle of his song

He faltered, and his hand fell from the harp,

And pale he turned, and reeled, and would have fallen,

But that they stayed him up; nor would he tell

His vision; but what doubt that he foresaw

This evil work of Lancelot and the Queen?’

Then thought the Queen, ‘Lo! they have set her on,

Our simple-seeming Abbess and her nuns,

To play upon me,’ and bowed her head nor spake.

Whereat the novice crying, with clasped hands,

Shame on her own garrulity garrulously,

Said the good nuns would check her gadding tongue

Full often, ‘and, sweet lady, if I seem

To vex an ear too sad to listen to me,

Unmannerly, with prattling and the tales

Which my good father told me, check me too

Nor let me shame my father’s memory, one

Of noblest manners, though himself would say

Sir Lancelot had the noblest; and he died,

Killed in a tilt, come next, five summers back,

And left me; but of others who remain,

And of the two first-famed for courtesy —

And pray you check me if I ask amiss —

But pray you, which had noblest, while you moved

Among them, Lancelot or our lord the King?’

Then the pale Queen looked up and answered her,

‘Sir Lancelot, as became a noble knight,

Was gracious to all ladies, and the same

In open battle or the tilting-field

Forbore his own advantage, and the King

In open battle or the tilting-field

Forbore his own advantage, and these two

Were the most nobly-mannered men of all;

For manners are not idle, but the fruit

Of loyal nature, and of noble mind.’

‘Yea,’ said the maid, ‘be manners such fair fruit?’

Then Lancelot’s needs must be a thousand-fold

Less noble, being, as all rumour runs,

The most disloyal friend in all the world.’

To which a mournful answer made the Queen:

‘O closed about by narrowing nunnery-walls,

What knowest thou of the world, and all its lights

And shadows, all the wealth and all the woe?

If ever Lancelot, that most noble knight,

Were for one hour less noble than himself,

Pray for him that he scape the doom of fire,

And weep for her that drew him to his doom.’

‘Yea,’ said the little novice, ‘I pray for both;

But I should all as soon believe that his,

Sir Lancelot’s, were as noble as the King’s,

As I could think, sweet lady, yours would be

Such as they are, were you the sinful Queen.’

So she, like many another babbler, hurt

Whom she would soothe, and harmed where she would heal;

For here a sudden flush of wrathful heat

Fired all the pale face of the Queen, who cried,

‘Such as thou art be never maiden more

For ever! thou their tool, set on to plague

And play upon, and harry me, petty spy

And traitress.’ When that storm of anger brake

From Guinevere, aghast the maiden rose,

White as her veil, and stood before the Queen

As tremulously as foam upon the beach

Stands in a wind, ready to break and fly,

And when the Queen had added ‘Get thee hence,’

Fled frighted. Then that other left alone

Sighed, and began to gather heart again,

Saying in herself, ‘The simple, fearful child

Meant nothing, but my own too-fearful guilt,

Simpler than any child, betrays itself.

But help me, heaven, for surely I repent.

For what is true repentance but in thought —

Not even in inmost thought to think again

The sins that made the past so pleasant to us:

And I have sworn never to see him more,

To see him more.’

And even in saying this,

Her memory from old habit of the mind

Went slipping back upon the golden days

In which she saw him first, when Lancelot came,

Reputed the best knight and goodliest man,

Ambassador, to lead her to his lord

Arthur, and led her forth, and far ahead

Of his and her retinue moving, they,

Rapt in sweet talk or lively, all on love

And sport and tilts and pleasure, (for the time

Was maytime, and as yet no sin was dreamed,)

Rode under groves that looked a paradise

Of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth

That seemed the heavens upbreaking through the earth,

And on from hill to hill, and every day

Beheld at noon in some delicious dale

The silk pavilions of King Arthur raised

For brief repast or afternoon repose

By couriers gone before; and on again,

Till yet once more ere set of sun they saw

The Dragon of the great Pendragonship,

That crowned the state pavilion of the King,

Blaze by the rushing brook or silent well.

But when the Queen immersed in such a trance,

And moving through the past unconsciously,

Came to that point where first she saw the King

Ride toward her from the city, sighed to find

Her journey done, glanced at him, thought him cold,

High, self-contained, and passionless, not like him,

‘Not like my Lancelot’ — while she brooded thus

And grew half-guilty in her thoughts again,

There rode an armed warrior to the doors.

A murmuring whisper through the nunnery ran,

Then on a sudden a cry, ‘The King.’ She sat

Stiff-stricken, listening; but when armed feet

Through the long gallery from the outer doors

Rang coming, prone from off her seat she fell,

And grovelled with her face against the floor:

There with her milkwhite arms and shadowy hair

She made her face a darkness from the King:

And in the darkness heard his armed feet

Pause by her; then came silence, then a voice,

Monotonous and hollow like a Ghost’s

Denouncing judgment, but though changed, the King’s:

‘Liest thou here so low, the child of one

I honoured, happy, dead before thy shame?

Well is it that no child is born of thee.

The children born of thee are sword and fire,

Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws,

The craft of kindred and the Godless hosts

Of heathen swarming o’er the Northern Sea;

Whom I, while yet Sir Lancelot, my right arm,

The mightiest of my knights, abode with me,

Have everywhere about this land of Christ

In twelve great battles ruining overthrown.

And knowest thou now from whence I come — from him

From waging bitter war with him: and he,

That did not shun to smite me in worse way,

Had yet that grace of courtesy in him left,

He spared to lift his hand against the King

Who made him knight: but many a knight was slain;

And many more, and all his kith and kin

Clave to him, and abode in his own land.

And many more when Modred raised revolt,

Forgetful of their troth and fealty, clave

To Modred, and a remnant stays with me.

And of this remnant will I leave a part,

True men who love me still, for whom I live,

To guard thee in the wild hour coming on,

Lest but a hair of this low head be harmed.

Fear not: thou shalt be guarded till my death.

Howbeit I know, if ancient prophecies

Have erred not, that I march to meet my doom.

Thou hast not made my life so sweet to me,

That I the King should greatly care to live;

For thou hast spoilt the purpose of my life.

Bear with me for the last time while I show,

Even for thy sake, the sin which thou hast sinned.

For when the Roman left us, and their law

Relaxed its hold upon us, and the ways

Were filled with rapine, here and there a deed

Of prowess done redressed a random wrong.

But I was first of all the kings who drew

The knighthood-errant of this realm and all

The realms together under me, their Head,

In that fair Order of my Table Round,

A glorious company, the flower of men,

To serve as model for the mighty world,

And be the fair beginning of a time.

I made them lay their hands in mine and swear

To reverence the King, as if he were

Their conscience, and their conscience as their King,

To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,

To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,

To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,

To honour his own word as if his God’s,

To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,

To love one maiden only, cleave to her,

And worship her by years of noble deeds,

Until they won her; for indeed I knew

Of no more subtle master under heaven

Than is the maiden passion for a maid,

Not only to keep down the base in man,

But teach high thought, and amiable words

And courtliness, and the desire of fame,

And love of truth, and all that makes a man.

And all this throve before I wedded thee,

Believing, “lo mine helpmate, one to feel

My purpose and rejoicing in my joy.”

Then came thy shameful sin with Lancelot;

Then came the sin of Tristram and Isolt;

Then others, following these my mightiest knights,

And drawing foul ensample from fair names,

Sinned also, till the loathsome opposite

Of all my heart had destined did obtain,

And all through thee! so that this life of mine

I guard as God’s high gift from scathe and wrong,

Not greatly care to lose; but rather think

How sad it were for Arthur, should he live,

To sit once more within his lonely hall,

And miss the wonted number of my knights,

And miss to hear high talk of noble deeds

As in the golden days before thy sin.

For which of us, who might be left, could speak

Of the pure heart, nor seem to glance at thee?

And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk

Thy shadow still would glide from room to room,

And I should evermore be vext with thee

In hanging robe or vacant ornament,

Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair.

For think not, though thou wouldst not love thy lord,

Thy lord hast wholly lost his love for thee.

I am not made of so slight elements.

Yet must I leave thee, woman, to thy shame.

I hold that man the worst of public foes

Who either for his own or children’s sake,

To save his blood from scandal, lets the wife

Whom he knows false, abide and rule the house:

For being through his cowardice allowed

Her station, taken everywhere for pure,

She like a new disease, unknown to men,

Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd,

Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps

The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse

With devil’s leaps, and poisons half the young.

Worst of the worst were that man he that reigns!

Better the King’s waste hearth and aching heart

Than thou reseated in thy place of light,

The mockery of my people, and their bane.’

He paused, and in the pause she crept an inch

Nearer, and laid her hands about his feet.

Far off a solitary trumpet blew.

Then waiting by the doors the warhorse neighed

At a friend’s voice, and he spake again:

‘Yet think not that I come to urge thy crimes,

I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere,

I, whose vast pity almost makes me die

To see thee, laying there thy golden head,

My pride in happier summers, at my feet.

The wrath which forced my thoughts on that fierce law,

The doom of treason and the flaming death,

(When first I learnt thee hidden here) is past.

The pang — which while I weighed thy heart with one

Too wholly true to dream untruth in thee,

Made my tears burn — is also past — in part.

And all is past, the sin is sinned, and I,

Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God

Forgives: do thou for thine own soul the rest.

But how to take last leave of all I loved?

O golden hair, with which I used to play

Not knowing! O imperial-moulded form,

And beauty such as never woman wore,

Until it became a kingdom’s curse with thee —

I cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine,

But Lancelot’s: nay, they never were the King’s.

I cannot take thy hand: that too is flesh,

And in the flesh thou hast sinned; and mine own flesh,

Here looking down on thine polluted, cries

“I loathe thee:” yet not less, O Guinevere,

For I was ever virgin save for thee,

My love through flesh hath wrought into my life

So far, that my doom is, I love thee still.

Let no man dream but that I love thee still.

Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul,

And so thou lean on our fair father Christ,

Hereafter in that world where all are pure

We two may meet before high God, and thou

Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know

I am thine husband — not a smaller soul,

Nor Lancelot, nor another. Leave me that,

I charge thee, my last hope. Now must I hence.

Through the thick night I hear the trumpet blow:

They summon me their King to lead mine hosts

Far down to that great battle in the west,

Where I must strike against the man they call

My sister’s son — no kin of mine, who leagues

With Lords of the White Horse, heathen, and knights,

Traitors — and strike him dead, and meet myself

Death, or I know not what mysterious doom.

And thou remaining here wilt learn the event;

But hither shall I never come again,

Never lie by thy side; see thee no more —

Farewell!’

And while she grovelled at his feet,

She felt the King’s breath wander o’er her neck,

And in the darkness o’er her fallen head,

Perceived the waving of his hands that blest.

Then, listening till those armed steps were gone,

Rose the pale Queen, and in her anguish found

The casement: ‘peradventure,’ so she thought,

‘If I might see his face, and not be seen.’

And lo, he sat on horseback at the door!

And near him the sad nuns with each a light

Stood, and he gave them charge about the Queen,

To guard and foster her for evermore.

And while he spake to these his helm was lowered,

To which for crest the golden dragon clung

Of Britain; so she did not see the face,

Which then was as an angel’s, but she saw,

Wet with the mists and smitten by the lights,

The Dragon of the great Pendragonship

Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire.

And even then he turned; and more and more

The moony vapour rolling round the King,

Who seemed the phantom of a Giant in it,

Enwound him fold by fold, and made him gray

And grayer, till himself became as mist

Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom.

Then she stretched out her arms and cried aloud

‘Oh Arthur!’ there her voice brake suddenly,

Then — as a stream that spouting from a cliff

Fails in mid air, but gathering at the base

Re-makes itself, and flashes down the vale —

Went on in passionate utterance:

‘Gone — my lord!

Gone through my sin to slay and to be slain!

And he forgave me, and I could not speak.

Farewell? I should have answered his farewell.

His mercy choked me. Gone, my lord the King,

My own true lord! how dare I call him mine?

The shadow of another cleaves to me,

And makes me one pollution: he, the King,

Called me polluted: shall I kill myself?

What help in that? I cannot kill my sin,

If soul be soul; nor can I kill my shame;

No, nor by living can I live it down.

The days will grow to weeks, the weeks to months

The months will add themselves and make the years,

The years will roll into the centuries,

And mine will ever be a name of scorn.

I must not dwell on that defeat of fame.

Let the world be; that is but of the world.

What else? what hope? I think there was a hope,

Except he mocked me when he spake of hope;

His hope he called it; but he never mocks,

For mockery is the fume of little hearts.

And blessed be the King, who hath forgiven

My wickedness to him, and left me hope

That in mine own heart I can live down sin

And be his mate hereafter in the heavens

Before high God. Ah great and gentle lord,

Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint

Among his warring senses, to thy knights —

To whom my false voluptuous pride, that took

Full easily all impressions from below,

Would not look up, or half-despised the height

To which I would not or I could not climb —

I thought I could not breathe in that fine air

That pure severity of perfect light —

I yearned for warmth and colour which I found

In Lancelot — now I see thee what thou art,

Thou art the highest and most human too,

Not Lancelot, nor another. Is there none

Will tell the King I love him though so late?

Now — ere he goes to the great Battle? none:

Myself must tell him in that purer life,

But now it were too daring. Ah my God,

What might I not have made of thy fair world,

Had I but loved thy highest creature here?

It was my duty to have loved the highest:

It surely was my profit had I known:

It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

We needs must love the highest when we see it,

Not Lancelot, nor another.’

Here her hand

Grasped, made her vail her eyes: she looked and saw

The novice, weeping, suppliant, and said to her,

‘Yea, little maid, for am I not forgiven?’

Then glancing up beheld the holy nuns

All round her, weeping; and her heart was loosed

Within her, and she wept with these and said,

‘Ye know me then, that wicked one, who broke

The vast design and purpose of the King.

O shut me round with narrowing nunnery-walls,

Meek maidens, from the voices crying “shame.”

I must not scorn myself: he loves me still.

Let no one dream but that he loves me still.

So let me, if you do not shudder at me,

Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;

Wear black and white, and be a nun like you,

Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;

Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys,

But not rejoicing; mingle with your rites;

Pray and be prayed for; lie before your shrines;

Do each low office of your holy house;

Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole

To poor sick people, richer in His eyes

Who ransomed us, and haler too than I;

And treat their loathsome hurts and heal mine own;

And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer

The sombre close of that voluptuous day,

Which wrought the ruin of my lord the King.’

She said: they took her to themselves; and she

Still hoping, fearing ‘is it yet too late?’

Dwelt with them, till in time their Abbess died.

Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life,

And for the power of ministration in her,

And likewise for the high rank she had borne,

Was chosen Abbess, there, an Abbess, lived

For three brief years, and there, an Abbess, past

To where beyond these voices there is peace.

(THIS IS THE END OF THE ‘ROUND TABLE’ COLLECTION PIPPY!)

The Passing of Arthur

1869

THAT story which the bold Sir Bedivere,

First made and latest left of all the knights,

Told, when the man was no more than a voice

In the white winter of his age, to those

With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.

For on their march to westward, Bedivere,

Who slowly paced among the slumbering host,

Heard in his tent the moanings of the King:

‘I found Him in the shining of the stars,

I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,

But in His ways with men I find Him not.

I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.

O me! for why is all around us here

As if some lesser god had made the world,

But had not force to shape it as he would,

Till the High God behold it from beyond,

And enter it, and make it beautiful?

Or else as if the world were wholly fair,

But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,

And have not power to see it as it is:

Perchance, because we see not to the close; —

For I, being simple, thought to work His will,

And have but stricken with the sword in vain;

And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend

Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm

Reels back into the beast, and is no more.

My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death;

Nay — God my Christ — I pass but shall not die.’

Then, ere that last weird battle in the west,

There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain killed

In Lancelot’s war, the ghost of Gawain blown

Along a wandering wind, and past his ear

Went shrilling, ‘Hollow, hollow all delight!

Hail, King! tomorrow thou shalt pass away.

Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee.

And I am blown along a wandering wind,

And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.’

And fainter onward, like wild birds that change

Their season in the night and wail their way

From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream

Shrilled; but in going mingled with dim cries

Far in the moonlit haze among the hills,

As of some lonely city sacked by night,

When all is lost, and wife and child with wail

Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and called,

‘Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind,

Thine, Gawain, was the voice — are these dim cries

Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild

Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?’

This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake:

‘O me, my King, let pass whatever will,

Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field;

But in their stead thy name and glory cling

To all high places like a golden cloud

For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass.

Light was Gawain in life, and light in death

Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man;

And care not thou for dreams from him, but rise —

I hear the steps of Modred in the west,

And with him many of thy people, and knights

Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown

Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee.

Right well in heart they know thee for the King.

Arise, go forth and conquer as of old.’

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

‘Far other is this battle in the west

Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth,

And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome,

Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall,

And shook him through the north. Ill doom is mine

To war against my people and my knights.

The king who fights his people fights himself.

And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke

That strikes them dead is as my death to me.

Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way

Through this blind haze, which ever since I saw

One lying in the dust at Almesbury,

Hath folded in the passes of the world.’

Then rose the King and moved his host by night,

And ever pushed Sir Modred, league by league,

Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse —

A land of old upheaven from the abyss

By fire, to sink into the abyss again;

Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,

And the long mountains ended in a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

There the pursuer could pursue no more,

And he that fled no further fly the King;

And there, that day when the great light of heaven

Burned at his lowest in the rolling year,

On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.

Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight

Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west.

A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:

Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew

Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold

With formless fear; and even on Arthur fell

Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.

For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,

And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;

And some had visions out of golden youth,

And some beheld the faces of old ghosts

Look in upon the battle; and in the mist

Was many a noble deed, many a base,

And chance and craft and strength in single fights,

And ever and anon with host to host

Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,

Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash

Of battleaxes on shattered helms, and shrieks

After the Christ, of those who falling down

Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist;

And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,

Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,

Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs

In that close mist, and cryings for the light,

Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.

Last, as by some one deathbed after wail

Of suffering, silence follows, or through death

Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,

Save for some whisper of the seething seas,

A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day

Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came

A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew

The mist aside, and with that wind the tide

Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field

Of battle: but no man was moving there;

Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon,

Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave

Brake in among dead faces, to and fro

Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down

Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,

And shivered brands that once had fought with Rome,

And rolling far along the gloomy shores

The voice of days of old and days to be.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere,

And whiter than the mist that all day long

Had held the field of battle was the King:

‘Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world,

And wastes the narrow realm whereon we move,

And beats upon the faces of the dead,

My dead, as though they had not died for me? —

O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fallen

Confusion, till I know not what I am,

Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King.

Behold, I seem but King among the dead.’

Then spake the bold Sir Bedivere: ‘My King,

King everywhere! and so the dead have kings,

There also will I worship thee as King.

Yet still thy life is whole, and still I live

Who love thee; but who hates thee, he that brought

The heathen back among us, yonder stands,

Modred, unharmed, the traitor of thine house.’

Then spake the King: ‘My house hath been my doom.

But call not thou this traitor of my house

Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me.

My house are rather they who sware my vows,

Yea, even while they brake them, owned me King.

And well for thee, saying in my dark hour,

When all the purport of my throne hath failed,

That quick or dead thou holdest me for King.

King am I, whatsoever be their cry;

And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see

Yet, ere I pass.’ And uttering this the King

Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege

Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword

Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow,

Striking the last stroke with Excalibur,

Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.

So all day long the noise of battle rolled

Among the mountains by the winter sea;

Until King Arthur’s Table, man by man,

Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord,

King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep,

The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,

A broken chancel with a broken cross,

That stood on a dark strait of barren land:

On one side lay the Ocean, and on one

Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

‘The sequel of today unsolders all

The goodliest fellowship of famous knights

Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep

They sleep — the men I loved. I think that we

Shall never more, at any future time,

Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,

Walking about the gardens and the halls

Of Camelot, as in the days that were.

I perish by this people which I made, —

Though Merlin sware that I should come again

To rule once more; but, let what will be, be,

I am so deeply smitten through the helm

That without help I cannot last till morn.

Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur,

Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how

In those old days, one summer noon, an arm

Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

Holding the sword — and how I rowed across

And took it, and have worn it, like a king;

And, wheresoever I am sung or told

In aftertime, this also shall be known:

But now delay not: take Excalibur,

And fling him far into the middle mere:

Watch what thou seest, and lightly bring me word.’

To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere:

‘It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus,

Aidless, alone, and smitten through the helm —

A little thing may harm a wounded man;

Yet I thy hest will all perform at full,

Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word.’

So saying, from the ruined shrine he stept,

And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,

Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,

Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang

Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down

By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,

Came on the shining levels of the lake.

There drew he forth the brand Excalibur,

And o’er him, drawing it, the winter moon,

Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth

And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt:

For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks,

Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work

Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long

That both his eyes were dazzled as he stood,

This way and that dividing the swift mind,

In act to throw: but at the last it seemed

Better to leave Excalibur concealed

There in the many-knotted waterflags,

That whistled stiff and dry about the marge.

So strode he back slow to the wounded King.

Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:

‘Hast thou performed my mission which I gave?

What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?’

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:

‘I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,

And the wild water lapping on the crag.’

To whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale:

‘Thou hast betrayed thy nature and thy name,

Not rendering true answer, as beseemed

Thy fealty, nor like a noble knight:

For surer sign had followed, either hand,

Or voice, or else a motion of the mere.

This is a shameful thing for men to lie.

Yet now, I charge thee, quickly go again,

As thou art lief and dear, and do the thing

I bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word.’

Then went Sir Bedivere the second time

Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere,

Counting the dewy pebbles, fixed in thought;

But when he saw the wonder of the hilt,

How curiously and strangely chased, he smote

His palms together, and he cried aloud:

‘And if indeed I cast the brand away,

Surely a precious thing, one worthy note,

Should thus be lost for ever from the earth,

Which might have pleased the eyes of many men.

What good should follow this, if this were done?

What harm, undone? Deep harm to disobey,

Seeing obedience is the bond of rule.

Were it well to obey then, if a king demand

An act unprofitable, against himself?

The King is sick, and knows not what he does.

What record, or what relic of my lord

Should be to aftertime, but empty breath

And rumours of a doubt? But were this kept,

Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings,

Some one might show it at a joust of arms,

Saying, “King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur,

Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake.

Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps

Upon the hidden bases of the hills.”

So might some old man speak in the aftertime

To all the people, winning reverence.

But now much honour and much fame were lost.’

So spake he, clouded with his own conceit,

And hid Excalibur the second time,

And so strode back slow to the wounded King.

Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily:

‘What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?’

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:

‘I heard the water lapping on the crag,

And the long ripple washing in the reeds.’

To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath:

‘Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue,

Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me!

Authority forgets a dying king,

Laid widowed of the power in his eye

That bowed the will. I see thee what thou art,

For thou, the latest-left of all my knights,

In whom should meet the offices of all,

Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt;

Either from lust of gold, or like a girl

Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes.

Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice,

And the third time may prosper, get thee hence:

But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur,

I will arise and slay thee with my hands.’

Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,

And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged

Among the bulrush beds, and clutched the sword,

And strongly wheeled and threw it. The great brand

Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,

And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch,

Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,

Seen where the moving isles of winter shock

By night, with noises of the Northern Sea.

So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur:

But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him

Three times, and drew him under in the mere.

And lightly went the other to the King.

Then spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath:

‘Now see I by thine eyes that this is done.

Speak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?’

And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:

‘Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems

Should blind my purpose, for I never saw,

Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die,

Not though I live three lives of mortal men,

So great a miracle as yonder hilt.

Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him;

But when I looked again, behold an arm,

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

That caught him by the hilt, and brandished him

Three times, and drew him under in the mere.’

And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard:

‘My end draws nigh; ‘tis time that I were gone.

Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight,

And bear me to the margin; yet I fear

My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die.’

So saying, from the pavement he half rose,

Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm,

And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes

As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere

Remorsefully regarded through his tears,

And would have spoken, but he found not words;

Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee,

O’er both his shoulders drew the languid hands,

And rising bore him through the place of tombs.

But, as he walked, King Arthur panted hard,

Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed

When all the house is mute. So sighed the King,

Muttering and murmuring at his ear, ‘Quick, quick!

I fear it is too late, and I shall die.’

But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,

Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked,

Larger than human on the frozen hills.

He heard the deep behind him, and a cry

Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.

Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves

And barren chasms, and all to left and right

The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based

His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang

Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels —

And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,

And the long glories of the winter moon.

Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge,

Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,

Beneath them; and descending they were ware

That all the decks were dense with stately forms,

Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream — by these

Three Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose

A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,

And, as it were one voice, an agony

Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills

All night in a waste land, where no one comes,

Or hath come, since the making of the world.

Then murmured Arthur, ‘Place me in the barge.’

So to the barge they came. There those three Queens

Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept.

But she, that rose the tallest of them all

And fairest, laid his head upon her lap,

And loosed the shattered casque, and chafed his hands,

And called him by his name, complaining loud,

And dropping bitter tears against a brow

Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white

And colourless, and like the withered moon

Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east;

And all his greaves and cuisses dashed with drops

Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls —

That made his forehead like a rising sun

High from the dais-throne — were parched with dust;

Or, clotted into points and hanging loose,

Mixed with the knightly growth that fringed his lips.

So like a shattered column lay the King;

Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest,

From spur to plume a star of tournament,

Shot through the lists at Camelot, and charged

Before the eyes of ladies and of kings.

Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:

‘Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?

Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?

For now I see the true old times are dead,

When every morning brought a noble chance,

And every chance brought out a noble knight.

Such times have been not since the light that led

The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.

But now the whole Round Table is dissolved

Which was an image of the mighty world,

And I, the last, go forth companionless,

And the days darken round me, and the years,

Among new men, strange faces, other minds.’

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?

I have lived my life, and that which I have done

May He within himself make pure! but thou,

If thou shouldst never see my face again,

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

But now farewell. I am going a long way

With these thou seest — if indeed I go

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) —

To the island-valley of Avilion;

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns

And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.’

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail

Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan

That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere

Revolving many memories, till the hull

Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn,

And on the mere the wailing died away.

But when that moan had past for evermore,

The stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn

Amazed him, and he groaned, ‘The King is gone.’

And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,

‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes.’

Whereat he slowly turned and slowly clomb

The last hard footstep of that iron crag;

Thence marked the black hull moving yet, and cried,

‘He passes to be King among the dead,

And after healing of his grievous wound

He comes again; but — if he come no more —

O me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat,

Who shrieked and wailed, the three whereat we gazed

On that high day, when, clothed with living light,

They stood before his throne in silence, friends

Of Arthur, who should help him at his need?’

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint

As from beyond the limit of the world,

Like the last echo born of a great cry,

Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice

Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb

Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,

Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,

Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,

Down that long water opening on the deep

Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go

From less to less and vanish into light.

And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

To the Queen

1873

O loyal to the royal in thyself,

And loyal to thy land, as this to thee —

Bear witness, that rememberable day,

When, pale as yet, and fever-worn, the Prince

Who scarce had plucked his flickering life again

From halfway down the shadow of the grave,

Past with thee through thy people and their love,

And London rolled one tide of joy through all

Her trebled millions, and loud leagues of man

And welcome! witness, too, the silent cry,

The prayer of many a race and creed, and clime —

Thunderless lightnings striking under sea

From sunset and sunrise of all thy realm,

And that true North, whereof we lately heard

A strain to shame us ‘keep you to yourselves;

So loyal is too costly! friends — your love

Is but a burthen: loose the bond, and go.’

Is this the tone of empire? here the faith

That made us rulers? this, indeed, her voice

And meaning, whom the roar of Hougoumont

Left mightiest of all peoples under heaven?

What shock has fooled her since, that she should speak

So feebly? wealthier — wealthier — hour by hour!

The voice of Britain, or a sinking land,

Some third-rate isle half-lost among her seas?

There rang her voice, when the full city pealed

Thee and thy Prince! The loyal to their crown

Are loyal to their own far sons, who love

Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes

For ever-broadening England, and her throne

In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle,

That knows not her own greatness: if she knows

And dreads it we are fallen. — But thou, my Queen,

Not for itself, but through thy living love

For one to whom I made it o’er his grave

Sacred, accept this old imperfect tale,

New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul,

Ideal manhood closed in real man,

Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost,

Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,

And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him

Of Geoffrey’s book, or him of Malleor’s, one

Touched by the adulterous finger of a time

That hovered between war and wantonness,

And crownings and dethronements: take withal

Thy poet’s blessing, and his trust that Heaven

Will blow the tempest in the distance back

From thine and ours: for some are sacred, who mark,

Or wisely or unwisely, signs of storm,

Waverings of every vane with every wind,

And wordy trucklings to the transient hour,

And fierce or careless looseners of the faith,

And Softness breeding scorn of simple life,

Or Cowardice, the child of lust for gold,

Or Labour, with a groan and not a voice,

Or Art with poisonous honey stolen from France,

And that which knows, but careful for itself,

And that which knows not, ruling that which knows

To its own harm: the goal of this great world

Lies beyond sight: yet — if our slowly-grown

And crowned Republic’s crowning common-sense,

That saved her many times, not fail — their fears

Are morning shadows huger than the shapes

That cast them, not those gloomier which forego

The darkness of that battle in the West,

Where all of high and holy dies away.

ENOCH ARDEN AND OTHER POEMS

This collection was released in 1862, offering a range of poems printed in various periodicals over the last decade.  The title poem is based on a tale by Thomas Woolner.  The narrative concerns the eponymous hero, a fisherman turned merchant sailor that leaves his wife Annie and three children to go to sea with his old captain.  Having lost his position due to an accident, Enoch Arden accepts the offer from the Captain, believing he can better serve his family by doing so. However during his voyage, Enoch is shipwrecked on a desert island with two companions; both eventually die, leaving Arden alone there – a situation reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe. The story could also be considered as a variation of the classical myth of Odysseus, who after an absence of twenty years, returns home to find a faithful wife waiting for him.

The first edition

Enoch Arden by George Goodwin Kilburne

CONTENTS

Enoch Arden

Aylmer’s Field

Sea Dreams

The Grandmother

Northern Farmer

Tithonus

The Voyage

In the Valley of Cauteretz

The Flower

Requiescat

The Sailor Boy

The Islet

The Ringlet

A Welcome to Alexandra

Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition

A Dedication

Experiments

Boädicéa

Experiments in Quantity

On Translations of Homer

Milton: Alcaics.

Milton: Hendecasyllabics.

On Translations of Homer

Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse.

Alfred Tennyson by P.Krämer-Friedrich Bruckmann

Enoch Arden

LONG lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;

And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands;

Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf

In cluster; then a moulder’d church; and higher

A long street climbs to one tall-tower’d mill;

And high in heaven behind it a gray down

With Danish barrows; and a hazelwood,

By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes

Green in a cuplike hollow of the down.

Here on this beach a hundred years ago,

Three children of three houses, Annie Lee,

The prettiest little damsel in the port,

And Philip Ray the miller’s only son,

And Enoch Arden, a rough sailor’s lad

Made orphan by a winter shipwreck, play’d

Among the waste and lumber of the shore,

Hard coils of cordage, swarthy fishing-nets,

Anchors of rusty fluke, and boats updrawn;

And built their castles of dissolving sand

To watch them overflow’d, or following up

And flying the white breaker, daily left

The little footprint daily wash’d away.

A narrow cave ran in beneath the cliff:

In this the children play’d at keeping house.

Enoch was host one day, Philip the next,

While Annie still was mistress; but at times

Enoch would hold possession for a week:

‘This is my house and this my little wife.’

‘Mine too’ said Philip ‘turn and turn about:’

When, if they quarrell’d, Enoch stronger-made

Was master: then would Philip, his blue eyes

All flooded with the helpless wrath of tears,

Shriek out ‘I hate you, Enoch,’ and at this

The little wife would weep for company,

And pray them not to quarrel for her sake,

And say she would he little wife to both.

But when the dawn of rosy childhood past,

And the new warmth of life’s ascending sun

Was felt by either, either fixt his heart

On that one girl; and Enoch spoke his love,

But Philip loved in silence; and the girl

Seem’d kinder unto Philip than to him;

But she loved Enoch; tho’ she knew it not,

And would if ask’d deny it. Enoch set

A purpose evermore before his eyes,

To hoard all savings to the uttermost,

To purchase his own boat, and make a home

For Annie: and so prosper’d that at last

A luckier or a bolder fisherman,

A carefuller in peril, did not breathe

For leagues along that breaker-beaten coast

Than Enoch. Likewise had he served a year

On board a merchantman, and made himself

Full sailor; and he thrice had pluck’d a life

From the dread sweep of the down-streaming seas:

And all men look’d upon him favourably:

And ere he touch’d his one-and-twentieth May

He purchased his own boat, and made a home

For Annie, neat and nestlike, halfway up

The narrow street that clamber’d toward the mill.

Then, on a golden autumn eventide,

The younger people making holiday,

With bag and sack and basket, great and small,

Went nutting to the hazels. Philip stay’d

(His father lying sick and needing him)

An hour behind; but as he climb’d the hill,

Just where the prone edge of the wood began

To feather toward the hollow, saw the pair,

Enoch and Annie, sitting hand-in-hand,

His large gray eyes and weather-beaten face

All-kindled by a still and sacred fire,

That burn’d as on an altar. Philip look’d,

And in their eyes and faces read his doom;

Then, as their faces drew together, groan’d,

And slipt aside, and like a wounded life

Crept down into the hollows of the wood;

There, while the rest were loud in merry-making,

Had his dark hour unseen, and rose and past

Bearing a lifelong hunger in his heart.

So these were wed, and merrily rang the bells,

And merrily ran the years, seven happy years,

Seven happy years of health and competence,

And mutual love and honourable toil;

With children; first a daughter. In him woke,

With his first babe’s first cry, the noble wish

To save all earnings to the uttermost,

And give his child a better bringing-up

Than his had been, or hers; a wish renew’d,

When two years after came a boy to be

The rosy idol of her solitudes,

While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,

Or often journeying landward; for in truth

Enoch’s white horse, and Enoch’s ocean-spoil

In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,

Rough-redden’d with a thousand winter gales,

Not only to the market-cross were known,

But in the leafy lanes behind the down,

Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,

And peacock-yewtree of the lonely Hall,

Whose Friday fare was Enoch’s ministering.

Then came a change, as all things human change.

Ten miles to northward of the narrow port

Open’d a larger haven: thither used

Enoch at times to go by land or sea;

And once when there, and clambering on a mast

In harbour, by mischance he slipt and fell:

A limb was broken when they lifted him;

And while he lay recovering there, his wife

Bore him another son, a sickly one:

Another hand crept too across his trade

Taking her bread and theirs: and on him fell,

Altho’ a grave and staid God-fearing man,

Yet lying thus inactive, doubt and gloom.

He seem’d, as in a nightmare of the night,

To see his children leading evermore

Low miserable lives of hand-to-mouth,

And her, he loved, a beggar: then he pray’d

‘Save them from this, whatever comes to me.’

And while he pray’d, the master of that ship

Enoch had served in, hearing his mischance,

Came, for he knew the man and valued him,

Reporting of his vessel China-bound,

And wanting yet a boatswain. Would he go?

There yet were many weeks before she sail’d,

Sail’d from this port. Would Enoch have the place?

And Enoch all at once assented to it,

Rejoicing at that answer to his prayer.

So now that shadow of mischance appear’d

No graver than as when some little cloud

Cuts off the fiery highway of the sun,

And isles a light in the offing: yet the wife —

When he was gone — the children — what to do?

Then Enoch lay long-pondering on his plans;

To sell the boat — and yet he loved her well —

How many a rough sea had he weather’d in her!

He knew her, as a horseman knows his horse —

And yet to sell her — then with what she brought

Buy goods and stores — set Annie forth in trade

With all that seamen needed or their wives —

So might she keep the house while he was gone.

Should he not trade himself out yonder? go

This voyage more than once? yea twice or thrice —

As oft as needed — last, returning rich,

Become the master of a larger craft,

With fuller profits lead an easier life,

Have all his pretty young ones educated,

And pass his days in peace among his own.

Thus Enoch in his heart determined all:

Then moving homeward came on Annie pale,

Nursing the sickly babe, her latest-born.

Forward she started with a happy cry,

And laid the feeble infant in his arms;

Whom Enoch took, and handled all his limbs,

Appraised his weight and fondled father-like,

But had no heart to break his purposes

To Annie, till the morrow, when he spoke.

Then first since Enoch’s golden ring had girt

Her finger, Annie fought against his will:

Yet not with brawling opposition she,

But manifold entreaties, many a tear,

Many a sad kiss by day by night renew’d

(Sure that all evil would come out of it)

Besought him, supplicating, if he cared

For her or his dear children, not to go.

He not for his own self caring but her,

Her and her children, let her plead in vain;

So grieving held his will, and bore it thro’.

For Enoch parted with his old sea-friend,

Bought Annie goods and stores, and set his hand

To fit their little streetward sitting-room

With shelf and corner for the goods and stores.

So all day long till Enoch’s last at home,

Shaking their pretty cabin, hammer and axe,

Auger and saw, while Annie seem’d to hear

Her own death-scaffold raising, shrill’d and rang,

Till this was ended, and his careful hand, —

The space was narrow, — having order’d all

Almost as neat and close as Nature packs

Her blossom or her seedling, paused; and he,

Who needs would work for Annie to the last,

Ascending tired, heavily slept till morn.

And Enoch faced this morning of farewell

Brightly and boldly. All his Annie’s fears,

Save, as his Annie’s, were a laughter to him.

Yet Enoch as a brave God-fearing man

Bow’d himself down, and in that mystery

Where God-in-man is one with man-in-God,

Pray’d for a blessing on his wife and babes

Whatever came to him: and then he said

‘Annie, this voyage by the grace of God

Will bring fair weather yet to all of us.

Keep a clean hearth and a clear fire for me,

For I’ll be back, my girl, before you know it.’

Then lightly rocking baby’s cradle ‘and he,

This pretty, puny, weakly little one, —

Nay — for I love him all the better for it —

God bless him, he shall sit upon my knees

And I will tell him tales of foreign parts,

And make him merry, when I come home again.

Come, Annie, come, cheer up before I go.’

Him running on thus hopefully she heard,

And almost hoped herself; but when he turn’d

The current of his talk to graver things

In sailor fashion roughly sermonizing

On providence and trust in Heaven, she heard,

Heard and not heard him; as the village girl,

Who sets her pitcher underneath the spring,

Musing on him that used to fill it for her,

Hears and not hears, and lets it overflow.

At length she spoke ‘O Enoch, you are wise;

And yet for all your wisdom well know I

That I shall look upon your face no more.’

‘Well then,’ said Enoch, ‘I shall look on yours.

Annie, the ship I sail in passes here

(He named the day) get you a seaman’s glass,

Spy out my face, and laugh at all your fears.’

But when the last of those last moments came,

‘Annie, my girl, cheer up, be comforted,

Look to the babes, and till I come again

Keep everything shipshape, for I must go.

And fear no more for me; or if you fear

Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds.

Is He not yonder in those uttermost

Parts of the morning? if I flee to these

Can I go from Him? and the sea is His,

The sea is His: He made it.’

Enoch rose,

Cast his strong arms about his drooping wife,

And kiss’d his wonder-stricken little ones;

But for the third, the sickly one, who slept

After a night of feverous wakefulness,

When Annie would have raised him Enoch said

‘Wake him not; let him sleep; how should the child

Remember this?’ and kiss’d him in his cot.

But Annie from her baby’s forehead clipt

A tiny curl, and gave it: this he kept

Thro’ all his future; but now hastily caught

His bundle, waved his hand, and went his way.

She when the day, that Enoch mention’d, came,

Borrow’d a glass, but all in vain: perhaps

She could not fix the glass to suit her eye;

Perhaps her eye was dim, hand tremulous;

She saw him not: and while he stood on deck

Waving, the moment and the vessel past.

Ev’n to the last dip of the vanishing sail

She watch’d it, and departed weeping for him;

Then, tho’ she mourn’d his absence as his grave,

Set her sad will no less to chime with his,

But throve not in her trade, not being bred

To barter, nor compensating the want

By shrewdness, neither capable of lies,

Nor asking overmuch and taking less,

And still foreboding ‘what would Enoch say?’

For more than once, in days of difficulty

And pressure, had she sold her wares for less

Than what she gave in buying what she sold:

She fail’d and sadden’d knowing it; and thus,

Expectant of that news which never came,

Gain’d for her own a scanty sustenance,

And lived a life of silent melancholy.

Now the third child was sickly-born and grew

Yet sicklier, tho’ the mother cared for it

With all a mother’s care: nevertheless,

Whether her business often call’d her from it,

Or thro’ the want of what it needed most,

Or means to pay the voice who best could tell

What most it needed — howsoe’er it was,

After a lingering, — ere she was aware, —

Like the caged bird escaping suddenly,

The little innocent soul flitted away.

In that same week when Annie buried it,

Philip’s true heart, which hunger’d for her peace

(Since Enoch left he had not look’d upon her),

Smote him, as having kept aloof so long.

‘Surely,’ said Philip, ‘I may see her now,

May be some little comfort;’ therefore went,

Past thro’ the solitary room in front,

Paused for a moment at an inner door,

Then struck it thrice, and, no one opening,

Enter’d; but Annie, seated with her grief,

Fresh from the burial of her little one,

Cared not to look on any human face,

But turn’d her own toward the wall and wept.

Then Philip standing up said falteringly

‘Annie, I came to ask a favour of you.’

He spoke; the passion in her moan’d reply

‘Favour from one so sad and so forlorn

As I am!’ half abash’d him; yet unask’d,

His bashfulness and tenderness at war,

He set himself beside her, saying to her:

‘I came to speak to you of what he wish’d,

Enoch, your husband: I have ever said

You chose the best among us — a strong man:

For where he fixt his heart he set his hand

To do the thing he will’d, and bore it thro’.

And wherefore did he go this weary way,

And leave you lonely? not to see the world —

For pleasure? — nay, but for the wherewithal

To give his babes a better bringing-up

Than his had been, or yours: that was his wish.

And if he come again, vext will he be

To find the precious morning hours were lost.

And it would vex him even in his grave,

If he could know his babes were running wild

Like colts about the waste. So, Annie, now —

Have we not known each other all our lives?

I do beseech you by the love you bear

Him and his children not to say me nay —

For, if you will, when Enoch comes again

Why then he shall repay me — if you will,

Annie — for I am rich and well-to-do.

Now let me put the boy and girl to school:

This is the favour that I came to ask.’

Then Annie with her brows against the wall

Answer’d ‘I cannot look you in the face;

I seem so foolish and so broken down.

When you came in my sorrow broke me down;

And now I think your kindness breaks me down;

But Enoch lives; that is borne in on me:

He will repay you: money can be repaid;

Not kindness such as yours.’

And Philip ask’d

‘Then you will let me, Annie?’

There she turn’d,

She rose, and fixt her swimming eyes upon him,

And dwelt a moment on his kindly face,

Then calling down a blessing on his head

Caught at his hand, and wrung it passionately,

And past into the little garth beyond.

So lifted up in spirit he moved away.

Then Philip put the boy and girl to school,

And bought them needful books, and everyway,

Like one who does his duty by his own,

Made himself theirs; and tho’ for Annie’s sake,

Fearing the lazy gossip of the port,

He oft denied his heart his dearest wish,

And seldom crost her threshold, yet he sent

Gifts by the children, garden-herbs and fruit,

The late and early roses from his wall,

Or conies from the down, and now and then,

With some pretext of fineness in the meal

To save the offence of charitable, flour

From his tall mill that whistled on the waste.

But Philip did not fathom Annie’s mind:

Scarce could the woman when he came upon her,

Out of full heart and boundless gratitude

Light on a broken word to thank him with.

But Philip was her children’s all-in-all;

From distant corners of the street they ran

To greet his hearty welcome heartily;

Lords of his house and of his mill were they;

Worried his passive ear with petty wrongs

Or pleasures, hung upon him, play’d with him

And call’d him Father Philip. Philip gain’d

As Enoch lost; for Enoch seem’d to them

Uncertain as a vision or a dream,

Faint as a figure seen in early dawn

Down at the far end of an avenue,

Going we know not where: and so ten years,

Since Enoch left his hearth and native land,

Fled forward, and no news of Enoch came.

It chanced one evening Annie’s children long’d

To go with others, nutting to the wood,

And Annie would go with them; then they begg’d

For Father Philip (as they call’d him) too:

Him, like the working bee in blossom-dust,

Blanch’d with his mill, they found; and saying to him

‘Come with us Father Philip’ he denied;

But when the children pluck’d at him to go,

He laugh’d, and yielded readily to their wish,

For was not Annie with them? and they went.

But after scaling half the weary down,

Just where the prone edge of the wood began

To feather toward the hollow, all her force

Fail’d her; and sighing, ‘Let me rest’ she said:

So Philip rested with her well-content;

While all the younger ones with jubilant cries

Broke from their elders, and tumultuously

Down thro’ the whitening hazels made a plunge

To the bottom, and dispersed, and bent or broke

The lithe reluctant boughs to tear away

Their tawny clusters, crying to each other

And calling, here and there, about the wood.

But Philip sitting at her side forgot

Her presence, and remember’d one dark hour

Here in this wood, when like a wounded life

He crept into the shadow: at last he said,

Lifting his honest forehead, ‘Listen, Annie,

How merry they are down yonder in the wood.

Tired, Annie?’ for she did not speak a word.

‘Tired?’ but her face had fall’n upon her hands;

At which, as with a kind of anger in him,

‘The ship was lost,’ he said, ‘the ship was lost!

No more of that! why should you kill yourself

And make them orphans quite?’ And Annie said

‘I thought not of it: but — I know not why —

Their voices make me feel so solitary.’

Then Philip coming somewhat closer spoke.

‘Annie, there is a thing upon my mind,

And it has been upon my mind so long,

That tho’ I know not when it first came there,

I know that it will out at last. O Annie,

It is beyond all hope, against all chance,

That he who left you ten long years ago

Should still be living; well then — let me speak:

I grieve to see you poor and wanting help:

I cannot help you as I wish to do

Unless — they say that women are so quick —

Perhaps you know what I would have you know —

I wish you for my wife. I fain would prove

A father to your children: I do think

They love me as a father: I am sure

That I love them as if they were mine own;

And I believe, if you were fast my wife,

That after all these sad uncertain years,

We might be still as happy as God grants

To any of his creatures. Think upon it:

For I am well-to-do — no kin, no care,

No burthen, save my care for you and yours:

And we have known each other all our lives,

And I have loved you longer than you know.’

Then answer’d Annie; tenderly she spoke:

‘You have been as God’s good angel in our house.

God bless you for it, God reward you for it,

Philip, with something happier than myself.

Can one love twice? can you be ever loved

As Enoch was? what is it that you ask?’

‘I am content’ he answer’d ‘to be loved

A little after Enoch.’ ‘O’ she cried,

Scared as it were, ‘dear Philip, wait a while:

If Enoch comes — but Enoch will not come —

Yet wait a year, a year is not so long:

Surely I shall be wiser in a year:

O wait a little!’ Philip sadly said

‘Annie, as I have waited all my life

I well may wait a little.’ ‘Nay’ she cried

‘I am bound: you have my promise — in a year:

Will you not bide your year as I bide mine?’

And Philip answer’d ‘I will bide my year.’

Here both were mute, till Philip glancing up

Beheld the dead flame of the fallen day

Pass from the Danish barrow overhead;

Then fearing night and chill for Annie, rose

And sent his voice beneath him thro’ the wood.

Up came the children laden with their spoil;

Then all descended to the port, and there

At Annie’s door he paused and gave his hand,

Saying gently ‘Annie, when I spoke to you,

That was your hour of weakness. I was wrong,

I am always bound to you, but you are free.’

Then Annie weeping answer’d ‘I am bound.’

She spoke; and in one moment as it were,

While yet she went about her household ways,

Ev’n as she dwelt upon his latest words,

That he had loved her longer than she knew,

That autumn into autumn flash’d again,

And there he stood once more before her face,

Claiming her promise. ‘Is it a year?’ she ask’d.

‘Yes, if the nuts’ he said ‘be ripe again:

Come out and see.’ But she — she put him off —

So much to look to — such a change — a month —

Give her a month — she knew that she was bound —

A month — no more. Then Philip with his eyes

Full of that lifelong hunger, and his voice

Shaking a little like a drunkard’s hand,

‘Take your own time, Annie, take your own time.’

And Annie could have wept for pity of him;

And yet she held him on delayingly

With many a scarce-believable excuse,

Trying his truth and his long-sufferance,

Till half-another year had slipt away.

By this the lazy gossips of the port,

Abhorrent of a calculation crost,

Began to chafe as at a personal wrong.

Some thought that Philip did but trifle with her;

Some that she but held off to draw him on;

And others laugh’d at her and Philip too,

As simple folk that knew not their own minds,

And one, in whom all evil fancies clung

Like serpent eggs together, laughingly

Would hint at worse in either. Her own son

Was silent, tho’ he often look’d his wish;

But evermore the daughter prest upon her

To wed the man so dear to all of them

And lift the household out of poverty;

And Philip’s rosy face contracting grew

Careworn and wan; and all these things fell on her

Sharp as reproach.

At last one night it chanced

That Annie could not sleep, but earnestly

Pray’d for a sign ‘my Enoch is he gone?’

Then compass’d round by the blind wall of night

Brook’d not the expectant terror of her heart,

Started from bed, and struck herself a light,

Then desperately seized the holy Book,

Suddenly set it wide to find a sign,

Suddenly put her finger on the text,

‘Under the palm-tree.’ That was nothing to her:

No meaning there: she closed the Book and slept:

When lo! her Enoch sitting on a height,

Under a palm-tree, over him the Sun:

‘He is gone,’ she thought, ‘he is happy, he is singing

Hosanna in the highest: yonder shines

The Sun of Righteousness, and these be palms

Whereof the happy people strowing cried

�Hosanna in the highest!�’ Here she woke,

Resolved, sent for him and said wildly to him

‘There is no reason why we should not wed.’

‘Then for God’s sake,’ he answer’d, ‘both our sakes,

So you will wed me, let it be at once.’

So these were wed and merrily rang the bells,

Merrily rang the bells and they were wed.

But never merrily beat Annie’s heart.

A footstep seem’d to fall beside her path,

She knew not whence; a whisper on her ear,

She knew not what; nor loved she to be left

Alone at home, nor ventured out alone.

What ail’d her then, that ere she enter’d, often

Her hand dwelt lingeringly on the latch,

Fearing to enter: Philip thought he knew:

Such doubts and fears were common to her state,

Being with child: but when her child was born,

Then her new child was as herself renew’d,

Then the new mother came about her heart,

Then her good Philip was her all-in-all,

And that mysterious instinct wholly died.

And where was Enoch? prosperously sail’d

The ship ‘Good Fortune,’ tho’ at setting forth

The Biscay, roughly ridging eastward, shook

And almost overwhelm’d her, yet unvext

She slipt across the summer of the world,

Then after a long tumble about the Cape

And frequent interchange of foul and fair,

She passing thro’ the summer world again,

The breath of heaven came continually

And sent her sweetly by the golden isles,

Till silent in her oriental haven.

There Enoch traded for himself, and bought

Quaint monsters for the market of those times,

A gilded dragon, also, for the babes.

Less lucky her home-voyage: at first indeed

Thro’ many a fair sea-circle, day by day,

Scarce-rocking, her full-busted figure-head

Stared o’er the ripple feathering from her bows:

Then follow’d calms, and then winds variable,

Then baffling, a long course of them; and last

Storm, such as drove her under moonless heavens

Till hard upon the cry of ‘breakers’ came

The crash of ruin, and the loss of all

But Enoch and two others. Half the night,

Buoy’d upon floating tackle and broken spars,

These drifted, stranding on an isle at morn

Rich, but the loneliest in a lonely sea.

No want was there of human sustenance,

Soft fruitage, mighty nuts, and nourishing roots;

Nor save for pity was it hard to take

The helpless life so wild that it was tame.

There in a seaward-gazing mountain-gorge

They built, and thatch’d with leaves of palm, a hut,

Half hut, half native cavern. So the three,

Set in this Eden of all plenteousness,

Dwelt with etemal summer, ill-content.

For one, the youngest, hardly more than boy,

Hurt in that night of sudden ruin and wreck,

Lay lingering out a five-years’ death-in-life.

They could not leave him. After he was gone,

The two remaining found a fallen stem;

And Enoch’s comrade, careless of himself,

Fire-hollowing this in Indian fashion, fell

Sun-stricken, and that other lived alone.

In those two deaths he read God’s warning ‘wait.’

The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns

And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,

The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,

The lightning flash of insect and of bird,

The lustre of the long convolvuluses

That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran

Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows

And glories of the broad belt of the world,

All these he saw; but what he fain had seen

He could not see, the kindly human face,

Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard

The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,

The league-long roller thundering on the reef,

The moving whisper of huge trees that branch’d

And blossom’d in the zenith, or the sweep

Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,

As down the shore he ranged, or all day long

Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,

A shipwreck’d sailor, waiting for a sail:

No sail ftom day to day, but every day

The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts

Among the palms and ferns and precipices;

The blaze upon the waters to the east;

The blaze upon his island overhead;

The blaze upon the waters to the west;

Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,

The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again

The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail.

There often as he watch’d or seem’d to watch,

So still, the golden lizard on him paused,

A phantom made of many phantoms moved

Before him haunting him, or he himself

Moved haunting people, things and places, known

Far in a darker isle beyond the line;

The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house,

The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,

The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall,

The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill

November dawns and dewy-glooming downs,

The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves,

And the low moan of leaden-colour’d seas.

Once likewise, in the ringing of his ears,

Tho’ faintly, merrily — far and far away —

He heard the pealing of his parish bells;

Then, tho’ he knew not wherefore, started up

Shuddering, and when the beauteous hateful isle

Return’d upon him, had not his poor heart

Spoken with That, which being everywhere

Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone,

Surely the man had died of solitude.

Thus over Enoch’s early-silvering head

The sunny and rainy seasons came and went

Year after year. His hopes to see his own,

And pace the sacred old familiar fields,

Not yet had perish’d, when his lonely doom

Came suddenly to an end. Another ship

(She wanted water) blown by baffling winds,

Like the Good Fortune, from her destined course,

Stay’d by this isle, not knowing where she lay:

For since the mate had seen at early dawn

Across a break on the mist-wreathen isle

The silent water slipping from the hills,

They sent a crew that landing burst away

In search of stream or fount, and fill’d the shores

With clamour. Downward from his mountain gorge

Stept the long-hair’d long-bearded solitary,

Brown, looking hardly human, strangely clad,

Muttering and mumbling, idiotlike it seem’d,

With inarticulate rage, and making signs

They knew not what: and yet he led the way

To where the rivulets of sweet water ran;

And ever as he mingled with the crew,

And heard them talking, his long-bounden tongue

Was loosen’d, till he made them understand;

Whom, when their casks were fill’d they took aboard:

And there the tale he utter’d brokenly,

Scarce-credited at first but more and more,

Amazed and melted all who listen’d to it:

And clothes they gave him and free passage home;

But oft he work’d among the rest and shook

His isolation from him. None of these

Came from his country, or could answer him,

If question’d, aught of what he cared to know.

And dull the voyage was with long delays,

The vessel scarce sea-worthy; but evermore

His fancy fled before the lazy wind

Returning, till beneath a clouded moon

He like a lover down thro’ all his blood

Drew in the dewy meadowy morning-breath

Of England, blown across her ghostly wall:

And that same morning officers and men

Levied a kindly tax upon themselves,

Pitying the lonely man, and gave him it:

Then moving up the coast they landed him,

Ev’n in that harbour whence he sail’d before.

There Enoch spoke no word to any one,

But homeward — home — what home? had he a home?

His home, he walk’d. Bright was that afternoon,

Sunny but chill; till drawn thro’ either chasm,

Where either haven open’d on the deeps,

Roll’d a sea-haze and whelm’d the world in gray;

Cut off the length of highway on before,

And left but narrow breadth to left and right

Of wither’d holt or tilth or pasturage.

On the nigh-naked tree the robin piped

Disconsolate, and thro’ the dripping haze

The dead weight of the dead leaf bore it down:

Thicker the drizzle grew, deeper the gloom;

Last, as it seem’d, a great mist-blotted light

Flared on him, and he came upon the place.

Then down the long street having slowly stolen,

His heart foreshadowing all calamity,

His eyes upon the stones, he reach’d the home

Where Annie lived and loved him, and his babes

In those far-off seven happy years were born;

But finding neither light nor murmur there

(A bill of sale gleam’d thro’ the drizzle) crept

Still downward thinking ‘dead or dead to me!’

Down to the pool and narrow wharf he went,

Seeking a tavern which of old he knew,

A front of timber-crost antiquity,

So propt, worm-eaten, ruinously old,

He thought it must have gone; but he was gone

Who kept it; and his widow Miriam Lane,

With daily-dwindling profits held the house;

A haunt of brawling sea men once, but now

Stiller, with yet a bed for wandering men.

There Enoch rested silent many days.

But Miriam Lane was good and garrulous,

Nor let him be, but often breaking in,

Told him, with other annals of the port,

Not knowing — Enoch was so brown, so bow’d,

So broken — all the story of his house.

His baby’s death, her growing poverty,

How Philip put her little ones to school,

And kept them in it, his long wooing her,

Her slow consent, and marriage, and the birth

Of Philip’s child: and o’er his countenance

No shadow past, nor motion: any one,

Regarding, well had deem’d he felt the tale

Less than the teller: only when she closed

‘Enoch, poor man, was cast away and lost’

He, shaking his gray head pathetically,

Repeated muttering ‘cast away and lost;’

Again in deeper inward whispers ‘lost!’

But Enoch yearn’d to see her face again;

‘If I might look on her sweet face again

And know that she is happy.’ So the thought

Haunted and harass’d him, and drove him forth,

At evening when the dull November day

Was growing duller twilight, to the hill.

There he sat down gazing on all below;

There did a thousand memories roll upon him,

Unspeakable for sadness. By and by

The ruddy square of comfortable light,

Far-blazing from the rear of Philip’s house,

Allured him, as the beacon-blaze allures

The bird of passage, till he madly strikes

Against it, and beats out his weary life.

For Philip’s dwelling fronted on the street,

The latest house to landward; but behind,

With one small gate that open’d on the waste,

Flourish’d a little garden square and wall’d:

And in it throve an ancient evergreen,

A yewtree, and all round it ran a walk

Of shingle, and a walk divided it:

But Enoch shunn’d the middle walk and stole

Up by the wall, behind the yew; and thence

That which he better might have shunn’d, if griefs

Like his have worse or better, Enoch saw.

For cups and silver on the burnish’d board

Sparkled and shone; so genial was the hearth:

And on the right hand of the hearth he saw

Philip, the slighted suitor of old times,

Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees;

And o’er her second father stoopt a girl,

A later but a loftier Annie Lee,

Fair-hair’d and tall, and from her lifted hand

Dangled a length of ribbon and a ring

To tempt the babe, who rear’d his creasy arms,

Caught at and ever miss’d it, and they laugh’d;

And on the left hand of the hearth he saw

The mother glancing often toward her babe,

But turning now and then to speak with him,

Her son, who stood beside her tall and strong,

And saying that which pleased him, for he smiled.

Now when the dead man come to life beheld

His wife his wife no more, and saw the babe

Hers, yet not his, upon the father’s knee,

And all the warmth, the peace, the happiness,

And his own children tall and beautiful,

And him, that other, reigning in his place,

Lord of his rights and of his children’s love, —

Then he, tho’ Miriam Lane had told him all,

Because things seen are mightier than things heard,

Stagger’d and shook, holding the branch, and fear’d

To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry,

Which in one moment, like the blast of doom,

Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth.

He therefore turning softly like a thief,

Lest the harsh shingle should grate underfoot,

And feeling all along the garden-wall,

Lest he should swoon and tumble and be found,

Crept to the gate, and open’d it, and closed,

As lightly as a sick man’s chamber-door,

Behind him, and came out upon the waste.

And there he would have knelt, but that his knees

Were feeble, so that falling prone he dug

His fingers into the wet earth, and pray’d.

‘Too hard to bear! why did they take me thence?

O God Almighty, blessed Saviour, Thou

That didst uphold me on my lonely isle,

Uphold me, Father, in my loneliness

A little longer! aid me, give me strength

Not to tell her, never to let her know.

Help me not to break in upon her peace.

My children too! must I not speak to these?

They know me not. I should betray myself.

Never: No father’s kiss for me — the girl

So like her mother, and the boy, my son.’

There speech and thought and nature fail’d a little,

And he lay tranced; but when he rose and paced

Back toward his solitary home again,

All down the long and narrow street he went

Beating it in upon his weary brain,

As tho’ it were the burthen of a song,

‘Not to tell her, never to let her know.’

He was not all unhappy. His resolve

Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore

Prayer from a living source within the will,

And beating up thro’ all the bitter world,

Like fountains of sweet water in the sea,

Kept him a living soul. ‘This miller’s wife’

He said to Miriam ‘that you spoke about,

Has she no fear that her first husband lives?’

‘Ay, ay, poor soul’ said Miriam, ‘fear enow!

If you could tell her you had seen him dead,

Why, that would be her comfort;’ and he thought

‘After the Lord has call’d me she shall know,

I wait His time,’ and Enoch set himself,

Scorning an alms, to work whereby to live.

Almost to all things could he turn his hand.

Cooper he was and carpenter, and wrought

To make the boatmen fishing-nets, or help’d

At lading and unlading the tall barks,

That brought the stinted commerce of those days;

Thus earn’d a scanty living for himself:

Yet since he did but labour for himself,

Work without hope, there was not life in it

Whereby the man could live; and as the year

Roll’d itself round again to meet the day

When Enoch had return’d, a languor came

Upon him, gentle sickness, gradually

Weakening the man, till he could do no more,

But kept the house, his chair, and last his bed.

And Enoch bore his weakness cheerfully.

For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck

See thro’ the gray skirts of a lifting squall

The boat that bears the hope of life approach

To save the life despair’d of, than he saw

Death dawning on him, and the close of all.

For thro’ that dawning gleam’d a kindlier hope

On Enoch thinking ‘after I am gone,

Then may she learn I lov’d her to the last.’

He call’d aloud for Miriam Lane and said

‘Woman, I have a secret — only swear,

Before I tell you — swear upon the book

Not to reveal it, till you see me dead.’

‘Dead,’ clamour’d the good woman, ‘hear him talk!

I warrant, man, that we shall bring you round.’

‘Swear’ added Enoch sternly ‘on the book.’

And on the book, half-frighted, Miriam swore.

Then Enoch rolling his gray eyes upon her,

‘Did you know Enoch Arden of this town?’

‘Know him?’ she said ‘I knew him far away.

Ay, ay, I mind him coming down the street;

Held his head high, and cared for no man, he.’

Slowly and sadly Enoch answer’d her;

‘His head is low, and no man cares for him.

I think I have not three days more to live;

I am the man.’ At which the woman gave

A half-incredulous, half-hysterical cry.

‘You Arden, you! nay, — sure he was a foot

Higher than you be.’ Enoch said again

‘My God has bow’d me down to what I am;

My grief and solitude have broken me;

Nevertheless, know you that I am he

Who married — but that name has twice been changed —

I married her who married Philip Ray.

Sit, listen.’ Then he told her of his voyage,

His wreck, his lonely life, his coming back,

His gazing in on Annie, his resolve,

And how he kept it. As the woman heard,

Fast flow’d the current of her easy tears,

While in her heart she yearn’d incessantly

To rush abroad all round the little haven,

Proclaiming Enoch Arden and his woes;

But awed and promise-bounden she forbore,

Saying only ‘See your bairns before you go!

Eh, let me fetch’em, Arden,’ and arose

Eager to bring them down, for Enoch hung

A moment on her words, but then replied:

‘Woman, disturb me not now at the last,

But let me hold my purpose till I die.

Sit down again; mark me and understand,

While I have power to speak. I charge you now,

When you shall see her, tell her that I died

Blessing her, praying for her, loving her;

Save for the bar between us, loving her

As when she laid her head beside my own.

And tell my daughter Annie, whom I saw

So like her mother, that my latest breath

Was spent in blessing her and praying for her.

And tell my son that I died blessing him.

And say to Philip that I blest him too;

He never meant us any thing but good.

But if my children care to see me dead,

Who hardly knew me living, let them come,

I am their father; but she must not come,

For my dead face would vex her after-life.

And now there is but one of all my blood

Who will embrace me in the world-to-be:

This hair is his: she cut it off and gave it,

And I have borne it with me all these years,

And thought to bear it with me to my grave;

But now my mind is changed, for I shall see him,

My babe in bliss: wherefore when I am gone,

Take, give her this, for it may comfort her:

It will moreover be a token to her,

That I am he.’

He ceased; and Miriam Lane

Made such a voluble answer promising all,

That once again he roll’d his eyes upon her

Repeating all he wish’d, and once again

She promised.

Then the third night after this,

While Enoch slumber’d motionless and pale,

And Miriam watch’d and dozed at intervals,

There came so loud a calling of the sea,

That all the houses in the haven rang.

He woke, he rose, he spread his arms abroad

Crying with a loud voice ‘A sail! a sail!

I am saved;’ and so fell back and spoke no more.

So past the strong heroic soul away.

And when they buried him the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

Aylmer’s Field

1793

DUST are our frames; and gilded dust, our pride

Looks only for a moment whole and sound;

Like that long-buried body of the king,

Found lying with his urns and ornaments,

Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven,

Slipt into ashes and was found no more.

Here is a story which in rougher shape

Came from a grizzled cripple, whom I saw

Sunning himself in a waste field alone —

Old, and a mine of memories — who had served,

Long since, a bygone Rector of the place,

And been himself a part of what he told.

SIR AYLMER AYLMER that almighty man,

The county God — in whose capacious hall,

Hung with a hundred shields, the family tree

Sprang from the midriff of a prostrate king —

Whose blazing wyvern weathercock’d the spire,

Stood from his walls and wing’d his entry-gates

And swang besides on many a windy sign —

Whose eyes from under a pyramidal head

Saw from his windows nothing save his own —

What lovelier of his own had he than her,

His only child, his Edith, whom he loved

As heiress and not heir regretfully?

But ‘he that marries her marries her name’

This fiat somewhat soothed himself and wife,

His wife a faded beauty of the Baths,

Insipid as the Queen upon a card;

Her all of thought and bearing hardly more

Than his own shadow in a sickly sun.

A land of hops and poppy-mingled corn,

Little about it stirring save a brook!

A sleepy land where under the same wheel

The same old rut would deepen year by year;

Where almost all the village had one name;

Where Aylmer follow’d Aylmer at the Hall

And Averill Averill at the Rectory

Thrice over; so that Rectory and Hall,

Bound in an immemorial intimacy,

Were open to each other; tho’ to dream

That Love could bind them closer well had made

The hoar hair of the Baronet bristle up

With horror, worse than had he heard his priest

Preach an inverted scripture, sons of men

Daughters of God; so sleepy was the land.

And might not Averill, had he will’d it so,

Somewhere beneath his own low range of roofs,

Have also set his many-shielded tree?

There was an Aylmer-Averill marriage once,

When the red rose was redder than itself,

And York’s white rose as red as Lancaster’s,

With wounded peace which each had prick’d to death.

‘Not proven’ Averill said, or laughingly

‘Some other race of Averills’ — prov’n or no,

What cared he? what, if other or the same?

He lean’d not on his fathers but himself.

But Leolin, his brother, living oft

With Averill, and a year or two before

Call’d to the bar, but ever call’d away

By one low voice to one dear neighborhood,

Would often, in his walks with Edith, claim

A distant kinship to the gracious blood

That shook the heart of Edith hearing him.

Sanguine he was: a but less vivid hue

Than of that islet in the chestnut-bloom

Flamed his cheek; and eager eyes, that still

Took joyful note of all things joyful, beam’d,

Beneath a manelike mass of rolling gold,

Their best and brightest, when they dwelt on hers.

Edith, whose pensive beauty, perfect else,

But subject to the season or the mood,

Shone like a mystic star between the less

And greater glory varying to and fro,

We know not wherefore; bounteously made,

And yet so finely, that a troublous touch

Thinn’d, or would seem to thin her in a day,

A joyous to dilate, as toward the light.

And these had been together from the first.

Leolin’s first nurse was, five years after, hers:

So much the boy foreran; but when his date

Doubled her own, for want of playmates, he

(Since Averill was a decad and a half

His elder, and their parents underground)

Had tost his ball and flown his kite, and roll’d

His hoop to pleasure Edith, with her dipt

Against the rush of the air in the prone swing,

Made blossom-ball or daisy-chain, arranged

Her garden, sow’d her name and kept it green

In living letters, told her fairy-tales,

Show’d here the fairy footings on the grass,

The little dells of cowslip, fairy palms,

The petty marestail forest, fairy pines,

Or from the tiny pitted target blew

What look’d a flight of fairy arrows aim’d

All at one mark, all hitting: make-believes

For Edith and himself: or else he forged,

But that was later, boyish histories

Of battle, bold adventure, dungeon, wreck,

Flights, terrors, sudden rescues, and true love

Crown’d after trial; sketches rude and faint,

But where a passion yet unborn perhaps

Lay hidden as the music of the moon

Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale.

And thus together, save for college-times

Or Temple-eaten terms, a couple, fair

As ever painter painted, poet sang,

Or Heav’n in lavish bounty moulded, grew.

And more and more, the maiden woman-grown,

He wasted hours with Averill; there, when first

The tented winter-field was broken up

Into that phalanx of the summer spears

That soon should wear the garland; there again

When burr and bine were gather’d; lastly there

At Christmas; ever welcome at the Hall,

On whose dull sameness his full tide of youth

Broke with a phosphorescence cheering even

My lady; and the Baronet yet had laid

No bar between them: dull and self-involved,

Tall and erect, but bending from his height

With half-allowing smiles for all the world,

And mighty courteous in the main — his pride

Lay deeper than to wear it as his ring —

He, like an Aylmer in his Aylmerism,

Would care no more for Leolin’s walking with her

Than for his old Newfoundland’s, when they ran

To loose him at the stables, for he rose

Twofooted at the limit of his chain,

Roaring to make a third: and how should Love,

Whom the cross-lightnings of four chance-met eyes

Flash into fiery life from nothing, follow

Such dear familiarities of dawn?

Seldom, but when he does, Master of all.

So these young hearts not knowing that they loved,

Not she at least, nor conscious of a bar

Between them, nor by plight or broken ring

Bound, but an immemorial intimacy,

Wander’d at will, but oft accompanied

By Averill: his, a brother’s love, that hung

With wings of brooding shelter o’er her peace,

Might have been other, save for Leolin’s —

Who knows? but so they wander’d, hour by hour

Gather’d the blossom that rebloom’d, and drank

The magic cup that fill’d itself anew.

A whisper half reveal’d her to herself.

For out beyond her lodges, where the brook

Vocal, with here and there a silence, ran

By sallowy rims, arose the laborers’ homes,

A frequent haunt of Edith, on low knolls

That dimpling died into each other, huts

At random scatter’d, each a nest in bloom.

Her art, her hand, her counsel all had wrought

About them: here was one that, summer-blanch’d,

Was parcel-bearded with the traveller’s-joy

In Autumn, parcel ivy-clad; and here

The warm-blue breathings of a hidden hearth

Broke from a bower of vine and honeysuckle:

One look’d all rosetree, and another wore

A close-set robe of jasmine sown with stars:

This had a rosy sea of gillyflowers

About it; this, a milky-way on earth,

Like visions in the Northern dreamer’s heavens,

A lily-avenue climbing to the doors;

One, almost to the martin-haunted eaves

A summer burial deep in hollyhocks;

Each, its own charm; and Edith’s everywhere;

And Edith ever visitant with him,

He but less loved than Edith, of her poor:

For she — so lowly-lovely and so loving,

Queenly responsive when the loyal hand

Rose from the clay it work’d in as she past,

Not sowing hedgerow texts and passing by,

Nor dealing goodly counsel from a height

That makes the lowest hate it, but a voice

Of comfort and an open hand of help,

A splendid presence flattering the poor roofs

Revered as theirs, but kindlier than themselves

To ailing wife or wailing infancy

Or old bedridden palsy, — was adored;

He, loved for her and for himself.    A grasp

Having the warmth and muscle of the heart,

A childly way with children, and a laugh

Ringing like proved golden coinage true,

Were no false passport to that easy realm,

Where once with Leolin at her side the girl,

Nursing a child, and turning to the warmth

The tender pink five-beaded baby-soles,

Heard the good mother softly whisper ‘Bless,

God bless ‘em; marriages are made in Heaven.’

A flash of semi-jealousy clear’d it to her.

My Lady’s Indian kinsman unannounced

With half a score of swarthy faces came.

His own, tho’ keen and bold and soldierly,

Sear’d by the close ecliptic, was not fair;

Fairer his talk, a tongue that ruled the hour,

Tho’ seeming boastful: so when first he dash’d

Into the chronicle of a deedful day,

Sir Aylmer half forgot his lazy smile

Of patron ‘Good! my lady’s kinsman! good!’

My lady with her fingers interlock’d,

And rotatory thumbs on silken knees,

Call’d all her vital spirits into each ear

To listen: unawares they flitted off,

Busying themselves about the flowerage

That stood from our a stiff brocade in which,

The meteor of a splendid season, she,

Once with this kinsman, ah so long ago,

Stept thro’ the stately minuet of those days:

But Edith’s eager fancy hurried with him

Snatch’d thro’ the perilous passes of his life:

Till Leolin ever watchful of her eye

Hated him with a momentary hate.

Wife-hunting, as the rumor ran, was he:

I know not, for he spoke not, only shower’d

His oriental gifts on everyone

And most on Edith: like a storm he came,

And shook the house, and like a storm he went.

Among the gifts he left her (possibly

He flow’d and ebb’d uncertain, to return

When others had been tested) there was one,

A dagger, in rich sheath with jewels on it

Sprinkled about in gold that branch’d itself

Fine as ice-ferns on January panes

Made by a breath.    I know not whence at first,

Nor of what race, the work; but as he told

The story, storming a hill-fort of thieves

He got it; for their captain after fight,

His comrades having fought their last below,

Was climbing up the valley; at whom he shot:

Down from the beetling crag to which he clung

Tumbled the tawny rascal at his feet,

This dagger with him, which when now admired

By Edith whom his pleasure was to please,

At once the costly Sahib yielded it to her.

And Leolin, coming after he was gone,

Tost over all her presents petulantly:

And when she show’d the wealthy scabbard, saying

‘Look what a lovely piece of workmanship!’

Slight was his answer ‘Well — I care not for it:’

Then playing with the blade he prick’d his hand,

‘A gracious gift to give a lady, this!’

‘But would it be more gracious’ ask’d the girl

‘Were I to give this gift of his to one

That is no lady?’    ‘Gracious?    No’ said he.

‘Me? — but I cared not for it.    O pardon me,

I seem to be ungraciousness itself.’

‘Take it’ she added sweetly ‘tho’ his gift;

For I am more ungracious ev’n than you,

I care not for it either;’ and he said

‘Why then I love it:’ but Sir Aylmer past,

And neither loved nor liked the thing he heard.

The next day came a neighbor.    Blues and reds

They talk’d of: blues were sure of it, he thought:

Then of the latest fox — where started — kill’d

In such a bottom: ‘Peter had the brush,

My Peter, first:’ and did Sir Aylmer know

That great pock-pitten fellow had been caught?

Then made his pleasure echo, hand to hand,

And rolling as it were the substance of it

Between his palms a moment up and down —

‘The birds were warm, the birds were warm upon him;

We have him now:’ and had Sir Aylmer heard —

Nay, but he must — the land was ringing of it —

This blacksmith-border marriage — one they knew —

Raw from the nursery — who could trust a child?

That cursed France with her egalities!

And did Sir Aylmer (deferentially

With nearing chair and lower’d accent) think —

For people talk’d — that it was wholly wise

To let that handsome fellow Averill walk

So freely with his daughter? people talk’d —

The boy might get a notion into him;

The girl might be entangled ere she knew.

Sir Aylmer Aylmer slowly stiffening spoke:

‘The girl and boy, Sir, know their differences!’

‘Good’ said his friend ‘but watch!’ and he ‘enough,

More than enough, Sir!    I can guard my own.’

They parted, and Sir Aylmer Aylmer watch’d.

Pale, for on her the thunders of the house

Had fallen first, was Edith that same night;

Pale as the Jeptha’s daughter, a rough piece

Of early rigid color, under which

Withdrawing by the counter door to that

Which Leolin open’d, she cast back upon him

A piteous glance, and vanish’d.    He, as one

Caught in a burst of unexpected storm,

And pelted with outrageous epithets,

Turning beheld the Powers of the House

On either side the hearth, indignant; her,

Cooling her false cheek with a featherfan,

Him glaring, by his own stale devil spurr’d,

And, like a beast hard-ridden, breathing hard.

‘Ungenerous, dishonorable, base,

Presumptuous! trusted as he was with her,

The sole succeeder to their wealth, their lands,

The last remaining pillar of their house,

The one transmitter of their ancient name,

Their child.’  ‘Our child!’  ‘Our heiress!’  ‘Ours!’ for still,

Like echoes from beyond a hollow, came

Her sicklier iteration.    Last he said

‘Boy, mark me! for your fortunes are to make.

I swear you shall not make them out of mine.

Now inasmuch as you have practised on her,

Perplext her, made her half forget herself,

Swerve from her duty to herself and us —

Things in an Aylmer deem’d impossible,

Far as we track ourselves — I say that this, —

Else I withdraw favor and countenance

From you and yours for ever — shall you do.

Sir, when you see her — but you shall not see her —

No, you shall write, and not to her, but me:

And you shall say that having spoken with me,

And after look’d into yourself, you find

That you meant nothing — as indeed you know

That you meant nothing.    Such as match as this!

Impossible, prodigious!’    These were words,

As meted by his measure of himself,

Arguing boundless forbearance: after which,

And Leolin’s horror-stricken answer, ‘I

So foul a traitor to myself and her,

Never oh never,’ for about as long

As the wind-hover hangs in the balance, paused

Sir Aylmer reddening from the storm within,

Then broke all bonds of courtesy, and crying

‘Boy, should I find you by my doors again,

My men shall lash you from the like a dog;

Hence!’ with a sudden execration drove

The footstool from before him, and arose;

So, stammering ‘scoundrel’ out of teeth that ground

As in a dreadful dream, while Leolin still

Retreated half-aghast, the fierce old man

Follow’d, and under his own lintel stood

Storming with lifted hands, a hoary face

Meet for the reverence of the hearth, but now,

Beneath a pale and unimpassion’d moon,

Vext with unworthy madness, and deform’d.

Slowly and conscious of the rageful eye

That watch’d him, till he heard the ponderous door

Close, crashing with long echoes thro’ the land,

Went Leolin; then, his passions all in flood

And masters of his motion, furiously

Down thro’ the bright lawns to his brother’s ran,

And foam’d away his heart at Averill’s ear:

Whom Averill solaced as he might, amazed:

The man was his, had been his father’s, friend:

He must have seen, himself had seen it long;

He must have known, himself had known: besides,

He never yet had set his daughter forth

Here in the woman-markets of the west,

Where our Caucasians let themselves be sold.

Some one, he thought, had slander’d Leolin to him.

‘Brother, for I have loved you more as a son

Than brother, let me tell you: I myself —

What is their pretty saying? jilted is it?

Jilted I was: I say it for your peace.

Pain’d, and, as bearing in myself the shame

The woman should have borne, humiliated,

I lived for years a stunted sunless life;

Till after our good parents past away

Watching your growth, I seem’d again to grow.

Leolin, I almost sin in envying you:

The very whitest lamb in all my fold

Loves you: I know her: the worst thought she has

Is whiter even than her pretty hand:

She must prove true: for, brother, where two fight

The strongest wins, and truth and love are strength,

And you are happy: let her parents be.’

But Leolin cried out the more upon them —

Insolent, brainless, heartless! heiress, wealth,

Their wealth, their heiress! wealth enough was theirs

For twenty matches.    Were he lord of this,

Why, twenty boys and girls should marry on it,

And forty blest ones bless him, and himself

Be wealthy still, ay wealthier.    He believed

This filthy marriage-hindering Mammon made

The harlot of the cities: nature crost

Was mother of the foul adulteries

That saturate soul with body.    Name, too! name,

Their ancient name! they might be proud; its worth

Was being Edith’s.    Ah, how pale she had look’d

Darling, to-night! they must have rated her

Beyond all tolerance.    These old pheasant-lords,

These partridge-breeders of a thousand years,

Who had mildew’d in their thousands, doing nothing

Since Egbert — why, the greater their disgrace!

Fall back upon a name! rest, rot in that!

Not keep it noble, make it nobler? fools,

With such a vantage-ground for nobleness!

He had known a man, a quintessence of man,

The life of all — who madly loved — and he,

Thwarted by one of these old father-fools,

Had rioted his life out, and made an end.

He would not do it! her sweet face and faith

Held him from that: but he had powers, he knew it:

Back would he to his studies, make a name,

Name, fortune too: the world should ring of him

To shame these mouldy Aylmers in their graves:

Chancellor, or what is greatest would he be —

‘O brother, I am grieved to learn your grief —

Give me my fling, and let me say my say.’

At which, like one that sees his own excess,

And easily forgives it as his own,

He laugh’d; and then was mute; but presently

Wept like a storm: and honest Averill seeing

How low his brother’s mood had fallen, fetch’d

His richest beeswing from a binn reserved

For banquets, praised the waning red, and told

The vintage — when this Aylmer came of age —

Then drank and past it; till at length the two,

Tho’ Leolin flamed and fell again, agreed

That much allowance must be made for men.

After an angry dream this kindlier glow

Faded with morning, but his purpose held.

Yet once by night again the lovers met,

A perilous meeting under the tall pines

That darken’d all the northward of her Hall.

Him, to her meek and modest bosom prest

In agony, she promised that no force,

Persuasion, no, nor death could alter her:

He, passionately hopefuller, would go,

Labor for his own Edith, and return

In such a sunlight of prosperity

He should not be rejected.    ‘Write to me!

They loved me, and because I love their child

They hate me: there is war between us, dear,

Which breaks all bonds but ours; we must remain

Sacred to one another.’    So they talk’d,

Poor children, for their comfort: the wind blew;

The rain of heaven, and their own bitter tears,

Tears, and the careless rain of heaven, mixt

Upon their faces, as they kiss’d each other

In darkness, and above them roar’d the pine.

So Leolin went; and as we task ourselves

To learn a language known but smatteringly

In phrases here and there at random, toil’d

Mastering the lawless science of our law,

That codeless myriad of precedent,

That wilderness of single instances,

Thro’ which a few, by wit or fortune led,

May beat a pathway out to wealth and fame.

The jests, that flash’d about the pleader’s room,

Lightning of the hour, the pun, the scurrilous tale, —

Old scandals buried now seven decads deep

In other scandals that have lived and died,

And left the living scandal that shall die —

Were dead to him already; bent as he was

To make disproof of scorn, and strong in hopes,

And prodigal of all brain-labor he,

Charier of sleep, and wine and exercise,

Except when for a breathing-while at eve,

Some niggard fraction of an hour, he ran

Beside the river-bank: and then indeed

Harder the times were, and the hands of power

Were bloodier, and the according hearts of men

Seem’d harder too; but the soft river-breeze,

Which fann’d the gardens of that rival rose

Yet fragrant in a heart remembering

His former talks with Edith, on him breathed

Far purelier in his rushings to and fro,

After his books, to flush his blood with air,

Then to his books again.    My lady’s cousin,

Half-sickening of his pension’d afternoon,

Drove in upon the student once or twice,

Ran a Malayan muck against the times,

Had golden hopes for France and all mankind,

Answer’d all queries touching those at home

With a heaved shoulder and a saucy smile,

And fain had haled him out into the world,

And air’d him there: his nearer friend would say

‘Screw not the chord too sharply lest it snap.’

Then left alone he pluck’d her dagger forth

From where his worldless heart had kept it warm,

Kissing his vows upon it like a knight.

And wrinkled benchers often talk’d of him

Approvingly, and prophesied his rise:

For heart, I think, help’d head: her letters too,

Tho’ far between, and coming fitfully

Like broken music, written as she found

Or made occasion, being strictly watch’d,

Charm’d him thro’ every labyrinth till he saw

An end, a hope, a light breaking upon him.

But they that cast her spirit into flesh,

Her worldy-wise begetters, plagued themselves

To sell her, those good parents, for her good.

Whatever eldest-born of rank or wealth

Might lie within their compass, him they lured

Into their net made pleasant by the baits

Of gold and beauty, wooing him to woo.

So month by month the noise about their doors,

And distant blaze of those dull banquets, made

The nightly wirer of their innocent hare

Falter before he took it.    All in vain.

Sullen, defiant, pitying, wroth, return’d

Leolin’s rejected rivals from their suit

So often, that the folly taking wings

Slipt o’er those lazy limits down the wind

With rumor, and became in other fields

A mockery to the yeomen over ale,

And laughter to their lords: but those at home,

As hunters round a hunted creature draw

The cordon close and closer toward the death,

Narrow’d her goings out and comings in;

Forbad her first the house of Averill,

Then closed her access to the wealthiest farms,

Last from her own home-circle of the poor

They barr’d her: yet she bore it: yet her cheek

Kept color: wondrous! but, O mystery!

What amulet drew her down to that old oak,

So old, that twenty years before, a part

Falling had let appear the brand of John —

Once grovelike, each huge arm a tree, but now

The broken base of a black tower, a cave

Of touchwood, with a single flourishing spray.

There the manorial lord too curiously

Raking in that millenial touchwood-dust

Found for himself a bitter treasure-trove;

Burst his own wyvern on the seal, and read

Writhing a letter from his child, for which

Came at the moment Leolin’s emissary,

A crippled lad, and coming turn’d to fly,

But scared with threats of jail and halter gave

To him that fluster’d his poor parish wits

The letter which he brought, and swore besides

To play their go-between as heretofore

Nor let them know themselves betray’d, and then,

Soul-stricken at their kindness to him, went

Hating his own lean heart and miserable.

Thenceforward oft from out a despot dream

Panting he woke, and oft as early as dawn

Aroused the black republic on his elms,

Sweeping the frothfly from the fescue, brush’d

Thro’ the dim meadow toward his treasure-trove,

Seized it, took home, and to my lady, who made

A downward crescent of her minion mouth,

Listless in all despondence, read; and tore,

As if the living passion symbol’d there

Were living nerves to feel the rent; and burnt,

Now chafing at his own great self defied,

Now striking on huge stumbling-blocks of scorn

In babyisms, and dear diminutives

Scatter’d all over the vocabulary

Of such a love as like a chidden babe,

After much wailing, hush’d itself at last

Hopeless of answer: then tho’ Averill wrote

And bad him with good heart sustain himself —

All would be well — the lover heeded not,

But passionately restless came and went,

And rustling once at night about the place,

There by a keeper shot at, slightly hurt,

Raging return’d: nor was it well for her

Kept to the garden now, and grove of pines,

Watch’d even there; and one was set to watch

The watcher, and Sir Aylmer watch’d them all,

Yet bitterer from his readings: once indeed,

Warm’d with his wines, or taking pride in her,

She look’d so sweet, he kiss’d her tenderly

Not knowing what possess’d him: that one kiss

Was Leolin’s one strong rival upon earth;

Seconded, for my lady follow’d suit,

Seem’d hope’s returning rose: and then ensued

A Martin’s summer of his faded love,

Or ordeal by kindness; after this

He seldom crost his child without a sneer;

The mother flow’d in shallower acrimonies:

Never one kindly smile, one kindly word:

So that the gentle creature shut from all

Her charitable use, and face to face

With twenty months of silence, slowly lost

Nor greatly cared to lose, her hold on life.

Last, some low fever ranging round to spy

The weakness of a people or a house,

Like flies that haunt a wound, or deer, or men,

Or almost all that is, hurting the hurt —

Save Christ as we believe him — found the girl

And flung her down upon a couch of fire,

Where careless of the household faces near,

And crying upon the name of Leolin,

She, and with her the race of Aylmer, past.

Star to star vibrates light: may soul to soul

Strike thro’ a finer element of her own?

So, — from afar, — touch as at once? or why

That night, that moment, when she named his name,

Did the keen shriek ‘yes love, yes Edith, yes,’

Shrill, till the comrade of his chambers woke,

And came upon him half-arisen from sleep,

With a weird bright eye, sweating and trembling,

His hair as it were crackling into flames,

His body half flung forward in pursuit,

And his long arms stretch’d as to grasp a flyer:

Nor knew he wherefore he had made the cry;

And being much befool’d and idioted

By the rough amity of the other, sank

As into sleep again.    The second day,

My lady’s Indian kinsman rushing in,

A breaker of the bitter news from home,

Found a dead man, a letter edged with death

Beside him, and the dagger which himself

Gave Edith, reddn’d with no bandit’s blood:

‘From Edith’ was engraven on the blade.

Then Averill went and gazed upon his death.

And when he came again, his flock believed —

Beholding how the years which are not Time’s

Had blasted him — that many thousand days

Were clipt by horror from his term of life.

Yet the sad mother, for the second death

Scarce touch’d her thro’ that nearness of the first,

And being used to find her pastor texts,

Sent to the harrow’d brother, praying him

To speak before the people of her child,

And fixt the Sabbath.    Darkly that day rose:

Autumn’s mock sunshine of the faded woods

Was all the life of it; for hard on these,

A breathless burthen of low-folded heavens

Stifled and chill’d at once: but every roof

Sent out a listener: many too had known

Edith among the hamlets round, and since

The parents’ harshness and the hapless loves

And double death were widely murmur’d, left

Their own gray tower, or plain-faced tabernacle,

To hear him; all in mourning these, and those

With blots of it about them, ribbon, glove

Or kerchief; while the church, — one night, except

For greenish glimmerings thro’ the lancets, — made

Still paler the pale head of him, who tower’d

Above them, with his hopes in either grave.

Long o’er his bent brows linger’d Averill,

His face magnetic to the hand from which

Livid he pluck’d it forth, and labor’d thro’

His brief prayer-prelude, gave the verse ‘Behold,

Your house is left unto you desolate!’

But lapsed into so long a pause again

As half amazed half frighted all his flock:

Then from his height and loneliness of grief

Bore down in flood, and dash’d his angry heart

Against the desolations of the world.

Never since our bad earth became one sea,

Which rolling o’er the palaces of the proud,

And all but those who knew the living God —

Eight that were left to make a purer world —

When since had flood, fire, earthquake, thunder wrought

Such waste and havoc as the idolatries,

Which from the low light of mortality

Shot up their shadows to the Heaven of Heavens,

And worshipt their own darkness as the Highest?

‘Gash thyself, priest, and honor thy brute Baal,

And to thy worst self sacrifice thyself,

For with thy worst self hast thou clothed thy God.’

Then came a Lord in no wise like to Baal.

The babe shall lead the lion.    Surely now

The wilderness shall blossom as the rose.

Crown thyself, worm, and worship thine own lusts! —

No coarse and blockish God of acreage

Stands at thy gate for thee to grovel to —

Thy God is far diffused in noble groves

And princely halls, and farms, and flowing lawns,

And heaps of living gold that daily grow,

And title-scrolls and gorgeous heraldries.

In such a shape dost thou behold thy God.

Thou wilt not gash thy flesh for him; for thine

Fares richly, in fine linen, not a hair

Ruffled upon the scarfskin, even while

The deathless ruler of thy dying house

Is wounded to the death that cannot die;

And tho’ thou numberest with the followers

Of One who cried ‘leave all and follow me.’

Thee therefore with His light about thy feet,

Thee with His message ringing in thine ears,

Thee shall thy brother man, the Lord from Heaven,

Born of a village girl, carpenter’s son,

Wonderful, Prince of peace, the Mighty God,

Count the more base idolater of the two;

Crueller: as not passing thro’ the fire

Bodies, but souls — thy children’s — thro’ the smoke,

The blight of low desires — darkening thine own

To thine own likeness; or if one of these,

Thy better born unhappily from thee,

Should, as by miracle, grow straight and fair —

Friends, I was bid to speak of such a one

By those who most have cause to sorrow for her —

Fairer than Rachel by the palmy well,

Fairer than Ruth among the fields of corn,

Fair as the Angel that said ‘hail’ she seem’d,

Who entering fill’d the house with sudden light.

For so mine own was brighten’d: where indeed

The roof so lowly but that beam of Heaven

Dawn’d sometime thro’ the doorway? whose the babe

Too ragged to be fondled on her lap,

Warm’d at her bosom?    The poor child of shame,

The common care whom no one cared for, leapt

To greet her, wasting his forgotten heart,

As with the mother he had never known,

In gambols; for her fresh and innocent eyes

Had such a star of morning in their blue,

That all neglected places of the field

Broke into nature’s music when they saw her.

Low was her voice, but won mysterious way

Thro’ the seal’d ear to which a louder one

Was all but silence — free of alms her hand —

The hand that robed your cottage-walls with flowers

Has often toil’d to clothe your little ones;

How often placed upon the sick man’s brow

Cool’d it, or laid his feverous pillow smooth!

Had you one sorrow and she shared it not?

One burthen and she would not lighten it?

One spiritual doubt she did not soothe?

Or when some heat of difference sparkled out,

How sweetly would she glide between your wraths,

And steal you from each other! for she walk’d

Wearing the light yoke of that Lord of love,

Who still’d the rolling wave of Galilee!

And one — of him I was not bid to speak —

Was always with her, whom you also knew.

Him too you loved, for he was worthy love.

And these had been together from the first;

They might have been together till the last.

Friends, this frail bark of ours, when sorely tried,

May wreck itself without the pilot’s guilt,

Without the captain’s knowledge: hope with me.

Whose shame is that, if he went hence with shame?

Nor mine the fault, if losing both of these

I cry to vacant chairs and widow’d walls,

“My house is left unto me desolate.”

While thus he spoke, his hearers wept; but some,

Sons of the glebe, with other frowns than those

That knit themselves for summer shadow, scowl’d

At their great lord.    He, when it seem’d he saw

No pale sheet-lightnings from afar, but fork’d

Of the near storm, and aiming at his head,

Sat anger-charm’d from sorrow, soldierlike,

Erect: but when the preacher’s cadence flow’d

Softening thro’ all the gentle attributes

Of his lost child, the wife, who watch’d his face,

Paled at a sudden twitch of his iron mouth;

And ‘O pray God that he hold up’ she thought

‘Or surely I shall shame myself and him.’

‘Nor yours the blame — for who beside your hearths

Can take her place — if echoing me you cry

“Our house is left unto us desolate?”

But thou, O thou that killest, hadst thou known,

O thou that stonest, hadst thou understood

The things belonging to thy peace and ours!

Is there no prophet but the voice that calls

Doom upon kings, or in the waste ‘Repent’?

Is not our own child on the narrow way,

Who down to those that saunter in the broad

Cries ‘come up hither,’ as a prophet to us?

Is there no stoning save with flint and rock?

Yes, as the dead we weep for testify —

No desolation but by sword and fire?

Yes, as your moanings witness, and myself

Am lonelier, darker, earthlier for my loss.

Give me your prayers, for he is past your prayers,

Not past the living fount of pity in Heaven.

But I that thought myself long-suffering, meek,

Exceeding “poor in spirit” — how the words

Have twisted back upon themselves, and mean

Vileness, we are grown so proud — I wish’d my voice

A rushing tempest of the wrath of God

To blow these sacrifices thro’ the world —

Sent like the twelve-divided concubine

To inflame the tribes: but there — out yonder — earth

Lightens from her own central Hell — O there

The red fruit of an old idolatry —

The heads of chiefs and princes fall so fast,

They cling together in the ghastly sack —

The land all shambles — naked marriages

Flash from the bridge, and ever-murder’d France,

By shores that darken with the gathering wolf,

Runs in a river of blood to the sick sea.

Is this a time to madden madness then?

Was this a time for these to flaunt their pride?

May Pharaoh’s darkness, folds as dense as those

Which hid the Holiest from the people’s eyes

Ere the great death, shroud this great sin from all:

Doubtless our narrow world must canvass it:

O rather pray for those and pity them,

Who thro’ their own desire accomplish’d bring

Their own gray hairs with sorrow to the grave —

Who broke the bond which they desired to break,

Which else had link’d their race with times to come —

Who wove coarse webs to snare her purity,

Grossly contriving their dear daughter’s good —

Poor souls, and knew not what they did, but sat

Ignorant, devising their own daughter’s death!

May not that earthly chastisement suffice?

Have not our love and reverence left them bare?

Will not another take their heritage?

Will there be children’s laughter in their hall

For ever and for ever, or one stone

Left on another, or is it a light thing

That I their guest, their host, their ancient friend,

I made by these the last of all my race

Must cry to these the last of theirs, as cried

Christ ere His agony to those that swore

Not by the temple but the gold, and made

Their own traditions God, and slew the Lord,

And left their memories a world’s curse—”Behold,

Your house is left unto you desolate?”’

Ended he had not, but she brook’d no more:

Long since her heart had beat remorselessly,

Her crampt-up sorrow pain’d her, and a sense

Of meanness in her unresisting life.

Then their eyes vext her; for on entering

He had cast the curtains of their seat aside —

Black velvet of the costliest — she herself

Had seen to that: fain had she closed them now,

Yet dared not stir to do it, only near’d

Her husband inch by inch, but when she laid,

Wifelike, her hand in one of his, he veil’d

His face with the other, and at once, as falls

A creeper when the prop is broken, fell

The woman shrieking at his feet, and swoon’d.

Then her own people bore along the nave

Her pendent hands, and narrow meagre face

Seam’d with the shallow cares of fifty years:

And here the Lord of all the landscape round

Ev’n to its last horizon, and of all

Who peer’d at him so keenly, follow’d out

Tall and erect, but in the middle aisle

Reel’d, as a footsore ox in crowded ways

Stumbling across the market to his death,

Unpitied; for he groped as blind, and seem’d

Always about to fall, grasping the pews

And oaken finials till he touch’d the door;

Yet to the lychgate, where his chariot stood,

Strode from the porch, tall and erect again.

But nevermore did either pass the gate

Save under pall with bearers.    In one month,

Thro’ weary and yet wearier hours,

The childless mother went to seek her child;

And when he felt the silence of his house

About him, and the change and not the change,

And those fixt eyes of painted ancestors

Staring for ever from their gilded walls

On him their last descendant, his own head

Began to droop, to fall; the man became

Imbecile; his one word was ‘desolate’;

Dead for two years before his death was he;

But when the second Christmas came, escaped

His keepers, and the silence which he felt,

To find a deeper in the narrow gloom

By wife and child; nor wanted at his end

The dark retinue reverencing death

At golden thresholds; nor from tender hearts,

And those who sorrow’d o’er a vanish’d race,

Pity, the violet on the tyrant’s grave.

Then the great Hall was wholly broken down,

And the broad woodland parcell’d into farms;

And where the two contrived their daughter’s good,

Lies the hawk’s cast, the mole has made his run,

The hedgehog underneath the plaintain bores,

The rabbit fondles his own harmless face,

The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there

Follows the mouse, and all is open field.

Sea Dreams

A CITY clerk, but gently born and bred;

His wife, an unknown artist’s orphan child —

One babe was theirs, a Margaret, three years old:

They, thinking that her clear germander eye

Droopt in the giant-factoried city-gloom,

Came, with a month’s leave given them, to the sea:

For which his gains were dock’d, however small:

Small were his gains, and hard his work; besides,

Their slender household fortunes (for the man

Had risk’d his little) like the little thrift,

Trembled in perilous places o’er a deep:

And oft, when sitting all alone, his face

Would darken, as he cursed his credulousness,

And that one unctuous mount which lured him, rogue,

To buy strange shares in some Peruvian mine.

Now seaward-bound for health they gain’d a coast,

All sand and cliff and deep-inrunning cave,

At close of day; slept, woke, and went the next,

The Sabbath, pious variers from the church,

To chapel; where a heated pulpiteer,

Not preaching simple Christ to simple men,

Announced the coming doom, and fulminated

Against the scarlet woman and her creed:

For sideways up he swung his arms, and shriek’d

‘Thus, thus with violence,’ ev’n as if he held

The Apocalyptic millstone, and himself

Were that great Angel; ‘Thus with violence

Shall Babylon be cast into the sea;

Then comes the close.’    The gentle-hearted wife

Sat shuddering at the ruin of a world;

He at his own: but when the wordy storm

Had ended, forth they came and paced the shore,

Ran in and out the long sea-framing caves,

Drank the large air, and saw, but scarce believed

(The sootflake of so many a summer still

Clung to their fancies) that they saw, the sea.

So now on sand they walk’d, and now on cliff,

Lingering about the thymy promontories,

Till all the sails were darken’d in the west,

And rosed in the east: then homeward and to bed:

Where she, who kept a tender Christian hope

Haunting a holy text, and still to that

Returning, as the bird returns, at night,

‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,’

Said, ‘Love, forgive him:’ but he did not speak;

And silenced by that silence lay the wife,

Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,

And musing on the little lives of men,

And how they mar this little by their feuds.

But while the two were sleeping, a full tide

Rose with ground-swell, which, on the foremost rocks

Touching, upjetted in spirts of wild sea-smoke,

And scaled in sheets of wasteful foam, and fell

In vast sea-cataracts — ever and anon

Dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs

Heard thro’ the living roar.  At this the babe,

Their Margaret cradled near them, wail’d and woke

The mother, and the father suddenly cried,

‘A wreck, a wreck!’ then turn’d, and groaning said,

‘Forgive!  How many will say, “forgive,” and find

A sort of absolution in the sound

To hate a little longer!  No; the sin

That neither God nor man can well forgive,

Hypocrisy, I saw it in him at once.

Is it so true that second thoughts are best?

Not first, and third, which are a riper first?

Too ripe, too late! they come too late for use.

Ah love, there surely lives in man and beast

Something divine to warn them of their foes:

And such a sense, when first I fronted him,

Said, “trust him not;” but after, when I came

To know him more, I lost it, knew him less;

Fought with what seem’d my own uncharity;

Sat at his table; drank his costly wines;

Made more and more allowance for his talk;

Went further, fool! and trusted him with all,

All my poor scrapings from a dozen years

Of dust and deskwork: there is no such mine,

None; but a gulf of ruin, swallowing gold,

Not making.  Ruin’d! ruin’d! the sea roars

Ruin: a fearful night!’

‘Not fearful; fair,’

Said the good wife, ‘if every star in heaven

Can make it fair: you do but bear the tide.

Had you ill dreams?’

‘O yes,’ he said, ‘I dream’d

Of such a tide swelling toward the land,

And I from out the boundless outer deep

Swept with it to the shore, and enter’d one

Of those dark caves that run beneath the cliffs.

I thought the motion of the boundless deep

Bore through the cave, and I was heaved upon it

In darkness: then I saw one lovely star

Larger and larger.  “What a world,” I thought,

“To live in!” but in moving I found

Only the landward exit of the cave,

Bright with the sun upon the stream beyond:

And near the light a giant woman sat,

All over earthy, like a piece of earth,

A pickaxe in her hand: then out I slipt

Into a land all of sun and blossom, trees

As high as heaven, and every bird that sings:

And here the night-light flickering in my eyes

Awoke me.’

‘That was then your dream,’ she said,

‘Not sad, but sweet.’

‘So sweet, I lay,’ said he,

‘And mused upon it, drifting up the stream

In fancy, till I slept again, and pieced

The broken vision; for I dream’d that still

The motion of the great deep bore me on,

And that the woman walk’d upon the brink:

I wonder’d at her strength, and ask’d her of it:

“It came,” she said, “by working in the mines:”

O then to ask her of my shares, I thought;

And ask’d; but not a word; she shook her head.

And then the motion of the current ceased,

And there was rolling thunder; and we reach’d

A mountain, like a wall of burs and thorns;

But she with her strong feet up the steep hill

Trod out a path: I follow’d; and at top

She pointed seaward: there a fleet of glass,

That seem’d a fleet of jewels under me,

Sailing along before a gloomy cloud

That not one moment ceased to thunder, past

In sunshine: right across its track there lay,

Down in the water, a long reef of gold,

Or what seem’d gold: and I was glad at first

To think that in our often-ransack’d world

Still so much gold was left; and then I fear’d

Lest the gay navy there should splinter on it,

And fearing waved my arm to warn them off;

An idle signal, for the brittle fleet

(I thought I could have died to save it) near’d,

Touch’d, clink’d, and clash’d, and vanish’d, and I woke,

I heard the clash so clearly.  Now I see

My dream was Life; the woman honest Work;

And my poor venture but a fleet of glass

Wreck’d on a reef of visionary gold.’

‘Nay,’ said the kindly wife to comfort him,

‘You raised your arm, you tumbled down and broke

The glass with little Margaret’s medicine it it;

And, breaking that, you made and broke your dream:

A trifle makes a dream, a trifle breaks.’

‘No trifle,’ groan’d the husband; ‘yesterday

I met him suddenly in the street, and ask’d

That which I ask’d the woman in my dream.

Like her, he shook his head.  “Show me the books!”

He dodged me with a long and loose account.

“The books, the books!” but he, he could not wait,

Bound on a matter he of life and death:

When the great Books (see Daniel seven and ten)

Were open’d, I should find he meant me well;

And then began to bloat himself, and ooze

All over with the fat affectionate smile

That makes the widow lean.  “My dearest friend,

Have faith, have faith!  We live by faith,” said he;

“And all things work together for the good

Of those” — it makes me sick to quote him — last

Gript my hand hard, and with God-bless-you went.

I stood like one that had received a blow:

I found a hard friend in his loose accounts,

A loose one in the hard grip of his hand,

A curse in his God-bless-you: then my eyes

Pursued him down the street, and far away,

Among the honest shoulders of the crowd,

Read rascal in the motions of his back,

And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee.’

‘Was he so bound, poor soul?’ said the good wife;

‘So are we all: but do not call him, love,

Before you prove him, rogue, and proved, forgive.

His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend

Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about

A silent court of justice in his breast,

Himself the judge and jury, and himself

The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn’d:

And that drags down his life: then comes what comes

Hereafter: and he meant, he said he meant,

Perhaps he meant, or partly meant, you well.’

‘“With all his conscience and one eye askew” —

Love, let me quote these lines, that you may learn

A man is likewise counsel for himself,

Too often, in that silent court of yours —

“With all his conscience and one eye askew,

So false, he partly took himself for true;

Whose pious talk, when most his heart was dry,

Made wet the crafty crowsfoot round his eye;

Who, never naming God except for gain,

So never took that useful name in vain;

Made Him his catspaw and the Cross his tool,

And Christ the bait to trap his dupe and fool;

Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace he forged,

And snakelike slimed his victim ere he gorged;

And oft at Bible meetings, o’er the rest

Arising, did his holy oily best,

Dropping the too rough H in Hell and Heaven,

To spread the Word by which himself had thriven.”

How like you this old satire?’

‘Nay,’ she said

‘I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,

Nor ever cared to better his own kind,

Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.

But will you hear my dream, for I had one

That altogether went to music?  Still

It awed me.’

Then she told it, having dream’d

Of that same coast.

— But round the North, a light,

A belt, it seem’d, of luminous vapor, lay,

And ever in it a low musical note

Swell’d up and died; and, as it swell’d, a ridge

Of breaker issued from the belt, and still

Grew with the growing note, and when the note

Had reach’d a thunderous fullness, on those cliffs

Broke, mixt with awful light (the same as that

Living within the belt) whereby she saw

That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more,

But huge cathedral fronts of every age,

Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see.

One after one: and then the great ridge drew,

Lessening to the lessening music, back,

And past into the belt and swell’d again

Slowly to music: ever when it broke

The statues, king or saint, or founder fell;

Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left

Came men and women in dark clusters round,

Some crying, “Set them up! they shall not fall!”

And others “Let them lie, for they have fall’n.”

And still they strove and wrangled: and she grieved

In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find

Their wildest wailings never out of tune

With that sweet note; and ever as their shrieks

Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave

Returning, while none mark’d it, on the crowd

Broke, mixt with awful light, and show’d their eyes

Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away

The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone,

To the waste deeps together.

‘Then I fixt

My wistful eyes on two fair images,

Both crown’d with stars and high among the stars, —

The Virgin Mother standing with her child

High up on one of those dark minster-fronts —

Till she began to totter, and the child

Clung to the mother, and sent out a cry

Which mixt with little Margaret’s, and I woke,

And my dream awed me: — well — but what are dreams?

Yours came but from the breaking of a glass,

And mine but from the crying of a child.’

‘Child?  No!’ said he, ‘but this tide’s roar, and his,

Our Boanerges with his threats of doom,

And loud-lung’d Antibabylonianisms

(Altho’ I grant but little music there)

Went both to make your dream: but if there were

A music harmonizing our wild cries,

Sphere-music such as that you dream’d about,

Why, that would make our passions far too like

The discords dear to the musician.  No —

One shriek of hate would jar all the hymns of heaven:

True Devils with no ear, they howl in tune

With nothing but the Devil!’

‘“True” indeed!

One of our town, but later by an hour

Here than ourselves, spoke with me on the shore;

While you were running down the sands, and made

The dimpled flounce of the sea-furbelow flap,

Good man, to please the child.  She brought strange news.

Why were you silent when I spoke to-night?

I had set my heart on your forgiving him

Before you knew.    We must forgive the dead.’

‘Dead! who is dead?’

‘The man your eye pursued.

A little after you had parted with him,

He suddenly dropt dead of heart-disease.’

‘Dead? he? of heart-disease? what heart had he

To die of? dead!’

‘Ah, dearest, if there be

A devil in man, there is an angel too,

And if he did that wrong you charge him with,

His angel broke his heart.  But your rough voice

(You spoke so loud) has roused the child again.

Sleep, little birdie, sleep! will she not sleep

Without her “little birdie?” well then, sleep,

And I will sing you “birdie.”’

Saying this,

The woman half turn’d round from him she loved,

Left him one hand, and reaching thro’ the night

Her other, found (for it was close beside)

And half embraced the basket cradle-head

With one soft arm, which, like the pliant bough

That moving moves the nest and nestling, sway’d

The cradle, while she sang this baby song.

What does the little birdie say

In her nest at peep of day?

Let me fly, says little birdie,

Mother, let me fly away.

Birdie, rest a little longer,

Till the little wings are stronger.

So she rests a little longer,

Then she flies away.

What does little baby say,

In her bed at peep of day?

Baby says, like little birdie,

Let me rise and fly away.

Baby, sleep a little longer,

Till the little limbs are stronger.

If she sleeps a little longer,

Baby too shall fly away.

‘She sleeps: let us too, let all evil, sleep.

He also sleeps — another sleep than ours.

He can do no more wrong: forgive him, dear,

And I shall sleep the sounder!’

Then the man,

‘His deeds yet live, the worst is yet to come.

Yet let your sleep for this one night be sound:

I do forgive him!’

‘Thanks, my love,’ she said,

‘Your own will be the sweeter,’ and they slept.

The Grandmother

I.

AND Willy, my eldest-born, is gone, you say, little Anne?

Ruddy and white, and strong on his legs, he looks like a man.

And Willy’s wife has written: she never was over-wise,

Never the wife for Willy: he wouldn’t take my advice.

II.

For, Annie, you see, her father was not the man to save,

Hadn’t a head to manage, and drank himself into his grave.

Pretty enough, very pretty! but I was against it for one.

Eh! — but he wouldn’t hear me — and Willy, you say, is gone.

III.

Willy, my beauty, my eldest-born, the flower of the flock;

Never a man could fling him: for Willy stood like a rock.

‘Here’s a leg for a babe of a week!’ says doctor; and he would be bound,

There was not his like that year in twenty parishes round.

IV.

Strong of his hands, and strong on his legs, but still of his tongue!

I ought to have gone before him: I wonder he went so young.

I cannot cry for him, Annie: I have not long to stay;

Perhaps I shall see him the sooner, for he lived far away.

V.

Why do you look at me, Annie? you think I am hard and cold;

But all my children have gone before me, I am so old:

I cannot weep for Willy, nor can I weep for the rest;

Only at your age, Annie, I could have wept with the best.

VI.

For I remember a quarrel I had with your father, my dear,

All for a slanderous story, that cost me many a tear.

I mean your grandfather, Annie: it cost me a world of woe,

Seventy years ago, my darling, seventy years ago.

VII.

For Jenny, my cousin, had come to the place, and I knew right well

That Jenny had tript in her time: I knew, but I would not tell.

And she to be coming and slandering me, the base little liar!

But the tongue is a fire as you know, my dear, the tongue is a fire.

VIII.

And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise,

That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,

That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,

But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

IX.

And Willy had not been down to the farm for a week and a day;

And all things look’d half-dead, tho’ it was the middle of May.

Jenny, to slander me, who knew what Jenny had been!

But soiling another, Annie, will never make oneself clean.

X.

And I cried myself well-nigh blind, and all of an evening late

I climb’d to the top of the garth, and stood by the road at the gate.

The moon like a rick on fire was rising over the dale,

And whit, whit, whit, in the bush beside me chirrupt the nightingale.

XI.

All of a sudden he stopt: there past by the gate of the farm,

Willy, — he didn’t see me, — and Jenny hung on his arm.

Out into the road I started, and spoke I scarce knew how;

Ah, there’s no fool like the old one — it makes me angry now.

XII.

Willy stood up like a man, and look’d the thing that he meant;

Jenny, the viper, made me a mocking courtesy and went.

And I said, ‘Let us part: in a hundred years it’ll all be the same,

You cannot love me at all, if you love not my good name.’

XIII.

And he turn’d, and I saw his eyes all wet, in the sweet moonshine:

Sweetheart, I love you so well that your good name is mine.

And what do I care for Jane, let her speak of you well or ill;

But marry me out of hand: we two shall be happy still.’

XIV.

‘Marry you, Willy!’ said I, ‘but I needs must speak my mind,

And I fear you’ll listen to tales, be jealous and hard and unkind.’

But he turn’d and claspt me in his arms, and answer’d, ‘No, love, no;’

Seventy years ago, my darling, seventy years ago.

XV.

So Willy and I were wedded: I wore a lilac gown;

And the ringers rang with a will, and he gave the ringers a crown.

But the first that ever I bare was dead before he was born,

Shadow and shine is life, little Annie, flower and thorn.

XVI.

That was the first time, too, that ever I thought of death.

There lay the sweet little body that never had drawn a breath.

I had not wept, little Anne, not since I had been a wife;

But I wept like a child that day, for the babe had fought for his life.

XVII.

His dear little face was troubled, as if with anger or pain:

I look’d at the still little body — his trouble had all been in vain.

For Willy I cannot weep, I shall see him another morn:

But I wept like a child for the child that was dead before he was born.

XVIII.

But he cheer’d me, my good man, for he seldom said me nay:

Kind, like a man, was he; like a man, too, would have his way:

Never jealous — not he: we had many a happy year;

And he died, and I could not weep — my own time seem’d so near.

XIX.

But I wish’d it had been God’s will that I, too, then could have died:

I began to be tired a little, and fain had slept at his side.

And that was ten years back, or more, if I don’t forget:

But as to the children, Annie, they’re all about me yet.

XX.

Pattering over the boards, my Annie who left me at two,

Patter she goes, my own little Annie, an Annie like you:

Pattering over the boards, she comes and goes at her will,

While Harry is in the five-acre and Charlie ploughing the hill.

XXI.

And Harry and Charlie, I hear them too — they sing to their team:

Often they come to the door in a pleasant kind of a dream.

They come and sit by my chair, they hover about my bed —

I am not always certain if they be alive or dead.

XXII.

And yet I know for a truth, there’s none of them left alive;

For Harry went at sixty, your father at sixty-five:

And Willy, my eldest born, at nigh threescore and ten;

I knew them all as babies, and now they’re elderly men.

XXIII.

For mine is a time of peace, it is not often I grieve;

I am oftener sitting at home in my father’s farm at eve:

And the neighbors come and laugh and gossip, and so do I;

I find myself often laughing at things that have long gone by.

XXIV.

To be sure the preacher says, our sins should make us sad:

But mine is a time of peace, and there is Grace to be had;

And God, not man, is the Judge of us all when life shall cease;

And in this Book, little Annie, the message is one of Peace.

XXV.

And age is a time of peace, so it be free from pain,

And happy has been my life; but I would not live it again.

I seem to be tired a little, that’s all, and long for rest;

Only at your age, Annie, I could have wept with the best.

XXVI.

So Willy has gone, my beauty, my eldest-born, my flower;

But how can I weep for Willy, he has but gone for an hour, —

Gone for a minute, my son, from this room into the next;

I, too, shall go in a minute. What time have I to be vext?

XXVII.

And Willy’s wife has written, she never was over-wise.

Get me my glasses, Annie: thank God that I keep my eyes.

There is but a trifle left you, when I shall have past away.

But stay with the old woman now: you cannot have long to stay.

Northern Farmer

OLD STYLE

I.

WHEER ‘asta beän saw long and meä liggin’ ‘ere aloän?

Noorse? thoort nowt o’ a noorse: whoy, doctor’s abeän an’ agoän:

Says that I moänt ‘a naw moor aäle: but I beänt a fool:

Git ma my aäle, fur I beänt a-gooin’ to breäk my rule.

II.

Doctors, they knaws nowt, for a says what’s nawways true:

Naw soort o’ koind o’ use to saäy the things that a do.

I’ve ‘ed my point o’ aäle ivry noight sin’ I beän ‘ere,

An’ I’ve ‘ed my quart ivry market-noight for foorty year.

III.

Parson’s a beän loikewoise, an’ a sittin’ ere o’ my bed.

‘The amoighty’s a taäkin o’ you1 to ‘issén, my friend,’ a said,

An’ a towd ma my sins, an’s toithe were due, an’ I gied it in hond;

I done my duty by un, as I ‘a done by the lond.

IV.

Larn’d a ma’ beä. I reckons I ‘annot sa mooch to larn.

But a cast oop, thot a did, ‘boot Bessy Marris’s barn.

Thaw a knaws I hallus voäted wi’ Squoire an’ choorch an staäte,

An’ i’ the woost o’ toimes I wur niver agin the raäte.

V.

An’ I hallus comed to ‘s choorch afoor moy Sally wur deäd,

An’ ‘eärd ‘um a bummin’ awaäy loike a buzzard-clock2 ower my ‘eäd,

An’ I niver knaw’d whot a mean’d but I thowt a ‘ad summut to saäy,

An I thowt a said whot a owt to ‘a said an’ I comed awaäy.

VI.

Bessy Marris’s barn! tha knaws she laäid it to meä.

Mowt ‘a beän, mayhap, for she wur a bad un, sheä.

‘Siver, I kep un, I kep un, my lass, tha mun understond;

I done my duty by un as I ‘a done boy the lond.

VII.

But Parson a comes an’ a goäs, an’ a says it easy an’ freeä

‘The amoighty’s a taäkin o’ you to ‘issen, my friend,’ says ‘eä.

I weänt saäy men be loiars, thof summun said it in ‘aäste:

But a reäds wonn sarmin a weeäk, an’ I ‘a stubb’d Thornaby waäste.

VIII.

D’ya moind the waäste, my lass? naw, naw, tha was not born then;

Theer wur a boggle in it, I often ‘eärd ‘um mysen;

Moäst loike a butter-bump,3 for I ‘eärd ‘um about an’ about,

But I stubb’d un oop wi’ the lot, an’ raäved an rembled ‘um out.

IX.

Keäper’s it wur; fo’ they fun ‘um theer a laäid on ‘is faäce

Down i’ the woild ‘enemies4 afoor I coom’d to the plaäce.

Noäks or Thimbleby — toäner5 ‘ed shot un as deäd as a naäil.

Noäks wur ‘ang’d for it oop at ‘soize — but git ma my aäle.

X.

Dubbut looök at the waäste: theer warn’t not feeäd for a cow:

Nowt at all but bracken an’ fuzz, an’ looäk at it now —

Warn’t worth nowt a haäcre, an’ now theer’s lots o’ feeäd,

Fourscoor6 yows upon it an’ some on it down i’ seeäd.7

XI.

Nobbut a bit on it’s left, an’ I meän’d to ‘a stubb’d it at fall,

Done it ta-year I meän’d, an’ runn’d plow thruff it an’ all,

If godamoighty an’ parson ‘ud nobbut let ma aloän,

Meä, wi’ haäte hoonderd haäcre o’ Squoire’s, an’ lond o’ my oän.

XII.

Do godamoighty knaw what a’s doing a-taäkin’ o’ meä?

I beänt wonn as saws ‘ere a beän an’ yonder a peä;

An’ Squoire ‘ull be sa mad an’ all — a’ dear a’ dear!

And I ‘a managed for Squoire coom Michaelmas thutty year.

XIII.

A mowt ‘a taäen owd Joänes, as ‘ant a ‘aäpoth o’ sense,

Or a mowt a’ taäen young Robins — a niver mended a fence:

But godamoighty a moost taäke meä an’ taäke ma now

Wi aäf the cows to cauve an’ Thornaby hoälms to plow!

XIV.

Loook ‘ow quoloty smoiles when they sees ma a passin’ by,

Says to thessén naw doot ‘what a mon a beä sewer-loy!’

For they knaws what I beän to Squoire sin fust a coom’d to the ‘All;

I done moy duty by Squoire an’ I done my duty boy all.

XV.

Squoire’s in Lunnon, an’ summun I reckons ‘ull ‘a to wroite,

For whoä’s to howd the lond ater meä thot muddles ma quoit;

Sartin-sewer I beä, thot a weänt niver give it to Joänes,

Naw, nor a moänt to Robins — a niver rembles the stoäns.

XVI.

But summun ‘ull come ater meä mayhap wi’ ‘is kittle o’ steam

Huzzin’ an’ maäzin’ the blessed feälds wi’ the Divil’s oaän teäm.

Sin I mun doy I mun doy, thaw loife they says is sweet,

But sin I mun doy I mun doy, for I couldn abeär to see it.

XVII.

What atta stannin’ theer for, an’ doesn bring ma the aäle?

Doctor’s a ‘toättler, lass, an a’s hallus i’ the owd taäle;

I weänt break rules fur Doctor, a knaws naw moor nor a floy;

Git ma my aäle I tell tha, an’ if I mun doy I mun doy.

Tithonus

THE WOODS decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,

Here at the quiet limit of the world,

A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream

The ever-silent spaces of the East,

Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man —

So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,

Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem’d

To his great heart none other than a God!

I ask’d thee, ‘Give me immortality.’

Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,

Like wealthy men who care not how they give.

But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,

And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,

And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d

To dwell in presence of immortal youth,

Immortal age beside immortal youth,

And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,

Thy beauty, make amends, tho’ even now,

Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,

Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears

To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:

Why should a man desire in any way

To vary from the kindly race of men,

Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance

Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes

A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.

Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals

From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,

And bosom beating with a heart renew’d.

Thy cheek begins to redden thro’ the gloom,

Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,

Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team

Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,

And shake the darkness from their loosen’d manes,

And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful

In silence, then before thine answer given

Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.

Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,

And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,

In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?

‘The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.’

Ay me! ay me! with what another heart

In days far-off, and with what other eyes

I used to watch — if I be he that watch’d —

The lucid outline forming round thee; saw

The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;

Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood

Glow with the glow that slowly crimson’d all

Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,

Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm

With kisses balmier than half-opening buds

Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss’d

Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,

Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,

While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East;

How can my nature longer mix with thine?

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold

Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet

Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam

Floats up from those dim fields about the homes

Of happy men that have the power to die,

And grassy barrows of the happier dead.

Release me, and restore me to the ground;

Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:

Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;

I earth in earth forget these empty courts,

And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

The Voyage

I.

WE LEFT behind the painted buoy

That tosses at the harbor-mouth;

And madly danced our hearts with joy,

As fast we fleeted to the South:

How fresh was every sight and sound

On open main or winding shore!

We knew the merry world was round,

And we might sail for evermore.

II.

Warm broke the breeze against the brow,

Dry sang the tackle, sang the sail:

The Lady’s-head upon the prow

Caught the shrill salt, and sheer’d the gale.

The broad seas swell’d to meet the keel,

And swept behind: so quick the run,

We felt the good ship shake and reel,

We seem’d to sail into the Sun!

III.

How oft we saw the Sun retire,

And burn the threshold of the night,

Fall from his Ocean-lane of fire,

And sleep beneath his pillar’d light!

How oft the purple-skirted robe

Of twilight slowly downward drawn,

As thro’ the slumber of the globe

Again we dash’d into the dawn!

IV.

New stars all night above the brim

Of waters lighten’d into view;

They climb’d as quickly, for the rim

Changed every moment as we flew.

Far ran the naked moon across

The houseless ocean’s heaving field,

Or flying shone, the silver boss

Of her own halo’s dusky shield;

V.

The peaky islet shifted shapes,

High towns on hills were dimly seen,

We past long lines of Northern capes

And dewy Northern meadows green.

We came to warmer waves, and deep

Across the boundless east we drove,

Where those long swells of breaker sweep

The nutmeg rocks and isles clove.

VI.

By peaks that flamed, or, all in shade,

Gloom’d the low coast and quivering brine

With ashy rains, that spreading made

Fantastic plume or sable pine;

By sands and steaming flats, and floods

Of mighty mouth, we scudded fast,

And hills and scarlet-mingled woods

Glow’d for a moment as we past.

VII.

O hundred shores of happy climes,

How swiftly stream’d ye by the bark!

At times the whole sea burn’d, at times

With wakes of fire we tore the dark;

At times a carven craft would shoot

From havens hid in fairy bowers,

With naked limbs and flowers and fruit,

But we nor paused for fruit nor flowers.

VIII.

For one fair Vision ever fled

Down the waste waters day and night,

And still we follow’d where she led,

In hope to gain upon her flight.

Her face was evermore unseen,

And fixt upon the far sea-line;

But each man murmur’d, ‘O my Queen,

I follow till I make thee mine.’

IX.

And now we lost her, now she gleam’d

Like Fancy made of golden air,

Now nearer to the prow she seem’d

Like Virtue firm, like Knowledge fair,

Now high on waves that idly burst

Like Heavenly Hope she crown’d the sea

And now, the bloodless point reversed,

She bore the blade of Liberty.

X.

And only one among us — him

We please not — he was seldom pleased:

He saw not far: his eyes were dim:

But ours he swore were all diseased.

‘A ship of fools’ he shriek’d in spite,

‘A ship of fools’ he sneer’d and wept.

And overboard one stormy night

He cast his body, and on we swept.

XI.

And never sail of ours was furl’d,

Nor anchor dropt at eve or morn;

We loved the glories of the world,

But laws of nature were our scorn;

For blasts would rise and rave and cease,

But whence were those that drove the sail

Across the whirlwind’s heart of peace,

And to and thro’ the counter-gale?

XII.

Again to colder climes we came,

For still we follow’d where she led:

Now mate is blind and captain lame,

And half the crew are sick or dead.

But blind or lame or sick or sound

We follow that which flies before:

We know the merry world is round,

And we may sail for evermore.

In the Valley of Cauteretz

ALL along the valley, stream that flashest white,

Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,

All along the valley, where thy waters flow,

I walk’d with one I loved two and thirty years ago.

All along the valley while I walk’d to-day,

The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away;

For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed

Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,

And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,

The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

The Flower

ONCE in a golden hour

I cast to earth a seed.

Up there came a flower,

The people said, a weed.

To and fro they went

Thro’ my garden-bower,

And muttering discontent

Cursed me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall

It wore a crown of light,

But thieves from o’er the wall

Stole the seed by night.

Sow’d it far and wide

By every town and tower,

Till all the people cried

‘Splendid is the flower.’

Read my little fable:

He that runs may read.

Most can raise the flowers now,

For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,

And some are poor indeed;

And now again the people

Call it but a weed.

Requiescat

FAIR is her cottage in its place,

Where yon broad water sweetly slowly glides.

It sees itself from thatch to base

Dream in the sliding tides.

And fairer she, but ah how soon to die!

Her quiet dream of life this hour may cease.

Her peaceful being slowly passes by

To some more perfect peace.

The Sailor Boy

HE ROSE at dawn and, fired with hope,

Shot o’er the seething harbor-bar,

And reach’d the ship and caught the rope,

And whistled to the morning star.

And while he whistled long and loud

He heard a fierce mermaiden cry,

‘O boy, tho’ thou art young and proud,

I see the place where thou wilt lie.

‘The sands and yeasty surges mix

In caves about the dreary bay,

And on thy ribs the limpet sticks,

And in thy heart the scrawl shall play.’

‘Fool,’ he answer’d, ‘death is sure

To those that stay and those that roam,

But I will nevermore endure

To sit with empty hands at home.

‘My mother clings about my neck,

My sisters crying “stay for shame;”

My father raves of death and wreck,

They are all to blame, they are all to blame.

‘God help me! save I take my part

Of danger in the roaring sea,

A devil rises in my heart,

Far worse than any death to me.’

The Islet

‘WHITHER O whither love shall we go,

For a score of sweet little summers or so’

The sweet little wife of the singer said,

On the day that follow’d the day she was wed,

‘Whither O whither love shall we go?’

And the singer shaking his curly head

Turn’d as he sat, and struck the keys

There at his right with a sudden crash,

Singing, ‘and shall it be over the seas

With a crew that is neither rude nor rash,

But a bevy of Eroses apple-cheek’d,

In a shallop of crystal ivory-beak’d,

With a satin sail of a ruby glow,

To a sweet little Eden on earth that I know,

A mountain islet pointed and peak’d;

Waves on a diamond shingle dash,

Cataract brooks to the ocean run,

Fairily-delicate palaces shine

Mixt with myrtle and clad with vine,

And overstream’d and silvery-streak’d

With many a rivulet high against the Sun

The facets of the glorious mountain flash

Above the valleys of palm and pine.’

‘Thither O thither, love, let us go.’

‘No, no, no!

For in all that exquisite isle, my dear,

There is but one bird with a musical throat,

And his compass is but of a single note,

That it makes one weary to hear.’

‘Mock me not! mock me not! love, let us go.’

‘No, love, no.

For the bud ever breaks into bloom on the tree,

And a storm never wakes on the lonely sea,

And a worm is there in the lonely wood,

That pierces the liver and blackens the blood,

And makes it a sorrow to be.’

The Ringlet

I.

‘YOUR ringlets, your ringlets,

That look so golden-gay,

If you will give me one, but one,

To kiss it night and day,

Then never chilling touch of Time

Will turn it silver-gray;

And then shall I know it is all true gold

To flame and sparkle and stream as of old,

Till all the comets in heaven are cold,

And all her stars decay.’

‘Then take it, love, and put it by;

This cannot change, nor yet can I.’

II.

‘My ringlet, my ringlet,

That art so golden-gay,

Now never chilling touch of Time

Can turn thee silver-gray;

And a lad may wink, and a girl may hint,

And a fool may say his say;

For my doubts and fears were all amiss,

And I swear henceforth by this and this,

That a doubt will only come for a kiss,

And a fear to be kiss’d away.’

‘Then kiss it, love, and put it by:

If this can change, why so can I.’

II.

O Ringlet, O Ringlet,

I kiss’d you night and day,

And Ringlet, O Ringlet,

You still are golden-gay,

But Ringlet, O Ringlet,

You should be silver-gray:

For what is this which now I’m told,

I that took you for true gold,

She that gave you’s bought and sold,

Sold, sold.

II.

O Ringlet, O Ringlet,

She blush’d a rosy red,

When Ringlet, O Ringlet,

She clipt you from her head,

And Ringlet, O Ringlet,

She gave you me, and said,

‘Come, kiss it, love, and put it by

If this can change, why so can I.’

O fie, you golden nothing, fie

You golden lie.

III.

O Ringlet, O Ringlet,

I count you much to blame,

For Ringlet, O Ringlet,

You put me much to shame,

So Ringlet, O Ringlet,

I doom you to the flame.

For what is this which now I learn,

Has given all my faith a turn?

Burn, you glossy heretic, burn,

Burn, burn.

A Welcome to Alexandra

March 7, 1863.

SEA-KINGS’ daughter from over the sea,

Alexandra!

Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,

But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee,

Alexandra!

Welcome her, thunders of fort and of fleet!

Welcome her, thundering cheer of the street!

Welcome her, all things youthful and sweet,

Scatter the blossom under her feet!

Break, happy land, into earlier flowers!

Make music, O bird, in the new-budded bowers!

Blazon your mottos of blessing and prayer!

Welcome her, welcome her, all that is ours!

Warble, O bugle, and trumpet, blare!

Flags, flutter out upon turrets and towers!

Flames, on the windy headland flare!

Utter your jubilee, steeple and spire!

Clash, ye bells, in the merry March air!

Flash, ye cities, in rivers of fire!

Rush to the roof, sudden rocket, and higher

Melt into stars for the land’s desire!

Roll and rejoice, jubilant voice,

Roll as a ground-swell dash’d on the strand,

Roar as the sea when he welcomes the land,

And welcome her, welcome the land’s desire,

The sea-kings’ daughter as happy as fair,

Blissful bride of a blissful heir,

Bride of the heir of the kings of the sea —

O joy to the people and joy to the throne,

Come to us, love us, and make us your own:

For Saxon or Dane or Norman we,

Teuton or Celt, or whatever we be,

We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee,

Alexandra!

Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition

I.

UPLIFT a thousand voices full and sweet,

In this wide hall with earth’s inventions stored,

And praise th’ invisible universal Lord,

Who lets once more in peace the nations meet,

Where Science, Art, and Labor have outpour’d

Their myriad horns of plenty at our feet.

II.

O silent father of our Kings to be

Mourn’d in this golden hour of jubilee,

For this, for all, we weep our thanks to thee!

III.

The world-compelling plan was thine, —

And, lo! the long laborious miles

Of Palace; lo! the giant aisles,

Rich in model and design;

Harvest-tool and husbandry,

Loom and wheel and engin’ry,

Secrets of the sullen mine,

Steel and gold, and corn and wine,

Fabric rough, or Fairy fine,

Sunny tokens of the Line,

Polar marvels, and a feast

Of wonder, out of West and East,

And shapes and hues of Part divine!

All of beauty, all of use,

That one fair planet can produce.

Brought from under every star,

Blown from over every main,

And mixt, as life is mixt with pain,

The works of peace with works of war.

IV.

Is the goal so far away?

Far, how far no tongue can say,

Let us dream our dream to-day.

V.

O ye, the wise who think, the wise who reign,

From growing commerce loose her latest chain,

And let the fair white-winged peacemaker fly

To happy havens under all the sky,

And mix the seasons and the golden hours,

Till each man finds his own in all men’s good,

And all men work in noble brotherhood,

Breaking their mailed fleets and armed towers,

And ruling by obeying Nature’s powers,

And gathering all the fruits of peace and crown’d with all her flowers.

A Dedication

DEAR, near and true — no truer Time himself

Can prove you, tho’ he make you evermore

Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life

Shoots to the fall — take this, and pray that he,

Who wrote it, honoring your sweet faith in him,

May trust himself; and spite of praise and scorn,

As one who feels the immeasurable world,

Attain the wise indifference of the wise;

And after Autumn past — if left to pass

His autumn into seeming-leafless days —

Draw toward the long frost and longest night,

Wearing his wisdom lightly, like the fruit

Which in our winter woodland looks a flower.1

Experiments

Boädicéa

WHILE about the shore of Mona those Neronian legionaries

Burnt and broke the grove and altar of the Druid and Druidess,

Far in the East Boädicéa, standing loftily charioted,

Mad and maddening all that heard her in her fierce volubility,

Girt by half the tribes of Britain, near the colony Cámulodúne,

Yell’d and shriek’d between her daughters o’er a wild confederacy.

‘They that scorn the tribes and call us Britain’s barbarous populaces,

Did they hear me, would they listen, did they pity me supplicating?

Shall I heed them in their anguish? shall I brook to be supplicated?

Hear Icenian, Catieuchlanian, hear Coritanian, Trinobant!

Must their ever-ravening eagle’s beak and talon annihilate us?

Tear the noble heart of Britain, leave it gorily quivering?

Bark an answer, Britain’s raven! bark and blacken innumerable,

Blacken round the Roman carrion, make the carcase a skeleton,

Kite and kestrel, wolf and wolfkin, from the wilderness, wallow in it,

Till the face of Bel be brighten’d, Taranis be propitiated.

Lo their colony half-defended! lo their colony, Cámulodúne!

There the horde of Roman robbers mock at a barbarous adversary.

There the hive of Roman liars worship a gluttonous emperor-idiot.

Such is Rome, and this her deity: hear it, Spirit of Cássivëlaún!

‘Hear it, Gods! the Gods have heard it, O Icenian, O Coritanian!

Doubt not ye the Gods have answer’d, Catieuchlanian, Trinobant.

These have told us all their anger in miraculous utterances,

Thunder, a flying fire in heaven, a murmur heard aërially,

Phantom sound of blows descending, moan of an enemy massacred,

Phantom wail of women and children, multitudinous agonies.

Bloodily flow’d the Tamesa rolling phantom bodies of horses and men;

Then a phantom colony smoulder’d on the refluent estuary;

Lastly yonder yester-even, suddenly giddily tottering —

There was one who watch’d and told me — down their statue of Victory fell.

Lo their precious Roman bantling, lo the colony Cámulodúne,

Shall we teach it a Roman lesson? shall we care to be pitiful?

Shall we deal with it as an infant? shall we dandle it amorously?

‘Hear Icenian, Catieuchlanian, hear Coritanian, Trinobant!

While I roved about the forest, long and bitterly meditating,

There I heard them in the darkness, at the mystical ceremony,

Loosely robed in flying raiment, sang the terrible prophetesses.

“Fear not, isle of blowing woodland, isle of silvery parapets!

Tho’ the Roman eagle shadow thee, tho’ the gathering enemy narrow thee,

Thou shalt wax and he shall dwindle, thou shalt be the mighty one yet!

Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be celebrated,

Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable,

Thine the lands of lasting summer, many-blossoming Paradises,

Thine the North and thine the South and thine the battle-thunder of God.”

So they chanted: how shall Britain light upon auguries happier?

So they chanted in the darkness, and there cometh a victory now.

Hear Icenian, Catieuchlanian, hear Coritanian, Trinobant!

Me the wife of rich Prasútagus, me the lover of liberty,

Me they seized and me they tortured, me they lash’d and humiliated,

Me the sport of ribald Veterans, mine of ruffian violators!

See they sit, they hide their faces, miserable in ignominy!

Wherefore in me burns an anger, not by blood to be satiated.

Lo the palaces and the temple, lo the colony Cámulodúne!

There they ruled, and thence they wasted all the flourishing territory,

Thither at their will they haled the yellow-ringleted Britoness —

Bloodily, bloodily fall the battle-axe, unexhausted, inexorable.

Shout Icenian, Catieuchlanian, shout Coritanian, Trinobant,

Till the victim hear within and yearn to hurry precipitously

Like the leaf in a roaring whirlwind, like the smoke in a hurricane whirl’d.

Lo the colony, there they rioted in the city of Cúnobelíne!

There they drank in cups of emerald, there at tables of ebony lay,

Rolling on their purple couches in their tender effeminacy.

There they dwelt and there they rioted; there — there — they dwell no more.

Burst the gates, and burn the palaces, break the works of the statuary,

Take the hoary Roman head and shatter it, hold it abominable,

Cut the Roman boy to pieces in his lust and voluptuousness,

Lash the maiden into swooning, me they lash’d and humiliated,

Chop the breasts from off the mother, dash the brains of the little one out,

Up my Britons, on my chariot, on my chargers, trample them under us.’

So the Queen Boädicéa, standing loftily charioted,

Brandishing in her hand a dart and rolling glances lioness-like,

Yell’d and shriek’d between her daughters in her fierce volubility.

Till her people all around the royal chariot agitated,

Madly dash’d the darts together, writhing barbarous lineaments,

Made the noise of frosty woodlands, when they shiver in January,

Roar’d as when the rolling breakers boom and blanch on the precipices,

Yell’d as when the winds of winter tear an oak on a promontory.

So the silent colony hearing her tumultuous adversaries

Clash the darts and on the buckler beat with rapid unanimous hand,

Thought on all her evil tyrannies, all her pitiless avarice,

Till she felt the heart within her fall and flutter tremulously,

Then her pulses at the clamoring of her enemy fainted away.

Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds.

Ran the land with Roman slaughter, multitudinous agonies.

Perish’d many a maid and matron, many a valorous legionary.

Fell the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Cámulodúne.

Experiments in Quantity

On Translations of Homer

Hexameters acrd Pentameters.

THESE lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer!

No — but a most burlesque barbarous experiment.

When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England?

When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon?

Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us,

Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters.

Milton: Alcaics.

O MIGHTY-MOUTH’D inventor of harmonies,

O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity,

God-gifted organ-voice of England,

Milton, a name to resound for ages;

Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,

Starr’d from Jehovah’s gorgeous armouries,

Tower, as the deep-domed empyrëan

Rings to the roar of an angel onset —

Me rather all that bowery loneliness,

The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,

And bloom profuse and cedar arches

Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,

Where some refulgent sunset of India

Streams o’er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,

And crimson-hued the stately palmwoods

Whisper in odorous heights of even.

Milton: Hendecasyllabics.

O YOU chorus of indolent reviewers,

Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,

Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem

All composed in a metre of Catullus,

All in quantity, careful of my motion,

Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him,

Lest I fall unawares before the people,

Waking laughter in indolent reviewers.

Should I flounder awhile without a tumble

Thro’ this metrification of Catullus,

They should speak to me not without a welcome,

All that chorus of indolent reviewers.

Hard, hard, hard is it, only not to tumble,

So fantastical is the dainty metre.

Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me

Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers.

O blatant Magazines, regard me rather —

Since I blush to belaud myself a moment —

As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost

Horticultural art, or half coquette-like

Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly.

On Translations of Homer

Hexameters acrd Pentameters.

THESE lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer!

No — but a most burlesque barbarous experiment.

When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England?

When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon?

Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us,

Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters.

Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse.

SO Hector spake; and Trojans roar’d applause;

Then loosed their sweating horses from the yoke,

And each beside his chariot bound his own;

And oxen from the city, and goodly sheep

In haste they drove, and honey-hearted wine

And bread from out the houses brought, and heap’d

Their firewood, and the winds from off the plain

Roll’d the rich vapor far into the heaven.

And these all night upon the bridge1 of war

Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed:

As when in heaven the stars about the moon

Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,

And every height comes out, and jutting peak

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens

Break open to their highest, and all the stars

Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:

So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds,

Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

Iliad VIII. 542-561.

BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS

CONTENTS

To Alfred Tennyson, My Grandson

The First Quarrel

Rizpah

The Northern Cobbler

The Revenge. A Ballad of the Fleet

The Sisters

The Village Wife; or,The Entail

In the Children’s Hospital

Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice

The Defence of Lucknow

Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham

Columbus

The Voyage of Maeldune

De Profundis

The Human Cry.

SONNETS

Prefatory Sonnet

To the Rev. W.H. Brookfield

Montenegro

To Victor Hugo

TRANSLATIONS

Battle Of Brunanburh

Achilles Over the Trench

To Princess Frederica on Her Marriage

Sir John Franklin

To Dante

To Alfred Tennyson, My Grandson

GOLDEN-HAIR’D Ally whose name is one with mine,

Crazy with laughter and babble and earth’s new wine,

Now that the flower of a year and a half is thine,

O little blossom, O mine, and mine of mine,

Glorious poet who never hast written a line,

Laugh, for the name at the head of my verse is thine.

May’st thou never be wrong’d by the name that is mine!

The First Quarrel

(In the Isle of Wight.)

I.

‘WAIT a little,’ you say, ‘you are sure it ‘ll all come right,’

But the boy was born i’ trouble, an’ looks so wan an’ so white:

Wait! an’ once I ha’ waited — I hadn’t to wait for long.

Now I wait, wait, wait for Harry. — No, no, you are doing me wrong!

Harry and I were married: the boy can hold up his head,

The boy was born in wedlock, but after my man was dead;

I ha’ work’d for him fifteen years, an’ I work an’ I wait to the end.

I am all alone in the world, an’ you are my only friend.

II.

Doctor, if you can wait, I’ll tell you the tale o’ my life.

When Harry an’ I were children, he call’d me his own little wife;

I was happy when I was with him, an’ sorry when he was away.

An’ when we play’d together, I loved him better than play;

He workt me the daisy chain — he made me the cowslip ball,

He fought the boys that were rude, an’ I loved him better than all.

Passionate girl tho’ I was, an’ often at home in disgrace,

I never could quarrel with Harry — I had but to look in his face.

III.

There was a farmer in Dorset of Harry’s kin, that had need

Of a good stout lad at his farm; he sent, an’ the father agreed;

So Harry was bound to the Dorsetshire farm for years an’ for years;

I walked with him down to the quay, poor lad, an’ we parted in tears.

The boat was beginning to move, we heard them a-ringing the bell,

I’ll never love any but you, God bless you, my own little Nell.’

IV.

I was a child, an’ he was a child, an’ he came to harm;

There was a girl, a hussy, that workt with him up at the farm,

One had deceived her an’ left her alone with her sin an’ her shame,

And so she was wicked with Harry; the girl was the most to blame.

V.

And years went over till I that was little had grown so tall,

The men would say of the maids, ‘Our Nelly’s the flower of ‘em all.’

I didn’t take heed o’ them, but I taught myself all I could

To make a good wife for Harry, when Harry came home for good.

VI.

Often I seem’d unhappy, and often as happy too,

For I heard it abroad in the fields ‘I’ll never love any but you;’

‘I’ll never love any but you’ the morning song of the lark,

‘I’11 never love any but you’ the nightin gale’s hymn in the dark.

VII.

And Harry came home at last, but he look’d at me sidelong and shy,

Vext me a bit, till he told me that so many years had gone by,

I had grown so handsome and tall — that I might ha’ forgot him somehow —

For he thought — there were other lads — he was fear’d to look at me now.

VIII.

Hard was the frost in the field, we were married o’ Christmas day,

Married among the red berries, an’ all as merry as May —

Those were the pleasant times, my house an’ my man were my pride,

We seem’d like ships i’ the Channel a-sailing with wind an’ tide.

IX.

But work was scant in the Isle, tho’ he tried the villages round,

So Harry went over the Solent to see if work could be found;

An’ he wrote ‘I ha’ six weeks’ work, little wife, so far as I know;

I’ll come for an hour to-morrow, an’ kiss you before I go.’

X.

So I set to righting the house, for wasn’t he coming that day?

An’ I hit on an old deal-box that was pasted in a corner away,

It was full of old odds an’ ends, an’ a letter along wi’ the rest,

I had better ha’ put my naked hand in a hornets’ nest.

XI.

‘Sweetheart’ — this was the letter — this was the letter I read —

‘You promised to find me work near you, an’ I wish I was dead —

Didn’t you kiss me an’ promise? you haven’t done it, my lad,

An’ I almost died o’ your going away, an’ I wish that I had.’

XII.

I too wish that I had — in the pleasant times that had past,

Before I quarrell’d with Harry — my quarrel — the first an’ the last.

XIII.

For Harry came in, an’ I flung him the letter that drove me wild,

An’ he told it me all at once, as simple as any child,

‘What can it matter, my lass, what I did wi’ my single life?

I ha’ been as true to you as ever a man to his wife;

An’ she wasn’t one o’ the worst.’ ‘Then,’ I said, ‘I’m none o’ the best.’

An’ he smiled at me, ‘Ain’t you, my love? Come, come, little wife, let it rest!

The man isn’t like the woman, no need to make such a stir.’

But he anger’d me all the more, an’ I said ‘You were keeping with her,

When I was a-loving you all along an’ the same as before.’

An’ he didn’t speak for a while, an’ he anger’d me more and more.

‘Then he patted my hand in his gentle way, ‘Let bygones be!’

‘Bygones! you kept yours hush’d,’ I said, ‘when you married me!

By-gones ma’ be come-agains; an’ she — in her shame an’ her sin —

You’ll have her to nurse my child, if I die o’ my lying in!

You’ll make her its second mother! I hate her — an’ I hate you!’

Ah, Harry, my man, you had better ha’ beaten me black an’ blue

Than ha’ spoken as kind as you did, when I were so crazy wi’ spite,

‘Wait a little, my lass, I am sure it ‘ill all come right.’

XIV.

An’ he took three turns in the rain, an’ I watch’d him, an’ when he came in

I felt that my heart was hard, he was all wet thro’ to the skin,

An’ I never said ‘off wi’ the wet,’ I never said ‘on wi’ the dry,’

So I knew my heart was hard, when he came to bid me goodbye.

‘You said that you hated me, Ellen, but that isn’t true, you know;

I am going to leave you a bit — you’ll kiss me before I go?’

XV.

‘Going! you’re going to her — kiss her — if you will,’ I said —

I was near my time wi’ the boy, I must ha’ been light i’ my head —

‘I had sooner be cursed than kiss’d!’ — I didn’t know well what I meant,

But I turn’d my face from him, an’ he turn’d his face an’ he went.

XVI.

And then he sent me a letter, ‘I’ve gotten my work to do;

You wouldn’t kiss me, my lass, an’ I never loved any but you;

I am sorry for all the quarrel an’ sorry for what she wrote,

I ha’ six weeks’ work in Jersey an’ go to-night by the boat.’

XVII.

An’ the wind began to rise, an’ I thought of him out at sea,

An’ I felt I had been to blame; he was always kind to me.

‘Wait a little, my lass, I am sure it ‘ill all come right’ —

An’ the boat went down that night — the boat went down that night.

Rizpah

17 —

I.

WAILING, wailing, wailing, the wind over land and sea —

And Willy’s voice in the wind, ‘O mother, come out to me.’

Why should he call me to-night, when he knows that I cannot go?

For the downs are as bright as day, and the full moon stares at the snow.

II.

We should be seen, my dear; they would spy us out of the town.

The loud black nights for us, and the storm rushing over the down,

When I cannot see my own hand, but am led by the creak of the chain,

And grovel and grope for my son till I find myself drenched with the rain.

III.

Anything fallen again? nay — what was there left to fall?

I have taken them home, I have number’d the bones, I have hidden them all.

What am I saying? and what are you? do you come as a spy?

Falls? what falls? who knows? As the tree falls so must it lie.

IV.

Who let her in? how long has she been? you — what have you heard?

Why did you sit so quiet? you never have spoken a word.

O — to pray with me — yes — a lady — none of their spies —

But the night has crept into my heart, and begun to darken my eyes.

V.

Ah — you, that have lived so soft, what should you know of the night,

The blast and the burning shame and the bitter frost and the fright?

I have done it, while you were asleep — you were only made for the day.

I have gather’d my baby together — and now you may go your way.

VI.

Nay — for it’s kind of you, Madam, to sit by an old dying wife.

But say nothing hard of my boy, I have only an hour of life.

I kiss’d my boy in the prison, before he went out to die.

‘They dared me to do it,’ he said, and he never has told me a lie.

I whipt him for robbing an orchard once when he was but a child —

‘The farmer dared me to do it,’ he said; he was always so wild —

And idle — and couldn’t be idle — my Willy — he never could rest.

The King should have made him a soldier, he would have been one of his best.

VII.

But he lived with a lot of wild mates, and they never would let him be good;

They swore that he dare not rob the mail, and he swore that he would;

And he took no life, but he took one purse, and when all was done

He flung it among his fellows — I’ll none of it, said my son.

VIII.

I came into court to the Judge and the lawyers. I told them my tale,

God’s own truth — but they kill’d him, they kill’d him for robbing the mail.

They hang’d him in chains for a show — we had always borne a good name —

To be hang’d for a thief — and then put away — isn’t that enough shame?

Dust to dust — low down — let us hide! but they set him so high

That all the ships of the world could stare at him, passing by.

God ‘ill pardon the hell — black raven and horrible fowls of the air,

But not the black heart of the lawyer who kill’d him and hang’d him there.

IX.

And the jailer forced me away. I had bid him my last goodbye;

They had fasten’d the door of his cell. ‘O mother!’ I heard him cry.

I couldn’t get back tho’ I tried, he had something further to say,

And now I never shall know it. The jailer forced me away.

X.

Then since I couldn’t but hear that cry of my boy that was dead,

They seized me and shut me up: they fasten’d me down on my bed.

‘Mother, O mother!’ — he call’d in the dark to me year after year —

They beat me for that, they beat me — you know that I couldn’t but hear;

And then at the last they found I had grown so stupid and still

They let me abroad again — but the creatures had worked their will.

XI.

Flesh of my flesh was gone, but bone of my bone was left —

I stole them all from the lawyers — and you, will you call it a theft? —

My baby, the bones that had suck’d me, the bones that had laughed and had cried —

Theirs? O no! they are mine — not theirs — they had moved in my side.

XII.

Do you think I was scared by the bones? I kiss’d ‘em, I buried ‘em all —

I can’t dig deep, I am old — in the night by the churchyard wall.

My Willy ‘ill rise up whole when the trumpet of judgment ‘ill sound,

But I charge you never to say that I laid him in holy ground.

XIII.

They would scratch him up — they would hang him again on the cursed tree.

Sin? O yes — we are sinners, I know — let all that be,

And read me a Bible verse of the Lord’s good will toward men —

‘Full of compassion and mercy, the Lord’ — let me hear it again;

‘Full of compassion and mercy — long — suffering.’ Yes, O yes!

For the lawyer is born but to murder — the Saviour lives but to bless.

He’ll never put on the black cap except for the worst of the worst,

And the first may be last — I have heard it in church — and the last may be first.

Suffering — O long — suffering — yes, as the Lord must know,

Year after year in the mist and the wind and the shower and the snow.

XIV.

Heard, have you? what? they have told you he never repented his sin.

How do they know it? are they his mother? are you of his kin?

Heard! have you ever heard, when the storm on the downs began,

The wind that ‘ill wail like a child and the sea that ‘ill moan like a man?

XV.

Election, Election and Reprobation — it’s all very well.

But I go to-night to my boy, and I shall not find him in Hell.

For I cared so much for my boy that the Lord has look’d into my care,

And He means me I’m sure to be happy with Willy, I know not where.

XVI.

And if he be lost — but to save my soul, that is all your desire:

Do you think that I care for my soul if my boy be gone to the fire?

I have been with God in the dark — go, go, you may leave me alone —

You never have borne a child — you are just as hard as a stone.

XVII.

Madam, I beg your pardon! I think that you mean to be kind,

But I cannot hear what you say for my Willy’s voice in the wind —

The snow and the sky so bright — he used but to call in the dark,

And he calls to me now from the church and not from the gibbet — for hark!

Nay — you can hear it yourself — it is coming — shaking the walls —

Willy — the moon’s in a cloud — Good-night. I am going. He calls.

The Northern Cobbler

I.

WAÄIT till our Sally cooms in, fur thou mun a’ sights1 to tell.

Eh, but I be maäin glad to seeä tha sa ‘arty an’ well.

‘Cast awaäy on a disolut land wi’ a vartical soon2!’

Strange fur to goä fur to think what saäilors a’ seeän an’ a’ doon;

‘Summat to drink — sa’ ‘ot?’ I ‘a nowt but Adam’s wine:

What’s the ‘eät o’ this little ‘ill-side to the ‘eät o’ the line?

II.

‘What’s i’ tha bottle a-stanning theer? I’ll tell tha. Gin.

But if thou wants thy grog, tha mun goä fur it down to the inn.

Naay — fur I be maäin-glad, but thaw tha was iver sa dry,

Thou gits naw gin fro’ the bottle theer, an’ I’ll tell tha why.

III.

Meä an’ thy sister was married, when wur it? back-end o’ June,

Ten year sin’, and wa ‘greed as well as a fiddle i’ tune:

I could fettle and clump owd booöts and shoes wi’ the best on ‘em all,

As fer as fro’ Thursby thurn hup to Harmsby and Hutterby Hall.

We was busy as beeäs i’ the bloom an’ ‘appy as ‘art could think,

An’ then the babby wur burn, and then I taäkes to the drink.

IV.

An’ I weant gaäinsaäy it, my lad, thaw I be hafe shaämed on it now,

We could sing a good song at the Plow, we could sing a good song at the Plow;

Thaw once of a frosty night I slither’d an hurted my huck,3

An’ I coom’d neck-an-crop soomtimes slaäpe down i’ the squad an’ the muck:

An’ once I fowt wi’ the Taäilor — not hafe ov a man, my lad —

Fur he scrawm’d an’ scratted my faäce like a cat, an’ it maäde’er sa mad

That Sally she turn’d a tongue-banger4 an’ raäted ma, ‘Sottin’ thy braäins

Guzzlin’ an’ soäkin’ an’ smoäkin’ an’ hawmin’5 about i’ the laänes,

Soä sow-droonk that tha doesn not touch thy ‘at to the Squire;’

An’ I looök’d cock-eyed at my noäse an’ I seeäd ‘im a-gittin’ o’ fire;

But sin’ I wur hallus i’ liquor an’ hallus as droonk as a king,

Foälks’ coostom flitted awaäy like a kite wi’ a brokken string.

V.

An’ Sally she wesh’d foälks’ cloäths to keep the wolf fro’ the door,

Eh but the moor she riled me, she druv me to drink the moor,

Fur I fun’, when ‘er hack wur turn’d, wheer Sally’s owd stockin’ wur ‘id,

An’ I grabb’d the munny she maäde, and I weär’d it o’ liquor, I did.

VI.

An’ one night I cooms ‘oäm like a bull gotten loose at a faäir,

An’ she wur a-waäitin’ fo’mma, an’ cryin’ and teärin’ ‘er ‘aäir,

An’ I tummled athurt the craädle an’ sweär’d as I’d break ivry stick

O’ furnitur ‘ere i’ the ‘ouse, an’ I gied our Sally a kick,

An’ I mash’d the taäbles an’ chairs, an’ she an’ the babby beäl’d,6

Fur I knaw’d naw moor what I did nor a mortal beäst o’ the feäld.

VII.

An’ when I waäked i’ the murnin’ I seeäd that our Sally went laämed

Cos’ o’ the kick as I gied ‘er, an’ I wur dreadful ashaämed;

An’ Sally wur sloomy7 an’ draggle taäil’d in an owd turn gown,

An’ the babby’s faäce wurn’t wesh’d an’ the ‘ole ‘ouse hupside down.

VIII.

An’ then I minded our Sally sa patty an’ neät an’ sweeät,

Strait as a pole an’ cleän as a flower fro’ ‘ead to feeät:

An’ then I minded the fust kiss I gied ‘er by Thursby thurn;

Theer wur a lark a-singin’ ‘is best of a Sunday at murn,

Couldn’t see ‘im, we ‘eärd ‘im a-mountin’ oop ‘igher an’ ‘igher,

An’ then ‘e turn’d to the sun, an’ ‘e shined like a sparkle o’ fire.

‘Doesn’t tha see ‘im,’ she axes, ‘fur I can see ‘im?’ an’ I

Seeäd nobbut the smile o’ the sun as danced in ‘er pratty blue eye;

An’ I says ‘I mun gie tha a kiss,’ an’ Sally says ‘Noä, thou moänt,’

But I gied ‘er a kiss, an’ then anoother, an’ Sally says ‘doänt!’

IX.

An’ when we coom’d into Meeätin’, at fust she wur all in a tew,

But, arter, we sing’d the ‘ymn togither like birds on a beugh;

An’ Muggins ‘e preäch’d o’ Hell-fire an’ the loov o’ God fur men,

An’ then upo’ coomin’ awaäy Sally gied me a kiss ov ‘ersen.

X.

Heer wur a fall fro’ a kiss to a kick like Saätan as fell

Down out o’ heaven i’ hell-fire — thaw theer’s naw drinkin’ i’ Hell;

Meä fur to kick our Sally as kep the wolf fro’ the door,

All along o’ the drink, fur I loov’d ‘er as well as afoor.

XI.

Sa like a greät num-cumpus I blubber’d awaäy o’ the bed —

‘Weänt niver do it naw moor;’ an’ Sally loookt up an’ she said,

‘I’ll upowd it8 tha weänt; thou’rt like the rest o’ the men,

Thou’ll goä sniffin’ about the tap till tha does it agëan.

Theer’s thy hennemy, man, an’ I knaws, as knaws tha sa well,

That, if tha seeäs ‘im an’ smells ‘im tha’ll foller ‘im slick into Hell.’

XII.

‘Naäy,’ says I, ‘fur I weänt goä sniffin’ about the tap.’

‘Weänt tha?’ she says, an’ mysen I thowt i’ mysen ‘mayhap.’

‘Noä:’ an’ I started awaäy like a shot, an’ down to the Hinn,

An’ I browt what tha seeäs stannin’ theer, yon big black bottle o’ gin.

XIII.

‘That caps owt,’9 says Sally, an’ saw she begins to cry,

But I puts it inter ‘er ‘ands an’ I says to ‘er, ‘Sally,’ says I,

‘Stan’ ‘im theer i’ the naäme o’ the Lord an’ the power ov ‘is Graäce,

Stan’ ‘im theer, fur I’ll looök my hennemy strait i’ the faäce,

Stan’ ‘im theer i’ the winder, an’ let ma looök at ‘im then,

‘E seeäms naw moor nor watter, an’ ‘e’s the Divil’s oän sen.’

XIV.

An’ I wur down i’ tha mouth, couldn’t do naw work an’ all,

Nasty an’ snaggy an’ shaäky, an’ poonch’d my ‘and wi’ the hawl,

But she wur a power o’ coomfut, an’ sattled ‘ersen o’ my knee,

An’ coäxd an’ coodled me oop till ageän I feel’d mysen free.

XV.

An’ Sally she tell’d it about, an’ foälk stood a-gawmin’10 in,

As thaw it wur summat bewitch’d istead of a quart o’ gin;

An’ some on ‘em said it wur watter — an’ I wur chousin’ the wife,

Fur I couldn’t ‘owd ‘ands off gin, wur it nobbut to saäve my life;

An’ blacksmith ‘e strips me the thick ov ‘is airm, an’ ‘e shaws it to me,

Feeäl thou this! thou can’t graw this upo’ watter!’ says he.

An’ Doctor ‘e calls o’ Sunday an’ just as candles was lit,

‘Thou moänt do it,’ he says, ‘tha mun break ‘im off bit by bit.’

‘Thou’rt but a Methody-man,’ says Parson, and laäys down ‘is ‘at,

An’ ‘e points to the bottle o’ gin, ‘but I respeeks tha fur that;’

An’ Squire, his oän very sen, walks down fro’ the ‘All to see,

An’ ‘e spanks ‘is ‘and into mine, ‘fur I respecks tha,’ says ‘e;

An’ coostom ageän draw’d in like a wind fro’ far an’ wide,

And browt me the booöts to be cobbled fro’ hafe the coontryside.

XVI.

An’ theer ‘e stans an’ theer ‘e shall stan to my dying daäy;

I ‘a gotten to loov ‘im ageän in anoother kind of a waäy,

Proud on ‘im, like, my lad, an’ I keeäps ‘im cleän an’ bright,

Loovs ‘im, an’ roobs ‘im, an’ doosts ‘im, an’ puts ‘im back i’ the light.

XVII.

Wouldn’t a pint a’ sarved as well as a quart? Naw doubt:

But I liked a bigger fetter to fight wi’ an fowt it out.

Fine an’ meller ‘e mun be by this, if I cared to taäste,

But I moänt, my lad, and I weänt, fur I’d feäl mysen cleän disgraäced.

XVIII.

An’ once I said to the Missis, ‘My lass, when I cooms to die,

Smash the bottle to smithers, the Divil’s in ‘im,’ said I.

But arter I chaänged my mind, an’ if Sally be left aloän,

I’ll hev ‘im a-buried wi’mma an’ taäkt ‘im afoor the Throän.

XIX.

Coom thou ‘eer — yon laädy a-steppin along the streeät,

Doesn’t tha knaw ‘er — sa pratty, an’ feät, an’ neät, an’ sweeät?

Look at the cloäths on ‘er back, thebbe ammost spick-span-new,

An’ Tommy’s faäce be as fresh as a codlin wesh’d i’ the dew.

XX.

‘Ere he our Sally an’ Tommy, an’ we be a-goin to dine,

Baäcon an’ taätes, an’ a beslings-pud-din’11 an’ Adam’s wine;

But if tha wants ony grog tha mun goä fur it down to the Hinn,

Fur I weänt shed a drop on ‘is blood, noä, not fur Sally’s oän kin.

The Revenge. A Ballad of the Fleet

1878

I.

AT FLORES in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,

And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away:

“Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-three!”

Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: “‘Fore God I am no coward;

But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear,

And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick.

We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty-three?”

II.

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: “I know you are no coward;

You fly them for a moment to fight with them again.

But I’ve ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore.

I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard,

To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.”

III.

So Lord Howard passed away with five ships of war that day,

Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;

But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land

Very carefully and slow,

Men of Bideford in Devon,

And we laid them on the ballast down below;

For we brought them all aboard,

And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain,

To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

IV.

He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight,

And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight,

With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow.

“Shall we fight or shall we fly?

Good Sir Richard, tell us now,

For to fight is but to die!

There’ll be little of us left by the time this sun be set.”

And Sir Richard said again: “We be all good English men.

Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,

For I never turn’d my back upon Don or devil yet.”

V.

Sir Richard spoke and he laughed, and we roared a hurrah, and so

The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe,

With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below;

For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen,

And the little Revenge ran on through the long sea-lane between.

VI.

Thousands of their soldiers looked down from their decks and laughed,

Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft

Running on and on, till delayed

By their mountain-like San Philip that, of fifteen hundred tons,

And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns,

Took the breath from our sails, and we stayed.

VII.

And while now the great San Philip hung above us like a cloud

Whence the thunderbolt will fall

Long and loud,

Four galleons drew away

From the Spanish fleet that day,

And two upon the larboard and two upon the starboard lay,

And the battle-thunder broke from them all.

VIII.

But anon the great San Philip, she bethought herself and went

Having that within her womb that had left her ill content;

And the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand to hand,

For a dozen times they came with their pikes and musqueteers,

And a dozen times we shook ‘em off as a dog that shakes his ears

When he leaps from the water to the land.

IX.

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea,

But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.

Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came,

Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame;

Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame.

For some were sunk and many were shattered, and so could fight us no more —

God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?

X.

For he said “Fight on! fight on!”

Though his vessel was all but a wreck;

And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was gone,

With a grisly wound to be dressed he had left the deck,

But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly dead,

And himself he was wounded again in the side and the head,

And he said “Fight on! fight on!”

XI.

And the night went down, and the sun smiled out far over the summer sea,

And the Spanish fleet with broken sides lay round us all in a ring;

But they dared not touch us again, for they fear’d that we still could sting,

So they watched what the end would be.

And we had not fought them in vain,

But in perilous plight were we,

Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain,

And half of the rest of us maimed for life

In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife;

And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold,

And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent;

And the masts and the rigging were lying over the side;

But Sir Richard cried in his English pride:

“We have fought such a fight for a day and a night

As may never be fought again!

We have won great glory, my men!

And a day less or more

At sea or ashore,

We die — does it matter when?

Sink me the ship, Master Gunner — sink her, split her in twain!

Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!”

XII.

And the gunner said “Ay, ay,” but the seamen made reply:

“We have children, we have wives,

And the Lord hath spared our lives.

We will make the Spaniard promise, if we yield, to let us go;

We shall live to fight again and to strike another blow.”

And the lion there lay dying, and they yielded to the foe.

XIII.

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,

Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,

And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace;

But he rose upon their decks, and he cried:

“I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true;

I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do:

With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die!”

And he fell upon their decks, and he died.

XIV.

And they stared at the dead that had been so valiant and true,

And had holden the power and glory of Spain so cheap

That he dared her with one little ship and his English few;

Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew,

But they sank his body with honour down into the deep,

And they manned the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,

And away she sailed with her loss and longed for her own;

When a wind from the lands they had ruined awoke from sleep,

And the water began to heave and the weather to moan,

And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,

And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,

Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,

And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shattered navy of Spain,

And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags

To be lost evermore in the main.

The Sisters

THEY have left the doors ajar; and by their clash,

And prelude on the keys, I know the song,

Their favourite — which I call ‘The Tables Turned.’

Evelyn begins it ‘O diviner Air.’

EVELYN.

O diviner Air,

Thro’ the heat, the drowth, the dust, the glare,

Far from out the west in shadowing showers,

Over all the meadow baked and bare,

Making fresh and fair

All the bowers and the flowers,

Fainting flowers, faded bowers,

Over all this weary world of ours,

Breathe, diviner Air!

A sweet voice that — you scarce could better that.

Now follows Edith echoing Evelyn.

EDITH.

O diviner light,

Thro’ the cloud that roofs our noon with night,

Thro’ the blotting mist, the blinding showers,

Far from out a sky for ever bright,

Over all the woodland’s flooded bowers,

Over all the meadow’s drowning flowers,

Over all this ruin’d world of ours,

Break, diviner light!

Marvellously like, their voices — and themselves

Tho’ one is somewhat deeper than the other,

As one is somewhat graver than the other —

Edith than Evelyn. Your good Uncle, whom

You count the father of your fortune, longs

For this alliance: let me ask you then,

Which voice most takes you? for I do not doubt

Being a watchful parent, you are taken

With one or other: tho’ sometimes I fear

You may be flickering, fluttering in a doubt

Between the two — which must not be — which might

Be death to one: they both are beautiful:

Evelyn is gayer, wittier, prettier, says

The common voice, if one may trust it: she?

No! but the paler and the graver, Edith.

Woo her and gain her then: no wavering, boy!

The graver is perhaps the one for you

Who jest and laugh so easily and so well.

For love will go by contrast, as by likes.

No sisters ever prized each other more.

Not so: their mother and her sister loved

More passionately still.

But that my best

And oldest friend, your Uncle, wishes it,

And that I know you worthy everyway

To be my son, I might, perchance, be loath

To part them, or part from them: and yet one

Should marry, or all the broad lands in your view

From this bay window — which our house has held

Three hundred years — will pass collaterally.

My father with a child on either knee,

A hand upon the head of either child,

Smoothing their locks, as golden as his own

Were silver, ‘get them wedded’ would he say.

And once my prattling Edith ask’d him why?’

Ay, why? said he, ‘ for why should I go lame?’

Then told them of his wars, and of his wound.

For see — this wine — the grape from whence it flow’d

Was blackening on the slopes of Portugal,

When that brave soldier, down the terrible ridge

Plunged in the last fierce charge at Waterloo,

And caught the laming bullet. He left me this.

Which yet retains a memory of its youth,

As I of mine, and my first passion. Come!

Here’s to your happy union with my child!

Yet must you change your name: no fault of mine!

You say that you can do it as willingly

As birds make ready for their bridal-time

By change of feather: for all that, my boy,

Some birds are sick and sullen when they moult.

An old and worthy name! but mine that stirr’d

Among our civil wars and earlier too

Among the Roses, the more venerable.

I care not for a name — no fault of mine.

Once more — a happier marriage than my own!

You see yon Lombard poplar on the plain.

The highway running by it leaves a breadth

Of sward to left and right, where, long ago,

One bright May morning in a world of song,

I lay at leisure, watching overhead

The aërial poplar wave, an amber spire.

I dozed; I woke. An open landaulet

Whirl’d by, which, after it had past me, show’d

Turning my way, the loveliest face on earth.

The face of one there sitting opposite.

On whom I brought a strange unhappiness,

That time I did not see.

Love at first sight

May seem — with goodly rhyme and reason for it —

Possible — at first glimpse, and for a face

Gone in a moment — strange. Yet once, when first

I came on lake Llanberris in the dark,

A moonless night with storm — one lightning-fork

Flash’d out the lake; and tho’ I loiter’d there

The full day after, yet in retrospect

That less than momentary thunder-sketch

Of lake and mountain conquers all the day.

The Sun himself has limn’d the face for me.

Not quite so quickly, no, nor half as well.

For look you here — the shadows are too deep,

And like the critic’s blurring comment make

The veriest beauties of the work appear

The darkest faults: the sweet eyes frown: the lips

Seem but a gash. My sole memorial

Of Edith — no, the other, — both indeed.

So that bright face was flash’d thro’ sense and soul

And by the poplar vanish’d — to be found

Long after, as it seem’d, beneath the tall

Tree-bowers, and those long-sweeping beechen boughs

Of our New Forest. I was there alone:

The phantom of the whirling landaulet

For ever past me by: when one quick peal

Of laughter drew me thro’ the glimmering glades

Down to the snowlike sparkle of a cloth

On fern and foxglove. Lo, the face again,

My Rosalind in this Arden — Edith — all

One bloom of youth, health, beauty, happiness,

And moved to merriment at a passing jest.

There one of those about her knowing me

Call’d me to join them; so with these I spent

What seem’d my crowning hour, my day of days.

I wood her then, nor unsuccessfully,

The worse for her, for me! was I content?

Ay — no, not quite; for now and then I thought

Laziness, vague love-longings, the bright May,

Had made a heated haze to magnify

The charm of Edith — that a man’s ideal

Is high in Heaven, and lodged with Plato’s God,

Not findable here — content, and not content,

In some such fashion as a man may be

That having had the portrait of his friend

Drawn by an artist, looks at it, and says,

‘Good! very like! not altogether he.’

As yet I had not bound myself by words,

Only, believing I loved Edith, made

Edith love me. Then came the day when I,

Flattering myself that all my doubts were fools

Born of the fool this Age that doubts of all —

Not I that day of Edith’s love or mine —

Had braced my purpose to declare myself:

I stood upon the stairs of Paradise.

The golden gates would open at a word.

I spoke it — told her of my passion, seen

And lost and found again, had got so far,

Had caught her hand, her eyelids fell — I heard

Wheels, and a noise of welcome at the doors —

On a sudden after two Italian years

I lad set the blossom of her health again,

The younger sister, Evelyn, enter’d — there,

There was the face, and altogether she.

The mother fell about the daughter’s neck,

The sisters closed in one another’s arms,

Their people throng’d about them from the hall,

And in the thick of question and reply

I fled the house, driven by one angel face,

And all the Furies.

I was bound to her;

I could not free myself in honour — bound

Not by the sounded letter of the word,

Put counterpressures of the yielded hand

That timorously and faintly echoed mine,

Quick blushes, the sweet dwelling of her eyes

Upon me when she thought I did not see —

Were these not bonds? nay, nay, but could I wed her

Loving the other? do her that great wrong?

Had I not dream’d I loved her yestermorn?

Had I not known where Love, at first a fear,

Grew after marriage to full height and form?

Yet after marriage, that mock-sister there —

Brother-in-law — the fiery nearness of it —

Unlawful and disloyal brotherhood —

What end but darkness could ensue from this

For all the three? So Love and Honour jarr’d

Tho’ Love and honour join’d to raise the full

High-tide of doubt that sway’d me up and down

Advancing nor retreating.

Edith wrote:

‘My mother bid; me ask’ (I did not tell you —

A widow with less guile than many a child.

God help the wrinkled children that are Christ’s

As well as the plump cheek — she wrought us harm,

Poor soul, not knowing) ‘are you ill?’ (so ran

The letter) ‘you have not been here of late.

You will not find me here. At last I go

On that long-promised visit to the North.

I told your wayside story to my mother

And Evelyn. She remembers you. Farewell.

Pray come and see my mother. Almost blind

With ever-growing cataract, yet she thinks

She sees you when she hears. Again farewell.

Cold words from one I had hoped to warm so far

That I could stamp my image on her heart!

‘Pray come and see my mother, and farewell.’

Cold, but as welcome as free airs of heaven

After a dungeon’s closeness. Selfish, strange!

What dwarfs are men! my strangled vanity

Utter’d a stifled cry — to have vext myself

And all in vain for her — cold heart or none —

No bride for me. Yet so my path was clear

To win the sister.

Whom I woo’d and won.

For Evelyn knew not of my former suit,

Because the simple mother work’d upon

By Edith pray it me not to whisper of it.

And Edith would be bridesmaid on the day.

But on that day, not being all at ease,

I from the altar glancing back upon her,

Before the first ‘I will’ was utter’d, saw

The bridesmaid pale, statuelike, passionless —

‘No harm, no harm’ I turn’d again, and placed

My ring upon the finger of my bride.

So, when we parted, Edith spoke no word,

She wept no tear, but round my Evelyn clung

In utter silence for so long, I thought

‘What, will she never set her sister free?’

We left her, happy each in each, and then,

As tho’ the happiness of each in each

Were not enough, must fain have torrents, lakes,

Hills, the great things of Nature and the fair,

To lift us as it were from commonplace,

And help us to our joy. Better have sent

Our Edith thro’ the glories of the earth,

To change with her horizon, if true Love

Were not his own imperial all-in-all.

Far off we went. My God, I would not live

Save that I think this gross hard-seeming world

Is our misshaping vision of the Powers

Behind the world, that make our griefs our gains.

For on the dark night of our marriage-day

The great Tragedian, that had quench’d herself

In that assumption of the bridesmaid — she

That loved me — our true Edith — her brain broke

With over-acting, till she rose and fled

Beneath a pitiless rush of Autumn rain

To the deaf church — to be let in — to pray

Before that altar — so I think; and there

They found her beating the hard Protestant doors.

She died and she was buried ere we knew.

I learnt it first. I had to speak. At once

The bright quick smile of Evelyn, that had sunn’d

The morning of our marriage, past away

And on our home-return the daily want

Of Edith in the house, the garden, still

Haunted us like her ghost; and by and by,

Either from that necessity for talk

Which lives with blindness, or plain innocence

Of nature, or desire that her lost child

Should earn from both the praise of heroism,

The mother broke her promise to the dead,

And told the living daughter with what love

Edith had welcomed my brief wooing of her,

And all her sweet self-sacrifice and death.

Henceforth that mystic bond betwixt the twins —

Did I not tell you they were twins? — prevail’d

So far that no caress could win my wife

Back to that passionate answer of full heart

I had from her at first. Not that her love,

Tho’ scarce as great as Edith’s power of love,

Had lessen’d, but the mother’s garrulous wail

For ever woke the unhappy Past again,

Till that dead bridesmaid, meant to be my bride,

Put forth cold hands between us, and I fear’d

The very fountains of her life were chill’d;

So took her thence, and brought her here, and here

She bore a child, whom reverently we call’d

Edith; and in the second year was born

A second — this I named from her own self,

Evelyn; then two weeks — no more — she joined,

In and beyond the grave, that one she loved.

Now in this quiet of declining life,

Thro’ dreams by night and trances of the day,

The sisters glide about me hand in hand,

Both beautiful alike, nor can I tell

One from the other, no, nor care to tell

One from the other, only know they come,

They smile upon me, till, remembering all

The love they both have borne me, and the love

I bore them both — divided as I am

From either by the stillness of the grave —

I know not which of these I love the best.

But you love Edith; and her own true eyes

Are traitors to her: our quick Evelyn —

The merrier, prettier, wittier, as they talk,

And not without good reason, my good son —

Is yet untouch’d: and I that hold them both

Dearest of all things — well, I am not sure —

But if there lie a preference eitherway,

And in the rich vocabulary of Love

‘Most dearest’ be a true superlative —

I think I likewise love your Edith most.

The Village Wife; or,The Entail

I.

‘OUSE-KEEPER sent tha my lass, fur New Squire coom’d last night.

Butter an’ heggs — yis — yis. I’ll goä wi’ tha back: all right;

Butter I warrants be prime, an’ I warrants the heggs be as well,

Hafe a pint o’ milk runs out when ya breäks the shell.

II.

Sit thysen down fur a bit: hev a glass o’ cowslip wine!

I liked the owd Squire an’ ‘is gells as thaw they was gells o’ mine,

Fur then we was all es one, the Squire an’ ‘is darters an’ me,

Hall but Miss Annie, the heldest, I niver not took to she:

But Nelly, the last of the cletch,2 I liked ‘er the fust on ‘em all,

Fur hoffens we talkt o’ my darter es died o’ the fever at fall:

An’ I thowt ‘twur the will o’ the Lord, but Miss Annie she said it wur draäins,

Fur she hedn’t naw coomfut in ‘er, an’ arn’d naw thanks fur ‘er paäins.

Eh! thebbe all wi’ the Lord my childer, I han’t gotten none!

Sa new squire’s coom’d wi’ ‘is taäil in ‘is ‘and, an’ owd Squire’s gone.

III.

Fur ‘staäte be i’ taäil, my lass: tha dosn’ knaw what that be?

But I knaws the law, I does, for the lawyer ha towd it me.

‘When theer’s naw ‘ead to a ‘Ouse by the fault o’ that ere maäle —

The gells they counts fur nowt, and the next un he taäkes the taäil.’

IV.

What be the next un like? can tha tell ony harm on ‘im lass? —

Naäy sit down — naw ‘urry — sa cowd! — hev another glass!

Straänge an’ cowd fur the time! we may happen a fall o’ snaw —

Not es I cares fur to hear ony harm, but I likes to knaw.

An’ I ‘oäps es ‘e beänt booöklarn’d: but ‘e dosn’ not coom fro’ the shere;

We’d anew o’ that wi’ the Squire, an’ we haätes booöklarnin’ ere.

V.

Fur Squire wur a Varsity scholard, an’ niver lookt arter the land —

Whoäts or tonups or taätes—’e ‘ed hallus a booök i’ ‘is ‘and,

Hallus aloän wi’ ‘is booöks, thaw nigh upo’ seventy year.

An’ booöks, what’s booöks? thou knaws thebbe naither ‘ere nor theer.

VI.

An’ the gells, they hedn’t naw taäils, an’ the lawyer he towd it me

That ‘is taäil were soä tied up es he couldn’t cut down a tree!

‘Drat the trees,’ says I, to be sewer I haätes ‘em, my lass,

Fur we puts the muck o’ the land an’ they sucks the muck fro’ the grass.

VII.

An’ Squire wur hallus a-smilin’, an’ gied to the tramps goin’ by —

An’ all o’ the wust i’ the parish — wi’ hoffens a drop in ‘is eye.

An’ ivry darter o’ Squire’s hed her awn ridin-erse to ‘ersen,

An’ they rampaged about wi’ their grooms, an’ was ‘unten’ arter the men,

An’ hallus a-dallackt3 an’ dizen’d out, an’ a-buyin’ new cloäthes,

While ‘e sit like a greät glimmer-gowk4 wi’ ‘is glasses athurt ‘is noäse,

An’ ‘is noäse sa grufted wi’ snuff es it couldn’t be scroob’d awaäy,

Fur atween ‘is reädin’ an’ writin’ ‘e sniff: up a box in a daäy,

An’ ‘e niver runn’d arter the fox, nor arter the birds wi’ ‘is gun,

An’ ‘e niver not shot one ‘are, but ‘e leäved it to Charlie ‘is son,

An’ ‘e niver not fish’d ‘is awn ponds, but Charlie ‘e cotch’d the pike,

For ‘e warn’t not burn to the land, an’ ‘e didn’t take kind to it like;

But I eärs es ‘e’d gie fur a howry5 owd book thutty pound an’ moor,

An’ ‘e’d wrote an owd book, his awn sen, sa I knaw’d es’e’d coom to be poor;

An’ ‘e gied — I be fear’d fur to tell tha ‘ow much — fur an owd scratted stoän,

An’ ‘e digg’d up a loomp i’ the land an’ ‘e got a brown pot an’ a boän,

An’ ‘e bowt owd money, es wouldn’t goä, wi’ good gowd o’ the Queen,

An’ ‘e bowt little statutes all-naäkt an’ which was a shaäme to be seen;

But ‘e niver looökt ower a bill, nor ‘e niver not seed to owt,

An’ ‘e niver knawd nowt but booöks, an’ booöks, as thou knaws, beänt nowt.

VIII.

But owd Squire’s laädy es long es she lived she kep ‘em all clear,

Thaw es long es she lived I niver hed none of ‘er darters ‘ere;

Burt arter she died we was all es one, the childer an’ me,

An’ sarvints runn’d in an’ out, an’ offens we hed ‘em to tea.

Lawk! ‘ow I laugh’d when the lasses ‘ud talk o’ their Missis’s waäys,

An’ the Missisis talk’d o’ the lasses. — I’ll tell tha some o’ these daäys.

Hoänly Miss Annie were saw stuck oop, like ‘er mother afoor —

‘Er an’ ‘er blessed darter — they niver derken’d my door.

IX.

An’ Squire ‘e smiled an’ ‘e smiled till ‘e’d gotten a fright at last,

An’ ‘e calls fur ‘is son, fur the ‘turney’s letters they foller’d sa fast;

But Squire wur afear’d o’ ‘is son, an’ ‘e says to ‘im, meek as a mouse,

‘Lad, thou mun cut off thy taäil, or the gells ‘ull goä to the ‘Ouse,

Fur I finds es I be that i’ debt, es I ‘oaps es thou’ll ‘elp me a bit,

An’ if thou’ll ‘gree to cut off thy taäil I may saäve mysen yit.’

X.

But Charlie ‘e sets back ‘is ears, an’ ‘e swears, an’ ‘e says to ‘im ‘Noa.

I’ve gotten the ‘staäte by the taäil an’ be dang’d if I iver let goa!

Coom! coom! feyther,’ ‘e says, ‘why shouldn’t thy booöks be sowd?

I hears es soom o’ thy booöks mebbe worth their weight i’ gowd.’

XI.

Heäps an’ heäps o’ booöks, I ha’ see’d ‘em, belong’d to the Squire,

But the lasses ‘ed teärd out leäves i’ the middle to kindle the fire;

Sa moäst on ‘is owd big booöks fetch’d nigh to nowt at the saäle,

And Squire were at Charlie agean to git ‘im to cut off ‘is taäil.

XII.

Ya wouldn’t find Charlie’s likes—’e were that outdacious at ‘oam,

Not thaw ya went fur to raäke out Hell wi’ a small-tooth coamb —

Droonk wi’ the Quoloty’s wine, an’ droonk wi’ the farmer’s a  8;le,

Mad wi’ the lasses an’ all — an’ ‘e wouldn’t cut off the taäil.

XIII.

Thou’s coom’d oop by the beck; and a thurn be a-grawin’ theer,

I niver ha seed it sa white wi’ the Maäy es I see’d it to-year —

Theerabouts Charlie joompt — and it gied me a scare tother night,

Fur I thowt it wur Charlie’s ghoäst i’ the derk, fur it looökt sa white.

‘Billy,’ says ‘e, ‘hev a joomp!’ — thaw the banks o’ the beck be sa high,

Fur he ca’d ‘is ‘erse Billy-rough-un, thaw niver a hair wur awry;

But Billy fell bakkuds o’ Charlie, an’ Charlie ‘e brok ‘is neck,

Sa theer wur a hend o’ the taäil, fur ‘e lost ‘is taäil i’ the beck.

XIV.

Sa ‘is taäil wur lost an’ ‘is booöks wur gone an’ ‘is boy wur deäd,

An’ Squire ‘e smiled an’ ‘e smiled, but ‘e niver not lift oop ‘is ‘eäd:

Hallus a soft un Squire! an’ ‘e smiled, fur ‘e hedn’t naw friend,

Sa feyther an’ son was buried togither, an’ this wur the hend.

XV.

An’ Parson as hesn’t the call, nor the mooney, but hes the pride,

‘E reads of a sewer an’ sartan ‘oäp o’ the tother side;

But I beänt that sewer es the Lord, how-siver they praäy’d an’ praäy’d,

Lets them inter ‘eaven eäsy es leäves their debts to be paäid.

Siver the mou’ds rattled down upo’ poor owd Squire i’ the wood,

An’ I cried along wi’ the gells, fur they weänt niver coons to naw good.

XVI.

Fur Molly the long un she walkt awaäy wi’ a hofficer lad,

An’ nawbody ‘eärd on ‘er sin, sa o’ coorse she be gone to the bad!

An’ Lucy wur laäme o’ one leg, sweet-’arts she niver ‘ed none —

Straänge an’ unheppen6 Miss Lucy! we naämed her ‘ Dot an’ gaw one!’

An’ Hetty wur weak i’ the hattics, wi’out ony harm i’ the legs,

An’ the fever ‘ed baäked Jinny’s ‘eäd as bald as one o’ them heggs,

An’ Nelly wur up fro’ the craädle as big i’ the mouth as a cow,

An’ saw she mun hammergrate,7 lass, of she weänt git a maäte onyhow!

An’ es for Miss Annie es call’d me afoor my awn foälks to my faäce

‘A hignorant village wife as ‘ud hev to be larn’d her awn plaäce,’

Hes fur Miss Hannie the heldest hes now be a-grawin’ sa howd,

I knaws that mooch o’ sheä, es it beänt not fit to be towd!

XVII.

Sa I didn’t not taäke it kindly ov owd Miss Annie to saäy

Es I should be talkin ageän ‘em, es soon es they went awaäy,

Fur, lawks! ‘ow I cried when they went, an’ our Nelly she gied me ‘er ‘and,

Fur I’d ha done owt for the Squire an’ ‘is gells es belong’d to the land;

Booöks, es I said afoor, thebbe neyther ‘ere nor theer!

But I sarved ‘em wi’ butter an’ heggs fur huppuds o’ twenty year.

XVIII.

An’ they hallus paäid what I hax’d, sa I hallus deal’d wi’ the Hall,

An’ they knaw’d what butter wur, an’ they knaw’d what a hegg wur an’ all;

Hugger-mugger they lived, but they wasn’t that eäsy to pleäse,

Till I gied ‘em Hinjian curn, an’ they laäid big heggs es tha seeas;

An’ I niver puts saäme8 i’ my butter, they does it at Willis’s farm,

Taäste another drop o’ the wine — tweänt do tha naw harm.

XIX.

Sa new Squire’s coom’d wi’ ‘is taäil in ‘is ‘and, an’ owd Squire’s gone;

I heard ‘im a roomlin’ by, but arter my nightcap wur on;

Sa I han’t clapt eyes on ‘im yit, fur he coom’d last night sa laäte —

Pluksh! ! ! 9 the hens i’ the peäs! why didn’t tha hesp the gaäte?

In the Children’s Hospital

EMMIE

I.

OUR doctor had call’d in another, I never had seen him before,

But he sent a chill to my heart when I saw him come in at the door,

Fresh from the surgery-schools of France and of other lands —

Harsh red hair, big voice, big chest, big merciless hands!

Wonderful cures he had done, O, yes, but they said too of him

He was happier using the knife than in trying to save the limb,

And that I can well believe, for he look’d so coarse and so red,

I could think he was one of those who would break their jests on the dead,

And mangle the living dog that had loved him and fawn’d at his knee —

Drench’d with the hellish oorali — that ever such things should be!

II.

Here was a boy — I am sure that some of our children would die

But for the voice of love, and the smile, and the comforting eye —

Here was a boy in the ward, every bone seem’d out of its place —

Caught in a mill and crush’d — it was all but a hopeless case:

And he handled him gently enough; but his voice and his face were not kind,

And it was but a hopeless case, he had seen it and made up his mind,

And he said to me roughly, ‘The lad will need little more of your care.’

‘All the more need,’ I told him, ‘to seek The Lord Jesus in prayer;

They are all His children here, and I pray for them all as my own.’

But he turn’d to me, ‘Ay, good woman, can prayer set a broken bone?’

Then he mutter’d half to himself, but I know that I heard him say,

‘All very well — but the good Lord Jesus has had his day.’

III.

Had? has it come? It has only dawn’d. It will come by and by.

O, how could I serve in the wards if the hope of the world were a lie?

How could I bear with the sights and the loathsome smells of disease

But that He said, ‘Ye do it to me, when ye do it to these’?

IV.

So he went. And we past to this ward where the younger children are laid.

Here is the cot of our orphan, our darling, our meek little maid;

Empty, you see, just now! We have lost her who loved her so much —

Patient of pain tho’ as quick as a sensitive plant to the touch.

Hers was the prettiest prattle, it often moved me to tears,

Hers was the gratefullest heart I have found in a child of her years —

Nay you remember our Emmie; you used to send her the flowers.

How she would smile at ‘em, play with ‘em, talk to ‘em hours after hours!

They that can wander at will where the works of the Lord are reveal’d

Little guess what joy can be got from a cowslip out of the field;

Flowers to these ‘spirits in prison’ are all they can know of the spring,

They freshen and sweeten the wards like the waft of an angel’s wing.

And she lay with a flower in one hand and her thin hands crost on her breast —

Wan, but as pretty as heart can desire, and we thought her at rest,

Quietly sleeping — so quiet, our doctor said, 145;Poor little dear,

Nurse, I must do it to-morrow; she’ll never live thro’ it, I fear.’

V.

I walk’d with our kindly old doctor as far as the head of the stair,

Then I return’d to the ward; the child didn’t see I was there.

VI.

Never since I was nurse had I been so grieved and so vext!

Emmie had heard him. Softly she call’d from her cot to the next,

‘He says I shall never live thro’ it;

O Annie, what shall I do?’ Annie consider’d.

‘If I,’ said the wise little Annie, ‘was you,

I should cry to the dear Lord Jesus to help me, for, Emmie, you see,

It’s all in the picture there: “Little children should come to me”’ —

Meaning the print that you gave us, I find that it always can please

Our children, the dear Lord Jesus with children about his knees.

‘Yes, and I will,’ said Emmie, ‘but then if I call to the Lord,

How should he know that it’s me? such a lot of beds in the ward!’

That was a puzzle for Annie. Again she consider’d and said:

‘Emmie, you put out your arms, and you leave ‘em outside on the bed —

The Lord has so much to see to! but, Emmie, you tell it him plain,

It’s the little girl with her arms lying out on the counterpane.’

VII.

I had sat three nights by the child — I could not watch her for four —

My brain had begun to reel — I felt I could do it no more.

That was my sleeping-night, but I thought that it never would pass.

There was a thunderclap once, and a clatter of hail on the glass,

And there was a phantom cry that I heard as I tost about,

The motherless bleat of a lamb in the storm and the darkness without;

My sleep was broken besides with dreams of the dreadful knife

And fears for our delicate Emmie who scarce would escape with her life;

Then in the gray of the morning it seem’d she stood by me and smiled,

And the doctor came at his hour, and we went to see to the child.

VIII.

He had brought his ghastly tools; we believed her asleep again —

Her dear, long, lean, little arms lying out on the counterpane —

Say that His day is done! Ah, why should we care what they say?

The Lord of the children had heard her, and Emmie had past away.

Dedicatory Poem to the Princess Alice

1879

DEAD Princess, living Power, if that which lived

True life live on — and if the fatal kiss,

Born of true life and love, divorce thee not

From earthly love and life — if what we call

The spirit flash not all at once from out

This shadow into Substance — then perhaps

The mellow’d murmur of the people’s praise

From thine own State, and all our breadth of realm,

Where Love and Longing dress thy deeds in light,

Ascends to thee; and this March morn that sees

Thy Soldier-brother’s bridal orange-bloom

Break thro’ the yews and cypress of thy grave,

And thine Imperial mother smile again,

May send one ray to thee! and who can tell —

Thou — England’s England-loving daughter — thou

Dying so English thou wouldst have her flag

Borne on thy coffin — where is he can swear

But that some broken gleam from our poor earth

May touch thee, while, remembering thee, I lay

At thy pale feet this ballad of the deeds

Of England, and her banner in the East?

The Defence of Lucknow

I.

BANNER of England, not for a season, O banner of Britain, hast thou

Floated in conquering battle or flapt to the battle-cry!

Never with mightier glory than when we had rear’d thee on high

Flying at top of the roofs in the ghastly siege of Lucknow —

Shot thro’ the staff or the halyard, but ever we raised thee anew,

And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.

II.

Frail were the works that defended the hold that we held with our lives —

Women and children among us, God help them, our children and wives!

Hold it we might — and for fifteen days or for twenty at most.

‘Never surrender, I charge you, but every man die at his post!’

Voice of the dead whom we loved, our Lawrence the best of the brave:

Cold were his brows when we kiss’d him — we laid him that night in his grave.

‘Every man die at his post!’ and there hail’d on our houses and halls

Death from their rifle-bullets, and death from their cannon-balls,

Death in our innermost chamber, and death at our slight barricade,

Death while we stood with the musket, and death while we stoopt to the spade,

Death to the dying, and wounds to the wounded, for often there fell,

Striking the hospital wall, crashing thro’ it, their shot and their shell,

Death — for their spies were among us, their marksmen were told of our best,

So that the brute bullet broke thro’ the brain that could think for the rest;

Bullets would sing by our foreheads, and bullets would rain at our feet —

Fire from ten thousand at once of the rebels that girdled us round —

Death at the glimpse of a finger from over the breadth of a street,

Death from the heights of the mosque and the palace, and death in the ground!

Mine? yes, a mine! Countermine! down, down! and creep thro’ the hole!

Keep the revolver in hand! you can hear him — the murderous mole!

Quiet, ah! quiet — wait till the point of the pickaxe be thro’!

Click with the pick, coming nearer and nearer again than before —

Now let it speak, and you fire, and the dark pioneer is no more;

And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew!

III.

Ay, but the foe sprung his mine many times, and it chanced on a day

Soon as the blast of that underground thunderclap echo ‘d away,

Dark thro’ the smoke and the sulphur like so many fiends in their hell —

Cannon-shot, musket-shot, volley on volley, and yell upon yell —

Fiercely on all the defences our myriad enemy fell.

What have they done? where is it? Out yonder. Guard the Redan!

Storm at the Water-gate! storm at the Bailey-gate! storm, and it ran

Surging and swaying all round us, as ocean on every side

Plunges and heaves at a bank that is daily devour’d by the tide —

So many thousands that if they be bold enough, who shall escape?

Kill or be kill’d, live or die, they shall know we are soldiers and men

Ready! take aim at their leaders — their masses are gapp’d with our grape —

Backward they reel like the wave, like the wave flinging forward again,

Flying and foil’d at the last by the handful they could not subdue;

And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.

IV.

Handful of men as we were, we were English in heart and in limb,

Strong with the strength of the race to command, to obey, to endure,

Each of us fought as if hope for the garrison hung but on him;

Still — could we watch at all points? we were every day fewer and fewer.

There was a whisper among us, but only a whisper that past

‘Children and wives — if the tigers leap into the fold unawares —

Every man die at his post — and the foe may outlive us at last —

Better to fall by the hands that they love, than to fall into theirs!’

Roar upon roar in a moment two mines by the enemy sprung

Clove into perilous chasms our walls and our poor palisades.

Rifleman, true is your heart, but be sure that your hand be as true!

Sharp is the fire of assault, better aimed are your flank fusillades —

Twice do we hurl them to earth from the ladders to which they had clung,

Twice from the ditch where they shelter we drive them with hand-grenades;

And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.

V.

Then on another wild morning another wild earthquake out-tore

Clean from our lines of defence ten or twelve good paces or more.

Rifleman, high on the roof, hidden there from the light of the sun —

One has leapt up on the breach, crying out: ‘Follow me, follow me!’ —

Mark him — he falls! then another, and him too, and down goes he.

Had they been bold enough then, who can tell but the traitors had won?

Boardings and rafters and doors — an embrasure I make way for the gun!

Now double-charge it with grape! It is charged and we fire, and they run.

Praise to our Indian brothers, and let the dark face have his due!

Thanks to the kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful and few,

Fought with the bravest among us, and drove them, and smote them, and slew,

That ever upon the topmost roof our banner in India blew.

VI.

Men will forget what we suffer and not what we do. We can fight!

But to be soldier all day and be sentinel all thro’ the night —

Ever the mine and assault, our sallies, their lying alarms,

Bugles and drums in the darkness, and shoutings and soundings to arms,

Ever the labour of fifty that had to be done by five,

Ever the marvel among us that one should be left alive,

Ever the day with its traitorous death from the loopholes around,

Ever the night with its coffinless corpse to be laid in the ground,

Heat like the mouth of a hell, or a deluge of cataract skies,

Stench of old offal decaying, and infinite torment of flies.

Thoughts of the breezes of May blowing over an English field,

Cholera, scurvy, and fever, the wound that would not be heal’d,

Lopping away of the limb by the pitiful-pitiless knife, —

Torture and trouble in vain, — for it never could save us a life.

Valour of delicate women who tended the hospital bed,

Horror of women in travail among the dying and dead,

Grief for our perishing children, and never a moment for grief,

Toil and ineffable weariness, faltering hopes of relief,

Havelock baffled, or beaten, or butcher’d for all that we knew —

Then day and night, day and night, coming down on the still-shatter’d walls

Millions of musket-bullets, and thousands of cannon-balls —

But ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.

VII.

Hark cannonade, fusillade! is it true what was told by the scout,

Outram and Havelock breaking their way through the fell mutineers?

Surely the pibroch of Europe is ringing again in our ears!

All on a sudden the garrison utter a jubilant shout,

Havelock’s glorious Highlanders answer with conquering cheers,

Sick from the hospital echo them, women and children come out,

Blessing the wholesome white faces of Havelock’s good fusileers,

Kissing the war-harden’d hand of the Highlander wet with their tears!

Dance to the pibroch! — saved! we are saved! — is it you? is it you?

Saved by the valour of Havelock, saved by the blessing of Heaven!

‘Hold it for fifteen days!’ we have held it for eighty-seven!

And ever aloft on the palace roof the old banner of England blew.

Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham

(In Wales.)

MY FRIEND should meet me somewhere hereabout

To take me to that hiding in the hills.

I have broke their cage, no gilded one, I trow —

I read no more the prisoner’s mute wail

Scribbled or carved upon the pitiless stone;

I find hard rocks, hard life, hard cheer, or none,

For I am emptier than a friar’s brains;

But God is with me in this wilderness,

These wet black passes and foam-churning chasms —

And God’s free air, and hope of better things.

I would I knew their speech; not now to glean,

Not now — I hope to do it — some scatter’d ears,

Some ears for Christ in this wild field of Wales —

But, bread, merely for bread. This tongue that wagg’d

They said with such heretical arrogance

Against the proud archbishop Arundel —

So much God’s cause was fluent in it — is here

But as a Latin Bible to the crowd;

‘Bara!’ — what use? The Shepherd, when I speak,

Vailing a sudden eyelid with his hard

‘Dim Saesneg’ passes, wroth at things of old —

No fault of mine. Had he God’s word in Welsh

He might be kindlier: happily come the day!

Not least art thou, thou little Bethlehem

In Judah, for in thee the Lord was born;

Nor thou in Britain, little Lutterworth,

Least, for in thee the word was born again.

Heaven-sweet Evangel, ever-living word,

Who whilome spakest to the South in Greek

About the soft Mediterranean shores,

And then in Latin to the Latin crowd,

As good need was — thou hast come to talk our isle.

Hereafter thou, fulfilling Pentecost,

Must learn to use the tongues of all the world.

Yet art thou thine own witness that thou bringest

Not peace, a sword, a fire.

What did he say,

My frighted Wiclif-preacher whom I crost

In flying hither? that one night a crowd

Throng’d the waste field about the city gates:

The king was on them suddenly with a host.

Why there? they came to hear their preacher. Then

Some cried on Cobham, on the good Lord Cobham;

Ay, for they love me! but the king — nor voice

Nor finger raised against him — took and hang’d,

Took, hang’d and burnt — how many — thirty-nine —

Call’d it rebellion — hang’d, poor friends, as rebels

And burn’d alive as heretics! for your Priest

Labels — to take the king along with him —

All heresy, treason: but to call men traitors

May make men traitors.

Rose of Lancaster,

Red in thy birth, redder with household war,

Now reddest with the blood of holy men,

Redder to be, red rose of Lancaster —

If somewhere in the North, as Rumour sang

Fluttering the hawks of this crown-lusting line —

By firth and loch thy silver sister grow,1

That were my rose, there my allegiance due.

Self-starved, they say — nay, murder’d, doubtless dead.

So to this king I cleaved: my friend was he,

Once my fast friend: I would have given my life

To help his own from scathe, a thousand lives

To save his soul. He might have come to learn

Our Wiclif’s learning: but the worldly Priests

Who fear the king’s hard common-sense should find

What rotten piles uphold their mason-work,

Urge him to foreign war. O had he will’d

I might have stricken a lusty stroke for him,

But he would not; far liever led my friend

Back to the pure and universal church,

But he would not: whether that heirless flaw

In his throne’s title make him feel so frail,

He leans on Antichrist; or that his mind,

So quick, so capable in soldiership,

In matters of the faith, alas the while!

More worth than all the kingdoms of this world,

Runs in the rut, a coward to the Priest.

Burnt — good Sir Roger Acton, my dear friend!

Burnt too, my faithful preacher, Beverley!

Lord give thou power to thy two witnesses!

Lest the false faith make merry over them

Two — nay but thirty-nine have risen and stand,

Dark with the smoke of human sacrifice,

Before thy light, and cry continually —

Cry — against whom?

Him, who should bear the sword

Of Justice — what! the kingly, kindly boy;

Who took the world so easily heretofore,

My boon companion, tavern-fellow — him

Who gibed and japed — in many a merry tale

That shook our sides — at Pardoners, Summoners,

Friars, absolution-sellers, monkeries

And nunneries, when the wild hour and the wine

Had set the wits aflame.

Harry of Monmouth,

Or Amurath of the East?

Better to sink

Thy fleurs-de-lys in slime again, and fling

Thy royalty back into the riotous fits

Of wine and harlotry — thy shame, and mine,

Thy comrade — than to persecute the Lord,

And play the Saul that never will be Paul.

Burnt, burnt! and while this mitred Arundel

Dooms our unlicensed preacher to the flame,

The mitre-sanction’d harlot draws his clerks

Into the suburb — their hard celibacy,

Sworn to be veriest ice of pureness, molten

Into adulterous living, or such crimes

As holy Paul — a shame to speak of them —

Among the heathen —

Sanctuary granted

To bandit, thief, assassin — yea to him

Who hacks his mother’s throat — denied to him,

Who finds the Saviour in his mother tongue.

The Gospel, the Priest’s pearl, flung down to swine —

The swine, lay-men, lay-women, who will come,

God willing, to outlearn the filthy friar.

Ah rather, Lord, than that thy Gospel, meant

To course and range thro’ all the world, should be

Tether’d to these dead pillars of the Church —

Rather than so, if thou wilt have it so,

Burst vein, snap sinew, and crack heart, and life

Pass in the fire of Babylon! but how long,

O Lord, how long!

My friend should meet me here.

Here is the copse, the fountain and — a Cross!

To thee, dead wood, I bow not head nor knees.

Rather to thee, green boscage, work of God,

Black holly, and white-flower’d wayfaring-tree!

Rather to thee, thou living water, drawn

By this good Wiclif mountain down from heaven,

And speaking clearly in thy native tongue —

No Latin — He that thirsteth, come and drink!

Eh! how I anger’d Arundel asking me,

To worship Holy Cross! I spread mine arms,

God’s work, I said, a cross of flesh and blood

And holier. That was heresy. (My good friend

By this time should be with me.) ‘Images?’

Bury them as God’s truer images

Are daily buried.’ ‘ Heresy. — Penance?’ ‘Fast,

Hairshirt and scourge-nay, let a man repent,

Do penance in his heart, God hears him.’ ‘Heresy —

Not shriven, not saved?’ ‘What profits an ill Priest

Between me and my God? I would not spurn

Good counsel of good friends, but shrive myself

No, not to an Apostle.’ ‘Heresy.’

(My friend is long in coming.) ‘Pilgrimages?’

‘Drink, bagpipes, revelling, devil’s-dances, vice.

The poor man’s money gone to fat the friar.

Who reads of begging saints in Scripture?’—’Heresy ‘ —

(Hath he been here — not found me — gone again?

Have I mislearnt our place of meeting?) ‘Bread —

Bread left after the blessing?’ how they stared,

That was their main test-question — glared at me!

‘He veil’d Himself in flesh, and now He veils

His flesh in bread, body and bread together.’

Then rose the howl of all the cassock’d wolves,

‘No bread, no bread. God’s body!’ Archbishop, Bishop,

Priors, Canons, Friars, bellringers, Parish-clerks —

‘No bread, no bread!’—’Authority of the Church,

Power of the keys!’ — Then I, God help me, I

So mock’d, so spum’d, so baited two whole days —

I lost myself and fell from evenness,

And rail’d at all the Popes, that ever since

Sylvester shed the venom of world-wealth

Into the church, had only prov’n themselves

Poisoners, murderers. Well — God pardon all —

Me, them, and all the world — yea, that proud Priest,

That mock-meek mouth of utter Antichrist,

That traitor to King Richard and the truth,

Who rose and doom’d me to the fire.

Amen!

Nay, I can burn, so that the Lord of life

Be by me in my death.

Those three! the fourth

Was like the Son of God! Not burnt were they.

On them the smell of burning had not past.

That was a miracle to convert the king.

These Pharisees, this Caiaphas-Arundel

What miracle could turn? He here again,

He thwarting their traditions of Himself,

He would be found a heretic to Himself,

And doom’d to burn alive.

So, caught, I burn.

Burn? heathen men have borne as much as this,

For freedom, or the sake of those they loved,

Or some less cause, some cause far less than mine;

For every other cause is less than mine.

The moth will singe her wings, and singed return,

Her love of light quenching her fear of pain —

How now, my soul, we do not heed the fire?

Faint-hearted? tut! — faint-stomach’d! faint as I am,

God willing, I will burn for Him.

Who comes?

A thousand marks are set upon my head.

Friend? — foe perhaps — a tussle for it then!

Nay, but my friend. Thou art so well disguised,

I knew thee not. Hast thou brought bread with thee?

I have not broken bread for fifty hours.

None? I am damn’d already by the Priest

For holding there was bread where bread was none —

No bread. My friends await me yonder? Yes.

Lead on then. Up the mountain? Is it far?

Not far. Climb first and reach me down thy hand.

I am not like to die for lack of bread

For I must live to testify by fire.2

Columbus

CHAINS, my good lord: in your raised brows I read

Some wonder at our chamber ornaments.

We brought this iron from our isles of gold.

Does the king know you deign to visit him

Whom once he rose from off his throne to greet

Before his people, like his brother king?

I saw your face that morning in the crowd.

At Barcelona — tho’ you were not then

So bearded. Yes. The city deck’d herself

To meet me, roar’d my name; the king, the queen

Bad me be seated, speak, and tell them all

The story of my voyage, and while I spoke

The crowd’s roar fell as at the ‘peace, be still!’

And when I ceased to speak, the king, the queen,

Sank from their thrones, and melted into tears,

And knelt, and lifted hand and heart and voice

In praise to God who led me thro’ the waste.

And then the great ‘Laudamus’ rose to heaven.

Chains for the Admiral of the Ocean! chains

For him who gave a new heaven, a new earth,

As holy John had prophesied of me,

Gave glory and more empire to the kings

Of Spain than all their battles! chains for him

Who push’d his prows into the setting sun,

And made West East, and sail’d the Dragon’s mouth,

And came upon the Mountain of the World,

And saw the rivers roll from Paradise!

Chains! we are Admirals of the Ocean, we,

We and our sons for ever. Ferdinand

Hath sign’d it and our Holy Catholic queen —

Of the Ocean — of the Indies — Admirals we —

Our title, which we never mean to yield,

Our guerdon not alone for what we did,

But our amends for all we might have done —

The vast occasion of our stronger life —

Eighteen long years of waste, seven in your Spain,

Lost, showing courts and kings a truth the babe

Will suck in with his milk hereafter — earth

A sphere.

Were you at Salamanca? No.

We fronted there the learning of all Spain,

All their cosmogonies, their astronomies

Guess-work they guess’d it, but the golden guess

Is morning-star to the full round of truth.

No guess-work! I was certain of my goal;

Some thought it heresy, but that would not hold.

King David call’d the heavens a hide, a tent

Spread over earth, and so this earth was flat:

Some cited old Lactantius: could it be

That trees grew downward, rain fell upward, men

Walk’d like the fly on ceilings? and besides,

The great Augustine wrote that none could breathe

Within the zone of heat; so might there be

Two Adams, two mankinds, and that was clean

Against God’s word: thus was I beaten back,

And chiefly to my sorrow by the Church.

And thought to turn my face from Spain, appeal

Once more to France or England; but our Queen

Recall’d me, for at last their Highnesses

Were half-assured this earth might be a sphere.

All glory to the all-blessed Trinity,

All glory to the mother of our Lord,

And Holy Church, from whom I never swerved

Not even by one hair’s-breadth of heresy,

I have accomplish’d what I came to do.

Not yet — not all — last night a dream — I sail’d

On my first voyage, harass’d by the frights

Of my first crew, their curses and their groans.

The great flame-banner borne by Teneriffe,

The compass, like an old friend false at last

In our most need, appall’d them, and the wind

Still westward, and the weedy seas — at length

The landbird, and the branch with berries on it,

The carven staff — and last the light, the light

On Guanahani! but I changed the name;

San Salvador I call’d it; and the light

Grew as I gazed, and brought out a broad sky

Of dawning over — not those alien palms,

The marvel of that fair new nature — not

That Indian isle, but our most ancient East

Moriah with Jerusalem; and I saw

The glory of the Lord flash up, and beat

Thro’ all the homely town from jasper, sapphire,

Chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sardius,

Chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase,

Jacynth, and amethyst — and those twelve gates,

Pearl — and I woke, and thought — death — I shall die —

I am written in the Lamb’s own Book of Life

To walk within the glory of the Lord

Sunless and moonless, utter light — but no!

The Lord had sent this bright, strange dream to me

To mind me of the secret vow I made

When Spain was waging war against the Moor —

I strove myself with Spain against the Moor.

There came two voices from the Sepulchre,

Two friars crying that if Spain should oust

The Moslem from her limit, he, the fierce

Soldan of Egypt, would break down and raze

The blessed tomb of Christ; whereon I vow’d

That, if our Princes harken’d to my prayer,

Whatever wealth I brought from that new world

Should, in this old, be consecrate to lead

A new crusade against the Saracen,

And free the Holy Sepulchre from thrall.

Gold? I had brought your Princes gold enough

If left alone! Being but a Genovese,

I am handled worse than had I been a Moor,

And breach’d the belting wall of Cambalu,

And given the Great Khan’s palaces to the Moor,

Or clutch’d the sacred crown of Prester John,

And cast it to the Moor: but had I brought

From Solomon’s now-recover’d Ophir all

The gold that Solomon’s navies carried home,

Would that have gilded me? Blue blood of Spain,

Tho’ quartering your own royal arms of Spain,

I have not: blue blood and black blood of Spain,

The noble and the convict of Castile,

Howl’d me from Hispaniola; for you know

The flies at home, that ever swarm about

And cloud the highest heads, and murmur down

Truth in the distance — these outbuzz’d me so

That even our prudent king, our righteous queen —

I pray’d them being so calumniated

They would commission one of weight and worth

To judge between my slander’d self and me —

Fonseca my main enemy at their court,

They sent me out his tool, Bovadilla, one

As ignorant and impolitic as a beast —

Blockish irreverence, brainless greed — who sack’d

My dwelling, seized upon my papers, loosed

My captives, feed the rebels of the crown,

Sold the crown-farms for all but nothing, gave

All but free leave for all to work the mines,

Drove me and my good brothers home in chains,

And gathering ruthless gold — a single piece

Weigh’d nigh four thousand Castillanos — so

They tell me — weigh’d him down into the abysm —

The hurricane of the latitude on him fell,

The seas of our discovering over-roll

I rim and his gold; the frailer caravel,

With what was mine, came happily to the shore.

There was a glimmering of God’s hand.

And God

Hath more than gliminer’d on me. O my lord,

I swear to you I heard his voice between

The thunders in the black Veragua nights,

‘O soul of little faith, slow to believe!

Have I not been about thee from thy birth?

Given thee the keys of the great Ocean-sea?

Set thee in light till time shall be no more?

Is it I who have deceived thee or the world?

Endure! thou hast done so well for men, that men

Cry out against thee: was it otherwise

With mine own Son?’

And more than once in days

Of doubt and cloud and storm, when drowning hope

Sank all but out of sight, I heard his voice,

‘Be not cast down. I lead thee by the hand,

Fear not.’ And I shall hear his voice again —

I know know that he has led me all my life,

I am not yet too old to work his will —

His voice again.

Still for all that, my lord,

I lying here bedridden and alone,

Cast off, put by, scouted by court and king —

The first discoverer starves — his followers, all

Flower into fortune — our world’s way — and I,

Without a roof that I can call mine own,

With scarce a coin to buy a meal withal,

And seeing what a door for scoundrel scum

I open’d to the West, thro’ which the lust,

Villany, violence, avarice, of your Spain

Pour’d in on all those happy naked isles —

Their kindly native princes slain or slaved,

Their wives and children Spanish concubines,

Their innocent hospitalities quench’d in blood,

Some dead of hunger, some beneath the scourge,

Some over-labour’d, some by their own hands, —

Yea, the dear mothers, crazing Nature, kill

Their babies at the breast for hate of Spain —

Ah God, the harmless people whom we found

In Hispaniola’s island-Paradise!

Who took us for the very Gods from Heaven,

And we have sent them very fiends from Hell;

And I myself, myself not blameless, I

Could sometimes wish I had never led the way.

Only the ghost of our great Catholic Queen

Smiles on me, saying, ‘Be thou comforted!

This creedless people will be brought to Christ

And own the holy governance of Rome.’

But who could dream that we, who bore the Cross

Thither, were excommunicated there,

For curbing crimes that scandalised the Cross,

By him, the Catalonian Minorite,

Rome’s Vicar in our Indies? who believe

These hard memorials of our truth to Spain

Clung closer to us for a longer term

Than any friend of ours at Court? and yet

Pardon — too harsh, unjust. I am rack’d with pains.

You see that I have hung them by my bed,

And I will have them buried in my grave.

Sir, in that flight of ages which are God’s

Own voice to justify the dead — perchance

Spain once the most chivalric race on earth,

Spain then the mightiest, wealthiest realm on earth,

So made by me, may seek to unbury me,

To lay me in some shrine of this old Spain,

Or in that vaster Spain I leave to Spain.

Then some one standing by my grave will say,

‘Behold the bones of Christopher Colòn’ —

‘Ay, but the chains, what do they mean — the chains?’ —

I sorrow for that kindly child of Spain

Who then will have to answer, ‘These same chains

Bound these same bones back thro’ the Atlantic sea,

Which he unchain’d for all the world to come.’

O Queen of Heaven who seest the souls in Hell

And purgatory, I suffer all as much

As they do — for the moment. Stay, my son

Is here anon: my son will speak for me

Ablier than I can in these spasms that grind

Bone against bone. You will not. One last word.

You move about the Court, I pray you tell

King Ferdinand who plays with me, that one,

Whose life has been no play with him and his

Hidalgos — shipwrecks, famines, fevers, fights,

‘Mutinies, treacheries — wink’d at, and condoned —

That I am loyal to him till the death,

And ready — tho’ our Holy Catholic Queen,

Who fain had pledged her jewels on my first voyage,

Whose hope was mine to spread the Catholic faith,

Who wept with me when I return’d in chains,

Who sits beside the blessed Virgin now,

To whom I send my prayer by night and day —

She is gone — but you will tell the King, that I,

Rack’d as I am with gout, and wrench’d with pains

Gain’d in the service of His Highness, yet

Am ready to sail forth on one last voyager

And readier, if the King would hear, to lead

One last crusade against the Saracen,

And save the Holy Sepulchre from thrall.

Going? I am old and slighted: you have dared

Somewhat perhaps in coming? my poor thanks!

I am but an alien and a Genovese.

The Voyage of Maeldune

(Founded on an Irish Legend. A.D. 7OO)

I.

I WAS the chief of the race — he had stricken my father dead —

But I gather’d my fellows together, I swore I would strike off his head.

Each of them look’d like a king, and was noble in birth as in worth,

And each of them boasted he sprang from the oldest race upon earth.

Each was as brave in the light as the bravest hero of song,

And each of them liefer had died than have done one another a wrong.

He lived on an isle in the ocean — we sail’d on a Friday morn —

He that had slain my father the day before I was born.

II.

And we came to the isle in the ocean, and there on the shore was he.

But a sudden blast blew us out and away thro’ a boundless sea.

III.

And we came to the Silent Isle that we never had touch’d at before,

Where a silent ocean always broke on a silent shore,

And the brooks glitter’d on in the light without sound, and the long waterfall,

Pour’d in a thunderless plunge to the base of the mountain walls,

And the poplar and cypress unshaken by storm flourish’d up beyond sight,

And the pine shot aloft from the crag to an unbelievable height,

And high in the heaven above it there flicker’d a songless lark,

And the cock couldn’t crow, and the bull couldn’t low, and the dog couldn’t bark.

And round it we went, and thro’ it, but never a murmur, a breath —

It was all of it fair as life, it was all of it quiet as death,

And we hated the beautiful Isle, for whenever we strove to speak

Our voices were thinner and fainter than any flittermouse-shriek;

And the men that were mighty of tongue and could raise such a battle-cry

That a hundred who heard it would rush on a thousand lances and die —

O they to be dumb’d by the charm! — so fluster’d with anger were they

They almost fell on each other; but after we sail’d away.

IV.

And we carne to the Isle of Shouting, we landed, a score of wild birds

Cried from the topmost summit with human voices and words;

Once in an hour they cried, and whenever their voices peal’d

The steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died from the field,

And the men dropt dead in the valleys and half of the cattle went lame,

And the roof sank in on the hearth, and the dwelling broke into flame;

And the shouting of these wild birds ran into the hearts of my crew,

Till they shouted along with the shouting and seized one another and slew;

But I drew them the one from the other; I saw that we could not stay,

And we left the dead to the birds and we sail’d with our wounded away.

V.

And we came to the Isle of Flowers: their breath met us out on the seas,

For the Spring and the middle Summer sat each on the lap of the breeze;

And the red passion-flower to the cliffs and the dark-blue clematis, clung,

And starr’d with a myriad blossom the long convolvulus hung;

And the topmost spire of the mountain was lilies in lieu of snow,

And the lilies like glaciers winded down, running out below

Thro’ the fire of the tulip and poppy, the blaze of gorse, and the blush

Of millions of roses that sprang without leaf or a thorn from the bush;

And the whole isle-side flashing down from the peak without ever a tree

Swept like a torrent of gems from the sky to the blue of the sea;

And we roll’d upon capes of crocus and vaunted our kith and our kin,

And we wallow’d in beds of lilies, and chanted the triumph of Finn,

Till each like a golden image was pollen’d from head to feet

And each was as dry as a cricket, with thirst in the middle-day heat.

Blossom and blossom, and promise of blossom, but never a fruit!

And we hated the Flowering Isle, as we hated the isle that was mute,

And we tore up the flowers by the million and flung them in bight and bay,

And we left but a naked rock, and in anger we sail’d away.

VI.

And we came to the Isle of Fruits: all round from the cliffs and the capes,

Purple or amber, dangled a hundred fathom of grapes,

And the warm melon lay like a little sun on the tawny sand,

And the fig ran up from the beach and rioted over the land,

And the mountain arose like a jewell’d throne thro’ the fragrant air,

Glowing with all-colour’d plums and with golden masses of pear,

And the crimson and scarlet of berries that flamed upon bine and vine,

But in every berry and fruit was the poisonous pleasure of wine;

And the peak of the mountain was apples, the hugest that ever were seen,

And they prest, as they grew, on each other, with hardly a leaflet between,

And all of them redder than rosiest health or than utterest shame,

And setting, when Even descended, the very sunset aflame;

And we stay’d three days, and we gorged and we madden’d, till every one drew

His sword on his fellow to slay him, and ever they struck and they slew;

And myself, I had eaten but sparely, and fought till I sunder’d the fray,

Then I bad them remember my father’s death, and we sail’d away.

VII.

And we came to the Isle of Fire: we were lured by the light from afar,

For the peak sent up one league of fire to the Northern Star;

Lured by the glare and the blare, but scarcely could stand upright,

For the whole isle shudder’d and shook like a man in a mortal affright;

We were giddy besides with the fruits we had gorged, and so crazed that at last

There were some leap’d into the fire; and away we sail’d, and we past

Over that undersea isle, where the water is clearer than air:

Down we look’d: what a garden! O bliss, what a Paradise there!

Towers of a happier time, low down in a rainbow deep

Silent palaces, quiet fields of eternal sleep!

And three of the gentlest and best of my people, whate’er I could say,

Plunged head down in the sea, and the Paradise trembled away.

VIII.

And we came to the Bounteous Isle, where the heavens lean low on the land,

And ever at dawn from the cloud glitter’d o’er us a sunbright hand,

Then it open’d and dropt at the side of each man, as he rose from his rest,

Bread enough for his need till the labourless day dipt under the West;

And we wander’d about it and thro’ it. O never was time so good!

And we sang of the triumphs of Finn, and the boast of our ancient blood,

And we gazed at the wandering wave as we sat by the gurgle of springs,

And we chanted the songs of the Bards and the glories of fairy kings;

But at length we began to be weary, to sigh, and to stretch and yawn,

Till we hated the Bounteous Isle and the sunbright hand of the dawn,

For there was not an enemy near, but the whole green Isle was our own,

And we took to playing at ball, and we took to throwing the stone,

And we took to playing at battle, but that was a perilous play,

For the passion of battle was in us, we slew and we sail’d away.

IX.

And we past to the Isle of Witches and heard their musical cry —

‘Come to us, O come, come’ in the stormy red of a sky

Dashing the fires and the shadows of dawn on the beautiful shapes,

For a wild witch naked as heaven stood on each of the loftiest capes,

And a hundred ranged on the rock like white sea-birds in a row,

And a hundred gamboll’d and pranced on the wrecks in the sand below,

And a hundred splash’d from the ledges, and bosom’d the burst of the spray,

But I knew we should fall on each other, and hastily sail’d away.

X.

And we came in an evil time to the Isle of the Double Towers,

One was of smooth-cut stone, one carved all over with flowers,

But an earthquake always moved in the hollows under the dells,

And they shock’d on each other and butted each other with clashing of bells,

And the daws flew out of the Towers and jangled and wrangled in vain,

And the clash and boom of the bells rang into the heart and the brain,

Till the passion of battle was on us, and all took sides with the Towers,

There were some for the clean-cut stone, there were more for the careen flowers,

And the wrathful thunder of God peal’d over us all the day,

For the one half slew the other, and after we sail’d away.

XI.

And we came to the Isle of a Saint who had sail’d with St. Brendan of yore,

He had lived ever since on the Isle and his winters were fifteen score,

And his voice was low as from other worlds, and his eyes were sweet,

And his white hair sank to his heels and his white beard fell to his feet,

And he spake to me, ‘O Maeldune, let be this purpose of thine!

Remember the words of the Lord when he told us “Vengeance is mine!”

His fathers have slain thy fathers in war or in single strife,

Thy fathers have slain his fathers, each taken a life for a life,

Thy father had slain his father, how long shall the murder last?

Go back to the Isle of Finn and suffer the Past to be Past.’

And we kiss’d the fringe of his beard and we pray’d as we heard him pray,

And the Holy man he assoil’d us, and sadly we sail’d away.

XII.

And we came to the Isle we were blown from, and thereon the shore was he,

The man that had slain my father. I saw him and let him be.

O weary was I of the travel, the trouble, the strife and the sin,

When I landed again, with a tithe of my men, on the Isle of Finn.

De Profundis

The Two Greetings.

I.

OUT of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

Where all that was to be, in all that was,

Whirl’d for a million æons thro’ the vast

Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light —

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

Thro’ all this changing world of changeless law,

And every phase of ever-heightening life,

And nine long months of antenatal gloom,

With this last moon, this crescent — her dark orb

Touch’d with earth’s light — thou comest, darling boy;

Our own; a babe in lineament and limb

Perfect, and prophet of the perfect man;

Whose face and form are hers and mine in one,

Indissolubly married like our love;

Live, and be happy in thyself, and serve

This mortal race thy kin so well, that men

May bless thee as we bless thee, O young life

Breaking with laughter from the dark; and may

The fated channel where thy motion lives

Be prosperously shaped, and sway thy course

Along the years of haste and random youth

Unshatter’d; then full-current thro’ full man:

And last in kindly curves, with gentlest fall,

By quiet field:, a slowly-dying power,

To that last deep where we and thou are still.

II.

I.

OUT of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

From that great deep, before our world begins,

Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will —

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

From that true world within the world we see,

Whereof our world is but the bounding shore —

Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,

With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun

Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.

II.

For in the world, which is not ours, They said

‘Let us make man’ and that which should be man,

From that one light no man can look upon,

Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons

And all the shadows. O dear Spirit half-lost

In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign

That thou art thou — who wailest being born

And banish’d into mystery, and the pain

Of this divisible-indivisible world

Among the numerable-innumerable

Sun, sun, and sun, thro’ finite-infinite space

In finite-infinite Time — our mortal veil

And shatter’d phantom of that infinite One,

Who made thee unconceivably Thyself

Out of His whole World-self and all in all —

Live thou! and of the grain and husk, the grape

And ivyberry, choose; and still depart

From death to death thro’ life and life, and find

Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought

Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite,

But this main-miracle, that thou art thou,

With power on thine own act and on the world.

The Human Cry.

I.

HALLOWED be Thy name — Halleluiah! —

Infinite Ideality!

Immeasurable Reality!

Infinite Personality!

Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah!

II.

We feel we are nothing — for all is Thou and in Thee;

We feel we are something — that also has come from Thee;

We know we are nothing — but Thou wilt help us to be.

Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah!

SONNETS

Prefatory Sonnet

To the ‘Nineteenth Century.’

THOSE that of late had fleeted far and fast

To touch all shores, now leaving to the skill

Of others their old craft seaworthy still,

Have charter’d this; where, mindful of the past,

Our true co-mates regather round the mast;

Of diverse tongue, but with a common will

Here, in this roaring moon of daffodil

And crocus, to put forth and brave the blast;

For some, descending from the sacred peak

Of hoar high-templed Faith, have leagued again

Their lot with ours to rove the world about;

And some are wilder comrades, sworn to seek

If any golden harbour be for men

In seas of Death and sunless gulfs of Doubt.

To the Rev. W.H. Brookfield

BROOKS, for they call’d you so that knew you best,

Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes,

How oft we two have heard St. Mary’s chimes!

How oft the Cantab supper, host and guest,

Would echo helpless laughter to your jest!

How oft with him we paced that walk of limes,

Him, the lost light of those dawn-golden times,

Who loved you well! Now both are gone to rest.

You man of humorous-melancholy mark,

Dead of some inward agony — is it so?

Our kindlier, trustier Jaques, past away

I cannot laud this life, it looks so dark

Σκιας οναρ — dream of a shadow, go —

God bless you. I shall join you in a day.

Montenegro

THEY rose to where their sovran eagle sails,

They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,

Chaste, frugal, savage, arm’d by day and night

Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales

Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,

And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight

Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight

By thousands down the crags and thro’ the vales.

O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne

Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm

Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,

Great Tsernogora! never since thine own

Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm

Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.

To Victor Hugo

1877

VICTOR in Drama, Victor in Romance,

Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears,

French of the French, and Lord of human tears;

Child-lover; Bard whose fame-lit laurels glance

Darkening the wreaths of all that would advance,

Beyond our strait, their claim to be thy peers;

Weird Titan by thy winter weight of years

As yet unbroken, Stormy voice of France!

Who dost not love our England — so they say;

I know not — England, France, all man to be

Will make one people ere man’s race be run:

And I, desiring that diviner day,

Yield thee full thanks for thy full courtesy

To younger England in the boy my son.

TRANSLATIONS

Battle Of Brunanburh

Constantinus, King of the Scot, after having sworn allegiance to Athelstan, allied himself with the Danes of Ireland under Anlaf, and invading England, was defeated by Athelstan and his brother Edmund with great slaughter at Brunanburh in the year 937.

I.

1 ATHELSTAN King,

Lord among Earls,

Bracelet-bestower and

Baron of Barons,

He with his brother,

Edmund Atheling,

Gaining a lifelong

Glory in battle,

Slew with the sword-edge

There by Brunanburh,

Brake the shield-wall,

Hew’d the lindenwood,2

Hack’d the battleshield,

Sons of Edward with hammer’d brands.

II.

Theirs was a greatness

Got from their Grandsires —

Theirs that so often in

Strife with their enemies

Struck for their hoards and their hearths and their homes.

III.

Bow’d the spoiler,

Bent the Scotsman,

Fell the shipcrews

Doom’d to the death.

All the field with blood of the fighters

Flow’d, from when first the great

Sun-star of morningtide,

Lamp of the Lord God

Lord everlasting,

Glode over earth till the glorious creature

Sank to his setting.

IV.

There lay many a man

Marr’d by the javelin,

Men of the Northland

Shot over shield.

There was the Scotsman

Weary of war.

V.

We the West-Saxons,

Long as the daylight

Lasted, in companies

Troubled the track of the host that we hated,

Grimly with swords that were sharp from the grindstone,

Fiercely we hack’d at the flyers before us.

VI.

Mighty the Mercian,

Hard was his hand-play,

Sparing not any of

Those that with Anlaf,

Warriors over the

Weltering waters

Borne in the bark’s-bosom,

Drew to this island:

Doom’d to the death.

VII.

Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke,

Seven strong Earls of the army of Anlaf

Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers,

Shipmen and Scotsmen.

VIII.

Then the Norse leader.

Dire was his need of it,

Few were his following,

Fled to his warship

Fleeted his vessel to sea with the king in it.

Saving his life on the fallow flood.

IX.

Also the crafty one,

Constantinus,

Crept to his North again,

Hoar-headed hero!

X.

Slender warrant had

He to be proud of

The welcome of war-knives —

He that was reft of his

Folk and his friends that had

Fallen in conflict,

Leaving his son too

Lost in the carnage,

Mangled to morsels,

A youngster in war!

XI.

Slender reason had

He to be glad of

The clash of the war-glaive —

Traitor and trickster

And spurner of treaties —

He nor had Anlaf

With armies so broken

A reason for bragging

That they had the better

In perils of battle

On places of slaughter —

The struggle of standards,

The rush of the javelins,

The crash of the charges,3

The wielding of weapons —

The play that they play’d with

The children of Edward.

XII.

Then with their nail’d prows

Parted the Norsemen, a

Blood-redden’d relic of

Javelins over

The jarring breaker, the deep-sea billow,

Shaping their way toward Dyflen4 again,

Shamed in their souls.

XIII.

Also the brethren,

King and Atheling,

Each in his glory,

Went to his own in his own West-Saxonland,

Glad of the war.

XIV.

Many a carcase they left to be carrion,

Many a livid one, many a sallow-skin —

Left for the white-tail’d eagle to tear it, and

Left for the horny-nibb’d raven to rend it, and

Gave to the garbaging war-hawk to gorge it, and

That gray beast, the wolf of the weald.

XV.

Never had huger

Slaughter of heroes

Slain by the sword-edge —

Such as old writers

Have writ of in histories —

Hapt in this isle, since

Up from the East hither

Saxon and Angle from

Over the broad billow

Broke into Britain with

Haughty war-workers who

Harried the Welshman, when

Earls that were lured by the

Hunger of glory gat

Hold of the land.

Achilles Over the Trench

ILIAD, XVIII. 2O2.

SO SAYING, light-foot Iris pass’d away.

Then rose Achilles dear to Zeus; and round

The warrior’s puissant shoulders Pallas flung

Her fringed ægis, and around his head

The glorious goddess wreath’d a golden cloud,

And from it lighted an all-shining flame.

As when a smoke from a city goes to heaven

Far off from out an island girt by foes,

All day the men contend in grievous war

From their own city, but with set of sun

Their fires flame thickly, and aloft the glare

Flies streaming, if perchance the neighbours round

May see, and sail to help them in the war;

So from his head the splendour went to heaven.

From wall to dyke he stept, he stood, nor join’d

The Achæans — honouring his wise mother’s word —

There standing, shouted, and Pallas far away

Call’d; and a boundless panic shook the foe.

For like the clear voice when a trumpet shrills,

Blown by the fierce beleaguerers of a town,

So rang the clear voice of Æakidês;

And when the brazen cry of Æakidês

Was heard among the Trojans, all their hearts

Were troubled, and the full-maned horses whirl’d

The chariots backward, knowing griefs at hand;

And sheer-astounded were the charioteers

To see the dread, unweariable fire

That always o’er the great Peleion’s head

Burn’d, for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn.

Thrice from the dyke he sent his mighty shout,

Thrice backward reel’d the Trojans and allies;

And there and then twelve of their noblest died

Among their spears and chariots.

To Princess Frederica on Her Marriage

O YOU that were eyes and light to the King till he past away

From the darkness of life —

He saw not his daughter — he blest her: the blind King sees you to-day,

He blesses the wife.

Sir John Franklin

On the Cenotaph in Westminster Abbey.

NOT here! the white North has thy bones; and thou,

Heroic sailor-soul,

Art passing on thine happier voyage now

Toward no earthly pole.

To Dante

(Written at Request of the Florentines.)

KING, that hast reign’d six hundred years, and grown

In power, and ever growest, since thine own

Fair Florence honouring thy nativity,

Thy Florence now the crown of Italy,

Hath sought the tribute of a verse from me,

I, wearing but the garland of a day,

Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away.

TIRESIAS AND OTHER POEMS

CONTENTS

To E. Fitzgerald

Tiresias

The Wreck

Despair

The Ancient Sage

The Flight

Tomorrow

The Spinster’s Sweet-Arts

The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava, Prologue

The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava

Epilogue

To Virgil

The Dead Prophet

Early Spring

Prefatory Poem to My Brother’s Sonnets

Frater Ave atque Vale

Helen’s Tower

Epitaph on Lord Stratford de Redcliffe

Epitaph on General Gordon

Epitaph on Caxton

To the Duke of Argyll

Hands all Round

Freedom

Poets and their Bibliographies

To H.R.H. Princess Beatrice

To E. Fitzgerald

OLD FITZ, who from your suburb grange,

Where once I tarried for a while,

Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,

And greet it with a kindly smile;

Whom yet I see as there you sit

Beneath your sheltering garden-tree,

And while your doves about you flit,

And plant on shoulder, hand and knee,

Or on your head their rosy feet,

As if they knew your diet spares

Whatever moved in that full sheet

Let down to Peter at his prayers;

Who live on milk and meal and grass;

And once for ten long weeks I tried

Your table of Pythagoras,

And seem’d at first ‘a thing enskied’

(As Shakespeare has it) airy-light

To float above the ways of men,

Then fell from that half-spiritual height

Chill’d, till I tasted flesh again

One night when earth was winter-black,

And all the heavens flash’d in frost;

And on me, half-asleep, came back

That wholesome heat the blood had lost,

And set me climbing icy capes

And glaciers, over which there roll’d

To meet me long-arm’d vines with grapes

Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold

Without, and warmth within me, wrought

To mould the dream; but none can say

That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought,

Who reads your golden Eastern lay,

Than which I know no version done

In English more divinely well;

A planet equal to the sun

Which cast it, that large infidel

Your Omar; and your Omar drew

Full-handed plaudits from our best

In modern letters, and from two,

Old friends outvaluing all the rest,

Two voices heard on earth no more;

But we old friends are still alive,

And I am nearing seventy-four,

While you have touch’d at seventy-five,

And so I send a birthday line

Of greeting; and my son, who dipt

In some forgotten book of mine

With sallow scraps of manuscript,

And dating many a year ago,

Has hit on this, which you will take

My Fitz, and welcome, as I know

Less for its own than for the sake

Of one recalling gracious times,

When, in our younger London days,

You found some merit in my rhymes,

And I more pleasure in your praise.

Tiresias

I WISH I were as in the years of old

While yet the blessed daylight made itself

Ruddy thro’ both the roofs of sight, and woke

These eyes, now dull, but then so keen to seek

The meanings ambush’d under all they saw,

The flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice,

What omens may foreshadow fate to man

And woman, and the secret of the Gods.

My son, the Gods, despite of human prayer,

Are slower to forgive than human kings.

The great God, Arês, burns in anger still

Against the guiltless heirs of him from Tyre

Our Cadmus, out of whom thou art, who found

Beside the springs of Dircê, smote, and still’d

Thro’ all its folds the multitudinous beast

The dragon, which our trembling fathers call’d

The God’s own son.

A tale, that told to me,

When but thine age, by age as winter-white

As mine is now, amazed, but made me yearn

For larger glimpses of that more than man

Which rolls the heavens, and lifts and lays the deep,

Yet loves and hates with mortal hates and loves,

And moves unseen among the ways of men.

Then, in my wanderings all the lands that lie

Subjected to the Heliconian ridge

Have heard this footstep fall, altho’ my wont

Was more to scale the highest of the heights

With some strange hope to see the nearer God.

One naked peak — the sister of the Sun

Would climb from out the dark, and linger there

To silver all the valleys with her shafts —

There once, but long ago, five-fold thy term

Of years, I lay; the winds were dead for heat;

The noonday crag made the hand burn; and sick

For shadow — not one bush was near — I rose

Following a torrent till its myriad falls

Found silence in the hollows underneath.

There in a secret olive-glade I saw

Pallas Athene climbing from the bath

In anger; yet one glittering foot disturb’d

The lucid well; one snowy knee was prest

Against the margin flowers; a dreadful light

Came from her golden hair, her golden helm

And all her golden armor on the grass,

And from her virgin breast, and virgin eyes

Remaining fixt on mine, till mine grew dark

For ever, and I heard a voice that said

“Henceforth be blind, for thou hast seen too much,

And speak the truth that no man may believe.”

Son, in the hidden world of sight that lives

Behind this darkness, I behold her still

Beyond all work of those who carve the stone

Beyond all dreams of Godlike womanhood,

Ineffable beauty, out of whom, at a glance

And as it were, perforce, upon me flash’d

The power of prophesying — but to me

No power — so chain’d and coupled with the curse

Of blindness and their unbelief who heard

And heard not, when I spake of famine, plague

Shrine-shattering earthquake, fire, flood, thunderbolt,

And angers of the Gods for evil done

And expiation lack’d — no power on Fate

Theirs, or mine own! for when the crowd would roar

For blood, for war, whose issue was their doom,

To cast wise words among the multitude

Was flinging fruit to lions; nor, in hours

Of civil outbreak, when I knew the twain

Would each waste each, and bring on both the yoke

Of stronger states, was mine the voice to curb

The madness of our cities and their kings.

Who ever turn’d upon his heel to hear

My warning that the tyranny of one

Was prelude to the tyranny of all?

My counsel that the tyranny of all

Led backward to the tyranny of one?

This power hath work’d no good to aught that lives

And these blind hands were useless in their wars.

O therefore, that the unfulfill’d desire,

The grief for ever born from griefs to be

The boundless yearning of the prophet’s heart —

Could that stand forth, and like a statue, rear’d

To some great citizen, win all praise from all

Who past it, saying, “That was he!”

In vain!

Virtue must shape itself in deed, and those

Whom weakness or necessity have cramp’d

Within themselves, immerging, each, his urn

In his own well, draws solace as he may.

Menœceus, thou hast eyes, and I can hear

Too plainly what full tides of onset sap

Our seven high gates, and what a weight of war

Rides on those ringing axles! jingle of bits,

Shouts, arrows, tramp of the horn-footed horse

That grind the glebe to powder! Stony showers

Of that ear-stunning hail of Arês crash

Along the sounding walls. Above, below

Shock after shock, the song-built towers and gates

Reel, bruised and butted with the shuddering

War-thunder of iron rams; and from within

The city comes a murmur void of joy,

Lest she be taken captive — maidens, wives,

And mothers with their babblers of the dawn,

And oldest age in shadow from the night,

Falling about their shrines before their Gods,

And wailing, “Save us.”

And they wail to thee!

These eyeless eyes, that cannot see thine own,

See this, that only in thy virtue lies

The saving of our Thebes; for, yesternight,

To me, the great God Arês, whose one bliss

Is war and human sacrifice — himself

Blood-red from battle, spear and helmet tipt

With stormy light as on a mast at sea,

Stood out before a darkness, crying, “Thebes,

Thy Thebes shall fall and perish, for I loathe

The seed of Cadmus — yet if one of these

By his own hand — if one of these — —”

My son,

No sound is breathed so potent to coerce,

And to conciliate, as their names who dare

For that sweet mother land which gave them birth

Nobly to do, nobly to die. Their names,

Graven on memorial columns, are a song

Heard in the future; few, but more than wall

And rampart, their examples reach a hand

Far thro’ all years, and everywhere they meet

And kindle generous purpose, and the strength

To mould it into action pure as theirs.

Fairer thy fate than mine, if life’s best end

Be to end well! and thou refusing this,

Unvenerable will thy memory be

While men shall move the lips; but if thou dare —

Thou, one of these, the race of Cadmus — then

No stone is fitted in yon marble girth

Whose echo shall not tongue thy glorious doom,

Nor in this pavement but shall ring thy name

To every hoof that clangs it, and the springs

Of Dircê laving yonder battle-plain,

Heard from the roofs by night, will murmur thee

To thine own Thebes, while Thebes thro’ thee shall stand

Firm-based with all her Gods.

The Dragon’s cave

Half hid, they tell me, now in flowing vines —

Where once he dwelt and whence he roll’d himself

At dead of night — thou knowest, and that smooth rock

Before it, altar-fashion’d, where of late

The woman-breasted Sphinx, with wings drawn back

Folded her lion paws, and look’d to Thebes.

There blanch the bones of whom she slew, and these

Mixt with her own, because the fierce beast found

A wiser than herself, and dash’d herself

Dead in her rage; but thou art wise enough

Tho’ young, to love thy wiser, blunt the curse

Of Pallas, bear, and tho’ I speak the truth

Believe I speak it, let thine own hand strike

Thy youthful pulses into rest and quench

The red God’s anger, fearing not to plunge

Thy torch of life in darkness, rather — thou

Rejoicing that the sun, the moon, the stars

Send no such light upon the ways of men

As one great deed.

Thither, my son, and there

Thou, that hast never known the embrace of love

Offer thy maiden life.

This useless hand!

I felt one warm tear fall upon it. Gone!

He will achieve his greatness.

But for me,

I would that I were gather’d to my rest,

And mingled with the famous kings of old

On whom about their ocean-islets flash

The faces of the Gods — the wise man’s word

Here trampled by the populace underfoot

There crown’d with worship — and these eyes will find

The men I knew, and watch the chariot whirl

About the goal again, and hunters race

The shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings

In height and prowess more than human, strive

Again for glory, while the golden lyre

Is ever sounding in heroic ears

Heroic hymns, and every way the vales

Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-fume

Of those who mix all odor to the Gods

On one far height in one far-shining fire.

“One height and one far-shining fire!”

And while I fancied that my friend

For this brief idyll would require

A less diffuse and opulent end,

And would defend his judgment well,

If I should deem it over nice —

The tolling of his funeral bell

Broke on my Pagan Paradise,

And mixt the dream of classic times,

And all the phantoms of the dream,

With present grief, and made the rhymes,

That miss’d his living welcome, seem

Like would-be guests an hour too late,

Who down the highway moving on

With easy laughter find the gate

Is bolted, and the master gone.

Gone onto darkness, that full light

Of friendship! past, in sleep, away

By night, into the deeper night!

The deeper night? A clearer day

Than our poor twilight dawn on earth —

If night, what barren toil to be!

What life, so maim’d by night, were worth

Our living out? Not mine to me

Remembering all the golden hours

Now silent, and so many dead,

And him the last; and laying flowers,

This wreath, above his honour’d head,

And praying that, when I from hence

Shall fade with him into the unknown,

My close of earth’s experience

May prove as peaceful as his own.

The Wreck

I.

HIDE ME, Mother! my Fathers belong’d to the church of old,

I am driven by storm and sin and death to the ancient fold,

I cling to the Catholic Cross once more, to the Faith that saves,

My brain is full of the crash of wrecks, and the roar of waves,

My life itself is a wreck, I have sullied a noble name,

I am flung from the rushing tide of the world as a waif of shame,

I am roused by the wail of a child, and awake to a livid light,

And a ghastlier face than ever has haunted a grave by night,

I would hide from the storm without, I would flee from the storm within,

I would make my life one prayer for a soul that died in his sin,

I was the tempter, Mother, and mine was the deeper fall;

I will sit at your feet, I will hide my face, I will tell you all.

II.

He that they gave me to, Mother, a heedless and innocent bride —

I never have wrong’d his heart, I have only wounded his pride —

Spain in his blood and the Jew —— dark visaged, stately and tall —

A princelier looking man never stept thro’ a Prince’s hall.

And who, when his anger was kindled, would venture to give him the nay?

And a man men fear is a man to be loved by the women they say.

And I could have loved him too, if the blossom can doat on the blight,

Or the young green leaf rejoice in the frost that sears it at night;

He would open the books that I prized, and toss them away with a yawn,

Repell’d by the magnet of Art to the which my nature was drawn,

The word of the Poet by whom the deeps of the world are stirr’d,

The music that robes it in language beneath and beyond the word!

My Shelley would fall from my hands when he cast a contemptuous glance

From where he was poring over his Tables of Trade and Finance;

My hands, when I heard him coming would drop from the chords or the keys,

But ever I fail’d to please him, however I strove to please —

All day long far-off in the cloud of the city, and there

Lost, head and heart, in the chances of dividend, consol, and share —

And at home if I sought for a kindly caress, being woman and weak,

His formal kiss fell chill as a flake of snow on the cheek:

And so, when I bore him a girl, when I held it aloft in my joy,

He look’d at it coldly, and said to me ‘Pity it isn’t a boy.’

The one thing given me, to love and to live for, glanced at in scorn!

The child that I felt I could die for — as if she were basely born!

I had lived a wild-flower life, I was planted now in a tomb;

The daisy will shut to the shadow, I closed my heart to the gloom;

I threw myself all abroad — I would play my part with the young

By the low foot-lights of the world — and I caught the wreath that was flung.

III.

Mother, I have not — however their tongues may have babbled of me —

Sinn’d thro’ an animal vileness, for all but a dwarf was he,

And all but a hunchback too; and I look’d at him, first, askance,

With pity — not he the knight for an amorous girl’s romance!

Tho’ wealthy enough to have bask’d in the light of a dowerless smile,

Having lands at home and abroad in a rich West-Indian isle;

But I came on him once at a ball, the heart of a listening crowd —

Why, what a brow was there! he was seated — speaking aloud

To women, the flower of the time, and men at the helm of state —

Flowing with easy greatness and touching on all things great,

Science, philosophy, song — till I felt myself ready to weep

For I knew not what, when I heard that voice, — as mellow and deep

As a psalm by a mighty master and peal’d from an organ, — roll

Rising and falling — for, Mother, the voice was the voice of the soul;

And the sun of the soul made day in the dark of his wonderful eyes.

Here was the hand that would help me, would heal me — the heart that was wise!

And he, poor man, when he learnt that I hated the ring I wore,

He helpt me with death, and he heal’d me with sorrow for evermore.

IV.

For I broke the bond. That day my nurse had brought me the child.

The small sweet face was flush’d, but it coo’d to the Mother and smiled.

‘Anything ailing,’ I ask’d her, ‘with baby?’ She shook her head,

And the Motherless Mother kiss’d it, and turn’d in her haste and fled.

V.

Low warm winds had gently breathed us away from the land —

Ten long sweet summer days upon deck, sitting hand in hand —

When he clothed a naked mind with the wisdom and wealth of his own,

And I bow’d myself down as a slave to his intellectual throne,

When he coin’d into English gold some treasure of classical song,

When he flouted a statesman’s error, or flamed at a public wrong,

When he rose as it were on the wings of an eagle beyond me, and past

Over the range and the change of the world from the first to the last,

When lie spoke of his tropical home in the canes by the purple tide,

And the high star-crowns of his palms on the deep-wooded mountain-side,

And cliffs all robed in lianas that dropt to the brink of his bay,

And trees like the towers of a minster, the sons of a winterless day.

‘Paradise there!’ so he said, but I seem’d in Paradise then

With the first great love I had felt for the first and greatest of men;

Ten long days of summer and sin — if it must be so —

But days of a larger light than I ever again shall know —

Days that will glimmer, I fear, thro’ life to my latest breath;

‘No frost there,’ so he said, ‘as in truest Love no Death.’

VI.

Mother, one morning a bird with a warble plaintively sweet

Perch’d on the shrouds, and then fell fluttering down at my feet;

I took it, he made it a cage, we fondled it, Stephen and I,

But it died, and I thought of the child for a moment, I scarce know why.

VII.

But if sin be sin, not inherited fate, as many will say,

My sin to my desolate little one found me at sea on a day,

When her orphan wail came borne in the shriek of a growing wind,

And a voice rang out in the thunders of Ocean and Heaven ‘Thou hast sinn’d.’

And down in the cabin were we, for the towering crest of the tides

Plunged on the vessel and swept in a cataract off from her sides,

And ever the great storm grew with a howl and a hoot of the blast

In the rigging, voices of hell — then came the crash of the mast.

‘The wages of sin is death,’ and there I began to weep,

‘I am the Jonah, the crew should cast me into the deep,

For ah God, what a heart was mine to forsake her even for you.’

‘Never the heart among women,’ he said, ‘more tender and true.’

‘The heart! not a mother’s heart, when I left my darling alone.’

‘Comfort yourself, for the heart of the father will care for his own.’

‘The heart of the father will spurn her,’ I cried, ‘for the sin of the wife,

The cloud of the mother’s shame will enfold her and darken her life.’

Then his pale face twitch’d; ‘O Stephen, I love you, I love you, and yet’ —

As I lean’d away from his arms—’would God, we had never met!’

And he spoke not — only the storm; till after a little, I yearn’d

For his voice again, and he call’d to me ‘Kiss me!’ and there — as I turn’d —

‘The heart, the heart!’ I kiss’d him, I clung to the sinking form,

And the storm went roaring above us, and he — was out of the storm.

VIII.

And then, then, Mother, the ship stagger’d under a thunderous shock,

That shook us asunder, as if she had struck and crash’d on a rock;

For a huge sea smote every soul from the decks of The Falcon but one;

All of them, all but the man that was lash’d to the helm had gone;

And I fell — and the storm and the days went by, but I knew no more —

Lost myself — lay like the dead by the dead on the cabin floor,

Dead to the death beside me, and lost to the loss that was mine,

With a dim dream, now and then, of a hand giving bread and wine,

Till I woke from the trance, and the ship stood still, and the skies were blue,

But the face I had known, O Mother, was not the face that I knew.

IX.

The strange misfeaturing mask that I saw so amazed me, that I

Stumbled on deck, half mad. I would fling myself over and die!

But one — he was waving a flag — the one man left on the wreck —

‘Woman’ — he graspt at my arm—’stay there’ — I crouch’d upon deck —

‘We are sinking, and yet there’s hope look yonder,’ he cried, ‘a sail’

In a tone so rough that I broke into passionate tears, and the wail

Of a beaten babe, till I saw that a boat was nearing us — then

All on a sudden I thought, I shall look on the child again.

X.

They lower’d me down the side, and there in the boat I lay

With sad eyes fixt on the lost sea-home, as we glided away,

And I sigh’d, as the low dark hull dipt under the smiling main,

‘Had I stay’d with him, I had now — with him — been out of my pain.’

XI.

They took us aboard: the crew were gentle, the captain kind;

But I was the lonely slave of an often-wandering mind;

For whenever a rougher gust might tumble a stormier wave,

‘O Stephen,’ I moan’d, ‘I am coming to thee in thine Ocean-grave.’

And again, when a balmier breeze curl’d over a peacefuller sea,

I found myself moaning again ‘O child, I am coming to thee.’

XII.

The broad white brow of the Isle — that bay with the colour’d sand —

Rich was the rose of sunset there, as we drew to the land;

All so quiet the ripple would hardly blanch into spray

At the feet of the cliff; and I pray’d—’my child’ — for I still could pray —

‘May her life be as blissfully calm, be never gloom’d by the curse

Of a sin, not hers!’

Was it well with the child?

I wrote to the nurse

Who had borne my flower on her hireling heart; and an answer came

Not from the nurse — nor yet to the wife — to her maiden name!

I shook as I open’d the letter — I knew that hand too well —

And from it a scrap, clipt out of the ‘deaths’ in a paper, fell.

‘Ten long sweet summer days’ of fever, and want of care!

And gone — that day of the storm — O Mother, she came to me there.

Despair

A man and his wife having lost faith in a God, and hope of a life to come, and being utterly miserable in this, resolve to end themselves by drowning. The woman is drowned, but the man rescued by a minister of the sect he had abandoned.

I.

IS IT you, that preach’d in the chapel there looking over the sand?

Follow’d us too that night, and dogg’d us, and drew me to land?

II.

What did I feel that night? You are curious. How should I tell?

Does it matter so much what I felt? You rescued me — yet — was it well

That you came unwish’d for, uncall’d, between me and the deep and my doom,

Three days since, three more dark days of the Godless gloom

Of a life without sun, without health, with out hope, without any delight

In anything here upon earth? but ah God, that night, that night

When the rolling eyes of the lighthouse there on the fatal neck

Of land running out into rock — they had saved many hundreds from wreck —

Glared on our way toward death, I remember I thought, as we past,

Does it matter how many they saved? we are all of us wreck’d at last —

‘Do you fear?’ and there came thro’ the roar of the breaker a whisper, a breath,

‘Fear? am I not with you? I am frighted at life not death.’

III.

And the suns of the limitless Universe sparkled and shone in the sky,

Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light was a lie —

Bright as with deathless hope — but, however they sparkled and shone,

The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our own —

No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below,

A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.

IV.

See, we were nursed in the drear night-fold of your fatalist creed,

And we turn’d to the growing dawn, we had hoped for a dawn indeed,

When the light of a Sun that was coming would scatter the ghosts of the Past,

And the cramping creeds that had madden’d the peoples would vanish at last,

And we broke away from the Christ, our human brother and friend,

For He spoke, or it seem’d that He spoke, of a Hell without help, without end.

V.

Hoped for a dawn and it came, but the promise had faded away;

We had past from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day;

He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire,

The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire —

Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong,

Of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder, and wrong.

VI.

O we poor orphans of nothing — alone on that lonely shore —

Born of the brainless Nature who knew not that which she bore!

Trusting no longer that earthly flower would be heavenly fruit —

Come from the brute, poor souls — no souls — and to die with the brute ——

VII.

Nay, but I am not claiming your pity: I know you of old —

Small pity for those that have ranged from the narrow warmth of your fold,

Where you bawl’d the dark side of your faith and a God of eternal rage,

Till you flung us back on ourselves, and the human heart, and the Age.

VIII.

But pity — the Pagan held it a vice — was in her and in me,

Helpless, taking the place of the pitying God that should be

Pity for all that aches in the grasp of an idiot power,

And pity for our own selves on an earth that bore not a flower;

Pity for all that suffers on land or in air or the deep,

And pity for our own selves till we long’d for eternal sleep.

IX.

‘Lightly step over the sands! the waters — you hear them call!

Life with its anguish, and horrors, and errors — away with it all!’

And she laid her hand in my own — she was always loyal and sweet —

Till the points of the foam in the dusk came playing about our feet.

There was a strong sea-current would sweep us out to the main.

‘Ah God’ tho’ I felt as I spoke I was taking the name in vain —

‘Ah God’ and we turn’d to each other, we kiss’d, we embraced, she and I,

Knowing the Love we were used to believe everlasting would die

We had read their know-nothing books and we lean’d to the darker side —

Ah God, should we find Him, perhaps, perhaps, if we died, if we died;

We never had found Him on earth, this earth is a fatherless Hell —

‘Dear Love, for ever and ever, for ever and ever farewell,’

Never a cry so desolate, not since the world began,

Never a kiss so sad, no, not since the coming of man!

X.

But the blind wave cast me ashore, and you saved me, a valueless life.

Not a grain of gratitude mine! You have parted the man from the wife.

I am left alone on the land, she is all alone in the sea;

If a curse meant ought, I would curse you for not having let me be.

XI.

Visions of youth — for my brain was drunk with the water, it seems;

I had past into perfect quiet at length out of pleasant dreams,

And the transient trouble of drowning — what was it when match’d with the pains

Of the hellish heat of a wretched life rushing back thro’ the veins?

XII.

Why should I live? one son had forged on his father and fled,

And if I believed in a God, I would thank him, the other is dead,

And there was a baby-girl, that had never look’d on the light

Happiest she of us all, for she past from the night to the night.

XIII.

But the crime, if a crime, of her eldest-born, her glory, her boast,

Struck hard at the tender heart of the mother, and broke it almost;

Tho’, glory and shame dying out for ever in endless time,

Does it matter so much whether crown’d for a virtue, or hang’d for a crime?

XIV.

And ruin’d by him, by him, I stood there, naked, amazed

In a world of arrogant opulence, fear’d myself turning crazed,

And I would not be mock’d in a madhouse! and she, the delicate wife,

With a grief that could only be cured, if cured, by the surgeon’s knife, —

XV.

Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of pain,

If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain,

And the homeless planet at length will be wheel’d thro’ the silence of space,

Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race,

When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last brother-worm will have fled

From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth that is dead?

XVI.

Have I crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? O yes,

For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press,

When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are whooping at noon,

And Doubt is the lord of this dunghill and crows to the sun and the moon,

Till the Sun and the Moon of our science are both of them turn’d into blood,

And Hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good;

For their knowing and know-nothing books are scatter’d from hand to hand —

We have knelt in your know-all chapel too looking over the sand.

XVII.

What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us so well?

Infinite cruelty rather that made everlasting Hell,

Made us, foreknew us, foredoom’d us, and does what he will with his own;

Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan!

XVIII.

Hell? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been told,

The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn for his gold,

And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a God as you say,

His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish’d away.

XIX.

All yet — I have had some glimmer, at times, in my gloomiest woe,

Of a God behind all — after all — the great God for aught that I know;

But the God of Love and of Hell together — they cannot be thought,

If there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and bring him to nought!

XX.

Blasphemy! whose is the fault? is it mine? for why would you save

A madman to vex you with wretched words, who is best in his grave?

Blasphemy! ay, why not, being damn’d beyond hope of grace?

O would I were yonder with her, and away from your faith and your face!

Blasphemy! true! I have scared you pale with my scandalous talk,

But the blasphemy to my mind lies all in the way that you walk.

XXI.

Hence! she is gone! can I stay? can I breathe divorced from the Past?

You needs must have good lynx-eyes if I do not escape you at last.

Our orthodox coroner doubtless will find it a felo-de-se,

And the stake and the cross-road, fool, if you will, does it matter to me?

The Ancient Sage

A THOUSAND summers ere the time of Christ

From out his ancient city came a Seer

Whom one that loved, and honour’d him, and yet

Was no disciple, richly garb’d, but worn

From wasteful living, follow’d — in his hand

A scroll of verse — till that old man before

A cavern whence an affluent fountain pour’d

From darkness into daylight, turn’d and spoke.

This wealth of waters might but seem to draw

From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher,

Yon summit half-a-league in air — and higher,

The cloud that hides it — higher still, the heavens

Whereby the cloud was moulded, and whereout

The cloud descended. Force is from the heights.

I am wearied of our city, son, and go

To spend my one last year among the hills.

What hast thou there? Some deathsong for the Ghouls

To make their banquet relish? let me read.

“How far thro’ all the bloom and brake

That nightingale is heard!

What power but the bird’s could make

This music in the bird?

How summer-bright are yonder skies,

And earth as fair in lute!

And yet what sign of aught that lies

Behind the green and blue?

But man to-day is fancy’s fool

As man hath ever been.

The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule

Were never heard or seen.”

If thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive

Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,

There, brooding by the central altar, thou

May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,

By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,

As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;

For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake

That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there

But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,

The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within

The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,

And in the million-millionth of a grain

Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,

And ever vanishing, never vanishes,

To me, my son, more mystic than myself,

Or even than the Nameless is to me.

And when thou sendest thy free soul thro’ heaven,

Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness,

Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names.

And if the Nameless should withdraw from all

Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world

Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark.

“And since — from when this earth began —

The Nameless never came

Among us, never spake with man,

And never named the Name” —

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,

Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no

Nor yet that thou art mortal — nay my son,

Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,

Am not thyself in converse with thyself,

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,

And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!

She reels not in the storm of warring words,

She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’

She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,

She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!

“What Power? aught akin to Mind,

The mind in me and you?

Or power as of the Gods gone blind

Who see not what they do?”

But some in yonder city hold, my son,

That none but Gods could build this house of ours,

So beautiful, vast, various, so beyond

All work of man, yet, like all work of man,

A beauty with defect —— till That which knows,

And is not known, but felt thro’ what we feel

Within ourselves is highest, shall descend

On this half-deed, and shape it at the last

According to the Highest in the Highest.

“What Power but the Years that make

And break the vase of clay,

And stir the sleeping earth, and wake

The bloom that fades away?

What rulers but the Days and Hours

That cancel weal with woe,

And wind the front of youth with flowers,

And cap our age with snow?”

The days and hours are ever glancing by,

And seem to flicker past thro’ sun and shade,

Or short, or long, as Pleasure leads, or Pain;

But with the Nameless is nor Day nor Hour;

Tho’ we, thin minds, who creep from thought to thought,

Break into ‘Thens’ and ‘Whens’ the Eternal Now

This double seeming of the single world! —

My words are like the babblings in a dream

Of nightmare, when the habblings break the dream.

But thou be wise in this dream-world of ours,

Nor take thy dial for thy deity,

But make the passing shadow serve thy will.

“The years that made the stripling wise

Undo their work again,

And leave him, blind of heart and eyes,

The last and least of men;

Who clings to earth, and once would dare

Hell-heat or Arctic cold,

And now one breath of cooler air

Would loose him from his hold;

His winter chills him to the root,

He withers marrow and mind;

The kernel of the shrivell’d fruit

Is jutting thro’ the rind;

The tiger spasms tear his chest,

The palsy wags his head;

The wife, the sons, who love him best

Would fain that he were dead;

The griefs by which he once was wrung

Were never worth the while” —

Who knows? or whether this earth-narrow life

Be yet but yolk, and forming in the shell

“The shaft of scorn that once had stung

But wakes a dotard smile.”

The placid gleams of sunset after storm!

“The statesman’s brain that sway’d the past

Is feebler than his knees;

The passive sailor wrecks at last

In ever-silent seas;

The warrior hath forgot his arms,

The Learned all his lore;

The changing market frets or charms

The merchant’s hope no more;

The prophet’s beacon burn’d in vain,

And now is lost in cloud;

The plowman passes, bent with pain,

To mix with what he plow’d;

The poet whom his Age would quote

As heir of endless fame —

He knows not ev’n the book he wrote,

Not even his own name.

For man has overlived his day,

And, darkening in the light,

Scarce feels the senses break away

To mix with ancient Night.”

The shell must break before the bird can fly.

“The years that when my Youth began

Had set the lily and rose

By all my ways where’er they ran,

Have ended mortal foes;

My rose of love for ever gone,

My lily of truth and trust —

They made her lily and rose in one,

And changed her into dust.

O rosetree planted in my grief,

And growing, on her tomb,

Her dust is greening in your leaf,

Her blood is in your bloom.

O slender lily waving there,

And laughing back the light,

In vain you tell me ‘Earth is fair’

When all is dark as night.”

My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,

So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.

Who knows but that the darkness is in man?

The doors of Night may be the gates of Light;

For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then

Suddenly heal’d, how would’st thou glory in all

The splendours and the voices of the world!

And we, the poor earth’s dying race, and yet

No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore

Await the last and largest sense to make

The phantom walls of this illusion fade,

And show us that the world is wholly fair.

“But vain the tears for darken’d years

As laughter over wine,

And vain the laughter as the tears,

O brother, mine or thine,

For all that laugh, and all that weep

And all that breathe are one

Slight ripple on the boundless deep

That moves, and all is gone.”

But that one ripple on the boundless deep

Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself

For ever changing form, but evermore

One with the boundless motion of the deep.

“Yet wine and laughter friends! and set

The lamps alight, and call

For golden music, and forget

The darkness of the pall.”

If utter darkness closed the day, my son ——

But earth’s dark forehead flings athwart the heavens

Her shadow crown’d with stars — and yonder — out

To northward — some that never set, but pass

From sight and night to lose themselves in day.

I hate the black negation of the bier,

And wish the dead, as happier than ourselves

And higher, having climb’d one step beyond

Our village miseries, might be borne in white

To burial or to burning, hymn’d from hence

With songs in praise of death, and crown’d with flowers!

“O worms and maggots of to-day

Without their hope of wings!”

But louder than thy rhyme the silent Word

Of that world-prophet in the heart of man.

“Tho’ some have gleams or so they say

Of more than mortal things.”

To-day? but what of yesterday? for oft

On me, when boy, there came what then I call’d,

Who knew no books and no philosophies,

In my boy-phrase ‘The Passion of the Past.’

The first gray streak of earliest summer-dawn,

The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom,

As if the late and early were but one —

A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower

Had murmurs ‘Lost and gone and lost and gone!’

A breath, a whisper — some divine farewell —

Desolate sweetness — far and far away —

What had he loved, what had he lost, the boy?

I know not and I speak of what has been.

And more, my son! for more than once when I

Sat all alone, revolving in myself

The word that is the symbol of myself,

The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

And past into the Nameless, as a cloud

Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs

Were strange not mine — and yet no shade of doubt,

But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self

The gain of such large life as match’d with ours

Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words,

Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.

“And idle gleams will come and go,

But still the clouds remain;”

The clouds themselves are children of the Sun.

“And Night and Shadow rule below

When only Day should reign.”

And Day and Night are children of the Sun,

And idle gleams to thee are light to me.

Some say, the Light was father of the Night,

And some, the Night was father of the Light,

No night no day! — I touch thy world again —

No ill no good! such counter-terms, my son,

Are border-races, holding, each its own

By endless war: but night enough is there

In yon dark city: get thee back: and since

The key to that weird casket, which for thee

But holds a skull, is neither thine nor mine,

But in the hand of what is more than man,

Or in man’s hand when man is more than man,

Let be thy wail and help thy fellow men,

And make thy gold thy vassal not thy king,

And fling free alms into the beggar’s bowl,

And send the day into the darken’d heart;

Nor list for guerdon in the voice of men,

A dying echo from a falling wall;

Nor care — for Hunger hath the Evil eye —

To vex the noon with fiery gems, or fold

Thy presence in the silk of sumptuous looms;

Nor roll thy viands on a luscious tongue,

Nor drown thyself with flies in honied wine;

Nor thou he rageful, like a handled bee,

And lose thy life by usage of thy sting;

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, whence, if thou

Look higher, then — perchance — thou mayest — beyond

A hundred ever-rising mountain lines,

And past the range of Night and Shadow — see

The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day

Strike on the Mount of Vision!

So, farewell.

The Flight

I.

ARE YOU sleeping? have you forgotten? do not sleep, my sister dear!

How can you sleep? the morning brings the day I hate and fear;

The cock has crow’d already once, he crows before his time;

Awake! the creeping glimmer steals, the hills are white with rime.

II.

Ah, clasp me in your arms, sister, ah, fold me to your breast!

Ah, let me weep my fill once more, and cry myself to rest!

To rest? to rest and wake no more were better rest for me,

Than to waken every morning to that face I loathe to see:

III.

I envied your sweet slumber, all night so calm you lay,

The night was calm, the morn is calm, and like another day;

But I could wish yon moaning sea would rise and burst the shore,

And such a whirlwind blow these woods, as never blew before.

IV.

For, one by one, the stars went down across the gleaming pane,

And project after project rose, and all of them were vain;

The blackthorn-blossom fades and falls and leaves the bitter sloe,

The hope I catch at vanishes and youth is turn’d to woe.

V.

Come, speak a little comfort! all night I pray’d with tears,

And yet no comfort came to me, and now the morn appears,

When he will tear me from your side, who bought me for his slave:

This father pays his debt with me, and weds me to my grave.

VI.

What father, this or mine, was he, who, on that summer day

When I had fall’n from off the crag we clamber’d up in play,

Found, fear’d me dead, and groan’d, and took and kiss’d me, and again

He kiss’d me; and I loved him then; he was my father then.

VII.

No father now, the tyrant vassal of a tyrant vice!

The Godless Jephtha vows his child . . . to one cast of the dice.

These ancient woods, this Hall at last will go — perhaps have gone,

Except his own meek daughter yield her life, heart, soul to one —

VIII.

To one who knows I scorn him. O the formal mocking bow,

The cruel smile, the courtly phrase that masks his malice now —

But often in the sidelong eyes a gleam of all things ill —

It is not Love but Hate that weds a bride against her will;

IX.

Hate, that would pluck from this true breast the locket that I wear,

The precious crystal into which I braided Edwin’s hair!

The love that keeps this heart alive beats on it night and day —

One golden curl, his golden gift, before he past away.

X.

He left us weeping in the woods; his boat was on the sand;

How slowly down the rocks he went, how loth to quit the land!

And all my life was darken’d, as I saw the white sail run,

And darken, up that lane of light into the setting sun.

XI.

How often have we watch’d the sun fade from us thro’ the West,

And follow Edwin to those isles, those islands of the Blest!

Is he not there? would I were there, the friend, the bride, the wife,

With him, where summer never dies, with Love, the Sun of life!

XII.

O would I were in Edwin’s arms — once more — to feel his breath

Upon my cheek — on Edwin’s ship, with Edwin, ev’n in death,

Tho’ all about the shuddering wreck the death-white sea should rave,

Or if lip were laid to lip on the pillows of the wave.

XIII.

Shall I take him? I kneel with him? I swear and swear forsworn

To love him most, whom most I loathe, to honour whom I scorn?

The Fiend would yell, the grave would yawn, my mother’s ghost would rise —

To lie, to lie — in God’s own house — the blackest of all lies!

XIV.

Why — rather than that hand in mine, tho’ every pulse would freeze,

I’d sooner fold an icy corpse dead of some foul disease:

Wed him? I will not wed him, let them spurn me from the doors,

And I will wander till I die about the barren moors.

XV.

The dear, mad bride who stabb’d her bridegroom on her bridal night —

If mad, then I am mad, but sane, if she were in the right.

My father’s madness makes me mad — but words are only words!

I am not mad, not yet, not quite — There! listen how the birds

XVI.

Begin to warble yonder in the budding orchard trees!

The lark has past from earth to Heaven upon the morning breeze!

How gladly, were I one of those, how early would I wake!

And yet the sorrow that I bear is sorrow for his sake.

XVII.

They love their mates, to whom they sing; or else their songs, that meet

The morning with such music, would never be so sweet!

And tho’ these fathers will not hear, the blessed Heavens are just,

And Love is fire, and burns the feet would trample it to dust.

XVIII.

A door was open’d in the house — who? who? my father sleeps!

A stealthy foot upon the stair! he — some one — this way creeps!

If he? yes, he . . . lurks, listens, fears his victim may have fled —

He! where is some sharp-pointed thing? he comes, and finds me dead.

XIX.

Not he, not yet! and time to act — but how my temples burn!

And idle fancies flutter me, I know not where to turn;

Speak to me, sister; counsel me; this marriage must not be.

You only know the love that makes the world a world to me!

XX.

Our gentle mother, had she lived — but we were left alone:

That other left us to ourselves; he cared not for his own;

So all the summer long we roam’d in these wild woods of ours,

My Edwin loved to call us then ‘His two wild woodland flowers.’

XXI.

Wild flowers blowing side by side in God’s free light and air,

Wild flowers of the secret woods, when Edwin found us there,

Wild woods in which we roved with him, and heard his passionate vow,

Wild woods in which we rove no more, if we be parted now!

XXII.

You will not leave me thus in grief to wander forth forlorn;

We never changed a bitter word, not once since we were born;

Our dying mother join’d our hands; she knew this father well;

She bid its love, like souls in Heaven, and now I fly from Hell,

XXIII.

And you with me; and we shall light upon some lonely shore,

Some lodge within the waste sea-dunes, and hear the waters roar,

And see the ships from out the West go dipping thro’ the foam,

And sunshine on that sail at last which brings our Edwin home.

XXIV.

But look, the morning grows apace, and lights the old church-tower,

And lights the clock! the hand points five — O me — it strikes the hour —

I bide no more, I meet my fate, whatever ills betide!

Arise, my own true sister, come forth! the world is wide.

XXV.

And yet my heart is ill at ease, my eyes are thin with dew,

I seem to see a new-dug grave up yonder by the yew!

If we should never more return, but wander hand in hand

With breaking hearts. without a friend, and in a distant land.

XXVI.

O sweet, they tell me that the world is hard, and harsh of mind,

But can it be so hard, so harsh, as those that should be kind?

That matters not: let come what will; at last the end is sure,

And every heart that loves with truth is equal to endure.

Tomorrow

I.

HER, that yer Honour was spakin’ to? Whin, yer Honour? last year —

Standin’ here be the bridge, when last yer Honour was here?

An’ yer Honour ye gev her the top of the mornin’, ‘Tomorra’ says she.

What did they call her, yer Honour? They call’d her Molly Magee.

An’ yer Honour’s the thrue ould blood that always manes to be kind,

But there’s rason in all things, yer Honour, for Molly was out of her mind.

II.

Shure, an’ meself remimbers wan night comin’ down be the sthrame,

An’ it seems to me now like a bit of yisther-day in a dhrame —

Here where yer Honour seen her — there was but a slip of a moon,

But I hard thim — Molly Magee wid her batchelor, Danny O’Roon —

‘You’ve been takin’ a dhrop o’ the crathur’ an’ Danny says ‘Troth, an’ I been

Dhrinkin’ yer health wid Shamus O’Shea at Katty’s shebeen;1

But I must be lavin’ ye soon.’ ‘Ochone are ye goin’ away?’

‘Goin’ to cut the Sassenach whate’ he says ‘over the say’ —

‘An’ whin will ye meet me agin?’ an’ I hard him ‘Molly asthore,

I’ll meet you agin tomorra,’ says he, ‘be the chapel-door.’

‘An’ whin arc ye goin’ to lave me?’ ‘O’ Monday mornin’’ says he;

‘An’ shore thin ye’ll meet me tomorra?’ ‘Tomorra, tomorra, Machree!’

Thin Molly’s ould mother, yer Honour, that had no likin’ for Dan,

Call’d from her cabin an’ tould her to come away from the man,

An’ Molly Magee kern flyin’ acrass me, as light as a lark,

Au’ Dan stood there for a minute, an’ thin wint into the dark.

But wirrah! the storm that night — the tundher, an’ rain that fell,

An’ the sthrames runnin’ down at the back o’ the glin ‘ud ‘a dhrownded Hell.

III.

But airth was at pace nixt mornin’, an’ Hiven in its glory smiled,

As the Holy Mother o’ Glory that smiles at her sleepin’ child —

Ethen — she stept an the chapel-green, an’ she turn’d herself roun’

Wid a diamond dhrop in her eye, for Danny was not to be foun’,

An’ many’s the time that I watch’d her at mass lettin’ down the tear,

For the Divil a Danny was there, yet Honour, for forty year.

IV.

Och, Molly Magee, wid the red o’ the rose an’ the white o’ the May,

An’ yer hair as black as the night, an’ yer eyes as bright as the day

Achora, yer laste little whishper was sweet as the lilt of a bird!

Acushla, ye set me heart batin’ to music wid ivery word!

An’ sorra the Queen wid her sceptre in sich an illigant han’,

An’ the fall of yer foot in the dance was as light as snow an the lan’,

An’ the sun kem out of a cloud whiniver ye walkt in the shtreet,

An’ Shamus O’Shea was yer shadda, an’ laid himself undher yer feet,

An’ I loved ye meself wid a heart and a half, me darlin’, and he

‘Ud ‘a shot his own sowl dead for a kiss of ye, Molly Magee.

V.

But shure we wor betther frinds whin I crack’d his skull for her sake.

An’ he ped me back wid the best he could give at ould Donovan’s wake —

For the boys wor about her agin whin Dan didn’t come to the fore,

An’ Shamus along wid the rest, but she put thim all to the door.

An’, afther, I thried her meself av the bird ‘ud come to me call,

But Molly, begorrah, ‘ud listhen to naither at all, at all.

VI.

An’ her nabours an frinds ‘ud consowl an’ condowl wid her, airly and late,

‘Your Danny,’ they says, ‘niver crasst over say to the Sassenach whate;

He’s gone to the States, aroon, an’ he’s married another wife,

An’ ye’ll niver set eyes an the face of the thraithur agin in life

An’ to dhrame of a married man, death alive, is a mortial sin.’

But Molly says ‘I’d his hand-promise, an’ shure he’ll meet me agin.’

VII.

An’ afther her paärints had inter’d glory, an’ both in wan day,

She began to spake to herself, the crathur, an’ whishper, an’ say

‘Tomorra, Tomorra!’ an’ Father Molowny he tuk her in han’,

‘Molly, you’re manin’,’ he says, ‘me dear, av I undherstan’,

That ye’ll meet your paärints agin an’ yer Danny O’Roon afore God

Wid his blessed Marthyrs an’ Saints;’ an’ she gev him a frindly nod,

‘Tomorra, Tomorra,’ she says, an’ she didn’t intind to desave,

But her wits wor dead, an’ her hair was as white as the snow an a grave.

VIII.

Arrah now, here last month they wor diggin’ the bog, an’ they foun’

Dhrownded in black bog-wather a corp lyin’ undher groun’.

IX.

Yer Honour’s own agint, he says to me wanst, at Katty’s shebeen,

‘The Divil take all the black lan’, for a blessin’ ‘ud come wid the green!’

An’ where ‘ud the poor man, thin, cut his bit o’ turf for the fire?

But och! bad scran to the bogs whin they swallies the man intire!

An’ sorra the bog that’s in Hiven wid all the light an’ the glow,

An’ there’s hate enough, shure, widout thim in the Divil’s kitchen below.

X.

Thim ould blind nagers in Agypt, I hard his Riverence say,

Could keep their haithen kings in the flesh for the Jidgemint day,

An’, faix, be the piper o’ Moses, they kep the cat an’ the dog,

But it ‘ud ‘a been aisier work av they lived be an Irish bog.

XI.

How-an-iver they laid this body they foun’ an the grass

Be the chapel-door, an’ the people ‘ud see it that wint in to mass —

But a frish gineration had riz, an’ most of the ould was few,

An’ I didn’t know him meself, an’ none of the parish knew.

XII.

But Molly kem limpin’ up wid her stick, she was lamed iv a knee,

Thin a slip of a gossoon call’d, ‘Div ye know him, Molly Magee?’

An’ she stood up strait as the Queen of the world — she lifted her head —

‘He said he would meet me tomorra!’ an’ dhropt down dead an the dead.

XIII.

Och, Molly, we thought, machree, ye would start back agin into life,

Whin we laid yez, aich be aich, at yet wake like husban’ an’ wife.

Sorra the dhry eye thin but was wet for the frinds that was gone!

Sorra the silent throat but we hard it cryin’ ‘Ochone!’

An’ Shamus O’Shea that has now ten childer, hansome an’ tall,

Him an’ his childer wor keenin’ as if he had lost thim all.

XIV.

Thin his Riverence buried thim both in wan grave be the dead boor-tree,2

The young man Danny O’Roon wid his ould woman, Molly Magee.

XV.

May all the flowers o’ Jeroosilim blossom an’ spring from the grass,

Imbrashin’ an’ kissin’ aich other — as ye did — over yer Crass!

An’ the lark fly out o’ the flowers wid his song to the Sun an’ the Moon,

An’ tell thin in Hiven about Molly Magee an’ her Danny O’Roon,

Till Holy St. Pether gets up wid his kays an’ opens the gate!

An’ shure, be the Crass, that’s betther nor cuttin’ the Sassenach whate

To be there wid the Blessed Mother, an’ Saints an’ Marthyrs galore,

An’ singin’ yer ‘Aves’ an’ ‘Pathers’ for iver an’ ivermore.

XVI.

Au’ now that I tould yer Honour what-iver I hard an’ seen,

Yer Honour ‘ill give me a thrifle to dhrink yer health in potheen.

The Spinster’s Sweet-Arts

I.

MILK for my sweet-arts, Bess! fur it mun be the time about now

When dolly cooms in fro’ the far-end close wi’ her paäils fro’ the cow.

Eh! tha be new to the plaäce — thou’rt gaäpin’ — doesn’t tha see

I calls ‘em arter the fellers es once was sweet upo’ me?

II.

Naäy to be sewer it be past ‘er time. What maäkes ‘er sa laäte?

Goa to the laäne at the back, an’ looök thruf Maddison’s gaäte!

III.

Sweet-arts! Molly belike may ‘a lighted to-night upo’ one.

Sweet-arts! thanks to the Lord that I niver not listen’d to noän!

So I sits i’ my oän armchair wi’ my oän kettle theere o’ the hob,

An’ Tommy the fust, an’ Tommy the second, an’ Steevie an’ Rob.

IV.

Rob, coom cop ‘ere o’ my knee. Thou sees that i’ spite o’ the men

I ‘a kep’ thruf thick an’ thin my two ‘oonderd a-year to mysen;

Yis! thaw tha call’d me es pretty es ony lass i’ the Shere;

An’ thou be es pretty a Tabby, but Robby I seed thruf ya theere.

V.

Feyther ‘ud saäy I wur ugly es sin, an’ I beänt not vaäin,

But I niver wur downright hugly, thaw soom ‘ud ‘a thowt ma plaäin,

An’ I wasn’t sa plaäin i’ pink ribbons, ye said I wur pretty i’ pinks,

An’ I liked to ‘ear it I did, but I brunt sich a fool as ye thinks;

Ye was stroäkin ma down wi’ the ‘air, as I be a-stroäkin o’ you,

But whiniver I looöked i’ the glass I wur sewer that it couldn’t be true;

Niver wur pretty, not I, but ye knaw’d it wur pleasant to ‘ear,

Thaw it warn’t not me es wur pretty, but my two ‘oonderd a-year.

VI.

D’ya mind the murnin’ when we was a-walkin’ togither, an’ stood

By the claäy’d-oop pond, that the foalk be sa scared at, i’ Gigglesby wood,

Wheer the poor wench drowndid hersen, black Sal, es’ed been disgraäced?

An’ I feel’d thy arm es I stood wur a-creeäpin about my waäist;

An’ me es wur allus afear’d of a man’s gittin’ over fond,

I sidled awaäy an’ awaäy till I plumpt foot fust i’ the pond;

And, Robby, I niver ‘a liked tha sa well, as I did that daäy,

Fur tha joompt in thysen, an’ tha hoickt my feet wi’ a flop fro’ the claäy.

Ay, stick oop thy back, an’ set oop thy taäil, tha may gie ma a kiss,

Fur I walk’d wi’ tha all the way hoam an’ wur niver sa nigh saäyin’ Yis.

But wa boath was i’ sich a clat we was shaämed to cross Gigglesby Greeän,

Fur a cat may looök at a king thou knaws but the cat mun be clean.

Sa we boäth on us kep out o’ sight o’ the winders o’ Gigglesby Hinn —

Naäy, but the claws o’ tha! quiet! they pricks clean thruf to the skin —

An’ wa boäth slinkt ‘oäm by the brokken shed i’ the laäne at the back,

Wheer the poodle runn’d at tha once, an’ thou runn’d oop o’ the thack;

An’ tha squeedg’d my ‘and i’ the shed, fur theere we was forced to ‘ide,

Fur I seed that Steevie wur coomin’, and one o’ the Tommies beside.

VII.

Theere now, what art ‘a mewin at, Steevie? for owt I can tell —

Robby wur fust to be sewer, or I mowt ‘a liked tha as well.

VIII.

But, Robby, I thowt o’ tha all the while I wur chaängin’ my gown,

An’ I thowt shall I chaänge my staäte? but, O Lord, upo’ coomin’ down —

My bran-new carpet es fresh es a midder o’ flowers i’ Maäy —

Why ‘edn’t tha wiped thy shoes? it wur clatted all ower wi’ claäy.

An’ I could ‘a cried ammost, fur I seed that it couldn’t be,

An’ Robby I gied tha a raätin that sattled thy coortin o’ me.

An’ Molly an’ me was agreed, as we was a-cleanin’ the floor,

That a man be a durty thing an’ a trouble an’ plague wi’ indoor.

But I rued it arter a bit, fur I stuck to tha moor na the rest,

But I couldn’t ‘a lived wi’ a man an’ I knaws it be all fur the best.

IX.

Naäy — let ma stroäk tha down till I maäkes tha es smooth es silk,

But if I ‘ed married tha, Robby, thou’d not ‘a been worth thy milk,

Thou’d niver ‘a cotch’d ony mice but ‘a left me the work to do,

And ‘a taäen to the bottle beside, so es all that I ‘ears be true;

But I loovs tha to maäke thysen ‘appy, an’ soa purr awaäy, my dear,

Thou ‘ed wellnigh purr’d ma awaäy fro’ my oän two ‘oonderd a-year.

X.

Sweärin agean, you Toms, as ye used to do twelve year sin’!

Ye niver ‘eärd Steevie swear ‘cep’ it wur at a dog coomin’ in,

An’ boath o’ ye mun be fools to be hallus a-shawin’ your claws,

Fur I niver cared nothink for neither — an’ one o’ ye deäd ye knaws!

Coom give hoäver then, weant ye? I warrant ye soom fine daäy —

Theere, dig down — I shall hew to gie one or tother awaäy.

Can’t ye taäke pattern by Steevie? ye shant hew a drop fro’ the paäil.

Steevie be right good manners bang thruf to the tip o’ the taäil.

XI.

Robby, git down wi’tha, wilt tha? let Steevie coom oop o’ my knee.

Steevie, my lad, thou ‘ed very nigh been the Steevie fur me!

Robby wur fust to be sewer, ‘e wur burn an’ bred i’ the ‘ouse,

But thou be es ‘ansom a tabby es iver patted a mouse.

XII.

An’ I beänt not vaäin, but I knaws I ‘ed led tha a quieter life

Nor her wi’ the hepitaph yonder! “A faäithfnl an’ loovin’ wife!”

An’ ‘cos o’ thy farm by the beck, an’ thy windmill oop o’ the croft,

Tha thowt tha would marry ma, did tha? but that wur a bit ower soft,

Thaw thou was es soäber es daäy, wi’ a niced red faäce, an’ es cleän

Es a shillin’ fresh fro’ the mint wi’ a bran-new ‘eäd o’ the Queeän,

An’ thy farmin’ es cleän es thysen’, fur, Steevie, tha kep’ it sa neät

That I niver not spied sa much es a poppy along wi’ the wheät,

An’ the wool of a thistle a-flyin’ an’ seeädin’ tha haäted to see;

‘Twur es bad es a battle-twig1 ‘ere i’ my oän blue chaumber to me.

Ay, roob thy whiskers ageän ma, fur I could ‘a taäen to tha well,

But fur thy bairns, poor Steevie, a bouncin’ boy an’ a gell.

XIII.

An’ thou was es fond o’ thy bairns es I be mysen o’ my cats,

But I niver not wish’d fur childer, I hevn’t naw likin’ fur brats;

Pretty anew when ya dresses ‘em oop, an’ they goäs fur a walk,

Or sits wi’ their ‘ands afoor ‘em, an’ doesn’t not ‘inder the talk!

But their bottles o’ pap, an’ their mucky bibs, an’ the clats an’ the clouts,

An’ their mashin’ their toys to pieäces an’ maäkin’ ma deaf wi’ their shouts,

An’ hallus a-joompin’ about ma as if they was set upo’ springs,

An’ a haxin’ ma hawkard questions, an’ saäyin’ ondecent things,

Alt’ a-callin’ ma ‘hugly’ mayhap to my faäce, or a teärin’ my gown —

Dear! dear! dear! I mun part them Tommies — Steevie git down.

XIV.

Ye be wuss nor the men-tommies, you. I tell’d ya, na moor o’ that!

Tom, lig theere o’ the cushion, an’ tother Tom ‘ere o’ the mat.

XV.

Theere! I ha’ master’d them! Hed I married the Tommies — O Lord,

To loove an’ obaäy the Tommies! I couldn’t ‘a stuck by my word.

To be horder’d about, an’ waäked, when Molly ‘d put out the light,

By a man coomin’ in wi’ a hiccup at ony hour o’ the night!

An’ the taäble staäin’d wi’ ‘is aäle, an’ the mud o’ ‘is boots o’ the stairs,

An’ the stink o’ ‘is pipe i’ the ‘ouse, an’ the mark o’ ‘is ‘eäd o’ the chairs!

An’ noun o’ my four sweet-arts ‘ud ‘a let me ‘a led my oän waäy,

Sa I likes ‘em best wi’ taäils when they ‘evn’t a word to saäy.

XVII.

An’ I sits i’ my oän little parlour, an’ sarved by my oän little lass,

Wi’ my oän little garden outside, an’ my oän bed o’ sparrow-grass,

An’ my oän door-poorch wi the woodbine an’ jessmine a-dressin’ it greeän,

An’ my oän fine Jackman i’ purple a roäbin’ the ‘ouse like a Queeän.

XVII.

An’ the little gells bobs to ma hoffens es I be abroad i’ the laänes,

When I goäs fur to coomfut the poor es be down wi’ their haäches an’ their paäins:

An’ a haäf-pot o’ jam, or a mossel o’ meät when it beänt too dear,

They maäkes ma a graäter Laädy nor ‘er i’ the mansion theer,

Hes ‘es hallus to hax of a man how much to spare or to spend;

An’ a spinster I be an’ I will be, if soä pleäse God, to the hend.

XVIII.

Mew! mew! — Bess wi’ the milk! what ha maäde our Molly sa laäte?

It should ‘a been ‘ere by seven, an’ theere — it be strikin’ height —

‘Cushie wur craäzed fur’er cauf’ well — I ‘eärd ‘er a maäkin’ ‘er moän,

An’ I thowt to mysen ‘thank God that I hevn’t naw cauf o’ my oän.’

Theere!

Set it down!

Now Robby!

You Tommies shall waäit to-night

Till Robby an’ Steevie ‘es ‘ed their lap — an’ it sarves ye right.

The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava, Prologue

Prologue to General Hamley

OUR BIRCHES yellowing and from each

The light leaf falling fast,

While squirrels from our fiery beech

Were bearing off the mast,

You came, and look’d and loved the view

Long-known and loved by me,

Green Sussex fading into blue

With one gray glimpse of sea;

And, gazing from this height alone,

We spoke of what had been

Most marvellous in the wars your own

Crimean eyes had seen;

And now — like old-world inns that take

Some warrior for a sign

That therewithin a guest may make

True cheer with honest wine —

Because you heard the lines I read

Nor utter’d word of blame,

I dare without your leave to head

These rhymings with your name,

Who know you but as one of those

I fain would meet again,

Yet know you, as your England knows

That you and all your men

Were soldiers to her heart’s desire,

When, in the vanish’d year,

You saw the league-long rampart-fire

Flare from Tel-el-Kebir

Thro’ darkness, and the foe was driven,

And Wolseley overthrew

Arâbi, and the stars in heaven

Paled, and the glory grew.

The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava

October 25, 1854

I.

THE CHARGE of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!

Down the hill, down the hill, thousands of Russians,

Thousands of horsemen, drew to the valley — and stay’d;

For Scarlett and Scarlett’s three hundred were riding by

When the points of the Russian lances arose in the sky;

And he call’d, ‘Left wheel into line!’ and they wheel’d and obey’d.

Then he look’d at the host that had halted he knew not why,

And he turn’d half round, and he bade his trumpeter sound

To the charge, and he rode on ahead, as he waved his blade

To the gallant three hundred whose glory will never die —

‘Follow,’ and up the hill, up the hill, up the hill,

Follow’d the Heavy Brigade.

II.

The trumpet, the gallop, the charge, and the might of the fight!

Thousands of horsemen had gather’d there on the height,

With a wing push’d out to the left and a wing to the right,

And who shall escape if they close? but he dash’d up alone

Thro’ the great gray slope of men,

Sway’d his sabre, and held his own

Like an Englishman there and then;

All in a moment follow’d with force

Three that were next in their fiery course,

Wedged themselves in between horse and horse,

Fought for their lives in the narrow gap they had made —

Four amid thousands! and up the hill, up the hill,

Gallopt the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade.

III.

Fell like a cannon-shot,

Burst like a thunderbolt,

Crash’d like a hurricane,

Broke thro’ the mass from below,

Drove thro’ the midst of the foe,

Plunged up and down, to and fro,

Rode flashing blow upon blow,

Brave Inniskillens and Greys

Whirling their sabres in circles of light!

And some of us, all in amaze,

Who were held for a while from the fight,

And were only standing at gaze,

When the dark-muffled Russian crowd

Folded its wings from the left and the right,

And roll’d them around like a cloud, —

O, mad for the charge and the battle were we,

When our own good redcoats sank from sight,

Like drops of blood in a dark-gray sea,

And we turn’d to each other, whispering, all dismay’d,

‘Lost are the gallant three hundred of Scarlett’s Brigade!’

IV.

‘Lost one and all’ were the words

Mutter’d in our dismay;

But they rode like victors and lords

Thro’ the forest of lances and swords

In the heart of the Russian hordes,

They rode, or they stood at bay —

Struck with the sword-hand and slew,

Down with the bridle-hand drew

The foe from the saddle and threw

Underfoot there in the fray —

Ranged like a storm or stood like a rock

In the wave of a stormy day;

Till suddenly shock upon shock

Stagger’d the mass from without,

Drove it in wild disarray,

For our men gallopt up with a cheer and a shout,

And the foeman surged, and waver’d, and reel’d

Up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, out of the field,

And over the brow and away.

V.

Glory to each and to all, and the charge that they made!

Glory to all the three hundred, and all the Brigade!

NOTE. — The ‘three hundred’ of the ‘Heavy Brigade’ who made this famous charge were the Scots Greys and the 2d squadron of Inniskillens; the remainder of the ‘Heavy Brigade’ subsequently dashing up to their support.

The ‘three’ were Scarlett’s aide-de-camp, Elliot, and the trumpeter, and Shegog the orderly, who had been close behind him.

Epilogue

IRENE.

NOT this way will you set your name

A star among the stars.

POET.

What way?

IRENE.

You praise when you should blame

The barbarism of wars.

A juster epoch has begun.

POET.

Yet tho’ this cheek be gray,

And that bright hair the modern sun,

Those eyes the blue to-day,

You wrong me, passionate little friend.

I would that wars should cease,

I would the globe from end to end

Might sow and reap in peace,

And some new Spirit o’erbear the old,

Or Trade re-frain the Powers

From war with kindly links of gold,

Or Love with wreaths of flowers.

Slav, Teuton, Kelt, I count them all

My friends and brother souls,

With all the peoples, great and small,

That wheel between the poles.

But since our mortal shadow, Ill,

To waste this earth began —

Perchance from some abuse of Will

In worlds before the man

Involving ours — he needs must fight

To make true peace his own,

He needs must combat might with might,

Or Might would rule alone;

And who loves war for war’s own sake

Is fool, or crazed, or worse;

But let the patriot-soldier take

His meed of fame in verse;

Nay — tho’ that realm were in the wrong

For which her warriors bleed,

It still were right to crown with song

The warrior’s noble deed —

A crown the Singer hopes may last,

For so the deed endures;

But Song will vanish in the Vast;

And that large phrase of yours

‘A star among the stars,’ my dear,

Is girlish talk at best;

For dare we dally with the sphere

As he did half in jest,

Old Horace? ‘I will strike,’ said he,

‘The stars with head sublime,’

But scarce could see, as now we see,

The man in space and time,

So drew perchance a happier lot

Than ours, who rhyme to-day.

The fires that arch this dusky dot —

Yon myriad-worlded way —

The vast sun-clusters’ gather’d blaze,

World-isles in lonely skies,

Whole heavens within themselves, amaze

Our brief humanities;

And so does Earth; for Homer’s fame,

Tho’ carved in harder stone —

The falling drop will make his name

As mortal as my own.

IRENE.

No!

POET.

Let it live then — ay, till when?

Earth passes, all is lost

In what they prophesy, our wise men,

Sun-flame or sunless frost,

And deed and song alike are swept

Away, and all in vain

As far as man can see, except

The man himself remain;

And tho’, in this lean age forlorn,

Too many a voice may cry

That man can have no after-morn,

Not yet of those am I.

The man remains, and whatsoe’er

He wrought of good or brave

Will mould him thro’ the cycle-year

That dawns behind the grave.

And here the Singer for his Art

Not all in vain may plead

‘The song that nerves a nation’s heart

Is in itself a deed.’

To Virgil

Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s Death.

I.

ROMAN VIRGIL, thou that singest Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire,

Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre;

II.

Landscape-lover, lord of language more than he that sang the ‘Works and Days,’

All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase;

III.

Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word;

IV.

Poet of the happy Tityrus piping underneath his beechen bowers;

Poet of the poet-satyr whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers;

V.

Chanter of the Pollio, glorying in the blissful years again to be,

Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea;

VI.

Thou that seëst Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind;

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind;

VII.

Light among the vanish’d ages; star that gildest yet this phantom shore;

Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more;

VIII.

Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Cæsar’s dome —

Tho’ thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound forever of Imperial Rome —

IX.

Now the Rome of slaves hath perish’d, and the Rome of freemen holds her place,

I, from out the Northern Island sunder’d once from all the human race,

X.

I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began,

Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.

The Dead Prophet

182–

I.

DEAD!

And the Muses cried with a stormy cry

‘Send them no more, for evermore.

Let the people die.’

II.

Dead!

‘Is it he then brought so low?’

And a careless people flock’d from the fields

With a purse to pay for the show.

III.

Dead, who had served his time,

Was one of the people’s kings,

Had labour’d in lifting them out of slime,

And showing them, souls have wings!

IV.

Dumb on the winter heath he lay.

His friends had stript him bare,

And roll’d his nakedness everyway

That all the crowd might stare.

V.

A storm-worn signpost not to be read,

And a tree with a moulder’d nest

On its barkless bones, stood stark by the dead;

And behind him, low in the West,

VI.

With shifting ladders of shadow and light,

And blurr’d in colour and form,

The sun hung over the gates of Night,

And glared at a coming storm.

VII.

Then glided a vulturous Beldam forth,

That on dumb death had thriven;

They call’d her ‘Reverence’ here upon earth,

And ‘The Curse of the Prophet’ in Heaven.

VIII.

She knelt—’We worship him’ — all but wept —

‘So great so noble was he!’

She clear’d her sight, she arose, she swept

The dust of earth from her knee.

IX.

‘Great! for he spoke and the people heard,

And his eloquence caught like a flame

From zone to zone of the world, till his Word

Had won him a noble name.

X.

Noble! he sung, and the sweet sound ran

Thro’ palace and cottage door,

For he touch’d on the whole sad planet of man,

The kings and the rich and the poor;

XI.

And he sung not alone of an old sun set,

But a sun coming up in his youth!

Great and noble — O yes — but yet —

For man is a lover of Truth,

XII.

And bound to follow, wherever she go

Stark-naked, and up or down,

Thro’ her high hill-passes of stainless snow,

Or the foulest sewer of the town —

XIII.

Noble and great — O ay — but then,

Tho’ a prophet should have his due,

Was he noblier-fashion’d than other men?

Shall we see to it, I and you?

XIV.

For since he would sit on a Prophet’s seat,

As a lord of the Human soul,

We needs must scan him from head to feet

Were it but for a wart or a mole?’

XV.

His wife and his child stood by him in tears,

But she — she push’d them aside.

‘Tho’ a name may last for a thousand years,

Yet a truth is a truth,’ she cried.

XVI.

And she that had haunted his pathway still,

Had often truckled and cower’d

When he rose in his wrath, and had yielded her will

To the master, as overpower’d,

XVII.

She tumbled his helpless corpse about.

‘Small blemish upon the skin!

But I think we know what is fair without

Is often as foul within.’

XVIII.

She crouch’d, she tore him part from part,

And out of his body she drew

The red ‘Blood-eagle’1 of liver and heart;

She held them up to the view;

XIX.

She gabbled, as she groped in the dead,

And all the people were pleased;

‘See, what a little heart,’ she said,

‘And the liver is half-diseased!’

XX.

She tore the Prophet after death,

And the people paid her well.

Lightnings flicker’d along the heath;

One shriek’d ‘The fires of Hell!

Early Spring

I.

ONCE MORE the Heavenly Power

Makes all things new,

And domes the red-plow’d hills

With loving blue;

The blackbirds have their wills,

The throstles too.

II.

Opens a door in heaven;

From skies of glass

A Jacob’s ladder falls

On greening grass,

And o’er the mountain-walls

Young angels pass.

III.

Before them fleets the shower,

And burst the buds,

And shine the level lands,

And flash the floods;

The stars are from their hands

Flung thro’ the woods,

IV.

The woods with living airs

How softly fann’d,

Light airs from where the deep,

All down the sand,

Is breathing in his sleep,

Heard by the land.

V.

O, follow, leaping blood,

The season’s lure!

O heart, look down and up

Serene, secure,

Warm as the crocus cup,

Like snowdrops, pure!

VI.

Past, Future glimpse and fade

Thro’ some slight spell,

A gleam from yonder vale,

Some far blue fell,

And sympathies, how frail,

In sound and smell!

VII.

Till at thy chuckled note,

Thou twinkling bird,

The fairy fancies range,

And, lightly stirr’d,

Ring little bells of change

From word to word.

VIII.

For now the Heavenly Power

Makes all things new,

And thaws the cold, and fills

The flower with dew;

The blackbirds have their wills,

The poets too.

Prefatory Poem to My Brother’s Sonnets

Midnight, June 30, 1879

I.

MIDNIGHT — in no midsummer tune

The breakers lash the shores:

The cuckoo of a joyless June

Is calling out of doors:

And thou hast vanish’d from thine own

To that which looks like rest,

True brother, only to be known

By those who love thee best.

II.

Midnight — and joyless June gone by,

And from the deluged park

The cuckoo of a worse July

Is calling thro’ the dark:

But thou art silent underground,

And o’er thee streams the rain,

True poet, surely to be found

When Truth is found again.

III.

And now, in these unsummer’d skies

The summer bird is still,

Far off a phantom cuckoo cries

From out a phantom hill;

And thro’ this midnight breaks the sun

Of sixty years away,

The light of days when life begun,

The days that seem to-day,

When all my griefs were shared with thee,

As all my hopes were thine —

As all thou wert was one with me,

May all thou art be mine!

Frater Ave atque Vale

ROW us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!

So they row’d, and there we landed—’O venusta Sirmio!’

There to me thro’ all the groves of olive in the summer glow,

There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow,

Came that ‘Ave atque Vale’ of the Poet’s hopeless woe,

Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago,

‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ — as we wander’d to and fro

Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below

Sweet Catullus’s all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio!

Helen’s Tower

Written at the request of my friend, Lord Dufferin.

HELEN’S TOWER, here I stand,

Dominant over sea and land.

Son’s love built me, and I hold

Mother’s love in letter’d gold.

Love is in and out of time,

I am mortal stone and lime.

Would my granite girth were strong

As either love, to last as long

I should wear my crown entire

To and thro’ the Doomsday fire,

And be found of angel eyes

In earth’s recurring Paradise.

Epitaph on Lord Stratford de Redcliffe

In Westminster Abbey

THOU third great Canning, stand among our best

And noblest, now thy long day’s work hath ceased,

Here silent in our Minster of the West

Who wert the voice of England in the East.

Epitaph on General Gordon

In the Gordon Boys’ National Memorial Home near Woking

WARRIOR of God, man’s friend, and tyrant’s foe,

Now somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan,

Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know

This earth has never borne a nobler man.

Epitaph on Caxton

In St. Margaret’s, Westminster

FIAT LUX (his motto)

THY PRAYER was ‘Light — more Light — while Time shall last!’

Thou rawest a glory growing on the night,

But not the shadows which that light would cast,

Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light.

To the Duke of Argyll

O PATRIOT Statesman, be thou wise to know

The limits of resistance, and the bounds

Determining concession; still be bold

Not only to slight praise but suffer scorn;

And be thy heart a fortress to maintain

The day against the moment, and the year

Against the day; thy voice, a music heard

Thro’ all the yells and counter-yells of feud

And faction, and thy will, a power to make

This ever-changing world of circumstance,

In changing, chime with never-changing Law.

Hands all Round

FIRST PLEDGE our Queen this solemn night,

Then drink to England, every guest;

That man’s the best Cosmopolite

Who loves his native country best.

May freedom’s oak for ever live

With stronger life from day to day;

That man’s the true Conservative

Who lops the moulder’d branch away.

Hands all round!

God the traitor’s hope confound!

To this great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,

And the great name of England, round and round.

To all the loyal hearts who long

To keep our English Empire whole!

To all our noble sons, the strong

New England of the Southern Pole!

To England under Indian skies,

To those dark millions of her realm!

To Canada whom we love and prize,

Whatever statesman hold the helm.

Hands all round!

God the traitor’s hope confound!

To this great name of England drink, my friends,

And all her glorious empire, round and round.

To all our statesmen so they be

True leaders of the land’s desire!

To both our Houses, may they see

Beyond the borough and the shire!

We sail’d wherever ship could sail,

We founded many a mighty state;

Pray God our greatness may not fail

Thro’ craven fears of being great.

Hands all round!

God the traitor’s hope confound!

To this great cause of Freedom drink my friends,

And the great name of England, round and round.

Freedom

I.

O THOU so fair in summers gone,

While yet thy fresh and virgin soul

Inform’d the pillar’d Parthenon,

The glittering Capitol;

II.

So fair in southern sunshine bathed,

But scarce of such majestic mien

As here with forehead vapor-swathed

In meadows ever green;

III.

For thou — when Athens reign’d and Rome,

Thy glorious eyes were dimm’d with pain

To mark in many a freeman’s home

The slave, the scourge, the chain;

IV.

O follower of the Vision, still

In motion to the distant gleam

Howe’er blind force and brainless will

May jar thy golden dream

V.

Of Knowledge fusing class with class,

Of civic Hate no more to be,

Of Love to leaven all the mass,

Till every soul be free;

VI.

Who yet, like Nature, wouldst not mar

By changes all too fierce and fast

This order of her Human Star,

This heritage of the past;

VII.

O scorner of the party cry

That wanders from the public good,

Thou — when the nations rear on high

Their idol smear’d with blood,

VIII.

And when they roll their idol down —

Of saner worship sanely proud;

Thou loather of the lawless crown

As of the lawless crowd;

IX.

How long thine ever-growing mind

Hath still’d the blast and strown the wave,

Tho’ some of late would raise a wind

To sing thee to thy grave,

X.

Men loud against all forms of power —

Unfurnish’d brows, tempestuous tongues,

Expecting all things in an hour —

Brass mouths and iron lungs!

Poets and their Bibliographies

OLD POETS foster’d under friendlier skies,

Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say,

At dawn, and lavish all the golden day

To make them wealthier in his readers’ eyes;

And you, old popular Horace, you the wise

Adviser of the nine-years-ponder’d lay,

And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay,

Catullus, whose dead songster never dies;

If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere

That once had roll’d you round and round the sun,

You see your Art still shrined in human shelves,

You should be jubilant that you flourish’d here

Before the Love of Letters, overdone,

Had swampt the sacred poets with themselves.

To H.R.H. Princess Beatrice

TWO Suns of Love make day of human life,

Which else with all its pains, and griefs, and deaths,

Were utter darkness — one, the Sun of dawn

That brightens thro’ the Mother’s tender eyes,

And warms the child’s awakening world — and one

The later-rising Sun of spousal Love,

Which from her household orbit draws the child

To move in other spheres. The Mother weeps

At that white funeral of the single life,

Her maiden daughter’s marriage; and her tears

Are half of pleasure, half of pain — the child

Is happy — even in leaving her! but Thou,

True daughter, whose all-faithful, filial eyes

Have seen the loneliness of earthly thrones,

Wilt neither quit the widow’d Crown, nor let

This later light of Love have risen in vain,

But moving thro’ the Mother’s home, between

The two that love thee, lead a summer life,

Sway’d by each Love, and swaying to each Love,

Like some conjectured planet in mid heaven

Between two suns, and drawing down from both

The light and genial warmth of double day.

LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER, ETC.

CONTENTS

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After

The Fleet

Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen

To W.C. Macready

Locksley Hall Sixty Years After

LATE, my grandson! half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts,

Watch’d again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts,

Wander’d back to living boyhood while I heard the curlews call,

I myself so close on death, and death itself in Locksley Hall.

So — your happy suit was blasted — she the faultless, the divine;

And you liken — boyish babble — this boy-love of yours with mine.

I myself have often babbled doubtless of a foolish past;

Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last.

‘Curse him!’ curse your fellow-victim? call him dotard in your rage?

Eyes that lured a doting boyhood well might fool a dotard’s age.

Jilted for a wealthier! wealthier? yet perhaps she was not wise;

I remember how you kiss’d the miniature with those sweet eyes.

In the hall there hangs a painting — Amy’s arms about my neck —

Happy children in a sunbeam sitting on the ribs of wreck.

In my life there was a picture, she that clasp’d my neck had flown;

I was left within the shadow sitting on the wreck alone.

Yours has been a slighter ailment, will you sicken for her sake?

You, not you! your modern amourist is of easier, earthlier make.

Amy loved me, Amy fail’d me, Amy was a timid child;

But your Judith — but your worldling — she had never driven me wild.

She that holds the diamond necklace dearer than the golden ring,

She that finds a winter sunset fairer than a morn of Spring.

She that in her heart is brooding on his briefer lease of life,

While she vows ‘till death shall part us,’ she the would-be-widow wife.

She the worldling born of worldlings — father, mother — be content,

Ev’n the homely farm can teach us there is something in descent.

Yonder in that chapel, slowly sinking now into the ground,

Lies the warrior, my forefather, with his feet upon the hound.

Cross’d! for once he sail’d the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride;

Dead the warrior, dead his glory, dead the cause in which he died.

Yet how often I and Amy in the mouldering aisle have stood,

Gazing for one pensive moment on that founder of our blood.

There again I stood to-day, and where of old we knelt in prayer,

Close beneath the casement crimson with the shield of Locksley — there,

All in white Italian marble, looking still as if she smiled,

Lies my Amy dead in child-birth, dead the mother, dead the child.

Dead — and sixty years ago, and dead her aged husband now —

I this old white-headed dreamer stoopt and kiss’d her marble brow.

Gone the fires of youth, the follies, furies, curses, passionate tears,

Gone like fires and floods and earthquakes of the planet’s dawning years.

Fires that shook me once, but now to silent ashes fall’n away.

Cold upon the dead volcano sleeps the gleam of dying day.

Gone the tyrant of my youth, and mute below the chancel stones,

All his virtues — I forgive them — black in white above his bones.

Gone the comrades of my bivouac, some in fight against the foe,

Some thro’ age and slow diseases, gone as all on earth will go.

Gone with whom for forty years my life in golden sequence ran,

She with all the charm of woman, she with all the breadth of man,

Strong in will and rich in wisdom, Edith, yet so lowly-sweet,

Woman to her inmost heart, and woman to her tender feet,

Very woman of very woman, nurse of ailing body and mind,

She that link’d again the broken chain that bound me to my kind.

Here to-day was Amy with me, while I wander’d down the coast,

Near us Edith’s holy shadow, smiling at the slighter ghost.

Gone our sailor son thy father, Leonard early lost at sea;

Thou alone, my boy, of Amy’s kin and mine art left to me.

Gone thy tender-natured mother, wearying to be left alone,

Pining for the stronger heart that once had beat beside her own.

Truth, for Truth is Truth, he worshipt, being true as he was brave;

Good, for Good is Good, he follow’d, yet he look’d beyond the grave,

Wiser there than you, that crowning barren Death as lord of all,

Deem this over-tragic drama’s closing curtain is the pall!

Beautiful was death in him, who saw the death, but kept the deck,

Saving women and their babes, and sinking with the sinking wreck,

Gone for ever! Ever? no — for since our dying race began,

Ever, ever, and for ever was the leading light of man.

Those that in barbarian burials kill’d the slave, and slew the wife

Felt within thernselves the sacred passion of the second life.

Indian warriors dream of ampler hunting grounds beyond the night;

Ev’n the black Australian dying hopes he shall return, a white.

Truth for truth, and good for good! The Good, the True, the Pure, the Just —

Take the charm ‘For ever’ from them, and they crumble into dust.

Gone the cry of ‘Forward, Forward,’ lost within a growing gloom;

Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.

Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space,

Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest common-place!

‘Forward’ rang the voices then, and of the many mine was one.

Let us hush this cry of ‘Forward’ till ten thousand years have gone.

Far among the vanish’d races, old Assyrian kings would flay

Captives whom they caught in battle — iron-hearted victors they.

Ages after, while in Asia, he that led the wild Moguls,

Timur built his ghastly tower of eighty thousand human skulls,

Then, and here in Edward’s time, an age of noblest English names,

Christian conquerors took and flung the conquer’d Christian into flames.

Love your enemy, bless your haters, said the Greatest of the great;

Christian love among the Churches look’d the twin of heathen hate.

From the golden alms of Blessing man had coin’d himself a curse:

Rome of Cæsar, Rome of Peter, which was crueller? which was worse?

France had shown a light to all men, preach’d a Gospel, all men’s good;

Celtic Demos rose a Demon, shriek’d and slaked the light with blood.

Hope was ever on her mountain, watching till the day begun —

Crown’d with sunlight — over darkness — from the still unrisen sun.

Have we grown at last beyond the passions of the primal clan?

‘Kill your enemy, for you hate him,’ still, ‘your enemy’ was a man.

Have we sunk below them? peasants maim the helpless horse, and drive

Innocent cattle under thatch, and burn the kindlier brutes alive.

Brutes, the brutes are not your wrongers — burnt at midnight, found at morn,

Twisted hard in mortal agony with their offspring, born-unborn,

Clinging to the silent mother! Are we devils? are we men?

Sweet St. Francis of Assisi, would that he were here again,

He that in his Catholic wholeness used to call the very flowers

Sisters, brothers — and the beasts — whose pains are hardly less than ours!

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! who can tell how all will end?

Read the wide world’s annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.

Hope the best, but hold the Present fatal daughter of the Past,

Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.

Ay, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise:

When was age so cramm’d with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?

Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn,

Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, ‘Ye are equals, equal-born.’

Equal-born? O yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.

Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat,

Till the Cat thro’ that mirage of overheated language loom

Larger than the Lion, — Demos end in working its own doom.

Russia bursts our Indian barrier, shall we fight her? shall we yield?

Pause! before you sound the trumpet, hear the voices from the field.

Those three hundred millions under one Imperial sceptre now,

Shall we hold them? shall we loose them? take the suffrage of the plow.

Nay, but these would feel and follow Truth if only you and you,

Rivals of realm-ruining party, when you speak were wholly true.

Plowmen, Shepherds, have I found, and more than once, and still could find,

Sons of God, and kings of men in utter nobleness of mind,

Truthful, trustful, looking upward to the practised hustings-liar;

So the Higher wields the Lower, while the Lower is the Higher.

Here and there a cotter’s babe is royal-born by right divine;

Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his swine.

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game;

Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.

Step by step we gain’d a freedom known to Europe, known to all;

Step by step we rose to greatness, — thro’ the tonguesters we may fall.

You that woo the Voices — tell them ‘old experience is a fool,’

Teach your flatter’d kings that only those who cannot read can rule.

Pluck the mighty from their seat, but set no meek ones in their place;

Pillory Wisdom in your markets, pelt your offal at her face.

Tumble Nature heel o’er head, and, yelling with the yelling street,

Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet.

Bring the old dark ages back without the faith, without the hope,

Break the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the slope.

Authors — essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part,

Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.

Rip your brothers’ vices open, strip your own foul passions bare;

Down with Reticence, down with Reverence — forward — naked — let them stare.

Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your sewer;

Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure.

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism, —

Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm.

Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men;

Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast again?

Only ‘dust to dust’ for me that sicken at your lawless din,

Dust in wholesome old-world dust before the newer world begin.

Heated am I? you — you wonder — well, it scarce becomes mine age —

Patience! let the dying actor mouth his last upon the stage.

Cries of unprogressive dotage ere the dotard fall asleep?

Noises of a current narrowing, not the music of a deep?

Ay, for doubtless I am old, and think gray thoughts, for I am gray:

After all the stormy changes shall we find a changeless May?

After madness, after massacre, Jacobinism and Jacquerie,

Some diviner force to guide us thro’ the days I shall not see?

When the schemes and all the systems, Kingdoms and Republics fall,

Something kindlier, higher, holier — all for each and each for all?

All the full-brain, half-brain races, led by Justice, Love, and Truth;

All the millions one at length with all the visions of my youth?

All diseases quench’d by Science, no man halt, or deaf or blind;

Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger mind?

Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue —

I have seen her far away — for is not Earth as yet so young? —

Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion kill’d,

Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till’d,

Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,

Universal ocean softly washing all her warless Isles.

Warless? when her tens are thousands, and her thousands millions, then —

All her harvest all too narrow — who can fancy warless men?

Warless? war will die out late then. Will it ever? late or soon?

Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon dead world the moon?

Dead the new astronomy calls her. . . . On this day and at this hour,

In this gap between the sandhills, whence you see the Locksley tower,

Here we met, our latest meeting — Amy — sixty years ago —

She and I — the moon was falling greenish thro’ a rosy glow,

Just above the gateway tower, and even where you see her now —

Here we stood and claspt each other, swore the seeming-deathless vow. . . .

Dead, but how her living glory lights the hall, the dune, the grass!

Yet the moonlight is the sunlight, and the sun himself will pass.

Venus near her! smiling downward at this earthlier earth of ours,

Closer on the Sun, perhaps a world of never fading flowers.

Hesper, whom the poet call’d the Bringer home of all good things.

All good things may move in Hesper, perfect peoples, perfect kings.

Hesper — Venus — were we native to that splendour or in Mars,

We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars.

Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite,

Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?

Might we not in glancing heavenward on a star so silver-fair,

Yearn, and clasp the hands and murmur, ‘Would to God that we were there’?

Forward, backward, backward, forward, in the immeasurable sea,

Sway’d by vaster ebbs and flows than can be known to you or me.

All the suns — are these but symbols of innumerable man,

Man or Mind that sees a shadow of the planner or the plan?

Is there evil but on earth? or pain in every peopled sphere?

Well be grateful for the sounding watchword ‘Evolution’ here,

Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,

And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.

What are men that He should heed us? cried the king of sacred song;

Insects of an hour, that hourly work their brother insect wrong,

While the silent Heavens roll, and Suns along their fiery way,

All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles a day.

Many an Æon moulded earth before her highest, man, was born,

Many an Æon too may pass when earth is manless and forlorn,

Earth so huge, and yet so bounded — pools of salt, and plots of land —

Shallow skin of green and azure — chains of mountain, grains of sand!

Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by,

Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye,

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, thro’ the human soul;

Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the Whole.

.     .     .     .     .

Here is Locksley Hall, my grandson, here the lion-guarded gate.

Not to-night in Locksley Hall — to-morrow — you, you come so late.

Wreck’d — your train — or all but wreck’d? a shatter’d wheel? a vicious boy!

Good, this forward, you that preach it, is it well to wish you joy?

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time,

City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?

There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet,

Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street.

There the Master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread,

There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead.

There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,

And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor.

Nay, your pardon, cry your ‘forward,’ yours are hope and youth, but I —

Eighty winters leave the dog too lame to follow with the cry,

Lame and old, and past his time, and passing now into the night;

Yet I would the rising race were half as eager for the light.

Light the fading gleam of Even? light the glimmer of the dawn?

Aged eyes may take the growing glimmer for the gleam withdrawn.

Far away beyond her myriad coming changes earth will be

Something other than the wildest modern guess of you and me.

Earth may reach her earthly-worst, or if she gain her earthly-best,

Would she find her human offspring this ideal man at rest?

Forward then, but still remember how the course of Time will swerve,

Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve.

Not the Hall to-night, my grandson! Death and Silence hold their own.

Leave the Master in the first dark hour of his last sleep alone.

Worthier soul was he than I am, sound and honest, rustic Squire,

Kindly landlord, boon companion — youthful jealousy is a liar.

Cast the poison from your bosom, oust the madness from your brain.

Let the trampled serpent show you that you have not lived in vain.

Youthful! youth and age are scholars yet but in the lower school,

Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool.

Yonder lies our young sea-village — Art and Grace are less and less:

Science grows and Beauty dwindles — roofs of slated hideousness!

There is one old Hostel left us where they swing the Locksley shield,

Till the peasant cow shall butt the ‘Lion passant’ from his field.

Poor old Heraldry, poor old History, poor old Poetry, passing hence,

In the common deluge drowning old political common-sense!

Poor old voice of eighty crying after voices that have fled!

All I loved are vanish’d voices, all my steps are on the dead.

All the world is ghost to me, and as the phantom disappears,

Forward far and far from here is all the hope of eighty years.

.     .     .     .     .

In this Hostel — I remember — I repent it o’er his grave —

Like a clown — by chance he met me — I refused the hand he gave.

From that casement where the trailer mantles all the mouldering bricks —

I was then in early boyhood, Edith but a child of six —

While I shelter’d in this archway from a day of driving showers —

Peept the winsome face of Edith like a flower among the flowers.

Here to-night! the Hall to-morrow, when they toll the Chapel bell!

Shall I hear in one dark room a wailing, ‘I have loved thee well.’

Then a peal that shakes the portal — one has come to claim his bride,

Her that shrank, and put me from her, shriek’d, and started from my side —

Silent echoes! You, my Leonard, use and not abuse your day,

Move among your people, know them, follow him who led the way,

Strove for sixty widow’d years to help his homelier brother men,

Served the poor, and built the cottage, raised the school, and drain’d the fen.

Hears he now the Voice that wrong’d him? who shall swear it cannot be?

Earth would never touch her worst, were one in fifty such as he.

Ere she gain her Heavenly-best, a God must mingle with the game:

Nay, there may be those about us whom we neither see nor name,

Felt within us as ourselves, the Powers of Good, the Powers of Ill,

Strowing balm, or shedding poison in the fountains of the Will.

Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine.

Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine.

Follow Light, and do the Right — for man can half-control his doom —

Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb.

Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past.

I that loathed, have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last.

Gone at eighty, mine own age, and I and you will bear the pall;

Then I leave thee Lord and Master, latest Lord of Locksley Hall.

The Fleet

I.

YOU, you, if you shall fail to understand

What England is, and what her all-in-all,

On you will come the curse of all the land,

Should this old England fall

Which Nelson left so great.

II.

His isle, the mightiest Ocean-power on earth,

Our own fair isle, the lord of every sea —

Her fuller franchise — what would that be worth —

Her ancient fame of Free —

Where she . . . a fallen state?

III.

Her dauntless army scatter’d, and so small,

Her island-myriads fed from alien lands —

The fleet of England is her all-in-all;

Her fleet is in your hands,

And in her fleet her fate.

IV.

You, you, that have the ordering of her fleet,

If you should only compass her disgrace,

When all men starve, the wild mob’s million feet

Will kick you from your place,

But then too late, too late.

Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen

Written at the Request of the Prince of Wales

I.

WELCOME, welcome with one voice!

In your welfare we rejoice,

Sons and brothers that have sent,

From isle and cape and continent,

Produce of your field and flood,

Mount and mine, and primal wood;

Works of subtle brain and hand,

And splendors of the morning land,

Gifts from every British zone;

Britons, hold your own!

II.

May we find, as ages run,

The mother featured in the son;

And may yours for ever be

That old strength and constancy

Which has made your fathers great

In our ancient island State,

And wherever her flag fly,

Glorying between sea and sky,

Makes the might of Britain known;

Britons, hold your own!

III.

Britain fought her sons of yore —

Britain fail’d; and never more,

Careless of our growing kin,

Shall we sin our father’s sin,

Men that in a narrower day —

Unprophetic rulers they —

Drove from out the mother’s nest

That young eagle of the West

To forage for herself alone;

Britons, hold your own!

IV.

Sharers of our glorious past,

Brothers, must we part at last?

Shall we not thro’ good and ill

Cleave to one another still?

Britain’s myriad voices call,

‘Sons, be welded each and all

Into one imperial whole,

One with Britain, heart and soul!

One life, one flag, one fleet, one throne!’

Britons, hold your own!

To W.C. Macready

1851

FAREWELL, Macready, since to-night we part;

Full-handed thunders often have confessed

Thy power, well-used to move the public breast.

We thank thee with our voice, and from the heart.

Farewell, Macready, since this night we part,

Go, take thine honors home; rank with the best,

Garrick and statelier Kemble, and the rest

Who made a nation purer through their art.

Thine is it that our drama did not die,

Nor flicker down to brainless pantomine,

And those gilt gauds men-children swarm to see.

Farewell, Macready, moral, grave, sublime;

Our Shakespeare’s bland and universal eye

Dwells pleased, through twice a hundred years, on thee.

•

DEMETER AND OTHER POEMS

CONTENTS

To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava

On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria

To Professor Jebb,

With the Following Poem.

Demeter and Persephone

Owd Roä.1

Vastness

The Ring

Forlorn

Happy

To Ulysses 1

To Mary Boyle

The Progress of Spring

Merlin and The Gleam

Romney’s Remorse

Parnassus

By an Evolutionist

OLD AGE

Far — far — away

Politics

Beautiful City

The Roses on the Terrace

The Play

On one who affected an Effeminate Manner

To one who ran down the English

The Snowdrop

The Throstle

The Oak

In Memoriam. W. G. Ward

To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava

I.

AT TIMES our Britain cannot rest,

At times her steps are swift and rash;

She moving, at her girdle clash

The golden keys of East and West.

II.

Not swift or rash, when late she lent

The sceptres of her West, her East,

To one, that ruling has increased

Her greatness and her self-content.

III.

Your rule has made the people love

Their ruler. Your viceregal days

Have added fulness to the phrase

Of ‘Gauntlet in the velvet glove.’

IV.

But since your name will grow with Time,

Not all, as honouring your fair fame

Of Statesman, have I made the name

A golden portal to my rhyme:

V.

But more, that you and yours may know

From me and mine, how dear a debt

We owed you, and are owing yet

To you and yours, and still would owe.

VI.

For he — your India was his Fate,

And drew him over sea to you —

He fain had ranged her thro’ and thro’,

To serve her myriads and the State, —

VII.

A soul that, watch’d from earliest youth,

And on thro’ many a brightening year,

Had never swerved for craft or fear,

By one side-path, from simple truth;

VIII.

Who might have chased and claspt Renown

And caught her chaplet here — and there

In haunts of jungle-poison’d air

The flame of life went wavering down;

IX.

But ere he left your fatal shore,

And lay on that funereal boat,

Dying, ‘Unspeakable’ he wrote

‘Their kindness,’ and he wrote no more;

X.

And sacred is the latest word;

And now the Was, the Might-have-been,

And those lone rites I have not seen,

And one dear sound I have not heard,

XI.

Are dreams that scarce will let me be,

Not there to bid my boy farewell,

When That within the coffin fell,

Fell — and flash’d into the Red Sea,

XII.

Beneath a hard Arabian moon

And alien stars. To question, why

The sons before the fathers die,

Not mine! and I may meet him soon;

XIII.

But while my life’s late eve endures,

Nor settles into hueless gray,

My memories of his briefer day

Will mix with love for you and yours.

On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria

I.

FIFTY TIMES the rose has flower’d and faded,

Fifty times the golden harvest fallen,

Since our Queen assumed the globe, the sceptre.

II.

She beloved for a kindliness

Rare in fable or history,

Queen, and Empress of India,

Crown’d so long with a diadem

Never worn by a worthier,

Now with prosperous auguries

Comes at last to the bounteous

Crowning year of her Jubilee.

III.

Nothing of the lawless, of the despot,

Nothing of the vulgar, or vainglorious,

All is gracious, gentle, great and queenly.

IV.

You then joyfully, all of you,

Set the mountain aflame to-night,

Shoot your stars to the firmament,

Deck your houses, illuminate

All your towns for a festival,

And in each let a multitude

Loyal, each, to the heart of it,

One full voice of allegiance,

Hail the fair Ceremonial

Of this year of her Jubilee.

V.

Queen, as true to womanhood as Queenhood,

Glorying in the glories of her people,

Sorrowing with the sorrows of the lowest!

VI.

You, that wanton in affluence,

Spare not now to be bountiful,

Call your poor to regale with you,

All the lowly, the destitute,

Make their neighborhood healthfuller,

Give your gold to the hospital,

Let the weary be comforted,

Let the needy be banqueted,

Let the maim’d in his heart rejoice

At this glad Ceremonial,

And this year of her Jubilee.

VII.

Henry’s fifty years are all in shadow,

Gray with distance Edward’s fifty summers,

Even her Grandsire’s fifty half forgotten.

VIII.

You, the Patriot Architect,

You that shape for eternity,

Raise a stately memorial,

Make it regally gorgeous,

Some Imperial Institute,

Rich in symbol, in ornament,

Which may speak to the centuries,

All the centuries after us,

Of this great Ceremonial,

And this year of her Jubilee.

IX.

Fifty years of ever-broadening Commerce!

Fifty years of ever-brightening Science!

Fifty years of ever-widening Empire!

X.

You, the Mighty, the Fortunate,

You, the Lord-territorial,

You, the Lord-manufacturer,

You, the hardy, laborious,

Patient children of Albion,

You, Canadian, Indian,

Australasian, African,

All your hearts be in harmony,

All your voices in unison.

Singing, ‘Hail to the glorious

Golden year of her Jubilee!’

XI.

Are there thunders moaning in the distance?

Are there spectres moving in the darkness?

Trust the Hand of Light will lead her people,

Till the thunders pass, the spectres vanish,

And the Light is Victor, and the darkness

Dawns into the Jubilee of the Ages.

To Professor Jebb,

With the Following Poem.

FAIR THINGS are slow to fade away,

Bear witness you, that yesterday1

From out the Ghost of Pindar inyou

Roll’d an Olympian; and they say2

That here the torpid mummy wheat

Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet

As that which gilds the glebe of England,

Sunn’d with a summer of milder heat.

So may this legend for awhile,

If greeted by your classic smile,

Tho’ dead in its Trinacrian Enna,

Blossom again on a colder isle.

Demeter and Persephone

(In Enna)

FAINT as a climate-changing bird that flies

All night across the darkness, and at dawn

Falls on the threshold of her native land,

And can no more, thou camest, O my child,

Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams,

Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumb

With passing thro’ at once from state to state,

Until I brought thee hither, that the day,

When here thy hands let fall the gather’d flower,

Might break thro’ clouded memories once again

On thy lost self. A sudden nightingale

Saw thee, and flash’d into a frolic of song

And welcome; and a gleam as of the moon,

When first she peers along the tremulous deep,

Fled wavering o’er thy face, and chased away

That shadow of a likeness to the king

Of shadows, thy dark mate. Persephone!

Queen of the dead no more — my child! Thine eyes

Again were human-godlike, and the Sun

Burst from a swimming fleece of winter gray,

And robed thee in his day from head to feet —

‘Mother!’ and I was folded in thine arms.

Child, those imperial, disimpassion’d eyes

Awed even me at first, thy mother — eyes

That oft had seen the serpent-wanded power

Draw downward into Hades with his drift

Of flickering spectres, lighted from below

By the red race of fiery Phlegethon;

But when before have Gods or men beheld

The Life that had descended re-arise,

And lighted from above him by the Sun?

So mighty was the mother’s childless cry,

A cry that rang thro’ Hades, Earth, and Heaven!

So in this pleasant vale we stand again,

The field of Enna, now once more ablaze

With flowers that brighten as thy footstep falls,

All flowers — but for one black blur of earth

Left by that closing chasm, thro’ which the car

Of dark Aïdoneus rising rapt thee hence.

And here, my child, tho’ folded in thine arms,

I feel the deathless heart of motherhood

Within me shudder, lest the naked glebe

Should yawn once more into the gulf, and thence

The shrilly whinnyings of the team of Hell,

Ascending, pierce the glad and songful air,

And all at once their arch’d necks, midnight-maned,

Jet upward thro’ the mid-day blossom. No!

For, see, thy foot has touch’d it; all the space

Of blank earth-baldness clothes itself afresh,

And breaks into the crocus-purple hour

That saw thee vanish.

Child, when thou wert gone,

I envied human wives, and nested birds,

Yea, the cubb’d lioness; went in search of thee

Thro’ many a palace, many a cot, and gave

Thy breast to ailing infants in the night,

And set the mother waking in amaze

To find her sick one whole; and forth again

Among the wail of midnight winds, and cried,

‘Where is my loved one? Wherefore do ye wail?’

And out from all the night an answer shrill’d,

‘We know not, and we know not why we wail.’

I climb’d on all the cliffs of all the seas,

And ask’d the waves that moan about the world

‘Where? do ye make your moaning for my child?’

And round from all the world the voices came

‘We know not, and we know not why we moan.’

‘Where’? and I stared from every eagle-peak,

I thridded the black heart of all the woods,

I peer’d thro’ tomb and cave, and in the storms

Of Autumn swept across the city, and heard

The murmur of their temples chanting me,

Me, me, the desolate Mother! ‘Where’? — and turn’d,

And fled by many a waste, forlorn of man,

And grieved for man thro’ all my grief for thee, —

The jungle rooted in his shatter’d hearth,

The serpent coil’d about his broken shaft,

The scorpion crawling over naked skulls; —

I saw the tiger in the ruin’d fane

Spring from his fallen God, but trace of thee

I saw not; and far on, and, following out

A league of labyrinthine darkness, came

On three gray heads beneath a gleaming rift.

‘Where’? and I heard one voice from all the three

‘We know not, for we spin the lives of men,

And not of Gods, and know not why we spin!

There is a Fate beyond us.’ Nothing knew.

Last as the likeness of a dying man,

Without his knowledge, from him flits to warn

A far-off friendship that he comes no more,

So he, the God of dreams, who heard my cry,

Drew from thyself the likeness of thyself

Without thy knowledge, and thy shadow past

Before me, crying ‘The Bright one in the highest

Is brother of the Dark one in the lowest,

And Bright and Dark have sworn that I, the child

Of thee, the great Earth-Mother, thee, the Power

That lifts her buried life from gloom to bloom,

Should be for ever and for evermore

The Bride of Darkness.’

So the Shadow wail’d.

Then I, Earth-Goddess, cursed the Gods of Heaven.

I would not mingle with their feasts; to me

Their nectar smack’d of hemlock on the lips,

Their rich ambrosia tasted aconite.

The man, that only lives and loves an hour,

Seem’d nobler than their hard Eternities.

My quick tears kill’d the flower, my ravings hush’d

The bird, and lost in utter grief I fail’d

To send my life thro’ olive-yard and vine

And golden grain, my gift to helpless man.

Rain-rotten died the wheat, the barley-spears

Were hollow-husk’d, the leaf fell, and the sun,

Pale at my grief, drew down before his time

Sickening, and Ætna kept her winter snow.

Then He, the brother of this Darkness, He

Who still is highest, glancing from his height

On earth a fruitless fallow, when he miss’d

The wonted steam of sacrifice, the praise

And prayer of men, decreed that thou should’st dwell

For nine white moons of each whole year with me,

Three dark ones in the shadow with thy King.

Once more the reaper in the gleam of dawn

Will see me by the landmark far away,

Blessing his field, or seated in the dusk

Of even, by the lonely threshing-floor,

Rejoicing in the harvest and the grange.

Yet I, Earth-Goddess, am but ill-content

With them, who still are highest. Those gray heads,

What meant they by their ‘Fate beyond the Fates’

But younger kindlier Gods to bear us down,

As we bore down the Gods before us? Gods,

To quench, not hurl the thunderbolt, to stay,

Not spread the plague, the famine; Gods indeed,

To send the noon into the night and break

The sunless halls of Hades into Heaven?

Till thy dark lord accept and love the Sun,

And all the Shadow die into the Light,

When thou shalt dwell the whole bright year with me,

And souls of men, who grew beyond their race,

And made themselves as Gods against the fear

Of Death and Hell; and thou that hast from men,

As Queen of Death, that worship which is Fear,

Henceforth, as having risen from out the dead,

Shalt ever send thy life along with mine

From buried grain thro’ springing blade, and bless

Their garner’d Autumn also, reap with me,

Earth-mother, in the harvest hymns of Earth

The worship which is Love, and see no more

The Stone, the Wheel, the dimly-glimmering lawns

Of that Elysium, all the hateful fires

Of torment, and the shadowy warrior glide

Along the silent field of Asphodel.

Owd Roä.1

NAÄY, noä mander (2) o’ use to be callin’ ‘im Roä, Roä, Roä,

Fur the dog’s stoän-deaf, an’ e’s blind, ‘e can naither Stan’ nor goä.

But I means fur to maäke ‘is owd aäge as ‘appy as iver I can,

Fur I owäs owd Roäver moor nor I iver owäd mottal man.

Thou’s rode of ‘is back when a babby, afoor thou was gotten too owd,

Fur ‘e’d fetch an’ carry like owt, ‘e was allus as good as gowd.

Eh, but ‘e’d fight wi’ a will when ‘e fowt; ‘e could howd (3) ‘is oän,

An’ Roä as the dog as knaw’d when an’ wheere to bury his boane.

An’ ‘e kep his head hoop like a king, an’ ‘e’d niver not down wi’ ‘is taäil,

Fur ‘e’d niver done nowt to be shaämed on, when we was i’ Howlaby Daäle.

An’ ‘e sarved me sa well when ‘e lived, that, Dick, when ‘e cooms to be deäd,

I thinks as I’d like fur to hev soom soort of a sarvice reäd.

Fur ‘e’s moor good sense na the Parliament man ‘at stans fur us ‘ere,

An’ I’d voät fur ‘im, my oän sen, if ‘e could but stan fur the Shere.

‘Faäithful an’ True’ — them words be i’ Scriptur — an’ Faäithful an’ True

Ull be fun’ (4) upo’ four short legs ten times fur one upo’ two.

An’ maäybe they’ll walk upo’ two but I knaws they runs upo’ four, (5) —

Bedtime, Dicky! but waäit till tha ‘eärs it be strikin’ the hour.

Fur I wants to tell tha o’ Roä when we lived i’ Howlaby Daäle,

Ten year sin — Naäy — naäy! tha mun nobbut hev’ one glass of aäle.

Straänge an’ owd-farran’d (6) the ‘ouse, an’ belt (7) long afoor my daäy

Wi’ haäfe o’ the chimleys a-twizzen’d (8) an’ twined like a band o’ haäy.

The fellers as maäkes them picturs, ‘ud coom at the fall o’ the year,

An’ cattle their ends upo stools to pictur the door-poorch theere,

An’ the Heagle ‘as hed two heäds stannin’ theere o’ the brokken stick; (9)

An’ they niver ‘ed seed sich ivin’s (10) as graw’d hall ower the brick;

An’ theere i’ the ‘ouse one night — but it’s down, an’ all on it now

Goän into mangles an’ tonups, (11) an’ raäved slick thruf by the plow —

Theere, when the ‘ouse wur a house, one night I wur sittin’ aloän,

Wi’ Roäver athurt my feeät, an’ sleeäpin still as a stoän,

Of a Christmas Eäve, an’ as cowd as this, an’ the midders (12) as white,

An the fences all on ‘em bolster ‘d oop wi’ the windle (13) that night;

An’ the cat wur a-sleeäpin alongside Roäver, but I wur awaäke,

An’ smoäkin’ an’ thinkin’ o’ things — Doänt maäke thysen sick wi’ the caäke.

Fur the men ater supper ‘ed sung their songs an’ ‘ed ‘ed their beer,

An’ ‘ed goän their waäys; ther was nobbut three, an’ noän on ‘em theere.

They was all on ‘em fear’d o’ the Ghoäst an’ dussn’t not sleeäp i’ the ‘ouse,

But Dicky, the Ghoäst moästlins (14) was nobbut a rat or a mouse.

An’ I looökt out wonst (15) at the night, an’ the daäle was all of a thaw,

Fur I seed the beck coomin’ down like a long black snaäke i’ the snaw,

An’ I heärd greät heäps o’ the snaw slushin’ down fro’ the bank to the beck,

An’ then as I stood i’ the doorwaäy, I feeäld it drip o’ my neck.

Saw I turn’d in ageän, an’ I thowt o’ the good owd times ‘at was goan,

An’ the munney they maäde by the war, an’ the times ‘at was coomin’ on;

Fur I thowt if the Staäte was a gawin’ to let in furriners’ wheat,

Howiver was British farmers to stan’ ageän o’ their feeät.

Howiver was I fur to find my rent an’ to paäy my men?

An’ all along o’ the feller (16) as turn’d ‘is back of hissen.

Thou slep i’ the chaumber above us, we couldn’t ha’ ‘eard tha call,

Sa Moother ‘ed tell’d ma to bring tha down, an’ thy craädle an’ all;

Fur the gell o’ the farm ‘at slep wi’ tha then ‘ed gotten wer leäve,

Fur to goä that night to ‘er foälk by cause o’ the Christmas Eäve;

But I cleän forgot tha, my lad, when Moother ‘ell gotten to bed,

An’ I slep i’ my chair hup-on-end, an’ the Freeä Traäde runn’d ‘i my ‘ead,

Till I dreäm’d ‘at Squire walkt in, an’ I says to him ‘Squire, ya’re laäte,’

Then I seed at ‘is faäce wur as red as the Yule-block theer i’ the graäte.

An’ ‘e says ‘can ya paäy me the rent to-night?’ an’ I says to ‘im ‘Noä,’

An’ ‘e cotch’d howd hard o’ my hairm, (17) ‘Then hout to-night tha shall goä.’

‘Tha’ll niver,’ says I, ‘be a-turnin ma hout upo’ Christmas Eäve’?

Then I waäked an’ I fun it was Roäver a-tuggin’ an’ tearin’ my slieäve.

An’ I thowt as ‘e’d goän cleän-wud, (18) fur I noäwaäys knaw’d ‘is intent;

An’ I says ‘Git awaäy, ya beäst,’ an’ I fetcht ‘im a kick an’ ‘e went.

Then ‘e tummled up stairs, fur I ‘eärd ‘im, as if ‘e’d ‘a brokken ‘is neck,

An’ I’d cleär forgot, little Dicky, thy chaumber door wouldn’t sneck; (19)

An’ I slep’ i’ my chair ageän wi’ my hairm hingin’ down to the floor,

An’ I thowt it was Roäver a-tuggin’ an’ tearin’ me wuss nor afoor,

An’ I thowt ‘at I kick’d ‘im ageän, but I kick’d thy Moother istead.

‘What arta snorin’ theere fur? the house is afire,’ she said.

Thy Moother ‘ed beän a-naggin’ about the gell o’ the farm,

She offens ‘ud spy summut wrong when there warn’t not a mossel o’ harm;

An’ she didn’t not solidly meän I wur gawin’ that waäy to the bad,

Fur the gell (20) a was as howry a trollope as iver traäpes’d i’ the squad.

But Moother was free of ‘er tongue, as I offens ‘ev tell’d ‘er mysen,

Sa I kep i’ my chair, fur I thowt she was nobbut a-rilin’ ma then.

An’ I says ‘ I’d be good to tha, Bess, if tha’d onywaäys let ma be good,’

But she skelpt ma haäfe ower i’ the chair, an’ screeäd like a Howl gone wud (21) —

‘Ya mun run fur the lether. (22) Git oop, if ya’re onywaäys good for owt.’

And I says ‘If I beänt noäwaäys — not nowadaäys — good fur nowt —

Yit I beänt sich a Nowt (23) of all Nowts as ‘ull hallus do as ‘e’s bid.’

‘But the stairs is afire,’ she said; then I seed ‘er a-cryin’, I did.

An’ she beäld ‘Ya mun saäve little Dick, an’ be sharp about it an’ all,’

Sa I runs to the yard fur a lether, an’ sets ‘im ageän the wall,

An’ I claums an’ I mashes the winder hin, when I gits to the top,

But the heat druv hout i’ my heyes till I feäld mysen ready to drop.

Thy Moother was howdin’ the lether, an’ tellin’ me not to be skeärd,

An’ I wasn’t afeärd, or I thinks leäst-waäys as I wasn’t afeärd;

But I couldn’t see fur the smoäke wheere thou was a-liggin, my lad,

An’ Roäver was theere i’ the chaumber a-yowlin’ an’ yaupin’ like mad;

An’ thou was a-beälin’ likewise, an’ a-squeälin’, as if tha was bit,

An’ it wasn’t a bite but a burn, fur the merk’s (24) o’ thy shou’der yit;

Then I call’d out Roä, Roä, Roä, thaw I didn’t haäfe think as ‘e’d ‘ear,

But ‘e coom’d thruf the fire wi my bairn i’ ‘is mouth to the winder theere!

He coom’d like a Hangel o’ marcy as soon as ‘e ‘eard ‘is naäme,

Or like tother Hangel i’ Scriptur ‘at summun seed i’ the flaäme,

When summun ‘ed hax’d fur a son, an’ ‘e promised a son to she,

An’ Roä was as good as the Hangel i’ saävin’ a son fur me.

Sa I browt tha down, an’ I says ‘I mun gaw up agean fur Roä.’

‘Gaw up ageän fur the varmint?’ I tell’d ‘er ‘Yeäs I mun goä.’

An’ I claumb’d up ageän to the winder, an’ clemm’d (25) owd Roä by the ‘eäd,

An’ ‘is ‘air coom’d off i’ my ‘ands an’ I taäked ‘im at fust fur dead;

Fur ‘e smell’d like a herse a-singein’, an’ seeäm’d as blind as a poop,

An’ haäfe on ‘im bare as a bublin’. (26) I couldn’t wakken ‘im oop,

But I browt ‘im down, an’ we got to the barn, fur the barn wouldn’t burn

Wi’ the wind blawin’ hard tother waäy, an’ the wind wasn’t like to turn.

An’ I kep a-callin’ o’ Roä till ‘e waggled ‘is taäil fur a bit,

But the cocks kep a-crawin’ an’ crawin’ all night, an’ I ‘ears ‘em yit;

An’ the dogs was a-yowlin’ all round, and thou was a-squeälin’ thysen,

An’ Moother was naggin’ an’ groänin’ an moänin’ an’ naggin’ ageän;

An’ I ‘eärd the bricks an’ the baulks (27) rummle down when the roof gev waäy,

Fur the fire was a-raägin’ an’ raävin’ an’ roärin’ like judgment daäy.

Warm enew theere sewer-ly, but the barn was as cowd as owt,

An’ we cuddled and huddled togither, an’ happt (28) wersens oop as we mowt.

An’ I browt Roä round, but Moother ‘ed beän sa soäk’d wi’ the thaw

‘At she cotch’d ‘er death o’ cowd that night, poor soul, i’ the straw.

Haäfe o’ the parish runn’d oop when the rigtree (29) was tummlin’ in —

Too laäte — but it’s all ower now — hall hower — an’ ten year sin;

Too laäte, tha mun git tha to bed, but I’ll coom an’ I’ll squench the light,

Fur we moänt ‘ev naw moor fires — and soa little Dick, good-night.

Vastness

I.

MANY a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish’d face,

Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish’d race.

II.

Raving politics, never at rest — as this poor earth’s pale history runs, —

What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

III.

Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, truthless violence mourn’d by the Wise,

Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of lies upon lies;

IV.

Stately purposes, valour in battle, glorious annals of army and fleet,

Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, trumpets of victory, groans of defeat;

V.

Innocence seethed in her mother’s milk, and Charity setting the martyr aflame;

Thraldom who walks with the banner of Freedom, and recks not to ruin a realm in her name.

VI.

Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools;

Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow’d up by her vassal legion of fools;

VII.

Trade flying over a thousand seas with her spice and her vintage, her silk and her corn;

Desolate offing, sailorless harbours, famishing populace, wharves forlorn;

VIII.

Star of the morning, Hope in the sunrise; gloom of the evening, Life at a close;

Pleasure who flaunts on her wide downway with her flying robe and her poison’d rose;

IX.

Pain, that has crawl’d from the corpse of Pleasure, a worm which writhes all day, and at night

Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back to the curse of the light;

X.

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone;

Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty; Flattery gilding the rift in a throne;

XI.

Fame blowing out from her golden trumpet a jubilant challenge to Time and to Fate;

Slander, her shadow, sowing the nettle on all the laurel’d graves of the Great;

XII.

Love for the maiden, crown’d with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been,

Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean;

XIII.

National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire;

Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapt in a moment of fire;

XIV.

He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind;

He that has nail’d all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind;

XV.

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth;

All new-old revolutions of Empire — change of the tide — what is all of it worth?

XVI.

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?

XVII.

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

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

XVIII.

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment’s anger of bees in their hive? —

.     .     .     .     .

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

The Ring

MIRIAM AND HER FATHER.

Miriam (singing).

MELLOW moon of heaven.

Bright in blue,

Moon of married hearts,

Hear me, you!

Twelve times in the year

Bring me bliss,

Globing Honey Moons

Bright as this.

Moon, you fade at times

From the night.

Young again you grow

Out of sight.

Silver crescent-curve,

Coining soon,

Globe again, and make

Honey Moon.

Shall not my love last,

Moon, with you,

For ten thousand years

Old and new?

Father. And who was he with such love-drunken eyes

They made a thousand honey moons of one?

Miriam. The prophet of his own, my Hubert — his

The words, and mine the setting. ‘Air and Words,’

Said Hubert, when I sang the song, ‘are bride

And bridegroom.’ Does it please you?

Father.                    Mainly, child,

Because I hear your Mother’s voice in yours.

She —— , why, you shiver tho’ the wind is west

With all the warmth of summer.

Miriam.                        Well, I felt

On a sudden I know not what, a breath that past

With all the cold of winter.

Father (muttering to himself). Even so.

The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man,

But cannot wholly free itself from Man,

Are calling to each other thro’ a dawn

Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil

Is rending, and the Voices of the day

Are heard across the Voices of the dark.

No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man,

But thro’ the Will of One who knows and rules —

And utter knowledge is but utter love — ,

Æonian Evolution, swift or slow,

Thro’ all the Spheres — an ever opening height,

An ever lessening earth — and she perhaps,

My Miriam, breaks her latest earthly link

With me to-day.

Miriam. You speak so low, what is it?

Your ‘Miriam breaks’ — is making a new link

Breaking an old one?

Father.            No, for we, my child,

Have been till now each other’s all-in-all.

Miriam. And you the lifelong guardian of the child.

Father. I, and one other whom you have not known.

Miriam.    And who? what other?

Father.        Whither are you bound?

For Naples which we only left in May?

Miriam. No! father, Spain, but Hubert brings me home

With April and the swallow. Wish me joy!

Father. What need to wish when Hubert weds in you

The heart of Love, and you the soul of Truth

In Hubert?

Miriam. Tho’ you used to call me once

The lonely maiden-Princess of the wool,

Who meant to sleep her hundred summers out

Before a kiss should wake her.

Father.                        Ay, but now

Your fairy Prince has found you, take this ring.

Miriam. ‘Io t’amo’ — and these diamonds — beautiful!

‘From Walter,’ and for me from you then?

Father.                                Well,

One Way for Miriam.

Miriam.                    Miriam am I not?

Father. This ring bequeath’d you by your mother, child,

Was to be given you — such her dying wish —

Given on the morning when you came of age

Or on the day you married. Both the days

Now close in one. The ring is doubly yours.

Why do you look so gravely at the tower?

Miriam. I never saw it yet so all ablaze

With creepers crimsoning to the pinnacles,

As if perpetual sunset linger’d there,

And all ablaze too in the lake below!

And how the birds that circle round the tower

Are cheeping to each other of their flight

To summer lands!

Father. And that has made you grave?

Fly — care not. Birds and brides must leave the nest.

Child, I am happier in your happiness

Than in mine own.

Miriam.            It is not that!

Father.                    What else?

Miriam. That chamber in the tower.

Father.        What chamber, child?

Your nurse is here?

Miriam. My Mother’s nurse and mine.

She comes to dress me in my bridal veil.

Father. What did she say?

Miriam.        She said, that you and I

Had been abroad for my poor health so long

She fear’d I had forgotten her, and I ask’d

About my Mother, and she said, ‘Thy hair

Is golden like thy Mother’s, not so fine.’

Father. What then? what more?

Miriam.    She said — perhaps indeed

She wander’d, having wander’d now so far

Beyond the common date of death — that you,

When I was smaller than the statuette

Of my dear Mother on your bracket here —

You took me to that chamber in the tower,

The topmost — a chest there, by which you knelt —

And there were books and dresses — left to me,

A ring too which you kiss’d, and I, she said,

I babbled, Mother, Mother — as I used

To prattle to her picture — stretcht’d my hands

As if I saw her; then a woman came

And caught me from my nurse. I hear her yet —

A sound of anger like a distant storm.

Father. Garrulous old crone.

Miriam.                        Poor nurse!

Father.                    I bad her keep,

Like a seal’d book, all mention of the ring,

For I myself would tell you all to-day.

Miriam. ‘She too might speak to-day,’ she mumbled. Still,

I scarce have learnt the title of your book,

But you will turn the pages.

Father.                    Ay, to-day!

I brought you to that chamber on your third

September birthday with your nurse, and felt

An icy breath play on me, while I stoopt

To take and kiss the ring.

Miriam.                        This very ring

Io t’amo?

Father.        Yes, for some wild hope was mine

That, in the misery of my married life,

Miriam your Mother might appear to me.

She came to you, not me. The storm, you hear

Far-off, is Muriel — your stepmother’s voice.

Miriam. Vext, that you thought my Mother came to me?

Or at my crying ‘Mother?’ or to find

My Mother’s diamonds hidden from her there,

Like worldly beauties in the Cell, not shown

To dazzle all that see them?

Father.                    Wait a while.

Your Mother and step-mother — Miriam Erne

And Muriel Erne — the two were cousins — lived

With Muriel’s mother on the down, that sees

A thousand squares of corn and meadow, far

As the gray deep, a landscape which your eyes

Have many a time ranged over when a babe.

Miriam. I climb’d the hill with Hubert yesterday,

And from the thousand squares, one silent voice

Came on the wind, and seem’d to say ‘Again.’

We saw far off an old forsaken house,

Then home, and past the ruin’d mill.

Father.                        And there

I found these cousins often by the brook,

For Miriam sketch’d and Muriel threw the fly;

The girls of equal age, but one was fair,

And one was dark, and both were beautiful.

No voice for either spoke within my heart

Then, for the surface eye, that only doats

On outward beauty, glancing from the one

To the other, knew not that which pleased it most,

The raven ringlet or the gold; but both

Were dowerless, and myself, I used to walk

This Terrace — morbid, melancholy; mine

And yet not mine the hall, the farm, the field;

For all that ample woodland whisper’d ‘debt,’

The brook that feeds this lakelet murmur’d ‘debt,’

And in yon arching avenue of old elms,

Tho’ mine, not mine, I heard the sober rook

And carrion crow cry ‘ Mortgage.’

Miriam.                    Father’s fault

Visited on the children!

Father.                Ay, but then

A kinsman, dying, stummon’d me to Rome —

He left me wealth — and while I journey’d hence,

And saw the world fly by me like a dream,

And while I communed with my truest self,

I woke to all of truest in myself,

Till, in the gleam of those mid-summer dawns,

The form of Muriel faded, and the face

Of Miriam grew upon me, till I knew;

And past and future mix’d in Heaven and made

The rosy twilight of a perfect day.

Miriam. So glad? no tear for him, who left you wealth,

Your kinsman?

Father. I had seen the man but once;

He loved my name not me; and then I pass’d

Home, and thro’ Venice, where a jeweller,

So far gone down, or so far up in life,

That he was nearing his own hundred, sold

This ring to me, then laugh’d ‘the ring is weird.’

And weird and worn and wizard-like was he.

‘Why weird?’ I ask’d him; and he said ‘The souls

Of two repentant Lovers guard the ring;’

Then with a ribald twinkle in his bleak eyes —

‘And if you give the ring to any maid,

They still remember what it cost them here,

And bind the maid to love you by the ring;

And if the ring were stolen from the maid,

The theft were death or madness to the thief,

So sacred those Ghost Lovers hold the gift.’

And then he told their legend:

‘Long ago

Two lovers parted by a scurrilous tale

Had quarrell’d, till the man repenting sent

This ring “Io t’amo” to his best beloved,

And sent it on her birthday. She in wrath

Return’d it on her birthday, and that day

His death-day, when, half-frenzied by the ring,

He wildly fought a rival suitor, him

The causer of that scandal, fought and fell;

And she that came to part them all too late,

And found a corpse and silence, drew the ring

From his dead finger, wore it till her death,

Shrined him within the temple of her heart,

Made every moment of her after life

A virgin victim to his memory,

And dying rose, and rear’d her arms, and cried

“I see him, Io t’amo, Io t’amo.”’

Miriam. Legend or true? So tender should be true!

Did he believe it? did you ask him?

Father.                                Ay!

But that half skeleton, like a barren ghost

From out the fleshless world of spirits, laugh’d:

A hollow laughter!

Miriam.        Vile, so near the ghost

Himself, to laugh at love in death! But you?

Father. Well, as the bygone lover thro’ this ring

Had sent his cry for her forgiveness, I

Would call thro’ this ‘Io t’amo’ to the heart

Of Miriam; then I bad the man en grave

‘From Walter’ on the ring, and send it — wrote

name, surname, all as clear as noon, but he —

Some younger hand must have engraven the ring —

His fingers were so stiffen’d by the frost

Of seven and ninety winters, that he scrawl’d

A ‘Miriam’ that might seem a ‘ Muriel’;

And Muriel claim’d and open’d what I meant

For Miriam, took the ring, and flaunted it

Before that other whom I loved and love.

A mountain stay’d me here, a minster there,

A galleried palace, or a battlefield,

Where stood the sheaf of Peace: but — coming home —

And on your Mother’s birthday — all but yours ——

A week betwixt — and when the tower as now

Was all ablaze with crimson to the roof,

And all ablaze too plunging in the lake

Head-foremost — who were those that stood between

The tower and that rich phantom of the tower?

Muriel and Miriam, each in white, and like

May-blossoms in mid autumn — was it they?

A light shot upward on them from the lake.

What sparkled there? whose hand was that? they stood

So close together. I am not keen of sight,

But coming nearer — Muriel had the ring —

‘O Miriam! have you given your ring to her?

O Miriam!’ Miriam redden’d, Muriel clench’d

The hand that wore it, till I cried again:

‘O Miriam, if you love me take the ring!’

She glanced at me, at Muriel, and was mute.

‘Nay, if you cannot love me, let it be.

Then — Muriel standing ever statue-like —

She turn’d, and in her soft imperial way

And saying gently: ‘Muriel, by your leave,’

Unclosed the hand, and from it drew the ring,

And gave it me, who pass’d it down her own,

‘Io t’amo, all is well then.’ Muriel fled.

Miriam. Poor Muriel!

Father. Ay, poor Muriel when you hear

What follows! Miriam loved me from the first,

Not thro’ the ring; but on her marriage morn

This birthday, death-day, and betrothal ring,

Laid on her table overnight, was gone;

And after hours of search and doubt and threats,

And hubbub, Muriel enter’d with it, ‘See! —

Found in a chink of that old moulder’d floor!’

My Miriam nodded with a pitying smile,

As who should say ‘that those who lose can find.’

Then I and she were married for a year,

One year without a storm, or even a cloud;

And you my Miriam born within the year;

And she my Miriam dead within the year.

I sat beside her dying, and she gaspt:

‘The books, the miniature, the lace are hers,

My ring too when she comes of age, or when

She marries; you — you loved me, kept your word.

You love me still “Io t’amo.” — Muriel — no —

She cannot love; she loves her own hard self,

Her firm will, her fix’d purpose. Promise me,

Miriam not Muriel — she shall have the ring.’

And there the light of other life, which lives

Beyond our burial and our buried eyes,

Gleam’d for a moment in her own on earth.

I swore the vow, then with my latest kiss

Upon them, closed her eyes, which would not close,

But kept their watch upon the ring and you.

Your birthday was her death-day.

Miriam.                O poor Mother!

And you, poor desolate Father, and poor me,

The little senseless, worthless, wordless babe,

Saved when your life was wreck’d!

Father.                    Desolate? yes!

Desolate as that sailor, whom the storm

Had parted from his comrade in the boat,

And dash’d half dead on barren sands, was I.

Nay, you were my one solace; only — you

Were always ailing. Muriel’s mother sent,

And sure am I, by Muriel, one day came

And saw you, shook her head, and patted yours,

And smiled, and making with a kindly pinch

Each poor pale cheek a momentary rose —

‘That should be fix’d,’ she said; ‘your pretty bud,

So blighted here, would flower into full health

Among our heath and bracken. Let her come!

And we will feed her with our mountain air.

And send her home to you rejoicing.’ No —

We could not part. And once, when you my girl

Rode on my shoulder home — the tiny fist

Had graspt a daisy from your Mother’s grave —

By the lych-gate was Muriel. ‘Ay,’ she said,

‘Among the tombs in this damp vale of yours!

You scorn my Mother’s warning, but the child

Is paler than before. We often walk

In open sun, and see beneath our feet

The mist of autumn gather from your lake,

And shroud the tower; and once we only saw

Your gilded vane, a light above the mist’ —

(Our old bright bird that still is veering there

Above his four gold letters) ‘and the light,’

She said, ‘was like that light’ — and there she paused,

And long; till I believing that the girl’s

Lean fancy, groping for it, could not find

One likeness, laugh’d a little and found her two —

‘A warrior’s crest above the cloud of war’ —

‘A fiery phoenix rising from the smoke,

The pyre he burnt in.’—’Nay,’ she said, ‘the light

That glimmers on the marsh and on the grave.’

And spoke no more, but turn’d and pass’d away.

Miriam, I am not surely one of those

Caught by the flower that closes on the fly,

But after ten slow weeks her fix’d intent,

In aiming at an all but hopeless mark

To strike it, struck; I took, I left you there;

I came, I went, was happier day by day;

For Muriel nursed you with a mother’s care;

Till on that clear and heather-scented height

The rounder cheek had brighten’d into bloom.

She always came to meet me carrying you,

And all her talk was of the babe she loved;

So, following her old pastime of the brook,

She threw the fly for me; but oftener left

That angling to the mother. ‘Muriel’s health

Had weaken’d, nursing little Miriam. Strange!

She used to shun the wailing babe, and doats

On this of yours.’ But when the matron saw

That hinted love was only wasted bait,

Not risen to, she was bolder. ‘Ever since

You sent the fatal ring’ — I told her ‘sent

To Miriam,’ ‘Doubtless — ay, but ever since

In all the world my dear one sees but you —

In your sweet babe she finds but you — she makes

Her heart a mirror that reflects but you.’

And then the tear fell, the voice broke. Her heart!

I gazed into the mirror, as a man

Who sees his face in water, and a stone,

That glances from the bottom of the pool,

Strike upward thro’ the shadow; yet at last,

Gratitude — loneliness — desire to keep

So skilled a nurse about you always — nay!

Some half remorseful kind of pity too —

‘Well! well, you know I married Muriel Erne.

‘I take thee Muriel for my wedded wife’ —

I had forgotten it was your birthday, child —

When all at once with some electric thrill

A cold air pass’d between us, and the hands

Fell from each other, and were join’d again.

No second cloudless honeymoon was mine.

For by and by she sicken’d of the farce,

She dropt the gracious mask of mother-hood,

She came no more to meet me, carrying you,

Nor ever cared to set you on her knee,

Nor ever let you gambol in her sight,

Nor ever cheer’d you with a kindly smile,

Nor ever ceased to clamour for the ring;

Why had I sent the ring at first to her?

Why had I made her love me thro’ the ring,

And then had changed? so fickle are men — the best!

Not she — but now my love was hers again,

The ring by right, she said, was hers again.

At times too shrilling in her angrier moods,

‘That weak and watery nature love you? No!

“Io t’amo, Io t’amo”!’ flung herself

Against my heart, but often while her lips

Were warm upon my check, an icy breath,

As from the grating of a sepulchre,

Past over both. I told her of my vow,

No pliable idiot I to break my vow;

But still she made her outcry for the ring;

For one monotonous fancy madden’d her,

Till I myself was madden’d with her cry,

And even that ‘Io t’amo,’ those three sweet

Italian words, became a weariness.

My people too were scared with eerie sounds,

A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls,

A noise of falling weights that never fell,

Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand,

Door-handles turn’d when none was at the door,

And bolted doors that open’d of themselves:

And one betwixt the dark and light had seen

Her, bending by the cradle of her babe.

Miriam. And I remember once that being waked

By noises in the house — and no one near —

I cried for nurse, and felt a gentle hand

Fall on my forehead, and a sudden face

Look’d in upon me like a gleam and pass’d,

And I was quieted, and slept again.

Or is it some half memory of a dream?

Father. Your fifth September birth day.

Miriam.                    And the face,

The hand, — my Mother.

Father. Miriam, on that day

Two lovers parted by no scurrilous tale —

Mere want of gold — and still for twenty years

Bound by the golden cord of their first love —

Had ask’d us to their marriage, and to share

Their marriage-banquet. Muriel, paler then

Than ever you were in your cradle, moan’d,

‘I am fitter for my bed, or for my grave,

I cannot go, go you.’ And then she rose,

She clung to me with such a hard embrace,

So lingeringly long, that half-amazed

I parted from her, and I went alone.

And when the bridegroom murmur’d, ‘With this ring,’

I felt for what I could not find, the key,

The guardian of her relics, of her ring.

I kept it as a sacred amulet

About me, — gone! and gone in that embrace!

Then, hurrying home, I found her not in house

Or garden — up the tower — an icy air

Fled by me. — There, the chest was open — all

The sacred relics tost about the floor —

Among them Muriel lying on her face —

I raised her, call’d her ‘Muriel. Muriel wake!’

The fatal ring lay near her; the glazed eye

Glared at me as in horror. Dead! I took

And chafed the freezing hand. A red mark ran

All round one finger pointed straight, the rest

Were crumpled inwards. Dead! — and maybe stung

With some remorse, had stolen, worn the ring —

Then torn it from her finger, or as if —

For never had I seen her show remorse —

As if —

Miriam. — those two Ghost lovers —

Father.                        Lovers yet —

Miriam. Yes, yes!

Father. — but dead so long, gone up so far,

That now their ever-rising life has dwarf’d

Or lost the moment of their past on earth,

As we forget our wail at being born.

As if —

Miriam.        a dearer ghost had

Father.          — wrench’d it away.

Miriam. Had floated in with sad reproachful eyes,

Till from her own hand she had torn the ring

In fright, and fallen dead. And I myself

Am half afraid to wear it.

Father.                Well, no more!

No bridal music this! but fear not you!

You have the ring she guarded; that poor link

With earth is broken, and has left her free,

Except that, still drawn downward for an hour,

Her spirit hovering by the church, where she

Was married too, may linger, till she sees

Her maiden coming like a Queen, who leaves

Some colder province in the North to gain

Her capital city, where the loyal bells

Clash welcome — linger, till her own, the babe

She lean’d to from her Spiritual sphere,

Her lonely maiden-Princess, crown’d with flowers,

Has enter’d on the larger woman-world

Of wives and mothers.

But the bridal veil —

Your nurse is waiting. Kiss me child and go.

Forlorn

I.

‘HE is fled — I wish him dead —

He that wrought my ruin —

O the flattery and the craft

Which were my undoing . . .

In the night, in the night,

When the storms are blowing.

II.

Who was witness of the crime?

Who shall now reveal it?

He is fled, or he is dead,

Marriage will conceal it . . .

In the night, in the night,

While the gloom is growing.’

III.

Catherine, Catherine, in the night,

What is this you’re dreaming?

There is laughter down in Hell

At your simple scheming . . .

In the night, in the night,

When the ghosts are fleeting.

IV.

You to place a hand in his

Like an honest woman’s,

You that lie with wasted lungs

Waiting for your summons . . .

In the night, O the night!

O the deathwatch beating!

V.

There will come a witness soon

Hard to be confuted,

All the world will hear a voice

Scream you are polluted . . .

In the night! O the night,

When the owls are wailing!

VI.

Shame and marriage, Shame and marriage,

Fright and foul dissembling,

Bantering bridesman, reddening priest,

Tower and altar trembling . . .

In the night, O the night,

When the mind is failing!

VII.

Mother, dare you kill your child?

How your hand is shaking!

Daughter of the seed of Cain,

What is this you’re taking? . . .

In the night, O the night,

While the house is sleeping.

VIII.

Dreadful! has it come to this,

O unhappy creature?

You that would not tread on a worm

For your gentle nature . . .

In the night, O the night,

O the night of weeping!

IX.

Murder would not veil your sin,

Marriage will not hide it,

Earth and Hell will brand your name,

Wretch you must abide it . . .

In the night, O the night,

Long before the dawning.

X.

Up, get up, and tell him all,

Tell him you were lying!

Do not die with a lie in your mouth,

You that know you’re dying . . .

In the night, O the night,

While the grave is yawning.

XI.

No — you will not die before,

Tho’ you’ll ne’er be stronger;

You will live till that is born,

Then a little longer . . .

In the night, O the night,

While the Fiend is prowling.

XII.

Death and marriage, Death and marriage!

Funeral hearses rolling!

Black with bridal favours mixt!

Bridal bells with tolling! . . .

In the night, O the night,

When the wolves are howling.

XIII.

Up, get up, the time is short,

Tell him now or never!

Tell him all before you die,

Lest you die for ever . . .

In the night, O the night,

Where there’s no forgetting.

XIV.

Up she got, and wrote him all,

All her tale of sadness,

Blister’d every word with tears,

And eased her heart of madness . . .

In the night, and nigh the dawn,

And while the moon was setting.

Happy

The Leper’s Bride

I.

WHY wail you, pretty plover? and what is it that you fear?

Is he sick your mate like mine? have you lost him, is he fled?

And there — the heron rises from his watch beside the mere,

And flies above the leper’s hut, where lives the living-dead.

II.

Come back, nor let me know it! would he live and die alone?

And has he not forgiven me yet, his over-jealous bride,

Who am, and was, and will be his, his own and only own,

To share his living death with him, die with him side by side?

III.

Is that the leper’s hut on the solitary moor,

Where noble Ulric dwells forlorn, and wears the leper’s weed?

The door is open. He! is he standing at the door,

My soldier of the Cross? it is he and he indeed!

IV.

My roses — will he take them now — mine, his — from off the tree

We planted both together, happy in our marriage morn?

O God, I could blaspheme, for he fought Thy fight for Thee,

And Thou hast made him leper to compass him with scorn —

V.

Hast spared the flesh of thousands, the coward and the base,

And set a crueller mark than Cain’s on him, the good and brave!

He sees me, waves me from him. I will front him face to face.

You need not wave me from you. I would leap into your grave.

.     .     .     .     .

VI.

My warrior of the Holy Cross and of the conquering sword,

The roses that you cast aside — once more I bring you these.

No nearer? do you scorn me when you tell me, O my lord,

You would not mar the beauty of your bride with your disease.

VII.

You say your body is so foul — then here I stand apart,

Who yearn to lay my loving head upon your leprous breast.

The leper plague may scale my skin but never taint my heart;

Your body is not foul to me, and body is foul at best.

VIII.

I loved you first when young and fair, but now I love you most;

The fairest flesh at last is filth on which the worm will feast;

This poor rib-grated dungeon of the holy human ghost,

This house with all its hateful needs no cleaner than the beast,

IX.

This coarse diseaseful creature which in Eden was divine,

This Satan-haunted ruin, this little city of sewers,

This wall of solid flesh that comes between your soul and mine,

Will vanish and give place to the beauty that endures,

X.

The beauty that endures on the Spiritual height,

When we shall stand transfigured, like Christ on Hermon hill,

And moving each to music, soul in soul and light in light,

Shall flash thro’ one another in a moment as we will.

XI.

Foul! foul! the word was yours not mine, I worship that right hand

Which fell’d the foes before you as the woodman fells the wood,

And sway’d the sword that lighten’d back the sun of Holy land,

And clove the Moslem crescent moon, and changed it into blood.

XII.

And once I worshipt all too well this creature of decay,

For Age will chink the face, and Death will freeze the supplest limbs —

Yet you in your mid manhood — O the grief when yesterday

They bore the Cross before you to the chant of funeral hymns.

XIII.

‘Libera me, Domine!’ you sang the Psalm, and when

The Priest pronounced you dead, and flung the mould upon your feet,

A beauty came upon your face, not that of living men,

But seen upon the silent brow when life has ceased to beat.

XIV.

‘Libera nos, Domino’ — you knew not one was there

Who saw you kneel beside your bier, and weeping scarce could see;

May I come a little nearer, I that heard, and changed the prayer

And sang the married ‘nos’ for the solitary ‘me.’

XV.

My beauty marred by you? by you! so be it. All is well

If I lose it and myself in the higher beauty, yours.

My beauty lured that falcon from his eyry on the fell,

Who never caught one gleam of the beauty which endures —

XVI.

The Count who sought to snap the bond that link’d us life to life,

Who whisper’d me ‘your Ulric loves’ — a little nearer still —

He hiss’d, ‘Let us revenge ourselves, your Ulric woos my wife’ —

A lie by which he thought he could subdue me to his will.

XVII.

I knew that you were near me when I let him kiss my brow;

Did he touch me on the lips? I was jealous, anger’d, vain,

And I meant to make you jealous. Are you jealous of me now?

Your pardon, O my love, if I ever gave you pain.

XVIII.

You never once accused me, but I wept alone, and sigh’d

In the winter of the Present for the summer of the Past;

That icy winter silence — how it froze you from your bride,

Tho’ I made one barren effort to break it at the last.

XIX.

I brought you, you remember, these roses, when I knew

You were parting for the war, and you took them tho’ you frown’d;

You frown’d and yet you kiss’d them. All at once the trumpet blew,

And you spurr’d your fiery horse, and you hurl’d them to the ground.

XX.

You parted for the Holy War without a word to me,

And clear myself unask’d — not I. My nature was too proud.

And him I saw but once again, and far away was he,

When I was praying in a storm — the crash was long and loud —

XXI.

That God would ever slant His bolt from falling on your head —

Then I lifted up my eyes, he was coming down the fell —

I clapt my hands. The sudden fire from Heaven had dash’d him dead,

And sent him charr’d and blasted to the deathless fire of Hell.

XXII.

See, I sinn’d but for a moment. I repented and repent,

And trust myself forgiven by the God to whom I kneel.

A little nearer? Yes. I shall hardly be content

Till I be leper like yourself, my love, from head to heel.

XXIII.

O foolish dreams, that you, that I, would slight our marriage oath

I held you at that moment even dearer than before;

Now God has made you leper in His loving care for both,

That we might cling together, never doubt each other more.

XXIV.

The Priest, who join’d you to the dead, has join’d our hands of old;

If man and wife be but one flesh, let mine be leprous too,

As dead from all the human race as if beneath the mould;

If you be dead, then I am dead, who only live for you.

XXV.

Would Earth tho’ hid in cloud not be follow’d by the Moon?

The leech forsake the dying bed for terror of his life?

The shadow leave the Substance in the brooding light of noon?

Or if I had been the leper would you have left the wife?

XXVI.

Not take them? Still you wave me off — poor roses — must I go —

I have worn them year by year — from the bush we both had set —

What? fling them to you? — well — that were hardly gracious. No!

Your plague but passes by the touch. A little nearer yet!

XXVII.

There, there! he buried you, the Priest; the Priest is not to blame,

He joins us once again, to his either office true:

I thank him. I am happy, happy. Kiss me. In the name

Of the everlasting God, I will live and die with You.

To Ulysses 1

I.

ULYSSES, much-experienced man,

Whose eyes have known this globe of ours,

Her tribes of men, and trees, and flowers,

From Corrientes to Japan,

II.

To you that bask below the Line,

I soaking here in winter wet —

The century’s three strong eights have met

To drag me down to seventy-nine

III.

In summer if I reach my day —

To you, yet young, who breathe the balm

Of summer-winters by the palm

And orange grove of Paraguay,

IV.

I tolerant of the colder time,

Who love the winter woods, to trace

On paler heavens the branching grace

Of leafless elm, or naked lime,

V.

And see my cedar green, and there

My giant ilex keeping leaf

When frost is keen and days are brief —

Or marvel how in English air

VI.

My yucca, which no winter quells,

Altho’ the months have scarce begun,

Has push’d toward our faintest sun

A spike of half-accomplish’d bells —

VII.

Or watch the waving pine which here

The warrior of Caprera set,2

A name that earth will not forget

Till earth has roll’d her latest year —

VIII.

I, once half-crazed for larger light

On broader zones beyond the foam,

But chaining fancy now at home

Among the quarried downs of Wight,

IX.

Not less would yield full thanks to you

For your rich gift, your tale of lands

I know not,3 your Arabian sands;

Your cane, your palm, tree-fern, bamboo,

X.

The wealth of tropic bower and brake;

Your Oriental Eden-isles,4

Where man, nor only Nature smiles;

Your wonder of the boiling lake;5

XI.

Phra-Chai, the Shadow of the Best,6

Phra-bat7 the step; your Pontic coast;

Crag-cloister;8 Anatolian Ghost;9

Hong-Kong,10 Karnac,11 and all the rest.

XII.

Thro’ which I follow’d line by line

Your leading hand, and came, my friend,

To prize your various book, and send

A gift of slenderer value, mine.

To Mary Boyle

WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM

I.

SPRING-FLOWERS! While you still delay to take

Your leave of town,

Our elm-tree’s ruddy-hearted blossom-flake

Is fluttering down.

II.

Be truer to your promise. There! I heard

Our cuckoo call.

Be needle to the magnet of your word,

Nor wait, till all

III.

Our vernal bloom from every vale and plain

And garden pass,

And all the gold from each laburnum chain

Drop to the grass.

IV.

Is memory with your Marian gone to rest,

Dead with the dead?

For ere she left us, when we met, you prest

My hand, and said

V.

‘I come with your spring-flowers.’ You came not, my friend;

My birds would sing,

You heard not. Take then this spring-flower I send,

This song of spring,

VI.

Found yesterday — forgotten mine own rhyme

By mine old self,

As I shall be forgotten by old Time,

Laid on the shelf —

VII.

A rhyme that flower’d betwixt the whitening sloe

And kingcup blaze,

And more than half a hundred years ago,

In rick-fire days,

VIII.

When Dives loathed the times, and paced his land

In fear of worse,

And sanguine Lazarus felt a vacant hand

Fill with his purse.

IX.

For lowly minds were madden’d to the height

By tonguester tricks,

And once — I well remember that red night

When thirty ricks,

X.

All flaming, made an English homestead hell —

These hands of mine

Have helpt to pass a bucket from the well

Along the line,

XI.

When this bare dome had not begun to gleam

Thro’ youthful curls,

And you were then a lover’s fairy dream,

His girl of girls;

XII.

And you, that now are lonely, and with Grief

Sit face to face,

Might find a flickering glimmer of relief

In change of place.

XIII.

What use to brood? This life of mingled pains

And joys to me,

Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains

The Mystery.

XIV.

Let golden youth bewail the friend, the wife,

For ever gone.

He dreams of that long walk thro’ desert life

Without the one.

XV.

The silver year should cease to mourn and sigh —

Not long to wait —

So close are we, dear Mary, you and I

To that dim gate.

XVI.

Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes

Or many or few,

He rests content, if his young music wakes

A wish in you

XVII.

To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm

Of sound and smoke,

For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm

And whispering oak.

The Progress of Spring

I.

THE GROUNDFLAME of the crocus breaks the mould,

Fair Spring slides hither o’er the Southern sea,

Wavers on her thin stem the snowdrop cold

That trembles not to kisses of the bee:

Come Spring, for now from all the dripping eaves

The spear of ice has wept itself away.

And hour by hour unfolding woodbine leaves

O’er his uncertain shadow droops the day.

She comes! The loosen’d rivulets run;

The frost-bead melts upon her golden hair;

Her mantle, slowly greening in the Sun,

Now wraps her close, now arching leaves her bare

To breaths of balmier air;

II.

Up leaps the lark, gone wild to welcome her.

About her glance the tits, and shriek the jays,

Before her skims the jubilant woodpecker,

The linnet’s bosom blushes at her gaze,

While round her brows a woodland culver flits,

Watching her large light eyes and gracious looks,

And in her open palm a halcyon sits

Patient — the secret splendor of the brooks.

Come Spring! She comes on waste and wood,

On farm and field: but enter also here,

Diffuse thyself at will thro’ all my blood,

And, tho’ thy violet sicken into sere,

Lodge with me all the year!

III.

Once more a downy drift against the brakes,

Self-darken’d in the sky, descending slow!

But gladly see I thro’ the wavering flakes

Yon blanching apricot like snow in snow.

These will thine eyes not brook in forest-paths,

On their perpetual pine, nor round the beech;

They fuse themselves to little spicy baths,

Solved in the tender blushes of the peach;

They lose themselves and die

On that new life that gems the hawthorn line;

Thy gay lent-lillies wave and put them by,

And out once more in varnish’d glory shine

Thy stars of celandine.

IV.

She floats across the hamlet. Heaven lours,

But in the tearful splendor of her smiles

I see the slowly-thickening chestnut towers

Fill out the spaces by the barren tiles.

Now past her feet the swallow circling flies,

A clamorous cuckoo stoops to meet her hand;

Her light makes rainbows in my closing eyes,

I hear a charm of song thro’ all the land.

Come, Spring! She comes, and Earth is glad

To roll her North below thy deepening dome,

But ere thy maiden birk be wholly clad,

And these low bushes dip their twigs in foam,

Make all true hearths thy home.

V.

Across my garden! and the thicket stirs,

The fountain pulses high in sunnier jets,

The blackcap warbles, and the turtle purrs,

The starling claps his tiny castanets.

Still round her forehead wheels the woodland dove,

And scatters on her throat the sparks of dew,

The kingcup fills her footprint, and above

Broaden the glowing isles of vernal blue.

Hail, ample presence of a Queen,

Bountiful, beautiful, apparell’d gay,

Whose mantle, every shade of glancing green,

Flies back in fragrant breezes to display

A tunic white as May!

VI.

She whispers, ‘From the South I bring you balm,

For on a tropic mountain was I born,

While some dark dweller by the coco-palm

Watch’d my far meadow zoned with airy morn;

From under rose a muffled moan of floods;

I sat beneath a solitude of snow;

There no one came, the turf was fresh, the woods

Plunged gulf on gulf thro’ all their vales below.

I saw beyond their silent tops

The steaming marshes of the scarlet cranes,

The slant seas leaning on the mangrove copse,

And summer basking in the sultry plains

About a land of canes.

VII.

‘Then from my vapor-girdle soaring forth

I scaled the buoyant highway of the birds,

And drank the dews and drizzle of the North,

That I might mix with men, and hear their words

On pathway’d plains; for — while my hand exults

Within the bloodless heart of lowly flowers

To work old laws of Love to fresh results,

Thro’ manifold effect of simple powers —

I too would teach the man

Beyond the darker hour to see the bright,

That his fresh life may close as it began,

The still-fulfilling promise of a light

Narrowing the bounds of night.’

VIII.

So wed thee with my soul, that I may mark

The coming year’s great good and varied ills,

And new developments, whatever spark

Be struck from out the clash of warring wills;

Or whether, since our nature cannot rest,

The smoke of war’s volcano burst again

From hoary deeps that belt the changeful West,

Old Empires, dwellings of the kings of men;

Or should those fail that hold the helm,

While the long day of knowledge grows and warms,

And in the heart of this most ancient realm

A hateful voice be utter’d, and alarms

Sounding ‘To arms! to arms!’

IX.

A simpler, saner lesson might he learn

Who reads thy gradual process, Holy Spring.

Thy leaves possess the season in their turn,

And in their time thy warblers rise on wing.

How surely glidest thou from March to May,

And changest, breathing it, the sullen wind,

Thy scope of operation, day by day,

Larger and fuller, like the human mind!

Thy warmths from bud to bud

Accomplish that blind model in the seed,

And men have hopes, which race the restless blood,

That after many changes may succeed

Life which is Life indeed.

Merlin and The Gleam

I.

O YOUNG Mariner,

You from the haven

Under the sea-cliff,

You that are watching

The gray Magician

With eyes of wonder,

I am Merlin,

And I am dying,

I am Merlin

Who follow The Gleam.

II.

Mighty the Wizard

Who found me at sunrise

Sleeping, and woke me

And learn’d me Magic!

Great the Master,

And sweet the Magic,

When over the valley,

In early summers,

Over the mountain,

On human faces,

And all around me,

Moving to melody,

Floated The Gleam.

III.

Once at the croak of a Raven who crost it,

A barbarous people,

Blind to the magic,

And deaf to the melody,

Snarl’d at and cursed me.

A demon vext me,

The light retreated,

The landskip darken’d,

The melody deaden’d,

The Master whisper’d

‘Follow The Gleam.’

IV.

Then to the melody,

Over a wilderness

Gliding, and glancing at

Elf of the woodland,

Gnome of the cavern,

Griffin and Giant,

And dancing of Fairies

In desolate hollows,

And wraiths of the mountain,

And rolling of dragons

By warble of water,

Or cataract music

Of falling torrents,

Flitted The Gleam.

V.

Down from the mountain

And over the level,

And streaming and shining on

Silent river,

Silvery willow,

Pasture and plowland,

Horses and oxen,

Innocent maidens,

Garrulous children,

Homestead and harvest,

Reaper and gleaner,

And rough-ruddy faces

Of lowly labour,

Slided The Gleam. —

VI.

Then, with a melody

Stronger and statelier,

Led me at length

To the city and palace

Of Arthur the king;

Touch’d at the golden

Cross of the churches,

Flash’d on the Tournament,

Flicker’d and bicker’d

From helmet to helmet,

And last on the forehead

Of Arthur the blameless

Rested The Gleam.

VII.

Clouds and darkness

Closed upon Camelot;

Arthur had vanish’d

I knew not whither,

The king who loved me,

And cannot die;

For out of the darkness

Silent and slowly

The Gleam, that had waned to a wintry glimmer

On icy fallow

And faded forest,

Drew to the valley

Named of the shadow,

And slowly brightening

Out of the glimmer,

And slowly moving again to a melody

Yearningly tender,

Fell on the shadow,

No longer a shadow,

But clothed with The Gleam.

VIII.

And broader and brighter

The Gleam flying onward,

Wed to the melody,

Sang thro’ the world;

And slower and fainter,

Old and weary,

But eager to follow,

I saw, whenever

In passing it glanced upon

Hamlet or city,

That under the Crosses

The dead man’s garden,

The mortal hillock,

Would break into blossom;

And so to the land’s

Last limit I came ——

And can no longer,

But die rejoicing,

For thro’ the Magic

Of Him the Mighty,

Who taught me in childhood,

There on the border

Of boundless Ocean,

And all but in Heaven

Hovers The Gleam.

IX.

Not of the sunlight,

Not of the moonlight,

Not of the starlight!

O young Mariner,

Down to the haven,

Call your companions,

Launch your vessel,

And crowd your canvas,

And, ere it vanishes

Over the margin,

After it, follow it,

Follow The Gleam.

Romney’s Remorse

‘I read Hayley’s Life of Romney the other day — Romney wanted but education and reading to make him a very fine painter; but his ideal was not high nor fixed. How touching is the close of his life! He married at nineteen, and because Sir Joshua and others had said that “marriage spoilt an artist” almost immediately left his wife in the North and scarce saw her till the end of his life; when old, nearly mad and quite desolate, he went back to her and she received him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney’s pictures! even as a matter of Art, I am sure.’ (Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. i.)

‘BEAT, little heart — I give you this and this’

Who are you? What! the Lady Hamilton?

Good, I am never weary painting you.

To sit once more? Cassandra, Hebe, Joan,

Or spinning at your wheel beside the vine —

Bacchante, what you will; and if I fail

To conjure and concentrate into form

And colour all you are, the fault is less

In me than Art. What Artist ever yet

Could make pure light live on the canvas? Art!

Why should I so disrelish that short word?

Where am I? snow on all the hills! so hot,

So fever’d! never colt would more delight

To roll himself in meadow grass than I

To wallow in that winter of the hills.

Nurse, were you hired? or came of your own will

To wait on one so broken, so forlorn?

Have I not met you somewhere long ago?

I am all but sure I have — in Kendal church —

O yes! I hired you for a season there,

And then we parted; but you look so kind

That you will not deny my sultry throat

One draught of icy water. There — you spill

The drops upon my forehead. Your hand shakes.

I am ashamed. I am a trouble to you,

Could kneel for your forgiveness. Are they tears?

For me — they do me too much grace — for me?

O Mary, Mary!

Vexing you with words!

Words only, born of fever, or the fumes

Of that dark opiate dose you gave me, — words,

Wild babble. I have stumbled back again

Into the common clay, the sounder self.

God stay me there, if only for your sake,

The truest, kindliest, noblest-hearted wife

That ever wore a Christian marriage-ring.

My curse upon the Master’s apothegm,

That wife and children drag an Artist down!

This seem’d my lodestar in the Heaven of Art,

And lured me from the household fire on earth.

To you my days have been a life-long lie,

Grafted on half a truth; and tho’ you say

‘Take comfort you have won the Painter’s fame,’

The best in me that sees the worst in me,

And groans to see it, finds no comfort there.

What fame? I am not Raphaël, Titian — no

Nor even a Sir Joshua, some will cry.

Wrong there! The painter’s fame? but mine, that grew

Blown into glittering by the popular breath,

May float awhile beneath the sun, may roll

The rainbow hues of heaven about it —

There!

The colour’d bubble bursts above the abyss

Of Darkness, utter Lethe.

Is it so?

Her sad eyes plead for my own fame with me

To make it dearer.

Look, the sun has risen

To flame along another dreary day.

Your hand. How bright you keep your marriage-ring!

Raise me. I thank you.

Has your opiate then

Bred this black mood? or am I conscious, more

Than other Masters, of the chasm between

Work and Ideal? Or does the gloom of Age

And suffering cloud the height I stand upon

Even from myself? stand? stood . . . no more.

And yet

The world would lose, if such a wife as you

Should vanish unrecorded. Might I crave

One favour? I am bankrupt of all claim

On your obedience, and my strongest wish

Falls flat before your least unwillingness.

Still would you — if it please you — sit to me?

I dream’d last night of that clear summer noon,

When seated on a rock, and foot to foot

With your own shadow in the placid lake,

You claspt our infant daughter, heart to heart.

I had been among the hills, and brought you down

A length of staghorn-moss, and this you twined

About her cap. I see the picture yet,

Mother and child. A sound from far away,

No louder than a bee among the flowers,

A fall of water lull’d the noon asleep.

You still’d it for the moment with a song

Which often echo’d in me, while I stood

Before the great Madonna-masterpieces

Of ancient Art in Paris, or in Rome.

Mary, my crayons! if I can, I will.

You should have been — I might have made you once,

Had I but known you as I know you now —

The true Alcestis of the time. Your song —

Sit, listen! I remember it, a proof

That I — even I — at times remember’d you.

‘Beat upon mine, little heart! beat, beat!

Beat upon mine! you are mine, my sweet!

All mine from your pretty blue eyes to your feet,

My sweet.’

Less profile! turn to me — three-quarter face.

‘Sleep, little blossom, my honey, my bliss!

For I give you this, and I give you this

And I blind your pretty blue eyes with a kiss!

Sleep!’

Too early blinded by the kiss of death —

‘Father and Mother will watch you grow’ —

You watch’d not I, she did not grow, she died.

‘Father and Mother will watch you grow,

And gather the roses whenever they blow,

And find the white heather wherever you go,

My sweet.’

Ah, my white heather only blooms in heaven

With Milton’s amaranth. There, there, there! a child

Had shamed me at it — Down, you idle tools,

Stampt into dust — tremulous, all awry,

Blurr’d like a landskip in a ruffled pool, —

Not one stroke firm. This Art, that harlot-like

Seduced me from you, leaves me harlot-like,

Who love her still, and whimper, impotent

To win her back before I die — and then —

Then, in the loud world’s bastard judgment-day,

One truth will damn me with the mindless mob,

Who feel no touch of my temptation, more

Than all the myriad lies, that blacken round

The corpse of every man that gains a name;

‘This model husband, this fine Artist’! Fool,

What matters? Six foot deep of burial mould

Will dull their comments! Ay, but when the shout

Of His descending peals from Heaven, and throbs

Thro’ earth, and all her graves, if He should ask

‘Why left you wife and children? for my sake,

According to my word?’ and I replied

‘Nay, Lord, for Art,’ why, that would sound so mean

That all the dead, who wait the doom of Hell

For bolder sins than mine, adulteries,

Wife-murders, — nay, the ruthless Mussulman

Who flings his bowstrung Harem in the sea,

Would turn, and glare at me, and point and jeer,

And gibber at the worm, who, living, made

The wife of wives a widow-bride, and lost

Salvation for a sketch.

I am wild again!

The coals of fire you heap upon my head

Have crazed me. Someone knocking there without?

No! Will my Indian brother come? to find

Me or my coffin? Should I know the man?

This worn-out Reason dying in her house

May leave the windows blinded, and if so,

Bid him farewell for me, and tell him —

Hope!

I hear a death-bed Angel whisper ‘Hope.’

“The miserable have no medicine

But only Hope!” He said it . . . in the play.

His crime was of the senses; of the mind

Mine; worse, cold, calculated.

Tell my son —

O let me lean my head upon your breast.

‘Beat little heart’ on this foul brain of mine.

I once had friends — and many — none like you.

I love you more than when we married. Hope!

O yes, I hope, or fancy that, perhaps,

Human forgiveness touches heaven, and thence —

For you forgive me, you are sure of that —

Reflected, sends a light on the forgiven.

Parnassus

Exegi monumentum . . .

Quod non . . .

Possit diruere . . .

. . . innumerabilis

Annorum series et fuga temporum. — HORACE.

I.

WHAT BE those crown’d forms high over the sacred fountain?

Bards, that the mighty Muses have raised to the heights of the mountain,

And over the flight of the Ages! O Goddesses, help me up thither!

Lightning may shrivel the laurel of Cæsar, but mine would not wither.

Steep is the mountain, but you, you will help me to overcome it,

And stand with my head in the zenith, and roll my voice from the summit,

Sounding for ever and ever thro’ Earth and her listening nations,

And mixt with the great sphere-music of stars and of constellations.

II.

What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain,

Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain?

On those two known peaks they stand ever spreading and heightening;

Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning!

Look, in their deep double shadow the crown’d ones all disappearing!

Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing!

‘Sounding for ever and ever?’ pass on! the sight confuses —

These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!

III.

If the lips were touch’d with fire from off a pure Pierian altar,

Tho’ their music here be mortal need the singer greatly care?

Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter;

Let the golden Iliad vanish, Homer here is Homer there.

By an Evolutionist

THE LORD let the house of a brute to the soul of a man,

And the man said, ‘Am I your debtor?’

And the Lord—’Not yet; but make it as clean as you can,

And then I will let you a better.’

I.

If my body come from brutes, my soul uncertain or a fable,

Why not bask amid the senses while the sun of morning shines,

I, the finer brute rejoicing in my hounds, and in my stable,

Youth and health, and birth and wealth, and choice of women and of wines?

II.

What hast thou done for me, grim Old Age, save breaking my bones on the rack?

Would I had past in the morning that looks so bright from afar!

OLD AGE

Done for thee? starved the wild beast that was linkt with thee eighty years back.

Less weight now for the ladder-of-heaven that hangs on a star.

I.

If my body come from brutes, tho’ somewhat finer than their own,

I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice be mute?

No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne,

Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy province of the brute.

II.

I have climb’d to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the Past.

Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire,

But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at last,

As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height that is higher.

Far — far — away

(FOR MUSIC)

WHAT SIGHT so lured him thro’ the fields he knew

As where earth’s green stole into heaven’s own hue,

Far — far — away?

What sound was dearest in his native dells?

The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells

Far — far — away.

What vague world-whisper, mystic pain or joy,

Thro’ those three words would haunt him when a boy,

Far — far — away?

A whisper from his dawn of life? a breath

From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death

Far — far — away?

Far, far, how far? from o’er the gates of Birth,

The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth,

Far — far — away?

What charm in words, a charm no words could give?

O dying words, can Music make you live

Far — far — away?

Politics

WE MOVE, the wheel must always move,

Nor always on the plain,

And if we move to such a goal

As Wisdom hopes to gain,

Then you that drive, and know your craft,

Will firmly hold the rein,

Nor lend an ear to random cries,

Or you may drive in vain;

For some cry ‘Quick’ and some cry ‘Slow,’

But, while the hills remain,

Up hill ‘Too-slow’ will need the whip,

Down hill ‘Too-quick’ the chain.

Beautiful City

BEAUTIFUL city, the centre and crater of European confusion,

O you with your passionate shriek for the rights of an equal humanity,

How often your Re-volution has proven but E-volution

Roll’d again back on itself in the tides of a civic insanity!

The Roses on the Terrace

ROSE, on this terrace fifty years ago,

When I was in my June, you in your May,

Two words, ‘My Rose,’ set all your face aglow,

And now that I am white and you are gray,

That blush of fifty years ago, my dear,

Blooms in the past, but close to me to-day,

As this red rose, which on our terrace here

Glows in the blue of fifty miles away.

The Play

ACT first, this Earth, a stage so gloom’d with woe

You all but sicken at the shifting scenes.

And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show

In some fifth Act what this wild Drama means.

On one who affected an Effeminate Manner

WHILE man and woman still are incomplete,

I prize that soul where man and woman meet,

Which types all Nature’s male and female plan,

But, friend, man-woman is not woman-man.

To one who ran down the English

YOU make our faults too gross, and thence maintain

Our darker future. May your fears be vain!

At times the small black fly upon the pane

May seem the black ox of the distant plain.

The Snowdrop

MANY, many welcomes,

February fair-maid,

Ever as of old time,

Solitary firstling,

Coming in the cold time,

Prophet of the gay time,

Prophet of the May time,

Prophet of the roses,

Many, many welcomes,

February fair-maid!

The Throstle

‘SUMMER is coming, summer is coming.

I know it, I know it, I know it.

Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,’

Yes, my wild little Poet.

Sing the new year in under the blue.

Last year you sang it as gladly.

‘New, new, new, new’! Is it then so new

That you should carol so madly?

‘Love again, song again, nest again, young again,’

Never a prophet so crazy!

And hardly a daisy as yet, little friend,

See, there is hardly a daisy.

‘Here again, here, here, here, happy year’!

O warble unchidden, unbidden!

Summer is coming, is coming, my dear,

And all the winters are hidden.

The Oak

LIVE thy Life,

Young and old,

Like yon oak,

Bright in spring,

Living gold;

Summer-rich

Then; and then

Autumn-changed,

Soberer-hued

Gold again.

All his leaves

Fallen at length,

Look, he stands,

Trunk and bough,

Naked strength.

In Memoriam. W. G. Ward

FAREWELL, whose like on earth I shall not find,

Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,

My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,

Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward,

How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,

How loyal in the following of thy Lord!

•

THE DEATH OF ŒNONE, AND OTHER POEMS

The last collection of poems to be published during Tennyson’s lifetime was published in 1892.  According to Greek mythology, Œnone was a mountain nymph on Mount Ida in Phrygia.  Her father was Cebren, a river-god, and her name suggests the gift of wine. Paris, son of the king Priam and the queen Hecuba, fell in love with Œnone when he was a shepherd on the slopes of Mount Ida, having been exposed in infancy, but rescued by the herdsman Agelaus. The couple married, and Œnone gave birth to a son, Corythus. When Paris later abandoned her to return to Troy and sail across the Aegean to capture Helen, Œnone predicted the Trojan War. Out of revenge for Paris’ betrayal, she sent Corythus to guide the Greeks to Troy. When mortally wounded by an arrow, Paris begged Œnone to heal him with her herbal arts, but she refused and cast him out with scorn, and so Paris died on the lower slopes of Ida. Overcome with remorse, Œnone threw herself on to his burning funeral pyre.

The only extensive surviving narration of Œnone and Paris is by Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthomerica, Book X.259-489, which tells of the return of wounded Paris to Œnone. Tennyson adapted Quintus’ classical treatment of the theme for The Death of Œnone, making full use of the myth’s tragic potential. This was Tennyson’s second attempt at a poem on the subject; his previous attempt Œnone was published much earlier in 1829 and was critically panned.

Œnone holding pan pipes – a detail from a sarcophagus with the Judgement of Paris, Rome

CONTENTS

June Bracken and Heather

To ——

To the Master of Balliol

The Death of Œnone

St. Telemachus

Akbar’s Dream

Notes to Akbar’s Dream

The Bandit’s Death

The Church-Warden and the Curate

Charity

Kapiolani

The Dawn

The Making of Man

Mechanophilus

Riflemen Form!

The Tourney

The Wanderer

Poets and Critics

A Voice Spake Out of the Skies

Doubt and Prayer

Faith

The Silent Voices

God and the Universe

The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale

To the Mourners.

The first edition of Tennyson’s last collection

June Bracken and Heather

To ——

THERE on the top of the down,

The wild heather round me and over me June’s high blue,

When I look’d at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown,

I thought to myself I would offer this book to you,

This, and my love together,

To you that are seventy-seven,

With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,

And a fancy as summer-new

As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather.

To the Master of Balliol

I.

DEAR MASTER in our classic town,

You, loved by all the younger gown

There at Balliol,

Lay your Plato for one minute down,

II.

And read a Grecian tale re-told,

Which, cast in later Grecian mould,

Quintus Calaber

Somewhat lazily handled of old;

III.

And on this white midwinter day —

For have the far-off hymns of May,

All her melodies,

All her harmonies echo’d away? —

IV.

To-day, before you turn again

To thoughts that lift the soul of men,

Hear my cataract’s

Downward thunder in hollow and glen,

V.

Till, led by dream and vague desire,

The woman, gliding toward the pyre,

Find her warrior

Stark and dark in his funeral fire.

The Death of Œnone

ŒNONE sat within the cave from out

Whose ivy-matted mouth she used to gaze

Down at the Troad; but the goodly view

Was now one blank, and all the serpent vines

Which on the touch of heavenly feet had risen,

And gliding thro’ the branches over-bower’d

The naked Three, were wither’d long ago,

And thro’ the sunless winter morning-mist

In silence wept upon the flowerless earth.

And while she stared at those dead cords that ran

Dark thro’ the mist, and linking tree to tree,

But once were gayer than a dawning sky

With many a pendent bell and fragrant star,

Her Past became her Present, and she saw

Him, climbing toward her with the golden fruit,

Him, happy to be chosen judge of Gods,

Her husband in the flush of youth and dawn,

Paris, himself as beauteous as a God.

Anon from out the long ravine below,

She heard a wailing cry, that seem’d at first

Thin as the bat like shrillings of the Dead

When driven to Hades, but, in coming near,

Across the downward thunder of the brook

Sounded ‘Œnone’; and on a sudden he,

Paris, no longer beauteous as a God,

Struck by a poison’d arrow in the fight,

Lame, crooked, reeling, livid, thro’ the mist

Rose, like the wraith of his dead self, and moan’d

‘Œnone, my Œnone, while we dwelt

Together in this valley — happy then —

Too happy had I died within thine arms,

Before the feud of Gods had marr’d our peace,

And sunder’d each from each. I am dying now

Pierced by a poison’d dart. Save me. Thou knowest,

Taught by some God, whatever herb or balm

May clear the blood from poison, and thy fame

Is blown thro’ all the Troad, and to thee

The shepherd brings his adder-bitten lamb,

The wounded warrior climbs from Troy to thee.

My life and death are in thy hand. The Gods

Avenge on stony hearts a fruitless prayer

For pity. Let me owe my life to thee.

I wrought thee bitter wrong, but thou forgive,

Forget it. Man is but the slave of Fate.

Œnone, by thy love which once was mine,

Help, heal me. I am poison’d to the heart.’

‘And I to mine’ she said ‘ Adulterer,

Go back to thine adulteress and die!’

He groan’d, he turn’d, and in the mist at once

Became a shadow, sank and disappear’d,

But, ere the mountain rolls into the plain,

Fell headlong dead; and of the shepherds one

Their oldest, and the same who first had found

Paris, a naked babe, among the woods

Of Ida, following lighted on him there,

And shouted, and the shepherds heard and came.

One raised the Prince, one sleek’d the squalid hair,

One kiss’d his hand, another closed his eyes,

And then, remembering the gay playmate rear’d

Among them, and forgetful of the man,

Whose crime had half unpeopled Ilion, these

All that day long labour’d, hewing the pines,

And built their shepherd-prince a funeral pile;

And, while the star of eve was drawing light

From the dead sun, kindled the pyre, and all

Stood round it, hush’d, or calling on his name.

But when the white fog vanish’d like a ghost

Before the day, and every topmost pine

Spired into bluest heaven, still in her cave,

Amazed, and ever seeming stared upon

By ghastlier than the Gorgon head, a face, —

His face deform’d by lurid blotch and blain —

There, like a creature frozen to the heart

Beyond all hope of warmth, Œnone sat

Not moving, till in front of that ravine

Which drowsed in gloom, self-darken’d from the west,

The sunset blazed along the wall of Troy.

Then her head sank, she slept, and thro’ her dream

A ghostly murmur floated, ‘Come to me,

Œnone! I can wrong thee now no more,

Œnone, my Œnone,’ and the dream

Wail’d in her, when she woke beneath the stars.

What star eould burn so low? not Ilion yet.

What light was there? She rose and slowly down,

By the long torrent’s ever-deepen’d roar,

Paced, following, as in trance, the silent cry.

She waked a bird of prey that scream’d and past

She roused a snake that hissing writhed away;

A panther sprang across her path, she heard

The shriek of some lost life among the pines,

But when she gain’d the broader vale, and saw

The ring of faces redden’d by the flames

Enfolding that dark body which had lain

Of old in her embrace, paused — and then ask’d

Falteringly, ‘Who lies on yonder pyre?’

But every man was mute for reverence.

Then moving quickly forward till the heat

Smote on her brow, she lifted up a voice

Of shrill command, ‘Who burns upon the pyre?’

Whereon their oldest and their boldest said,

‘He, whom thou wouldst not heal!’ and all at once

The morning light of happy marriage broke

Thro’ all the clouded years of widowhood,

And muffling up her comely head, and crying

‘Husband!’ she leapt upon the funeral pile,

And mixt herself with him and past in fire.

St. Telemachus

HAD the fierce ashes of some fiery peak

Been hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe?

For day by day, thro’ many a blood-red eve,

In that four-hundredth summer after Christ,

The wrathful sunset glared against a cross

Rear’d on the tumbled ruins of an old fane

No longer sacred to the Sun, and flamed

On one huge slope beyond, where in his cave

The man, whose pious hand had built the cross,

A man who never changed a word with men,

Fasted and pray’d, Telemachus the Saint.

Eve after eve that haggard anchorite

Would haunt the desolated fane, and there

Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low

‘Vicisti Galilæe’; louder again,

Spurning a shatter’d fragment of the God,

‘Vicisti Galilæe!’ but — when now

Bathed in that lurid crimson — ask’d ‘Is earth

On fire to the West? or is the Demon-god

Wroth at his fall?’ and heard an answer ‘Wake

Thou deedless dreamer, lazying out a life

Of self-suppression, not of selfless love.’

And once a flight of shadowy fighters crost

The disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wings

Came sweeping by him, and pointed to the West,

And at his ear he heard a whisper ‘Rome’

And in his heart he cried ‘ The call of God!’

And call’d arose, and, slowly plunging down

Thro’ that disastrous glory, set his face

By waste and field and town of alien tongue,

Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphere

Of westward-wheeling stars; and every dawn

Struck from him his own shadow on to Rome.

Foot-sore, way-worn, at length he touch’d his goal,

The Christian city. All her splendour fail’d

To lure those eyes that only yearn’d to see,

Fleeting betwixt her column’d palace-walls,

The shape with wings. Anon there past a crowd

With shameless laughter, Pagan oath, and jest,

Hard Romans brawling of their monstrous games;

He, all but deaf thro’ age and weariness,

And muttering to himself ‘The call of God’

And borne along by that full stream of men,

Like some old wreck on some indrawing sea,

Gain’d their huge Colosseum. The caged beast

Yell’d, as he yell’d of yore for Christian blood.

Three slaves were trailing a dead lion away,

One, a dead man. He stumbled in, and sat

Blinded; but when the momentary gloom,

Made by the noonday blaze without, had left

His aged eyes, he raised them, and beheld

A blood-red awning waver overhead,

The dust send up a steam of human blood,

The gladiators moving toward their fight,

And eighty thousand Christian faces watch

Man murder man. A sudden strength from heaven,

As some great shock may wake a palsied limb,

Turn’d him again to boy, for up he sprang,

And glided lightly down the stairs, and o’er

The barrier that divided beast from man

Slipt, and ran on, and flung himself between

The gladiatorial swords, and call’d ‘Forbear

In the great name of Him who died for men,

Christ Jesus!’ For one moment afterward

A silence follow’d as of death, and then

A hiss as from a wilderness of snakes,

Then one deep roar as of a breaking sea,

And then a shower of stones that stoned him dead,

And then once more a silence as of death.

His dream became a deed that woke the world,

For while the frantic rabble in half-amaze

Stared at him dead, thro’ all the nobler hearts

In that vast Oval ran a shudder of shame.

The Baths, the Forum gabbled of his death,

And preachers linger’d o’er his dying words,

Which would not die, but echo’d on to reach

Honorius, till he heard them, and decreed

That Rome no more should wallow in this old lust

Of Paganism, and make her festal hour

Dark with the blood of man who murder’d man.

Akbar’s Dream

AN INSCRIPTION BY ABUL FAZL FOR A TEMPLE IN KASHMIR (Blochmann xxxii.)

O GOD in every temple I see people that see thee,

and in every language I hear spoken, people praise thee.

Polytheism and Islám feel after thee.

Each religion says, ‘Thou art one, without equal.’

If it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer,

and if it be a Christian Church, people ring the bell from love to Thee.

Sometimes I frequent the Christian cloister,

and sometimes the mosque.

But it is thou whom I search from temple to temple.

Thy elect have no dealings with either heresy or orthodoxy;

for neither of them stands behind the screen of thy truth.

Heresy to the heretic, and religion to the orthodox,

But the dust of the rose-petal belongs to the heart of the perfume seller.

AKBAR and ABUL FAZL before the palace

at Futehpur-Sikri at night.

‘LIGHT of the nations’ ask’d his Chronicler

Of Akbar ‘what has darken’d thee to-night?’

Then, after one quick glance upon the stars,

And turning slowly toward him, Akbar said

‘The shadow of a dream — an idle one

It may be. Still I raised my heart to heaven,

I pray’d against the dream. To pray, to do —

To pray, to do according to the prayer,

Are, both, to worship Alla, but the prayers,

That have no successor in deed, are faint

And pale in Alla’s eyes, fair mothers they

Dying in childbirth of dead sons. I vow’d

Whate’er my dreams, I still would do the right

Thro’ all the vast dominion which a sword,

That only conquers men to conquer peace,

Has won me. AlIa be my guide!

But come,

My noble friend, my faithful counsellor,

Sit by my side. While thou art one with me,

I seem no longer like a lonely man

In the king’s garden, gathering here and there

From each fair plant the blossom choicest-grown

To wreathe a crown not only for the king

But in due time for every Mussulmân,

Brahmin, and Buddhist, Christian, and Parsee,

Thro’ all the warring world of Hindustan.

Well spake thy brother in his hymn to heaven

“Thy glory baffles wisdom. AIl the tracks

Of science making toward Thy Perfectness

Are blinding desert sand; we scarce can spell

The Alif of Thine Alphabet of Love.”

He knows Himself, men nor themselves nor Him,

For every splinter’d fraction of a sect

Will clamour “I am on the Perfect Way,

All else is to perdition.”

Shall the rose

Cry to the lotus “No flower thou”? the palm

Call to the cypress “I alone am fair”?

The mango spurn the melon at his foot?

“Mine is the one fruit Alla made for man.”

Look how the living pulse of Alla beats

Thro’ all His world. If every single star

Should shriek its claim “I only am in heaven”

Why that were such sphere-music as the Greek

Had hardly dream’d of. There is light in all,

And light, with more or less of shade, in all

Man-modes of worship; but our Ulama,

Who “sitting on green sofas contemplate

The torment of the damn’d” already, these

Are like wild brutes new-caged — the narrower

The cage, the more their fury. Me they front

With sullen brows. What wonder! I decreed

That even the dog was clean, that men may taste

Swine-flesh, drink wine; they know too that whene’er

In our free Hall, where each philosophy

And mood of faith may hold its own, they blurt

Their furious formalisms, I but hear

The clash of tides that meet in narrow seas, —

Not the Great Voice not the true Deep.

To drive

A people from their ancient fold of Faith,

And wall them up perforce in mine — unwise,

Unkinglike; — and the morning of my reign

Was redden’d by that cloud of shame when I . . .

I hate the rancour of their castes and creeds,

I let men worship as they will, I reap

No revenue from the field of unbelief.

I cull from every faith and race the best

And bravest soul for counsellor and friend.

I loathe the very name of infidel.

I stagger at the Korân and the sword.

I shudder at the Christian and the stake;

Yet “Alla,” says their sacred book, “is Love,”

And when the Goan Padre quoting Him,

Issa Ben Mariam, his own prophet, cried

“Love one another little ones” and “bless”

Whom? even “your persecutors”! there methought

The cloud was rifted by a purer gleam

Than glances from the sun of our Islâm.

And thou rememberest what a fury shook

Those pillars of a moulder’d faith, when he,

That other, prophet of their fall, proclaimed

His Master as “the Sun of Righteousness,”

Yea, Alla here on earth, who caught and held

His people by the bridle-rein of Truth.

What art thou saying? “And was not Alla call’d

In old Irân the Sun of Love? and Love

The net of truth?”

A voice from old Irân!

Nay, but I know it — his, the hoary Sheik,

On whom the women shrieking “Atheist” flung

Filth from the roof, the mystic melodist

Who all but lost himself in Alla, him

Abû Saîd —

— a sun but dimly seen

Here, till the mortal morning mists of earth

Fade in the noon of heaven, when creed and race

Shall bear false witness, each of each, no more,

But find their limits by that larger light,

And overstep them, moving easily

Thro’ after-ages in the love of Truth,

The truth of Love.

The sun, the sun! they rail

At me the Zoroastrian. Let the Sun,

Who heats our earth to yield us grain and fruit,

And laughs upon thy field as well as mine,

And warms the blood of Shiah and Sunnee,

Symbol the Eternal! Yea and may not kings

Express Him also by their warmth of love

For all they rule — by equal law for all?

By deeds a light to men?

But no such light

Glanced from our Presence on the face of one,

Who breaking in upon us yestermorn,

With all the Hells a-glare in either eye,

Yell’d “hast thou brought us down a new Korân

From heaven? art thou the Prophet? canst thou work

Miracles?” and the wild horse, anger, plunged

To fling me, and fail’d. Miracles! no, not I

Nor he, nor any. I can but lift the torch

Of Reason in the dusky cave of Life,

And gaze on this great miracle, the World,

Adoring That who made, and makes, and is,

And is not, what I gaze on — all else Form,

Ritual, varying with the tribes of men.

Ay but, my friend, thou knowest I hold that forms

Are needful: only let the hand that rules,

With politic care, with utter gentleness,

Mould them for all his people.

And what are forms?

Fair garments, plain or rich, and fitting close

Or flying looselier, warm’d but by the heart

Within them, moved but by the living limb,

And cast aside, when old, for newer, — Forms!

The Spiritual in Nature’s market-place —

The silent Alphabet-of-heaven-in-man

Made vocal — banners blazoning a Power

That is not seen and rules from far away —

A silken cord let down from Paradise,

When fine Philosophies would fail, to draw

The crowd from wallowing in the mire of earth,

And all the more, when these behold their Lord,

Who shaped the forms, obey them, and himself

Here on this bank in some way live the life

Beyond the bridge, and serve that Infinite

Within us, as without, that All-in-all,

And over all, the never-changing One

And ever-changing Many, in praise of Whom

The Christian bell, the cry from off the mosque,

And vaguer voices of Polytheism

Make but one music, harmonising, “Pray.”

There westward — under yon slow-falling star,

The Christians own a Spiritual Head;

And following thy true counsel, by thine aid,

Myself am such in our Islam, for no

Mirage of glory, but for power to fuse

My myriads into union under one;

To hunt the tiger of oppression out

From office; and to spread the Divine Faith

Like calming oil on all their stormy creeds,

And fill the hollows between wave and wave;

To nurse my children on the milk of Truth,

And alchemise old hates into the gold

Of Love, and make it current; and beat back

The menacing poison of intolerant priests,

Those cobras ever setting up their hoods —

One Alla! one Kalifa!

Still — at times

A doubt, a fear, — and yester afternoon

I dream’d, — thou knowest how deep a well of love

My heart is for my son, Saleem, mine heir, —

And yet so wild and wayward that my dream —

He glares askance at thee as one of those

Who mix the wines of heresy in the cup

Of counsel — so — I pray thee —

Well, I dream’d

That stone by stone I rear’d a sacred fane,

A temple, neither Pagod, Mosque, nor Church,

But loftier, simpler, always open-door’d

To every breath from heaven, and Truth and Peace

And Love and Justice came and dwelt therein;

But while we stood rejoicing, I and thou,

I heard a mocking laugh “the new Korân!”

And on the sudden, and with a cry “Saleem”

Thou, thou — I saw thee fall before me, and then

Me too the black-wing’d Azrael overcame,

But Death had ears and eyes; I watch’d my son,

And those that follow’d, loosen, stone from stone,

All my fair work; and from the ruin arose

The shriek and curse of trampled millions, even

As in the time before; but while I groan’d,

From out the sunset pour’d an alien race,

Who fitted stone to stone again, and Truth,

Peace, Love and Justice came and dwelt therein,

Nor in the field without were seen or heard

Fires of Súttee, nor wail of baby-wife,

Or Indian widow; and in sleep I said

“All praise to Alla by whatever hands

My mission be accomplish’d!” but we hear

Music: our palace is awake,and morn

Has lifted the dark eyelash of the Night

From off the rosy cheek of waking Day.

Our hymn to the sun. They sing it. Let us go.’

HYMN

I.

Once again thou flamest heavenward, once again we see thee rise.

Every morning is thy birthday gladdening human hearts and eyes.

Every morning here we greet it, bowing lowly down before thee,

Thee the God1ike, thee the changeless in thine ever-changing skies.

II.

Shadow-maker, shadow-slayer, arrowing light from clime to clime,

Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their woodland rhyme.

Warble bird, and open flower, and, men below the dome of azure

Kneel adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures Time!

Notes to Akbar’s Dream

THE GREAT Mogul Emperor Akbar was born October 14, 1542, and died 1605. At 13 he succeeded his father Humayun; at 18 he himself assumed the sole charge of government. He subdued and ruled over fifteen large provinces; his empire included all India north of the Vindhya Mountains — in the south of India he was not so successful. His tolerance of religions and his abhorrence of religious persecution put our Tudors to shame. He invented a new eclectic religion by which he hoped to unite all creeds, castes and peoples: and his legislation was remarkable for vigour, justice and humanity.

‘Thy glory baffles wisdom.’ The Emperor quotes from a hymn to the Deity by Faizi, brother of Abul Fazl, Akbar’s chief friend and minister, who wrote the Ain i Akbari (Annals of Akbar). His influence on his age was immense. It may be that he and his brother Faizi led Akbar’s mind away from Islam and the Prophet — this charge is brought against him by every Muhammadan writer; but Abul Fazl also led his sovereign to a true appreciation of his duties, and from the moment that he entered Court, the problem of successfully ruling over mixed races, which Islam in few other countries had to solve, was carefully considered, and the policy of toleration was the result (Blochmann xxix.)

Abul Fazl thus gives an account of himself. ‘The advice of my Father with difficulty kept me back from acts of folly; my mind had no rest and my heart felt itself drawn to the sages of Mongolia or to the hermits on Lebanon. I longed for interviews with the Llamas of Tibet or with the padres of Portugal, and I would gladly sit with the priests of the Parsis and the learned of the Zendavesta. I was sick of the learned of my own land.’

He became the intimate friend and adviser of Akbar, and helped him in his tolerant system of government. Professor Blochmann writes ‘Impressed with a favourable idea of the value of his Hindu subjects, he (Akbar) had resolved when pensively sitting in the evenings on the solitary stone at Futehpur-Sikri to rule with an even hand all men in his dominions; but as the extreme views of the learned and the lawyers continually urged him to persecute instead of to heal, he instituted discussions, because, believing himself to be in error, he thought it his duty as ruler to inquire.’ ‘These discussions took place every Thursday night in the Ibadat-khana a building at Futehpur-Sikri, erected for the purpose’ (Malleson).

In these discussions Abul Fazl became a great power, and he induced the chief of the disputants to draw up a document defining the ‘divine Faith’ as it was called, and assigning to Akbar the rank of a Mujahid, or supreme khalifah, the vicegerent of the one true God.

Abul Fazl was finally murdered at the instigation of Akbar’s son Salim, who in his Memoirs declares that it was Abul Fazl who had perverted his father’s mind so that he denied the divine mission of Mahomet, and turned away his love from his son.

Faizi. When Akbar conquered the North-West Provinces of India, Faizi, then 20, began his life as a poet, and earned his living as a physician. He is reported to have been very generous and to have treated the poor for nothing. His fame reached Akbar’s ears who commanded him to come to the camp at Chitor. Akbar was delighted with his varied knowledge and scholarship and made the poet teacher to his sons. Faizi at 33 was appointed Chief Poet (1588). He collected a fine library of 4300 MSS. and died at the age of 40 (1595) when Akbar incorporated his collection of rare books in the Imperial Library.

The Warring World of Hindostan. Akbar’s rapid conquests and the good government of his fifteen provinces with their complete military, civil and political systems make him conspicuous among the great kings of history.

The Goan Padre. Abul Fazl relates that ‘one night the Ibadat-khana was heightened by the presence of Padre Rodolpho, who for intelligence and wisdom was unrivalled among Christian doctors. Several carping and bigoted men attacked him and this afforded an opportunity for the display of the calm judgment and justice of the assembly. These men brought forward the old received assertions, and did not attempt to arrive at truth by reasoning. Their statements were torn to pieces, and they were nearly put to shame, when they began to attack the contradictions of the Gospel, but they could not prove their assertions. With perfect calmness, and earnest conviction of the truth, he replied to their arguments.’

Abû Sa’îd. ‘Love is the net of Truth, Love is the noose of God’ is a quotation from the great Sufee poet Abû Sa’îd — born A.D. 968, died at the age of 83. He is a mystical poet, and some of his expressions have been compared to our George Herbert. Of Shaikh Abû Sa’îd it is recorded that he said, ‘when my affairs had reacht a certain pitch I buried under the dust my books and opened a shop on my own account (i.e. began to teach with authority), and verily men represented me as that which I was not, until it came to this, that they went to the Qadhi and testified against me of unbelieverhood; and women got upon the roofs and cast unclean things upon me.’ (Vide reprint from article in National Review, March, 1891, by C. J. Pickering.)

Aziz. I am not aware that there is any record of such intrusion upon the king’s privacy, but the expressions in the text occur in a letter sent by Akbar’s foster-brother Aziz, who refused to come to court when summoned and threw up his government, and ‘after writing an insolent and reproachful letter to Akbar in which he asked him if he had received a book from heaven, or if he could work miracles like Mahomet that he presumed to introduce a new religion, warned him that he was on the way to eternal perdition, and concluded with a prayer to God to bring him back into the path of salvation’ (Elphinstone).

‘The Koran, the Old and New Testament, and the Psalms of David are called books by way of excellence, and their followers “people of the Book”’ (Elphinstone).

Akbar according to Abdel Kadir had his son Murad instructed in the Gospel, and used to make him begin his lessons ‘In the name of Christ’ instead of in the usual way ‘In the name of God.’

To drive

A people from their ancient fold of Truth, etc.

Malleson says ‘This must have happened because Akbar states it, but of the forced conversions I have found no record. This must have taken place whilst he was still a minor, and whilst the chief authority was wielded by Bairam.’

‘I reap no revenue from the field of unbelief.’ The Hindus are fond of pilgrimages, and Akbar removed a remunerative tax raised by his predecessors on pilgrimages. He also abolished the jezza or capitation tax on those who differed from the Mahomedan faith. He discouraged all excessive prayers, fasts and pilgrimages.

Suttee. Akbar decreed that every widow who showed the least desire not to be burnt on her husband’s funeral pyre, should be let go free and unharmed.

Baby-wife. He forbade marriage before the age of puberty.

Indian widow. Akbar ordained that remarriage was lawful.

Music. ‘About a watch before daybreak,’ says Abul Fazl, the musicians played to the king in the palace. ‘His Majesty had such a knowledge of the science of music as trained musicians do not possess.’

‘The Divine Faith.’ The Divine Faith slowly passed away under the immediate successors of Akbar. An idea of what the Divine Faith was may be gathered from the inscription at the head of the poem. The document referred to, Abul Fazl says, ‘brought about excellent results: (1) the Court became a gathering place of the sages and learned of all creeds; the good doctrines of all religious systems were recognized, and their defects were not allowed to obscure their good features; (2) perfect toleration or peace with all was established; and (3) the perverse and evil-minded were covered with shame on seeing the disinterested motives of His Majesty, and these stood in the pillory of disgrace.’ Dated September 1579 — Ragab 987 (Blochmann xiv.)

The Bandit’s Death

To SIR WALTER SCOTT

O GREAT AND GALLANT SCOTT,

TRUE GENTLEMAN, HEART, BLOOD AND BONE,

I WOULD IT HAD BEEN MY LOT

TO HAVE SEEN THEE, AND HEARD THEE, AND KNOWN.

SIR, do you see this dagger? nay, why do you start aside?

I was not going to stab you, tho’ I am the Bandit’s bride.

You have set a price on his head: I may claim it without a lie.

What have I here in the cloth? I will show it you by-and-by.

Sir, I was once a wife. I had one brief summer of bliss.

But the Bandit had woo’d me in vain, and he stabb’d my Piero with this.

And he dragg’d me up there to his cave in the mountain, and there one day

He had left his dagger behind him. I found it. I hid it away.

For he reek’d with the blood of Piero; his kisses were red with his crime,

And I cried to the Saints to avenge me. They heard, they bided their time.

In a while I bore him a son, and he loved to dandle the child,

And that was a link between us; but I — to be reconciled? —

No, by the Mother of God, tho’ I think I hated him less,

And — well, if I sinn’d last night, I will find the Priest and confess.

Listen! we three were alone in the dell at the close of the clay.

I was lilting a song to the babe, and it laugh’d like a dawn in May.

Then on a sudden we saw your soldiers crossing the ridge,

And he caught my little one from me: we dipt down under the bridge

By the great dead pine — you know it — and heard as we crouch’d below,

The clatter of arms, and voices, and men passing to and fro.

Black was the night when we crept away — not a star in the sky —

Hush’d as the heart of the grave, till the little one utter’d a cry.

I whisper’d ‘give it to me,’ but he would not answer me — then

He gript it so hard by the throat that the boy never cried again.

We return’d to his cave — the link was broken — he sobb’d and he wept,

And cursed himself; then he yawn’d, for the wretch could sleep, and he slept

Ay, till dawn stole into the cave, and a ray red as blood

Glanced on the strangled face — I could make Sleep Death, if I would —

Glared on at the murder’d son, and the murderous father at rest, . . .

I drove the blade that had slain my husband thrice thro’ his breast.

He was loved at least by his dog: it was chain’d, but its horrible yell

‘She has kill’d him, has kill’d him, has kill’d him’ rang out all down thro’ the dell,

Till I felt I could end myself too with the dagger — so deafen’d and dazed —

Take it, and save me from it ! I fled. I was all but crazed

With the grief that gnaw’d at my heart, and the weight that dragg’d at my hand;

But thanks to the Blessed Saints that I came on none of his band;

And the band will be scatter’d now their gallant captain is dead,

For I with this dagger of his — do you doubt me? Here is his head !

The Church-Warden and the Curate

This is written in the dialect which was current in my youth at Spilsby and in the country about it.

I.

EH? good daäy! good daäy! thaw it beän’t not mooch of a daäy,

Nasty, casselty1 weather! an’ mea Haäfe down wi’ my haäy!2

II.

How be the farm gittin on? noäways. Gittin on i’deeäd!

Why, tonups was Haäfe on ‘em fingers an’ toas,3 an’ the mare brokken-kneeäd,

An’ pigs didn’t sell at fall,4 an’ wa lost wer Haldeny cow,

An’ it beäts ma to knaw wot she died on, but wool’s looking oop ony how.

III.

An’ soä they’ve maäde tha a parson, an’ thou’ll git along, niver fear,

Fur I beän chuch-warden mysen i’ the parish fur fifteen year.

Well — sin ther beä chuch-wardens, ther mun be parsons an’ all,

An’ if t’öne stick alongside t’uther5 the chuch weänt happen a fall.

IV.

Fur I wur a Baptis wonst, an’ ageän the toithe an’ the raäte,

Till I fun6 that it warn’t not the gaäinist7 waäy to the narra Gaäte.

An’ I can’t abeär ‘em, I can’t, fur a lot on ‘em coom’d ta-year8 —

I wur down wi’ the rheumatis then — to my pond to wesh thessens theere —

Sa I sticks like the ivin9 as long as I lives to the owd chuch now,

Fur they wesh’d their sins i’ my pond, an’ I doubts they poison’d the cow.

V.

Ay, an’ ya seed the Bishop. They say’s ‘at he coom’d fra nowt —

Burn i’ traäde. Sa I warrants ‘e niver said haäfe wot ‘e thowt,

But ‘e creeäpt an’ ‘e crawl’d along, till ‘e feeäld ‘e could howd ‘is oän,

Then ‘e married a greät Yerl’s darter, an’ sits o’ the Bishop’s throan.

VI.

Now I’ll gie the a bit o’ my mind an’ tha weant be taakin’ offence,

Fur thou be a big scholard now wi’ a hoonderd haäcre o’ sense —

But sich an obstropulous10 lad — naay, naay — fur I minds tha sa well,

Tha’d niver not hopple11 thy tongue, an’ the tongue’s sit afire o’ Hell,

As I says to my missis to-daäy, when she hurl’d a plaäte at the cat

An’ anoother ageän my noäse. Ya was niver sa bad as that.

VII.

But I minds when i’ Howlaby beck won daäy ya was ticklin’ o’ trout,

An’ keeäper ‘e seed ya an roon’d, an’ ‘e beal’d12 to ya ‘Lad coom hout’

An’ ya stood oop naäkt i’ the beck, an’ ya tell’d ‘im to knaw his awn plaäce

An’ ye call’d ‘im a clown, ya did, an’ ya thraw’d the fish i’ ‘is faäce,

An’ ‘e torn’d13 as red as a stag-tuckey’s14 wattles, but theer an’ then

I coämb’d ‘im down, fur I promised ya’d niver not do it ageän.

VIII.

An’ I cotch’d tha wonst i’ my garden, when thou was a height-year-howd,15

An’ I fun thy pockets as full o’ my pippins as iver they’d ‘owd,16

An’ thou was as peärky17 as owt, an’ tha maäde me as mad as mad,

But I says to the ‘keeäp ‘em, an’ welcome’ fur thou was the Parson’s lad.

IX.

An Parson ‘e ‘ears on it all, an’ then taäkes kindly to me,

An’ then I wur chose Chuch-warden an’ coom’d to the top o’ the tree,

Fur Quoloty’s hall my friends, an’ they maäkes ma a help to the poor,

When I gits the plaäte fuller o’ Soondays nor ony chuch-warden afoor,

Fur if iver thy feyther’ed riled me I kep’ mysen meeäk as a lamb,

An’ saw by the Graäce o’ the Lord, Mr. Harry, I ham wot I ham.

X.

But Parson ‘e will speäk out, saw, now ‘e be sixty-seven,

He’ll niver swap Owlby an’ Scratby fur owt but the Kingdom o’ Heaven:

An’ thou’II be ‘is Curate ‘ere, but, if iver tha meäns to git ‘igher,

The mun tackle the sins o’ the Wo’ld,18 an’ not the faults o’ the Squire.

An’ I reckons tha’ll light of a livin’ some-wheers i’ the Wowd19 or the Fen,

If tha cottons down to thy betters, an’ keeäps thysen to thysen.

But niver not speäk plaäin out, if tha wants to git forrards a bit,

But creeäp along the hedge-bottoms, an’ thou’ll be a Bishop yit.

XI.

Naäy, but tha mun speäk hout to the Baptises here i’ the town,

Fur moäst on ‘em talks ageän tithe, an’ I’d like the to preäch ‘em down,

Fur they’ve bin a-preächin’ mea down, they heve, an’ I haätes ‘em now,

Fur they leäved their nasty sins i’ my pond, an’ it poison’d the cow.

Charity

I.

WHAT am I doing, you say to me, ‘wasting the sweet summer hours’?

Haven’t you eyes? I am dressing the grave of a woman with flowers.

II.

For a woman ruin’d the world, as God’s own scriptures tell,

And a man ruin’d mine, but a woman, God bless her, kept me from Hell.

III.

Love me? O yes, no doubt — how long — till you threw me aside!

Dresses and laces and jewels and never a ring for the bride.

IV.

All very well just now to be calling me darling and sweet,

And after a while would it matter so much if I came on the street?

V.

You when I met you first — when he brought you! — I turn’d away

And the hard blue eyes have it still, that stare of a beast of prey.

VI.

You were his friend — you — you — when he promised to make me his bride,

And you knew that he meant to betray me — you knew — you knew that he lied.

VII.

He married an heiress, an orphan with half a shire of estate, —

I sent him a desolate wail and a curse, when I learn’d my fate.

VIII.

For I used to play with the knife, creep down to the river-shore,

Moan to myself ‘one plunge-then quiet for evermore.’

IX.

Would the man have a touch of remorse when he heard what an end was mine?

Or brag to his fellow rakes of his conquest over their wine?

X.

Money — my hire — his money — I sent him back what he gave, —

Will you move a little that way? your shadow falls on the grave.

XI.

Two trains clash’d: then and there he was crush’d in a moment and died,

But the new-wedded wife was unharm’d, tho’ sitting close at his side.

XII.

She found my letter upon him, my wail of reproach and scorn;

I had cursed the woman he married, and him, and the day I was born.

XIII.

They put him aside for ever, and after a week — no more —

A stranger as welcome as Satan — a widow came to my door:

XIV.

So I turn’d my face to the wall, I was mad, I was raving-wild,

I was close on that hour of dishonour, the birth of a baseborn child.

XV.

O you that can flatter your victims, and juggle, and lie and cajole,

Man, can you even guess at the love of a soul for a soul?

XVI.

I had cursed her as woman and wife, and in wife and woman I found

The tenderest Christ-like creature that ever stept on the ground.

XVII.

She watch’d me, she nursed me, she fed me, she sat day and night by my bed,

Till the joyless birthday came of a boy born happily dead.

XVIII.

And her name? what was it? I ask’d her. She said with a sudden glow

On her patient face ‘ My dear, I will tell you before I go.’

XIX.

And I when I learnt it at last, I shriek’d, I sprang from my seat,

I wept, and I kiss’d her hands, I flung myself down at her feet,

XX.

And we pray’d together for him, for him who had given her the name.

She has left me enough to live on. I need no wages of shame.

XXI.

She died of a fever caught when a nurse in a hospital ward.

She is high in the Heaven of Heavens, she is face to face with her Lord,

XXII.

And He sees not her like anywhere in this pitiless world of ours!

I have told you my tale. Get you gone. I am dressing her grave with flowers.

Kapiolani

Kapiolani was a great chieftainess who lived in the Sandwich Islands at the beginning of this century. She won the cause of Christianity by openly defying the priests of the terrible goddess Peelè. In spite of their threats of vengeance she ascended the volcano Mauna-Loa, then clambered down over a bank of cinders 400 feet high to the great lake of fire (nine miles round) — Kilauēä — the home and haunt of the goddess, and flung into the boiling lava the consecrated berries which it was sacrilege for a woman to handle.

Kapi‘olani and Naihe, at the rear of the funeral procession of Queen Keōpūolani, 1823.

I.

WHEN from the terrors of Nature a people have fashion’d and worship a Spirit of Evil,

Blest he the Voice of the Teacher who calls to them

‘Set yourselves free!’

II.

Noble the Saxon who hurl’d at his Idol a valorous weapon in olden England!

Great and greater, and greatest of women, island heroine, Kapiolani

Clomb the mountain, and flung the berries, and dared the Goddess, and freed the people

Of Hawa-i-ee!

III.

A people believing that Peelè the Goddess would wallow in fiery riot and revel

On Kilauēä,

Dance in a fountain of flame with her devils, or shake with tier thunders and shatter her island,

Rolling her anger

Thro’ blasted valley and flaring forest in blood-red cataracts down to the sea!

IV.

Long as the lava-light

Glares from the lava-lake

Dazing the starlight,

Long as the silvery vapour in daylight

Over the mountain

Floats, will the glory of Kapiolani be mingled with either on Hawa-i-ee.

V.

What said her Priesthood?

‘Woe to this island if ever a woman should handle or gather the berries of Peelè!

Accurséd were she!

And woe to this island if ever a woman should climb to the dwelling of Peelè the Goddess!

Accurséd were she!’

VI.

One from the Sunrise

Dawn’d on His people, and slowly before him

Vanish’d shadow-like

Gods and Goddesses,

None but the terrible Peelè remaining as Kapiolani ascended her mountain,

Baffled her priesthood,

Broke the Taboo,

Dipt to the crater,

Call’d on the Power adored by the Christian, and crying ‘I dare her, let Peelè avenge herself ‘!

Into the flame-billow dash’d the berries, and drove the demon from Hawa-i-ee.

The Dawn

“You are but children.”

Egyptian Priest to Solon.

I.

RED of the Dawn!

Screams of a babe in the red-hot palms of a Moloch of Tyre,

Man with his brotherless dinner on man in the tropical wood,

Priests in the name of the Lord passing souls thro’ fire to the fire,

Head-hunters and boats of Dahomey that float upon human blood!

II.

Red of the Dawn!

Godless fury of peoples, and Christless frolic of kings,

And the bolt of war dashing down upon cities and blazing farms,

For Babylon was a child new-born, and Rome was a babe in arms,

And London and Paris and all the rest are as yet but in leading-strings.

III.

Dawn not Day,

While scandal is mouthing a bloodless name at her cannibal feast,

And rake-ruin’d bodies and souls go down in a common wreck,

And the press of a thousand cities is prized for it smells of the beast,

Or easily violates Virgin Truth for a coin or a cheque.

IV.

Dawn not Day!

Is it Shame, so few should have climb’d from the dens in the level below,

Men, with a heart and a soul, no slaves of a four-footed will?

But if twenty million of summers are stored in the sunlight still,

We are far from the noon of man, there is time for the race to grow.

V.

Red of the Dawn!

Is it turning a fainter red? so be it, but when shall we lay

The Ghost of the Brute that is walking and haunting us yet, and be free?

In a hundred, a thousand winters? Ah, what will our children be,

The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?

The Making of Man

WHERE is one that, born of woman, altogether can escape

From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, or of ape?

Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages,

Shall not æon after æon pass and touch him into shape?

All about him shadow still, but, while the races flower and fade,

Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade,

Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in choric

Hallelujah to the Maker ‘It is finish’d. Man is made.’

The Dreamer

ON a midnight in midwinter when all but the winds were dead,

‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ was a Scripture that rang thro’ his head,

Till he dream’d that a Voice of the Earth went wailingly past him and said:

‘I am losing the light of my Youth

And the Vision that led me of old,

And I clash with an iron Truth,

When I make for an Age of gold,

And I would that my race were run,

For teeming with liars, and madmen, and knaves,

And wearied of Autocrats, Anarchs, and Slaves,

And darken’d with doubts of a Faith that saves,

And crimson with battles, and hollow with graves,

To the wail of my winds, and the moan of my waves

I whirl, and I follow the Sun.’

Was it only the wind of the Night shrilling out Desolation and wrong

Thro’ a dream of the dark? Yet he thought that he answer’d her wail with a song —

Moaning your losses, O Earth,

Heart-weary and overdone!

But all’s well that ends well,

Whirl, and follow the Sun!

He is racing from heaven to heaven

And less will be lost than won,

For all’s well that ends well,

Whirl, and follow the Sun!

The Reign of the Meek upon earth,

O weary one, has it begun?

But all’s well that ends well,

Whirl, and follow the Sun!

For moans will have grown sphere-music

Or ever your race be run

And all’s well that ends well,

Whirl, and follow the Sun!

Mechanophilus

(In the time of the first railways.)

NOW first we stand and understand,

And sunder false from true,

And handle boldly with the hand,

And see and shape and do.

Dash back that ocean with a pier,

Strow yonder mountain flat,

A railway there, a tunnel here,

Mix me this Zone with that!

Bring me my horse — my horse? my wings

That I may soar the sky,

For Thought into the outward springs,

I find her with the eye.

O will she, moonlike, sway the main,

And bring or chase the storm,

Who was a shadow in the brain,

And is a living form?

Far as the Future vaults her skies,

From this my vantage ground

To those still-working energies

I spy nor term nor bound.

As we surpass our fathers’ skill,

Our sons will shame our own;

A thousand things are hidden still

And not a hundred known.

And had some prophet spoken true

Of all we shall achieve,

The wonders were so wildly new,

That no man would believe.

Meanwhile, my brothers, work, and wield

The forces of to-day,

And plow the present like a field,

And garner all you may!

You, what the cultured surface grows,

Dispense with careful hands:

Deep under deep for ever goes,

Heaven over heaven expands.

Riflemen Form!

THERE is a sound of thunder afar,

Storm in the South that darkens the day!

Storm of battle and thunder of war!

Well if it do not roll our way.

Storm, Storm, Riflemen form!

Ready, be ready against the storm!

Riflemen, Riflemen, Riflemen form!

Be not deaf to the sound that warns,

Be not gull’d by a despot’s plea!

Are figs of thistles? or grapes of thorns?

How can a despot feel with the Free?

Form, Form, Riflemen Form!

Ready, be ready to meet the storm!

Riflemen, Riflemen, Riflemen form!

Let your reforms for a moment go!

Look to your butts, and take good aims!

Better a rotten borough or so

Than a rotten fleet and a city in flames!

Storm, Storm, Riflemen form!

Ready, be ready against the storm!

Riflemen, Riflemen, Riflemen form!

Form, be ready to do or die!

Form in Freedom’s name and the Queen’s

True we have got — such a faithful ally

That only the Devil can tell what he means.

Form, Form, Riflemen Form

Ready, be ready to meet the storm!

Riflemen, Riflemen, Riflemen form!1

The Tourney

RALPH would fight in Edith’s sight,

For Ralph was Edith’s lover,

Ralph went down like a fire to the fight,

Struck to the left and struck to the right,

Roll’d them over and over.

‘Gallant Sir Ralph,’ said the king.

Casques were crack’d and hauberks hack’d,

Lances snapt in sunder,

Rang the stroke, and sprang the blood,

Knights were thwack’d and riven, and hew’d

Like broad oaks with thunder.

‘O what an arm,’ said the king.

Edith bow’d her stately head,

Saw them lie confounded,

Edith Montfort bow’d her head,

Crown’d her knight’s, and flush’d as red

As poppies when she crown’d it.

‘Take her Sir Ralph,’ said the king.

The Wanderer

THE GLEAM of household sunshine ends,

And here no longer can I rest;

Farewell! — You will not speak, my friends,

Unfriendly of your parted guest.

O well for him that finds a friend,

Or makes a friend where’er he come,

And loves the world from end to end,

And wanders on from home to home!

O happy he, and fit to live,

On whom a happy home has power

To make him trust his life, and give

His fealty to the halcyon hour!

I count you kind, I hold you true;

But what may follow who can tell?

Give me a hand — and you — and you —

And deem me grateful, and farewell!

Poets and Critics

THIS thing, that thing is the rage,

Helter-skelter runs the age;

Minds on this round earth of ours

Vary like the leaves and flowers,

Fashion’d after certain laws;

Sing thou low or loud or sweet,

All at all points thou canst not meet,

Some will pass and some will pause.

What is true at last will tell:

Few at first will place thee well;

Some too low would have thee shine,

Some too high — no fault of thine —

Hold thine own, and work thy will!

Year will graze the heel of year,

But seldom comes the poet here,

And the Critic’s rarer still.

A Voice Spake Out of the Skies

A VOICE spake out of the skies

To a just man and a wise —

‘The world and all within it

Will only last a minute!’

And a beggar began to cry

‘Food, food or I die’!

Is it worth his while to eat,

Or mine to give him meat,

If the world and all within it

Were nothing the next minute?

Doubt and Prayer

THO’ Sin too oft, when smitten by Thy rod,

Rail at ‘Blind Fate’ with many a vain ‘Alas!’

From sin thro’ sorrow into Thee we pass

By that same path our true forefathers trod;

And let not Reason fail me, nor the sod

Draw from my death Thy living flower and grass,

Before I learn that Love, which is, and was

My Father, and my Brother, and my God!

Steel me with patience! soften me with grief!

Let blow the trumpet strongly while I pray,

Till this embattled wall of unbelief

My prison, not my fortress, fall away!

Then, if Thou willest, let my day be brief,

So Thou wilt strike Thy glory thro’ the day.

Faith

I.

DOUBT no longer that the Highest is the wisest and the best,

Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope or break thy rest,

Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling

Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest!

II.

Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart’s desire!

Thro’ the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.

Wait till Death has flung them open, when the man will make the Maker

Dark no more with human hatreds in the glare of deathless fire!

The Silent Voices

WHEN the dumb Hour, clothed in black,

Brings the Dreams about my bed,

Call me not so often back,

Silent Voices of the dead,

Toward the lowland ways behind me,

And the sunlight that is gone!

Call me rather, silent voices,

Forward to the starry track

Glimmering up the heights beyond me

On, and always on!

God and the Universe

I.

WILL my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights?

Must my day be dark by reason, O ye Heavens, of your boundless nights,

Rush of Suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites?

II.

‘Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state,

Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power which alone is great,

Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent Opener of the Gate.’

The Death of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale

To the Mourners.

THE bridal garland falls upon the bier,

The shadow of a crown, that o’er him hung,

Has vanish’d in the shadow cast by Death.

So princely, tender, truthful, reverent, pure —

Mourn! That a world-wide Empire mourns with you,

That all the Thrones are clouded by your loss,

Were slender solace. Yet be comforted;

For if this earth be ruled by Perfect Love,

Then, after his brief range of blameless days,

The toll of funeral in an Angel ear

Sounds happier than the merriest marriage-bell.

The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life,

His shadow darkens earth: his truer name

Is ‘Onward,’ no discordance in the roll

And march of that Eternal Harmony

Whereto the worlds beat time, tho’ faintly heard

Until the great Hereafter. Mourn in hope!

The Poems

Louth Grammar School — where Tennyson was educated from 1816 to 1820

The school today

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

ADVERTISEMENT.

STANZAS.

IN EARLY YOUTH I LOST MY SIRE.

MEMORY.

YES — THERE BE SOME GAY SOULS WHO NEVER WEEP.

HAVE YE NOT SEEN THE BUOYANT ORB?

THE EXILE’S HARP.

WHY SHOULD WE WEEP FOR THOSE WHO DIE?

RELIGION! THO’ WE SEEM TO SPURN.

REMORSE.

ON GOLDEN EVENINGS, WHEN THE SUN.

THE DELL OF E ——  — .

MY BROTHER.

ANTONY TO CLEOPATRA.

I WANDER IN DARKNESS AND SORROW.

TO ONE WHOSE HOPE REPOSED ON THEE.

THE OLD SWORD.

THE GONDOLA.

WE MEET NO MORE.

BY AN EXILE OF BASSORAH.

MARIA TO HER LUTE, THE GIFT OF HER DYING LOVER.

THE VALE OF BONES.

TO FANCY.

BOYHOOD.

DID NOT THY ROSEATE LIPS OUTVIE.

HUNTSMAN’S SONG.

PERSIA.

EGYPT.

THE DRUID’S PROPHECIES.

LINES.

SWISS SONG.

THE EXPEDITION OF NADIR SHAH INTO HINDOSTAN.

GREECE.

THE MAID OF SAVOY.

IGNORANCE OF MODERN EGYPT.

MIDNIGHT.

IN SUMMER, WHEN ALL NATURE GLOWS.

SCOTCH SONG.

BORNE ON LIGHT WINGS OF BUOYANT DOWN.

SONG: IT IS THE SOLEMN EVEN-TIME.

THE STARS OF YON BLUE PLACID SKY.

FRIENDSHIP.

ON THE DEATH OF MY GRANDMOTHER.

AND ASK YE WHY THESE SAD TEARS STREAM?

ON SUBLIMITY.

THE DEITY.

THE REIGN OF LOVE.

TIS THE VOICE OF THE DEAD.

TIME: AN ODE.

GOD’S DENUNCIATIONS AGAINST PHARAOH-HOPHRA, OR APRIES.

ALL JOYOUS IN THE REALMS OF DAY.

THE BATTLE-FIELD.

THE THUNDER-STORM.

THE GRAVE OF A SUICIDE.

ON THE DEATH OF LORD BYRON.

THE WALK AT MIDNIGHT.

MITHRIDATES PRESENTING BERENICE WITH THE CUP OF POISON.

THE BARD’S FAREWELL.

EPIGRAM.

ON BEING ASKED FOR A SIMILE TO ILLUSTRATE THE ADVANTAGE OF KEEPING THE PASSIONS SUBSERVIENT TO REASON.

EPIGRAM ON A MUSICIAN WHOSE HARP-STRINGS WERE CRACKED FROM WANT OF USING.

THE OLD CHIEFTAIN.

APOLLONIUS RHODIUS’S COMPLAINT.

THE FALL OF JERUSALEM.

LAMENTATION OF THE PERUVIANS.

SHORT EULOGIUM ON HOMER.

A SISTER, SWEET ENDEARING NAME!

THE SUN GOES DOWN IN THE DARK BLUE MAIN.

STILL, MUTE, AND MOTIONLESS SHE LIES.

OH! NEVER MAY FROWNS AND DISSENSION MOLEST.

ON A DEAD ENEMY.

LINES.

THE DUKE OF ALVA’S OBSERVATION ON KINGS.

AH! YES, THE LIP MAY FAINTLY SMILE.

THOU CAMEST TO THY BOWER, MY LOVE.

TO ——

THE PASSIONS.

THE HIGH-PRIEST TO ALEXANDER.

THE DEW, WITH WHICH THE EARLY MEAD IS DREST.

ON THE MOONLIGHT SHINING UPON A FRIEND’S GRAVE.

A CONTRAST.

EPIGRAM.

THE DYING CHRISTIAN.

THOSE WORLDLY GOODS THAT, DISTANT, SEEM.

HOW GAYLY SINKS THE GORGEOUS SUN WITHIN HIS GOLDEN BED.

OH! YE WILD WINDS, THAT ROAR AND RAVE.

SWITZERLAND.

A GLANCE.

BABYLON.

OH! WERE THIS HEART OF HARDEST STEEL.

THE SLIGHTED LOVER.

CEASE, RAILER, CEASE! UNTHINKING MAN.

ANACREONTIC.

IN WINTER’S DULL AND CHEERLESS REIGN.

SUNDAY MOBS.

PHRENOLOGY.

LOVE.

TO ——  —

SONG: TO SIT BESIDE A CRYSTAL SPRING

IMAGINATION.

THE OAK OF THE NORTH.

EXHORTATION TO THE GREEKS.

KING CHARLES’S VISION.

TIMBUCTOO

CLARIBEL: A MELODY

LILIAN

ISABEL

THE ‘HOW’ AND THE ‘WHY’

ELEGIACS

MARIANA

O —— : CLEAR-HEADED FRIEND...

MADELINE

THE MERMAN

THE MERMAID

SUPPOSED CONFESSIONS

THE BURIAL OF LOVE

TO ——

SONG THE OWL

SECOND SONG TO THE SAME

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

ODE TO MEMORY

SONG “I’THE GLOOMING LIGHT...”

SONG: A SPIRIT HAUNTS THE YEAR’S LAST HOURS

ADELINE

A CHARACTER

SONG “THE LINTWHITE AND THE THROSTLECOCK...”

SONG “EVERY DAY HATH ITS NIGHT...”

THE POET

THE POET’S MIND

NOTHING WILL DIE

ALL THINGS WILL DIE

HERO TO LEANDER

THE MYSTIC

THE DYING SWAN

A DIRGE

THE GRASSHOPPER

LOVE, PRIDE AND FORGETFULNESS

CHORUS: “THE VARIED EARTH...”

LOST HOPE

THE DESERTED HOUSE

THE TEARS OF HEAVEN

LOVE AND SORROW

TO A LADY SLEEPING

SONNET “COULD I OUTWEAR MY PRESENT STATE OF WOE...”

SONNET “THOUGH NIGHT HATH CLIMBED HER PEAK OF HIGHEST NOON...”

SONNET “SHALL THE HAG EVIL DIE WITH CHILD OF GOOD...”

SONNET “THE PALLID THUNDERSTRICKEN SIGH FOR GAIN...”

LOVE

THE KRAKEN

THE BALLAD OF ORIANA

CIRCUMSTANCE

ENGLISH WAR SONG

NATIONAL SONG

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, 1832

DUALISMS

WE ARE FREE

THE SEA FAIRIES

SONNET TO J. M. K.

MINE BE THE STRENGTH OF SPIRIT...

TO ––(“MY LIFE IS FULL...”)

BUONOPARTE

SONNET: “OH, BEAUTY, PASSING BEAUTY!...”

SONNET: “BUT WERE I LOVED, AS I DESIRE TO BE”

THE LADY OF SHALOTT, 1833

MARIANA IN THE SOUTH

ELEÄNORE

THE MILLER’S DAUGHTER

FATIMA (O LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!)

ŒNONE, 1833

THE SISTERS

TO ––

THE PALACE OF ART

THE MAY QUEEN

NEW YEAR’S EVE

THE HESPERIDES

THE LOTOS EATERS

CHORIC SONG

ROSALIND

MY ROSALIND, MY ROSALIND

A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN

SONG  “WHO CAN SAY...?”

MARGARET

KATE

SONNET: “BLOW YE THE TRUMPET, GATHER FROM AFAR...”

POLAND

TO –– (“AS WHEN, WITH DOWNCAST EYES...”)

O DARLING ROOM

TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH

THE DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR

TO J. S.

THE LOVER’S TALE

ŒNONE, 1842

THE LADY OF SHALOTT, 1842

CONCLUSION.

LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE

YOU ASK ME, WHY, THO’ ILL AT EASE

OF OLD SAT FREEDOM ON THE HEIGHTS

LOVE THOU THY LAND, WITH LOVE FAR-BROUGHT

THE GOOSE

THE EPIC

MORTE D’ARTHUR

THE GARDENER’S DAUGHTER

DORA

AUDLEY COURT

WALKING TO THE MAIL

ST SIMON STYLITES

THE TALKING OAK

LOVE AND DUTY

ULYSSES

LOCKSLEY HALL

GODIVA

THE TWO VOICES

THE DAY-DREAM

THE SLEEPING PALACE

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, 1842

THE ARRIVAL

THE REVIVAL

THE DEPARTURE

MORAL

L’ENVOI

EPILOGUE

AMPHION

SIR GALAHAD

EDWARD GREY

WILL WATERPROOF’S LYRICAL MONOLOGUE MADE AT THE COCK.

LADY CLARE

THE LORD OF BURLEIGH

SIR LAUNCELOT AND QUEEN GUINEVERE

A FAREWELL

THE BEGGAR MAID

THE VISION OF SIN

THE SKIPPING ROPE

MOVE EASTWARD, HAPPY EARTH...

BREAK, BREAK, BREAK...

THE POET’S SONG

A FRAGMENT

ANACREONTICS

CHECK EVERY OUTFLASH, EVERY RUDER SALLY

ME MY OWN FATE TO LASTING SORROW DOOMETH

THERE ARE THREE THINGS THAT FILL MY HEART WITH SIGHS

THE GOLDEN YEAR

TO THE QUEEN

EDWIN MORRIS, OR THE LAKE

COME NOT, WHEN I AM DEAD...

THE EAGLE

TO E. L. ON HIS TRAVELS IN GREECE.

THE NEW TIMON AND THE POET.

AFTER-THOUGHT

CAMBRIDGE

THE GERM OF ‘MAUD’

BEWICK FRAGMENT

THE SKIPPING-ROPE

THE NEW TIMON AND THE POETS

MABLETHORPE

HERE OFTEN, WHEN A CHILD, I LAY RECLINED

WHAT TIME I WASTED YOUTHFUL HOURS

COME NOT, WHEN I AM DEAD

SONNET TO W.C. MACREADY

BRITONS, GUARD YOUR OWN

FOR THE PENNY-WISE

THE THIRD OF FEBRUARY, 1852

HANDS ALL ROUND

SUGGESTED BY READING AN ARTICLE IN A NEWSPAPER

GOD BLESS OUR PRINCE AND BRIDE

THE RINGLET

SONG: HOME THEY BROUGHT HIM SLAIN WITH SPEARS

LINES 1865-1866

A WELCOME TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS MARIE ALEXANDROVNA, DUCHESS OF EDINBURGH.

LITERARY SQUABBLES

THE HIGHER PANTHEISM

CROSSING THE BAR

FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL

CHILD-SONGS

THE CITY CHILD.

MINNIE AND WINNIE.

LUCRETIUS

THE SPITEFUL LETTER

IN THE GARDEN AT SWAINSTON

THE THIRD OF FEBRUARY, 1852

THE VICTIM

THE VOICE AND THE PEAK

WAGES

THE WINDOW, OR, THE SONG OF THE WRENS

PRINCESS: PROLOGUE

PRINCESS: I

PRINCESS: II

PRINCESS: III

PRINCESS: IV

PRINCESS: V

PRINCESS: VI

PRINCESS: VII

PRINCESS: CONCLUSION

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.: PREFACE

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.:

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.: EPILOGUE

MAUD: PART I

MAUD: PART II

MAUD: PART III

THE BROOK

THE LETTERS

THE DAISY

TO THE REV. F.D. MAURICE

WILL

ODE ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

DEDICATION

THE COMING OF ARTHUR

THE ROUND TABLE

GARETH AND LYNETTE

THE MARRIAGE OF GERAINT

GERAINT AND ENID

BALIN AND BALAN

MERLIN AND VIVIEN

LANCELOT AND ELAINE

THE HOLY GRAIL

PELLEAS AND ETTARRE

THE LAST TOURNAMENT

GUINEVERE

THE PASSING OF ARTHUR

TO THE QUEEN

ENOCH ARDEN

AYLMER’S FIELD

SEA DREAMS

THE GRANDMOTHER

NORTHERN FARMER

TITHONUS

THE VOYAGE

IN THE VALLEY OF CAUTERETZ

THE FLOWER

REQUIESCAT

THE SAILOR BOY

THE ISLET

THE RINGLET

A WELCOME TO ALEXANDRA

ODE SUNG AT THE OPENING OF THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION

A DEDICATION

EXPERIMENTS

BOÄDICÉA

EXPERIMENTS IN QUANTITY

ON TRANSLATIONS OF HOMER

MILTON: ALCAICS.

MILTON: HENDECASYLLABICS.

ON TRANSLATIONS OF HOMER

SPECIMEN OF A TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD IN BLANK VERSE.

TO ALFRED TENNYSON, MY GRANDSON

THE FIRST QUARREL

RIZPAH

THE NORTHERN COBBLER

THE REVENGE. A BALLAD OF THE FLEET

THE SISTERS

THE VILLAGE WIFE; OR,THE ENTAIL

IN THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL

DEDICATORY POEM TO THE PRINCESS ALICE

THE DEFENCE OF LUCKNOW

SIR JOHN OLDCASTLE, LORD COBHAM

COLUMBUS

THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE

DE PROFUNDIS

THE HUMAN CRY.

SONNETS

PREFATORY SONNET

TO THE REV. W.H. BROOKFIELD

MONTENEGRO

TO VICTOR HUGO

TRANSLATIONS

BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH

ACHILLES OVER THE TRENCH

TO PRINCESS FREDERICA ON HER MARRIAGE

SIR JOHN FRANKLIN

TO DANTE

TO E. FITZGERALD

TIRESIAS

THE WRECK

DESPAIR

THE ANCIENT SAGE

THE FLIGHT

TOMORROW

THE SPINSTER’S SWEET-ARTS

THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE AT BALACLAVA, PROLOGUE

THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE AT BALACLAVA

EPILOGUE

TO VIRGIL

THE DEAD PROPHET

EARLY SPRING

PREFATORY POEM TO MY BROTHER’S SONNETS

FRATER AVE ATQUE VALE

HELEN’S TOWER

EPITAPH ON LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE

EPITAPH ON GENERAL GORDON

EPITAPH ON CAXTON

TO THE DUKE OF ARGYLL

HANDS ALL ROUND

FREEDOM

POETS AND THEIR BIBLIOGRAPHIES

TO H.R.H. PRINCESS BEATRICE

LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER

THE FLEET

OPENING OF THE INDIAN AND COLONIAL EXHIBITION BY THE QUEEN

TO W.C. MACREADY

TO THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA

ON THE JUBILEE OF QUEEN VICTORIA

TO PROFESSOR JEBB,

WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM.

DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE

OWD ROÄ.1

VASTNESS

THE RING

FORLORN

HAPPY

TO ULYSSES 1

TO MARY BOYLE

THE PROGRESS OF SPRING

MERLIN AND THE GLEAM

ROMNEY’S REMORSE

PARNASSUS

BY AN EVOLUTIONIST

OLD AGE

FAR — FAR — AWAY

POLITICS

BEAUTIFUL CITY

THE ROSES ON THE TERRACE

THE PLAY

ON ONE WHO AFFECTED AN EFFEMINATE MANNER

TO ONE WHO RAN DOWN THE ENGLISH

THE SNOWDROP

THE THROSTLE

THE OAK

IN MEMORIAM. W. G. WARD

JUNE BRACKEN AND HEATHER

TO ——

TO THE MASTER OF BALLIOL

THE DEATH OF ŒNONE

ST. TELEMACHUS

AKBAR’S DREAM

NOTES TO AKBAR’S DREAM

THE BANDIT’S DEATH

THE CHURCH-WARDEN AND THE CURATE

CHARITY

KAPIOLANI

THE DAWN

THE MAKING OF MAN

MECHANOPHILUS

RIFLEMEN FORM!

THE TOURNEY

THE WANDERER

POETS AND CRITICS

A VOICE SPAKE OUT OF THE SKIES

DOUBT AND PRAYER

FAITH

THE SILENT VOICES

GOD AND THE UNIVERSE

THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF CLARENCE AND AVONDALE

TO THE MOURNERS.

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

A-D   E-H   I-L   M-O   P-S   T-V   W-Z

A CHARACTER

A CONTRAST.

A DEDICATION

A DIRGE

A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN

A FAREWELL

A FRAGMENT

A GLANCE.

A SISTER, SWEET ENDEARING NAME!

A VOICE SPAKE OUT OF THE SKIES

A WELCOME TO ALEXANDRA

A WELCOME TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS MARIE ALEXANDROVNA, DUCHESS OF EDINBURGH.

ACHILLES OVER THE TRENCH

ADELINE

ADVERTISEMENT.

AFTER-THOUGHT

AH! YES, THE LIP MAY FAINTLY SMILE.

AKBAR’S DREAM

ALL JOYOUS IN THE REALMS OF DAY.

ALL THINGS WILL DIE

AMPHION

ANACREONTIC.

ANACREONTICS

AND ASK YE WHY THESE SAD TEARS STREAM?

ANTONY TO CLEOPATRA.

APOLLONIUS RHODIUS’S COMPLAINT.

AUDLEY COURT

AYLMER’S FIELD

BABYLON.

BALIN AND BALAN

BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH

BEAUTIFUL CITY

BEWICK FRAGMENT

BOÄDICÉA

BORNE ON LIGHT WINGS OF BUOYANT DOWN.

BOYHOOD.

BREAK, BREAK, BREAK...

BRITONS, GUARD YOUR OWN

BUONOPARTE

BY AN EVOLUTIONIST

BY AN EXILE OF BASSORAH.

CAMBRIDGE

CEASE, RAILER, CEASE! UNTHINKING MAN.

CHARITY

CHECK EVERY OUTFLASH, EVERY RUDER SALLY

CHILD-SONGS

CHORIC SONG

CHORUS: “THE VARIED EARTH...”

CIRCUMSTANCE

CLARIBEL: A MELODY

COLUMBUS

COME NOT, WHEN I AM DEAD

COME NOT, WHEN I AM DEAD...

CONCLUSION.

CROSSING THE BAR

DE PROFUNDIS

DEDICATION

DEDICATORY POEM TO THE PRINCESS ALICE

DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE

DESPAIR

DID NOT THY ROSEATE LIPS OUTVIE.

DORA

DOUBT AND PRAYER

DUALISMS

EARLY SPRING

EDWARD GREY

EDWIN MORRIS, OR THE LAKE

EGYPT.

ELEÄNORE

ELEGIACS

ENGLISH WAR SONG

ENOCH ARDEN

EPIGRAM ON A MUSICIAN WHOSE HARP-STRINGS WERE CRACKED FROM WANT OF USING.

EPIGRAM.

EPIGRAM.

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

EPITAPH ON CAXTON

EPITAPH ON GENERAL GORDON

EPITAPH ON LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE

EXHORTATION TO THE GREEKS.

EXPERIMENTS

EXPERIMENTS IN QUANTITY

FAITH

FAR — FAR — AWAY

FATIMA (O LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!)

FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL

FOR THE PENNY-WISE

FORLORN

FRATER AVE ATQUE VALE

FREEDOM

FRIENDSHIP.

GARETH AND LYNETTE

GERAINT AND ENID

GOD AND THE UNIVERSE

GOD BLESS OUR PRINCE AND BRIDE

GOD’S DENUNCIATIONS AGAINST PHARAOH-HOPHRA, OR APRIES.

GODIVA

GREECE.

GUINEVERE

HANDS ALL ROUND

HANDS ALL ROUND

HAPPY

HAVE YE NOT SEEN THE BUOYANT ORB?

HELEN’S TOWER

HERE OFTEN, WHEN A CHILD, I LAY RECLINED

HERO TO LEANDER

HOW GAYLY SINKS THE GORGEOUS SUN WITHIN HIS GOLDEN BED.

HUNTSMAN’S SONG.

I WANDER IN DARKNESS AND SORROW.

IGNORANCE OF MODERN EGYPT.

IMAGINATION.

IN EARLY YOUTH I LOST MY SIRE.

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.:

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.: EPILOGUE

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.: PREFACE

IN MEMORIAM. W. G. WARD

IN SUMMER, WHEN ALL NATURE GLOWS.

IN THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL

IN THE GARDEN AT SWAINSTON

IN THE VALLEY OF CAUTERETZ

IN WINTER’S DULL AND CHEERLESS REIGN.

ISABEL

JUNE BRACKEN AND HEATHER

KAPIOLANI

KATE

KING CHARLES’S VISION.

L’ENVOI

LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE

LADY CLARE

LAMENTATION OF THE PERUVIANS.

LANCELOT AND ELAINE

LILIAN

LINES 1865-1866

LINES.

LINES.

LITERARY SQUABBLES

LOCKSLEY HALL

LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER

LOST HOPE

LOVE

LOVE AND DUTY

LOVE AND SORROW

LOVE THOU THY LAND, WITH LOVE FAR-BROUGHT

LOVE, PRIDE AND FORGETFULNESS

LOVE.

LUCRETIUS

MABLETHORPE

MADELINE

MARGARET

MARIA TO HER LUTE, THE GIFT OF HER DYING LOVER.

MARIANA

MARIANA IN THE SOUTH

MAUD: PART I

MAUD: PART II

MAUD: PART III

ME MY OWN FATE TO LASTING SORROW DOOMETH

MECHANOPHILUS

MEMORY.

MERLIN AND THE GLEAM

MERLIN AND VIVIEN

MIDNIGHT.

MILTON: ALCAICS.

MILTON: HENDECASYLLABICS.

MINE BE THE STRENGTH OF SPIRIT...

MINNIE AND WINNIE.

MITHRIDATES PRESENTING BERENICE WITH THE CUP OF POISON.

MONTENEGRO

MORAL

MORTE D’ARTHUR

MOVE EASTWARD, HAPPY EARTH...

MY BROTHER.

MY ROSALIND, MY ROSALIND

NATIONAL SONG

NEW YEAR’S EVE

NORTHERN FARMER

NOTES TO AKBAR’S DREAM

NOTHING WILL DIE

O —— : CLEAR-HEADED FRIEND...

O DARLING ROOM

ODE ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

ODE SUNG AT THE OPENING OF THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION

ODE TO MEMORY

ŒNONE, 1833

ŒNONE, 1842

OF OLD SAT FREEDOM ON THE HEIGHTS

OH! NEVER MAY FROWNS AND DISSENSION MOLEST.

OH! WERE THIS HEART OF HARDEST STEEL.

OH! YE WILD WINDS, THAT ROAR AND RAVE.

OLD AGE

ON A DEAD ENEMY.

ON BEING ASKED FOR A SIMILE TO ILLUSTRATE THE ADVANTAGE OF KEEPING THE PASSIONS SUBSERVIENT TO REASON.

ON GOLDEN EVENINGS, WHEN THE SUN.

ON ONE WHO AFFECTED AN EFFEMINATE MANNER

ON SUBLIMITY.

ON THE DEATH OF LORD BYRON.

ON THE DEATH OF MY GRANDMOTHER.

ON THE JUBILEE OF QUEEN VICTORIA

ON THE MOONLIGHT SHINING UPON A FRIEND’S GRAVE.

ON TRANSLATIONS OF HOMER

ON TRANSLATIONS OF HOMER

OPENING OF THE INDIAN AND COLONIAL EXHIBITION BY THE QUEEN

OWD ROÄ.1

PARNASSUS

PELLEAS AND ETTARRE

PERSIA.

PHRENOLOGY.

POETS AND CRITICS

POETS AND THEIR BIBLIOGRAPHIES

POLAND

POLITICS

PREFATORY POEM TO MY BROTHER’S SONNETS

PREFATORY SONNET

PRINCESS: CONCLUSION

PRINCESS: I

PRINCESS: II

PRINCESS: III

PRINCESS: IV

PRINCESS: PROLOGUE

PRINCESS: V

PRINCESS: VI

PRINCESS: VII

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

RELIGION! THO’ WE SEEM TO SPURN.

REMORSE.

REQUIESCAT

RIFLEMEN FORM!

RIZPAH

ROMNEY’S REMORSE

ROSALIND

SCOTCH SONG.

SEA DREAMS

SECOND SONG TO THE SAME

SHORT EULOGIUM ON HOMER.

SIR GALAHAD

SIR JOHN FRANKLIN

SIR JOHN OLDCASTLE, LORD COBHAM

SIR LAUNCELOT AND QUEEN GUINEVERE

SONG  “WHO CAN SAY...?”

SONG “EVERY DAY HATH ITS NIGHT...”

SONG “I’THE GLOOMING LIGHT...”

SONG “THE LINTWHITE AND THE THROSTLECOCK...”

SONG THE OWL

SONG: A SPIRIT HAUNTS THE YEAR’S LAST HOURS

SONG: HOME THEY BROUGHT HIM SLAIN WITH SPEARS

SONG: IT IS THE SOLEMN EVEN-TIME.

SONG: TO SIT BESIDE A CRYSTAL SPRING

SONNET “COULD I OUTWEAR MY PRESENT STATE OF WOE...”

SONNET “SHALL THE HAG EVIL DIE WITH CHILD OF GOOD...”

SONNET “THE PALLID THUNDERSTRICKEN SIGH FOR GAIN...”

SONNET “THOUGH NIGHT HATH CLIMBED HER PEAK OF HIGHEST NOON...”

SONNET TO J. M. K.

SONNET TO W.C. MACREADY

SONNET: “BLOW YE THE TRUMPET, GATHER FROM AFAR...”

SONNET: “BUT WERE I LOVED, AS I DESIRE TO BE”

SONNET: “OH, BEAUTY, PASSING BEAUTY!...”

SONNETS

SPECIMEN OF A TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD IN BLANK VERSE.

ST SIMON STYLITES

ST. TELEMACHUS

STANZAS.

STILL, MUTE, AND MOTIONLESS SHE LIES.

SUGGESTED BY READING AN ARTICLE IN A NEWSPAPER

SUNDAY MOBS.

SUPPOSED CONFESSIONS

SWISS SONG.

SWITZERLAND.

THE ‘HOW’ AND THE ‘WHY’

THE ANCIENT SAGE

THE ARRIVAL

THE BALLAD OF ORIANA

THE BANDIT’S DEATH

THE BARD’S FAREWELL.

THE BATTLE-FIELD.

THE BEGGAR MAID

THE BROOK

THE BURIAL OF LOVE

THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE AT BALACLAVA

THE CHARGE OF THE HEAVY BRIGADE AT BALACLAVA, PROLOGUE

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

THE CHURCH-WARDEN AND THE CURATE

THE CITY CHILD.

THE COMING OF ARTHUR

THE DAISY

THE DAWN

THE DAY-DREAM

THE DEAD PROPHET

THE DEATH OF ŒNONE

THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF CLARENCE AND AVONDALE

THE DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR

THE DEFENCE OF LUCKNOW

THE DEITY.

THE DELL OF E ——  — .

THE DEPARTURE

THE DESERTED HOUSE

THE DEW, WITH WHICH THE EARLY MEAD IS DREST.

THE DRUID’S PROPHECIES.

THE DUKE OF ALVA’S OBSERVATION ON KINGS.

THE DYING CHRISTIAN.

THE DYING SWAN

THE EAGLE

THE EPIC

THE EXILE’S HARP.

THE EXPEDITION OF NADIR SHAH INTO HINDOSTAN.

THE FALL OF JERUSALEM.

THE FIRST QUARREL

THE FLEET

THE FLIGHT

THE FLOWER

THE GARDENER’S DAUGHTER

THE GERM OF ‘MAUD’

THE GOLDEN YEAR

THE GONDOLA.

THE GOOSE

THE GRANDMOTHER

THE GRASSHOPPER

THE GRAVE OF A SUICIDE.

THE HESPERIDES

THE HIGHER PANTHEISM

THE HIGH-PRIEST TO ALEXANDER.

THE HOLY GRAIL

THE HUMAN CRY.

THE ISLET

THE KRAKEN

THE LADY OF SHALOTT, 1833

THE LADY OF SHALOTT, 1842

THE LAST TOURNAMENT

THE LETTERS

THE LORD OF BURLEIGH

THE LOTOS EATERS

THE LOVER’S TALE

THE MAID OF SAVOY.

THE MAKING OF MAN

THE MARRIAGE OF GERAINT

THE MAY QUEEN

THE MERMAID

THE MERMAN

THE MILLER’S DAUGHTER

THE MYSTIC

THE NEW TIMON AND THE POET.

THE NEW TIMON AND THE POETS

THE NORTHERN COBBLER

THE OAK

THE OAK OF THE NORTH.

THE OLD CHIEFTAIN.

THE OLD SWORD.

THE PALACE OF ART

THE PASSING OF ARTHUR

THE PASSIONS.

THE PLAY

THE POET

THE POET’S MIND

THE POET’S SONG

THE PROGRESS OF SPRING

THE REIGN OF LOVE.

THE REVENGE. A BALLAD OF THE FLEET

THE REVIVAL

THE RING

THE RINGLET

THE RINGLET

THE ROSES ON THE TERRACE

THE ROUND TABLE

THE SAILOR BOY

THE SEA FAIRIES

THE SILENT VOICES

THE SISTERS

THE SISTERS

THE SKIPPING ROPE

THE SKIPPING-ROPE

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, 1832

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, 1842

THE SLEEPING PALACE

THE SLIGHTED LOVER.

THE SNOWDROP

THE SPINSTER’S SWEET-ARTS

THE SPITEFUL LETTER

THE STARS OF YON BLUE PLACID SKY.

THE SUN GOES DOWN IN THE DARK BLUE MAIN.

THE TALKING OAK

THE TEARS OF HEAVEN

THE THIRD OF FEBRUARY, 1852

THE THIRD OF FEBRUARY, 1852

THE THROSTLE

THE THUNDER-STORM.

THE TOURNEY

THE TWO VOICES

THE VALE OF BONES.

THE VICTIM

THE VILLAGE WIFE; OR,THE ENTAIL

THE VISION OF SIN

THE VOICE AND THE PEAK

THE VOYAGE

THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE

THE WALK AT MIDNIGHT.

THE WANDERER

THE WINDOW, OR, THE SONG OF THE WRENS

THE WRECK

THERE ARE THREE THINGS THAT FILL MY HEART WITH SIGHS

THOSE WORLDLY GOODS THAT, DISTANT, SEEM.

THOU CAMEST TO THY BOWER, MY LOVE.

TIMBUCTOO

TIME: AN ODE.

TIRESIAS

TIS THE VOICE OF THE DEAD.

TITHONUS

TO ––

TO ——

TO ——

TO ——

TO ——  —

TO –– (“AS WHEN, WITH DOWNCAST EYES...”)

TO ––(“MY LIFE IS FULL...”)

TO A LADY SLEEPING

TO ALFRED TENNYSON, MY GRANDSON

TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH

TO DANTE

TO E. FITZGERALD

TO E. L. ON HIS TRAVELS IN GREECE.

TO FANCY.

TO H.R.H. PRINCESS BEATRICE

TO J. S.

TO MARY BOYLE

TO ONE WHO RAN DOWN THE ENGLISH

TO ONE WHOSE HOPE REPOSED ON THEE.

TO PRINCESS FREDERICA ON HER MARRIAGE

TO PROFESSOR JEBB,

TO THE DUKE OF ARGYLL

TO THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA

TO THE MASTER OF BALLIOL

TO THE MOURNERS.

TO THE QUEEN

TO THE QUEEN

TO THE REV. F.D. MAURICE

TO THE REV. W.H. BROOKFIELD

TO ULYSSES 1

TO VICTOR HUGO

TO VIRGIL

TO W.C. MACREADY

TOMORROW

TRANSLATIONS

ULYSSES

VASTNESS

WAGES

WALKING TO THE MAIL

WE ARE FREE

WE MEET NO MORE.

WHAT TIME I WASTED YOUTHFUL HOURS

WHY SHOULD WE WEEP FOR THOSE WHO DIE?

WILL

WILL WATERPROOF’S LYRICAL MONOLOGUE MADE AT THE COCK.

WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM.

YES — THERE BE SOME GAY SOULS WHO NEVER WEEP.

YOU ASK ME, WHY, THO’ ILL AT EASE

The Plays

Trinity College, Cambridge, where Tennyson commenced his university studies in 1827.  Here he joined a secret society called the Cambridge Apostles and also met Arthur Henry Hallam, who became his closest friend.

Arthur Henry Hallam (1811-1833) was an English poet, best known as the subject of Tennyson’s major work, In Memoriam A.H.H..

QUEEN MARY: A DRAMA

CONTENTS

Dramatis Personæ

Act I

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Scene V

Act II

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Act III

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene V

Scene VI

Act IV

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Act V

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Scene V

Dramatis Personæ

QUEEN MARY.

PHILIP, King of Naples and Sicily, afterwards King of Spain.

THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH.

REGINALD POLE, Cardinal and Papal Legate.

SIMON RENARD, Spanish Ambassador.

LE SIEUR DE NOAILLES, French Ambassador.

THOMAS CRANMER, Archbishop of Canterbury.

SIR NICHOLAS HEATH, Archbishop of York; Lord Chancellor after Gardiner.

EDWARD COURTENAY, Earl of Devon.

LORD WILLIAM HOWARD, afterwards Lord Howard, and Lord High Admiral.

LORD WILLIAMS OF THAME.

LORD PAGET.

LORD PETRE.

STEPHEN GARDINER, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor.

EDMUND BONNER, Bishop of London.

THOMAS THIRLBY, Bishop of Ely.

SIR THOMAS WYATT Insurrectionary Leader.

SIR THOMAS STAFFORD Insurrectionary Leader.

SIR RALPH BAGENHALL.

SIR ROBERT SOUTHWELL.

SIR HENRY BEDINGFIELD.

SIR WILLIAM CECIL.

SIR THOMAS WHITE, Lord Mayor of London.

THE DUKE OF ALVA attending on Philip.

THE COUNT DE FERIA attending on Philip.

PETER MARTYR.

FATHER COLE.

FATHER BOURNE.

VILLA GARCIA.

SOTO.

CAPTAIN BRETT Adherent of Wyatt

ANTHONY KNYVETT Adherent of Wyatt.

PETERS, Gentleman of Lord Howard.

ROGER, Servant to Noailles.

WILLIAM, Servant to Wyatt.

STEWARD OF HOUSEHOLD to the Princess Elizabeth.

OLD NOKES and NOKES.

MARCHIONESS OF EXETER, Mother of Courtenay.

LADY CLARENCE Lady in Waiting to the Queen.

LADY MAGDALEN DACRES Lady in Waiting to the Queen.

ALICE

MAID OF HONOUR to the Princess Elizabeth.

JOAN Country Wife.

TIB Country Wife.

LORDS and other Attendants, Members of the Privy Council, Members of Parliament, Two Gentlemen, Aldermen, Citizens, Peasants, Ushers, Messengers, Guards, Pages, Gospellers, Marshalmen, etc.

Act I

Scene I

Aldgate Richly Decorated

Crowd. Marshalmen.

MARSHALMAN.

Stand back, keep a clear lane! When will her Majesty pass, sayst thou? why now, even now; wherefore draw back your heads and your horns before I break them, and make what noise you will with your tongues, so it be not treason. Long live Queen Mary, the lawful and legitimate daughter of Harry the Eighth! Shout, knaves!

CITIZENS.

Long live Queen Mary!

FIRST CITIZEN.

That’s a hard word, legitimate; what does it mean?

SECOND CITIZEN.

It means a bastard.

THIRD CITIZEN.

Nay, it means true-born.

FIRST CITIZEN.

Why, didn’t the Parliament make her a bastard?

SECOND CITIZEN.

No; it was the Lady Elizabeth.

THIRD CITIZEN.

That was after, man; that was after.

FIRST CITIZEN.

Then which is the bastard?

SECOND CITIZEN.

Troth, they be both bastards by Act of Parliament and Council.

THIRD CITIZEN.

Ay, the Parliament can make every true-born man of us a bastard. Old Nokes, can’t it make thee a bastard? thou shouldst know, for thou art as white as three Christmasses.

OLD NOKES (dreamily).

Who’s a-passing? King Edward or King Richard?

THIRD CITIZEN.

No, old Nokes.

OLD NOKES.

It’s Harry!

THIRD CITIZEN.

It’s Queen Mary.

OLD NOKES.

The blessed Mary’s a-passing!

[Falls on his knees.

NOKES.

Let father alone, my masters! he’s past your questioning.

THIRD CITIZEN.

Answer thou for him, then thou’rt no such cockerel thyself, for thou was born i’ the tail end of old Harry the Seventh.

NOKES.

Eh! that was afore bastard-making began. I was born true man at five in the forenoon i’ the tail of old Harry, and so they can’t make me a bastard.

THIRD CITIZEN.

But if Parliament can make the Queen a bastard, why, it follows all the more that they can make thee one, who art fray’d i’ the knees, and out at elbow, and bald o’ the back, and bursten at the toes, and down at heels.

NOKES.

I was born of a true man and a ring’d wife, and I can’t argue upon it; but I and my old woman ‘ud burn upon it, that would we.

MARSHALMAN.

What are you cackling of bastardy under the Queen’s own nose? I’ll have you flogg’d and burnt too, by the Rood I will.

FIRST CITIZEN.

He swears by the Rood. Whew!

SECOND CITIZEN.

Hark! the trumpets.

[The Procession passes, MARY and ELIZABETH riding side by side, and disappears under the gate.

CITIZENS.

Long live Queen Mary! down with all traitors! God save her Grace; and death to Northumberland!

[Exeunt.

Manent TWO GENTLEMEN.

FIRST GENTLEMAN.

By God’s light a noble creature, right royal!

SECOND GENTLEMAN.

She looks comelier than ordinary to-day; but to my mind the Lady Elizabeth is the more noble and royal.

FIRST GENTLEMAN.

I mean the Lady Elizabeth. Did you hear (I have a daughter in her service who reported it) that she met the Queen at Wanstead with five hundred horse, and the Queen (tho’ some say they be much divided) took her hand, call’d her sweet sister, and kiss’d not her alone, but all the ladies of her following.

SECOND GENTLEMAN.

Ay, that was in her hour of joy; there will be plenty to sunder and unsister them again: this Gardiner for one, who is to be made Lord Chancellor, and will pounce like a wild beast out of his cage to worry Cranmer.

FIRST GENTLEMAN.

And furthermore, my daughter said that when there rose a talk of the late rebellion, she spoke even of Northumberland pitifully, and of the good Lady Jane as a poor innocent child who had but obeyed her father; and furthermore, she said that no one in her time should be burnt for heresy.

SECOND GENTLEMAN.

Well, sir, I look for happy times.

FIRST GENTLEMAN.

There is but one thing against them. I know not if you know.

SECOND GENTLEMAN.

I suppose you touch upon the rumour that Charles, the master of the world, has offer’d her his son Philip, the Pope and the Devil. I trust it is but a rumour.

FIRST GENTLEMAN.

She is going now to the Tower to loose the prisoners there, and among them Courtenay, to be made Earl of Devon, of royal blood, of splendid feature, whom the council and all her people wish her to marry. May it be so, for we are many of us Catholics, but few Papists, and the Hot Gospellers will go mad upon it.

SECOND GENTLEMAN.

Was she not betroth’d in her babyhood to the Great Emperor himself?

FIRST GENTLEMAN.

Ay, but he’s too old.

SECOND GENTLEMAN.

And again to her cousin Reginald Pole, now Cardinal; but I hear that he too is full of aches and broken before his day.

FIRST GENTLEMAN.

O, the Pope could dispense with his Cardinalate, and his achage, and his breakage, if that were all: will you not follow the procession?

SECOND GENTLEMAN.

No; I have seen enough for this day.

FIRST GENTLEMAN.

Well, I shall follow; if I can get near enough I shall judge with my own eyes whether her Grace incline to this splendid scion of Plantagenet.

[Exeunt.

Scene II

A Room in Lambeth Palace.

CRANMER.

To Strasburg, Antwerp, Frankfort, Zurich, Worms,

Geneva, Basle — our Bishops from their sees

Or fled, they say, or flying — Poinet, Barlow,

Bale, Scory, Coverdale; besides the Deans

Of Christchurch, Durham, Exeter, and Wells —

Ailmer and Bullingham, and hundreds more;

So they report: I shall be left alone.

No: Hooper, Ridley, Latimer will not fly.

Enter PETER MARTYR.

PETER MARTYR.

Fly, Cranmer! were there nothing else, your name

Stands first of those who sign’d the Letters Patent

That gave her royal crown to Lady Jane.

CRANMER.

Stand first it may, but it was written last:

Those that are now her Privy Council, sign’d

Before me: nay, the Judges had pronounced

That our young Edward might bequeath the crown

Of England, putting by his father’s will.

Yet I stood out, till Edward sent for me.

The wan boy-king, with his fast-fading eyes

Fixt hard on mine, his frail transparent hand,

Damp with the sweat of death, and griping mine,

Whisper’d me, if I loved him, not to yield

His Church of England to the Papal wolf

And Mary; then I could no more — I sign’d.

Nay, for bare shame of inconsistency,

She cannot pass her traitor council by,

To make me headless.

PETER MARTYR.

That might be forgiven.

I tell you, fly, my Lord. You do not own

The bodily presence in the Eucharist,

Their wafer and perpetual sacrifice:

Your creed will be your death.

CRANMER.

Step after step,

Thro’ many voices crying right and left,

Have I climb’d back into the primal church,

And stand within the porch, and Christ with me:

My flight were such a scandal to the faith,

The downfall of so many simple souls,

I dare not leave my post.

PETER MARTYR.

But you divorced

Queen Catharine and her father; hence, her hate

Will burn till you are burn’d.

CRANMER.

I cannot help it.

The Canonists and Schoolmen were with me.

‘Thou shalt not wed thy brother’s wife.’—’Tis written,

‘They shall be childless.’ True, Mary was born,

But France would not accept her for a bride

As being born from incest; and this wrought

Upon the king; and child by child, you know,

Were momentary sparkles out as quick

Almost as kindled; and he brought his doubts

And fears to me. Peter, I’ll swear for him

He did believe the bond incestuous.

But wherefore am I trenching on the time

That should already have seen your steps a mile

From me and Lambeth? God be with you! Go.

PETER MARTYR.

Ah, but how fierce a letter you wrote against

Their superstition when they slander’d you

For setting up a mass at Canterbury

To please the Queen.

CRANMER.

It was a wheedling monk

Set up the mass.

PETER MARTYR.

I know it, my good Lord.

But you so bubbled over with hot terms

Of Satan, liars, blasphemy, Antichrist,

She never will forgive you. Fly, my Lord, fly!

CRANMER.

I wrote it, and God grant me power to burn!

PETER MARTYR.

They have given me a safe conduct: for all that

I dare not stay. I fear, I fear, I see you,

Dear friend, for the last time; farewell, and fly.

CRANMER.

Fly and farewell, and let me die the death.

[Exit Peter Martyr.

Enter OLD SERVANT.

O, kind and gentle master, the Queen’s Officers

Are here in force to take you to the Tower.

CRANMER.

Ay, gentle friend, admit them. I will go.

I thank my God it is too late to fly.

[Exeunt.

Scene III

St. Paul’s Cross

FATHER BOURNE in the pulpit. A CROWD. MARCHIONESS OF EXETER, COURTENAY. The SIEUR DE NOAILLES and his man ROGER in front of the stage. Hubbub.

NOAILLES.

Hast thou let fall those papers in the palace?

ROGER.

Ay, sir.

NOAILLES.

‘There will be no peace for Mary till Elizabeth lose her head.’

ROGER.

Ay, sir.

NOAILLES.

And the other, ‘Long live Elizabeth the Queen!’

ROGER.

Ay, sir; she needs must tread upon them.

NOAILLES.  Well.

These beastly swine make such a grunting here,

I cannot catch what Father Bourne is saying.

ROGER.

Quiet a moment, my masters; hear what the shaveling has to say for himself.

CROWD.

Hush — hear!

BOURNE..

— and so this unhappy land, long divided in itself, and sever’d from the faith, will return into the one true fold, seeing that our gracious Virgin Queen hath ——

CROWD.

No pope! no pope!

ROGER (to those about him, mimicking BOURNE).

— hath sent for the holy legate of the holy father the Pope, Cardinal Pole, to give us all that holy absolution which ——

FIRST CITIZEN.

Old Bourne to the life!

SECOND CITIZEN.

Holy absolution! holy Inquisition!

THIRD CITIZEN.

Down with the Papist!

[Hubbub.

BOURNE..

— and now that your good bishop, Bonner, who hath lain so long under bonds for the faith —

[Hubbub.

NOAILLES.

Friend Roger, steal thou in among the crowd,

And get the swine to shout Elizabeth.

Yon gray old Gospeller, sour as midwinter,

Begin with him.

ROGER (goes).

By the mass, old friend, we’ll have no pope here while the Lady Elizabeth lives.

GOSPELLER..

Art thou of the true faith, fellow, that swearest by the mass?

ROGER.

Ay, that am I, new converted, but the old leaven sticks to my tongue yet.

FIRST CITIZEN.

He says right; by the mass we’ll have no mass here.

VOICES OF THE CROWD.

Peace! hear him; let his own words damn the Papist. From thine own mouth I judge thee — tear him down!

BOURNE..

— and since our Gracious Queen, let me call her our second Virgin Mary, hath begun to re-edify the true temple —— ,

FIRST CITIZEN.

Virgin Mary! we’ll have no virgins here — we’ll have the Lady Elizabeth!

[Swords are drawn, a knife is hurled and sticks in the pulpit. The mob throng to the pulpit stairs.

MARCHIONESS OF EXETER.

Son Courtenay, wilt thou see the holy father

Murdered before thy face? up, son, and save him!

They love thee, and thou canst not come to harm.

COURTENAY (in the pulpit).

Shame, shame, my masters! are you

English-born, And set yourselves by hundreds against one?

CROWD.

A Courtenay! a Courtenay!

[A train of Spanish servants crosses at the back of the stage.

NOAILLES.

These birds of passage come before their time:

Stave off the crowd upon the Spaniard there.

ROGER.

My masters, yonder’s fatter game for you

Than this old gaping gurgoyle: look you there —

The Prince of Spain coming to wed our Queen!

After him, boys! and pelt him from the city.

[They seize stones and follow the Spaniards. Exeunt on the other side Marchioness of Exeter and Attendants.

NOAILLES (to ROGER).

Stand from me. If Elizabeth lose her head —

That makes for France.

And if her people, anger’d thereupon,

Arise against her and dethrone the Queen —

That makes for France.

And if I breed confusion anyway —

That makes for France.

Good-day, my Lord of Devon;

A bold heart yours to beard that raging mob!

COURTENAY.

My mother said, Go up; and up I went.

I knew they would not do me any wrong,

For I am mighty popular with them, Noailles.

NOAILLES.

You look’d a king.

COURTENAY.

Why not? I am king’s blood.

NOAILLES.

And in the whirl of change may come to be one.

COURTENAY.

Ah!

NOAILLES.

But does your gracious Queen entreat you kinglike?

COURTENAY.

‘Fore God, I think she entreats me like a child.

NOAILLES.

You’ve but a dull life in this maiden court, I fear, my Lord?

COURTENAY.

A life of nods and yawns.

NOAILLES.

So you would honour my poor house to-night,

We might enliven you. Divers honest fellows,

The Duke of Suffolk lately freed from prison,

Sir Peter Carew and Sir Thomas Wyatt,

Sir Thomas Stafford, and some more — we play.

COURTENAY.

At what?

NOAILLES.

The Game of Chess.

COURTENAY.

The Game of Chess!

I can play well, and I shall beat you there.

NOAILLES.

Ay, but we play with Henry, King of France,

And certain of his court.

His Highness makes his moves across the Channel,

We answer him with ours, and there are messengers

That go between us.

COURTENAY.

Why, such a game, sir, were whole years a playing.

NOAILLES.

Nay; not so long I trust. That all depends

Upon the skill and swiftness of the players.

COURTENAY.

The King is skilful at it?

NOAILLES.  Very, my Lord.

COURTENAY.

And the stakes high?

NOAILLES.

But not beyond your means.

COURTENAY.

Well, I’m the first of players, I shall win.

NOAILLES.

With our advice and in our company,

And so you well attend to the king’s moves,

I think you may.

COURTENAY.

When do you meet?

NOAILLES.

To-night.

COURTENAY (aside).

I will be there; the fellow’s at his tricks —

Deep — I shall fathom him. (Aloud) Good morning,

Noailles.

[Exit Courtenay.

NOAILLES.

Good-day, my Lord. Strange game of chess! a King

That with her own pawns plays against a Queen,

Whose play is all to find herself a King.

Ay; but this fine blue-blooded Courtenay seems

Too princely for a pawn. Call him a Knight,

That, with an ass’s, not a horse’s head,

Skips every way, from levity or from fear.

Well, we shall use him somehow, so that Gardiner

And Simon Renard spy not out our game

Too early. Roger, thinkest thou that anyone

Suspected thee to be my man?

ROGER.

Not one, sir.

NOAILLES.

No! the disguise was perfect. Let’s away.

[Exeunt.

Scene IV

London. A Room in the Palace.

ELIZABETH. Enter COURTENAY.

COURTENAY.

So yet am I,

Unless my friends and mirrors lie to me,

A goodlier-looking fellow than this Philip.

Pah!

The Queen is ill advised: shall I turn traitor?

They’ve almost talked me into it: yet the word

Affrights me somewhat: to be such a one

As Harry Bolingbroke hath a lure in it.

Good now, my Lady Queen, tho’ by your age,

And by your looks you are not worth the having,

Yet by your crown you are.

[Seeing ELIZABETH.

The Princess there?

If I tried her and la — she’s amorous.

Have we not heard of her in Edward’s time,

Her freaks and frolics with the late Lord Admiral?

I do believe she’d yield. I should be still

A party in the state; and then, who knows —

ELIZABETH.

What are you musing on, my Lord of Devon?

COURTENAY.

Has not the Queen —

ELIZABETH.

Done what, Sir?

COURTENAY.

— made you follow

The Lady Suffolk and the Lady Lennox? —

You,

The heir presumptive.

ELIZABETH.

Why do you ask? you know it.

COURTENAY.

You needs must bear it hardly.

ELIZABETH.

No, indeed!

I am utterly submissive to the Queen.

COURTENAY.

Well, I was musing upon that; the Queen

Is both my foe and yours: we should be friends.

ELIZABETH.

My Lord, the hatred of another to us

Is no true bond of friendship.

COURTENAY.

Might it not

Be the rough preface of some closer bond?

ELIZABETH.

My Lord, you late were loosed from out the Tower,

Where, like a butterfly in a chrysalis,

You spent your life; that broken, out you flutter

Thro’ the new world, go zigzag, now would settle

Upon this flower, now that; but all things here

At court are known; you have solicited

The Queen, and been rejected.

COURTENAY.

Flower, she!

Half faded! but you, cousin, are fresh and sweet

As the first flower no bee has ever tried.

ELIZABETH.

Are you the bee to try me? why, but now

I called you butterfly.

COURTENAY.

You did me wrong,

I love not to be called a butterfly:

Why do you call me butterfly?

ELIZABETH.

Why do you go so gay then?

COURTENAY.

Velvet and gold.

This dress was made me as the Earl of Devon

To take my seat in; looks it not right royal?

ELIZABETH.

So royal that the Queen forbad you wearing it.

COURTENAY.

I wear it then to spite her.

ELIZABETH.

My Lord, my Lord;

I see you in the Tower again. Her Majesty

Hears you affect the Prince — prelates kneel to you. —

COURTENAY.

I am the noblest blood in Europe, Madam,

A Courtenay of Devon, and her cousin.

ELIZABETH.

She hears you make your boast that after all

She means to wed you. Folly, my good Lord.

COURTENAY.

How folly? a great party in the state

Wills me to wed her.

ELIZABETH.

Failing her, my Lord,

Doth not as great a party in the state

Will you to wed me?

COURTENAY.

Even so, fair lady.

ELIZABETH.

You know to flatter ladies.

COURTENAY.  Nay, I meant

True matters of the heart.

ELIZABETH.

My heart, my Lord,

Is no great party in the state as yet.

COURTENAY.

Great, said you? nay, you shall be great. I love you,

Lay my life in your hands. Can you be close?

ELIZABETH.

Can you, my Lord?

COURTENAY.

Close as a miser’s casket.

Listen:

The King of France, Noailles the Ambassador,

The Duke of Suffolk and Sir Peter Carew,

Sir Thomas Wyatt, I myself, some others,

Have sworn this Spanish marriage shall not be.

If Mary will not hear us — well — conjecture —

Were I in Devon with my wedded bride,

The people there so worship me — Your ear;

You shall be Queen.

ELIZABETH.

You speak too low, my Lord;

I cannot hear you.

COURTENAY.

I’ll repeat it.

ELIZABETH.

No!

Stand further off, or you may lose your head.

COURTENAY.

I have a head to lose for your sweet sake.

ELIZABETH.

Have you, my Lord? Best keep it for your own.

Nay, pout not, cousin.

Not many friends are mine, except indeed

Among the many. I believe you mine;

And so you may continue mine, farewell,

And that at once.

Enter MARY, behind.

MARY.

Whispering — leagued together

To bar me from my Philip.

COURTENAY.

Pray — consider —

ELIZABETH (seeing the QUEEN).

Well, that’s a noble horse of yours, my Lord.

I trust that he will carry you well to-day,

And heal your headache.

COURTENAY.

You are wild; what headache?

Heartache, perchance; not headache.

ELIZABETH (aside to COURTENAY).

Are you blind?

[COURTENAY sees the QUEEN and exit. Exit MARY.

Enter LORD WILLIAM HOWARD.

HOWARD.

Was that my Lord of Devon? do not you

Be seen in corners with my Lord of Devon.

He hath fallen out of favour with the Queen.

She fears the Lords may side with you and him

Against her marriage; therefore is he dangerous.

And if this Prince of fluff and feather come

To woo you, niece, he is dangerous everyway.

ELIZABETH.

Not very dangerous that way, my good uncle.

HOWARD.

But your own state is full of danger here.

The disaffected, heretics, reformers,

Look to you as the one to crown their ends.

Mix not yourself with any plot I pray you;

Nay, if by chance you hear of any such,

Speak not thereof — no, not to your best friend,

Lest you should be confounded with it. Still —

Perinde ac cadaver — as the priest says,

You know your Latin — quiet as a dead body.

What was my Lord of Devon telling you?

ELIZABETH.

Whether he told me anything or not,

I follow your good counsel, gracious uncle.

Quiet as a dead body.

HOWARD.

You do right well.

I do not care to know; but this I charge you,

Tell Courtenay nothing. The Lord Chancellor

(I count it as a kind of virtue in him,

He hath not many), as a mastiff dog

May love a puppy cur for no more reason

Than that the twain have been tied up together,

Thus Gardiner — for the two were fellow-prisoners

So many years in yon accursed Tower —

Hath taken to this Courtenay. Look to it, niece,

He hath no fence when Gardiner questions him;

All oozes out; yet him — because they know him

The last White Rose, the last Plantagenet

(Nay, there is Cardinal Pole, too), the people

Claim as their natural leader — ay, some say,

That you shall marry him, make him King belike.

ELIZABETH.

Do they say so, good uncle?

HOWARD.

Ay, good niece!

You should be plain and open with me, niece.

You should not play upon me.

ELIZABETH.

No, good uncle.

Enter GARDINER.

GARDINER.

The Queen would see your Grace upon the moment.

ELIZABETH.

Why, my lord Bishop?

GARDINER.

I think she means to counsel your withdrawing

To Ashridge, or some other country house.

ELIZABETH.

Why, my lord Bishop?

GARDINER.

I do but bring the message, know no more.

Your Grace will hear her reasons from herself.

ELIZABETH.

‘Tis mine own wish fulfill’d before the word

Was spoken, for in truth I had meant to crave

Permission of her Highness to retire

To Ashridge, and pursue my studies there.

GARDINER.

Madam, to have the wish before the word

Is man’s good Fairy — and the Queen is yours.

I left her with rich jewels in her hand,

Whereof ‘tis like enough she means to make

A farewell present to your Grace.

ELIZABETH.

My Lord,

I have the jewel of a loyal heart.

GARDINER.

I doubt it not, Madam, most loyal.

[Bows low and exit.

HOWARD.  See,

This comes of parleying with my Lord of Devon.

Well, well, you must obey; and I myself

Believe it will be better for your welfare.

Your time will come.

ELIZABETH.

I think my time will come.

Uncle,

I am of sovereign nature, that I know,

Not to be quell’d; and I have felt within me

Stirrings of some great doom when God’s just hour

Peals — but this fierce old Gardiner — his big baldness,

That irritable forelock which he rubs,

His buzzard beak and deep-incavern’d eyes

Half fright me.

HOWARD.

You’ve a bold heart; keep it so.

He cannot touch you save that you turn traitor;

And so take heed I pray you — you are one

Who love that men should smile upon you, niece.

They’d smile you into treason — some of them.

ELIZABETH.

I spy the rock beneath the smiling sea.

But if this Philip, the proud Catholic prince,

And this bald priest, and she that hates me, seek

In that lone house, to practise on my life,

By poison, fire, shot, stab —

HOWARD.

They will not, niece.

Mine is the fleet and all the power at sea —

Or will be in a moment. If they dared

To harm you, I would blow this Philip and all

Your trouble to the dogstar and the devil.

ELIZABETH.

To the Pleiads, uncle; they have lost a sister.

HOWARD.

But why say that? what have you done to lose her?

Come, come, I will go with you to the Queen.

[Exeunt.

Scene V

A Room in the Palace.

MARY with PHILIP’S miniature. ALICE.

MARY (kissing the miniature).

Most goodly, King-like and an Emperor’s son, —

A king to be, — is he not noble, girl?

ALICE.

Goodly enough, your Grace, and yet, methinks,

I have seen goodlier.

MARY.

Ay; some waxen doll

Thy baby eyes have rested on, belike;

All red and white, the fashion of our land.

But my good mother came (God rest her soul)

Of Spain, and I am Spanish in myself,

And in my likings.

ALICE.

By your Grace’s leave

Your royal mother came of Spain, but took

To the English red and white. Your royal father

(For so they say) was all pure lily and rose

In his youth, and like a lady.

MARY.

O, just God!

Sweet mother, you had time and cause enough

To sicken of his lilies and his roses.

Cast off, betray’d, defamed, divorced, forlorn!

And then the King — that traitor past forgiveness,

The false archbishop fawning on him, married

The mother of Elizabeth — a heretic

Ev’n as she is; but God hath sent me here

To take such order with all heretics

That it shall be, before I die, as tho’

My father and my brother had not lived.

What wast thou saying of this Lady Jane,

Now in the Tower?

ALICE.

Why, Madam, she was passing

Some chapel down in Essex, and with her

Lady Anne Wharton, and the Lady Anne

Bow’d to the Pyx; but Lady Jane stood up

Stiff as the very backbone of heresy.

And wherefore bow ye not, says Lady Anne,

To him within there who made Heaven and Earth?

I cannot, and I dare not, tell your Grace

What Lady Jane replied.

MARY.

But I will have it.

ALICE.

She said — pray pardon me, and pity her —

She hath harken’d evil counsel — ah! she said,

The baker made him.

MARY.

Monstrous! blasphemous!

She ought to burn. Hence, thou (Exit Alice). No — being traitor

Her head will fall: shall it? she is but a child.

We do not kill the child for doing that

His father whipt him into doing — a head

So full of grace and beauty! would that mine

Were half as gracious! O, my lord to be,

My love, for thy sake only.

I am eleven years older than he is.

But will he care for that?

No, by the holy Virgin, being noble,

But love me only: then the bastard sprout,

My sister, is far fairer than myself.

Will he be drawn to her?

No, being of the true faith with myself.

Paget is for him — for to wed with Spain

Would treble England — Gardiner is against him;

The Council, people, Parliament against him;

But I will have him! My hard father hated me;

My brother rather hated me than loved;

My sister cowers and hates me. Holy Virgin,

Plead with thy blessed Son; grant me my prayer:

Give me my Philip; and we two will lead

The living waters of the Faith again

Back thro’ their widow’d channel here, and watch

The parch’d banks rolling incense, as of old,

To heaven, and kindled with the palms of Christ!

Enter USHER.

Who waits, sir?

USHER.

Madam, the Lord Chancellor.

MARY.

Bid him come in. (Enter GARDINER.)

Good morning, my good Lord.

[Exit Usher.

GARDINER.

That every morning of your Majesty

May be most good, is every morning’s prayer

Of your most loyal subject, Stephen Gardiner.

MARY.

Come you to tell me this, my Lord?

GARDINER.

And more.

Your people have begun to learn your worth.

Your pious wish to pay King Edward’s debts,

Your lavish household curb’d, and the remission

Of half that subsidy levied on the people,

Make all tongues praise and all hearts beat for you.

I’d have you yet more loved: the realm is poor,

The exchequer at neap-tide: we might withdraw

Part of our garrison at Calais.

MARY.

Calais!

Our one point on the main, the gate of France!

I am Queen of England; take mine eyes, mine heart,

But do not lose me Calais.

GARDINER.

Do not fear it.

Of that hereafter. I say your Grace is loved.

That I may keep you thus, who am your friend

And ever faithful counsellor, might I speak?

MARY.

I can forespeak your speaking. Would I marry

Prince Philip, if all England hate him? That is

Your question, and I front it with another:

Is it England, or a party? Now, your answer.

GARDINER.

My answer is, I wear beneath my dress

A shirt of mail: my house hath been assaulted,

And when I walk abroad, the populace,

With fingers pointed like so many daggers,

Stab me in fancy, hissing Spain and Philip;

And when I sleep, a hundred men-at-arms

Guard my poor dreams for England. Men would murder me,

Because they think me favourer of this marriage.

MARY.

And that were hard upon you, my Lord Chancellor.

GARDINER.

But our young Earl of Devon —

MARY.

Earl of Devon?

I freed him from the Tower, placed him at Court;

I made him Earl of Devon, and — the fool —

He wrecks his health and wealth on courtesans,

And rolls himself in carrion like a dog.

GARDINER.

More like a school-boy that hath broken bounds,

Sickening himself with sweets.

MARY.

I will not hear of him.

Good, then, they will revolt: but I am Tudor,

And shall control them.

GARDINER.

I will help you, Madam,

Even to the utmost. All the church is grateful.

You have ousted the mock priest, repulpited

The shepherd of St. Peter, raised the rood again,

And brought us back the mass. I am all thanks

To God and to your Grace: yet I know well,

Your people, and I go with them so far,

Will brook nor Pope nor Spaniard here to play

The tyrant, or in commonwealth or church.

MARY (showing the picture).

Is this the face of one who plays the tyrant?

Peruse it; is it not goodly, ay, and gentle?

GARDINER.

Madam, methinks a cold face and a haughty.

And when your Highness talks of Courtenay —

Ay, true — a goodly one. I would his life

Were half as goodly (aside).

MARY.

What is that you mutter?

GARDINER.

Oh, Madam, take it bluntly; marry Philip,

And be stepmother of a score of sons!

The prince is known in Spain, in Flanders, ha!

For Philip —

MARY.

You offend us; you may leave us.

You see thro’ warping glasses.

GARDINER.

If your Majesty —

MARY.

I have sworn upon the body and blood of Christ

I’ll none but Philip.

GARDINER.

Hath your Grace so sworn?

MARY.

Ay, Simon Renard knows it.

GARDINER.

News to me!

It then remains for your poor Gardiner,

So you still care to trust him somewhat less

Than Simon Renard, to compose the event

In some such form as least may harm your Grace.

MARY.

I’ll have the scandal sounded to the mud.

I know it a scandal.

GARDINER.

All my hope is now

It may be found a scandal.

MARY.

You offend us.

GARDINER (aside).

These princes are like children, must be physick’d,

The bitter in the sweet. I have lost mine office,

It may be, thro’ mine honesty, like a fool.

[Exit.

Enter USHER.

MARY.

Who waits?

USHER.

The Ambassador from France, your Grace.

MARY (sits down).

Bid him come in. Good morning, Sir de Noailles.

[Exit Usher,

NOAILLES (entering).

A happy morning to your Majesty.

MARY.

And I should some time have a happy morning;

I have had none yet. What says the King your master?

NOAILLES.

Madam, my master hears with much alarm,

That you may marry Philip, Prince of Spain —

Foreseeing, with whate’er unwillingness,

That if this Philip be the titular king

Of England, and at war with him, your Grace

And kingdom will be suck’d into the war,

Ay, tho’ you long for peace; wherefore, my master,

If but to prove your Majesty’s goodwill,

Would fain have some fresh treaty drawn between you.

MARY.

Why some fresh treaty? wherefore should I do it?

Sir, if we marry, we shall still maintain

All former treaties with his Majesty.

Our royal word for that! and your good master,

Pray God he do not be the first to break them,

Must be content with that; and so, farewell.

NOAILLES (going, returns).

I would your answer had been other, Madam,

For I foresee dark days.

MARY.

And so do I, sir;

Your master works against me in the dark.

I do believe he holp Northumberland

Against me.

NOAILLES.

Nay, pure phantasy, your Grace.

Why should he move against you?

MARY.

Will you hear why?

Mary of Scotland, — for I have not own’d

My sister, and I will not, — after me

Is heir of England; and my royal father,

To make the crown of Scotland one with ours,

Had mark’d her for my brother Edward’s bride;

Ay, but your king stole her a babe from Scotland

In order to betroth her to your Dauphin.

See then:

Mary of Scotland, married to your Dauphin,

Would make our England, France;

Mary of England, joining hands with Spain,

Would be too strong for France.

Yea, were there issue born to her, Spain and we,

One crown, might rule the world. There lies your fear.

That is your drift. You play at hide and seek.

Show me your faces!

NOAILLES.

Madam, I am amazed:

French, I must needs wish all good things for France.

That must be pardon’d me; but I protest

Your Grace’s policy hath a farther flight

Than mine into the future. We but seek

Some settled ground for peace to stand upon.

MARY.

Well, we will leave all this, sir, to our council.

Have you seen Philip ever?

NOAILLES.

Only once.

MARY.

Is this like Philip?

NOAILLES.

Ay, but nobler-looking.

MARY.

Hath he the large ability of the Emperor?

NOAILLES.

No, surely.

MARY.

I can make allowance for thee,

Thou speakest of the enemy of thy king.

NOAILLES.

Make no allowance for the naked truth.

He is every way a lesser man than Charles;

Stone-hard, ice-cold — no dash of daring in him.

MARY.

If cold, his life is pure.

NOAILLES.

Why (smiling), no, indeed.

MARY.

Sayst thou?

NOAILLES.

A very wanton life indeed (smiling).

MARY.

Your audience is concluded, sir.

[Exit Noailles.

You cannot

Learn a man’s nature from his natural foe.

Enter USHER.

Who waits?

USHER.

The Ambassador of Spain, your Grace.

[Exit.

Enter SIMON RENARD.

MARY (rising to meet him).

Thou art ever welcome, Simon Renard. Hast thou

Brought me the letter which thine Emperor promised

Long since, a formal offer of the hand Of Philip?

RENARD.

Nay, your Grace, it hath not reach’d me.

I know not wherefore — some mischance of flood,

And broken bridge, or spavin’d horse, or wave

And wind at their old battle: he must have written.

MARY.

But Philip never writes me one poor word.

Which in his absence had been all my wealth.

Strange in a wooer!

RENARD.

Yet I know the Prince,

So your king-parliament suffer him to land,

Yearns to set foot upon your island shore.

MARY.

God change the pebble which his kingly foot

First presses into some more costly stone

Than ever blinded eye. I’ll have one mark it

And bring it me. I’ll have it burnish’d firelike;

I’ll set it round with gold, with pearl, with diamond.

Let the great angel of the church come with him;

Stand on the deck and spread his wings for sail!

God lay the waves and strow the storms at sea,

And here at land among the people! O Renard,

I am much beset, I am almost in despair.

Paget is ours. Gardiner perchance is ours;

But for our heretic Parliament —

RENARD.

O Madam,

You fly your thoughts like kites. My master, Charles,

Bad you go softly with your heretics here,

Until your throne had ceased to tremble. Then

Spit them like larks for aught I care. Besides,

When Henry broke the carcase of your church

To pieces, there were many wolves among you

Who dragg’d the scatter’d limbs into their den.

The Pope would have you make them render these;

So would your cousin, Cardinal Pole; ill counsel!

These let them keep at present; stir not yet

This matter of the Church lands. At his coming

Your star will rise.

MARY.

My star! a baleful one.

I see but the black night, and hear the wolf.

What star?

RENARD.

Your star will be your princely son,

Heir of this England and the Netherlands!

And if your wolf the while should howl for more,

We’ll dust him from a bag of Spanish gold.

I do believe, I have dusted some already,

That, soon or late, your Parliament is ours.

MARY.

Why do they talk so foully of your Prince,

Renard?

RENARD.

The lot of Princes. To sit high

Is to be lied about.

MARY.

They call him cold,

Haughty, ay, worse.

RENARD.

Why, doubtless, Philip shows

Some of the bearing of your blue blood — still

All within measure — nay, it well becomes him.

MARY.

Hath he the large ability of his father?

RENARD.

Nay, some believe that he will go beyond him.

MARY.

Is this like him?

RENARD.

Ay, somewhat; but your Philip

Is the most princelike Prince beneath the sun.

This is a daub to Philip.

MARY.

Of a pure life?

RENARD.

As an angel among angels. Yea, by Heaven,

The text — Your Highness knows it, ‘Whosoever

Looketh after a woman,’ would not graze

The Prince of Spain. You are happy in him there,

Chaste as your Grace!

MARY.

I am happy in him there.

RENARD.

And would be altogether happy, Madam,

So that your sister were but look’d to closer.

You have sent her from the court, but then she goes,

I warrant, not to hear the nightingales,

But hatch you some new treason in the woods.

MARY.

We have our spies abroad to catch her tripping,

And then if caught, to the Tower.

RENARD.

The Tower! the block!

The word has turn’d your Highness pale; the thing

Was no such scarecrow in your father’s time.

I have heard, the tongue yet quiver’d with the jest

When the head leapt — so common! I do think

To save your crown that it must come to this.

MARY.

No, Renard; it must never come to this.

RENARD.

Not yet; but your old Traitors of the Tower —

Why, when you put Northumberland to death,

The sentence having past upon them all,

Spared you the Duke of Suffolk, Guildford Dudley,

Ev’n that young girl who dared to wear your crown?

MARY.

Dared? nay, not so; the child obey’d her father.

Spite of her tears her father forced it on her.

RENARD.

Good Madam, when the Roman wish’d to reign,

He slew not him alone who wore the purple,

But his assessor in the throne, perchance

A child more innocent than Lady Jane.

MARY.

I am English Queen, not Roman Emperor.

RENARD.

Yet too much mercy is a want of mercy,

And wastes more life. Stamp out the fire, or this

Will smoulder and re-flame, and burn the throne

Where you should sit with Philip: he will not come

Till she be gone.

MARY.

Indeed, if that were true —

For Philip comes, one hand in mine, and one

Steadying the tremulous pillars of the Church —

But no, no, no. Farewell. I am somewhat faint

With our long talk. Tho’ Queen, I am not Queen

Of mine own heart, which every now and then

Beats me half dead: yet stay, this golden chain —

My father on a birthday gave it me,

And I have broken with my father — take

And wear it as memorial of a morning

Which found me full of foolish doubts, and leaves me

As hopeful.

RENARD (aside).

Whew — the folly of all follies

Is to be love-sick for a shadow. (Aloud) Madam,

This chains me to your service, not with gold,

But dearest links of love. Farewell, and trust me,

Philip is yours.

[Exit.

MARY.

Mine — but not yet all mine.

Enter USHER.

USHER.

Your Council is in Session, please your Majesty.

MARY.

Sir, let them sit. I must have time to breathe.

No, say I come. (Exit Usher.) I won by boldness once.

The Emperor counsell’d me to fly to Flanders.

I would not; but a hundred miles I rode,

Sent out my letters, call’d my friends together,

Struck home and won.

And when the Council would not crown me — thought

To bind me first by oaths I could not keep,

And keep with Christ and conscience — was it boldness

Or weakness that won there? when I, their Queen,

Cast myself down upon my knees before them,

And those hard men brake into woman tears,

Ev’n Gardiner, all amazed, and in that passion

Gave me my Crown.

Enter ALICE.

Girl; hast thou ever heard

Slanders against Prince Philip in our Court?

ALICE.

What slanders? I, your Grace; no, never.

MARY.

Nothing?

ALICE.

Never, your Grace.

MARY.

See that you neither hear them nor repeat!

ALICE (aside).

Good Lord! but I have heard a thousand such.

Ay, and repeated them as often — mum!

Why comes that old fox-Fleming back again?

Enter RENARD.

RENARD.

Madam, I scarce had left your Grace’s presence

Before I chanced upon the messenger

Who brings that letter which we waited for —

The formal offer of Prince Philip’s hand.

It craves an instant answer, Ay or No.

MARY.

An instant Ay or No! the Council sits.

Give it me quick.

ALICE (stepping before her).

Your Highness is all trembling.

MARY.

Make way.        [Exit into the Council Chamber.

ALICE.

O, Master Renard, Master Renard,

If you have falsely painted your fine Prince;

Praised, where you should have blamed him, I pray God

No woman ever love you, Master Renard.

It breaks my heart to hear her moan at night

As tho’ the nightmare never left her bed.

RENARD.

My pretty maiden, tell me, did you ever

Sigh for a beard?

ALICE.

That’s not a pretty question.

RENARD.

Not prettily put? I mean, my pretty maiden,

A pretty man for such a pretty maiden.

ALICE.

My Lord of Devon is a pretty man.

I hate him. Well, but if I have, what then?

RENARD.

Then, pretty maiden, you should know that whether

A wind be warm or cold, it serves to fan

A kindled fire.

ALICE.

According to the song.

His friends would praise him, I believed ‘em,

His foes would blame him, and I scorn’d ‘em,

His friends — as Angels I received ‘em,

His foes — the Devil had suborn’d ‘em.

RENARD.

Peace, pretty maiden.

I hear them stirring in the Council Chamber.

Lord Paget’s ‘Ay’ is sure — who else? and yet,

They are all too much at odds to close at once

In one full-throated No! Her Highness comes.

Enter MARY.

ALICE.

How deathly pale! — a chair, your Highness

[Bringing one to the QUEEN.

RENARD.

Madam,

The Council?

MARY.

Ay! My Philip is all mine.

[Sinks into chair, half fainting.

Act II

Scene I

Alington Castle.

SIR THOMAS WYATT.

I do not hear from Carew or the Duke

Of Suffolk, and till then I should not move.

The Duke hath gone to Leicester; Carew stirs

In Devon: that fine porcelain Courtenay,

Save that he fears he might be crack’d in using,

(I have known a semi-madman in my time

So fancy-ridd’n) should be in Devon too.

Enter WILLIAM.

News abroad, William?

WILLIAM.

None so new, Sir Thomas, and none so old, Sir Thomas. No new news that Philip comes to wed Mary, no old news that all men hate it. Old Sir Thomas would have hated it. The bells are ringing at Maidstone. Doesn’t your worship hear?

WYATT.

Ay, for the Saints are come to reign again.

Most like it is a Saint’s-day. There’s no call

As yet for me; so in this pause, before

The mine be fired, it were a pious work

To string my father’s sonnets, left about

Like loosely-scatter’d jewels, in fair order,

And head them with a lamer rhyme of mine,

To grace his memory.

WILLIAM.

Ay, why not, Sir Thomas? He was a fine courtier, he; Queen Anne loved him. All the women loved him. I loved him, I was in Spain with him. I couldn’t eat in Spain, I couldn’t sleep in Spain. I hate Spain, Sir Thomas.

WYATT.

But thou could’st drink in Spain if I remember.

WILLIAM.

Sir Thomas, we may grant the wine. Old Sir Thomas always granted the wine.

WYATT.

Hand me the casket with my father’s sonnets.

WILLIAM.

Ay — sonnets — a fine courtier of the old Court, old Sir Thomas.

[Exit.

WYATT.

Courtier of many courts, he loved the more

His own gray towers, plain life and letter’d peace,

To read and rhyme in solitary fields,

The lark above, the nightingale below,

And answer them in song. The sire begets

Not half his likeness in the son. I fail

Where he was fullest: yet — to write it down.

[He writes.

Re-enter WILLIAM.

WILLIAM.

There is news, there is news, and no call for sonnet-sorting now, nor for sonnet-making either, but ten thousand men on Penenden Heath all calling after your worship, and your worship’s name heard into Maidstone market, and your worship the first man in Kent and Christendom, for the Queen’s down, and the world’s up, and your worship a-top of it.

WYATT.

Inverted Æsop — mountain out of mouse.

Say for ten thousand ten — and pothouse knaves,

Brain-dizzied with a draught of morning ale.

Enter ANTONY KNYVETT.

WILLIAM.

Here’s Antony Knyvett.

KNYVETT.

Look you, Master Wyatt,

Tear up that woman’s work there.

WYATT.

No; not these,

Dumb children of my father, that will speak

When I and thou and all rebellions lie

Dead bodies without voice. Song flies you know

For ages.

KNYVETT.

Tut, your sonnet’s a flying ant,

Wing’d for a moment.

WYATT.

Well, for mine own work,

[Tearing the paper.

It lies there in six pieces at your feet;

For all that I can carry it in my head.

KNYVETT.

If you can carry your head upon your shoulders.

WYATT.

I fear you come to carry it off my shoulders,

And sonnet-making’s safer.

KNYVETT.

Why, good Lord,

Write you as many sonnets as you will.

Ay, but not now; what, have you eyes, ears, brains?

This Philip and the black-faced swarms of Spain,

The hardest, cruellest people in the world,

Come locusting upon us, eat us up,

Confiscate lands, goods, money — Wyatt, Wyatt,

Wake, or the stout old island will become

A rotten limb of Spain. They roar for you

On Penenden Heath, a thousand of them — more —

All arm’d, waiting a leader; there’s no glory

Like his who saves his country: and you sit

Sing-songing here; but, if I’m any judge,

By God, you are as poor a poet, Wyatt,

As a good soldier.

WYATT.

You as poor a critic

As an honest friend: you stroke me on one cheek,

Buffet the other. Come, you bluster, Antony!

You know I know all this. I must not move

Until I hear from Carew and the Duke.

I fear the mine is fired before the time.

KNYVETT (showing a paper).

But here’s some Hebrew. Faith, I half forgot it.

Look; can you make it English? A strange youth

Suddenly thrust it on me, whisper’d, ‘Wyatt,’

And whisking round a corner, show’d his back

Before I read his face.

WYATT.

Ha! Courtenay’s cipher.        [Reads.

‘Sir Peter Carew fled to France: it is thought the Duke will be taken.

I am with you still; but, for appearance sake, stay with the Queen.

Gardiner knows, but the Council are all at odds, and the Queen hath no

force for resistance. Move, if you move, at once.’

Is Peter Carew fled? Is the Duke taken?

Down scabbard, and out sword! and let Rebellion

Roar till throne rock, and crown fall. No; not that;

But we will teach Queen Mary how to reign.

Who are those that shout below there?

KNYVETT.

Why, some fifty

That follow’d me from Penenden Heath in hope

To hear you speak.

WYATT.

Open the window, Knyvett;

The mine is fired, and I will speak to them.

Men of Kent; England of England; you that have kept your old customs upright, while all the rest of England bow’d theirs to the Norman, the cause that hath brought us together is not the cause of a county or a shire, but of this England, in whose crown our Kent is the fairest jewel. Philip shall not wed Mary; and ye have called me to be your leader. I know Spain. I have been there with my father; I have seen them in their own land; have marked the haughtiness of their nobles; the cruelty of their priests. If this man marry our Queen, however the Council and the Commons may fence round his power with restriction, he will be King, King of England, my masters; and the Queen, and the laws, and the people, his slaves. What? shall we have Spain on the throne and in the parliament; Spain in the pulpit and on the law-bench; Spain in all the great offices of state; Spain in our ships, in our forts, in our houses, in our beds?

CROWD.

No! no! no Spain!

WILLIAM.

No Spain in our beds — that were worse than all. I have been there with old Sir Thomas, and the beds I know. I hate Spain.

A PEASANT.

But, Sir Thomas, must we levy war against the Queen’s Grace?

WYATT.

No, my friend; war for the Queen’s Grace — to save her from herself and Philip — war against Spain. And think not we shall be alone — thousands will flock to us. The Council, the Court itself, is on our side. The Lord Chancellor himself is on our side. The King of France is with us; the King of Denmark is with us; the world is with us — war against Spain! And if we move not now, yet it will be known that we have moved; and if Philip come to be King, O, my God! the rope, the rack, the thumbscrew, the stake, the fire. If we move not now, Spain moves, bribes our nobles with her gold, and creeps, creeps snake-like about our legs till we cannot move at all; and ye know, my masters, that wherever Spain hath ruled she hath wither’d all beneath her. Look at the New World — a paradise made hell; the red man, that good helpless creature, starved, maim’d, flogg’d, flay’d, burn’d, boil’d, buried alive, worried by dogs; and here, nearer home, the Netherlands, Sicily, Naples, Lombardy. I say no more — only this, their lot is yours. Forward to London with me! forward to London! If ye love your liberties or your skins, forward to London!

CROWD.

Forward to London! A Wyatt! a Wyatt!

WYATT.

But first to Rochester, to take the guns

From out the vessels lying in the river.

Then on.

A PEASANT.

Ay, but I fear we be too few, Sir Thomas.

WYATT.

Not many yet. The world as yet, my friend,

Is not half-waked; but every parish tower

Shall clang and clash alarum as we pass,

And pour along the land, and swoll’n and fed

With indraughts and side-currents, in full force

Roll upon London.

CROWD.

A Wyatt! a Wyatt! Forward!

KNYVETT.

Wyatt, shall we proclaim Elizabeth?

WYATT.

I’ll think upon it, Knyvett.

KNYVETT.

Or Lady Jane?

WYATT.

No, poor soul; no.

Ah, gray old castle of Alington, green field

Beside the brimming Medway, it may chance

That I shall never look upon you more.

KNYVETT.

Come, now, you’re sonnetting again.

WYATT.  Not I.

I’ll have my head set higher in the state;

Or — if the Lord God will it — on the stake.

[Exeunt.

Scene II

Guildhall

SIR THOMAS WHITE (The Lord Mayor), LORD WILLIAM HOWARD, SIR RALPH BAGENHALL, ALDERMEN and CITIZENS.

WHITE.

I trust the Queen comes hither with her guards.

HOWARD.

Ay, all in arms.

[Several of the citizens move hastily out of the hall.

Why do they hurry out there?

WHITE.

My Lord, cut out the rotten from your apple,

Your apple eats the better. Let them go.

They go like those old Pharisees in John

Convicted by their conscience, arrant cowards,

Or tamperers with that treason out of Kent.

When will her Grace be here?

HOWARD.

In some few minutes.

She will address your guilds and companies.

I have striven in vain to raise a man for her.

But help her in this exigency, make

Your city loyal, and be the mightiest man

This day in England.

WHITE.

I am Thomas White.

Few things have fail’d to which I set my will.

I do my most and best.

HOWARD.

You know that after

The Captain Brett, who went with your train bands

To fight with Wyatt, had gone over to him

With all his men, the Queen in that distress

Sent Cornwallis and Hastings to the traitor,

Feigning to treat with him about her marriage —

Know too what Wyatt said.

WHITE.

He’d sooner be,

While this same marriage question was being argued,

Trusted than trust — the scoundrel — and demanded

Possession of her person and the Tower.

HOWARD.

And four of her poor Council too, my Lord,

As hostages.

WHITE.

I know it. What do and say

Your Council at this hour?

HOWARD.

I will trust you.

We fling ourselves on you, my Lord. The Council,

The Parliament as well, are troubled waters;

And yet like waters of the fen they know not

Which way to flow. All hangs on her address,

And upon you, Lord Mayor.

WHITE.

How look’d the city

When now you past it? Quiet?

HOWARD.

Like our Council,

Your city is divided. As we past,

Some hail’d, some hiss’d us. There were citizens

Stood each before his shut-up booth, and look’d

As grim and grave as from a funeral.

And here a knot of ruffians all in rags,

With execrating execrable eyes,

Glared at the citizen. Here was a young mother,

Her face on flame, her red hair all blown back,

She shrilling ‘Wyatt,’ while the boy she held

Mimick’d and piped her ‘Wyatt,’ as red as she

In hair and cheek; and almost elbowing her,

So close they stood, another, mute as death,

And white as her own milk; her babe in arms

Had felt the faltering of his mother’s heart,

And look’d as bloodless. Here a pious Catholic,

Mumbling and mixing up in his scared prayers

Heaven and earth’s Maries; over his bow’d shoulder

Scowl’d that world-hated and world-hating beast,

A haggard Anabaptist. Many such groups.

The names of Wyatt, Elizabeth, Courtenay,

Nay the Queen’s right to reign—’fore God, the rogues —

Were freely buzzed among them. So I say

Your city is divided, and I fear

One scruple, this or that way, of success

Would turn it thither. Wherefore now the Queen

In this low pulse and palsy of the state,

Bad me to tell you that she counts on you

And on myself as her two hands; on you,

In your own city, as her right, my Lord,

For you are loyal.

WHITE.

Am I Thomas White?

One word before she comes. Elizabeth —

Her name is much abused among these traitors.

Where is she? She is loved by all of us.

I scarce have heart to mingle in this matter,

If she should be mishandled.

HOWARD.

No; she shall not.

The Queen had written her word to come to court:

Methought I smelt out Renard in the letter,

And fearing for her, sent a secret missive,

Which told her to be sick. Happily or not,

It found her sick indeed.

WHITE.

God send her well;

Here comes her Royal Grace.

Enter GUARDS, MARY and ;GARDINER.

SIR THOMAS WHITE leads her to a raised seat on the dais.

WHITE.

I, the Lord Mayor, and these our companies

And guilds of London, gathered here, beseech

Your Highness to accept our lowliest thanks

For your most princely presence; and we pray

That we, your true and loyal citizens,

From your own royal lips, at once may know

The wherefore of this coming, and so learn

Your royal will, and do it. — I, Lord Mayor

Of London, and our guilds and companies.

MARY.

In mine own person am I come to you,

To tell you what indeed ye see and know,

How traitorously these rebels out of Kent

Have made strong head against ourselves and you.

They would not have me wed the Prince of Spain:

That was their pretext — so they spake at first —

But we sent divers of our Council to them,

And by their answers to the question ask’d,

It doth appear this marriage is the least

Of all their quarrel.

They have betrayed the treason of their hearts:

Seek to possess our person, hold our Tower,

Place and displace our councillors, and use

Both us and them according as they will.

Now what I am ye know right well — your Queen;

To whom, when I was wedded to the realm

And the realm’s laws (the spousal ring whereof,

Not ever to be laid aside, I wear

Upon this finger), ye did promise full

Allegiance and obedience to the death.

Ye know my father was the rightful heir

Of England, and his right came down to me

Corroborate by your acts of Parliament:

And as ye were most loving unto him,

So doubtless will ye show yourselves to me.

Wherefore, ye will not brook that anyone

Should seize our person, occupy our state,

More specially a traitor so presumptuous

As this same Wyatt, who hath tamper’d with

A public ignorance, and, under colour

Of such a cause as hath no colour, seeks

To bend the laws to his own will, and yield

Full scope to persons rascal and forlorn,

To make free spoil and havock of your goods.

Now as your Prince, I say,

I, that was never mother, cannot tell

How mothers love their children; yet, methinks,

A prince as naturally may love his people

As these their children; and be sure your Queen

So loves you, and so loving, needs must deem

This love by you return’d as heartily;

And thro’ this common knot and bond of love,

Doubt not they will be speedily overthrown.

As to this marriage, ye shall understand

We made thereto no treaty of ourselves,

And set no foot theretoward unadvised

Of all our Privy Council; furthermore,

This marriage had the assent of those to whom

The king, my father, did commit his trust;

Who not alone esteem’d it honourable,

But for the wealth and glory of our realm,

And all our loving subjects, most expedient.

As to myself,

I am not so set on wedlock as to choose

But where I list, nor yet so amorous

That I must needs be husbanded; I thank God,

I have lived a virgin, and I noway doubt

But that with God’s grace, I can live so still.

Yet if it might please God that I should leave

Some fruit of mine own body after me,

To be your king, ye would rejoice thereat,

And it would be your comfort, as I trust;

And truly, if I either thought or knew

This marriage should bring loss or danger to you,

My subjects, or impair in any way

This royal state of England, I would never

Consent thereto, nor marry while I live;

Moreover, if this marriage should not seem,

Before our own High Court of Parliament,

To be of rich advantage to our realm,

We will refrain, and not alone from this,

Likewise from any other, out of which

Looms the least chance of peril to our realm.

Wherefore be bold, and with your lawful Prince

Stand fast against our enemies and yours,

And fear them not. I fear them not. My Lord,

I leave Lord William Howard in your city,

To guard and keep you whole and safe from all

The spoil and sackage aim’d at by these rebels,

Who mouth and foam against the Prince of Spain.

VOICES.

Long live Queen Mary!

Down with Wyatt!

The Queen!

WHITE.

Three voices from our guilds and companies!

You are shy and proud like Englishmen, my masters,

And will not trust your voices. Understand:

Your lawful Prince hath come to cast herself

On loyal hearts and bosoms, hoped to fall

Into the wide-spread arms of fealty,

And finds you statues. Speak at once — and all!

For whom?

Our sovereign Lady by King Harry’s will;

The Queen of England — or the Kentish Squire?

I know you loyal. Speak! in the name of God!

The Queen of England or the rabble of Kent?

The reeking dungfork master of the mace!

Your havings wasted by the scythe and spade —

Your rights and charters hobnail’d into slush —

Your houses fired — your gutters bubbling blood —

ACCLAMATION.

No! No! The Queen! the Queen!

WHITE.

Your Highness hears

This burst and bass of loyal harmony,

And how we each and all of us abhor

The venomous, bestial, devilish revolt

Of Thomas Wyatt. Hear us now make oath

To raise your Highness thirty thousand men,

And arm and strike as with one hand, and brush

This Wyatt from our shoulders, like a flea

That might have leapt upon us unawares.

Swear with me, noble fellow-citizens, all,

With all your trades, and guilds, and companies.

CITIZENS.

We swear!

MARY.

We thank your Lordship and your loyal city.

[Exit MARY attended.

WHITE.

I trust this day, thro’ God, I have saved the crown.

FIRST ALDERMAN.

Ay, so my Lord of Pembroke in command

Of all her force be safe; but there are doubts.

SECOND ALDERMAN.

I hear that Gardiner, coming with the Queen,

And meeting Pembroke, bent to his saddle-bow,

As if to win the man by flattering him.

Is he so safe to fight upon her side?

FIRST ALDERMAN.

If not, there’s no man safe.

WHITE.

Yes, Thomas White.

I am safe enough; no man need flatter me.

SECOND ALDERMAN.

Nay, no man need; but did you mark our Queen?

The colour freely play’d into her face,

And the half sight which makes her look so stern,

Seem’d thro’ that dim dilated world of hers,

To read our faces; I have never seen her

So queenly or so goodly.

WHITE.

Courage, sir,

That makes or man or woman look their goodliest.

Die like the torn fox dumb, but never whine

Like that poor heart, Northumberland, at the block.

BAGENHALL.

The man had children, and he whined for those.

Methinks most men are but poor-hearted, else

Should we so doat on courage, were it commoner?

The Queen stands up, and speaks for her own self;

And all men cry, She is queenly, she is goodly.

Yet she’s no goodlier; tho’ my Lord Mayor here,

By his own rule, he hath been so bold to-day,

Should look more goodly than the rest of us.

WHITE.

Goodly? I feel most goodly heart and hand,

And strong to throw ten Wyatts and all Kent.

Ha! ha! sir; but you jest; I love it: a jest

In time of danger shows the pulses even.

Be merry! yet, Sir Ralph, you look but sad.

I dare avouch you’d stand up for yourself,

Tho’ all the world should bay like winter wolves.

BAGENHALL.

Who knows? the man is proven by the hour.

WHITE.

The man should make the hour, not this the man;

And Thomas White will prove this Thomas Wyatt,

And he will prove an Iden to this Cade,

And he will play the Walworth to this Wat;

Come, sirs, we prate; hence all — gather your men —

Myself must bustle. Wyatt comes to Southwark;

I’ll have the drawbridge hewn into the Thames,

And see the citizens arm’d. Good day; good day.

[Exit White.

BAGENHALL.

One of much outdoor bluster.

HOWARD.

For all that,

Most honest, brave, and skilful; and his wealth

A fountain of perennial alms — his fault

So thoroughly to believe in his own self.

BAGENHALL.

Yet thoroughly to believe in one’s own self,

So one’s own self be thorough, were to do

Great things, my Lord.

HOWARD.

It may be.

BAGENHALL.

I have heard

One of your Council fleer and jeer at him.

HOWARD.

The nursery-cocker’d child will jeer at aught

That may seem strange beyond his nursery.

The statesman that shall jeer and fleer at men,

Makes enemies for himself and for his king;

And if he jeer not seeing the true man

Behind his folly, he is thrice the fool;

And if he see the man and still will jeer,

He is child and fool, and traitor to the State.

Who is he? let me shun him.

BAGENHALL.

Nay, my Lord,

He is damn’d enough already.

HOWARD.

I must set

The guard at Ludgate. Fare you well, Sir Ralph.

BAGENHALL.

‘Who knows?’ I am for England. But who knows,

That knows the Queen, the Spaniard, and the Pope,

Whether I be for Wyatt, or the Queen?

[Exeunt.

Scene III

London Bridge

Enter SIR THOMAS WYATT and BRETT.

WYATT.

Brett, when the Duke of Norfolk moved against us

Thou cried’st ‘A Wyatt!’ and flying to our side

Left his all bare, for which I love thee, Brett.

Have for thine asking aught that I can give,

For thro’ thine help we are come to London Bridge;

But how to cross it balks me. I fear we cannot.

BRETT.

Nay, hardly, save by boat, swimming, or wings.

WYATT.

Last night I climb’d into the gate-house, Brett,

And scared the gray old porter and his wife.

And then I crept along the gloom and saw

They had hewn the drawbridge down into the river.

It roll’d as black as death; and that same tide

Which, coming with our coming, seem’d to smile

And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest,

Ran sunless down, and moan’d against the piers.

But o’er the chasm I saw Lord William Howard

By torchlight, and his guard; four guns gaped at me,

Black, silent mouths: had Howard spied me there

And made them speak, as well he might have done,

Their voice had left me none to tell you this.

What shall we do?

BRETT.

On somehow. To go back

Were to lose all.

WYATT.

On over London Bridge

We cannot: stay we cannot; there is ordnance

On the White Tower and on the Devil’s Tower,

And pointed full at Southwark; we must round

By Kingston Bridge.

BRETT.

Ten miles about.

WYATT.

Ev’n so.

But I have notice from our partisans

Within the city that they will stand by us

If Ludgate can be reach’d by dawn to-morrow.

Enter one of WYATT’S MEN.

MAN.

Sir Thomas, I’ve found this paper; pray your worship read it; I know not my letters; the old priests taught me nothing.

WYATT (reads).

‘Whosoever will apprehend the traitor Thomas Wyatt shall have a hundred pounds for reward.’

MAN.

Is that it? That’s a big lot of money.

WYATT.

Ay, ay, my friend; not read it? ‘Tis not written

Half plain enough. Give me a piece of paper!

[Writes ‘THOMAS WYATT’ large.

There, any man can read that.        [Sticks it in his cap.

BRETT.

But that’s foolhardy.

WYATT.

No! boldness, which will give my followers boldness.

Enter MAN with a prisoner.

MAN.

We found him, your worship, a plundering o’ Bishop Winchester’s

house; he says he’s a poor gentleman.

WYATT.

Gentleman! a thief! Go hang him. Shall we make

Those that we come to serve our sharpest foes?

BRETT.

Sir Thomas —

WYATT.

Hang him, I say.

BRETT.

Wyatt, but now you promised me a boon.

WYATT.

Ay, and I warrant this fine fellow’s life.

BRETT.

Ev’n so; he was my neighbour once in Kent.

He’s poor enough, has drunk and gambled out

All that he had, and gentleman he was.

We have been glad together; let him live.

WYATT.

He has gambled for his life, and lost, he hangs.

No, no, my word’s my word. Take thy poor gentleman!

Gamble thyself at once out of my sight,

Or I will dig thee with my dagger. Away!

Women and children!

Enter a Crowd of WOMEN and CHILDREN.

FIRST WOMAN.

O Sir Thomas, Sir Thomas, pray you go away, Sir Thomas, or you’ll make the White Tower a black ‘un for us this blessed day. He’ll be the death on us; and you’ll set the Divil’s Tower a-spitting, and he’ll smash all our bits o’ things worse than Philip o’ Spain.

SECOND WOMAN.

Don’t ye now go to think that we be for Philip o’ Spain.

THIRD WOMAN.

No, we know that ye be come to kill the Queen, and we’ll pray for you all on our bended knees. But o’ God’s mercy don’t ye kill the Queen here, Sir Thomas; look ye, here’s little Dickon, and little Robin, and little Jenny — though she’s but a side-cousin — and all on our knees, we pray you to kill the Queen further off, Sir Thomas.

WYATT.

My friends, I have not come to kill the Queen

Or here or there: I come to save you all,

And I’ll go further off.

CROWD.

Thanks, Sir Thomas, we be beholden to you, and we’ll pray for you on our bended knees till our lives’ end.

WYATT.

Be happy, I am your friend. To Kingston, forward!

[Exeunt.

Scene IV

Room in the Gatehouse of Westminster Palace

MARY, ALICE, GARDINER, RENARD, LADIES.

GARDINER.

Their cry is, Philip never shall be king.

MARY.

Lord Pembroke in command of all our force

Will front their cry and shatter them into dust.

ALICE.

Was not Lord Pembroke with Northumberland?

O madam, if this Pembroke should be false?

MARY.

No, girl; most brave and loyal, brave and loyal.

His breaking with Northumberland broke Northumberland.

At the park gate he hovers with our guards.

These Kentish ploughmen cannot break the guards.

Enter MESSENGER.

MESSENGER.

Wyatt, your Grace, hath broken thro’ the guards

And gone to Ludgate.

GARDINER.

Madam, I much fear

That all is lost; but we can save your Grace.

The river still is free. I do beseech you,

There yet is time, take boat and pass to Windsor.

MARY.

I pass to Windsor and I lose my crown.

GARDINER.

Pass, then, I pray your Highness, to the Tower.

MARY.

I shall but be their prisoner in the Tower.

Cries without.

The traitor! treason! Pembroke!

LADIES.

Treason! treason!

MARY.

Peace.

False to Northumberland, is he false to me?

Bear witness, Renard, that I live and die

The true and faithful bride of Philip — A sound

Of feet and voices thickening hither — blows —

Hark, there is battle at the palace gates,

And I will out upon the gallery.

LADIES.

No, no, your Grace; see there the arrows flying.

MARY.

I am Harry’s daughter, Tudor, and not Fear.

[Goes out on the gallery.

The guards are all driven in, skulk into corners

Like r

Act III

Scene I

The Conduit in Gracechurch, painted with the Nine Worthies, among them King Henry VIII. holding a book, on it inscribed ‘Verbum Dei’.

Enter SIR RALPH BAGENHALL and SIR THOMAS STAFFORD.

BAGENHALL.

A hundred here and hundreds hang’d in Kent.

The tigress had unsheath’d her nails at last,

And Renard and the Chancellor sharpen’d them.

In every London street a gibbet stood.

They are down to-day. Here by this house was one;

The traitor husband dangled at the door,

And when the traitor wife came out for bread

To still the petty treason therewithin,

Her cap would brush his heels.

STAFFORD.

It is Sir Ralph,

And muttering to himself as heretofore.

Sir, see you aught up yonder?

BAGENHALL.

I miss something.

The tree that only bears dead fruit is gone.

STAFFORD.

What tree, sir?

BAGENHALL.

Well, the tree in Virgil, sir,

That bears not its own apples.

STAFFORD.

What! the gallows?

BAGENHALL.

Sir, this dead fruit was ripening overmuch,

And had to be removed lest living Spain

Should sicken at dead England.

STAFFORD.

Not so dead,

But that a shock may rouse her.

BAGENHALL.

I believe

Sir Thomas Stafford?

STAFFORD.

I am ill disguised.

BAGENHALL.

Well, are you not in peril here?

STAFFORD.

I think so.

I came to feel the pulse of England, whether

It beats hard at this marriage. Did you see it?

BAGENHALL.

Stafford, I am a sad man and a serious.

Far liefer had I in my country hall

Been reading some old book, with mine old hound

Couch’d at my hearth, and mine old flask of wine

Beside me, than have seen it: yet I saw it.

STAFFORD.

Good, was it splendid?

BAGENHALL.

Ay, if Dukes, and Earls,

And Counts, and sixty Spanish cavaliers,

Some six or seven Bishops, diamonds, pearls,

That royal commonplace too, cloth of gold, Could make it so.

STAFFORD.

And what was Mary’s dress?

BAGENHALL.

Good faith, I was too sorry for the woman

To mark the dress. She wore red shoes!

STAFFORD.

Red shoes!

BAGENHALL.

Scarlet, as if her feet were wash’d in blood,

As if she had waded in it.

STAFFORD.

Were your eyes

So bashful that you look’d no higher?

BAGENHALL.

A diamond,

And Philip’s gift, as proof of Philip’s love,

Who hath not any for any, — tho’ a true one,

Blazed false upon her heart.

STAFFORD.

But this proud Prince —

BAGENHALL.

Nay, he is King, you know, the King of Naples.

The father ceded Naples, that the son

Being a King, might wed a Queen — O he

Flamed in brocade — white satin his trunk-hose,

Inwrought with silver, — on his neck a collar,

Gold, thick with diamonds; hanging down from this

The Golden Fleece — and round his knee, misplaced,

Our English Garter, studded with great emeralds,

Rubies, I know not what. Have you had enough

Of all this gear?

STAFFORD.

Ay, since you hate the telling it.

How look’d the Queen?

BAGENHALL.

No fairer for her jewels.

And I could see that as the new-made couple

Came from the Minster, moving side by side

Beneath one canopy, ever and anon

She cast on him a vassal smile of love,

Which Philip with a glance of some distaste,

Or so methought, return’d. I may be wrong, sir.

This marriage will not hold.

STAFFORD.

I think with you.

The King of France will help to break it.

BAGENHALL.

France!

We have once had half of France, and hurl’d our battles

Into the heart of Spain; but England now

Is but a ball chuck’d between France and Spain,

His in whose hand she drops; Harry of Bolingbroke

Had holpen Richard’s tottering throne to stand,

Could Harry have foreseen that all our nobles

Would perish on the civil slaughter-field,

And leave the people naked to the crown,

And the crown naked to the people; the crown

Female, too! Sir, no woman’s regimen

Can save us. We are fallen, and as I think,

Never to rise again.

STAFFORD.

You are too black-blooded.

I’d make a move myself to hinder that:

I know some lusty fellows there in France.

BAGENHALL.

You would but make us weaker, Thomas Stafford.

Wyatt was a good soldier, yet he fail’d,

And strengthen’d Philip.

STAFFORD.

Did not his last breath

Clear Courtenay and the Princess from the charge

Of being his co-rebels?

BAGENHALL.

Ay, but then

What such a one as Wyatt says is nothing:

We have no men among us. The new Lords

Are quieted with their sop of Abbeylands,

And ev’n before the Queen’s face Gardiner buys them

With Philip’s gold. All greed, no faith, no courage!

Why, ev’n the haughty prince, Northumberland,

The leader of our Reformation, knelt

And blubber’d like a lad, and on the scaffold

Recanted, and resold himself to Rome.

STAFFORD.

I swear you do your country wrong, Sir Ralph.

I know a set of exiles over there,

Dare-devils, that would eat fire and spit it out

At Philip’s beard: they pillage Spain already.

The French King winks at it. An hour will come

When they will sweep her from the seas. No men?

Did not Lord Suffolk die like a true man?

Is not Lord William Howard a true man?

Yea, you yourself, altho’ you are black-blooded:

And I, by God, believe myself a man.

Ay, even in the church there is a man —

Cranmer.

Fly would he not, when all men bad him fly.

And what a letter he wrote against the Pope!

There’s a brave man, if any.

BAGENHALL.

Ay; if it hold.

CROWD (coming on).

God save their Graces!

STAFFORD.

Bagenhall, I see

The Tudor green and white. (Trumpets.) They are coming now.

And here’s a crowd as thick as herring-shoals.

BAGENHALL.

Be limpets to this pillar, or we are torn

Down the strong wave of brawlers.

CROWD.

God save their Graces!

[Procession of Trumpeters, Javelin-men, etc.; then

Spanish and Flemish Nobles intermingled.

STAFFORD.

Worth seeing, Bagenhall! These black dog-Dons

Garb themselves bravely. Who’s the long-face there,

Looks very Spain of very Spain?

BAGENHALL.

The Duke

Of Alva, an iron soldier.

STAFFORD.

And the Dutchman,

Now laughing at some jest?

BAGENHALL.

William of Orange,

William the Silent.

STAFFORD.

Why do they call him so?

BAGENHALL.

He keeps, they say, some secret that may cost

Philip his life.

STAFFORD.

But then he looks so merry.

BAGENHALL.

I cannot tell you why they call him so.

[The KING and QUEEN pass, attended by Peers of

the Realm, Officers of State, etc. Cannon shot off.

CROWD.

Philip and Mary, Philip and Mary!

Long live the King and Queen, Philip and Mary!

STAFFORD.

They smile as if content with one another.

BAGENHALL.

A smile abroad is oft a scowl at home.

[KING and QUEEN pass on. Procession.

FIRST CITIZEN.

I thought this Philip had been one of those black devils of Spain, but he hath a yellow beard.

SECOND CITIZEN.

Not red like Iscariot’s.

FIRST CITIZEN.

Like a carrot’s, as thou say’st, and English carrot’s better than Spanish licorice; but I thought he was a beast.

THIRD CITIZEN.

Certain I had heard that every Spaniard carries a tail like a devil under his trunk-hose.

TAILOR.

Ay, but see what trunk-hoses! Lord! they be fine; I never stitch’d none such. They make amends for the tails.

FOURTH CITIZEN.

Tut! every Spanish priest will tell you that all English heretics have tails.

FIFTH CITIZEN.

Death and the Devil — if he find I have one —

FOURTH CITIZEN.

Lo! thou hast call’d them up! here they come — a pale horse for Death and Gardiner for the Devil.

Enter GARDINER (turning back from the procession).

GARDINER.

Knave, wilt thou wear thy cap before the Queen?

MAN.

My Lord, I stand so squeezed among the crowd I cannot lift my hands unto my head.

GARDINER.

Knock off his cap there, some of you about him!

See there be others that can use their hands.

Thou art one of Wyatt’s men?

MAN.

No, my Lord, no.

GARDINER.

Thy name, thou knave?

MAN.

I am nobody, my Lord.

GARDINER (shouting).

God’s passion! knave, thy name?

MAN.

I have ears to hear.

GARDINER.

Ay, rascal, if I leave thee ears to hear.

Find out his name and bring it me (to ATTENDANT).

ATTENDANT.

Ay, my Lord.

GARDINER.

Knave, thou shalt lose thine ears and find thy tongue,

And shalt be thankful if I leave thee that.

[Coming before the Conduit.

The conduit painted — the nine worthies — ay!

But then what’s here? King Harry with a scroll.

Ha — Verbum Dei — verbum — word of God!

God’s passion! do you know the knave that painted it?

ATTENDANT.

I do, my Lord.

GARDINER.

Tell him to paint it out,

And put some fresh device in lieu of it —

A pair of gloves, a pair of gloves, sir; ha?

There is no heresy there.

ATTENDANT.

I will, my Lord;

The man shall paint a pair of gloves. I am sure

(Knowing the man) he wrought it ignorantly,

And not from any malice.

GARDINER.

Word of God

In English! over this the brainless loons

That cannot spell Esaias from St. Paul,

Make themselves drunk and mad, fly out and flare

Into rebellions. I’ll have their bibles burnt.

The bible is the priest’s. Ay! fellow, what!

Stand staring at me! shout, you gaping rogue!

MAN.

I have, my Lord, shouted till I am hoarse.

GARDINER.

What hast thou shouted, knave?

MAN.  Long live Queen Mary!

GARDINER.

Knave, there be two. There be both King and Queen,

Philip and Mary. Shout!

MAN.

Nay, but, my Lord,

The Queen comes first, Mary and Philip.

GARDINER.  Shout, then,

Mary and Philip!

MAN.

Mary and Philip!

GARDINER.

Now,

Thou hast shouted for thy pleasure, shout for mine!

Philip and Mary!

MAN.

Must it be so, my Lord?

GARDINER.

Ay, knave.

MAN.

Philip and Mary!

GARDINER.

I distrust thee.

Thine is a half voice and a lean assent.

What is thy name?

MAN.

Sanders.

GARDINER.

What else?

MAN.

Zerubbabel.

GARDINER.

Where dost thou live?

MAN.

In Cornhill.

GARDINER.  Where, knave, where?

MAN.

Sign of the Talbot.

GARDINER.

Come to me to-morrow. —

Rascal! — this land is like a hill of fire,

One crater opens when another shuts.

But so I get the laws against the heretic,

Spite of Lord Paget and Lord William Howard,

And others of our Parliament, revived,

I will show fire on my side — stake and fire —

Sharp work and short. The knaves are easily cow’d.

Follow their Majesties.

[Exit. The crowd following.

BAGENHALL.

As proud as Becket.

STAFFORD.

You would not have him murder’d as Becket was?

BAGENHALL.

No — murder fathers murder: but I say

There is no man — there was one woman with us —

It was a sin to love her married, dead

I cannot choose but love her.

STAFFORD.

Lady Jane?

CROWD (going off).

God save their Graces!

STAFFORD.

Did you see her die?

BAGENHALL.

No, no; her innocent blood had blinded me.

You call me too black-blooded — true enough

Her dark dead blood is in my heart with mine.

If ever I cry out against the Pope

Her dark dead blood that ever moves with mine

Will stir the living tongue and make the cry.

STAFFORD.

Yet doubtless you can tell me how she died?

BAGENHALL.

Seventeen — and knew eight languages — in music

Peerless — her needle perfect, and her learning

Beyond the churchmen; yet so meek, so modest,

So wife-like humble to the trivial boy

Mismatch’d with her for policy! I have heard

She would not take a last farewell of him,

She fear’d it might unman him for his end.

She could not be unmann’d — no, nor outwoman’d —

Seventeen — a rose of grace!

Girl never breathed to rival such a rose;

Rose never blew that equall’d such a bud.

STAFFORD.

Pray you go on.

BAGENHALL.

She came upon the scaffold,

And said she was condemn’d to die for treason;

She had but follow’d the device of those

Her nearest kin: she thought they knew the laws.

But for herself, she knew but little law,

And nothing of the titles to the crown;

She had no desire for that, and wrung her hands,

And trusted God would save her thro’ the blood

Of Jesus Christ alone.

STAFFORD.

Pray you go on.

BAGENHALL.

Then knelt and said the Misere Mei —

But all in English, mark you; rose again,

And, when the headsman pray’d to be forgiven,

Said, ‘You will give me my true crown at last,

But do it quickly;’ then all wept but she,

Who changed not colour when she saw the block,

But ask’d him, childlike: ‘Will you take it off

Before I lay me down?’ ‘No, madam,’ he said,

Gasping; and when her innocent eyes were bound,

She, with her poor blind hands feeling—’where is it?

Where is it?’ — You must fancy that which follow’d,

If you have heart to do it!

CROWD (in the distance).

God save their Graces!

STAFFORD.

Their Graces, our disgraces! God confound them!

Why, she’s grown bloodier! when I last was here,

This was against her conscience — would be murder!

BAGENHALL.

The ‘Thou shall do no murder,’ which God’s hand

Wrote on her conscience, Mary rubb’d out pale —

She could not make it white — and over that,

Traced in the blackest text of Hell—’Thou shall!’

And sign’d it — Mary!

STAFFORD.

Philip and the Pope

Must have sign’d too. I hear this Legate’s coming

To bring us absolution from the Pope.

The Lords and Commons will bow down before him —

You are of the house? what will you do, Sir Ralph?

BAGENHALL.

And why should I be bolder than the rest,

Or honester than all?

STAFFORD.

But, sir, if I —

And oversea they say this state of yours

Hath no more mortice than a tower of cards;

And that a puff would do it — then if I

And others made that move I touch’d upon,

Back’d by the power of France, and landing here,

Came with a sudden splendour, shout, and show,

And dazzled men and deafen’d by some bright

Loud venture, and the people so unquiet —

And I the race of murder’d Buckingham —

Not for myself, but for the kingdom — Sir,

I trust that you would fight along with us.

BAGENHALL.

No; you would fling your lives into the gulf.

STAFFORD.

But if this Philip, as he’s like to do,

Left Mary a wife-widow here alone,

Set up a viceroy, sent his myriads hither

To seize upon the forts and fleet, and make us

A Spanish province; would you not fight then?

BAGENHALL.

I think I should fight then.

STAFFORD.

I am sure of it.

Hist! there’s the face coming on here of one

Who knows me. I must leave you. Fare you well,

You’ll hear of me again.

BAGENHALL.

Upon the scaffold.

[Exeunt.

Scene II

Room in Whitehall Palace

MARY. Enter PHILIP and CARDINAL POLE.

POLE.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Benedicta tu in mulieribus.

MARY.

Loyal and royal cousin, humblest thanks.

Had you a pleasant voyage up the river?

POLE.

We had your royal barge, and that same chair,

Or rather throne of purple, on the deck.

Our silver cross sparkled before the prow,

The ripples twinkled at their diamond-dance,

The boats that follow’d, were as glowing-gay

As regal gardens; and your flocks of swans,

As fair and white as angels; and your shores

Wore in mine eyes the green of Paradise.

My foreign friends, who dream’d us blanketed

In ever-closing fog, were much amazed

To find as fair a sun as might have flash’d

Upon their lake of Garda, fire the Thames;

Our voyage by sea was all but miracle;

And here the river flowing from the sea,

Not toward it (for they thought not of our tides),

Seem’d as a happy miracle to make glide —

In quiet — home your banish’d countryman.

MARY.

We heard that you were sick in Flanders, cousin.

POLE.

A dizziness.

MARY.

And how came you round again?

POLE.

The scarlet thread of Rahab saved her life;

And mine, a little letting of the blood.

MARY.

Well? now?

POLE.

Ay, cousin, as the heathen giant

Had but to touch the ground, his force return’d —

Thus, after twenty years of banishment,

Feeling my native land beneath my foot,

I said thereto: ‘Ah, native land of mine,

Thou art much beholden to this foot of mine,

That hastes with full commission from the Pope

To absolve thee from thy guilt of heresy.

Thou hast disgraced me and attainted me,

And mark’d me ev’n as Cain, and I return

As Peter, but to bless thee: make me well.’

Methinks the good land heard me, for to-day

My heart beats twenty, when I see you, cousin.

Ah, gentle cousin, since your Herod’s death,

How oft hath Peter knock’d at Mary’s gate!

And Mary would have risen and let him in,

But, Mary, there were those within the house

Who would not have it.

MARY.

True, good cousin Pole;

And there were also those without the house

Who would not have it.

POLE.

I believe so, cousin.

State-policy and church-policy are conjoint,

But Janus-faces looking diverse ways.

I fear the Emperor much misvalued me.

But all is well; ‘twas ev’n the will of God,

Who, waiting till the time had ripen’d, now,

Makes me his mouth of holy greeting. ‘Hail,

Daughter of God, and saver of the faith.

Sit benedictus fructus ventris tui!’

MARY.

Ah, heaven!

POLE.

Unwell, your Grace?

MARY.

No, cousin, happy —

Happy to see you; never yet so happy

Since I was crown’d.

POLE.

Sweet cousin, you forget

That long low minster where you gave your hand

To this great Catholic King.

PHILIP.

Well said, Lord Legate.

MARY.

Nay, not well said; I thought of you, my liege,

Ev’n as I spoke.

PHILIP.

Ay, Madam; my Lord Paget

Waits to present our Council to the Legate.

Sit down here, all; Madam, between us you.

POLE.

Lo, now you are enclosed with boards of cedar,

Our little sister of the Song of Songs!

You are doubly fenced and shielded sitting here

Between the two most high-set thrones on earth,

The Emperor’s highness happily symboll’d by

The King your husband, the Pope’s Holiness

By mine own self.

MARY.

True, cousin, I am happy.

When will you that we summon both our houses

To take this absolution from your lips,

And be regather’d to the Papal fold?

POLE.

In Britain’s calendar the brightest day

Beheld our rough forefathers break their Gods,

And clasp the faith in Christ; but after that

Might not St. Andrew’s be her happiest day?

MARY.

Then these shall meet upon St. Andrew’s day.

Enter PAGET, who presents the Council. Dumb show.

POLE.

I am an old man wearied with my journey,

Ev’n with my joy. Permit me to withdraw.

To Lambeth?

PHILIP.

Ay, Lambeth has ousted Cranmer.

It was not meet the heretic swine should live

In Lambeth.

MARY.

There or anywhere, or at all.

PHILIP.

We have had it swept and garnish’d after him.

POLE.

Not for the seven devils to enter in?

PHILIP.

No, for we trust they parted in the swine.

POLE.

True, and I am the Angel of the Pope.

Farewell, your Graces.

PHILIP.

Nay, not here — to me;

I will go with you to the waterside.

POLE.

Not be my Charon to the counter side?

PHILIP.

No, my Lord Legate, the Lord Chancellor goes.

POLE.

And unto no dead world; but Lambeth palace,

Henceforth a centre of the living faith.

[Exeunt Philip, Pole, Paget, etc.

Manet MARY.

MARY.

He hath awaked! he hath awaked!

He stirs within the darkness!

Oh, Philip, husband! now thy love to mine

Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw,

That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love.

The second Prince of Peace —

The great unborn defender of the Faith,

Who will avenge me of mine enemies —

He comes, and my star rises.

The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands,

The proud ambitions of Elizabeth,

And all her fieriest partisans — are pale

Before my star!

The light of this new learning wanes and dies:

The ghosts of Luther and Zuinglius fade

Into the deathless hell which is their doom

Before my star!

His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind!

His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down!

His faith shall clothe the world that will be his,

Like universal air and sunshine! Open,

Ye everlasting gates! The King is here! —

My star, my son!

Enter PHILIP, DUKE OF ALVA, etc.

Oh, Philip, come with me;

Good news have I to tell you, news to make

Both of us happy — ay, the Kingdom too.

Nay come with me — one moment!

PHILIP (to ALVA).

More than that:

There was one here of late — William the Silent

They call him — he is free enough in talk,

But tells me nothing. You will be, we trust,

Sometime the viceroy of those provinces —

He must deserve his surname better.

ALVA.

Ay, sir;

Inherit the Great Silence.

PHILIP.

True; the provinces

Are hard to rule and must be hardly ruled;

Most fruitful, yet, indeed, an empty rind,

All hollow’d out with stinging heresies;

And for their heresies, Alva, they will fight;

You must break them or they break you.

ALVA (proudly).

The first.

PHILIP.

Good!

Well, Madam, this new happiness of mine?

[Exeunt.

Enter THREE PAGES.

FIRST PAGE.

News, mates! a miracle, a miracle! news!

The bells must ring; Te Deums must be sung;

The Queen hath felt the motion of her babe!

SECOND PAGE.

Ay; but see here!

FIRST PAGE.

See what?

SECOND PAGE.

This paper, Dickon.

I found it fluttering at the palace gates: —

‘The Queen of England is delivered of a dead dog!’

THIRD PAGE.

These are the things that madden her. Fie upon it!

FIRST PAGE.

Ay; but I hear she hath a dropsy, lad,

Or a high-dropsy, as the doctors call it.

THIRD PAGE.

Fie on her dropsy, so she have a dropsy!

I know that she was ever sweet to me.

FIRST PAGE.

For thou and thine are Roman to the core.

THIRD PAGE.

So thou and thine must be. Take heed!

FIRST PAGE.  Not I,

And whether this flash of news be false or true,

So the wine run, and there be revelry,

Content am I. Let all the steeples clash,

Till the sun dance, as upon Easter Day.

[Exeunt.

Scene III

Great Hall in Whitehall

At the far end a dais. On this three chairs, two under one canopy

for MARY and PHILIP, another on the right of these for POLE.

Under the dais on POLE’S side, ranged along the wall, sit all the

Spiritual Peers, and along the wall opposite, all the Temporal. The

Commons on cross benches in front, a line of approach to the dais

between them. In the foreground, SIR RALPH BAGENHALL and other

Members of the Commons.

FIRST MEMEBER.

St. Andrew’s day; sit close, sit close, we are friends.

Is reconciled the word? the Pope again?

It must be thus; and yet, cocksbody! how strange

That Gardiner, once so one with all of us

Against this foreign marriage, should have yielded

So utterly! — strange! but stranger still that he,

So fierce against the Headship of the Pope,

Should play the second actor in this pageant

That brings him in; such a cameleon he!

SECOND MEMEBER.

This Gardiner turn’d his coat in Henry’s time;

The serpent that hath slough’d will slough again.

THIRD MEMEBER.

Tut, then we all are serpents.

SECOND MEMEBER.

Speak for yourself.

THIRD MEMEBER.

Ay, and for Gardiner! being English citizen,

How should he bear a bridegroom out of Spain?

The Queen would have him! being English churchman

How should he bear the headship of the Pope?

The Queen would have it! Statesmen that are wise

Shape a necessity, as a sculptor clay,

To their own model.

SECOND MEMEBER.

Statesmen that are wise

Take truth herself for model. What say you?

[To SIR RALPH BAGENHALL.

BAGENHALL.

We talk and talk.

FIRST MEMEBER.

Ay, and what use to talk?

Philip’s no sudden alien — the Queen’s husband,

He’s here, and king, or will be — yet cocksbody!

So hated here! I watch’d a hive of late;

My seven-years’ friend was with me, my young boy;

Out crept a wasp, with half the swarm behind.

‘Philip!’ says he. I had to cuff the rogue

For infant treason.

THIRD MEMEBER.

But they say that bees,

If any creeping life invade their hive

Too gross to be thrust out, will build him round,

And bind him in from harming of their combs.

And Philip by these articles is bound

From stirring hand or foot to wrong the realm.

SECOND MEMEBER.

By bonds of beeswax, like your creeping thing;

But your wise bees had stung him first to death.

THIRD MEMEBER.

Hush, hush!

You wrong the Chancellor: the clauses added

To that same treaty which the emperor sent us

Were mainly Gardiner’s: that no foreigner

Hold office in the household, fleet, forts, army;

That if the Queen should die without a child,

The bond between the kingdoms be dissolved;

That Philip should not mix us any way

With his French wars —

SECOND MEMEBER.

Ay, ay, but what security,

Good sir, for this, if Philip ——

THIRD MEMEBER.

Peace — the Queen, Philip, and Pole.

[All rise, and stand.

Enter MARY, PHILIP, and POLE.

[GARDINER conducts them to the three chairs of state.

PHILIP sits on the QUEEN’S left, POLE on her right.

GARDINER.

Our short-lived sun, before his winter plunge,

Laughs at the last red leaf, and Andrew’s Day.

MARY.

Should not this day be held in after years

More solemn than of old?

PHILIP.

Madam, my wish

Echoes your Majesty’s.

POLE.

It shall be so.

GARDINER.

Mine echoes both your Graces’; (aside) but the Pope —

Can we not have the Catholic church as well

Without as with the Italian? if we cannot,

Why then the Pope.

My lords of the upper house,

And ye, my masters, of the lower house,

Do ye stand fast by that which ye resolved?

VOICES.

We do.

GARDINER.

And be you all one mind to supplicate

The Legate here for pardon, and acknowledge

The primacy of the Pope?

VOICES.

We are all one mind.

GARDINER.

Then must I play the vassal to this Pole.        [Aside.

[He draws a paper from under his robes and

presents it to the KING and QUEEN, who look

through it and return it to him; then ascends

a tribune, and reads.

We, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal,

And Commons here in Parliament assembled,

Presenting the whole body of this realm

Of England, and dominions of the same,

Do make most humble suit unto your Majesties,

In our own name and that of all the state,

That by your gracious means and intercession

Our supplication be exhibited

To the Lord Cardinal Pole, sent here as Legate

From our most Holy Father Julius, Pope,

And from the Apostolic see of Rome;

And do declare our penitence and grief

For our long schism and disobedience,

Either in making laws and ordinances

Against the Holy Father’s primacy,

Or else by doing or by speaking aught

Which might impugn or prejudice the same;

By this our supplication promising,

As well for our own selves as all the realm,

That now we be and ever shall be quick,

Under and with your Majesties’ authorities,

To do to the utmost all that in us lies

Towards the abrogation and repeal

Of all such laws and ordinances made;

Whereon we humbly pray your Majesties,

As persons undefiled with our offence,

So to set forth this humble suit of ours

That we the rather by your intercession

May from the Apostolic see obtain,

Thro’ this most reverend Father, absolution,

And full release from danger of all censures

Of Holy Church that we be fall’n into,

So that we may, as children penitent,

Be once again received into the bosom

And unity of Universal Church;

And that this noble realm thro’ after years

May in this unity and obedience

Unto the holy see and reigning Pope

Serve God and both your Majesties.

VOICES.

Amen.

[All sit.

[He again presents the petition to the KING and

QUEEN, who hand it reverentially to POLE.

POLE (sitting).

This is the loveliest day that ever smiled

On England. All her breath should, incenselike,

Rise to the heavens in grateful praise of Him

Who now recalls her to His ancient fold.

Lo! once again God to this realm hath given

A token of His more especial Grace;

For as this people were the first of all

The islands call’d into the dawning church

Out of the dead, deep night of heathendom,

So now are these the first whom God hath given

Grace to repent and sorrow for their schism;

And if your penitence be not mockery,

Oh how the blessed angels who rejoice

Over one saved do triumph at this hour

In the reborn salvation of a land

So noble.        [A pause.

For ourselves we do protest

That our commission is to heal, not harm;

We come not to condemn, but reconcile;

We come not to compel, but call again;

We come not to destroy, but edify;

Nor yet to question things already done;

These are forgiven — matters of the past —

And range with jetsam and with offal thrown

Into the blind sea of forgetfulness.        [A pause.

Ye have reversed the attainder laid on us

By him who sack’d the house of God; and we,

Amplier than any field on our poor earth

Can render thanks in fruit for being sown,

Do here and now repay you sixty-fold,

A hundred, yea, a thousand thousand-fold,

With heaven for earth.

[Rising and stretching forth his hands. All kneel but

SIR RALPH BAGENHALL, who rises and remains standing.

The Lord who hath redeem’d us

With His own blood, and wash’d us from our sins,

To purchase for Himself a stainless bride;

He, whom the Father hath appointed Head

Of all his church, He by His mercy absolve you!        [A pause.

And we by that authority Apostolic,

Given unto us, his Legate, by the Pope,

Our Lord and Holy Father, Julius,

God’s Vicar and Vicegerent upon earth,

Do here absolve you and deliver you

And every one of you, and all the realm

And its dominions from all heresy,

All schism, and from all and every censure,

Judgment, and pain accruing thereupon;

And also we restore you to the bosom

And unity of Universal Church.

[Turning to GARDINER.

Our letters of commission will declare this plainlier.

[QUEEN heard sobbing. Cries of Amen! Amen! Some of the

Members embrace one another. All but SIR RALPH BAGENHALL

pass out into the neighboring chapel, whence is heard

the Te Deum.

BAGENHALL.

We strove against the papacy from the first,

In William’s time, in our first Edward’s time,

And in my master Henry’s time; but now,

The unity of Universal Church,

Mary would have it; and this Gardiner follows;

The unity of Universal Hell,

Philip would have it; and this Gardiner follows!

A Parliament of imitative apes!

Sheep at the gap which Gardiner takes, who not

Believes the Pope, nor any of them believe —

These spaniel-Spaniard English of the time,

Who rub their fawning noses in the dust,

For that is Philip’s gold-dust, and adore

This Vicar of their Vicar. Would I had been

Born Spaniard! I had held my head up then.

I am ashamed that I am Bagenhall,

English.

Enter OFFICER.

OFFICER.

Sir Ralph Bagenhall!

BAGENHALL.

What of that?

OFFICER.

You were the one sole man in either house

Who stood upright when both the houses fell.

BAGENHALL.

The houses fell!

OFFICER.

I mean the houses knelt

Before the Legate.

BAGENHALL.

Do not scrimp your phrase,

But stretch it wider; say when England fell.

OFFICER.

I say you were the one sole man who stood.

BAGENHALL.

I am the one sole man in either house,

Perchance in England, loves her like a son.

OFFICER.

Well, you one man, because you stood upright,

Her Grace the Queen commands you to the Tower.

BAGENHALL.

As traitor, or as heretic, or for what?

OFFICER.

If any man in any way would be

The one man, he shall be so to his cost.

BAGENHALL.

What! will she have my head?

OFFICER.

A round fine likelier.

Your pardon. [Calling to ATTENDANT.

By the river to the Tower.

[Exeunt.

Scene V

Woodstock.

ELIZABETH, LADY IN WAITING.

ELIZABETH.

So they have sent poor Courtenay over sea.

LADY.

And banish’d us to Woodstock, and the fields.

The colours of our Queen are green and white,

These fields are only green, they make me gape.

ELIZABETH.

There’s whitethorn, girl.

LADY.

Ay, for an hour in May.

But court is always May, buds out in masques,

Breaks into feather’d merriments, and flowers

In silken pageants. Why do they keep us here?

Why still suspect your Grace?

ELIZABETH.

Hard upon both.

[Writes on the window with a diamond.

Much suspected, of me

Nothing proven can be.

Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner.

LADY.

What hath your Highness written?

ELIZABETH.

A true rhyme.

LADY.

Cut with a diamond; so to last like truth.

ELIZABETH.

Ay, if truth last.

LADY.

But truth, they say, will out,

So it must last. It is not like a word,

That comes and goes in uttering.

ELIZABETH.

Truth, a word!

The very Truth and very Word are one.

But truth of story, which I glanced at, girl,

Is like a word that comes from olden days,

And passes thro’ the peoples: every tongue

Alters it passing, till it spells and speaks

Quite other than at first.

LADY.

I do not follow.

ELIZABETH.

How many names in the long sweep of time

That so foreshortens greatness, may but hang

On the chance mention of some fool that once

Brake bread with us, perhaps: and my poor chronicle

Is but of glass. Sir Henry Bedingfield

May split it for a spite.

LADY.

God grant it last,

And witness to your Grace’s innocence,

Till doomsday melt it.

ELIZABETH.

Or a second fire,

Like that which lately crackled underfoot

And in this very chamber, fuse the glass,

And char us back again into the dust

We spring from. Never peacock against rain

Scream’d as you did for water.

LADY.

And I got it.

I woke Sir Henry — and he’s true to you

I read his honest horror in his eyes.

ELIZABETH.

Or true to you?

LADY.

Sir Henry Bedingfield!

I will have no man true to me, your Grace,

But one that pares his nails; to me? the clown!

ELIZABETH.

Out, girl! you wrong a noble gentleman.

LADY.

For, like his cloak, his manners want the nap

And gloss of court; but of this fire he says.

Nay swears, it was no wicked wilfulness,

Only a natural chance.

ELIZABETH.

A chance — perchance

One of those wicked wilfuls that men make,

Nor shame to call it nature. Nay, I know

They hunt my blood. Save for my daily range

Among the pleasant fields of Holy Writ

I might despair. But there hath some one come;

The house is all in movement. Hence, and see.

[Exit Lady.

MILKMAID (singing without).

Shame upon you, Robin,

Shame upon you now!

Kiss me would you? with my hands

Milking the cow?

Daisies grow again,

Kingcups blow again,

And you came and kiss’d me milking the cow.

Robin came behind me,

Kiss’d me well I vow;

Cuff him could I? with my hands

Milking the cow?

Swallows fly again,

Cuckoos cry again,

And you came and kiss’d me milking the cow.

Come, Robin, Robin,

Come and kiss me now;

Help it can I? with my hands

Milking the cow?

Ringdoves coo again,

All things woo again.

Come behind and kiss me milking the cow!

ELIZABETH.

Right honest and red-cheek’d; Robin was violent,

And she was crafty — a sweet violence,

And a sweet craft. I would I were a milkmaid,

To sing, love, marry, churn, brew, bake, and die,

Then have my simple headstone by the church,

And all things lived and ended honestly.

I could not if I would. I am Harry’s daughter:

Gardiner would have my head. They are not sweet,

The violence and the craft that do divide

The world of nature; what is weak must lie;

The lion needs but roar to guard his young;

The lapwing lies, says ‘here’ when they are there.

Threaten the child; ‘I’ll scourge you if you did it:’

What weapon hath the child, save his soft tongue,

To say ‘I did not?’ and my rod’s the block.

I never lay my head upon the pillow

But that I think, ‘Wilt thou lie there to-morrow?’

How oft the falling axe, that never fell,

Hath shock’d me back into the daylight truth

That it may fall to-day! Those damp, black, dead

Nights in the Tower; dead — with the fear of death

Too dead ev’n for a death-watch! Toll of a bell,

Stroke of a clock, the scurrying of a rat

Affrighted me, and then delighted me,

For there was life — And there was life in death —

The little murder’d princes, in a pale light,

Rose hand in hand, and whisper’d, ‘come away!

The civil wars are gone for evermore:

Thou last of all the Tudors, come away!

With us is peace!’ The last? It was a dream;

I must not dream, not wink, but watch. She has gone,

Maid Marian to her Robin — by and by

Both happy! a fox may filch a hen by night,

And make a morning outcry in the yard;

But there’s no Renard here to ‘catch her tripping.’

Catch me who can; yet, sometime I have wish’d

That I were caught, and kill’d away at once

Out of the flutter. The gray rogue, Gardiner,

Went on his knees, and pray’d me to confess

In Wyatt’s business, and to cast myself

Upon the good Queen’s mercy; ay, when, my Lord?

God save the Queen! My jailor —

Enter SIR HENRY BEDINGFIELD.

BEDINGFIELD.

One, whose bolts,

That jail you from free life, bar you from death.

There haunt some Papist ruffians hereabout

Would murder you.

ELIZABETH.

I thank you heartily, sir,

But I am royal, tho’ your prisoner,

And God hath blest or cursed me with a nose —

Your boots are from the horses.

BEDINGFIELD.

Ay, my Lady.

When next there comes a missive from the Queen

It shall be all my study for one hour

To rose and lavender my horsiness,

Before I dare to glance upon your Grace.

ELIZABETH.

A missive from the Queen: last time she wrote,

I had like to have lost my life: it takes my breath:

O God, sir, do you look upon your boots,

Are you so small a man? Help me: what think you,

Is it life or death.

BEDINGFIELD.

I thought not on my boots;

The devil take all boots were ever made

Since man went barefoot. See, I lay it here,

For I will come no nearer to your Grace;

[Laying down the letter.

And, whether it bring you bitter news or sweet,

And God hath given your Grace a nose, or not,

I’ll help you, if I may.

ELIZABETH.

Your pardon, then;

It is the heat and narrowness of the cage

That makes the captive testy; with free wing

The world were all one Araby. Leave me now,

Will you, companion to myself, sir?

BEDINGFIELD.

Will I?

With most exceeding willingness, I will;

You know I never come till I be call’d.

[Exit.

ELIZABETH.

It lies there folded: is there venom in it?

A snake — and if I touch it, it may sting.

Come, come, the worst!

Best wisdom is to know the worst at once.        [Reads:

‘It is the King’s wish, that you should wed Prince Philibert of Savoy.

You are to come to Court on the instant; and think of this in your coming.

‘MARY THE QUEEN.’

Think I have many thoughts;

I think there may be birdlime here for me;

I think they fain would have me from the realm;

I think the Queen may never bear a child;

I think that I may be some time the Queen,

Then, Queen indeed: no foreign prince or priest

Should fill my throne, myself upon the steps.

I think I will not marry anyone,

Specially not this landless Philibert

Of Savoy; but, if Philip menace me,

I think that I will play with Philibert,

As once the Holy Father did with mine,

Before my father married my good mother, —

For fear of Spain.

Enter LADY.

LADY.

O Lord! your Grace, your Grace,

I feel so happy: it seems that we shall fly

These bald, blank fields, and dance into the sun

That shines on princes.

ELIZABETH.

Yet, a moment since,

I wish’d myself the milkmaid singing here,

To kiss and cuff among the birds and flowers —

A right rough life and healthful.

LADY.

But the wench

Hath her own troubles; she is weeping now;

For the wrong Robin took her at her word.

Then the cow kick’d, and all her milk was spilt.

Your Highness such a milkmaid?

ELIZABETH.

I had kept

My Robins and my cows in sweeter order

Had I been such.

LADY (slyly).

And had your Grace a Robin?

ELIZABETH.

Come, come, you are chill here; you want the sun

That shines at court; make ready for the journey.

Pray God, we ‘scape the sunstroke. Ready at once.

[Exeunt.

Scene VI

London. A Room in the Palace.

LORD PETRE and LORD WILLIAM HOWARD.

PETRE.

You cannot see the Queen. Renard denied her,

Ev’n now to me.

HOWARD.

Their Flemish go-between

And all-in-all. I came to thank her Majesty

For freeing my friend Bagenhall from the Tower;

A grace to me! Mercy, that herb-of-grace,

Flowers now but seldom.

PETRE.

Only now perhaps.

Because the Queen hath been three days in tears

For Philip’s going — like the wild hedge-rose

Of a soft winter, possible, not probable,

However you have prov’n it.

HOWARD.

I must see her.

Enter RENARD.

RENARD.

My Lords, you cannot see her Majesty.

HOWARD.

Why then the King! for I would have him bring it

Home to the leisure wisdom of his Queen,

Before he go, that since these statutes past,

Gardiner out-Gardiners Gardiner in his heat,

Bonner cannot out-Bonner his own self —

Beast! — but they play with fire as children do,

And burn the house. I know that these are breeding

A fierce resolve and fixt heart-hate in men

Against the King, the Queen, the Holy Father,

The faith itself. Can I not see him?

RENARD.

Not now.

And in all this, my Lord, her Majesty

Is flint of flint, you may strike fire from her,

Not hope to melt her. I will give your message.

[Exeunt Petre and Howard.

Enter PHILIP (musing)

PHILIP.

She will not have Prince Philibert of Savoy,

I talk’d with her in vain — says she will live

And die true maid — a goodly creature too.

Would she had been the Queen! yet she must have him;

She troubles England: that she breathes in England

Is life and lungs to every rebel birth

That passes out of embryo.

Simon Renard! —

This Howard, whom they fear, what was he saying?

RENARD.

What your imperial father said, my liege,

To deal with heresy gentlier. Gardiner burns,

And Bonner burns; and it would seem this people

Care more for our brief life in their wet land,

Than yours in happier Spain. I told my Lord

He should not vex her Highness; she would say

These are the means God works with, that His church

May flourish.

PHILIP.

Ay, sir, but in statesmanship

To strike too soon is oft to miss the blow.

Thou knowest I bad my chaplain, Castro, preach

Against these burnings.

RENARD.

And the Emperor

Approved you, and when last he wrote, declared

His comfort in your Grace that you were bland

And affable to men of all estates,

In hope to charm them from their hate of Spain.

PHILIP.

In hope to crush all heresy under Spain.

But, Renard, I am sicker staying here

Than any sea could make me passing hence,

Tho’ I be ever deadly sick at sea.

So sick am I with biding for this child.

Is it the fashion in this clime for women

To go twelve months in bearing of a child?

The nurses yawn’d, the cradle gaped, they led

Processions, chanted litanies, clash’d their bells,

Shot off their lying cannon, and her priests

Have preach’d, the fools, of this fair prince to come;

Till, by St. James, I find myself the fool.

Why do you lift your eyebrow at me thus?

RENARD.

I never saw your Highness moved till now.

PHILIP.

So weary am I of this wet land of theirs,

And every soul of man that breathes therein.

RENARD.

My liege, we must not drop the mask before

The masquerade is over —

PHILIP.

— Have I dropt it?

I have but shown a loathing face to you,

Who knew it from the first.

Enter MARY.

MARY (aside).

With Renard. Still

Parleying with Renard, all the day with Renard,

And scarce a greeting all the day for me —

And goes to-morrow.

[Exit MARY.

PHILIP (to RENARD, who advances to him).

Well, sir, is there more?

RENARD (who has perceived the QUEEN).

May Simon Renard speak a single word?

PHILIP.

Ay.

RENARD.

And be forgiven for it?

PHILIP.

Simon Renard

Knows me too well to speak a single word

That could not be forgiven.

RENARD.

Well, my liege,

Your Grace hath a most chaste and loving wife.

PHILIP.

Why not? The Queen of Philip should be chaste.

RENARD.

Ay, but, my Lord, you know what Virgil sings,

Woman is various and most mutable.

PHILIP.

She play the harlot! never.

RENARD.

No, sire, no,

Not dream’d of by the rabidest gospeller.

There was a paper thrown into the palace,

‘The King hath wearied of his barren bride.’

She came upon it, read it, and then rent it,

With all the rage of one who hates a truth

He cannot but allow. Sire, I would have you —

What should I say, I cannot pick my words —

Be somewhat less — majestic to your Queen.

PHILIP.

Am I to change my manners, Simon Renard,

Because these islanders are brutal beasts?

Or would you have me turn a sonneteer,

And warble those brief-sighted eyes of hers?

RENARD.

Brief-sighted tho’ they be, I have seen them, sire,

When you perchance were trifling royally

With some fair dame of court, suddenly fill

With such fierce fire — had it been fire indeed

It would have burnt both speakers.

PHILIP.

Ay, and then?

RENARD.

Sire, might it not be policy in some matter

Of small importance now and then to cede

A point to her demand?

PHILIP.

Well, I am going.

RENARD.

For should her love when you are gone, my liege,

Witness these papers, there will not be wanting

Those that will urge her injury — should her love —

And I have known such women more than one —

Veer to the counterpoint, and jealousy

Hath in it an alchemic force to fuse

Almost into one metal love and hate, —

And she impress her wrongs upon her Council,

And these again upon her Parliament —

We are not loved here, and would be then perhaps

Not so well holpen in our wars with France,

As else we might be — here she comes.

Enter MARY.

MARY.

O Philip!

Nay, must you go indeed?

PHILIP.

Madam, I must.

MARY.

The parting of a husband and a wife

Is like the cleaving of a heart; one half

Will flutter here, one there.

PHILIP.

You say true, Madam.

MARY.

The Holy Virgin will not have me yet

Lose the sweet hope that I may bear a prince.

If such a prince were born and you not here!

PHILIP.

I should be here if such a prince were born.

MARY.

But must you go?

PHILIP.

Madam, you know my father,

Retiring into cloistral solitude

To yield the remnant of his years to heaven,

Will shift the yoke and weight of all the world

From off his neck to mine. We meet at Brussels.

But since mine absence will not be for long,

Your Majesty shall go to Dover with me,

And wait my coming back.

MARY.

To Dover? no,

I am too feeble. I will go to Greenwich,

So you will have me with you; and there watch

All that is gracious in the breath of heaven

Draw with your sails from our poor land, and pass

And leave me, Philip, with my prayers for you.

PHILIP.

And doubtless I shall profit by your prayers.

MARY.

Methinks that would you tarry one day more

(The news was sudden) I could mould myself

To bear your going better; will you do it?

PHILIP.

Madam, a day may sink or save a realm.

MARY.

A day may save a heart from breaking too.

PHILIP.

Well, Simon Renard, shall we stop a day?

RENARD.

Your Grace’s business will not suffer, sire,

For one day more, so far as I can tell.

PHILIP.

Then one day more to please her Majesty.

MARY.

The sunshine sweeps across my life again.

O if I knew you felt this parting, Philip,

As I do!

PHILIP.

By St. James I do protest,

Upon the faith and honour of a Spaniard,

I am vastly grieved to leave your Majesty.

Simon, is supper ready?

RENARD.

Ay, my liege,

I saw the covers laying.

PHILIP.

Let us have it.

[Exeunt.

Act IV

Scene I

A Room in the Palace

MARY, CARDINAL POLE

MARY.

What have you there?

POLE.

So please your Majesty,

A long petition from the foreign exiles

To spare the life of Cranmer. Bishop Thirlby,

And my Lord Paget and Lord William Howard,

Crave, in the same cause, hearing of your Grace.

Hath he not written himself — infatuated —

To sue you for his life?

MARY.

His life? Oh, no;

Not sued for that — he knows it were in vain.

But so much of the anti-papal leaven

Works in him yet, he hath pray’d me not to sully

Mine own prerogative, and degrade the realm

By seeking justice at a stranger’s hand

Against my natural subject. King and Queen,

To whom he owes his loyalty after God,

Shall these accuse him to a foreign prince?

Death would not grieve him more. I cannot be

True to this realm of England and the Pope

Together, says the heretic.

POLE.

And there errs;

As he hath ever err’d thro’ vanity.

A secular kingdom is but as the body

Lacking a soul; and in itself a beast.

The Holy Father in a secular kingdom

Is as the soul descending out of heaven

Into a body generate.

MARY.

Write to him, then.

POLE.

I will.

MARY.

And sharply, Pole.

POLE.

Here come the Cranmerites!

Enter THIRLBY, LORD PAGET, LORD WILLIAM HOWARD.

HOWARD.

Health to your Grace! Good morrow, my Lord Cardinal;

We make our humble prayer unto your Grace

That Cranmer may withdraw to foreign parts,

Or into private life within the realm.

In several bills and declarations, Madam,

He hath recanted all his heresies.

PAGET.

Ay, ay; if Bonner have not forged the bills.        [Aside.

MARY.

Did not More die, and Fisher? he must burn.

HOWARD.

He hath recanted, Madam.

MARY.

The better for him.

He burns in Purgatory, not in Hell.

HOWARD.

Ay, ay, your Grace; but it was never seen

That any one recanting thus at full,

As Cranmer hath, came to the fire on earth.

MARY.

It will be seen now, then.

THIRLBY.

O Madam, Madam!

I thus implore you, low upon my knees,

To reach the hand of mercy to my friend.

I have err’d with him; with him I have recanted.

What human reason is there why my friend

Should meet with lesser mercy than myself?

MARY.

My Lord of Ely, this. After a riot

We hang the leaders, let their following go.

Cranmer is head and father of these heresies,

New learning as they call it; yea, may God

Forget me at most need when I forget

Her foul divorce — my sainted mother — No! —

HOWARD.

Ay, ay, but mighty doctors doubted there.

The Pope himself waver’d; and more than one

Row’d in that galley — Gardiner to wit,

Whom truly I deny not to have been

Your faithful friend and trusty councillor.

Hath not your Highness ever read his book.

His tractate upon True Obedience,

Writ by himself and Bonner?

MARY.

I will take

Such order with all bad, heretical books

That none shall hold them in his house and live,

Henceforward. No, my Lord.

HOWARD.

Then never read it.

The truth is here. Your father was a man

Of such colossal kinghood, yet so courteous,

Except when wroth, you scarce could meet his eye

And hold your own; and were he wroth indeed,

You held it less, or not at all. I say,

Your father had a will that beat men down;

Your father had a brain that beat men down —

POLE.

Not me, my Lord.

HOWARD.

No, for you were not here;

You sit upon this fallen Cranmer’s throne;

And it would more become you, my Lord Legate,

To join a voice, so potent with her Highness,

To ours in plea for Cranmer than to stand

On naked self-assertion.

MARY.

All your voices

Are waves on flint. The heretic must burn.

HOWARD.

Yet once he saved your Majesty’s own life;

Stood out against the King in your behalf.

At his own peril.

MARY.

I know not if he did;

And if he did I care not, my Lord Howard.

My life is not so happy, no such boon,

That I should spare to take a heretic priest’s,

Who saved it or not saved. Why do you vex me?

PAGET.

Yet to save Cranmer were to serve the Church,

Your Majesty’s I mean; he is effaced,

Self-blotted out; so wounded in his honour,

He can but creep down into some dark hole

Like a hurt beast, and hide himself and die;

But if you burn him, — well, your Highness knows

The saying, ‘Martyr’s blood — seed of the Church.’

MARY.

Of the true Church; but his is none, nor will be.

You are too politic for me, my Lord Paget.

And if he have to live so loath’d a life,

It were more merciful to burn him now.

THIRLBY.

O yet relent. O, Madam, if you knew him

As I do, ever gentle, and so gracious,

With all his learning —

MARY.

Yet a heretic still.

His learning makes his burning the more just.

THIRLBY.

So worshipt of all those that came across him;

The stranger at his hearth, and all his house —

MARY.

His children and his concubine, belike.

THIRLBY.

To do him any wrong was to beget

A kindness from him, for his heart was rich,

Of such fine mould, that if you sow’d therein

The seed of Hate, it blossom’d Charity.

POLE.

‘After his kind it costs him nothing,’ there’s

An old world English adage to the point.

These are but natural graces, my good Bishop,

Which in the Catholic garden are as flowers,

But on the heretic dunghill only weeds.

HOWARD.

Such weeds make dunghills gracious.

MARY.

Enough, my Lords.

It is God’s will, the Holy Father’s will,

And Philip’s will, and mine, that he should burn.

He is pronounced anathema.

HOWARD.

Farewell, Madam,

God grant you ampler mercy at your call

Than you have shown to Cranmer.

[Exeunt Lords.

POLE.

After this,

Your Grace will hardly care to overlook

This same petition of the foreign exiles

For Cranmer’s life.

MARY.

Make out the writ to-night.

[Exeunt.

Scene II

Oxford. CRANMER in Prison

CRANMER.

Last night, I dream’d the faggots were alight,

And that myself was fasten’d to the stake, I

And found it all a visionary flame,

Cool as the light in old decaying wood;

And then King Harry look’d from out a cloud,

And bad me have good courage; and I heard

An angel cry ‘There is more joy in Heaven,’ —

And after that, the trumpet of the dead.

[Trumpets without.

Why, there are trumpets blowing now: what is it?

Enter FATHER COLE.

COLE.

Cranmer, I come to question you again;

Have you remain’d in the true Catholic faith

I left you in?

CRANMER.

In the true Catholic faith,

By Heaven’s grace, I am more and more confirm’d.

Why are the trumpets blowing, Father Cole?

COLE.

Cranmer, it is decided by the Council

That you to-day should read your recantation

Before the people in St. Mary’s Church.

And there be many heretics in the town,

Who loathe you for your late return to Rome,

And might assail you passing through the street,

And tear you piecemeal: so you have a guard.

CRANMER.

Or seek to rescue me. I thank the Council.

COLE.

Do you lack any money?

CRANMER.

Nay, why should I?

The prison fare is good enough for me.

COLE.

Ay, but to give the poor.

CRANMER.

Hand it me, then!

I thank you.

COLE.

For a little space, farewell;

Until I see you in St. Mary’s Church.

[Exit Cole.

CRANMER.

It is against all precedent to burn

One who recants; they mean to pardon me.

To give the poor — they give the poor who die.

Well, burn me or not burn me I am fixt;

It is but a communion, not a mass:

A holy supper, not a sacrifice;

No man can make his Maker — Villa Garcia.

Enter VILLA GARCIA.

VILLA GARCIA.

Pray you write out this paper for me, Cranmer.

CRANMER.

Have I not writ enough to satisfy you?

VILLA GARCIA.

It is the last.

CRANMER.

Give it me, then.

[He writes.

VILLA GARCIA.

Now sign.

CRANMER.

I have sign’d enough, and I will sign no more.

VILLA GARCIA.

It is no more than what you have sign’d already,

The public form thereof.

CRANMER.

It may be so;

I sign it with my presence, if I read it.

VILLA GARCIA.

But this is idle of you. Well, sir, well,

You are to beg the people to pray for you;

Exhort them to a pure and virtuous life;

Declare the Queen’s right to the throne; confess

Your faith before all hearers; and retract

That Eucharistic doctrine in your book.

Will you not sign it now?

CRANMER.

No, Villa Garcia,

I sign no more. Will they have mercy on me?

VILLA GARCIA.

Have you good hopes of mercy!

So, farewell.

[Exit.

CRANMER.

Good hopes, not theirs, have I that I am fixt,

Fixt beyond fall; however, in strange hours,

After the long brain-dazing colloquies,

And thousand-times recurring argument

Of those two friars ever in my prison,

When left alone in my despondency,

Without a friend, a book, my faith would seem

Dead or half-drown’d, or else swam heavily

Against the huge corruptions of the Church,

Monsters of mistradition, old enough

To scare me into dreaming, ‘what am I,

Cranmer, against whole ages?’ was it so,

Or am I slandering my most inward friend,

To veil the fault of my most outward foe —

The soft and tremulous coward in the flesh?

O higher, holier, earlier, purer church,

I have found thee and not leave thee any more.

It is but a communion, not a mass —

No sacrifice, but a life-giving feast!

(Writes.) So, so; this will I say — thus will I pray.

[Puts up the paper.

Enter BONNER.

BONNER.

Good day, old friend; what, you look somewhat worn;

And yet it is a day to test your health

Ev’n at the best: I scarce have spoken with you

Since when? — your degradation. At your trial

Never stood up a bolder man than you;

You would not cap the Pope’s commissioner —

Your learning, and your stoutness, and your heresy,

Dumbfounded half of us. So, after that,

We had to dis-archbishop and unlord,

And make you simple Cranmer once again.

The common barber dipt your hair, and I

Scraped from your finger-points the holy oil;

And worse than all, you had to kneel to me;

Which was not pleasant for you, Master Cranmer.

Now you, that would not recognise the Pope,

And you, that would not own the Real Presence,

Have found a real presence in the stake,

Which frights you back into the ancient faith:

And so you have recanted to the Pope.

How are the mighty fallen, Master Cranmer!

CRANMER.

You have been more fierce against the Pope than I;

But why fling back the stone he strikes me with?

[Aside.

O Bonner, if I ever did you kindness —

Power hath been given you to try faith by fire —

Pray you, remembering how yourself have changed,

Be somewhat pitiful, after I have gone,

To the poor flock — to women and to children —

That when I was archbishop held with me.

BONNER.

Ay — gentle as they call you — live or die!

Pitiful to this pitiful heresy?

I must obey the Queen and Council, man.

Win thro’ this day with honour to yourself,

And I’ll say something for you — so — good-bye.

[Exit.

CRANMER.

This hard coarse man of old hath crouch’d to me

Till I myself was half ashamed for him.

Enter THIRLBY.

Weep not, good Thirlby.

THIRLBY.

Oh, my Lord, my Lord!

My heart is no such block as Bonner’s is:

Who would not weep?

CRANMER.

Why do you so my — lord me,

Who am disgraced?

THIRLBY.

On earth; but saved in heaven

By your recanting.

CRANMER.

Will they burn me, Thirlby?

THIRLBY.

Alas, they will; these burnings will not help

The purpose of the faith; but my poor voice

Against them is a whisper to the roar

Of a spring-tide.

CRANMER.

And they will surely burn me?

THIRLBY.

Ay; and besides, will have you in the church

Repeat your recantation in the ears

Of all men, to the saving of their souls,

Before your execution. May God help you

Thro’ that hard hour!

CRANMER.

And may God bless you, Thirlby!

Well, they shall hear my recantation there.

[Exit Thirlby.

Disgraced, dishonour’d! — not by them, indeed,

By mine own self — by mine own hand!

O thin-skinn’d hand and jutting veins, ‘twas you

That sign’d the burning of poor Joan of Kent;

But then she was a witch. You have written much,

But you were never raised to plead for Frith,

Whose dogmas I have reach’d: he was deliver’d

To the secular arm to burn; and there was Lambert;

Who can foresee himself? truly these burnings,

As Thirlby says, are profitless to the burners,

And help the other side. You shall burn too,

Burn first when I am burnt.

Fire — inch by inch to die in agony! Latimer

Had a brief end — not Ridley. Hooper burn’d

Three-quarters of an hour. Will my faggots

Be wet as his were? It is a day of rain.

I will not muse upon it.

My fancy takes the burner’s part, and makes

The fire seem even crueller than it is.

No, I not doubt that God will give me strength,

Albeit I have denied him.

Enter SOTO and VILLA GARCIA.

VILLA GARCIA.

We are ready

To take you to St. Mary’s, Master Cranmer.

CRANMER.

And I: lead on; ye loose me from my bonds.

[Exeunt.

Scene III

St. Mary’s Church.

COLE in the Pulpit, LORD WILLIAMS OF THAME presiding. LORD WILLIAM HOWARD, LORD PAGET, and others. CRANMER enters between SOTO and VILLA GARCIA, and the whole Choir strike up ‘Nunc Dimittis.’ CRANMER is set upon a Scaffold before the people.

COLE.

Behold him —

[A pause: people in the foreground.

PEOPLE.

Oh, unhappy sight!

FIRST PROTESTANT.

See how the tears run down his fatherly face.

SECOND PROTESTANT.

James, didst thou ever see a carrion crow

Stand watching a sick beast before he dies?

FIRST PROTESTANT.

Him perch’d up there? I wish some thunderbolt

Would make this Cole a cinder, pulpit and all.

COLE.

Behold him, brethren: he hath cause to weep! —

So have we all: weep with him if ye will,

Yet —

It is expedient for one man to die,

Yea, for the people, lest the people die.

Yet wherefore should he die that hath return’d

To the one Catholic Universal Church,

Repentant of his errors?

PROTESTANT murmurs.

Ay, tell us that.

COLE.

Those of the wrong side will despise the man,

Deeming him one that thro’ the fear of death

Gave up his cause, except he seal his faith

In sight of all with flaming martyrdom.

CRANMER.

Ay.

COLE.

Ye hear him, and albeit there may seem

According to the canons pardon due

To him that so repents, yet are there causes

Wherefore our Queen and Council at this time

Adjudge him to the death. He hath been a traitor,

A shaker and confounder of the realm;

And when the King’s divorce was sued at Rome,

He here, this heretic metropolitan,

As if he had been the Holy Father, sat

And judged it. Did I call him heretic?

A huge heresiarch! never was it known

That any man so writing, preaching so,

So poisoning the Church, so long continuing,

Hath found his pardon; therefore he must die,

For warning and example.

Other reasons

There be for this man’s ending, which our Queen

And Council at this present deem it not

Expedient to be known.

PROTESTANT murmurs.

I warrant you.

COLE.

Take therefore, all, example by this man,

For if our Holy Queen not pardon him,

Much less shall others in like cause escape,

That all of you, the highest as the lowest,

May learn there is no power against the Lord.

There stands a man, once of so high degree,

Chief prelate of our Church, archbishop, first

In Council, second person in the realm,

Friend for so long time of a mighty King;

And now ye see downfallen and debased

From councillor to caitiff — fallen so low,

The leprous flutterings of the byway, scum

And offal of the city would not change

Estates with him; in brief, so miserable,

There is no hope of better left for him,

No place for worse.

Yet, Cranmer, be thou glad.

This is the work of God. He is glorified

In thy conversion: lo! thou art reclaim’d;

He brings thee home: nor fear but that to-day

Thou shalt receive the penitent thief’s award,

And be with Christ the Lord in Paradise.

Remember how God made the fierce fire seem

To those three children like a pleasant dew.

Remember, too,

The triumph of St. Andrew on his cross,

The patience of St. Lawrence in the fire.

Thus, if thou call on God and all the saints,

God will beat down the fury of the flame,

Or give thee saintly strength to undergo.

And for thy soul shall masses here be sung

By every priest in Oxford. Pray for him.

CRANMER.

Ay, one and all, dear brothers, pray for me;

Pray with one breath, one heart, one soul for me.

COLE.

And now, lest anyone among you doubt

The man’s conversion and remorse of heart,

Yourselves shall hear him speak. Speak, Master Cranmer,

Fulfil your promise made me, and proclaim

Your true undoubted faith, that all may hear.

CRANMER.

And that I will. O God, Father of Heaven!

O Son of God, Redeemer of the world!

O Holy Ghost! proceeding from them both,

Three persons and one God, have mercy on me,

Most miserable sinner, wretched man.

I have offended against heaven and earth

More grievously than any tongue can tell.

Then whither should I flee for any help?

I am ashamed to lift my eyes to heaven,

And I can find no refuge upon earth.

Shall I despair then? — God forbid! O God,

For thou art merciful, refusing none

That come to Thee for succour, unto Thee,

Therefore, I come; humble myself to Thee;

Saying, O Lord God, although my sins be great,

For thy great mercy have mercy! O God the Son,

Not for slight faults alone, when thou becamest

Man in the Flesh, was the great mystery wrought;

O God the Father, not for little sins

Didst thou yield up thy Son to human death;

But for the greatest sin that can be sinn’d,

Yea, even such as mine, incalculable,

Unpardonable, — sin against the light,

The truth of God, which I had proven and known.

Thy mercy must be greater than all sin.

Forgive me, Father, for no merit of mine,

But that Thy name by man be glorified,

And Thy most blessed Son’s, who died for man.

Good people, every man at time of death

Would fain set forth some saying that may live

After his death and better humankind;

For death gives life’s last word a power to live,

And, like the stone-cut epitaph, remain

After the vanish’d voice, and speak to men.

God grant me grace to glorify my God!

And first I say it is a grievous case,

Many so dote upon this bubble world,

Whose colours in a moment break and fly,

They care for nothing else. What saith St. John:

‘Love of this world is hatred against God.’

Again, I pray you all that, next to God,

You do unmurmuringly and willingly

Obey your King and Queen, and not for dread

Of these alone, but from the fear of Him

Whose ministers they be to govern you.

Thirdly, I pray you all to live together

Like brethren; yet what hatred Christian men

Bear to each other, seeming not as brethren,

But mortal foes! But do you good to all

As much as in you lieth. Hurt no man more

Than you would harm your loving natural brother

Of the same roof, same breast. If any do,

Albeit he think himself at home with God,

Of this be sure, he is whole worlds away.

PROTESTANT murmurs.

What sort of brothers then be those that lust

To burn each other?

WILLIAMS.

Peace among you, there!

CRANMER.

Fourthly, to those that own exceeding wealth,

Remember that sore saying spoken once

By Him that was the truth, ‘How hard it is

For the rich man to enter into Heaven;’

Let all rich men remember that hard word.

I have not time for more: if ever, now

Let them flow forth in charity, seeing now

The poor so many, and all food so dear.

Long have I lain in prison, yet have heard

Of all their wretchedness. Give to the poor,

Ye give to God. He is with us in the poor.

And now, and forasmuch as I have come

To the last end of life, and thereupon

Hangs all my past, and all my life to be,

Either to live with Christ in Heaven with joy,

Or to be still in pain with devils in hell;

And, seeing in a moment, I shall find

[Pointing upwards.

Heaven or else hell ready to swallow me,

[Pointing downwards.

I shall declare to you my very faith

Without all colour.

COLE.

Hear him, my good brethren.

CRANMER.

I do believe in God, Father of all;

In every article of the Catholic faith,

And every syllable taught us by our Lord,

His prophets, and apostles, in the Testaments,

Both Old and New.

COLE.

Be plainer, Master Cranmer.

CRANMER.

And now I come to the great cause that weighs

Upon my conscience more than anything

Or said or done in all my life by me;

For there be writings I have set abroad

Against the truth I knew within my heart,

Written for fear of death, to save my life,

If that might be; the papers by my hand

Sign’d since my degradation — by this hand

[Holding out his right hand.

Written and sign’d — I here renounce them all;

And, since my hand offended, having written

Against my heart, my hand shall first be burnt,

So I may come to the fire.

[Dead silence.

PROTESTANT murmurs.

FIRST PROTESTANT.

I knew it would be so.

SECOND PROTESTANT.

Our prayers are heard!

THIRD PROTESTANT.

God bless him!

CATHOLIC murmurs.

Out upon him! out upon him!

Liar! dissembler! traitor! to the fire!

WILLIAMS (raising his voice).

You know that you recanted all you said

Touching the sacrament in that same book

You wrote against my Lord of Winchester;

Dissemble not; play the plain Christian man.

CRANMER.

Alas, my Lord,

I have been a man loved plainness all my life;

I did dissemble, but the hour has come

For utter truth and plainness; wherefore, I say,

I hold by all I wrote within that book.

Moreover,

As for the Pope I count him Antichrist,

With all his devil’s doctrines; and refuse,

Reject him, and abhor him. I have said.

[Cries on all sides,’Pull him down! Away with him!’

COLE.

Ay, stop the heretic’s mouth! Hale him away!

WILLAIAMS.

Harm him not, harm him not! have him to the fire!

[CRANMER goes out between Two Friars, smiling; hands are reached to him from the crowd. LORD WILLIAM HOWARD and LORD PAGET are left alone in the church.

PAGET.

The nave and aisles all empty as a fool’s jest!

No, here’s Lord William Howard. What, my Lord,

You have not gone to see the burning?

HOWARD.  Fie!

To stand at ease, and stare as at a show,

And watch a good man burn. Never again.

I saw the deaths of Latimer and Ridley.

Moreover, tho’ a Catholic, I would not,

For the pure honour of our common nature,

Hear what I might — another recantation

Of Cranmer at the stake.

PAGET.

You’d not hear that.

He pass’d out smiling, and he walk’d upright;

His eye was like a soldier’s, whom the general

He looks to and he leans on as his God,

Hath rated for some backwardness and bidd’n him

Charge one against a thousand, and the man

Hurls his soil’d life against the pikes and dies.

HOWARD.

Yet that he might not after all those papers

Of recantation yield again, who knows?

PAGET.

Papers of recantation! Think you then

That Cranmer read all papers that he sign’d?

Or sign’d all those they tell us that he sign’d?

Nay, I trow not: and you shall see, my Lord,

That howsoever hero-like the man

Dies in the fire, this Bonner or another

Will in some lying fashion misreport

His ending to the glory of their church.

And you saw Latimer and Ridley die?

Latimer was eighty, was he not? his best

Of life was over then.

HOWARD.

His eighty years

Look’d somewhat crooked on him in his frieze;

But after they had stript him to his shroud,

He stood upright, a lad of twenty-one,

And gather’d with his hands the starting flame,

And wash’d his hands and all his face therein,

Until the powder suddenly blew him dead.

Ridley was longer burning; but he died

As manfully and boldly, and, ‘fore God,

I know them heretics, but right English ones.

If ever, as heaven grant, we clash with Spain,

Our Ridley-soldiers and our Latimer-sailors

Will teach her something.

PAGET.

Your mild Legate Pole

Will tell you that the devil helpt them thro’ it.

[A murmur of the Crowd in the distance.

Hark, how those Roman wolfdogs howl and bay him!

HOWARD.

Might it not be the other side rejoicing

In his brave end?

PAGET.

They are too crush’d, too broken,

They can but weep in silence.

HOWARD.

Ay, ay, Paget,

They have brought it in large measure on themselves.

Have I not heard them mock the blessed Host

In songs so lewd, the beast might roar his claim

To being in God’s image, more than they?

Have I not seen the gamekeeper, the groom.

Gardener, and huntsman, in the parson’s place,

The parson from his own spire swung out dead,

And Ignorance crying in the streets, and all men

Regarding her? I say they have drawn the fire

On their own heads: yet, Paget, I do hold

The Catholic, if he have the greater right,

Hath been the crueller.

PAGET.

Action and re-action,

The miserable see-saw of our child-world,

Make us despise it at odd hours, my Lord.

Heaven help that this re-action not re-act

Yet fiercelier under Queen Elizabeth,

So that she come to rule us.

HOWARD.

The world’s mad.

PAGET.

My Lord, the world is like a drunken man,

Who cannot move straight to his end — but reels

Now to the right, then as far to the left,

Push’d by the crowd beside — and underfoot

An earthquake; for since Henry for a doubt —

Which a young lust had clapt upon the back,

Crying, ‘Forward!’ — set our old church rocking, men

Have hardly known what to believe, or whether

They should believe in anything; the currents

So shift and change, they see not how they are borne,

Nor whither. I conclude the King a beast;

Verily a lion if you will — the world

A most obedient beast and fool — myself

Half beast and fool as appertaining to it;

Altho’ your Lordship hath as little of each

Cleaving to your original Adam-clay,

As may be consonant with mortality.

HOWARD.

We talk and Cranmer suffers.

The kindliest man I ever knew; see, see,

I speak of him in the past. Unhappy land!

Hard-natured Queen, half-Spanish in herself,

And grafted on the hard-grain’d stock of Spain —

Her life, since Philip left her, and she lost

Her fierce desire of bearing him a child,

Hath, like a brief and bitter winter’s day,

Gone narrowing down and darkening to a close.

There will be more conspiracies, I fear.

PAGET.

Ay, ay, beware of France.

HOWARD.

O Paget, Paget!

I have seen heretics of the poorer sort,

Expectant of the rack from day to day,

To whom the fire were welcome, lying chain’d

In breathless dungeons over steaming sewers,

Fed with rank bread that crawl’d upon the tongue,

And putrid water, every drop a worm,

Until they died of rotted limbs; and then

Cast on the dunghill naked, and become

Hideously alive again from head to heel,

Made even the carrion-nosing mongrel vomit

With hate and horror.

PAGET.

Nay, you sicken me

To hear you.

HOWARD.

Fancy-sick; these things are done,

Done right against the promise of this Queen

Twice given.

PAGET.

No faith with heretics, my Lord!

Hist! there be two old gossips — gospellers,

I take it; stand behind the pillar here;

I warrant you they talk about the burning.

Enter TWO OLD WOMEN. JOAN, and after her TIB.

JOAN.

Why, it be Tib!

TIB.

I cum behind tha, gall, and couldn’t make tha hear. Eh, the wind and the wet! What a day, what a day! nigh upo’ judgement daay loike. Pwoaps be pretty things, Joan, but they wunt set i’ the Lord’s cheer o’ that daay.

JOAN.

I must set down myself, Tib; it be a var waay vor my owld legs up vro’ Islip. Eh, my rheumatizy be that bad howiver be I to win to the burnin’.

TIB.

I should saay ‘twur ower by now. I’d ha’ been here avore, but Dumble wur blow’d wi’ the wind, and Dumble’s the best milcher in Islip.

JOAN.

Our Daisy’s as good ‘z her.

TIB.

Noa, Joan.

JOAN.

Our Daisy’s butter’s as good’z hern.

TIB.

Noa, Joan.

JOAN.

Our Daisy’s cheeses be better.

TIB.

Noa, Joan.

JOAN.

Eh, then ha’ thy waay wi’ me, Tib; ez thou hast wi’ thy owld man.

TIB.

Ay, Joan, and my owld man wur up and awaay betimes wi’ dree hard eggs for a good pleace at the burnin’; and barrin’ the wet, Hodge ‘ud ha’ been a-harrowin’ o’ white peasen i’ the outfield — and barrin’ the wind, Dumble wur blow’d wi’ the wind, so ‘z we was forced to stick her, but we fetched her round at last. Thank the Lord therevore. Dumble’s the best milcher in Islip.

JOAN.

Thou’s thy way wi’ man and beast, Tib. I wonder at tha’, it beats me! Eh, but I do know ez Pwoaps and vires be bad things; tell ‘ee now, I heerd summat as summun towld summun o’ owld Bishop Gardiner’s end; there wur an owld lord a-cum to dine wi’ un, and a wur so owld a couldn’t bide vor his dinner, but a had to bide howsomiver, vor ‘I wunt dine,’ says my Lord Bishop, says he, ‘not till I hears ez Latimer and Ridley be a-vire;’ and so they bided on and on till vour o’ the clock, till his man cum in post vro’ here, and tells un ez the vire has tuk holt. ‘Now,’ says the Bishop, says he, ‘we’ll gwo to dinner;’ and the owld lord fell to ‘s meat wi’ a will, God bless un! but Gardiner wur struck down like by the hand o’ God avore a could taste a mossel, and a set un all a-vire, so ‘z the tongue on un cum a-lolluping out o’ ‘is mouth as black as a rat. Thank the Lord, therevore.

PAGET.

The fools!

TIB.

Ay, Joan; and Queen Mary gwoes on a-burnin’ and a-burnin’, to get her baaby born; but all her burnin’s ‘ill never burn out the hypocrisy that makes the water in her. There’s nought but the vire of God’s hell ez can burn out that.

JOAN.

Thank the Lord, therevore.

PAGET.

The fools!

TIB.

A-burnin’, and a-burnin’, and a-makin’ o’ volk madder and madder; but tek thou my word vor’t, Joan, — and I bean’t wrong not twice i’ ten year — the burnin’ o’ the owld archbishop’ll burn the Pwoap out o’ this ‘ere land vor iver and iver.

HOWARD.

Out of the church, you brace of cursed crones,

Or I will have you duck’d! (Women hurry out.) Said I not right?

For how should reverend prelate or throned prince

Brook for an hour such brute malignity?

Ah, what an acrid wine has Luther brew’d!

PAGET.

Pooh, pooh, my Lord! poor garrulous country-wives.

Buy you their cheeses, and they’ll side with you;

You cannot judge the liquor from the lees.

HOWARD.

I think that in some sort we may. But see,

Enter PETERS.

Peters, my gentleman, an honest Catholic,

Who follow’d with the crowd to Cranmer’s fire.

One that would neither misreport nor lie,

Not to gain paradise: no, nor if the Pope,

Charged him to do it — he is white as death.

Peters, how pale you look! you bring the smoke

Of Cranmer’s burning with you.

PETERS.

Twice or thrice

The smoke of Cranmer’s burning wrapt me round.

HOWARD.

Peters, you know me Catholic, but English.

Did he die bravely? Tell me that, or leave

All else untold.

PETERS.

My Lord, he died most bravely.

HOWARD.

Then tell me all.

PAGET.

Ay, Master Peters, tell us.

PETERS.

You saw him how he past among the crowd;

And ever as he walk’d the Spanish friars

Still plied him with entreaty and reproach:

But Cranmer, as the helmsman at the helm

Steers, ever looking to the happy haven

Where he shall rest at night, moved to his death;

And I could see that many silent hands

Came from the crowd and met his own; and thus

When we had come where Ridley burnt with Latimer,

He, with a cheerful smile, as one whose mind

Is all made up, in haste put off the rags

They had mock’d his misery with, and all in white,

His long white beard, which he had never shaven

Since Henry’s death, down-sweeping to the chain,

Wherewith they bound him to the stake, he stood

More like an ancient father of the Church,

Than heretic of these times; and still the friars

Plied him, but Cranmer only shook his head,

Or answer’d them in smiling negatives;

Whereat Lord Williams gave a sudden cry: —

‘Make short! make short!’ and so they lit the wood.

Then Cranmer lifted his left hand to heaven,

And thrust his right into the bitter flame;

And crying, in his deep voice, more than once,

‘This hath offended — this unworthy hand!’

So held it till it all was burn’d, before

The flame had reach’d his body; I stood near —

Mark’d him — he never uttered moan of pain:

He never stirr’d or writhed, but, like a statue,

Unmoving in the greatness of the flame,

Gave up the ghost; and so past martyr-like —

Martyr I may not call him — past — but whither?

PAGET.

To purgatory, man, to purgatory.

PETERS.

Nay, but, my Lord, he denied purgatory.

PAGET.

Why then to heaven, and God ha’ mercy on him.

HOWARD.

Paget, despite his fearful heresies,

I loved the man, and needs must moan for him;

O Cranmer!

PAGET.

But your moan is useless now:

Come out, my Lord, it is a world of fools.

[Exeunt.

Act V

Scene I

London. Hall in the Palace.

QUEEN, SIR NICHOLAS HEATH.

HEATH.

Madam,

I do assure you, that it must be look’d to:

Calais is but ill-garrison’d, in Guisnes

Are scarce two hundred men, and the French fleet

Rule in the narrow seas. It must be look’d to,

If war should fall between yourself and France;

Or you will lose your Calais.

MARY.

It shall be look’d to;

I wish you a good morning, good Sir Nicholas:

Here is the King.

[Exit Heath.

Enter PHILIP.

PHILIP.

Sir Nicholas tells you true,

And you must look to Calais when I go.

MARY.

Go? must you go, indeed — again — so soon?

Why, nature’s licensed vagabond, the swallow,

That might live always in the sun’s warm heart,

Stays longer here in our poor north than you: —

Knows where he nested — ever comes again.

PHILIP.

And, Madam, so shall I.

MARY.

O, will you? will you?

I am faint with fear that you will come no more.

PHILIP.

Ay, ay; but many voices call me hence.

MARY.

Voices — I hear unhappy rumours — nay,

I say not, I believe. What voices call you

Dearer than mine that should be dearest to you?

Alas, my Lord! what voices and how many?

PHILIP.

The voices of Castille and Aragon,

Granada, Naples, Sicily, and Milan, —

The voices of Franche-Comte, and the Netherlands,

The voices of Peru and Mexico,

Tunis, and Oran, and the Philippines,

And all the fair spice-islands of the East.

MARY (admiringly).

You are the mightiest monarch upon earth,

I but a little Queen: and, so indeed,

Need you the more.

PHILIP.

A little Queen! but when

I came to wed your majesty, Lord Howard,

Sending an insolent shot that dash’d the seas

Upon us, made us lower our kingly flag

To yours of England.

MARY.

Howard is all English!

There is no king, not were he ten times king,

Ten times our husband, but must lower his flag

To that of England in the seas of England.

PHILIP.

Is that your answer?

MARY.

Being Queen of England,

I have none other.

PHILIP.

So.

MARY.

But wherefore not

Helm the huge vessel of your state, my liege,

Here by the side of her who loves you most?

PHILIP.

No, Madam, no! a candle in the sun

Is all but smoke — a star beside the moon

Is all but lost; your people will not crown me —

Your people are as cheerless as your clime;

Hate me and mine: witness the brawls, the gibbets.

Here swings a Spaniard — there an Englishman;

The peoples are unlike as their complexion;

Yet will I be your swallow and return —

But now I cannot bide.

MARY.

Not to help me?

They hate me also for my love to you,

My Philip; and these judgments on the land —

Harvestless autumns, horrible agues, plague —

PHILIP.

The blood and sweat of heretics at the stake

Is God’s best dew upon the barren field.

Burn more!

MARY.

I will, I will; and you will stay?

PHILIP.

Have I not said? Madam, I came to sue

Your Council and yourself to declare war.

MARY.

Sir, there are many English in your ranks

To help your battle.

PHILIP.

So far, good. I say

I came to sue your Council and yourself

To declare war against the King of France.

MARY.

Not to see me?

PHILIP.

Ay, Madam, to see you.

Unalterably and pesteringly fond!        [Aside.

But, soon or late you must have war with France;

King Henry warms your traitors at his hearth.

Carew is there, and Thomas Stafford there.

Courtenay, belike —

MARY.

A fool and featherhead!

PHILIP.

Ay, but they use his name. In brief, this Henry

Stirs up your land against you to the intent

That you may lose your English heritage.

And then, your Scottish namesake marrying

The Dauphin, he would weld France, England, Scotland,

Into one sword to hack at Spain and me.

MARY.

And yet the Pope is now colleagued with France;

You make your wars upon him down in Italy: —

Philip, can that be well?

PHILIP.

Content you, Madam;

You must abide my judgment, and my father’s,

Who deems it a most just and holy war.

The Pope would cast the Spaniard out of Naples:

He calls us worse than Jews, Moors, Saracens.

The Pope has pushed his horns beyond his mitre —

Beyond his province. Now,

Duke Alva will but touch him on the horns,

And he withdraws; and of his holy head —

For Alva is true son of the true church —

No hair is harm’d. Will you not help me here?

MARY.

Alas! the Council will not hear of war.

They say your wars are not the wars of England.

They will not lay more taxes on a land

So hunger-nipt and wretched; and you know

The crown is poor. We have given the church-lands back:

The nobles would not; nay, they clapt their hands

Upon their swords when ask’d; and therefore God

Is hard upon the people. What’s to be done?

Sir, I will move them in your cause again,

And we will raise us loans and subsidies

Among the merchants; and Sir Thomas Gresham

Will aid us. There is Antwerp and the Jews.

PHILIP.

Madam, my thanks.

MARY.

And you will stay your going?

PHILIP.

And further to discourage and lay lame

The plots of France, altho’ you love her not,

You must proclaim Elizabeth your heir.

She stands between you and the Queen of Scots.

MARY.

The Queen of Scots at least is Catholic.

PHILIP.

Ay, Madam, Catholic; but I will not have

The King of France the King of England too.

MARY.

But she’s a heretic, and, when I am gone,

Brings the new learning back.

PHILIP.

It must be done.

You must proclaim Elizabeth your heir.

MARY.

Then it is done; but you will stay your going

Somewhat beyond your settled purpose?

PHILIP.

No!

MARY.

What, not one day?

PHILIP.

You beat upon the rock.

MARY.

And I am broken there.

PHILIP.

Is this a place

To wail in, Madam? what! a public hall.

Go in, I pray you.

MARY.

Do not seem so changed.

Say go; but only say it lovingly.

PHILIP.

You do mistake. I am not one to change.

I never loved you more.

MARY.

Sire, I obey you.

Come quickly.

PHILIP.

Ay.

[Exit Mary.

Enter COUNT DE FERIA.

FERIA (aside).

The Queen in tears!

PHILIP.          Feria!

Hast thou not mark’d — come closer to mine ear —

How doubly aged this Queen of ours hath grown

Since she lost hope of bearing us a child?

FERIA.

Sire, if your Grace hath mark’d it, so have I.

PHILIP.

Hast thou not likewise mark’d Elizabeth,

How fair and royal — like a Queen, indeed?

FERIA.

Allow me the same answer as before —

That if your Grace hath mark’d her, so have I.

PHILIP.

Good, now; methinks my Queen is like enough

To leave me by and by.

FERIA.

To leave you, sire?

PHILIP.

I mean not like to live. Elizabeth —

To Philibert of Savoy, as you know,

We meant to wed her; but I am not sure

She will not serve me better — so my Queen

Would leave me — as — my wife.

FERIA.

Sire, even so.

PHILIP.

She will not have Prince Philibert of Savoy.

FERIA.

No, sire.

PHILIP.

I have to pray you, some odd time,

To sound the Princess carelessly on this;

Not as from me, but as your phantasy;

And tell me how she takes it.

FERIA.

Sire, I will.

PHILIP.

I am not certain but that Philibert

Shall be the man; and I shall urge his suit

Upon the Queen, because I am not certain:

You understand, Feria.

FERIA.

Sire, I do.

PHILIP.

And if you be not secret in this matter,

You understand me there, too?

FERIA.

Sire, I do.

PHILIP.

You must be sweet and supple, like a Frenchman.

She is none of those who loathe the honeycomb.

[Exit Feria.

Enter RENARD.

RENARD.

My liege, I bring you goodly tidings.

PHILIP.

Well?

RENARD.

There will be war with France, at last, my liege;

Sir Thomas Stafford, a bull-headed ass,

Sailing from France, with thirty Englishmen,

Hath taken Scarboro’ Castle, north of York;

Proclaims himself protector, and affirms

The Queen has forfeited her right to reign

By marriage with an alien — other things

As idle; a weak Wyatt! Little doubt

This buzz will soon be silenced; but the Council

(I have talk’d with some already) are for war.

This the fifth conspiracy hatch’d in France;

They show their teeth upon it; and your Grace,

So you will take advice of mine, should stay

Yet for awhile, to shape and guide the event.

PHILIP.

Good! Renard, I will stay then.

RENARD.

Also, sire,

Might I not say — to please your wife, the Queen?

PHILIP.

Ay, Renard, if you care to put it so.

[Exeunt.

Scene II

A Room in the Palace.

MARY, sitting: a rose in her hand. LADY CLARENCE. ALICE in the background.

MARY.

Look! I have play’d with this poor rose so long

I have broken off the head.

LADY CLARENCE.

Your Grace hath been

More merciful to many a rebel head

That should have fallen, and may rise again.

MARY.

There were not many hang’d for Wyatt’s rising.

LADY CLARENCE.

Nay, not two hundred.

MARY.

I could weep for them

And her, and mine own self and all the world.

LADY CLARENCE.

For her? for whom, your Grace?

Enter USHER.

USHER.

The Cardinal.

Enter CARDINAL POLE. (MARY rises.)

MARY.

Reginald Pole, what news hath plagued thy heart?

What makes thy favour like the bloodless head

Fall’n on the block, and held up by the hair?

Philip? —

POLE.

No, Philip is as warm in life

As ever.

MARY.

Ay, and then as cold as ever.

Is Calais taken?

POLE.

Cousin, there hath chanced

A sharper harm to England and to Rome,

Than Calais taken. Julius the Third

Was ever just, and mild, and father-like;

But this new Pope Caraffa, Paul the Fourth,

Not only reft me of that legateship

Which Julius gave me, and the legateship

Annex’d to Canterbury — nay, but worse —

And yet I must obey the Holy Father,

And so must you, good cousin; — worse than all,

A passing bell toll’d in a dying ear —

He hath cited me to Rome, for heresy,

Before his Inquisition.

MARY.

I knew it, cousin,

But held from you all papers sent by Rome,

That you might rest among us, till the Pope,

To compass which I wrote myself to Rome,

Reversed his doom, and that you might not seem

To disobey his Holiness.

POLE.

He hates Philip;

He is all Italian, and he hates the Spaniard;

He cannot dream that I advised the war;

He strikes thro’ me at Philip and yourself.

Nay, but I know it of old, he hates me too;

So brands me in the stare of Christendom

A heretic!

Now, even now, when bow’d before my time,

The house half-ruin’d ere the lease be out;

When I should guide the Church in peace at home,

After my twenty years of banishment,

And all my lifelong labour to uphold

The primacy — a heretic. Long ago,

When I was ruler in the patrimony,

I was too lenient to the Lutheran,

And I and learned friends among ourselves

Would freely canvass certain Lutheranisms.

What then, he knew I was no Lutheran.

A heretic!

He drew this shaft against me to the head,

When it was thought I might be chosen Pope,

But then withdrew it. In full consistory,

When I was made Archbishop, he approved me.

And how should he have sent me Legate hither,

Deeming me heretic? and what heresy since?

But he was evermore mine enemy,

And hates the Spaniard — fiery-choleric,

A drinker of black, strong, volcanic wines,

That ever make him fierier. I, a heretic?

Your Highness knows that in pursuing heresy

I have gone beyond your late Lord Chancellor, —

He cried Enough! enough! before his death. —

Gone beyond him and mine own natural man

(It was God’s cause); so far they call me now,

The scourge and butcher of their English church.

MARY.

Have courage, your reward is Heaven itself.

POLE.

They groan amen; they swarm into the fire

Like flies — for what? no dogma. They know nothing;

They burn for nothing.

MARY.

You have done your best.

POLE.

Have done my best, and as a faithful son,

That all day long hath wrought his father’s work,

When back he comes at evening hath the door

Shut on him by the father whom he loved,

His early follies cast into his teeth,

And the poor son turn’d out into the street

To sleep, to die — I shall die of it, cousin.

MARY.

I pray you be not so disconsolate;

I still will do mine utmost with the Pope.

Poor cousin!

Have not I been the fast friend of your life

Since mine began, and it was thought we two

Might make one flesh, and cleave unto each other

As man and wife?

POLE.

Ah, cousin, I remember

How I would dandle you upon my knee

At lisping-age. I watch’d you dancing once

With your huge father; he look’d the Great Harry,

You but his cockboat; prettily you did it,

And innocently. No — we were not made

One flesh in happiness, no happiness here;

But now we are made one flesh in misery;

Our bridemaids are not lovely — Disappointment,

Ingratitude, Injustice, Evil-tongue,

Labour-in-vain.

MARY.

Surely, not all in vain.

Peace, cousin, peace! I am sad at heart myself.

POLE.

Our altar is a mound of dead men’s clay,

Dug from the grave that yawns for us beyond;

And there is one Death stands behind the Groom,

And there is one Death stands behind the Bride —

MARY.

Have you been looking at the ‘Dance of Death’?

POLE.

No; but these libellous papers which I found

Strewn in your palace. Look you here — the Pope

Pointing at me with ‘Pole, the heretic,

Thou hast burnt others, do thou burn thyself,

Or I will burn thee;’ and this other; see! —

‘We pray continually for the death

Of our accursed Queen and Cardinal Pole.’

This last — I dare not read it her.        [Aside.

MARY.

Away!

Why do you bring me these?

I thought you knew better. I never read,

I tear them; they come back upon my dreams.

The hands that write them should be burnt clean off

As Cranmer’s, and the fiends that utter them

Tongue-torn with pincers, lash’d to death, or lie

Famishing in black cells, while famish’d rats

Eat them alive. Why do they bring me these?

Do you mean to drive me mad?

POLE.

I had forgotten

How these poor libels trouble you. Your pardon,

Sweet cousin, and farewell! ‘O bubble world,

Whose colours in a moment break and fly!’

Why, who said that? I know not — true enough!

[Puts up the papers, all but the last, which falls.

Exit POLE.

ALICE.

If Cranmer’s spirit were a mocking one,

And heard these two, there might be sport for him.        [Aside.

MARY.

Clarence, they hate me; even while I speak

There lurks a silent dagger, listening

In some dark closet, some long gallery, drawn,

And panting for my blood as I go by.

LADY CLARENCE.

Nay, Madam, there be loyal papers too,

And I have often found them.

MARY.

Find me one!

LADY CLARENCE.

Ay, Madam; but Sir Nicholas Heath, the Chancellor,

Would see your Highness.

MARY.

Wherefore should I see him?

LADY CLARENCE.

Well, Madam, he may bring you news from Philip.

MARY.

So, Clarence.

LADY CLARENCE.

Let me first put up your hair;

It tumbles all abroad.

MARY.

And the gray dawn

Of an old age that never will be mine

Is all the clearer seen. No, no; what matters?

Forlorn I am, and let me look forlorn.

Enter SIR NICHOLAS HEATH.

HEATH.

I bring your Majesty such grievous news

I grieve to bring it. Madam, Calais is taken.

MARY.

What traitor spoke? Here, let my cousin Pole

Seize him and burn him for a Lutheran.

HEATH.

Her Highness is unwell. I will retire.

LADY CLARENCE.

Madam, your Chancellor, Sir Nicholas Heath.

MARY.

Sir Nicholas! I am stunn’d — Nicholas Heath?

Methought some traitor smote me on the head.

What said you, my good Lord, that our brave English

Had sallied out from Calais and driven back

The Frenchmen from their trenches?

HEATH.

Alas! no.

That gateway to the mainland over which

Our flag hath floated for two hundred years

Is France again.

MARY.

So; but it is not lost —

Not yet. Send out: let England as of old

Rise lionlike, strike hard and deep into

The prey they are rending from her — ay, and rend

The renders too. Send out, send out, and make

Musters in all the counties; gather all

From sixteen years to sixty; collect the fleet;

Let every craft that carries sail and gun

Steer toward Calais. Guisnes is not taken yet?

HEATH.

Guisnes is not taken yet.

MARY.

There yet is hope.

HEATH.

Ah, Madam, but your people are so cold;

I do much fear that England will not care.

Methinks there is no manhood left among us.

MARY.

Send out; I am too weak to stir abroad:

Tell my mind to the Council — to the Parliament:

Proclaim it to the winds. Thou art cold thyself

To babble of their coldness. O would I were

My father for an hour! Away now — Quick!

[Exit Heath.

I hoped I had served God with all my might!

It seems I have not. Ah! much heresy

Shelter’d in Calais. Saints, I have rebuilt

Your shrines, set up your broken images;

Be comfortable to me. Suffer not

That my brief reign in England be defamed

Thro’ all her angry chronicles hereafter

By loss of Calais. Grant me Calais. Philip,

We have made war upon the Holy Father

All for your sake: what good could come of that?

LADY CLARENCE.

No, Madam, not against the Holy Father;

You did but help King Philip’s war with France,

Your troops were never down in Italy.

MARY.

I am a byword. Heretic and rebel

Point at me and make merry. Philip gone!

And Calais gone! Time that I were gone too!

LADY CLARENCE.

Nay, if the fetid gutter had a voice

And cried I was not clean, what should I care?

Or you, for heretic cries? And I believe,

Spite of your melancholy Sir Nicholas,

Your England is as loyal as myself.

MARY (seeing the paper draft by POLE).

There! there! another paper! Said you not

Many of these were loyal? Shall I try

If this be one of such?

LADY CLARENCE.

Let it be, let it be.

God pardon me! I have never yet found one.        [Aside.

MARY (reads).

‘Your people hate you as your husband hates you.’

Clarence, Clarence, what have I done? what sin

Beyond all grace, all pardon? Mother of God,

Thou knowest never woman meant so well,

And fared so ill in this disastrous world.

My people hate me and desire my death.

LADY CLARENCE.

No, Madam, no.

MARY.

My husband hates me, and desires my death.

LADY CLARENCE.

No, Madam; these are libels.

MARY.

I hate myself, and I desire my death.

LADY CLARENCE.

Long live your Majesty! Shall Alice sing you

One of her pleasant songs? Alice, my child,

Bring us your lute (Alice goes). They say the gloom of Saul

Was lighten’d by young David’s harp.

MARY.

Too young!

And never knew a Philip.

Re-enter ALICE.

Give me the lute. He hates me!

(She sings.)

Hapless doom of woman happy in betrothing!

Beauty passes like a breath and love is lost in loathing:

Low, my lute; speak low, my lute, but say the world is nothing —

Low, lute, low!

Love will hover round the flowers when they first awaken;

Love will fly the fallen leaf, and not be overtaken;

Low, my lute! oh low, my lute! we fade and are forsaken —

Low, dear lute, low!

Take it away! not low enough for me!

ALICE.

Your Grace hath a low voice.

MARY.

How dare you say it?

Even for that he hates me. A low voice

Lost in a wilderness where none can hear!

A voice of shipwreck on a shoreless sea!

A low voice from the dust and from the grave

(Sitting on the ground).

There, am I low enough now?

ALICE.

Good Lord! how grim and ghastly looks her Grace,

With both her knees drawn upward to her chin.

There was an old-world tomb beside my father’s,

And this was open’d, and the dead were found

Sitting, and in this fashion; she looks a corpse.

Enter LADY MAGDALEN DACRES.

LADY MAGDALEN.

Madam, the Count de Feria waits without,

In hopes to see your Highness.

LADY CLARENCE (pointing to MARY).

Wait he must —

Her trance again. She neither sees nor hears,

And may not speak for hours.

LADY MAGDALEN.

Unhappiest

Of Queens and wives and women!

ALICE (in the foreground with LADY MAGDALEN).

And all along

Of Philip.

LADY MAGDALEN.

Not so loud! Our Clarence there

Sees ever such an aureole round the Queen,

It gilds the greatest wronger of her peace,

Who stands the nearest to her.

ALICE.

Ay, this Philip;

I used to love the Queen with all my heart —

God help me, but methinks I love her less

For such a dotage upon such a man.

I would I were as tall and strong as you.

LADY MAGDALEN.

I seem half-shamed at times to be so tall.

ALICE.

You are the stateliest deer in all the herd —

Beyond his aim — but I am small and scandalous,

And love to hear bad tales of Philip.

LADY MAGDALEN.

Why?

I never heard him utter worse of you

Than that you were low-statured.

ALICE.

Does he think

Low stature is low nature, or all women’s

Low as his own?

LADY MAGDALEN.

There you strike in the nail.

This coarseness is a want of phantasy.

It is the low man thinks the woman low;

Sin is too dull to see beyond himself.

ALICE.

Ah, Magdalen, sin is bold as well as dull.

How dared he?

LADY MAGDALEN.

Stupid soldiers oft are bold.

Poor lads, they see not what the general sees,

A risk of utter ruin. I am not

Beyond his aim, or was not.

ALICE.

Who? Not you?

Tell, tell me; save my credit with myself.

LADY MAGDALEN.

I never breathed it to a bird in the eaves,

Would not for all the stars and maiden moon

Our drooping Queen should know! In Hampton Court

My window look’d upon the corridor;

And I was robing; — this poor throat of mine,

Barer than I should wish a man to see it, —

When he we speak of drove the window back,

And, like a thief, push’d in his royal hand;

But by God’s providence a good stout staff

Lay near me; and you know me strong of arm;

I do believe I lamed his Majesty’s

For a day or two, tho’, give the Devil his due,

I never found he bore me any spite.

ALICE.

I would she could have wedded that poor youth,

My Lord of Devon — light enough, God knows,

And mixt with Wyatt’s rising — and the boy

Not out of him — but neither cold, coarse, cruel,

And more than all — no Spaniard.

LADY CLARENCE.

Not so loud.

Lord Devon, girls! what are you whispering here?

ALICE.

Probing an old state-secret — how it chanced

That this young Earl was sent on foreign travel,

Not lost his head.

LADY CLARENCE.

There was no proof against him.

ALICE.

Nay, Madam; did not Gardiner intercept

A letter which the Count de Noailles wrote

To that dead traitor Wyatt, with full proof

Of Courtenay’s treason? What became of that?

LADY CLARENCE.

Some say that Gardiner, out of love for him,

Burnt it, and some relate that it was lost

When Wyatt sack’d the Chancellor’s house in Southwark.

Let dead things rest.

ALICE.

Ay, and with him who died

Alone in Italy.

LADY CLARENCE.

Much changed, I hear,

Had put off levity and put graveness on.

The foreign courts report him in his manner

Noble as his young person and old shield.

It might be so — but all is over now;

He caught a chill in the lagoons of Venice,

And died in Padua.

MARY (looking up suddenly).

Died in the true faith?

LADY CLARENCE.

Ay, Madam, happily.

MARY.

Happier he than I.

LADY MAGDALEN.

It seems her Highness hath awaken’d. Think you

That I might dare to tell her that the Count —

MARY.

I will see no man hence for evermore,

Saving my confessor and my cousin Pole.

LADY MAGDALEN.

It is the Count de Feria, my dear lady.

MARY.

What Count?

LADY MAGDALEN.

The Count de Feria, from his Majesty

King Philip.

MARY.

Philip! quick! loop up my hair!

Throw cushions on that seat, and make it throne-like.

Arrange my dress — the gorgeous Indian shawl

That Philip brought me in our happy days! —

That covers all. So — am I somewhat Queenlike,

Bride of the mightiest sovereign upon earth?

LADY CLARENCE.

Ay, so your Grace would bide a moment yet.

MARY.

No, no, he brings a letter. I may die

Before I read it. Let me see him at once.

Enter COUNT DE FERIA (kneels).

FERIA.

I trust your Grace is well. (Aside) How her hand burns!

MARY.

I am not well, but it will better me,

Sir Count, to read the letter which you bring.

FERIA.

Madam, I bring no letter.

MARY.

How! no letter?

FERIA.

His Highness is so vex’d with strange affairs —

MARY.

That his own wife is no affair of his.

FERIA.

Nay, Madam, nay! he sends his veriest love,

And says, he will come quickly.

MARY.

Doth he, indeed?

You, sir, do you remember what you said

When last you came to England?

FERIA.

Madam, I brought

My King’s congratulations; it was hoped

Your Highness was once more in happy state

To give him an heir male.

MARY.

Sir, you said more;

You said he would come quickly. I had horses

On all the road from Dover, day and night;

On all the road from Harwich, night and day;

But the child came not, and the husband came not;

And yet he will come quickly. . . . Thou hast learnt

Thy lesson, and I mine. There is no need

For Philip so to shame himself again.

Return,

And tell him that I know he comes no more.

Tell him at last I know his love is dead,

And that I am in state to bring forth death —

Thou art commission’d to Elizabeth,

And not to me!

FERIA.

Mere compliments and wishes.

But shall I take some message from your Grace?

MARY.

Tell her to come and close my dying eyes,

And wear my crown, and dance upon my grave.

FERIA.

Then I may say your Grace will see your sister?

Your Grace is too low-spirited. Air and sunshine.

I would we had you, Madam, in our warm Spain.

You droop in your dim London.

MARY.

Have him away!

I sicken of his readiness.

LADY CLARENCE.

My Lord Count,

Her Highness is too ill for colloquy.

FERIA (kneels, and kisses her hand).

I wish her Highness better. (Aside) How her hand burns!

[Exeunt.

Scene III

A house near London.

ELIZABETH, STEWARD OF THE HOUSEHOLD, ATTENDANTS.

ELIZABETH.

There’s half an angel wrong’d in your account;

Methinks I am all angel, that I bear it

Without more ruffling. Cast it o’er again.

STEWARD.

I were whole devil if I wrong’d you, Madam.

[Exit Steward.

ATTENDANT.

The Count de Feria, from the King of Spain.

ELIZABETH.

Ay! — let him enter. Nay, you need not go:

[To her LADIES.

Remain within the chamber, but apart.

We’ll have no private conference. Welcome to England!

Enter FERIA.

FERIA.

Fair island star!

ELIZABETH.

I shine! What else, Sir Count?

FERIA.

As far as France, and into Philip’s heart.

My King would know if you be fairly served,

And lodged, and treated.

ELIZABETH.

You see the lodging, sir,

I am well-served, and am in everything

Most loyal and most grateful to the Queen.

FERIA.

You should be grateful to my master, too.

He spoke of this; and unto him you owe

That Mary hath acknowledged you her heir.

ELIZABETH.

No, not to her nor him; but to the people,

Who know my right, and love me, as I love

The people! whom God aid!

FERIA.

You will be Queen,

And, were I Philip —

ELIZABETH.

Wherefore pause you — what?

FERIA.

Nay, but I speak from mine own self, not him;

Your royal sister cannot last; your hand

Will be much coveted! What a delicate one!

Our Spanish ladies have none such — and there,

Were you in Spain, this fine fair gossamer gold —

Like sun-gilt breathings on a frosty dawn —

That hovers round your shoulder —

ELIZABETH.

Is it so fine?

Troth, some have said so.

FERIA.

— would be deemed a miracle.

ELIZABETH.

Your Philip hath gold hair and golden beard;

There must be ladies many with hair like mine.

FERIA.

Some few of Gothic blood have golden hair,

But none like yours.

ELIZABETH.

I am happy you approve it.

FERIA.

But as to Philip and your Grace — consider,

If such a one as you should match with Spain,

What hinders but that Spain and England join’d,

Should make the mightiest empire earth has known.

Spain would be England on her seas, and England

Mistress of the Indies.

ELIZABETH.

It may chance, that England

Will be the Mistress of the Indies yet,

Without the help of Spain.

FERIA.

Impossible;

Except you put Spain down.

Wide of the mark ev’n for a madman’s dream.

ELIZABETH.

Perhaps; but we have seamen.

Count de Feria,

I take it that the King hath spoken to you;

But is Don Carlos such a goodly match?

FERIA.

Don Carlos, Madam, is but twelve years old.

ELIZABETH.

Ay, tell the King that I will muse upon it;

He is my good friend, and I would keep him so;

But — he would have me Catholic of Rome,

And that I scarce can be; and, sir, till now

My sister’s marriage, and my father’s marriages,

Make me full fain to live and die a maid.

But I am much beholden to your King.

Have you aught else to tell me?

FERIA.

Nothing, Madam,

Save that methought I gather’d from the Queen

That she would see your Grace before she — died.

ELIZABETH.

God’s death! and wherefore spake you not before?

We dally with our lazy moments here,

And hers are number’d. Horses there, without!

I am much beholden to the King, your master.

Why did you keep me prating? Horses, there!

[Exit Elizabeth, etc.

FERIA.

So from a clear sky falls the thunderbolt!

Don Carlos? Madam, if you marry Philip,

Then I and he will snaffle your ‘God’s death,’

And break your paces in, and make you tame;

God’s death, forsooth — you do not know King Philip.

[Exit.

Scene IV

London. Before the Palace.

A light burning within. VOICES of the night passing.

FIRST.

Is not yon light in the Queen’s chamber?

SECOND.

Ay,

They say she’s dying.

FIRST.

So is Cardinal Pole.

May the great angels join their wings, and make

Down for their heads to heaven!

SECOND.

Amen. Come on.

[Exeunt.

TWO OTHERS.

FIRST.

There’s the Queen’s light. I hear she cannot live.

SECOND.

God curse her and her Legate! Gardiner burns

Already; but to pay them full in kind,

The hottest hold in all the devil’s den

Were but a sort of winter; sir, in Guernsey,

I watch’d a woman burn; and in her agony

The mother came upon her — a child was born —

And, sir, they hurl’d it back into the fire,

That, being but baptized in fire, the babe

Might be in fire for ever. Ah, good neighbour,

There should be something fierier than fire

To yield them their deserts.

FIRST.

Amen to all

Your wish, and further.

A THIRD VOICE.

Deserts! Amen to what? Whose deserts? Yours? You have a gold ring on your finger, and soft raiment about your body; and is not the woman up yonder sleeping after all she has done, in peace and quietness, on a soft bed, in a closed room, with light, fire, physic, tendance; and I have seen the true men of Christ lying famine-dead by scores, and under no ceiling but the cloud that wept on them, not for them.

FIRST.

Friend, tho’ so late, it is not safe to preach.

You had best go home. What are you?

THIRD.

What am I? One who cries continually with sweat and tears to the Lord God that it would please Him out of His infinite love to break down all kingship and queenship, all priesthood and prelacy; to cancel and abolish all bonds of human allegiance, all the magistracy, all the nobles, and all the wealthy; and to send us again, according to His promise, the one King, the Christ, and all things in common, as in the day of the first church, when Christ Jesus was King.

FIRST.

If ever I heard a madman, — let’s away!

Why, you long-winded — Sir, you go beyond me.

I pride myself on being moderate.

Good night! Go home. Besides, you curse so loud,

The watch will hear you. Get you home at once.

[Exeunt.

Scene V

London. A room in the Palace.

A Gallery on one side. The moonlight streaming through a range of windows on the wall opposite. MARY, LADY CLARENCE, LADY MAGDALEN DACRES, ALICE. QUEEN pacing the Gallery. A writing table in front. QUEEN comes to the table and writes and goes again, pacing the Gallery.

LADY CLARENCE.

Mine eyes are dim: what hath she written? read.

ALICE.

‘I am dying, Philip; come to me.’

LADY MAGDALEN.

There — up and down, poor lady, up and down.

ALICE.

And how her shadow crosses one by one

The moonlight casements pattern’d on the wall,

Following her like her sorrow. She turns again.

[Queen sits and writes, and goes again.

LADY CLARENCE.

What hath she written now?

ALICE.

Nothing; but ‘come, come, come,’ and all awry,

And blotted by her tears. This cannot last.

[QUEEN returns.

MARY.

I whistle to the bird has broken cage,

And all in vain.        [Sitting down.

Calais gone — Guisnes gone, too — and Philip gone!

LADY CLARENCE.

Dear Madam, Philip is but at the wars;

I cannot doubt but that he comes again;

And he is with you in a measure still.

I never look’d upon so fair a likeness

As your great King in armour there, his hand

Upon his helmet.

[Pointing to the portrait of Philip on the wall.

MARY.

Doth he not look noble?

I had heard of him in battle over seas,

And I would have my warrior all in arms.

He said it was not courtly to stand helmeted

Before the Queen. He had his gracious moment,

Altho’ you’ll not believe me. How he smiles

As if he loved me yet!

LADY CLARENCE.

And so he does.

MARY.

He never loved me — nay, he could not love me.

It was his father’s policy against France.

I am eleven years older than he,

Poor boy!        [Weeps.

ALICE.

That was a lusty boy of twenty-seven;        [Aside.

Poor enough in God’s grace!

MARY.

— And all in vain!

The Queen of Scots is married to the Dauphin,

And Charles, the lord of this low world, is gone;

And all his wars and wisdoms past away:

And in a moment I shall follow him.

LADY CLARENCE.

Nay, dearest Lady, see your good physician.

MARY.

Drugs — but he knows they cannot help me — says

That rest is all — tells me I must not think —

That I must rest — I shall rest by and by.

Catch the wild cat, cage him, and when he springs

And maims himself against the bars, say ‘rest’:

Why, you must kill him if you would have him rest —

Dead or alive you cannot make him happy.

LADY CLARENCE.

Your Majesty has lived so pure a life,

And done such mighty things by Holy Church,

I trust that God will make you happy yet.

MARY.

What is the strange thing happiness? Sit down here:

Tell me thine happiest hour.

LADY CLARENCE.

I will, if that

May make your Grace forget yourself a little.

There runs a shallow brook across our field

For twenty miles, where the black crow flies five,

And doth so bound and babble all the way

As if itself were happy. It was May-time,

And I was walking with the man I loved.

I loved him, but I thought I was not loved.

And both were silent, letting the wild brook

Speak for us — till he stoop’d and gather’d one

From out a bed of thick forget-me-nots,

Look’d hard and sweet at me, and gave it me.

I took it, tho’ I did not know I took it,

And put it in my bosom, and all at once

I felt his arms about me, and his lips —

MARY.

O God! I have been too slack, too slack;

There are Hot Gospellers even among our guards —

Nobles we dared not touch. We have but burnt

The heretic priest, workmen, and women and children.

Wet, famine, ague, fever, storm, wreck, wrath, —

We have so play’d the coward; but by God’s grace,

We’ll follow Philip’s leading, and set up

The Holy Office here — garner the wheat,

And burn the tares with unquenchable fire!

Burn! —

Fie, what a savour! tell the cooks to close

The doors of all the offices below.

Latimer!

Sir, we are private with our women here —

Ever a rough, blunt, and uncourtly fellow —

Thou light a torch that never will go out!

‘Tis out — mine flames. Women, the Holy Father

Has ta’en the legateship from our cousin Pole —

Was that well done? and poor Pole pines of it,

As I do, to the death. I am but a woman,

I have no power. — Ah, weak and meek old man,

Seven-fold dishonour’d even in the sight

Of thine own sectaries — No, no. No pardon!

Why that was false: there is the right hand still

Beckons me hence.

Sir, you were burnt for heresy, not for treason,

Remember that! ‘twas I and Bonner did it,

And Pole; we are three to one — Have you found mercy there,

Grant it me here: and see, he smiles and goes,

Gentle as in life.

ALICE.

Madam, who goes? King Philip?

MARY.

No, Philip comes and goes, but never goes.

Women, when I am dead,

Open my heart, and there you will find written

Two names, Philip and Calais; open his, —

So that he have one, —

You will find Philip only, policy, policy, —

Ay, worse than that — not one hour true to me!

Foul maggots crawling in a fester’d vice!

Adulterous to the very heart of Hell.

Hast thou a knife?

ALICE.

Ay, Madam, but o’ God’s mercy —

MARY.

Fool, think’st thou I would peril mine own soul

By slaughter of the body? I could not, girl,

Not this way — callous with a constant stripe,

Unwoundable. The knife!

ALICE.

Take heed, take heed!

The blade is keen as death.

MARY.

This Philip shall not

Stare in upon me in my haggardness;

Old, miserable, diseased,

Incapable of children. Come thou down.

Cuts out the picture and throws it down.

Lie there. (Wails) O God, I have kill’d my Philip!

ALICE.  No,

Madam, you have but cut the canvas out;

We can replace it.

MARY.

All is well then; rest —

I will to rest; he said, I must have rest.

[Cries of ‘ELIZABETH’ in the street.

A cry! What’s that? Elizabeth? revolt?

A new Northumberland, another Wyatt?

I’ll fight it on the threshold of the grave.

LADY CLARENCE.

Madam, your royal sister comes to see you.

MARY.

I will not see her.

Who knows if Boleyn’s daughter be my sister?

I will see none except the priest. Your arm.

[To LADY CLARENCE.

O Saint of Aragon, with that sweet worn smile

Among thy patient wrinkles — Help me hence.

[Exeunt.

The PRIEST passes. Enter ELIZABETH and SIR WILLIAM CECIL.

ELIZABETH.

Good counsel yours —

No one in waiting? still,

As if the chamberlain were Death himself!

The room she sleeps in — is not this the way?

No, that way there are voices. Am I too late?

Cecil. . . . God guide me lest I lose the way.

[Exit Elizabeth.

CECIL.

Many points weather’d, many perilous ones,

At last a harbour opens; but therein

Sunk rocks — they need fine steering — much it is

To be nor mad, nor bigot — have a mind —

Nor let Priests’ talk, or dream of worlds to be,

Miscolour things about her — sudden touches

For him, or him — sunk rocks; no passionate faith —

But — if let be — balance and compromise;

Brave, wary, sane to the heart of her — a Tudor

School’d by the shadow of death — a Boleyn, too,

Glancing across the Tudor — not so well.

Enter ALICE.

How is the good Queen now?

ALICE.

Away from Philip.

Back in her childhood — prattling to her mother

Of her betrothal to the Emperor Charles,

And childlike — jealous of him again — and once

She thank’d her father sweetly for his book

Against that godless German. Ah, those days

Were happy. It was never merry world

In England, since the Bible came among us.

CECIL.

And who says that?

ALICE.

It is a saying among the Catholics.

CECIL.

It never will be merry world in England,

Till all men have their Bible, rich and poor.

ALICE.

The Queen is dying, or you dare not say it.

Enter ELIZABETH.

ELIZABETH.

The Queen is dead.

CECIL.

Then here she stands! my homage.

ELIZABETH.

She knew me, and acknowledged me her heir,

Pray’d me to pay her debts, and keep the Faith:

Then claspt the cross, and pass’d away in peace.

I left her lying still and beautiful,

More beautiful than in life. Why would you vex yourself,

Poor sister? Sir, I swear I have no heart

To be your Queen. To reign is restless fence,

Tierce, quart, and trickery. Peace is with the dead.

Her life was winter, for her spring was nipt:

And she loved much: pray God she be forgiven.

CECIL.

Peace with the dead, who never were at peace!

Yet she loved one so much — I needs must say —

That never English monarch dying left

England so little.

ELIZABETH.

But with Cecil’s aid

And others, if our person be secured

From traitor stabs — we will make England great.

Enter PAGET, and other LORDS OF THE COUNCIL,

SIR RALPH BAGENHALL, etc.

LORDS.

God save Elizabeth, the Queen of England!

BAGENHALL.

God save the Crown! the Papacy is no more.

PAGET (aside).

Are we so sure of that?

ACCLAMATION.

God save the Queen!

HAROLD: A DRAMA

CONTENTS

Dramatis Personæ

Act I

Scene I

Scene II

Act II

Scene I

Scene II

Act III

Scene I

Scene II

Act IV

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Act V

Scene I

Scene II

Show-Day at Battle Abbey, 1876.

A GARDEN here — May breath and bloom of spring —

The cuckoo yonder from an English elm

Crying ‘with my false egg I overwhelm

The native nest:’ and fancy hears the ring

Of harness, and that deathful arrow sing,

And Saxon battleaxe clang on Norman helm.

Here rose the dragon-banner of our realm:

Here fought, here fell, our Norman-slander’d king.

O Garden blossoming out of English blood!

O strange hate-healer Time! We stroll and stare

Where might made right eight hundred years ago;

Might, right? ay good, so all things make for good —

But he and he, if soul be soul, are where

Each stands full face with all he did below.

Dramatis Personæ

KING EDWARD THE CONFESSOR.

STIGAND, created Archbishop of Canterbury by the Antipope Benedict.

ALDRED, Archbishop of York.

THE NORMAN BISHOP OF LONDON.

HAROLD, Earl of Wessex, afterwards King of England, Son of Godwin

TOSTIG, Earl of Northumbria, Son of Godwin

GURTH, Earl of East Anglia, Son of Godwin

LEOFWIN, Earl of Kent and Essex, Son of Godwin

WULFNOTH

COUNT WILLIAM OF NORMANDY.

WILLIAM RUFUS.

WILLIAM MALET, a Norman Noble.1

EDWIN, Earl of Mercia, Son of Alfgar of Mercia

MORCAR, Earl of Northumbria after Tostig, Son of Alfgar of Mercia

GAMEL, a Northumbrian Thane.

GUY, Count of Ponthieu.

ROLF, a Ponthieu Fisherman.

HUGH MARGOT, a Norman Monk.

OSGOD and ATHELRIC, Canons from Waltham.

THE QUEEN, Edward the Confessor’s Wife, Daughter of Godwin.

ALDWYTH, Daughter of Alfgar and Widow of Griffyth, King of Wales.

EDITH, Ward of King Edward.

Courtiers, Earls and Thanes, Men-at-Arms, Canons of Waltham,

Fishermen, etc.

Act I

Scene I

London. The King’s Palace.

(A comet seen through the open window.)

ALDWYTH, GAMEL, COURTIERS talking together.

FIRST COURTIER.

Lo! there once more — this is the seventh night!

Yon grimly-glaring, treble-brandish’d scourge

Of England!

SECOND COURTIER.

Horrible!

FIRST COURTIER.

Look you, there’s a star

That dances in it as mad with agony!

THIRD COURTIER.

Ay, like a spirit in Hell who skips and flies

To right and left, and cannot scape the flame.

SECOND COURTIER.

Steam’d upward from the undescendable

Abysm.

FIRST COURTIER.

Or floated downward from the throne

Of God Almighty.

ALDWYTH.

Gamel, son of Orm,

What thinkest thou this means?

GAMEL.

War, my dear lady!

ALDWYTH.

Doth this affright thee?

GAMEL.

Mightily, my dear lady!

ALDWYTH.

Stand by me then, and look upon my face,

Not on the comet.

Enter MORCAR.

Brother! why so pale?

MORCAR.

It glares in heaven, it flares upon the Thames,

The people are as thick as bees below,

They hum like bees, — they cannot speak — for awe;

Look to the skies, then to the river, strike

Their hearts, and hold their babies up to it.

I think that they would Molochize them too,

To have the heavens clear.

ALDWYTH.

They fright not me.

Enter LEOFWIN, after him GURTH.

Ask thou Lord Leofwin what he thinks of this!

MORCAR.

Lord Leofwin, dost thou believe, that these

Three rods of blood-red fire up yonder mean

The doom of England and the wrath of Heaven?

BISHOP OF LONDON (passing).

Did ye not cast with bestial violence

Our holy Norman bishops down from all

Their thrones in England? I alone remain.

Why should not Heaven be wroth?

LEOFWIN.

With us, or thee?

BISHOP OF LONDON.

Did ye not outlaw your archbishop Robert,

Robert of Jumiéges — well-nigh murder him too?

Is there no reason for the wrath of Heaven?

LEOFWIN.

Why then the wrath of Heaven hath three tails,

The devil only one.

[Exit Bishop of London.

Enter ARCHBISHOP STIGAND.

Ask our Archbishop.

Stigand should know the purposes of Heaven.

STIGAND.

Not I. I cannot read the face of heaven;

Perhaps our vines will grow the better for it.

LEOFWIN (laughing).

He can but read the king’s face on his coins.

STIGAND.

Ay, ay, young lord, there the king’s face is power.

GURTH.

O father, mock not at a public fear,

But tell us, is this pendent hell in heaven

A harm to England?

STIGAND.

Ask it of King Edward!

And he may tell thee, I am a harm to England.

Old uncanonical Stigand — ask of me

Who had my pallium from an Antipope!

Not he the man — for in our windy world

What’s up is faith, what’s down is heresy.

Our friends, the Normans, holp to shake his chair.

I have a Norman fever on me, son,

And cannot answer sanely. . . . What it means?

Ask our broad Earl.

[Pointing to HAROLD, who enters.

HAROLD (seeing GAMEL).

Hail, Gamel, son of Orm!

Albeit no rolling stone, my good friend Gamel,

Thou hast rounded since we met. Thy life at home

Is easier than mine here. Look! am I not

Work-wan, flesh-fallen?

GAMEL.

Art thou sick, good Earl?

HAROLD.

Sick as an autumn swallow for a voyage,

Sick for an idle week of hawk and hound

Beyond the seas — a change! When camest thou hither?

GAMEL.

To-day, good Earl.

HAROLD.

Is the North quiet, Gamel?

GAMEL.

Nay, there be murmurs, for thy brother breaks us

With over-taxing — quiet, ay, as yet —

Nothing as yet.

HAROLD.

Stand by him, mine old friend,

Thou art a great voice in Northumberland!

Advise him: speak him sweetly, he will hear thee.

He is passionate but honest. Stand thou by him!

More talk of this to-morrow, if yon weird sign

Not blast us in our dreams. — Well, father Stigand —

[To STIGAND, who advances to him.

STIGAND (pointing to the comet).

War there, my son? is that the doom of England?

HAROLD.

Why not the doom of all the world as well?

For all the world sees it as well as England.

These meteors came and went before our day,

Not harming any: it threatens us no more

Than French or Norman. War? the worst that follows

Things that seem jerk’d out of the common rut

Of Nature is the hot religious fool,

Who, seeing war in heaven, for heaven’s credit

Makes it on earth: but look, where Edward draws

A faint foot hither, leaning upon Tostig.

He hath learnt to love our Tostig much of late.

LEOFWIN.

And he hath learnt, despite the tiger in him,

To sleek and supple himself to the king’s hand.

GURTH.

I trust the kingly touch that cures the evil

May serve to charm the tiger out of him.

LEOFWIN.

He hath as much of cat as tiger in him.

Our Tostig loves the hand and not the man.

HAROLD.

Nay! Better die than lie!

Enter KING, QUEEN, and TOSTIG.

EDWARD.

In heaven signs!

Signs upon earth! signs everywhere! your Priests

Gross, worldly, simoniacal, unlearn’d!

They scarce can read their Psalter; and your churches

Uncouth, unhandsome, while in Normanland

God speaks thro’ abler voices, as He dwells

In statelier shrines. I say not this, as being

Half Norman-blooded, nor as some have held,

Because I love the Norman better — no,

But dreading God’s revenge upon this realm

For narrowness and coldness: and I say it

For the last time perchance, before I go

To find the sweet refreshment of the Saints.

I have lived a life of utter purity:

I have builded the great church of Holy Peter:

I have wrought miracles — to God the glory —

And miracles will in my name be wrought

Hereafter. — I have fought the fight and go —

I see the flashing of the gates of pearl —

And it is well with me, tho’ some of you

Have scorn’d me — ay — but after I am gone

Woe, woe to England! I have had a vision;

The seven sleepers in the cave at Ephesus

Have turn’d from right to left.

HAROLD.

My most dear Master,

What matters? let them turn from left to right

And sleep again.

TOSTIG.

Too hardy with thy king!

A life of prayer and fasting well may see

Deeper into the mysteries of heaven

Than thou, good brother.

ALDWYTH (aside).

Sees he into thine,

That thou wouldst have his promise for the crown?

EDWARD.

Tostig says true; my son, thou art too hard,

Not stagger’d by this ominous earth and heaven:

But heaven and earth are threads of the same loom,

Play into one another, and weave the web

That may confound thee yet.

HAROLD.

Nay, I trust not,

For I have served thee long and honestly.

EDWARD.

I know it, son; I am not thankless: thou

Hast broken all my foes, lighten’d for me

The weight of this poor crown, and left me time

And peace for prayer to gain a better one.

Twelve years of service! England loves thee for it.

Thou art the man to rule her!

ALDWYTH (aside).

So, not Tostig!

HAROLD.

And after those twelve years a boon, my king,

Respite, a holiday: thyself wast wont

To love the chase: thy leave to set my feet

On board, and hunt and hawk beyond the seas!

EDWARD.

What, with this flaming horror overhead?

HAROLD.

Well, when it passes then.

EDWARD.

Ay if it pass.

Go not to Normandy — go not to Normandy.

HAROLD.

And wherefore not, my king, to Normandy?

Is not my brother Wulfnoth hostage there

For my dead father’s loyalty to thee?

I pray thee, let me hence and bring him home.

EDWARD.

Not thee, my son: some other messenger.

HAROLD.

And why not me, my lord, to Normandy?

Is not the Norman Count thy friend and mine?

EDWARD.

I pray thee, do not go to Normandy.

HAROLD.

Because my father drove the Normans out

Of England? — That was many a summer gone —

Forgotten and forgiven by them and thee.

EDWARD.

Harold, I will not yield thee leave to go.

HAROLD.

Why then to Flanders. I will hawk and hunt

In Flanders.

EDWARD.

Be there not fair woods and fields

In England? Wilful, wilful. Go — the Saints

Pilot and prosper all thy wandering out

And homeward. Tostig, I am faint again.

Son Harold, I will in and pray for thee.

[Exit, leaning on Tostig, and followed by Stigand, Morcar, and Courtiers.

HAROLD.

What lies upon the mind of our good king

That he should harp this way on Normandy?

QUEEN.

Brother, the king is wiser than he seems;

And Tostig knows it; Tostig loves the king.

HAROLD.

And love should know; and — be the king so wise, —

Then Tostig too were wiser than he seems.

I love the man but not his phantasies.

Re-enter TOSTIG.

Well, brother,

When didst thou hear from thy Northumbria?

TOSTIG.

When did I hear aught but this ‘When’ from thee?

Leave me alone, brother, with my Northumbria:

She is my mistress, let me look to her!

The King hath made me Earl; make me not fool!

Nor make the King a fool, who made me Earl!

HAROLD.

No, Tostig — lest I make myself a fool

Who made the King who made thee, make thee Earl.

TOSTIG.

Why chafe me then? Thou knowest I soon go wild.

GURTH.

Come, come! as yet thou art not gone so wild

But thou canst hear the best and wisest of us.

HAROLD.

So says old Gurth, not I: yet hear! thine earldom,

Tostig, hath been a kingdom. Their old crown

Is yet a force among them, a sun set

But leaving light enough for Alfgar’s house

To strike thee down by — nay, this ghastly glare

May heat their fancies.

TOSTIG.

My most worthy brother,

Thou art the quietest man in all the world —

Ay, ay and wise in peace and great in war —

Pray God the people choose thee for their king!

But all the powers of the house of Godwin

Are not enframed in thee.

HAROLD.

Thank the Saints, no!

But thou hast drain’d them shallow by thy tolls,

And thou art ever here about the King:

Thine absence well may seem a want of care.

Cling to their love; for, now the sons of Godwin

Sit topmost in the field of England, envy,

Like the rough bear beneath the tree, good brother,

Waits till the man let go.

TOSTIG.

Good counsel truly!

I heard from my Northumbria yesterday.

HAROLD.

How goes it then with thy Northumbria? Well?

TOSTIG.

And wouldst thou that it went aught else than well?

HAROLD.

I would it went as well as with mine earldom,

Leofwin’s and Gurth’s.

TOSTIG.

Ye govern milder men.

GURTH.

We have made them milder by just government.

TOSTIG.

Ay, ever give yourselves your own good word.

LEOFWIN.

An honest gift, by all the Saints, if giver

And taker be but honest! but they bribe

Each other, and so often, an honest world

Will not believe them.

HAROLD.

I may tell thee, Tostig,

I heard from thy Northumberland to-day.

TOSTIG.

From spies of thine to spy my nakedness

In my poor North!

HAROLD.

There is a movement there,

A blind one — nothing yet.

TOSTIG.

Crush it at once

With all the power I have! — I must — I will! —

Crush it half-born! Fool still? or wisdom there,

My wise head-shaking Harold?

HAROLD.

Make not thou

The nothing something. Wisdom when in power

And wisest, should not frown as Power, but smile

As kindness, watching all, till the true must

Shall make her strike as Power: but when to strike —

O Tostig, O dear brother — If they prance,

Rein in, not lash them, lest they rear and run

And break both neck and axle.

TOSTIG.

Good again!

Good counsel tho’ scarce needed. Pour not water

In the full vessel running out at top

To swamp the house.

LEOFWIN.

Nor thou be a wild thing

Out of the waste, to turn and bite the hand

Would help thee from the trap.

TOSTIG.

Thou playest in tune.

LEOFWIN.

To the deaf adder thee, that wilt not dance

However wisely charm’d.

TOSTIG.

No more, no more!

GURTH.

I likewise cry ‘no more.’ Unwholesome talk

For Godwin’s house! Leofwin, thou hast a tongue!

Tostig, thou look’st as thou wouldst spring upon him.

St. Olaf, not while I am by! Come, come,

Join hands, let brethren dwell in unity;

Let kith and kin stand close as our shield-wall,

Who breaks us then? I say, thou hast a tongue,

And Tostig is not stout enough to bear it.

Vex him not, Leofwin.

TOSTIG.

No, I am not vext, —

Altho’ ye seek to vex me, one and all.

I have to make report of my good earldom

To the good king who gave it — not to you —

Not any of you. — I am not vext at all.

HAROLD.

The king? the king is ever at his prayers;

In all that handles matter of the state

I am the king.

TOSTIG.

That shall thou never be

If I can thwart thee.

HAROLD.

Brother, brother!

TOSTIG.  Away!

[Exit Tostig.

QUEEN.

Spite of this grisly star ye three must gall

Poor Tostig.

LEOFWIN.

Tostig, sister, galls himself;

He cannot smell a rose but pricks his nose

Against the thorn, and rails against the rose.

QUEEN.

I am the only rose of all the stock

That never thorn’d him; Edward loves him, so

Ye hate him. Harold always hated him.

Why — how they fought when boys — and, Holy Mary!

How Harold used to beat him!

HAROLD.

Why, boys will fight.

Leofwin would often fight me, and I beat him.

Even old Gurth would fight. I had much ado

To hold mine own against old Gurth. Old Gurth,

We fought like great states for grave cause; but Tostig —

On a sudden — at a something — for a nothing —

The boy would fist me hard, and when we fought

I conquer’d, and he loved me none the less,

Till thou wouldst get him all apart, and tell him

That where he was but worsted, he was wrong’d.

Ah! thou hast taught the king to spoil him too;

Now the spoilt child sways both. Take heed, take heed;

Thou art the Queen; ye are boy and girl no more:

Side not with Tostig in any violence,

Lest thou be sideways guilty of the violence.

QUEEN.

Come fall not foul on me. I leave thee, brother.

HAROLD.

Nay, my good sister —

[Exeunt Queen, Harold, Gurth, and Leofwin.

ALDWYTH.

Gamel, son of Orm,

What thinkest thou this means?        [Pointing to the comet.

GAMEL.

War, my dear lady,

War, waste, plague, famine, all malignities.

ALDWYTH.

It means the fall of Tostig from his earldom.

GAMEL.

That were too small a matter for a comet!

ALDWYTH.

It means the lifting of the house of Alfgar.

GAMEL.

Too small! a comet would not show for that!

ALDWYTH.

Not small for thee, if thou canst compass it.

GAMEL.

Thy love?

ALDWYTH.

As much as I can give thee, man;

This Tostig is, or like to be, a tyrant;

Stir up thy people: oust him!

GAMEL.

And thy love?

ALDWYTH.

As much as thou canst bear.

GAMEL.

I can bear all,

And not be giddy.

ALDWYTH.

No more now: to-morrow.

Scene II

In the Garden. The King’s house near London. Sunset.

EDITH.

Mad for thy mate, passionate nightingale. . . .

I love thee for it — ay, but stay a moment;

He can but stay a moment: he is going.

I fain would hear him coming! . . . near me . . . near.

Somewhere — To draw him nearer with a charm

Like thine to thine.

(Singing.)

Love is come with a song and a smile,

Welcome Love with a smile and a song:

Love can stay but a little while.

Why cannot he stay? They call him away:

Ye do him wrong, ye do him wrong;

Love will stay for a whole life long.

Enter HAROLD.

HAROLD.

The nightingales in Havering-at-the-Bower

Sang out their loves so loud, that Edward’s prayers

Were deafen’d and he pray’d them dumb, and thus

I dumb thee too, my wingless nightingale!

[Kissing her.

EDITH.

Thou art my music! Would their wings were mine

To follow thee to Flanders! Must thou go?

HAROLD.

Not must, but will. It is but for one moon.

EDITH.

Leaving so many foes in Edward’s hall

To league against thy weal. The Lady Aldwyth

Was here to-day, and when she touch’d on thee,

She stammer’d in her hate; I am sure she hates thee,

Pants for thy blood.

HAROLD.

Well, I have given her cause —

I fear no woman.

EDITH.

Hate not one who felt

Some pity for thy hater! I am sure

Her morning wanted sunlight, she so praised

The convent and lone life — within the pale —

Beyond the passion. Nay — she held with Edward,

At least methought she held with holy Edward,

That marriage was half sin.

HAROLD.

A lesson worth

Finger and thumb — thus (snaps his fingers). And my answer to it —

See here — an interwoven H and E!

Take thou this ring; I will demand his ward

From Edward when I come again. Ay, would she?

She to shut up my blossom in the dark!

Thou art my nun, thy cloister in mine arms.

EDITH (taking the ring).

Yea, but Earl Tostig —

HAROLD.

That’s a truer fear!

For if the North take fire, I should be back;

I shall be, soon enough.

EDITH.

Ay, but last night

An evil dream that ever came and went —

HAROLD.

A gnat that vext thy pillow! Had I been by,

I would have spoil’d his horn. My girl, what was it?

EDITH.

Oh! that thou wert not going!

For so methought it was our marriage-morn,

And while we stood together, a dead man

Rose from behind the altar, tore away

My marriage ring, and rent my bridal veil;

And then I turn’d, and saw the church all fill’d

With dead men upright from their graves, and all

The dead men made at thee to murder thee,

But thou didst back thyself against a pillar,

And strike among them with thy battle-axe —

There, what a dream!

HAROLD.

Well, well — a dream — no more!

EDITH.

Did not Heaven speak to men in dreams of old?

HAROLD.

Ay — well — of old. I tell thee what, my child;

Thou hast misread this merry dream of thine,

Taken the rifted pillars of the wood

For smooth stone columns of the sanctuary,

The shadows of a hundred fat dead deer

For dead men’s ghosts. True, that the battle-axe

Was out of place; it should have been the bow. —

Come, thou shalt dream no more such dreams; I swear it,

By mine own eyes — and these two sapphires — these

Twin rubies, that are amulets against all

The kisses of all kind of womankind

In Flanders, till the sea shall roll me back

To tumble at thy feet.

EDITH.

That would but shame me,

Rather than make me vain. The sea may roll

Sand, shingle, shore-weed, not the living rock

Which guards the land.

HAROLD.

Except it be a soft one,

And undereaten to the fall. Mine amulet . . .

This last . . . upon thine eyelids, to shut in

A happier dream. Sleep, sleep, and thou shalt see

My grayhounds fleeting like a beam of light,

And hear my peregrine and her bells in heaven;

And other bells on earth, which yet are heaven’s;

Guess what they be.

EDITH.

He cannot guess who knows.

Farewell, my king.

HAROLD.

Not yet, but then — my queen.

[Exeunt.

Enter ALDWYTH from the thicket.

ALDWYTH.

The kiss that charms thine eyelids into sleep,

Will hold mine waking. Hate him? I could love him

More, tenfold, than this fearful child can do;

Griffyth I hated: why not hate the foe

Of England? Griffyth when I saw him flee,

Chased deer-like up his mountains, all the blood

That should have only pulsed for Griffyth, beat

For his pursuer. I love him or think I love him.

If he were King of England, I his queen,

I might be sure of it. Nay, I do love him. —

She must be cloister’d somehow, lest the king

Should yield his ward to Harold’s will. What harm?

She hath but blood enough to live, not love. —

When Harold goes and Tostig, shall I play

The craftier Tostig with him? fawn upon him?

Chime in with all? ‘O thou more saint than king!’

And that were true enough. ‘O blessed relics!’

‘O Holy Peter!’ If he found me thus,

Harold might hate me; he is broad and honest,

Breathing an easy gladness . . . not like Aldwyth . . .

For which I strangely love him. Should not England

Love Aldwyth, if she stay the feuds that part

The sons of Godwin from the sons of Alfgar

By such a marrying? Courage, noble Aldwyth!

Let all thy people bless thee!

Our wild Tostig,

Edward hath made him Earl: he would be king: —

The dog that snapt the shadow, dropt the bone. —

I trust he may do well, this Gamel, whom

I play upon, that he may play the note

Whereat the dog shall howl and run, and Harold

Hear the king’s music, all alone with him,

Pronounced his heir of England.

I see the goal and half the way to it. —

Peace-lover is our Harold for the sake

Of England’s wholeness — so — to shake the North

With earthquake and disruption — some division —

Then fling mine own fair person in the gap

A sacrifice to Harold, a peace-offering,

A scape-goat marriage — all the sins of both

The houses on mine head — then a fair life

And bless the Queen of England.

MORCAR (coming from the thicket).

Art thou assured

By this, that Harold loves but Edith?

ALDWYTH.

Morcar!

Why creep’st thou like a timorous beast of prey

Out of the bush by night?

MORCAR.

I follow’d thee.

ALDWYTH.

Follow my lead, and I will make thee earl.

MORCAR.

What lead then?

ALDWYTH.

Thou shalt flash it secretly

Among the good Northumbrian folk, that I —

That Harold loves me — yea, and presently

That I and Harold are betroth’d — and last —

Perchance that Harold wrongs me; tho’ I would not

That it should come to that.

MORCAR.

I will both flash

And thunder for thee.

ALDWYTH.

I said ‘secretly;’

It is the flash that murders, the poor thunder

Never harm’d head.

MORCAR.

But thunder may bring down

That which the flash hath stricken.

ALDWYTH.

Down with Tostig!

That first of all — And when doth Harold go?

MORCAR.

To-morrow — first to Bosham, then to Flanders.

ALDWYTH.

Not to come back till Tostig shall have shown

And redden’d with his people’s blood the teeth

That shall be broken by us — yea, and thou

Chair’d in his place. Good-night, and dream thyself

Their chosen Earl.

[Exit Aldwyth.

MORCAR.

Earl first, and after that

Who knows I may not dream myself their king!

Act II

Scene I

Seashore. Ponthieu. Night.

HAROLD and his MEN, wrecked.

HAROLD.

Friends, in that last inhospitable plunge

Our boat hath burst her ribs; but ours are whole;

I have but bark’d my hands.

ATTENDANT.

I dug mine into

My old fast friend the shore, and clinging thus

Felt the remorseless outdraught of the deep

Haul like a great strong fellow at my legs,

And then I rose and ran. The blast that came

So suddenly hath fallen as suddenly —

Put thou the comet and this blast together —

HAROLD.

Put thou thyself and mother-wit together.

Be not a fool!

Enter FISHERMEN with torches, HAROLD going up to one of them, ROLF.

Wicked sea-will-o’-the-wisp!

Wolf of the shore! dog, with thy lying lights

Thou hast betray’d us on these rocks of thine!

ROLF.

Ay, but thou liest as loud as the black herring-pond behind thee. We be fishermen; I came to see after my nets.

HAROLD.

To drag us into them. Fishermen? devils!

Who, while ye fish for men with your false fires,

Let the great Devil fish for your own souls.

ROLF.

Nay then, we be liker the blessed Apostles; they were fishers of men, Father Jean says.

HAROLD.

I had liefer that the fish had swallowed me,

Like Jonah, than have known there were such devils.

What’s to be done?

[To his MEN — goes apart with them.

FISHERMAN.

Rolf, what fish did swallow Jonah?

ROLF.

A whale!

FISHERMAN.

Then a whale to a whelk we have swallowed the King of England. I saw him over there. Look thee, Rolf, when I was down in the fever, she was down with the hunger, and thou didst stand by her and give her thy crabs, and set her up again, till now, by the patient Saints, she’s as crabb’d as ever.

ROLF.

And I’ll give her my crabs again, when thou art down again.

FISHERMAN.

I thank thee, Rolf. Run thou to Count Guy; he is hard at hand. Tell him what hath crept into our creel, and he will fee thee as freely as he will wrench this outlander’s ransom out of him — and why not? for what right had he to get himself wrecked on another man’s land?

ROLF.

Thou art the human-heartedest, Christian-charitiest of all crab-catchers. Share and share alike!

[Exit.

HAROLD (to FISHERMAN).

Fellow, dost thou catch crabs?

FISHERMAN.

As few as I may in a wind, and less than I would in a calm. Ay!

HAROLD.

I have a mind that thou shalt catch no more.

FISHERMAN.

How?

HAROLD.

I have a mind to brain thee with mine axe.

FISHERMAN.

Ay, do, do, and our great Count-crab will make his nippers meet in thine heart; he’ll sweat it out of thee, he’ll sweat it out of thee. Look, he’s here! He’ll speak for himself! Hold thine own, if thou canst!

Enter GUY, COUNT OF PONTHIEU.

HAROLD.

Guy, Count of Ponthieu?

GUY.

Harold, Earl of Wessex!

HAROLD.

Thy villains with their lying lights have wreck’d us!

GUY.

Art thou not Earl of Wessex?

HAROLD.

In mine earldom

A man may hang gold bracelets on a bush,

And leave them for a year, and coming back

Find them again.

GUY.

Thou art a mighty man

In thine own earldom!

HAROLD.

Were such murderous liars

In Wessex — if I caught them, they should hang

Cliff-gibbeted for sea-marks; our sea-mew

Winging their only wail!

GUY.

Ay, but my men

Hold that the shipwreckt are accursed of God; —

What hinders me to hold with mine own men?

HAROLD.

The Christian manhood of the man who reigns!

GUY.

Ay, rave thy worst, but in our oubliettes

Thou shalt or rot or ransom. Hale him hence!

[To one of his ATTENDANTS.

Fly thou to William; tell him we have Harold.

Scene II

Bayeux. Palace.

COUNT WILLIAM and WILLIAM MALET.

WILLIAM.

We hold our Saxon woodcock in the springe,

But he begins to flutter. As I think

He was thine host in England when I went

To visit Edward.

MALET.

Yea, and there, my lord,

To make allowance for their rougher fashions,

I found him all a noble host should be.

WILLIAM.

Thou art his friend: thou know’st my claim on England

Thro’ Edward’s promise: we have him in the toils.

And it were well, if thou shouldst let him feel,

How dense a fold of danger nets him round,

So that he bristle himself against my will.

MALET.

What would I do, my lord, if I were you?

WILLIAM.

What wouldst thou do?

MALET.

My lord, he is thy guest.

WILLIAM.

Nay, by the splendour of God, no guest of mine.

He came not to see me, had past me by

To hunt and hawk elsewhere, save for the fate

Which hunted him when that un-Saxon blast,

And bolts of thunder moulded in high heaven

To serve the Norman purpose, drave and crack’d

His boat on Ponthieu beach; where our friend Guy

Had wrung his ransom from him by the rack,

But that I slept between and purchased him,

Translating his captivity from Guy

To mine own hearth at Bayeux, where he sits

My ransom’d prisoner.

MALET.

Well, if not with gold,

With golden deeds and iron strokes that brought

Thy war with Brittany to a goodlier close

Than else had been, he paid his ransom back.

WILLIAM.

So that henceforth they are not like to league

With Harold against me.

MALET.

A marvel, how

He from the liquid sands of Coesnon

Haled thy shore-swallow’d, armour’d Normans up

To fight for thee again!

WILLIAM.

Perchance against

Their saver, save thou save him from himself.

MALET.

But I should let him home again, my lord.

WILLIAM.

Simple! let fly the bird within the hand,

To catch the bird again within the bush!

No.

Smooth thou my way, before he clash with me;

I want his voice in England for the crown,

I want thy voice with him to bring him round;

And being brave he must be subtly cow’d,

And being truthful wrought upon to swear

Vows that he dare not break. England our own

Thro’ Harold’s help, he shall be my dear friend

As well as thine, and thou thyself shalt have

Large lordship there of lands and territory.

MALET.

I knew thy purpose; he and Wulfnoth never

Have met, except in public; shall they meet

In private? I have often talk’d with Wulfnoth,

And stuff’d the boy with fears that these may act

On Harold when they meet.

WILLIAM.

Then let them meet!

MALET.

I can but love this noble, honest Harold.

WILLIAM.

Love him! why not? thine is a loving office,

I have commission’d thee to save the man:

Help the good ship, showing the sunken rock,

Or he is wreckt for ever.

Enter WILLIAM RUFUS.

WILLIAM RUFUS.

Father.

WILLIAM.

Well, boy.

WILLIAM RUFUS.

They have taken away the toy thou gavest me,

The Norman knight.

WILLIAM.

Why, boy?

WILLIAM RUFUS.

Because I broke

The horse’s leg — it was mine own to break;

I like to have my toys, and break them too.

WILLIAM.

Well, thou shalt have another Norman knight!

WILLIAM RUFUS.

And may I break his legs?

WILLIAM.

Yea, — get thee gone!

WILLIAM RUFUS.

I’ll tell them I have had my way with thee.

[Exit.

MALET.

I never knew thee check thy will for ought

Save for the prattling of thy little ones.

WILLIAM.

Who shall be kings of England. I am heir

Of England by the promise of her king.

MALET.

But there the great Assembly choose their king,

The choice of England is the voice of England.

WILLIAM.

I will be king of England by the laws,

The choice, and voice of England.

MALET.

Can that be?

WILLIAM.

The voice of any people is the sword

That guards them, or the sword that beats them down.

Here comes the would-be what I will be . . . king-like . . .

Tho’ scarce at ease; for, save our meshes break,

More kinglike he than like to prove a king.

Enter HAROLD, musing, with his eyes on the ground.

He sees me not — and yet he dreams of me.

Earl, wilt thou fly my falcons this fair day?

They are of the best, strong-wing’d against the wind.

HAROLD (looking up suddenly, having caught but the last word).

Which way does it blow?

WILLIAM.

Blowing for England, ha?

Not yet. Thou hast not learnt thy quarters here.

The winds so cross and jostle among these towers.

HAROLD.

Count of the Normans, thou hast ransom’d us,

Maintain’d, and entertain’d us royally!

WILLIAM.

And thou for us hast fought as loyally,

Which binds us friendship-fast for ever!

HAROLD.

Good!

But lest we turn the scale of courtesy

By too much pressure on it, I would fain,

Since thou hast promised Wulfnoth home with us,

Be home again with Wulfnoth.

WILLIAM.

Stay — as yet

Thou hast but seen how Norman hands can strike,

But walk’d our Norman field, scarce touch’d or tasted

The splendours of our Court.

HAROLD.

I am in no mood:

I should be as the shadow of a cloud

Crossing your light.

WILLIAM.

Nay, rest a week or two,

And we will fill thee full of Norman sun,

And send thee back among thine island mists

With laughter.

HAROLD.

Count, I thank thee, but had rather

Breathe the free wind from off our Saxon downs,

Tho’ charged with all the wet of all the west.

WILLIAM.

Why if thou wilt, so let it be — thou shalt.

That were a graceless hospitality

To chain the free guest to the banquet-board;

To-morrow we will ride with thee to Harfleur,

And see thee shipt, and pray in thy behalf

For happier homeward winds than that which crack’d

Thy bark at Ponthieu, — yet to us, in faith,

A happy one — whereby we came to know

Thy valour and thy value, noble earl.

Ay, and perchance a happy one for thee,

Provided — I will go with thee to-morrow —

Nay — but there be conditions, easy ones,

So thou, fair friend, will take them easily.

Enter PAGE.

PAGE.

My lord, there is a post from over seas

With news for thee.

[Exit Page.

WILLIAM.

Come, Malet, let us hear!

[Exeunt COUNT WILLIAM and MALET.

HAROLD.

Conditions? What conditions? pay him back

His ransom? ‘easy’ — that were easy — nay —

No money-lover he! What said the King?

‘I pray you do not go to Normandy.’

And fate hath blown me hither, bound me too

With bitter obligation to the Count —

Have I not fought it out? What did he mean?

There lodged a gleaming grimness in his eyes,

Gave his shorn smile the lie. The walls oppress me,

And yon huge keep that hinders half the heaven.

Free air! free field!

[Moves to go out. A Man-at-Arms follows him.

HAROLD (to the MAN-AT-ARMS).

I need thee not. Why dost thou follow me?

MAN-AT-ARMS.

I have the Count’s commands to follow thee.

HAROLD.

What then? Am I in danger in this court?

MAN-AT-ARMS.

I cannot tell. I have the Count’s commands.

HAROLD.

Stand out of earshot then, and keep me still

In eyeshot.

MAN-AT-ARMS.

Yea, lord Harold.

[Withdraws.

HAROLD.

And arm’d men

Ever keep watch beside my chamber door,

And if I walk within the lonely wood,

There is an arm’d man ever glides behind!

Enter MALET.

Why am I follow’d, haunted, harass’d, watch’d?

See yonder!    [Pointing to the MAN-AT-ARMS.

MALET.

‘Tis the good Count’s care for thee!

The Normans love thee not, nor thou the Normans,

Or — so they deem.

HAROLD.

But wherefore is the wind,

Which way soever the vane-arrow swing,

Not ever fair for England? Why but now

He said (thou heardst him) that I must not hence

Save on conditions.

MALET.

So in truth he said.

HAROLD.

Malet, thy mother was an Englishwoman;

There somewhere beats an English pulse in thee!

MALET.

Well — for my mother’s sake I love your England,

But for my father I love Normandy.

HAROLD.

Speak for thy mother’s sake, and tell me true.

MALET.

Then for my mother’s sake, and England’s sake

That suffers in the daily want of thee,

Obey the Count’s conditions, my good friend.

HAROLD.

How, Malet, if they be not honourable!

MALET.

Seem to obey them.

HAROLD.

Better die than lie!

MALET.

Choose therefore whether thou wilt have thy conscience

White as a maiden’s hand, or whether England

Be shatter’d into fragments.

HAROLD.

News from England?

MALET.

Morcar and Edwin have stirr’d up the Thanes

Against thy brother Tostig’s governance;

And all the North of Humber is one storm.

HAROLD.

I should be there, Malet, I should be there!

MALET.

And Tostig in his own hall on suspicion

Hath massacred the Thane that was his guest,

Gamel, the son of Orm: and there be more

As villainously slain.

HAROLD.

The wolf! the beast!

Ill news for guests, ha, Malet! More? What more?

What do they say? did Edward know of this?

MALET.

They say, his wife was knowing and abetting.

HAROLD.

They say, his wife! — To marry and have no husband

Makes the wife fool. My God, I should be there.

I’ll hack my way to the sea.

MALET.

Thou canst not, Harold;

Our Duke is all between thee and the sea,

Our Duke is all about thee like a God;

All passes block’d. Obey him, speak him fair,

For he is only debonair to those

That follow where he leads, but stark as death

To those that cross him. — Look thou, here is Wulfnoth!

I leave thee to thy talk with him alone;

How wan, poor lad! how sick and sad for home!

[Exit Malet.

HAROLD (muttering).

Go not to Normandy — go not to Normandy!

Enter WULFNOTH.

Poor brother! still a hostage!

WULFNOTH.

Yea, and I

Shall see the dewy kiss of dawn no more

Make blush the maiden-white of our tall cliffs,

Nor mark the sea-bird rouse himself and hover

Above the windy ripple, and fill the sky

With free sea-laughter — never — save indeed

Thou canst make yield this iron-mooded Duke

To let me go.

HAROLD.

Why, brother, so he will;

But on conditions. Canst thou guess at them?

WULFNOTH.

Draw nearer, — I was in the corridor,

I saw him coming with his brother Odo

The Bayeux bishop, and I hid myself.

HAROLD.

They did thee wrong who made thee hostage; thou

Wast ever fearful.

WULFNOTH.

And he spoke — I heard him —

‘This Harold is not of the royal blood,

Can have no right to the crown,’ and Odo said,

‘Thine is the right, for thine the might; he is here,

And yonder is thy keep.’

HAROLD.

No, Wulfnoth, no.

WULFNOTH.

And William laugh’d and swore that might was right,

Far as he knew in this poor world of ours —

‘Marry, the Saints must go along with us,

And, brother, we will find a way,’ said he —

Yea, yea, he would be king of England.

HAROLD.

Never!

WULFNOTH.

Yea, but thou must not this way answer him.

HAROLD.

Is it not better still to speak the truth?

WULFNOTH.

Not here, or thou wilt never hence nor I:

For in the racing toward this golden goal

He turns not right or left, but tramples flat

Whatever thwarts him; hast thou never heard

His savagery at Alencon, — the town

Hung out raw hides along their walls, and cried

‘Work for the tanner.’

HAROLD.

That had anger’d me

Had I been William.

WULFNOTH.

Nay, but he had prisoners,

He tore their eyes out, sliced their hands away,

And flung them streaming o’er the battlements

Upon the heads of those who walk’d within —

O speak him fair, Harold, for thine own sake.

HAROLD.

Your Welshman says, ‘The Truth against the World,’

Much more the truth against myself.

WULFNOTH.

Thyself?

But for my sake, oh brother! oh! for my sake!

HAROLD.

Poor Wulfnoth! do they not entreat thee well?

WULFNOTH.

I see the blackness of my dungeon loom

Across their lamps of revel, and beyond

The merriest murmurs of their banquet clank

The shackles that will bind me to the wall.

HAROLD.

Too fearful still!

WULFNOTH.

Oh no, no — speak him fair!

Call it to temporize; and not to lie;

Harold, I do not counsel thee to lie.

The man that hath to foil a murderous aim

May, surely, play with words.

HAROLD.

Words are the man.

Not ev’n for thy sake, brother, would I lie.

WULFNOTH.

Then for thine Edith?

HAROLD.

There thou prick’st me deep.

WULFNOTH.

And for our Mother England?

HAROLD.

Deeper still.

WULFNOTH.

And deeper still the deep-down oubliette,

Down thirty feet below the smiling day —

In blackness — dogs’ food thrown upon thy head.

And over thee the suns arise and set,

And the lark sings, the sweet stars come and go,

And men are at their markets, in their fields,

And woo their loves and have forgotten thee;

And thou art upright in thy living grave,

Where there is barely room to shift thy side,

And all thine England hath forgotten thee;

And he our lazy-pious Norman King,

With all his Normans round him once again,

Counts his old beads, and hath forgotten thee.

HAROLD.

Thou art of my blood, and so methinks, my boy,

Thy fears infect me beyond reason. Peace!

WULFNOTH.

And then our fiery Tostig, while thy hands

Are palsied here, if his Northumbrians rise

And hurl him from them, — I have heard the Normans

Count upon this confusion — may he not make

A league with William, so to bring him back?

HAROLD.

That lies within the shadow of the chance.

WULFNOTH.

And like a river in flood thro’ a burst dam

Descends the ruthless Norman — our good King

Kneels mumbling some old bone — our helpless folk

Are wash’d away, wailing, in their own blood —

HAROLD.

Wailing! not warring? Boy, thou hast forgotten

That thou art English.

WULFNOTH.

Then our modest women —

I know the Norman license — thine own Edith —

HAROLD.

No more! I will not hear thee — William comes.

WULFNOTH.

I dare not well be seen in talk with thee.

Make thou not mention that I spake with thee.

[Moves away to the back of the stage.

Enter WILLIAM, MALET, and OFFICER.

OFFICER.

We have the man that rail’d against thy birth.

WILLIAM.

Tear out his tongue.

OFFICER.

He shall not rail again.

He said that he should see confusion fall

On thee and on thine house.

WILLIAM.

Tear out his eyes, And plunge him into prison.

OFFICER.

It shall be done.

[Exit Officer.

WILLIAM.

Look not amazed, fair earl! Better leave undone

Than do by halves — tongueless and eyeless, prison’d —

HAROLD.

Better methinks have slain the man at once!

WILLIAM.

We have respect for man’s immortal soul,

We seldom take man’s life, except in war;

It frights the traitor more to maim and blind.

HAROLD.

In mine own land I should have scorn’d the man,

Or lash’d his rascal back, and let him go.

WILLIAM.

And let him go? To slander thee again!

Yet in thine own land in thy father’s day

They blinded my young kinsman, Alfred — ay,

Some said it was thy father’s deed.

HAROLD.

They lied.

WILLIAM.

But thou and he — whom at thy word, for thou

Art known a speaker of the truth, I free

From this foul charge —

HAROLD.

Nay, nay, he freed himself

By oath and compurgation from the charge.

The king, the lords, the people clear’d him of it.

WILLIAM.

But thou and he drove our good Normans out

From England, and this rankles in us yet.

Archbishop Robert hardly scaped with life.

HAROLD.

Archbishop Robert! Robert the Archbishop!

Robert of Jumiéges, he that —

MALET.

Quiet! quiet!

HAROLD.

Count! if there sat within the Norman chair

A ruler all for England — one who fill’d

All offices, all bishopricks with English —

We could not move from Dover to the Humber

Saving thro’ Norman bishopricks — I say

Ye would applaud that Norman who should drive

The stranger to the fiends!

WILLIAM.

Why, that is reason!

Warrior thou art, and mighty wise withal!

Ay, ay, but many among our Norman lords

Hate thee for this, and press upon me — saying

God and the sea have given thee to our hands —

To plunge thee into life-long prison here: —

Yet I hold out against them, as I may,

Yea — would hold out, yea, tho’ they should revolt —

For thou hast done the battle in my cause;

I am thy fastest friend in Normandy.

HAROLD.

I am doubly bound to thee . . . if this be so.

WILLIAM.

And I would bind thee more, and would myself

Be bounden to thee more.

HAROLD.

Then let me hence With Wulfnoth to King Edward.

WILLIAM.

So we will. We hear he hath not long to live.

HAROLD.

It may be.

WILLIAM.

Why then the heir of England, who is he?

HAROLD.

The Atheling is nearest to the throne.

WILLIAM.

But sickly, slight, half-witted and a child,

Will England have him king?

HAROLD.

It may be, no.

WILLIAM.

And hath King Edward not pronounced his heir?

HAROLD.

Not that I know.

WILLIAM.

When he was here in Normandy,

He loved us and we him, because we found him.

A Norman of the Normans.

HAROLD.

So did we.

WILLIAM.

A gentle, gracious, pure and saintly man!

And grateful to the hand that shielded him,

He promised that if ever he were king

In England, he would give his kingly voice

To me as his successor. Knowest thou this?

HAROLD.

I learn it now.

WILLIAM.

Thou knowest I am his cousin,

And that my wife descends from Alfred?

HAROLD.

Ay.

WILLIAM.

Who hath a better claim then to the crown

So that ye will not crown the Atheling?

HAROLD.

None that I know . . . if that but hung upon

King Edward’s will.

WILLIAM.

Wilt thou uphold my claim?

MALET (aside to HAROLD).

Be careful of thine answer, my good friend.

WULFNOTH (aside to HAROLD).

Oh! Harold, for my sake and for thine own!

HAROLD.

Ay . . . if the king have not revoked his promise.

WILLIAM.

But hath he done it then?

HAROLD.

Not that I know.

WILLIAM.

Good, good, and thou wilt help me to the crown?

HAROLD.

Ay . . . if the Witan will consent to this.

WILLIAM.

Thou art the mightiest voice in England, man,

Thy voice will lead the Witan — shall I have it?

WULFNOTH (aside to HAROLD).

Oh! Harold, if thou love thine Edith, ay.

HAROLD.

Ay, if —

MALET (aside to HAROLD).

Thine ‘ifs’ will sear thine eyes out — ay.

WILLIAM.

I ask thee, wilt thou help me to the crown?

And I will make thee my great Earl of Earls,

Foremost in England and in Normandy;

Thou shalt be verily king — all but the name —

For I shall most sojourn in Normandy;

And thou be my vice-king in England. Speak.

WULFNOTH (aside to HAROLD).

Ay, brother — for the sake of England — ay.

HAROLD.

My lord —

MALET (aside to HAROLD).

Take heed now.

HAROLD.

Ay.

WILLIAM.

I am content,

For thou art truthful, and thy word thy bond.

To-morrow will we ride with thee to Harfleur.

[Exit William.

MALET.

Harold, I am thy friend, one life with thee,

And even as I should bless thee saving mine,

I thank thee now for having saved thyself.

[Exit Malet.

HAROLD.

For having lost myself to save myself,

Said ‘ay’ when I meant ‘no,’ lied like a lad

That dreads the pendent scourge, said ‘ay’ for ‘no’!

Ay! No! — he hath not bound me by an oath —

Is ‘ay’ an oath? is ‘ay’ strong as an oath?

Or is it the same sin to break my word

As break mine oath? He call’d my word my bond!

He is a liar who knows I am a liar,

And makes believe that he believes my word —

The crime be on his head — not bounden — no.

[Suddenly doors are flung open, discovering in an inner hall COUNT WILLIAM in his state robes, seated upon his throne, between two BISHOPS, ODO OF BAYEUX being one: in the centre of the hall an ark covered with cloth of gold; and on either side of it the NORMAN BARONS.

Enter a JAILOR before WILLIAM’S throne.

WILLIAM (to JAILOR).

Knave, hast thou let thy prisoner scape?

JAILOR.

Sir Count,

He had but one foot, he must have hopt away,

Yea, some familiar spirit must have help’d him.

WILLIAM.

Woe knave to thy familiar and to thee!

Give me thy keys.    [They fall clashing.

Nay let them lie. Stand there and wait my will.

[The JAILOR stands aside.

WILLIAM (to HAROLD).

Hast thou such trustless jailors in thy North?

HAROLD.

We have few prisoners in mine earldom there,

So less chance for false keepers.

WILLIAM.

We have heard

Of thy just, mild, and equal governance;

Honour to thee! thou art perfect in all honour!

Thy naked word thy bond! confirm it now

Before our gather’d Norman baronage,

For they will not believe thee — as I believe.

[Descends from his throne and stands by the ark.

Let all men here bear witness of our bond!

[Beckons to HAROLD, who advances.

Enter MALET behind him.

Lay thou thy hand upon this golden pall!

Behold the jewel of St. Pancratius

Woven into the gold. Swear thou on this!

HAROLD.

What should I swear? Why should I swear on this?

WILLIAM (savagely).

Swear thou to help me to the crown of England.

MALET (whispering HAROLD).

My friend, thou hast gone too far to palter now.

WULFNOTH (whispering HAROLD).

Swear thou to-day, to-morrow is thine own.

HAROLD.

I swear to help thee to the crown of England . . .

According as King Edward promises.

WILLIAM.

Thou must swear absolutely, noble Earl.

MALET (whispering).

Delay is death to thee, ruin to England.

WULFNOTH (whispering).

Swear, dearest brother, I beseech thee, swear!

HAROLD (putting his hand on the jewel).

I swear to help thee to the crown of England.

WILLIAM.

Thanks, truthful Earl; I did not doubt thy word,

But that my barons might believe thy word,

And that the Holy Saints of Normandy

When thou art home in England, with thine own,

Might strengthen thee in keeping of thy word,

I made thee swear. — Show him by whom he hath sworn.

[The two BISHOPS advance, and raise the cloth of gold.

The bodies and bones of Saints are seen lying in the ark.

The holy bones of all the Canonised

From all the holiest shrines in Normandy!

HAROLD.

Horrible!        [They let the cloth fall again.

WILLIAM.

Ay, for thou hast sworn an oath

Which, if not kept, would make the hard earth rive

To the very Devil’s horns, the bright sky cleave

To the very feet of God, and send her hosts

Of injured Saints to scatter sparks of plague

Thro’ all your cities, blast your infants, dash

The torch of war among your standing corn,

Dabble your hearths with your own blood. — Enough!

Thou wilt not break it! I, the Count — the King —

Thy friend — am grateful for thine honest oath,

Not coming fiercely like a conqueror, now,

But softly as a bridegroom to his own.

For I shall rule according to your laws,

And make your ever-jarring Earldoms move

To music and in order — Angle, Jute,

Dane, Saxon, Norman, help to build a throne

Out-towering hers of France. . . . The wind is fair

For England now. . . . To-night we will be merry.

To-morrow will I ride with thee to Harfleur.

[Exeunt WILLIAM and all the NORMAN BARONS, etc.

HAROLD.

To-night we will be merry — and to-morrow —

Juggler and bastard — bastard — he hates that most —

William the tanner’s bastard! Would he heard me!

O God, that I were in some wide, waste field

With nothing but my battle-axe and him

To spatter his brains! Why let earth rive, gulf in

These cursed Normans — yea and mine own self.

Cleave heaven, and send thy saints that I may say

Ev’n to their faces, ‘If ye side with William

Ye are not noble.’ How their pointed fingers

Glared at me! Am I Harold, Harold, son

Of our great Godwin? Lo! I touch mine arms,

My limbs — they are not mine — they are a liar’s —

I mean to be a liar — I am not bound —

Stigand shall give me absolution for it —

Did the chest move? did it move? I am utter craven!

O Wulfnoth, Wulfnoth, brother, thou hast betray’d me!

WULFNOTH.

Forgive me, brother, I will live here and die.

Enter PAGE.

PAGE.

My lord! the Duke awaits thee at the banquet.

HAROLD.

Where they eat dead men’s flesh, and drink their blood.

PAGE.

My lord —

HAROLD.

I know your Norman cookery is so spiced,

It masks all this.

PAGE.

My lord! thou art white as death.

HAROLD.

With looking on the dead. Am I so white?

Thy Duke will seem the darker. Hence, I follow.

[Exeunt.

Act III

Scene I

The King’s Palace. London.

KING EDWARD dying on a couch, and by him standing the QUEEN, HAROLD, ARCHBISHOP STIGAND, GURTH, LEOFWIN, ARCHBISHOP ALDRED, ALDWYTH, and EDITH.

STIGAND.

Sleeping or dying there? If this be death,

Then our great Council wait to crown thee King —

Come hither, I have a power;        [To HAROLD.

They call me near, for I am close to thee

And England — I, old shrivell’d Stigand, I,

Dry as an old wood-fungus on a dead tree,

I have a power!

See here this little key about my neck!

There lies a treasure buried down in Ely:

If e’er the Norman grow too hard for thee,

Ask me for this at thy most need, son Harold,

At thy most need — not sooner.

HAROLD.

So I will.

STIGAND.

Red gold — a hundred purses — yea, and more!

If thou canst make a wholesome use of these

To chink against the Norman, I do believe

My old crook’d spine would bud out two young wings

To fly to heaven straight with.

HAROLD.

Thank thee, father!

Thou art English, Edward too is English now,

He hath clean repented of his Normanism.

STIGAND.

Ay, as the libertine repents who cannot

Make done undone, when thro’ his dying sense

Shrills ‘lost thro’ thee.’ They have built their castles here;

Our priories are Norman; the Norman adder

Hath bitten us; we are poison’d: our dear England

Is demi-Norman. He! —

[Pointing to KING EDWARD, sleeping.

HAROLD.

I would I were

As holy and as passionless as he!

That I might rest as calmly! Look at him —

The rosy face, and long down-silvering beard,

The brows unwrinkled as a summer mere. —

STIGAND.

A summer mere with sudden wreckful gusts

From a side-gorge. Passionless? How he flamed

When Tostig’s anger’d earldom flung him, nay,

He fain had calcined all Northumbria

To one black ash, but that thy patriot passion

Siding with our great Council against Tostig,

Out-passion’d his! Holy? ay, ay, forsooth,

A conscience for his own soul, not his realm;

A twilight conscience lighted thro’ a chink;

Thine by the sun; nay, by some sun to be,

When all the world hath learnt to speak the truth,

And lying were self-murder by that state

Which was the exception.

HAROLD.

That sun may God speed!

STIGAND.

Come, Harold, shake the cloud off!

HAROLD.

Can I, father?

Our Tostig parted cursing me and England;

Our sister hates us for his banishment;

He hath gone to kindle Norway against England,

And Wulfnoth is alone in Normandy.

For when I rode with William down to Harfleur,

‘Wulfnoth is sick,’ he said; ‘he cannot follow;’

Then with that friendly-fiendly smile of his,

‘We have learnt to love him, let him a little longer

Remain a hostage for the loyalty

Of Godwin’s house.’ As far as touches Wulfnoth

I that so prized plain word and naked truth

Have sinn’d against it — all in vain.

LEOFWIN.

Good brother,

By all the truths that ever priest hath preach’d,

Of all the lies that ever men have lied,

Thine is the pardonablest.

HAROLD.

May be so!

I think it so, I think I am a fool

To think it can be otherwise than so.

STIGAND.

Tut, tut, I have absolved thee: dost thou scorn me,

Because I had my Canterbury pallium,

From one whom they dispoped?

HAROLD.

No, Stigand, no!

STIGAND.

Is naked truth actable in true life?

I have heard a saying of thy father Godwin,

That, were a man of state nakedly true,

Men would but take him for the craftier liar.

LEOFWIN.

Be men less delicate than the Devil himself?

I thought that naked Truth would shame the Devil,

The Devil is so modest.

GURTH.

He never said it!

LEOFWIN.

Be thou not stupid-honest, brother Gurth!

HAROLD.

Better to be a liar’s dog, and hold

My master honest, than believe that lying

And ruling men are fatal twins that cannot

Move one without the other. Edward wakes! —

Dazed — he hath seen a vision.

EDWARD.

The green tree!

Then a great Angel past along the highest

Crying ‘the doom of England,’ and at once

He stood beside me, in his grasp a sword

Of lightnings, wherewithal he cleft the tree

From off the bearing trunk, and hurl’d it from him

Three fields away, and then he dash’d and drench’d,

He dyed, he soak’d the trunk with human blood,

And brought the sunder’d tree again, and set it

Straight on the trunk, that thus baptized in blood

Grew ever high and higher, beyond my seeing,

And shot out sidelong boughs across the deep

That dropt themselves, and rooted in far isles

Beyond my seeing: and the great Angel rose

And past again along the highest crying

‘The doom of England!’ — Tostig, raise my head!

[Falls back senseless.

HAROLD (raising him).

Let Harold serve for Tostig!

QUEEN.

Harold served

Tostig so ill, he cannot serve for Tostig!

Ay, raise his head, for thou hast laid it low!

The sickness of our saintly king, for whom

My prayers go up as fast as my tears fall,

I well believe, hath mainly drawn itself

From lack of Tostig — thou hast banish’d him.

HAROLD.

Nay — but the council, and the king himself.

QUEEN.

Thou hatest him, hatest him.

HAROLD (coldly).

Ay — Stigand, unriddle This vision, canst thou?

STIGAND.

Dotage!

EDWARD (starting up).

It is finish’d.

I have built the Lord a house — the Lord hath dwelt

In darkness. I have built the Lord a house —

Palms, flowers, pomegranates, golden cherubim

With twenty-cubit wings from wall to wall —

I have built the Lord a house — sing, Asaph! clash

The cymbal, Heman! blow the trumpet, priest!

Fall, cloud, and fill the house — lo! my two pillars,

Jachin and Boaz! —      [Seeing HAROLD and GURTH.

Harold, Gurth, — where am I?

Where is the charter of our Westminster?

STIGAND.

It lies beside thee, king, upon thy bed.

EDWARD.

Sign, sign at once — take, sign it, Stigand, Aldred!

Sign it, my good son Harold, Gurth, and Leofwin,

Sign it, my queen!

ALL.

We have sign’d it.

EDWARD.

It is finish’d!

The kingliest Abbey in all Christian lands,

The lordliest, loftiest minster ever built

To Holy Peter in our English isle!

Let me be buried there, and all our kings,

And all our just and wise and holy men

That shall be born hereafter. It is finish’d!

Hast thou had absolution for thine oath?        [To HAROLD.

HAROLD.

Stigand hath given me absolution for it.

EDWARD.

Stigand is not canonical enough

To save thee from the wrath of Norman Saints.

STIGAND.

Norman enough! Be there no Saints of England

To help us from their brethren yonder?

EDWARD.

Prelate,

The Saints are one, but those of Normanland

Are mightier than our own. Ask it of Aldred.

[To HAROLD.

ALDRED.

It shall be granted him, my king; for he

Who vows a vow to strangle his own mother

Is guiltier keeping this, than breaking it.

EDWARD.

O friends, I shall not overlive the day.

STIGAND.

Why then the throne is empty. Who inherits?

For tho’ we be not bound by the king’s voice

In making of a king, yet the king’s voice

Is much toward his making. Who inherits?

Edgar the Atheling?

EDWARD.

No, no, but Harold.

I love him: he hath served me: none but he

Can rule all England. Yet the curse is on him

For swearing falsely by those blessed bones;

He did not mean to keep his vow.

HAROLD.

Not mean

To make our England Norman.

EDWARD.

There spake Godwin,

Who hated all the Normans; but their Saints

Have heard thee, Harold.

EDITH.

Oh! my lord, my king!

He knew not whom he sware by.

EDWARD.

Yea, I know

He knew not, but those heavenly ears have heard,

Their curse is on him; wilt thou bring another,

Edith, upon his head?

EDITH.

No, no, not I.

EDWARD.

Why then, thou must not wed him.

HAROLD.

Wherefore, wherefore?

EDWARD.

O son, when thou didst tell me of thine oath,

I sorrow’d for my random promise given

To yon fox-lion. I did not dream then

I should be king. — My son, the Saints are virgins;

They love the white rose of virginity,

The cold, white lily blowing in her cell:

I have been myself a virgin; and I sware

To consecrate my virgin here to heaven —

The silent, cloister’d, solitary life,

A life of life-long prayer against the curse

That lies on thee and England.

HAROLD.

No, no, no.

EDWARD.

Treble denial of the tongue of flesh,

Like Peter’s when he fell, and thou wilt have

To wail for it like Peter. O my son!

Are all oaths to be broken then, all promises

Made in our agony for help from heaven?

Son, there is one who loves thee: and a wife,

What matters who, so she be serviceable

In all obedience, as mine own hath been:

God bless thee, wedded daughter.

[Laying his hand on the QUEEN’S head.

QUEEN.

Bless thou too

That brother whom I love beyond the rest,

My banish’d Tostig.

EDWARD.

All the sweet Saints bless him!

Spare and forbear him, Harold, if he comes!

And let him pass unscathed; he loves me, Harold!

Be kindly to the Normans left among us,

Who follow’d me for love! and dear son, swear

When thou art king, to see my solemn vow

Accomplish’d.

HAROLD.

Nay, dear lord, for I have sworn

Not to swear falsely twice.

EDWARD.

Thou wilt not swear?

HAROLD.

I cannot.

EDWARD.

Then on thee remains the curse,

Harold, if thou embrace her: and on thee,

Edith, if thou abide it, —

[The KING swoons; EDITH falls and kneels by the couch.

STIGAND.

He hath swoon’d!

Death? . . . no, as yet a breath.

HAROLD.

Look up! look up!

Edith!

ALDRED.

Confuse her not; she hath begun

Her life-long prayer for thee.

ALDWYTH.

O noble Harold,

I would thou couldst have sworn.

HAROLD.

For thine own pleasure?

ALDWYTH.

No, but to please our dying king, and those

Who make thy good their own — all England, Earl.

ALDRED.

I would thou couldst have sworn. Our holy king

Hath given his virgin lamb to Holy Church

To save thee from the curse.

HAROLD.

Alas! poor man,

His promise brought it on me.

ALDRED.

O good son!

That knowledge made him all the carefuller

To find a means whereby the curse might glance

From thee and England.

HAROLD.

Father, we so loved —

ALDRED.

The more the love, the mightier is the prayer;

The more the love, the more acceptable

The sacrifice of both your loves to heaven.

No sacrifice to heaven, no help from heaven;

That runs thro’ all the faiths of all the world.

And sacrifice there must be, for the king

Is holy, and hath talk’d with God, and seen

A shadowing horror; there are signs in heaven —

HAROLD.

Your comet came and went.

ALDRED.

And signs on earth!

Knowest thou Senlac hill?

HAROLD.

I know all Sussex;

A good entrenchment for a perilous hour!

ALDRED.

Pray God that come not suddenly! There is one

Who passing by that hill three nights ago —

He shook so that he scarce could out with it —

Heard, heard —

HAROLD.

The wind in his hair?

ALDRED.

A ghostly horn

Blowing continually, and faint battle-hymns,

And cries, and clashes, and the groans of men;

And dreadful shadows strove upon the hill,

And dreadful lights crept up from out the marsh —

Corpse-candles gliding over nameless graves —

HAROLD.

At Senlac?

ALDRED.

Senlac.

EDWARD (waking).

Senlac! Sanguelac,

The Lake of Blood!

STIGAND.

This lightning before death

Plays on the word, — and Normanizes too!

HAROLD.

Hush, father, hush!

EDWARD.

Thou uncanonical fool,

Wilt thou play with the thunder? North and South

Thunder together, showers of blood are blown

Before a never-ending blast, and hiss

Against the blaze they cannot quench — a lake,

A sea of blood — we are drown’d in blood — for God

Has fill’d the quiver, and Death has drawn the bow —

Sanguelac! Sanguelac! the arrow! the arrow!        [Dies.

STIGAND.

It is the arrow of death in his own heart —

And our great Council wait to crown thee King.

Scene II

In the Garden. The King’s house near London.

EDITH.

Crown’d, crown’d and lost, crown’d King — and lost to me!

(Singing.)

Two young lovers in winter weather,

None to guide them,

Walk’d at night on the misty heather;

Night, as black as a raven’s feather;

Both were lost and found together,

None beside them.

That is the burthen of it — lost and found

Together in the cruel river Swale

A hundred years ago; and there’s another,

Lost, lost, the light of day,

To which the lover answers lovingly

‘I am beside thee.’

Lost, lost, we have lost the way.

‘Love, I will guide thee.’

Whither, O whither? into the river,

Where we two may be lost together,

And lost for ever? ‘Oh! never, oh! never,

Tho’ we be lost and be found together.’

Some think they loved within the pale forbidden

By Holy Church: but who shall say? the truth

Was lost in that fierce North, where they were lost,

Where all good things are lost, where Tostig lost

The good hearts of his people. It is Harold!

Enter HAROLD.

Harold the King!

HAROLD.

Call me not King, but Harold.

EDITH.

Nay, thou art King!

HAROLD.

Thine, thine, or King or churl!

My girl, thou hast been weeping: turn not thou

Thy face away, but rather let me be

King of the moment to thee, and command

That kiss my due when subject, which will make

My kingship kinglier to me than to reign

King of the world without it.

EDITH.

Ask me not,

Lest I should yield it, and the second curse

Descend upon thine head, and thou be only

King of the moment over England.

HAROLD.

Edith,

Tho’ somewhat less a king to my true self

Than ere they crown’d me one, for I have lost

Somewhat of upright stature thro’ mine oath,

Yet thee I would not lose, and sell not thou

Our living passion for a dead man’s dream;

Stigand believed he knew not what he spake.

Oh God! I cannot help it, but at times

They seem to me too narrow, all the faiths

Of this grown world of ours, whose baby eye

Saw them sufficient. Fool and wise, I fear

This curse, and scorn it. But a little light! —

And on it falls the shadow of the priest;

Heaven yield us more! for better, Woden, all

Our cancell’d warrior-gods, our grim Walhalla,

Eternal war, than that the Saints at peace

The Holiest of our Holiest one should be

This William’s fellow-tricksters; — better die

Than credit this, for death is death, or else

Lifts us beyond the lie. Kiss me — thou art not

A holy sister yet, my girl, to fear

There might be more than brother in my kiss,

And more than sister in thine own.

EDITH.

I dare not.

HAROLD.

Scared by the church—’Love for a whole life long’

When was that sung?

EDITH.

Here to the nightingales.

HAROLD.

Their anthems of no church, how sweet they are!

Nor kingly priest, nor priestly king to cross

Their billings ere they nest.

EDITH.

They are but of spring,

They fly the winter change — not so with us —

No wings to come and go.

HAROLD.

But wing’d souls flying

Beyond all change and in the eternal distance

To settle on the Truth.

EDITH.

They are not so true,

They change their mates.

HAROLD.

Do they? I did not know it.

EDITH.

They say thou art to wed the Lady Aldwyth.

HAROLD.

They say, they say.

EDITH.

If this be politic,

And well for thee and England — and for her —

Care not for me who love thee.

GURTH (calling).

Harold, Harold!

HAROLD.

The voice of Gurth!    (Enter GURTH.)    Good even, my good brother!

GURTH.

Good even, gentle Edith.

EDITH.

Good even, Gurth.

GURTH.

Ill news hath come! Our hapless brother, Tostig —

He, and the giant King of Norway, Harold

Hardrada — Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Orkney,

Are landed North of Humber, and in a field

So packt with carnage that the dykes and brooks

Were bridged and damm’d with dead, have overthrown

Morcar and Edwin.

HAROLD.

Well then, we must fight.

How blows the wind?

GURTH.

Against St. Valery

And William.

HAROLD.

Well then, we will to the North.

GURTH.

Ay, but worse news: this William sent to Rome,

Swearing thou swarest falsely by his Saints:

The Pope and that Archdeacon Hildebrand

His master, heard him, and have sent him back

A holy gonfanon, and a blessed hair

Of Peter, and all France, all Burgundy,

Poitou, all Christendom is raised against thee;

He hath cursed thee, and all those who fight for thee,

And given thy realm of England to the bastard.

HAROLD.

Ha! ha!

EDITH.

Oh! laugh not! . . . Strange and ghastly in the gloom

And shadowing of this double thunder-cloud

That lours on England — laughter!

HAROLD.

No, not strange!

This was old human laughter in old Rome

Before a Pope was born, when that which reign’d

Call’d itself God. — A kindly rendering

Of ‘Render unto Caesar.’ . . . The Good Shepherd!

Take this, and render that.

GURTH.

They have taken York.

HAROLD.

The Lord was God and came as man — the Pope

Is man and comes as God. — York taken?

GURTH.

Yea,

Tostig hath taken York!

HAROLD.

To York then. Edith,

Hadst thou been braver, I had better braved

All — but I love thee and thou me — and that

Remains beyond all chances and all churches,

And that thou knowest.

EDITH.

Ay, but take back thy ring.

It burns my hand — a curse to thee and me.

I dare not wear it.

[Proffers HAROLD the ring, which he takes.

HAROLD.

But I dare. God with thee!

[Exeunt HAROLD and GURTH.

EDITH.

The King hath cursed him, if he marry me;

The Pope hath cursed him, marry me or no!

God help me! I know nothing — can but pray

For Harold — pray, pray, pray — no help but prayer,

A breath that fleets beyond this iron world,

And touches Him that made it.

Act IV

Scene I

In Northumbria.

ARCHBISHOP ALDRED, MORCAR, EDWIN, and FORCES. Enter HAROLD. The standard of the golden Dragon of Wessex preceding him.

HAROLD.

What! are thy people sullen from defeat?

Our Wessex dragon flies beyond the Humber,

No voice to greet it.

EDWIN.

Let not our great king

Believe us sullen — only shamed to the quick

Before the king — as having been so bruised

By Harold, king of Norway; but our help

Is Harold, king of England. Pardon us, thou!

Our silence is our reverence for the king!

HAROLD.

Earl of the Mercians! if the truth be gall,

Cram me not thou with honey, when our good hive

Needs every sting to save it.

VOICES.

Aldwyth! Aldwyth!

HAROLD.

Why cry thy people on thy sister’s name?

MORCAR.

She hath won upon our people thro’ her beauty,

And pleasantness among them.

VOICES.

Aldwyth, Aldwyth!

HAROLD.

They shout as they would have her for a queen.

MORCAR.

She hath followed with our host, and suffer’d all.

HAROLD.

What would ye, men?

VOICE.

Our old Northumbrian crown,

And kings of our own choosing.

HAROLD.

Your old crown

Were little help without our Saxon carles

Against Hardrada.

VOICE.

Little! we are Danes,

Who conquer’d what we walk on, our own field.

HAROLD.

They have been plotting here!        [Aside.

VOICE.

He calls us little!

HAROLD.

The kingdoms of this world began with little,

A hill, a fort, a city — that reach’d a hand

Down to the field beneath it, ‘Be thou mine,

Then to the next, ‘Thou also!’ If the field

Cried out ‘I am mine own;’ another hill

Or fort, or city, took it, and the first

Fell, and the next became an Empire.

VOICE.

Yet

Thou art but a West Saxon: we are Danes!

HAROLD.

My mother is a Dane, and I am English;

There is a pleasant fable in old books,

Ye take a stick, and break it; bind a score

All in one faggot, snap it over knee,

Ye cannot.

VOICE.

Hear King Harold! he says true!

HAROLD.

Would ye be Norsemen?

VOICES.

No!

HAROLD.

Or Norman?

VOICES.

No!

HAROLD.

Snap not the faggot-band then.

VOICE.

That is true!

VOICE.

Ay, but thou art not kingly, only grandson

To Wulfnoth, a poor cow-herd.

HAROLD.

This old Wulfnoth

Would take me on his knees and tell me tales

Of Alfred and of Athelstan the Great

Who drove you Danes; and yet he held that Dane,

Jute, Angle, Saxon, were or should be all

One England, for this cow-herd, like my father,

Who shook the Norman scoundrels off the throne,

Had in him kingly thoughts — a king of men,

Not made but born, like the great king of all,

A light among the oxen.

VOICE.

That is true!

VOICE.

Ay, and I love him now, for mine own father

Was great, and cobbled.

VOICE.

Thou art Tostig’s brother,

Who wastes the land.

HAROLD.

This brother comes to save

Your land from waste; I saved it once before,

For when your people banish’d Tostig hence,

And Edward would have sent a host against you,

Then I, who loved my brother, bad the king

Who doted on him, sanction your decree

Of Tostig’s banishment, and choice of Morcar,

To help the realm from scattering.

VOICE.

King! thy brother,

If one may dare to speak the truth, was wrong’d.

Wild was he, born so: but the plots against him

Had madden’d tamer men.

MORCAR.

Thou art one of those

Who brake into Lord Tostig’s treasure-house

And slew two hundred of his following,

And now, when Tostig hath come back with power,

Are frighted back to Tostig.

OLD THANE.

Ugh! Plots and feuds!

This is my ninetieth birthday. Can ye not

Be brethren? Godwin still at feud with Alfgar,

And Alfgar hates King Harold. Plots and feuds!

This is my ninetieth birthday!

HAROLD.

Old man, Harold

Hates nothing; not his fault, if our two houses

Be less than brothers.

VOICES.

Aldwyth, Harold, Aldwyth!

HAROLD.

Again! Morcar! Edwin! What do they mean?

EDWIN.

So the good king would deign to lend an ear

Not overscornful, we might chance — perchance —

To guess their meaning.

MORCAR.

Thine own meaning, Harold,

To make all England one, to close all feuds,

Mixing our bloods, that thence a king may rise

Half-Godwin and half-Alfgar, one to rule

All England beyond question, beyond quarrel.

HAROLD.

Who sow’d this fancy here among the people?

MORCAR.

Who knows what sows itself among the people?

A goodly flower at times.

HAROLD.

The Queen of Wales?

Why, Morcar, it is all but duty in her

To hate me; I have heard she hates me.

MORCAR.

No!

For I can swear to that, but cannot swear

That these will follow thee against the Norsemen,

If thou deny them this.

HAROLD.

Morcar and Edwin,

When will you cease to plot against my house?

EDWIN.

The king can scarcely dream that we, who know

His prowess in the mountains of the West,

Should care to plot against him in the North.

MORCAR.

Who dares arraign us, king, of such a plot?

HAROLD.

Ye heard one witness even now.

MORCAR.

The craven!

There is a faction risen again for Tostig,

Since Tostig came with Norway — fright not love.

HAROLD.

Morcar and Edwin, will ye, if I yield,

Follow against the Norseman?

MORCAR.

Surely, surely!

HAROLD.

Morcar and Edwin, will ye upon oath,

Help us against the Norman?

MORCAR.

With good will;

Yea, take the Sacrament upon it, king.

HAROLD.

Where is thy sister?

MORCAR.

Somewhere hard at hand.

Call and she comes.

[One goes out, then enter ALDWYTH.

HAROLD.

I doubt not but thou knowest

Why thou art summon’d.

ALDWYTH.

Why? — I stay with these,

Lest thy fierce Tostig spy me out alone,

And flay me all alive.

HAROLD.

Canst thou love one

Who did discrown thine husband, unqueen thee?

Didst thou not love thine husband?

ALDWYTH.

Oh! my lord,

The nimble, wild, red, wiry, savage king —

That was, my lord, a match of policy.

HAROLD.

Was it?

I knew him brave: he loved his land: he fain

Had made her great: his finger on her harp

(I heard him more than once) had in it Wales,

Her floods, her woods, her hills: had I been his,

I had been all Welsh.

ALDWYTH.

Oh, ay — all Welsh — and yet

I saw thee drive him up his hills — and women

Cling to the conquer’d, if they love, the more;

If not, they cannot hate the conqueror.

We never — oh! good Morcar, speak for us,

His conqueror conquer’d Aldwyth.

HAROLD.

Goodly news!

MORCAR.

Doubt it not thou! Since Griffith’s head was sent

To Edward, she hath said it.

HAROLD.

I had rather

She would have loved her husband. Aldwyth, Aldwyth,

Canst thou love me, thou knowing where I love?

ALDWYTH.

I can, my lord, for mine own sake, for thine,

For England, for thy poor white dove, who flutters

Between thee and the porch, but then would find

Her nest within the cloister, and be still.

HAROLD.

Canst thou love one, who cannot love again?

ALDWYTH.

Full hope have I that love will answer love.

HAROLD.

Then in the name of the great God, so be it!

Come, Aldred, join our hands before the hosts,

That all may see.

[ALDRED joins the hands of HAROLD and ALDWYTH and blesses them.

VOICES.

Harold, Harold and Aldwyth!

HAROLD.

Set forth our golden Dragon, let him flap

The wings that beat down Wales!

Advance our Standard of the Warrior,

Dark among gems and gold; and thou, brave banner,

Blaze like a night of fatal stars on those

Who read their doom and die.

Where lie the Norsemen? on the Derwent? ay

At Stamford-bridge.

Morcar, collect thy men; Edwin, my friend —

Thou lingerest. — Gurth, —

Last night King Edward came to me in dreams —

The rosy face and long down-silvering beard —

He told me I should conquer: —

I am no woman to put faith in dreams.

(To his army.)

Last night King Edward came to me in dreams,

And told me we should conquer.

VOICES.

Forward! Forward!

Harold and Holy Cross!

ALDWYTH.

The day is won!

Scene II

A Plain. Before the Battle of Stamford-Bridge.

HAROLD and his GUARD.

HAROLD.

Who is it comes this way? Tostig?

(Enter TOSTIG with a small force.)        O brother,

What art thou doing here?

TOSTIG.

I am foraging

For Norway’s army.

HAROLD.

I could take and slay thee.

Thou art in arms against us.

TOSTIG.

Take and slay me,

For Edward loved me.

HAROLD.

Edward bad me spare thee.

TOSTIG.

I hate King Edward, for he join’d with thee

To drive me outlaw’d. Take and slay me, I say,

Or I shall count thee fool.

HAROLD.

Take thee, or free thee,

Free thee or slay thee, Norway will have war;

No man would strike with Tostig, save for Norway.

Thou art nothing in thine England, save for Norway,

Who loves not thee but war. What dost thou here,

Trampling thy mother’s bosom into blood?

TOSTIG.

She hath wean’d me from it with such bitterness.

I come for mine own Earldom, my Northumbria;

Thou hast given it to the enemy of our house.

HAROLD.

Northumbria threw thee off, she will not have thee,

Thou hast misused her: and, O crowning crime!

Hast murder’d thine own guest, the son of Orm,

Gamel, at thine own hearth.

TOSTIG.

The slow, fat fool!

He drawl’d and prated so, I smote him suddenly,

I knew not what I did. He held with Morcar. —

I hate myself for all things that I do.

HAROLD.

And Morcar holds with us. Come back with him.

Know what thou dost; and we may find for thee,

So thou be chasten’d by thy banishment,

Some easier earldom.

TOSTIG.

What for Norway then?

He looks for land among us, he and his.

HAROLD.

Seven feet of English land, or something more,

Seeing he is a giant.

TOSTIG.

That is noble!

That sounds of Godwin.

HAROLD.

Come thou back, and be

Once more a son of Godwin.

TOSTIG (turns away).

O brother, brother,

O Harold —

HAROLD (laying his hand on TOSTIG’S shoulder).

Nay then, come thou back to us!

TOSTIG (after a pause turning to him).

Never shall any man say that I, that Tostig

Conjured the mightier Harold from his North

To do the battle for me here in England,

Then left him for the meaner! thee! —

Thou hast no passion for the House of Godwin —

Thou hast but cared to make thyself a king —

Thou hast sold me for a cry. —

Thou gavest thy voice against me in the Council —

I hate thee, and despise thee, and defy thee.

Farewell for ever!

[Exit.

HAROLD.

On to Stamford-bridge!

Scene III

After the Battle of Stamford-Bridge. Banquet.

HAROLD and ALDWYTH. GURTH, LEOFWIN, MORCAR, EDWIN, and other EARLS and THANES.

VOICES.

Hail! Harold! Aldwyth! hail, bridegroom and bride!

ALDWYTH (talking with HAROLD).

Answer them thou!

Is this our marriage-banquet? Would the wines

Of wedding had been dash’d into the cups

Of victory, and our marriage and thy glory

Been drunk together! these poor hands but sew,

Spin, broider — would that they were man’s to have held

The battle-axe by thee!

HAROLD.

There was a moment

When being forced aloof from all my guard,

And striking at Hardrada and his madmen

I had wish’d for any weapon.

ALDWYTH.

Why art thou sad?

HAROLD.

I have lost the boy who play’d at ball with me,

With whom I fought another fight than this

Of Stamford-bridge.

ALDWYTH.

Ay! ay! thy victories

Over our own poor Wales, when at thy side

He conquer’d with thee.

HAROLD.

No — the childish fist

That cannot strike again.

ALDWYTH.

Thou art too kindly.

Why didst thou let so many Norsemen hence?

Thy fierce forekings had clench’d their pirate hides

To the bleak church doors, like kites upon a barn.

HAROLD.

Is there so great a need to tell thee why?

ALDWYTH.

Yea, am I not thy wife?

VOICES.

Hail, Harold, Aldwyth!

Bridegroom and bride!

ALDWYTH.

Answer them!        [To HAROLD.

HAROLD (to all).

Earls and Thanes!

Full thanks for your fair greeting of my bride!

Earls, Thanes, and all our countrymen! the day,

Our day beside the Derwent will not shine

Less than a star among the goldenest hours

Of Alfred, or of Edward his great son,

Or Athelstan, or English Ironside

Who fought with Knut, or Knut who coming Dane

Died English. Every man about his king

Fought like a king; the king like his own man,

No better; one for all, and all for one,

One soul! and therefore have we shatter’d back

The hugest wave from Norseland ever yet

Surged on us, and our battle-axes broken

The Raven’s wing, and dumb’d his carrion croak

From the gray sea for ever. Many are gone —

Drink to the dead who died for us, the living

Who fought and would have died, but happier lived,

If happier be to live; they both have life

In the large mouth of England, till her voice

Die with the world. Hail — hail!

MORCAR.

May all invaders perish like Hardrada!

All traitors fail like Tostig.

[All drink but HAROLD.

ALDWYTH.

Thy cup’s full!

HAROLD.

I saw the hand of Tostig cover it.

Our dear, dead, traitor-brother, Tostig, him

Reverently we buried. Friends, had I been here,

Without too large self-lauding I must hold

The sequel had been other than his league

With Norway, and this battle. Peace be with him!

He was not of the worst. If there be those

At banquet in this hall, and hearing me —

For there be those I fear who prick’d the lion

To make him spring, that sight of Danish blood

Might serve an end not English — peace with them

Likewise, if they can be at peace with what

God gave us to divide us from the wolf!

ALDWYTH (aside to HAROLD).

Make not our Morcar sullen: it is not wise.

HAROLD.

Hail to the living who fought, the dead who fell!

VOICES.

Hail, hail!

FIRST THANE.

How ran that answer which King Harold gave

To his dead namesake, when he ask’d for England?

LEOFWIN.

‘Seven feet of English earth, or something more,

Seeing he is a giant!’

FIRST THANE.

Then for the bastard

Six feet and nothing more!

LEOFWIN.

Ay, but belike

Thou hast not learnt his measure.

FIRST THANE.

By St. Edmund

I over-measure him. Sound sleep to the man

Here by dead Norway without dream or dawn!

SECOND THANE.

What is he bragging still that he will come

To thrust our Harold’s throne from under him?

My nurse would tell me of a molehill crying

To a mountain ‘Stand aside and room for me!’

FIRST THANE.

Let him come! let him come.

Here’s to him, sink or swim!        [Drinks.

SECOND THANE.

God sink him!

FIRST THANE.

Cannot hands which had the strength

To shove that stranded iceberg off our shores,

And send the shatter’d North again to sea,

Scuttle his cockle-shell? What’s Brunanburg

To Stamford-bridge? a war-crash, and so hard,

So loud, that, by St. Dunstan, old St. Thor —

By God, we thought him dead — but our old Thor

Heard his own thunder again, and woke and came

Among us again, and mark’d the sons of those

Who made this Britain England, break the North:

Mark’d how the war-axe swang,

Heard how the war-horn sang,

Mark’d how the spear-head sprang,

Heard how the shield-wall rang,

Iron on iron clang,

Anvil on hammer bang —

SECOND THANE.

Hammer on anvil, hammer on anvil. Old dog,

Thou art drunk, old dog!

FIRST THANE.

Too drunk to fight with thee!

SECOND THANE.

Fight thou with thine own double, not with me,

Keep that for Norman William!

FIRST THANE.

Down with William!

THIRD THANE.

The washerwoman’s brat!

FOURTH THANE.

The tanner’s bastard!

FIFTH THANE.

The Falaise byblow!

[Enter a THANE, from Pevensey, spattered with mud.

HAROLD.

Ay, but what late guest,

As haggard as a fast of forty days,

And caked and plaster’d with a hundred mires,

Hath stumbled on our cups?

THANE from Pevensey.

My lord the King!

William the Norman, for the wind had changed —

HAROLD.

I felt it in the middle of that fierce fight

At Stamford-bridge. William hath landed, ha?

THANE from Pevensey.

Landed at Pevensey — I am from Pevensey —

Hath wasted all the land at Pevensey —

Hath harried mine own cattle — God confound him!

I have ridden night and day from Pevensey —

A thousand ships — a hundred thousand men —

Thousands of horses, like as many lions

Neighing and roaring as they leapt to land —

HAROLD.

How oft in coming hast thou broken bread?

THANE from Pevensey.

Some thrice, or so.

HAROLD.

Bring not thy hollowness

On our full feast. Famine is fear, were it but

Of being starved. Sit down, sit down, and eat,

And, when again red-blooded, speak again;

(Aside.) The men that guarded England to the South

Were scatter’d to the harvest. . . . No power mine

To hold their force together. . . . Many are fallen

At Stamford-bridge . . . the people stupid-sure

Sleep like their swine . . . in South and North at once

I could not be.

(Aloud.) Gurth, Leofwin, Morcar, Edwin!

(Pointing to the revellers.)

The curse of England! these are drown’d in wassail,

And cannot see the world but thro’ their wines!

Leave them! and thee too, Aldwyth, must I leave —

Harsh is the news! hard is our honeymoon!

Thy pardon. (Turning round to his ATTENDANTS.)

Break the banquet up . . . Ye four!

And thou, my carrier-pigeon of black news,

Cram thy crop full, but come when thou art call’d.

[Exit Harold.

Act V

Scene I

A Tent on a Mound, From Which Can Be Seen the Field of Senlac.

HAROLD, sitting; by him standing HUGH MARGOT the Monk, GURTH, LEOFWIN.

HAROLD.

Refer my cause, my crown to Rome! . . . The wolf

Mudded the brook and predetermined all.

Monk,

Thou hast said thy say, and had my constant ‘No’

For all but instant battle. I hear no more.

MARGOT.

Hear me again — for the last time. Arise,

Scatter thy people home, descend the hill,

Lay hands of full allegiance in thy Lord’s

And crave his mercy, for the Holy Father

Hath given this realm of England to the Norman.

HAROLD.

Then for the last time, monk, I ask again

When had the Lateran and the Holy Father

To do with England’s choice of her own king?

MARGOT.

Earl, the first Christian Cæsar drew to the East

To leave the Pope dominion in the West

He gave him all the kingdoms of the West.

HAROLD.

So! — did he? — Earl — I have a mind to play

The William with thine eyesight and thy tongue.

Earl — ay — thou art but a messenger of William.

I am weary — go: make me not wroth with thee!

MARGOT.

Mock-king, I am the messenger of God,

His Norman Daniel! Mene, Mene, Tekel!

Is thy wrath Hell, that I should spare to cry,

Yon heaven is wroth with thee? Hear me again!

Our Saints have moved the Church that moves the world,

And all the Heavens and very God: they heard —

They know King Edward’s promise and thine — thine.

HAROLD.

Should they not know free England crowns herself?

Not know that he nor I had power to promise?

Not know that Edward cancell’d his own promise?

And for my part therein — Back to that juggler,        [Rising.

Tell him the saints are nobler than he dreams,

Tell him that God is nobler than the Saints,

And tell him we stand arm’d on Senlac Hill,

And bide the doom of God.

MARGOT.

Hear it thro’ me.

The realm for which thou art forsworn is cursed,

The babe enwomb’d and at the breast is cursed,

The corpse thou whelmest with thine earth is cursed,

The soul who fighteth on thy side is cursed,

The seed thou sowest in thy field is cursed,

The steer wherewith thou plowest thy field is cursed,

The fowl that fleeth o’er thy field is cursed,

And thou, usurper, liar —

HAROLD.

Out, beast monk!

[Lifting his hand to strike him. GURTH stops the blow.

I ever hated monks.

MARGOT.

I am but a voice

Among you: murder, martyr me if ye will —

HAROLD.

Thanks, Gurth! The simple, silent, selfless man

Is worth a world of tonguesters. (To MARGOT.) Get thee gone!

He means the thing he says. See him out safe!

LEOFWIN.

He hath blown himself as red as fire with curses.

An honest fool! Follow me, honest fool,

But if thou blurt thy curse among our folk,

I know not — I may give that egg-bald head

The tap that silences.

HAROLD.

See him out safe.

[Exeunt LEOFWIN and MARGOT.

GURTH.

Thou hast lost thine even temper, brother Harold!

HAROLD.

Gurth, when I past by Waltham, my foundation

For men who serve the neighbour, not themselves,

I cast me down prone, praying; and, when I rose,

They told me that the Holy Rood had lean’d

And bow’d above me; whether that which held it

Had weaken’d, and the Rood itself were bound

To that necessity which binds us down;

Whether it bow’d at all but in their fancy;

Or if it bow’d, whether it symbol’d ruin

Or glory, who shall tell? but they were sad,

And somewhat sadden’d me.

GURTH.

Yet if a fear,

Or shadow of a fear, lest the strange Saints

By whom thou swarest, should have power to balk

Thy puissance in this fight with him, who made

And heard thee swear — brother — I have not sworn —

If the king fall, may not the kingdom fall?

But if I fall, I fall, and thou art king;

And, if I win, I win, and thou art king;

Draw thou to London, there make strength to breast

Whatever chance, but leave this day to me.

LEOFWIN (entering).

And waste the land about thee as thou goest,

And be thy hand as winter on the field,

To leave the foe no forage.

HAROLD.

Noble Gurth!

Best son of Godwin! If I fall, I fall —

The doom of God! How should the people fight

When the king flies? And, Leofwin, art thou mad?

How should the King of England waste the fields

Of England, his own people? — No glance yet

Of the Northumbrian helmet on the heath?

LEOFWIN.

No, but a shoal of wives upon the heath,

And someone saw thy willy-nilly nun

Vying a tress against our golden fern.

HAROLD.

Vying a tear with our cold dews, a sigh

With these low-moaning heavens. Let her be fetch’d.

We have parted from our wife without reproach,

Tho’ we have dived thro’ all her practices;

And that is well.

LEOFWIN.

I saw her even now:

She hath not left us.

HAROLD.

Nought of Morcar then?

GURTH.

Nor seen, nor heard; thine, William’s or his own

As wind blows, or tide flows: belike he watches,

If this war-storm in one of its rough rolls

Wash up that old crown of Northumberland.

HAROLD.

I married her for Morcar — a sin against

The truth of love. Evil for good, it seems,

Is oft as childless of the good as evil

For evil.

LEOFWIN.

Good for good hath borne at times

A bastard false as William.

HAROLD.

Ay, if Wisdom

Pair’d not with Good. But I am somewhat worn,

A snatch of sleep were like the peace of God.

Gurth, Leofwin, go once more about the hill —

What did the dead man call it — Sanguelac,

The lake of blood?

LEOFWIN.

A lake that dips in William

As well as Harold.

HAROLD.

Like enough. I have seen

The trenches dug, the palisades uprear’d

And wattled thick with ash and willow-wands;

Yea, wrought at them myself. Go round once more;

See all be sound and whole. No Norman horse

Can shatter England, standing shield by shield;

Tell that again to all.

GURTH.

I will, good brother.

HAROLD.

Our guardsman hath but toil’d his hand and foot,

I hand, foot, heart and head. Some wine!

(One pours wine into a goblet which he hands to HAROLD.)

Too much!

What? we must use our battle-axe to-day.

Our guardsmen have slept well, since we came in?

LEOFWIN.

Ay, slept and snored. Your second-sighted man

That scared the dying conscience of the king,

Misheard their snores for groans. They are up again

And chanting that old song of Brunanburg

Where England conquer’d.

HAROLD.

That is well. The Norman,

What is he doing?

LEOFWIN.

Praying for Normandy;

Our scouts have heard the tinkle of their bells.

HAROLD.

And our old songs are prayers for England too!

But by all Saints —

LEOFWIN.

Barring the Norman!

HAROLD.

Nay,

Were the great trumpet blowing doomsday dawn,

I needs must rest. Call when the Norman moves —

[Exeunt all, but HAROLD.

No horse — thousands of horses — our shield wall —

Wall — break it not — break not — break —      [Sleeps.

VISION OF EDWARD.

Son Harold, I thy king, who came before

To tell thee thou shouldst win at Stamford-bridge,

Come yet once more, from where I am at peace,

Because I loved thee in my mortal day,

To tell thee them shalt die on Senlac hill —

Sanguelac!

VISION OF WULFNOTH.

O brother, from my ghastly oubliette

I send my voice across the narrow seas —

No more, no more, dear brother, nevermore —

Sanguelac!

VISION OF TOSTIG.

O brother, most unbrotherlike to me,

Thou gavest thy voice against me in my life,

I give my voice against thee from the grave —

Sanguelac!

VISION OF NORMAN SAINTS.

O hapless Harold!

King but for an hour!

Thou swarest falsely by our blessed bones,

We give our voice against thee out of heaven!

Sanguelac! Sanguelac! The arrow! the arrow!

HAROLD (starting up, battle-axe in hand.)

Away!

My battle-axe against your voices. Peace!

The king’s last word—’the arrow!’ I shall die —

I die for England then, who lived for England —

What nobler? men must die.

I cannot fall into a falser world —

I have done no man wrong. Tostig, poor brother,

Art thou so anger’d?

Fain had I kept thine earldom in thy hands

Save for thy wild and violent will that wrench’d

All hearts of freemen from thee. I could do

No other than this way advise the king

Against the race of Godwin. Is it possible

That mortal men should bear their earthly heats

Into yon bloodless world, and threaten us thence

Unschool’d of Death? Thus then thou art revenged —

I left our England naked to the South

To meet thee in the North. The Norseman’s raid

Hath helpt the Norman, and the race of Godwin

Hath ruin’d Godwin. No — our waking thoughts

Suffer a stormless shipwreck in the pools

Of sullen slumber, and arise again

Disjointed: only dreams — where mine own self

Takes part against myself! Why? for a spark

Of self-disdain born in me when I sware

Falsely to him, the falser Norman, over

His gilded ark of mummy-saints, by whom

I knew not that I sware, — not for myself —

For England — yet not wholly —

Enter EDITH.

Edith, Edith,

Get thou into thy cloister as the king

Will’d it: be safe: the perjury-mongering Count

Hath made too good an use of Holy Church

To break her close! There the great God of truth

Fill all thine hours with peace! — A lying devil

Hath haunted me — mine oath — my wife — I fain

Had made my marriage not a lie; I could not:

Thou art my bride! and thou in after years

Praying perchance for this poor soul of mine

In cold, white cells beneath an icy moon —

This memory to thee! — and this to England,

My legacy of war against the Pope

From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age,

Till the sea wash her level with her shores,

Or till the Pope be Christ’s.

Enter ALDWYTH.

ALDWYTH (to EDITH).

Away from him!

EDITH.

I will. . . . I have not spoken to the king

One word; and one I must. Farewell!        [Going.

HAROLD.

Not yet.

Stay.

EDITH.

To what use?

HAROLD.

The king commands thee, woman!

(To ALDWYTH.)

Have thy two brethren sent their forces in?

ALDWYTH.

Nay, I fear not.

HAROLD.

Then there’s no force in thee!

Thou didst possess thyself of Edward’s ear

To part me from the woman that I loved!

Thou didst arouse the fierce Northumbrians!

Thou hast been false to England and to me! —

As . . . in some sort . . . I have been false to thee.

Leave me. No more — Pardon on both sides — Go!

ALDWYTH.

Alas, my lord, I loved thee.

HAROLD (bitterly).

With a love

Passing thy love for Griffyth! wherefore now

Obey my first and last commandment. Go!

ALDWYTH.

O Harold! husband! Shall we meet again?

HAROLD.

After the battle — after the battle. Go.

ALDWYTH.

I go. (Aside.) That I could stab her standing there!

[Exit Aldwyth.

EDITH.

Alas, my lord, she loved thee.

HAROLD.

Never! never!

EDITH.

I saw it in her eyes!

HAROLD.

I see it in thine.

And not on thee — nor England — fall God’s doom!

EDITH.

On thee? on me. And thou art England! Alfred

Was England. Ethelred was nothing. England

Is but her king, and thou art Harold!

HAROLD.

Edith,

The sign in heaven — the sudden blast at sea —

My fatal oath — the dead Saints — the dark dreams —

The Pope’s Anathema — the Holy Rood

That bow’d to me at Waltham — Edith, if

I, the last English King of England —

EDITH.

No,

First of a line that coming from the people,

And chosen by the people —

HAROLD.

And fighting for

And dying for the people —

EDITH.

Living! living!

HAROLD.

Yea so, good cheer! thou art Harold, I am Edith!

Look not thus wan!

EDITH.

What matters how I look?

Have we not broken Wales and Norseland? slain,

Whose life was all one battle, incarnate war,

Their giant-king, a mightier man-in-arms

Than William.

HAROLD.

Ay, my girl, no tricks in him —

No bastard he! when all was lost, he yell’d,

And bit his shield, and dash’d it on the ground,

And swaying his two-handed sword about him,

Two deaths at every swing, ran in upon us

And died so, and I loved him as I hate

This liar who made me liar. If Hate can kill,

And Loathing wield a Saxon battle-axe —

EDITH.

Waste not thy might before the battle!

HAROLD.

No,

And thou must hence. Stigand will see thee safe,

And so — Farewell.        [He is going, but turns back.

The ring thou darest not wear.

I have had it fashion’d, see, to meet my hand.

[HAROLD shows the ring which is on his finger.

Farewell!        [He is going, but turns back again.

I am dead as Death this day to ought of earth’s

Save William’s death or mine.

EDITH.

Thy death! — to-day!

Is it not thy birthday?

HAROLD.

Ay, that happy day!

A birthday welcome! happy days and many!

One — this!        [They embrace.

Look, I will bear thy blessing into the battle

And front the doom of God.

NORMAN CRIES (heard in the distance).

Ha Rou! Ha Rou!

Enter GURTH.

GURTH.

The Norman moves!

HAROLD.

Harold and Holy Cross!

[Exeunt Harold and Gurth.

Enter STIGAND.

STIGAND.

Our Church in arms — the lamb the lion — not

Spear into pruning-hook — the counter way —

Cowl, helm; and crozier, battle-axe. Abbot Alfwig,

Leofric, and all the monks of Peterboro’

Strike for the king; but I, old wretch, old Stigand,

With hands too limp to brandish iron — and yet

I have a power — would Harold ask me for it —

I have a power.

EDITH.

What power, holy father?

STIGAND.

Power now from Harold to command thee hence

And see thee safe from Senlac.

EDITH.

I remain!

STIGAND.

Yea, so will I, daughter, until I find

Which way the battle balance. I can see it

From where we stand: and, live or die, I would

I were among them!

CANONS from Waltham (singing without).

Salva patriam

Sancte Pater,

Salva Fili,

Salva Spiritus,

Salva patriam,

Sancta Mater.1

EDITH.

Are those the blessed angels quiring, father?

STIGAND.

No, daughter, but the canons out of Waltham,

The king’s foundation, that have follow’d him.

EDITH.

O God of battles, make their wall of shields

Firm as thy cliffs, strengthen their palisades!

What is that whirring sound?

STIGAND.

The Norman arrow!

EDITH.

Look out upon the battle — is he safe?

STIGAND.

The king of England stands between his banners.

He glitters on the crowning of the hill.

God save King Harold!

EDITH.

— chosen by his people

And fighting for his people!

STIGAND.

There is one

Come as Goliath came of yore — he flings

His brand in air and catches it again,

He is chanting some old warsong.

EDITH.

And no David

To meet him?

STIGAND.

Ay, there springs a Saxon on him,

Falls — and another falls.

EDITH.

Have mercy on us!

STIGAND.

Lo! our good Gurth hath smitten him to the death.

EDITH.

So perish all the enemies of Harold!

CANONS (singing).

Hostis in Angliam

Ruit prædator,

Illorum, Domine,

Scutum scindatur!

Hostis per Angliae

Plagas bacchatur;

Casa crematur,

Pastor fugatur

Grex trucidatur —

STIGAND.

Illos trucida, Domine.

EDITH.

Ay, good father.

CANONS (singing).

Illorum scelera

Pœna sequatur!

ENGLISH CRIES.

Harold and Holy Cross! Out! out!

STIGAND.

Our javelins

Answer their arrows. All the Norman foot

Are storming up the hill. The range of knights

Sit, each a statue on his horse, and wait.

ENGLISH CRIES.

Harold and God Almighty!

NORMAN CRIES.

Ha Rou! Ha Rou!

CANONS (singing).

Eques cum pedite

Præpediatur!

Illorum in lacrymas

Cruor fundatur!

Pereant, pereant,

Anglia precatur.

STIGAND.

Look, daughter, look.

EDITH.

Nay, father, look for me!

STIGAND.

Our axes lighten with a single flash

About the summit of the hill, and heads

And arms are sliver’d off and splinter’d by

Their lightning — and they fly — the Norman flies.

EDITH.

Stigand, O father, have we won the day?

STIGAND.

No, daughter, no — they fall behind the horse —

Their horse are thronging to the barricades;

I see the gonfanon of Holy Peter

Floating above their helmets — ha! he is down!

EDITH.

He down! Who down?

STIGAND.

The Norman Count is down.

EDITH.

So perish all the enemies of England!

STIGAND.

No, no, he hath risen again — he bares his face —

Shouts something — he points onward — all their horse

Swallow the hill locust-like, swarming up.

EDITH.

O God of battles, make his battle-axe keen

As thine own sharp-dividing justice, heavy

As thine own bolts that fall on crimeful heads

Charged with the weight of heaven wherefrom they fall!

CANONS (singing).

Jacta tonitrua

Deus bellator!

Surgas e tenebris,

Sis vindicator!

Fulmina, fulmina

Deus vastator!

EDITH.

O God of battles, they are three to one,

Make thou one man as three to roll them down!

CANONS (singing).

Equus cum equite

Dejiciatur!

Acies, Acies

Prona sternatur!

Illorum lanceas

Frange Creator!

STIGAND.

Yea, yea, for how their lances snap and shiver

Against the shifting blaze of Harold’s axe!

War-woodman of old Woden, how he fells

The mortal copse of faces! There! And there!

The horse and horseman cannot meet the shield,

The blow that brains the horseman cleaves the horse,

The horse and horseman roll along the hill,

They fly once more, they fly, the Norman flies!

Equus cum equite

Præcipitatur.

EDITH.

O God, the God of truth hath heard my cry.

Follow them, follow them, drive them to the sea!

Illorum scelera

Pœna sequatur!

STIGAND.

Truth! no; a lie; a trick, a Norman trick!

They turn on the pursuer, horse against foot,

They murder all that follow.

EDITH.

Have mercy on us!

STIGAND.

Hot-headed fools — to burst the wall of shields!

They have broken the commandment of the king!

EDITH.

His oath was broken — O holy Norman Saints,

Ye that are now of heaven, and see beyond

Your Norman shrines, pardon it, pardon it,

That he forsware himself for all he loved,

Me, me and all! Look out upon the battle!

STIGAND.

They thunder again upon the barricades.

My sight is eagle, but the strife so thick —

This is the hottest of it: hold, ash! hold, willow!

ENGLISH CRIES.

Out, out!

NORMAN CRIES.

Ha Rou!

STIGAND.

Ha! Gurth hath leapt upon him

And slain him: he hath fallen.

EDITH.

And I am heard.

Glory to God in the Highest! fallen, fallen!

STIGAND.

No, no, his horse — he mounts another — wields

His war-club, dashes it on Gurth, and Gurth,

Our noble Gurth, is down!

EDITH.

Have mercy on us!

STIGAND.

And Leofwin is down!

EDITH.

Have mercy on us!

O Thou that knowest, let not my strong prayer

Be weaken’d in thy sight, because I love

The husband of another!

NORMAN CRIES.

Ha Rou! Ha Rou!

EDITH.

I do not hear our English war-cry.

STIGAND.

No.

EDITH.

Look out upon the battle — is he safe?

STIGAND.

He stands between the banners with the dead

So piled about him he can hardly move.

EDITH (takes up the war-cry).

Out! out!

NORMAN CRIES.

Ha Rou!

EDITH (cries out).

Harold and Holy Cross!

NORMAN CRIES.

Ha Rou! Ha Rou!

EDITH.

What is that whirring sound?

STIGAND.

The Norman sends his arrows up to Heaven,

They fall on those within the palisade!

EDITH.

Look out upon the hill — is Harold there?

STIGAND.

Sanguelac — Sanguelac — the arrow — the arrow! — away!

Scene II

Field of the Dead. Night.

ALDWYTH and EDITH.

ALDWYTH.

O Edith, art thou here? O Harold, Harold —

Our Harold — we shall never see him more.

EDITH.

For there was more than sister in my kiss,

And so the saints were wroth. I cannot love them,

For they are Norman saints — and yet I should —

They are so much holier than their harlot’s son

With whom they play’d their game against the king!

ALDWYTH.

The king is slain, the kingdom over-thrown!

EDITH.

No matter!

ALDWYTH.

How no matter, Harold slain? —

I cannot find his body. O help me thou!

O Edith, if I ever wrought against thee,

Forgive me thou, and help me here!

EDITH.

No matter!

ALDWYTH.

Not help me, nor forgive me?

EDITH.

So thou saidest.

ALDWYTH.

I say it now, forgive me!

EDITH.

Cross me not!

I am seeking one who wedded me in secret.

Whisper! God’s angels only know it. Ha!

What art thou doing here among the dead?

They are stripping the dead bodies naked yonder,

And thou art come to rob them of their rings!

ALDWYTH.

O Edith, Edith, I have lost both crown

And husband.

EDITH.

So have I.

ALDWYTH.

I tell thee, girl,

I am seeking my dead Harold.

EDITH.

And I mine!

The Holy Father strangled him with a hair

Of Peter, and his brother Tostig helpt;

The wicked sister clapt her hands and laugh’d;

Then all the dead fell on him.

ALDWYTH.

Edith, Edith —

EDITH.

What was he like, this husband? like to thee?

Call not for help from me. I knew him not.

He lies not here: not close beside the standard.

Here fell the truest, manliest hearts of England.

Go further hence and find him.

ALDWYTH.

She is crazed!

EDITH.

That doth not matter either. Lower the light.

He must be here.

Enter two CANONS, OSGOD and ATHELRIC, with torches. They turn over the dead bodies and examine them as they pass.

OSGOD.

I think that this is Thurkill.

ATHELRIC.

More likely Godric.

OSGOD.

I am sure this body

Is Alfwig, the king’s uncle.

ATHELRIC.

So it is!

No, no — brave Gurth, one gash from brow to knee!

OSGOD.

And here is Leofwin.

EDITH.

And here is He!

ALDWYTH.

Harold? Oh no — nay, if it were — my God,

They have so maim’d and murder’d all his face

There is no man can swear to him.

EDITH.

But one woman!

Look you, we never mean to part again.

I have found him, I am happy.

Was there not someone ask’d me for forgiveness?

I yield it freely, being the true wife

Of this dead King, who never bore revenge.

Enter COUNT WILLIAM and WILLIAM MALET.

WILLIAM.

Who be these women? And what body is this?

EDITH.

Harold, thy better!

WILLIAM.

Ay, and what art thou?

EDITH.

His wife!

MALET.

Not true, my girl, here is the Queen!

[Pointing out ALDWYTH.

WILLIAM (to ALDWYTH).

Wast thou his Queen?

ALDWYTH.

I was the Queen of Wales.

WILLIAM.

Why then of England. Madam, fear us not.

(To MALET.) Knowest thou this other?

MALET.

When I visited England,

Some held she was his wife in secret — some —

Well — some believed she was his paramour.

EDITH.

Norman, thou liest! liars all of you,

Your Saints and all! I am his wife! and she —

For look, our marriage ring!

[She draws it off the finger of HAROLD.

I lost it somehow —

I lost it, playing with it when I was wild.

That bred the doubt! but I am wiser now . . .

I am too wise. . . . Will none among you all

Bear me true witness — only for this once —

That I have found it here again?        [She puts it on.

And thou,

Thy wife am I for ever and evermore.

[Falls on the body and dies.

WILLIAM.

Death! — and enough of death for this one day,

The day of St. Calixtus, and the day,

My day when I was born.

MALET.

And this dead king’s

Who, king or not, hath kinglike fought and fallen,

His birthday, too. It seems but yestereven

I held it with him in his English halls,

His day, with all his rooftree ringing ‘Harold,’

Before he fell into the snare of Guy;

When all men counted Harold would be king,

And Harold was most happy.

WILLIAM.

Thou art half English

Take them away!

Malet, I vow to build a church to God

Here on the hill of battle; let our high altar

Stand where their standard fell . . . where these two lie.

Take them away, I do not love to see them.

Pluck the dead woman off the dead man, Malet!

MALET.

Faster than ivy. Must I hack her arms off?

How shall I part them?

WILLIAM.

Leave them. Let them be!

Bury him and his paramour together.

He that was false in oath to me, it seems

Was false to his own wife. We will not give him

A Christian burial: yet he was a warrior,

And wise, yea truthful, till that blighted vow

Which God avenged to-day.

Wrap them together in a purple cloak

And lay them both upon the waste sea-shore

At Hastings, there to guard the land for which

He did forswear himself — a warrior — ay,

And but that Holy Peter fought for us,

And that the false Northumbrian held aloof,

And save for that chance arrow which the Saints

Sharpen’d and sent against him — who can tell? —

Three horses had I slain beneath me: twice

I thought that all was lost. Since I knew battle,

And that was from my boyhood, never yet —

No, by the splendour of God — have I fought men

Like Harold and his brethren, and his guard

Of English. Every man about his king

Fell where he stood. They loved him: and, pray God

My Normans may but move as true with me

To the door of death. Of one self-stock at first,

Make them again one people — Norman, English;

And English, Norman; we should have a hand

To grasp the world with, and a foot to stamp it . . .

Flat. Praise the Saints, It is over. No more blood!

I am king of England, so they thwart me not,

And I will rule according to their laws.

(To ALDWYTH.) Madam, we will entreat thee with all honour.

ALDWYTH.

My punishment is more than I can bear.

BECKET

CONTENTS

Dramatis Personæ

Prologue

Act I

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Act II

Scene I

Scene II

Act III

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Act IV

Scene I

Scene II

Act V

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Dramatis Personæ

HENRY II. (son of the Earl of Anjou).

THOMAS BECKET, Chancellor of England, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.

GILBERT FOLIOT, Bishop of London.

ROGER, Archbishop of York.

Bishop of Hereford.

HILARY, Bishop of Chichester.

JOCELYN, Bishop of Salisbury.

JOHN OF SALISBURY friend of Becket.

HERBERT OF BOSHAM friend of Becket.

WALTER MAP, reputed author of ‘Golias,’ Latin poems against the priesthood.

KING LOUIS OF FRANCE.

GEOFFREY, son of Rosamund and Henry.

GRIM, a monk of Cambridge.

SIR REGINALD FITZURSE    }

SIR RICHARD DE BRITO     } the four knights of the King’s household, enemies of Becket.

SIR WILLIAM DE TRACY     }

SIR HUGH DE MORVILLE    }

DE BROC OF SALTWOOD CASTLE.

LORD LEICESTER.

PHILIP DE ELEEMOSYNA.

TWO KNIGHT TEMPLARS.

JOHN OF OXFORD (called the Swearer).

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE, Queen of England (divorced from Louis of France).

ROSAMUND DE CLIFFORD.

MARGERY.

Prologue

A Castle in Normandy. Interior of the Hall. Roofs of a City seen thro’ Windows.

HENRY and BECKET at chess.

HENRY.

So then our good Archbishop Theobald

Lies dying.

BECKET.

I am grieved to know as much.

HENRY.

But we must have a mightier man than he

For his successor.

BECKET.

Have you thought of one?

HENRY.

A cleric lately poison’d his own mother,

And being brought before the courts of the Church,

They but degraded him. I hope they whipt him.

I would have hang’d him.

BECKET.

It is your move.

HENRY.  Well — there.

[Moves.

The Church in the pell-mell of Stephen’s time

Hath climb’d the throne and almost clutch’d the crown;

But by the royal customs of our realm

The Church should hold her baronies of me,

Like other lords amenable to law.

I’ll have them written down and made the law.

BECKET.

My liege, I move my bishop.

HENRY.

And if I live,

No man without my leave shall excommunicate

My tenants or my household.

BECKET.

Look to your king.

HENRY.

No man without my leave shall cross the seas

To set the Pope against me — I pray your pardon.

BECKET.

Well — will you move?

HENRY.

There.

[Moves.

BECKET.

Check — you move so wildly.

HENRY.

There then!

[Moves.

BECKET.

Why — there then, for you see my bishop

Hath brought your king to a standstill. You are beaten.

HENRY (kicks over the board).

Why, there then — down go bishop and king together.

I loathe being beaten; had I fixt my fancy

Upon the game I should have beaten thee,

But that was vagabond.

BECKET.

Where, my liege? With Phryne,

Or Lais, or thy Rosamund, or another?

HENRY.

My Rosamund is no Lais, Thomas Becket;

And yet she plagues me too — no fault in her —

But that I fear the Queen would have her life.

BECKET.

Put her away, put her away, my liege!

Put her away into a nunnery!

Safe enough there from her to whom thou art bound

By Holy Church. And wherefore should she seek

The life of Rosamund de Clifford more

Than that of other paramours of thine?

HENRY.

How dost thou know I am not wedded to her?

BECKET.

How should I know?

HENRY.

That is my secret, Thomas.

BECKET.

State secrets should be patent to the statesman

Who serves and loves his king, and whom the king

Loves not as statesman, but true lover and friend.

HENRY.

Come, come, thou art but deacon, not yet bishop,

No, nor archbishop, nor my confessor yet.

I would to God thou wert, for I should find

An easy father confessor in thee.

BECKET.

St. Denis, that thou shouldst not. I should beat

Thy kingship as my bishop hath beaten it.

HENRY.

Hell take thy bishop then, and my kingship too!

Come, come, I love thee and I know thee, I know thee,

A doter on white pheasant-flesh at feasts,

A sauce-deviser for thy days of fish,

A dish-designer, and most amorous

Of good old red sound liberal Gascon wine:

Will not thy body rebel, man, if thou flatter it?

BECKET.

That palate is insane which cannot tell

A good dish from a bad, new wine from old.

HENRY.

Well, who loves wine loves woman.

BECKET.  So I do.

Men are God’s trees, and women are God’s flowers;

And when the Gascon wine mounts to my head,

The trees are all the statelier, and the flowers

Are all the fairer.

HENRY.

And thy thoughts, thy fancies?

BECKET.

Good dogs, my liege, well train’d, and easily call’d

Off from the game.

HENRY.

Save for some once or twice,

When they ran down the game and worried it.

BECKET.

No, my liege, no! — not once — in God’s name, no!

HENRY.

Nay, then, I take thee at thy word — believe thee

The veriest Galahad of old Arthur’s hall.

And so this Rosamund, my true heart-wife,

Not Eleanor — she whom I love indeed

As a woman should be loved — Why dost thou smile

So dolorously?

BECKET.

My good liege, if a man

Wastes himself among women, how should he love

A woman, as a woman should be loved?

HENRY.

How shouldst thou know that never hast loved one?

Come, I would give her to thy care in England

When I am out in Normandy or Anjou.

BECKET.

My lord, I am your subject, not your ——

HENRY.        Pander.

God’s eyes! I know all that — not my purveyor

Of pleasures, but to save a life — her life;

Ay, and the soul of Eleanor from hell-fire.

I have built a secret bower in England, Thomas,

A nest in a bush.

BECKET.

And where, my liege?

HENRY (whispers).        Thine ear.

BECKET.

That’s lone enough.

HENRY (laying paper on table).

This chart here mark’d ‘Her Bower,’

Take, keep it, friend. See, first, a circling wood,

A hundred pathways running everyway,

And then a brook, a bridge; and after that

This labyrinthine brickwork maze in maze,

And then another wood, and in the midst

A garden and my Rosamund. Look, this line —

The rest you see is colour’d green — but this

Draws thro’ the chart to her.

BECKET.

This blood-red line?

HENRY.

Ay! blood, perchance, except thou see to her.

BECKET.

And where is she? There in her English nest?

HENRY.

Would God she were — no, here within the city.

We take her from her secret bower in Anjou

And pass her to her secret bower in England.

She is ignorant of all but that I love her.

BECKET.

My liege, I pray thee let me hence: a widow

And orphan child, whom one of thy wild barons ——

HENRY.

Ay, ay, but swear to see to her in England.

BECKET.

Well, well, I swear, but not to please myself.

HENRY.

Whatever come between us?

BECKET.

What should come

Between us, Henry?

HENRY.

Nay — I know not, Thomas.

BECKET.

What need then? Well — whatever come between us.

[Going.

HENRY.

A moment! thou didst help me to my throne

In Theobald’s time, and after by thy wisdom

Hast kept it firm from shaking; but now I,

For my realm’s sake, myself must be the wizard

To raise that tempest which will set it trembling

Only to base it deeper. I, true son

Of Holy Church — no croucher to the Gregories

That tread the kings their children underheel —

Must curb her; and the Holy Father, while

This Barbarossa butts him from his chair,

Will need my help — be facile to my hands.

Now is my time. Yet — lest there should be flashes

And fulminations from the side of Rome,

An interdict on England — I will have

My young son Henry crown’d the King of England,

That so the Papal bolt may pass by England,

As seeming his, not mine, and fall abroad.

I’ll have it done — and now.

BECKET.

Surely too young

Even for this shadow of a crown; and tho’

I love him heartily, I can spy already

A strain of hard and headstrong in him. Say,

The Queen should play his kingship against thine!

HENRY.

I will not think so, Thomas. Who shall crown him?

Canterbury is dying.

BECKET.

The next Canterbury.

HENRY.

And who shall he be, my friend Thomas? Who?

BECKET.

Name him; the Holy Father will confirm him.

HENRY (lays his hand on BECKET’S shoulder).

Here!

BECKET.

Mock me not. I am not even a monk.

Thy jest — no more. Why — look — is this a sleeve

For an archbishop?

HENRY.

But the arm within

Is Becket’s, who hath beaten down my foes.

BECKET.

A soldier’s, not a spiritual arm.

HENRY.

I lack a spiritual soldier, Thomas —

A man of this world and the next to boot.

BECKET.

There’s Gilbert Foliot.

HENRY.

He! too thin, too thin.

Thou art the man to fill out the Church robe;

Your Foliot fasts and fawns too much for me.

BECKET.

Roger of York.

HENRY.

Roger is Roger of York.

King, Church, and State to him but foils wherein

To set that precious jewel, Roger of York.

No.

BECKET.

Henry of Winchester?

HENRY.

Him who crown’d Stephen —

King Stephen’s brother! No; too royal for me.

And I’ll have no more Anselms.

BECKET.

Sire, the business

Of thy whole kingdom waits me: let me go.

HENRY.

Answer me first.

BECKET.

Then for thy barren jest

Take thou mine answer in bare commonplace —

Nolo episcopari.

HENRY.

Ay, but Nolo

Archiepiscopari, my good friend,

Is quite another matter.

BECKET.

A more awful one.

Make me archbishop! Why, my liege, I know

Some three or four poor priests a thousand times

Fitter for this grand function. Me archbishop!

God’s favour and king’s favour might so clash

That thou and I —— That were a jest indeed!

HENRY.

Thou angerest me, man: I do not jest.

Enter ELEANOR and SIR REGINALD FITZURSE.

ELEANOR (singing).

Over! the sweet summer closes,

The reign of the roses is done —

HENRY (to BECKET, who is going).

Thou shalt not go. I have not ended with thee.

ELEANOR (seeing chart on table).

This chart with the red line! her bower! whose bower?

HENRY.

The chart is not mine, but Becket’s: take it, Thomas.

ELEANOR.

Becket! O — ay — and these chessmen on the floor — the king’s crown broken! Becket hath beaten thee again — and thou hast kicked down the board. I know thee of old.

HENRY.

True enough, my mind was set upon other matters.

ELEANOR.

What matters? State matters? love matters?

HENRY.

My love for thee, and thine for me.

ELEANOR.

Over! the sweet summer closes,

The reign of the roses is done;

Over and gone with the roses,

And over and gone with the sun.

Here; but our sun in Aquitaine lasts longer. I would I were in Aquitaine again — your north chills me.

Over! the sweet summer closes,

And never a flower at the close;

Over and gone with the roses,

And winter again and the snows.

That was not the way I ended it first — but unsymmetrically, preposterously, illogically, out of passion, without art — like a song of the people. Will you have it? The last Parthian shaft of a forlorn Cupid at the King’s left breast, and all left-handedness and under-handedness.

And never a flower at the close,

Over and gone with the roses,

Not over and gone with the rose.

True, one rose will outblossom the rest, one rose in a bower. I speak after my fancies, for I am a Troubadour, you know, and won the violet at Toulouse; but my voice is harsh here, not in tune, a nightingale out of season; for marriage, rose or no rose, has killed the golden violet.

BECKET.

Madam, you do ill to scorn wedded love.

ELEANOR.

So I do. Louis of France loved me, and I dreamed that I loved Louis of France: and I loved Henry of England, and Henry of England dreamed that he loved me; but the marriage-garland withers even with the putting on, the bright link rusts with the breath of the first after-marriage kiss, the harvest moon is the ripening of the harvest, and the honeymoon is the gall of love; he dies of his honeymoon. I could pity this poor world myself that it is no better ordered.

HENRY.

Dead is he, my Queen? What, altogether? Let me swear nay to that by this cross on thy neck. God’s eyes! what a lovely cross! what jewels!

ELEANOR.

Doth it please you? Take it and wear it on that hard heart of yours — there.

[Gives it to him.

HENRY (puts it on).

On this left breast before so hard a heart,

To hide the scar left by thy Parthian dart.

ELEANOR.

Has my simple song set you jingling? Nay, if I took and translated that hard heart into our Provençal facilities, I could so play about it with the rhyme ——

HENRY.

That the heart were lost in the rhyme and the matter in the metre. May we not pray you, Madam, to spare us the hardness of your facility?

ELEANOR.

The wells of Castaly are not wasted upon the desert. We did but jest.

HENRY.

There’s no jest on the brows of Herbert there. What is it, Herbert?

Enter HERBERT OF BOSHAM.

HERBERT.

My liege, the good Archbishop is no more.

HENRY.

Peace to his soul!

HERBERT.

I left him with peace on his face — that sweet other-world smile, which will be reflected in the spiritual body among the angels. But he longed much to see your Grace and the Chancellor ere he past, and his last words were a commendation of Thomas Becket to your Grace as his successor in the archbishoprick.

HENRY.

Ha, Becket! thou rememberest our talk!

BECKET.

My heart is full of tears — I have no answer.

HENRY.

Well, well, old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again. Come to me to-morrow. Thou hast but to hold out thy hand. Meanwhile the revenues are mine. A-hawking, a-hawking! If I sit, I grow fat.

[Leaps over the table, and exit.

BECKET.

He did prefer me to the chancellorship,

Believing I should ever aid the Church —

But have I done it? He commends me now

From out his grave to this archbishoprick.

HERBERT.

A dead man’s dying wish should be of weight.

BECKET.

His should. Come with me. Let me learn at full

The manner of his death, and all he said.

[Exeunt Herbert and Becket.

ELEANOR.

Fitzurse, that chart with the red line — thou sawest it — her bower.

FITZURSE.

Rosamund’s?

ELEANOR.

Ay — there lies the secret of her whereabouts, and the King gave it to his Chancellor.

FITZURSE.

To this son of a London merchant — how your Grace must hate him.

ELEANOR.

Hate him? as brave a Soldier as Henry and a goodlier man: but thou — dost thou love this Chancellor, that thou hast sworn a voluntary allegiance to him?

FITZURSE.

Not for my love toward him, but because he had the love of the King. How should a baron love a beggar on horseback, with the retinue of three kings behind him, outroyalling royalty? Besides, he holp the King to break down our castles, for the which I hate him.

ELEANOR.

For the which I honour him. Statesman not Churchman he. A great and sound policy that: I could embrace him for it: you could not see the King for the kinglings.

FITZURSE.

Ay, but he speaks to a noble as tho’ he were a churl, and to a churl as if he were a noble.

ELEANOR.

Pride of the plebeian!

FITZURSE.

And this plebeian like to be Archbishop!

ELEANOR.

True, and I have an inherited loathing of these black sheep of the Papacy. Archbishop? I can see further into a man than our hot-headed Henry, and if there ever come feud between Church and Crown, and I do not then charm this secret out of our loyal Thomas, I am not Eleanor.

FITZURSE.

Last night I followed a woman in the city here. Her face was veiled, but the back methought was Rosamund — his paramour, thy rival. I can feel for thee.

ELEANOR.

Thou feel for me! — paramour — rival! King Louis had no paramours, and I loved him none the more. Henry had many, and I loved him none the less — now neither more nor less — not at all; the cup’s empty. I would she were but his paramour, for men tire of their fancies; but I fear this one fancy hath taken root, and borne blossom too, and she, whom the King loves indeed, is a power in the State. Rival! — ay, and when the King passes, there may come a crash and embroilment as in Stephen’s time; and her children — canst thou not — that secret matter which would heat the King against thee (whispers him and he starts). Nay, that is safe with me as with thyself: but canst thou not — thou art drowned in debt — thou shalt have our love, our silence, and our gold — canst thou not — if thou light upon her — free me from her?

FITZURSE.

Well, Madam, I have loved her in my time.

ELEANOR.

No, my bear, thou hast not. My Courts of Love would have held thee guiltless of love — the fine attractions and repulses, the delicacies, the subtleties.

FITZURSE.

Madam, I loved according to the main purpose and intent of nature.

ELEANOR.

I warrant thee! thou wouldst hug thy Cupid till his ribs cracked — enough of this. Follow me this Rosamund day and night, whithersoever she goes; track her, if thou canst, even into the King’s lodging, that I may (clenches her fist) — may at least have my cry against him and her, — and thou in thy way shouldst be jealous of the King, for thou in thy way didst once, what shall I call it, affect her thine own self.

FITZURSE.

Ay, but the young colt winced and whinnied and flung up her heels; and then the King came honeying about her, and this Becket, her father’s friend, like enough staved us from her.

ELEANOR.

Us!

FITZURSE.

Yea, by the Blessed Virgin! There were more than I buzzing round the blossom — De Tracy — even that flint De Brito.

ELEANOR.

Carry her off among you; run in upon her and devour her, one and all of you; make her as hateful to herself and to the King, as she is to me.

FITZURSE.

I and all would be glad to wreak our spite on the rose-faced minion of the King, and bring her to the level of the dust, so that the King ——

ELEANOR.

Let her eat it like the serpent, and be driven out of her paradise.

Act I

Scene I

BECKET’S House in London. Chamber barely furnished. BECKET unrobing. HERBERT OF BOSHAM and SERVANT.

SERVANT.

Shall I not help your lordship to your rest?

BECKET.

Friend, am I so much better than thyself

That thou shouldst help me? Thou art wearied out

With this day’s work, get thee to thine own bed.

Leave me with Herbert, friend.

[Exit Servant.

Help me off, Herbert, with this — and this.

HERBERT.

Was not the people’s blessing as we past

Heart-comfort and a balsam to thy blood?

BECKET.

The people know their Church a tower of strength,

A bulwark against Throne and Baronage.

Too heavy for me, this; off with it, Herbert!

HERBERT.

Is it so much heavier than thy Chancellor’s robe?

BECKET.

No; but the Chancellor’s and the Archbishop’s

Together more than mortal man can bear.

HERBERT.

Not heavier than thine armour at Thoulouse?

BECKET.

O Herbert, Herbert, in my chancellorship

I more than once have gone against the Church.

HERBERT.

To please the King?

BECKET.

Ay, and the King of kings,

Or justice; for it seem’d to me but just

The Church should pay her scutage like the lords.

But hast thou heard this cry of Gilbert Foliot

That I am not the man to be your Primate,

For Henry could not work a miracle —

Make an Archbishop of a soldier?

HERBERT.  Ay,

For Gilbert Foliot held himself the man.

BECKET.

Am I the man? My mother, ere she bore me,

Dream’d that twelve stars fell glittering out of heaven

Into her bosom.

HERBERT.

Ay, the fire, the light,

The spirit of the twelve Apostles enter’d

Into thy making.

BECKET.

And when I was a child,

The Virgin, in a vision of my sleep,

Gave me the golden keys of Paradise. Dream,

Or prophecy, that?

HERBERT.

Well, dream and prophecy both.

BECKET.

And when I was of Theobald’s household, once —

The good old man would sometimes have his jest —

He took his mitre off, and set it on me,

And said, ‘My young Archbishop — thou wouldst make

A stately Archbishop!’ Jest or prophecy there?

HERBERT.

Both, Thomas, both.

BECKET.

Am I the man? That rang

Within my head last night, and when I slept

Methought I stood in Canterbury Minster,

And spake to the Lord God, and said, ‘O Lord,

I have been a lover of wines, and delicate meats,

And secular splendours, and a favourer

Of players, and a courtier, and a feeder

Of dogs and hawks, and apes, and lions, and lynxes.

Am I the man?’ And the Lord answer’d me,

‘Thou art the man, and all the more the man.’

And then I asked again, ‘O Lord my God,

Henry the King hath been my friend, my brother,

And mine uplifter in this world, and chosen me

For this thy great archbishoprick, believing

That I should go against the Church with him.

And I shall go against him with the Church,

And I have said no word of this to him:

Am I the man?’ And the Lord answer’d me,

‘Thou art the man, and all the more the man.’

And thereupon, methought, He drew toward me,

And smote me down upon the Minster floor.

I fell.

HERBERT.

God make not thee, but thy foes, fall.

BECKET.

I fell. Why fall? Why did He smite me? What?

Shall I fall off — to please the King once more?

Not fight — tho’ somehow traitor to the King —

My truest and mine utmost for the Church?

HERBERT.

Thou canst not fall that way. Let traitor be;

For how have fought thine utmost for the Church,

Save from the throne of thine archbishoprick?

And how been made Archbishop hadst thou told him,

‘I mean to fight mine utmost for the Church,

Against the King?’

BECKET.

But dost thou think the King

Forced mine election?

HERBERT.

I do think the King

Was potent in the election, and why not?

Why should not Heaven have so inspired the King?

Be comforted. Thou art the man — be thou

A mightier Anselm.

BECKET.

I do believe thee, then. I am the man.

And yet I seem appall’d — on such a sudden

At such an eagle-height I stand and see

The rift that runs between me and the King.

I served our Theobald well when I was with him;

I served King Henry well as Chancellor;

I am his no more, and I must serve the Church.

This Canterbury is only less than Rome,

And all my doubts I fling from me like dust,

Winnow and scatter all scruples to the wind,

And all the puissance of the warrior,

And all the wisdom of the Chancellor,

And all the heap’d experiences of life,

I cast upon the side of Canterbury —

Our holy mother Canterbury, who sits

With tatter’d robes. Laics and barons, thro’

The random gifts of careless kings, have graspt

Her livings, her advowsons, granges, farms,

And goodly acres — we will make her whole;

Not one rood lost. And for these Royal customs,

These ancient Royal customs — they are Royal,

Not of the Church — and let them be anathema,

And all that speak for them anathema.

HERBERT.

Thomas, thou art moved too much.

BECKET.  O Herbert, here

I gash myself asunder from the King,

Tho’ leaving each, a wound; mine own, a grief

To show the scar for ever — his, a hate

Not ever to be heal’d.

Enter ROSAMUND DE CLIFFORD, flying from SIR REGINALD FITZURSE. Drops her veil.

BECKET.

Rosamund de Clifford!

ROSAMUND.

Save me, father, hide me — they follow me —

and I must not be known.

BECKET.

Pass in with Herbert there.

[Exeunt Rosamund and Herbert by side door.

Enter FITZURSE.

FITZURSE.

The Archbishop!

BECKET.

Ay! what wouldst thou, Reginald?

FITZURSE.

Why — why, my lord, I follow’d — follow’d one —

BECKET.

And then what follows? Let me follow thee.

FITZURSE.

It much imports me I should know her name.

BECKET.

What her?

FITZURSE.

The woman that I follow’d hither.

BECKET.

Perhaps it may import her all as much

Not to be known.

FITZURSE.

And what care I for that?

Come, come, my lord Archbishop; I saw that door

Close even now upon the woman.

BECKET.

Well?

FITZURSE (making for the door).

Nay, let me pass, my lord, for I must know.

BECKET.

Back, man!

FITZURSE.

Then tell me who and what she is.

BECKET.

Art thou so sure thou followedst anything?

Go home, and sleep thy wine off, for thine eyes

Glare stupid — wild with wine.

FITZURSE (making to the door).

I must and will.

I care not for thy new archbishoprick.

BECKET.

Back, man, I tell thee! What!

Shall I forget my new archbishoprick

And smite thee with my crozier on the skull?

‘Fore God, I am a mightier man than thou.

FITZURSE.

It well befits thy new archbishoprick

To take the vagabond woman of the street

Into thine arms!

BECKET.

O drunken ribaldry!

Out, beast! out, bear!

FITZURSE.

I shall remember this.

BECKET.

Do, and begone!

[Exit Fitzurse.

[Going to the door, sees DE TRACY.]

Tracy, what dost thou here?

DE TRACY.

My lord, I follow’d Reginald Fitzurse.

BECKET.

Follow him out!

DE TRACY.

I shall remember this

Discourtesy.

[Exit.

BECKET.

Do. These be those baron-brutes

That havock’d all the land in Stephen’s day.

Rosamund de Clifford.

Re-enter ROSAMUND and HERBERT.

ROSAMUND.

Here am I.

BECKET.  Why here?

We gave thee to the charge of John of Salisbury.

To pass thee to thy secret bower to-morrow.

Wast thou not told to keep thyself from sight?

ROSAMUND.

Poor bird of passage! so I was; but, father,

They say that you are wise in winged things,

And know the ways of Nature. Bar the bird

From following the fled summer — a chink — he’s out,

Gone! And there stole into the city a breath

Full of the meadows, and it minded me

Of the sweet woods of Clifford, and the walks

Where I could move at pleasure, and I thought

Lo! I must out or die.

BECKET.

Or out and die.

And what hast thou to do with this Fitzurse?

ROSAMUND.

Nothing. He sued my hand. I shook at him.

He found me once alone. Nay — nay — I cannot

Tell you: my father drove him and his friends,

De Tracy and De Brito, from our castle.

I was but fourteen and an April then.

I heard him swear revenge.

BECKET.

Why will you court it

By self-exposure? flutter out at night?

Make it so hard to save a moth from the fire?

ROSAMUND.

I have saved many of ‘em. You catch ‘em, so,

Softly, and fling them out to the free air.

They burn themselves within-door.

BECKET.        Our good John

Must speed you to your bower at once. The child

Is there already.

ROSAMUND.

Yes — the child — the child —

O rare, a whole long day of open field.

BECKET.

Ay, but you go disguised.

ROSAMUND.

O rare again!

We’ll baffle them, I warrant. What shall it be?

I’ll go as a nun.

BECKET.

No.

ROSAMUND.

What, not good enough

Even to play at nun?

BECKET.

Dan John with a nun,

That Map, and these new railers at the Church

May plaister his clean name with scurrilous rhymes!

No!

Go like a monk, cowling and clouding up

That fatal star, thy Beauty, from the squint

Of lust and glare of malice. Good night! good night!

ROSAMUND.

Father, I am so tender to all hardness!

Nay, father, first thy blessing.

BECKET.  Wedded?

ROSAMUND.  Father!

BECKET.

Well, well! I ask no more. Heaven bless thee! hence!

ROSAMUND.

O, holy father, when thou seest him next,

Commend me to thy friend.

BECKET.

What friend?

ROSAMUND.        The King.

BECKET.

Herbert, take out a score of armed men

To guard this bird of passage to her cage;

And watch Fitzurse, and if he follow thee,

Make him thy prisoner. I am Chancellor yet.

[Exeunt Herbert and Rosamund.

Poor soul! poor soul!

My friend, the King! . . . O thou Great Seal of England,

Given me by my dear friend the King of England —

We long have wrought together, thou and I —

Now must I send thee as a common friend

To tell the King, my friend, I am against him.

We are friends no more: he will say that, not I.

The worldly bond between us is dissolved,

Not yet the love: can I be under him

As Chancellor? as Archbishop over him?

Go therefore like a friend slighted by one

That hath climb’d up to nobler company.

Not slighted — all but moan’d for: thou must go.

I have not dishonour’d thee — I trust I have not;

Not mangled justice. May the hand that next

Inherits thee be but as true to thee

As mine hath been! O, my dear friend, the King!

O brother! — I may come to martyrdom.

I am martyr in myself already. — Herbert!

HERBERT (re-entering).

My lord, the town is quiet, and the moon

Divides the whole long street with light and shade.

No footfall — no Fitzurse. We have seen her home.

BECKET.

The hog hath tumbled himself into some corner,

Some ditch, to snore away his drunkenness

Into the sober headache, — Nature’s moral

Against excess. Let the Great Seal be sent

Back to the King to-morrow.

HERBERT.

Must that be?

The King may rend the bearer limb from limb

Think on it again.

BECKET.

Against the moral excess

No physical ache, but failure it may be

Of all we aim’d at. John of Salisbury

Hath often laid a cold hand on my heats,

And Herbert hath rebuked me even now.

I will be wise and wary, not the soldier

As Foliot swears it. — John, and out of breath!

Enter JOHN OF SALISBURY.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Thomas, thou wast not happy taking charge

Of this wild Rosamund to please the King,

Nor am I happy having charge of her —

The included Danaë has escaped again

Her tower, and her Acrisius — where to seek?

I have been about the city.

BECKET.

Thou wilt find her

Back in her lodging. Go with her — at once —

To-night — my men will guard you to the gates.

Be sweet to her, she has many enemies.

Send the Great Seal by daybreak. Both, good night!

Scene II

Street in Northampton leading to the Castle.

ELEANOR’S RETAINERS and BECKET’S RETAINERS fighting. Enter ELEANOR and BECKET from opposite streets.

ELEANOR.

Peace, fools!

BECKET.

Peace, friends! what idle brawl is this?

RETAINER OF BECKET.

They said — her Grace’s people — thou wast found —

Liars! I shame to quote ‘em — caught, my lord,

With a wanton in thy lodging — Hell requite ‘em!

RETAINER OF ELEANOR.

My liege, the Lord Fitzurse reported this

In passing to the Castle even now.

RETAINER OF BECKET.

And then they mock’d us and we fell upon ‘em,

For we would live and die for thee, my lord,

However kings and queens may frown on thee.

BECKET TO HIS RETAINERS.

Go, go — no more of this!

ELEANOR TO HER RETAINERS.

Away! — (Exeunt Retainers) Fitzurse —

BECKET.

Nay, let him be.

ELEANOR.

No, no, my Lord Archbishop,

‘Tis known you are midwinter to all women,

But often in your chancellorship you served

The follies of the King.

BECKET.

No, not these follies!

ELEANOR.

My lord, Fitzurse beheld her in your lodging.

BECKET.

Whom?

ELEANOR.

Well — you know — the minion, Rosamund.

BECKET.

He had good eyes!

ELEANOR.

Then hidden in the street

He watch’d her pass with John of Salisbury

And heard her cry ‘Where is this bower of mine?’

BECKET.

Good ears too!

ELEANOR.

You are going to the Castle,

Will you subscribe the customs?

BECKET.  I leave that,

Knowing how much you reverence Holy Church,

My liege, to your conjecture.

ELEANOR.

I and mine —

And many a baron holds along with me —

Are not so much at feud with Holy Church

But we might take your side against the customs —

So that you grant me one slight favour.

BECKET.  What?

ELEANOR.

A sight of that same chart which Henry gave you

With the red line—’her bower.’

BECKET.  And to what end?

ELEANOR.

That Church must scorn herself whose fearful Priest

Sits winking at the license of a king,

Altho’ we grant when kings are dangerous

The Church must play into the hands of kings;

Look! I would move this wanton from his sight

And take the Church’s danger on myself.

BECKET.

For which she should be duly grateful.

ELEANOR.        True!

Tho’ she that binds the bond, herself should see

That kings are faithful to their marriage vow.

BECKET.

Ay, Madam, and queens also.

ELEANOR.

And queens also!

What is your drift?

BECKET.

My drift is to the Castle,

Where I shall meet the Barons and my King.      [Exit.

DE BROC, DE TRACY, DE BRITO, DE MORVILLE (passing).

ELEANOR.

To the Castle?

DE BROC.

Ay!

ELEANOR.

Stir up the King, the Lords!

Set all on fire against him!

DE BRITO.

Ay, good Madam!

[Exeunt.

ELEANOR.

Fool! I will make thee hateful to thy King.

Churl! I will have thee frighted into France,

And I shall live to trample on thy grave.

Scene III

The Hall in Northampton Castle.

On one side of the stage the doors of an inner Council-chamber, half-open. At the bottom, the great doors of the Hall. ROGER ARCHBISHOP OF YORK, FOLIOT BISHOP OF LONDON, HILARY OF CHICHESTER, BISHOP OF HEREFORD, RICHARD DE HASTINGS (Grand Prior of Templars), PHILIP DE ELEEMOSYNA (the Pope’s Almoner), and others. DE BROC, FITZURSE, DE BRITO, DE MORVILLE, DE TRACY, and other BARONS assembled — a table before them. JOHN OF OXFORD, President of the Council.

Enter BECKET and HERBERT OF BOSHAM.

BECKET.

Where is the King?

ROGER OF YORK.

Gone hawking on the Nene,

His heart so gall’d with thine ingratitude,

He will not see thy face till thou hast sign’d

These ancient laws and customs of the realm.

Thy sending back the Great Seal madden’d him,

He all but pluck’d the bearer’s eyes away.

Take heed, lest he destroy thee utterly.

BECKET.

Then shalt thou step into my place and sign.

ROGER OF YORK.

Didst thou not promise Henry to obey

These ancient laws and customs of the realm?

BECKET.

Saving the honour of my order — ay.

Customs, traditions, — clouds that come and go;

The customs of the Church are Peter’s rock.

ROGER OF YORK.

Saving thine order! But King Henry sware

That, saving his King’s kingship, he would grant thee

The crown itself. Saving thine order, Thomas,

Is black and white at once, and comes to nought.

O bolster’d up with stubbornness and pride,

Wilt thou destroy the Church in fighting for it,

And bring us all to shame?

BECKET.

Roger of York,

When I and thou were youths in Theobald’s house,

Twice did thy malice and thy calumnies

Exile me from the face of Theobald.

Now I am Canterbury and thou art York.

ROGER OF YORK.

And is not York the peer of Canterbury?

Did not Great Gregory bid St. Austin here

Found two archbishopricks, London and York?

BECKET.

What came of that? The first archbishop fled,

And York lay barren for a hundred years.

Why, by this rule, Foliot may claim the pall

For London too.

FOLIOT.

And with good reason too,

For London had a temple and a priest

When Canterbury hardly bore a name.

BECKET.

The pagan temple of a pagan Rome!

The heathen priesthood of a heathen creed!

Thou goest beyond thyself in petulancy!

Who made thee London? Who, but Canterbury?

JOHN OF OXFORD.

Peace, peace, my lords! these customs are no longer

As Canterbury calls them, wandering clouds,

But by the King’s command are written down,

And by the King’s command I, John of Oxford,

The President of this Council, read them.

BECKET.  Read!

JOHN OF OXFORD (reads).

‘All causes of advowsons and presentations, whether between laymen or clerics, shall be tried in the King’s court.’

BECKET.

But that I cannot sign: for that would drag

The cleric before the civil judgment-seat,

And on a matter wholly spiritual.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

‘If any cleric be accused of felony, the Church shall not protect him: but he shall answer to the summons of the King’s court to be tried therein.’

BECKET.

And that I cannot sign.

Is not the Church the visible Lord on earth?

Shall hands that do create the Lord be bound

Behind the back like laymen-criminals?

The Lord be judged again by Pilate? No!

JOHN OF OXFORD.

‘When a bishoprick falls vacant, the King, till another be appointed, shall receive the revenues thereof.’

BECKET.

And that I cannot sign. Is the King’s treasury

A fit place for the monies of the Church,

That be the patrimony of the poor?

JOHN OF OXFORD.

‘And when the vacancy is to be filled up, the King shall summon the chapter of that church to court, and the election shall be made in the Chapel Royal, with the consent of our lord the King, and by the advice of his Government.’

BECKET.

And that I cannot sign: for that would make

Our island-Church a schism from Christendom,

And weight down all free choice beneath the throne.

FOLIOT.

And was thine own election so canonical,

Good father?

BECKET.

If it were not, Gilbert Foliot,

I mean to cross the sea to France, and lay

My crozier in the Holy Father’s hands,

And bid him re-create me, Gilbert Foliot.

FOLIOT.

Nay; by another of these customs thou

Wilt not be suffer’d so to cross the seas

Without the license of our lord the King.

BECKET.

That, too, I cannot sign.

DE BROC, DE BRITO, DE TRACY, FITZURSE, DE MORVILLE, start up — a clash of swords.

Sign and obey!

BECKET.

My lords, is this a combat or a council?

Are ye my masters, or my lord the King?

Ye make this clashing for no love o’ the customs

Or constitutions, or whate’er ye call them,

But that there be among you those that hold

Lands reft from Canterbury.

DE BROC.

And mean to keep them,

In spite of thee!

LORDS (shouting).

Sign, and obey the crown!

BECKET.

The crown? Shall I do less for Canterbury

Than Henry for the crown? King Stephen gave

Many of the crown lands to those that helpt him;

So did Matilda, the King’s mother. Mark,

When Henry came into his own again,

Then he took back not only Stephen’s gifts,

But his own mother’s, lest the crown should be

Shorn of ancestral splendour. This did Henry.

Shall I do less for mine own Canterbury?

And thou, De Broc, that holdest Saltwood Castle ——

DE BROC.

And mean to hold it, or ——

BECKET.

To have my life.

DE BROC.

The King is quick to anger; if thou anger him,

We wait but the King’s word to strike thee dead.

BECKET.

Strike, and I die the death of martyrdom;

Strike, and ye set these customs by my death

Ringing their own death-knell thro’ all the realm.

HERBERT.

And I can tell you, lords, ye are all as like

To lodge a fear in Thomas Becket’s heart

As find a hare’s form in a lion’s cave.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

Ay, sheathe your swords, ye will displease the King.

DE BROC.

Why down then thou! but an he come to Saltwood,

By God’s death, thou shalt stick him like a calf!

[Sheathing his sword.

HILARY.

O my good lord, I do entreat thee — sign.

Save the King’s honour here before his barons.

He hath sworn that thou shouldst sign, and now but shuns

The semblance of defeat; I have heard him say

He means no more; so if thou sign, my lord,

That were but as the shadow of an assent.

BECKET.

‘Twould seem too like the substance, if I sign’d.

PHILIP DE ELEEMOSYNA.

My lord, thine ear! I have the ear of the Pope.

As thou hast honour for the Pope our master,

Have pity on him, sorely prest upon

By the fierce Emperor and his Antipope.

Thou knowest he was forced to fly to France;

He pray’d me to pray thee to pacify

Thy King; for if thou go against thy King,

Then must he likewise go against thy King,

And then thy King might join the Antipope,

And that would shake the Papacy as it stands.

Besides, thy King swore to our cardinals

He meant no harm nor damage to the Church.

Smoothe thou his pride — thy signing is but form;

Nay, and should harm come of it, it is the Pope

Will be to blame — not thou. Over and over

He told me thou shouldst pacify the King,

Lest there be battle between Heaven and Earth,

And Earth should get the better — for the time.

Cannot the Pope absolve thee if thou sign?

BECKET.

Have I the orders of the Holy Father?

PHILIP DE ELEEMOSYNA.

Orders, my lord — why, no; for what am I?

The secret whisper of the Holy Father.

Thou, that hast been a statesman, couldst thou always

Blurt thy free mind to the air?

BECKET.

If Rome be feeble, then should I be firm.

PHILIP.

Take it not that way — balk not the Pope’s will.

When he hath shaken off the Emperor,

He heads the Church against the King with thee.

RICHARD DE HASTINGS (kneeling).

Becket, I am the oldest of the Templars;

I knew thy father; he would be mine age

Had he lived now; think of me as thy father!

Behold thy father kneeling to thee, Becket.

Submit; I promise thee on my salvation

That thou wilt hear no more o’ the customs.

BECKET.   What!

Hath Henry told thee? hast thou talk’d with him?

Another TEMPLAR (kneeling).

Father, I am the youngest of the Templars,

Look on me as I were thy bodily son,

For, like a son, I lift my hands to thee.

PHILIP.

Wilt thou hold out for ever, Thomas Becket?

Dost thou not hear?

BECKET (signs).

Why — there then — there — I sign,

And swear to obey the customs.

FOLIOT.

Is it thy will,

My lord Archbishop, that we too should sign?

BECKET.

O ay, by that canonical obedience

Thou still hast owed thy father, Gilbert Foliot.

FOLIOT.

Loyally and with good faith, my lord Archbishop?

BECKET.

O ay, with all that loyalty and good faith

Thou still hast shown thy primate, Gilbert Foliot.

[Becket draws apart with Herbert.

Herbert, Herbert, have I betray’d the Church?

I’ll have the paper back — blot out my name.

HERBERT.

Too late, my lord: you see they are signing there.

BECKET.

False to myself — it is the will of God

To break me, prove me nothing of myself!

This Almoner hath tasted Henry’s gold.

The cardinals have finger’d Henry’s gold.

And Rome is venal ev’n to rottenness.

I see it, I see it.

I am no soldier, as he said — at least

No leader. Herbert, till I hear from the Pope

I will suspend myself from all my functions.

If fast and prayer, the lacerating scourge ——

FOLIOT (from the table).

My lord Archbishop, thou hast yet to seal.

BECKET.

First, Foliot, let me see what I have sign’d.

[Goes to the table.

What, this! and this! — what! new and old together!

Seal? If a seraph shouted from the sun,

And bad me seal against the rights of the Church,

I would anathematise him. I will not seal.

[Exit with Herbert.

Enter KING HENRY.

HENRY.

Where’s Thomas? hath he sign’d? show me the papers!

Sign’d and not seal’d! How’s that?

JOHN OF OXFORD.  He would not seal.

And when he sign’d, his face was stormy-red —

Shame, wrath, I know not what. He sat down there

And dropt it in his hands, and then a paleness,

Like the wan twilight after sunset, crept

Up even to the tonsure, and he groan’d,

‘False to myself! It is the will of God!’

HENRY.

God’s will be what it will, the man shall seal,

Or I will seal his doom. My burgher’s son —

Nay, if I cannot break him as the prelate,

I’ll crush him as the subject. Send for him back.

[Sits on his throne.

Barons and bishops of our realm of England,

After the nineteen winters of King Stephen —

A reign which was no reign, when none could sit

By his own hearth in peace; when murder common

As nature’s death, like Egypt’s plague, had fill’d

All things with blood; when every doorway blush’d,

Dash’d red with that unhallow’d passover;

When every baron ground his blade in blood;

The household dough was kneaded up with blood;

The millwheel turn’d in blood; the wholesome plow

Lay rusting in the furrow’s yellow weeds,

Till famine dwarft the race — I came, your King!

Nor dwelt alone, like a soft lord of the East,

In mine own hall, and sucking thro’ fools’ ears

The flatteries of corruption — went abroad

Thro’ all my counties, spied my people’s ways;

Yea, heard the churl against the baron — yea,

And did him justice; sat in mine own courts

Judging my judges, that had found a King

Who ranged confusions, made the twilight day,

And struck a shape from out the vague, and law

From madness. And the event — our fallows till’d,

Much corn, repeopled towns, a realm again.

So far my course, albeit not glassy-smooth,

Had prosper’d in the main, but suddenly

Jarr’d on this rock. A cleric violated

The daughter of his host, and murder’d him.

Bishops — York, London, Chichester, Westminster —

Ye haled this tonsured devil into your courts;

But since your canon will not let you take

Life for a life, ye but degraded him

Where I had hang’d him. What doth hard murder care

For degradation? and that made me muse,

Being bounden by my coronation oath

To do men justice. Look to it, your own selves!

Say that a cleric murder’d an archbishop,

What could ye do? Degrade, imprison him —

Not death for death.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

But I, my liege, could swear,

To death for death.

HENRY.

And, looking thro’ my reign,

I found a hundred ghastly murders done

By men, the scum and offal of the Church;

Then, glancing thro’ the story of this realm,

I came on certain wholesome usages,

Lost in desuetude, of my grandsire’s day,

Good royal customs — had them written fair

For John of Oxford here to read to you.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

And I can easily swear to these as being

The King’s will and God’s will and justice; yet

I could but read a part to-day, because ——

FITZURSE.

Because my lord of Canterbury ——

DE TRACY.  Ay,

This lord of Canterbury ——

DE BRITO.

As is his wont

Too much of late whene’er your royal rights

Are mooted in our councils ——

FITZURSE.

— made an uproar.

HENRY.

And Becket had my bosom on all this;

If ever man by bonds of gratefulness —

I raised him from the puddle of the gutter,

I made him porcelain from the clay of the city —

Thought that I knew him, err’d thro’ love of him,

Hoped, were he chosen archbishop, Church and Crown,

Two sisters gliding in an equal dance,

Two rivers gently flowing side by side —

But no!

The bird that moults sings the same song again,

The snake that sloughs comes out a snake again.

Snake — ay, but he that lookt a fangless one,

Issues a venomous adder.

For he, when having dofft the Chancellor’s robe —

Flung the Great Seal of England in my face —

Claim’d some of our crown lands for Canterbury —

My comrade, boon companion, my co-reveller,

The master of his master, the King’s king. —

God’s eyes! I had meant to make him all but king.

Chancellor-Archbishop, he might well have sway’d

All England under Henry, the young King,

When I was hence. What did the traitor say?

False to himself, but ten-fold false to me!

The will of God — why, then it is my will —

Is he coming?

MESSENGER (entering).

With a crowd of worshippers,

And holds his cross before him thro’ the crowd,

As one that puts himself in sanctuary.

HENRY.

His cross!

ROGER OF YORK.

His cross! I’ll front him, cross to cross.

[Exit Roger of York.

HENRY.

His cross! it is the traitor that imputes

Treachery to his King!

It is not safe for me to look upon him.

Away — with me!

[Goes in with his Barons to the Council Chamber,

the door of which is left open.

Enter BECKET, holding his cross of silver before him.

The BISHOPS come round him.

HEREFORD.

The King will not abide thee with thy cross.

Permit me, my good lord, to bear it for thee,

Being thy chaplain.

BECKET.

No: it must protect me.

HERBERT.

As once he bore the standard of the Angles,

So now he bears the standard of the angels.

FOLIOT.

I am the Dean of the province: let me bear it.

Make not thy King a traitorous murderer.

BECKET.

Did not your barons draw their swords against me?

Enter ROGER OF YORK, with his cross, advancing to BECKET.

BECKET.

Wherefore dost thou presume to bear thy cross,

Against the solemn ordinance from Rome,

Out of thy province?

ROGER OF YORK.

Why dost thou presume,

Arm’d with thy cross, to come before the King?

If Canterbury bring his cross to court,

Let York bear his to mate with Canterbury.

FOLIOT (seizing hold of BECKET’S cross).

Nay, nay, my lord, thou must not brave the King.

Nay, let me have it. I will have it!

BECKET.        Away!

[Flinging him off.

FOLIOT.

He fasts, they say, this mitred Hercules!

He fast! is that an arm of fast? My lord,

Hadst thou not sign’d, I had gone along with thee;

But thou the shepherd hast betray’d the sheep,

And thou art perjured, and thou wilt not seal.

As Chancellor thou wast against the Church,

Now as Archbishop goest against the King;

For, like a fool, thou knowst no middle way.

Ay, ay! but art thou stronger than the King?

BECKET.

Strong — not in mine own self, but Heaven; true

To either function, holding it; and thou

Fast, scourge thyself, and mortify thy flesh,

Not spirit — thou remainest Gilbert Foliot,

A worldly follower of the worldly strong.

I, bearing this great ensign, make it clear

Under what Prince I fight.

FOLIOT.

My lord of York,

Let us go in to the Council, where our bishops

And our great lords will sit in judgment on him.

BECKET.

Sons sit in judgment on their father! — then

The spire of Holy Church may prick the graves —

Her crypt among the stars. Sign? seal? I promised

The King to obey these customs, not yet written,

Saving mine order; true too, that when written

I sign’d them — being a fool, as Foliot call’d me.

I hold not by my signing. Get ye hence,

Tell what I say to the King.

[Exeunt HEREFORD, FOLIOT, and other BISHOPS.

ROGER OF YORK.

The Church will hate thee.

[Exit.

BECKET.

Serve my best friend and make him my worst foe;

Fight for the Church, and set the Church against me!

HERBERT.

To be honest is to set all knaves against thee.

Ah! Thomas, excommunicate them all!

HEREFORD (re-entering).

I cannot brook the turmoil thou hast raised.

I would, my lord Thomas of Canterbury,

Thou wert plain Thomas and not Canterbury,

Or that thou wouldst deliver Canterbury

To our King’s hands again, and be at peace.

HILARY (re-entering).

For hath not thine ambition set the Church

This day between the hammer and the anvil —

Fealty to the King, obedience to thyself?

HERBERT.

What say the bishops?

HILARY.

Some have pleaded for him,

But the King rages — most are with the King;

And some are reeds, that one time sway to the current,

And to the wind another. But we hold

Thou art forsworn; and no forsworn Archbishop

Shall helm the Church. We therefore place ourselves

Under the shield and safeguard of the Pope,

And cite thee to appear before the Pope,

And answer thine accusers. . . . Art thou deaf?

BECKET.

I hear you.

[Clash of arms.

HILARY.

Dost thou hear those others?

BECKET.  Ay!

ROGER OF YORK (re-entering).

The King’s ‘God’s eyes!’ come now so thick and fast,

We fear that he may reave thee of thine own.

Come on, come on! it is not fit for us

To see the proud Archbishop mutilated.

Say that he blind thee and tear out thy tongue.

BECKET.

So be it. He begins at top with me:

They crucified St. Peter downward.

ROGER OF YORK.  Nay,

But for their sake who stagger betwixt thine

Appeal, and Henry’s anger, yield.

BECKET.  Hence, Satan!

[Exit Roger of York.

FITZURSE (re-entering),

My lord, the King demands three hundred marks,

Due from his castles of Berkhamstead and Eye

When thou thereof wast warden.

BECKET.

Tell the King

I spent thrice that in fortifying his castles.

DE TRACY (re-entering.)

My lord, the King demands seven hundred marks,

Lent at the siege of Thoulouse by the King.

BECKET.

I led seven hundred knights and fought his wars.

DE BRITO (re-entering).

My lord, the King demands five hundred marks,

Advanced thee at his instance by the Jews,

For which the King was bound security.

BECKET.

I thought it was a gift; I thought it was a gift.

Enter LORD LEICESTER (followed by BARONS and BISHOPS).

My lord, I come unwillingly. The King

Demands a strict account of all those revenues

From all the vacant sees and abbacies,

Which came into thy hands when Chancellor.

BECKET.

How much might that amount to, my lord Leicester?

LEICESTER.

Some thirty — forty thousand silver marks.

BECKET.

Are these your customs? O my good lord Leicester,

The King and I were brothers. All I had

I lavish’d for the glory of the King;

I shone from him, for him, his glory, his

Reflection: now the glory of the Church

Hath swallow’d up the glory of the King;

I am his no more, but hers. Grant me one day

To ponder these demands.

LEICESTER.

Hear first thy sentence!

The King and all his lords —

BECKET.

Son, first hear me!

LEICESTER.

Nay, nay, canst thou, that holdest thine estates

In fee and barony of the King, decline

The judgment of the King?

BECKET.

The King! I hold

Nothing in fee and barony of the King.

Whatever the Church owns — she holds it in

Free and perpetual alms, unsubject to

One earthly sceptre.

LEICESTER.

Nay, but hear thy judgment.

The King and all his barons ——

BECKET.

Judgment! Barons!

Who but the bridegroom dares to judge the bride,

Or he the bridegroom may appoint? Not he

That is not of the house, but from the street

Stain’d with the mire thereof.

I had been so true

To Henry and mine office that the King

Would throne me in the great Archbishoprick:

And I, that knew mine own infirmity,

For the King’s pleasure rather than God’s cause

Took it upon me — err’d thro’ love of him.

Now therefore God from me withdraws Himself,

And the King too.

What! forty thousand marks!

Why thou, the King, the Pope, the Saints, the world,

Know that when made Archbishop I was freed,

Before the Prince and chief Justiciary,

From every bond and debt and obligation

Incurr’d as Chancellor.

Hear me, son.        As gold

Outvalues dross, light darkness, Abel Cain,

The soul the body, and the Church the Throne,

I charge thee, upon pain of mine anathema,

That thou obey, not me, but God in me,

Rather than Henry. I refuse to stand

By the King’s censure, make my cry to the Pope,

By whom I will be judged; refer myself,

The King, these customs, all the Church, to him,

And under his authority — I depart.

[Going.

[LEICESTER looks at him doubtingly.

Am I a prisoner?

LEICESTER.

By St. Lazarus, no!

I am confounded by thee. Go in peace.

DE BROC.

In peace now — but after. Take that for earnest.

[Flings a bone at him from the rushes.

DE BRITO, FITZURSE, DE TRACY, and others (flinging wisps of rushes).

Ay, go in peace, caitiff, caitiff! And that too, perjured prelate — and that, turncoat shaveling! There, there, there! traitor, traitor, traitor!

BECKET.

Mannerless wolves!

[Turning and facing them.

HERBERT.

Enough, my lord, enough!

BECKET.

Barons of England and of Normandy,

When what ye shake at doth but seem to fly,

True test of coward, ye follow with a yell.

But I that threw the mightiest knight of France,

Sir Engelram de Trie, ——

HERBERT.

Enough, my lord.

BECKET.

More than enough. I play the fool again.

Enter HERALD.

HERALD.

The King commands you, upon pain of death,

That none should wrong or injure your Archbishop.

FOLIOT.

Deal gently with the young man Absalom.

[Great doors of the Hall at the back open, and discover a crowd.

They shout:

Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!

Scene IV

Refectory of the Monastery at Northampton.

A Banquet on the Tables.

Enter BECKET. BECKET’S RETAINERS.

1ST RETAINER.

Do thou speak first.

2ND RETAINER.

Nay, thou! Nay, thou! Hast not thou drawn the short straw?

1ST RETAINER.

My lord Archbishop, wilt thou permit us —

BECKET.

To speak without stammering and like a free man?

Ay.

1ST RETAINER.

My lord, permit us then to leave thy service.

BECKET.

When?

1ST RETAINER.

Now.

BECKET.

To-night?

1ST RETAINER.

To-night, my lord.

BECKET.

And why?

1ST RETAINER.

My lord, we leave thee not without tears.

BECKET.

Tears? Why not stay with me then?

1ST RETAINER.

My lord, we cannot yield thee an answer altogether to thy satisfaction.

BECKET.

I warrant you, or your own either. Shall I find you one? The King hath frowned upon me.

1ST RETAINER.

That is not altogether our answer, my lord.

BECKET.

No; yet all but all. Go, go! Ye have eaten of my dish and drunken of my cup for a dozen years.

1ST RETAINER.

And so we have. We mean thee no wrong. Wilt thou not say, ‘God bless you,’ ere we go?

BECKET.

God bless you all! God redden your pale blood! But mine is human-red; and when ye shall hear it is poured out upon earth, and see it mounting to Heaven, my God bless you, that seems sweet to you now, will blast and blind you like a curse.

1ST RETAINER.

We hope not, my lord. Our humblest thanks for your blessing. Farewell!

[Exeunt Retainers.

BECKET.

Farewell, friends! farewell, swallows! I wrong the bird; she leaves only the nest she built, they leave the builder. Why? Am I to be murdered to-night?

[Knocking at the door.

ATTENDANT.

Here is a missive left at the gate by one from the castle.

BECKET.

Cornwall’s hand or Leicester’s: they write marvellously alike.

[Reading.

‘Fly at once to France, to King Louis of France: there be those about our King who would have thy blood.’

Was not my lord of Leicester bidden to our supper?

ATTENDANT.

Ay, my lord, and divers other earls and barons. But the hour is past, and our brother, Master Cook, he makes moan that all be a-getting cold.

BECKET.

And I make my moan along with him. Cold after warm, winter after summer, and the golden leaves, these earls and barons, that clung to me, frosted off me by the first cold frown of the King. Cold, but look how the table steams, like a heathen altar; nay, like the altar at Jerusalem. Shall God’s good gifts be wasted? None of them here! Call in the poor from the streets, and let them feast.

HERBERT.

That is the parable of our blessed Lord.

BECKET.

And why should not the parable of our blessed Lord be acted again? Call in the poor! The Church is ever at variance with the kings, and ever at one with the poor. I marked a group of lazars in the marketplace — half-rag, half-sore — beggars, poor rogues (Heaven bless ‘em) who never saw nor dreamed of such a banquet. I will amaze them. Call them in, I say. They shall henceforward be my earls and barons — our lords and masters in Christ Jesus.

[Exit Herbert.

If the King hold his purpose, I am myself a beggar. Forty thousand marks! forty thousand devils — and these craven bishops!

A POOR MAN (entering) with his dog.

My lord Archbishop, may I come in with my poor friend, my dog? The King’s verdurer caught him a-hunting in the forest, and cut off his paws. The dog followed his calling, my lord. I ha’ carried him ever so many miles in my arms, and he licks my face and moans and cries out against the King.

BECKET.

Better thy dog than thee. The King’s courts would use thee worse than thy dog — they are too bloody. Were the Church king, it would be otherwise. Poor beast! poor beast! set him down. I will bind up his wounds with my napkin. Give him a bone, give him a bone! Who misuses a dog would misuse a child — they cannot speak for themselves. Past help! his paws are past help. God help him!

Enter the BEGGARS (and seat themselves at the Tables).

BECKET and HERBERT wait upon them.

1ST BEGGAR.

Swine, sheep, ox — here’s a French supper. When thieves fall out, honest men ——

2ND BEGGAR.

Is the Archbishop a thief who gives thee thy supper?

1ST BEGGAR.

Well, then, how does it go? When honest men fall out, thieves — no, it can’t be that.

2ND BEGGAR.

Who stole the widow’s one sitting hen o’ Sunday, when she was at mass?

1ST BEGGAR.

Come, come! thou hadst thy share on her. Sitting hen! Our Lord Becket’s our great sitting-hen cock, and we shouldn’t ha’ been sitting here if the barons and bishops hadn’t been a-sitting on the Archbishop.

BECKET.

Ay, the princes sat in judgment against me, and the Lord hath prepared your table — Sederunt principes, ederunt pauperes.

A VOICE.

Becket, beware of the knife!

BECKET.

Who spoke?

3RD BEGGAR.

Nobody, my lord. What’s that, my lord?

BECKET.

Venison.

3RD BEGGAR.

Venison?

BECKET.

Buck; deer, as you call it.

3RD BEGGAR.

King’s meat! By the Lord, won’t we pray for your lordship!

BECKET.

And, my children, your prayers will do more for me in the day of peril that dawns darkly and drearily over the house of God — yea, and in the day of judgment also, than the swords of the craven sycophants would have done had they remained true to me whose bread they have partaken. I must leave you to your banquet. Feed, feast, and be merry. Herbert, for the sake of the Church itself, if not for my own, I must fly to France to-night. Come with me.

[Exit with Herbert.

3RD BEGGAR.

Here — all of you — my lord’s health (they drink). Well — if that isn’t goodly wine —

1ST BEGGAR.

Then there isn’t a goodly wench to serve him with it: they were fighting for her to-day in the street.

3RD BEGGAR.

Peace!

1ST BEGGAR.

The black sheep baaed to the miller’s ewe-lamb,

The miller’s away for to-night.

Black sheep, quoth she, too black a sin for me.

And what said the black sheep, my masters?

We can make a black sin white.

3RD BEGGAR.

Peace!

1ST BEGGAR.

‘Ewe lamb, ewe lamb, I am here by the dam.’

But the miller came home that night,

And so dusted his back with the meal in his sack,

That he made the black sheep white.

3RD BEGGAR.

Be we not of the family? be we not a-supping with the head of the family? be we not in my lord’s own refractory? Out from among us; thou art our black sheep.

Enter the four KNIGHTS.

FITZURSE.

Sheep, said he? And sheep without the shepherd, too. Where is my lord Archbishop? Thou the lustiest and lousiest of this Cain’s brotherhood, answer.

3RD BEGGAR.

With Cain’s answer, my lord. Am I his keeper? Thou shouldst call him Cain, not me.

FITZURSE.

So I do, for he would murder his brother the State.

3RD BEGGAR (rising and advancing).

No my lord; but because the Lord hath set his mark upon him that no man should murder him.

FITZURSE.

Where is he? where is he?

3RD BEGGAR.

With Cain belike, in the land of Nod, or in the land of France for aught I know.

FITZURSE.

France! Ha! De Morville, Tracy, Brito — fled is he? Cross swords all of you! swear to follow him! Remember the Queen!

[The four KNIGHTS cross their swords.

DE BRITO.

They mock us; he is here.

[All the BEGGARS rise and advance upon them.

FITZURSE.

Come, you filthy knaves, let us pass.

3RD BEGGAR.

Nay, my lord, let us pass. We be a-going home after our supper in all humbleness, my lord; for the Archbishop loves humbleness, my lord; and though we be fifty to four, we daren’t fight you with our crutches, my lord. There now, if thou hast not laid hands upon me! and my fellows know that I am all one scale like a fish. I pray God I haven’t given thee my leprosy, my lord.

[FITZURSE shrinks from him and another presses upon DE BRITO.

DE BRITO.

Away, dog!

4TH BEGGAR.

And I was bit by a mad dog o’ Friday, an’ I be half dog already by this token, that tho’ I can drink wine I cannot bide water, my lord; and I want to bite, I want to bite, and they do say the very breath catches.

DE BRITO.

Insolent clown. Shall I smite him with the edge of the sword?

DE MORVILLE.

No, nor with the flat of it either. Smite the shepherd and the sheep are scattered. Smite the sheep and the shepherd will excommunicate thee.

DE BRITO.

Yet my fingers itch to beat him into nothing.

5TH BEGGAR.

So do mine, my lord. I was born with it, and sulphur won’t bring it out o’ me. But for all that the Archbishop washed my feet o’ Tuesday. He likes it, my lord.

6TH BEGGAR.

And see here, my lord, this rag fro’ the gangrene i’ my leg. It’s humbling — it smells o’ human natur’. Wilt thou smell it, my lord? for the Archbishop likes the smell on it, my lord; for I be his lord and master i’ Christ, my lord.

DE MORVILLE.

Faugh! we shall all be poisoned. Let us go.

[They draw back, BEGGARS following.

7TH BEGGAR.

My lord, I ha’ three sisters a-dying at home o’ the sweating sickness. They be dead while I be a-supping.

8TH BEGGAR.

And I ha’ nine darters i’ the spital that be dead ten times o’er i’ one day wi’ the putrid fever; and I bring the taint on it along wi’ me, for the Archbishop likes it, my lord.

[Pressing upon the KNIGHTS till they disappear thro’ the door.

3RD BEGGAR.

Crutches, and itches, and leprosies, and ulcers, and gangrenes, and running sores, praise ye the Lord, for to-night ye have saved our Archbishop!

1ST BEGGAR.

I’ll go back again. I hain’t half done yet.

HERBERT OF BOSHAM (entering).

My friends, the Archbishop bids you good-night. He hath retired to rest, and being in great jeopardy of his life, he hath made his bed between the altars, from whence he sends me to bid you this night pray for him who hath fed you in the wilderness.

3RD BEGGAR.

So we will — so we will, I warrant thee. Becket shall be king, and the Holy Father shall be king, and the world shall live by the King’s venison and the bread o’ the Lord, and there shall be no more poor for ever. Hurrah! Vive le Roy! That’s the English of it.

Act II

Scene I

ROSAMUND’S Bower. A Garden of Flowers. In the midst a bank of wild-flowers with a bench before it.

Voices heard singing among the trees.

Duet.

1. Is it the wind of the dawn that I hear in the pine overhead?

2. No; but the voice of the deep as it hollows the cliffs of the land.

1. Is there a voice coming up with the voice of the deep from the strand,

One coming up with a song in the flush of the glimmering red?

2. Love that is born of the deep coming up with the sun from the sea.

1. Love that can shape or can shatter a life till the life shall have fled?

2. Nay, let us welcome him, Love that can lift up a life from the dead.

1. Keep him away from the lone little isle. Let us be, let us be.

2. Nay, let him make it his own, let him reign in it — he, it is he,

Love that is born of the deep coming up with the sun from the sea.

Enter HENRY and ROSAMUND.

ROSAMUND.

Be friends with him again — I do beseech thee.

HENRY.

With Becket? I have but one hour with thee —

Sceptre and crozier clashing, and the mitre

Grappling the crown — and when I flee from this

For a gasp of freer air, a breathing-while

To rest upon thy bosom and forget him —

Why thou, my bird, thou pipest Becket, Becket —

Yea, thou my golden dream of Love’s own bower,

Must be the nightmare breaking on my peace

With ‘Becket.’

ROSAMUND.

O my life’s life, not to smile

Is all but death to me. My sun, no cloud!

Let there not be one frown in this one hour.

Out of the many thine, let this be mine!

Look rather thou all-royal as when first

I met thee.

HENRY.

Where was that?

ROSAMUND.

Forgetting that

Forgets me too.

HENRY.

Nay, I remember it well.

There on the moors.

ROSAMUND.

And in a narrow path.

A plover flew before thee. Then I saw

Thy high black steed among the flaming furze,

Like sudden night in the main glare of day.

And from that height something was said to me

I knew not what.

HENRY.

I ask’d the way.

ROSAMUND.  I think so.

So I lost mine.

HENRY.

Thou wast too shamed to answer.

ROSAMUND.

Too scared — so young!

HENRY.

The rosebud of my rose! —

Well, well, no more of him — I have sent his folk,

His kin, all his belongings, overseas;

Age, orphans, and babe-breasting mothers — all

By hundreds to him — there to beg, starve, die —

So that the fool King Louis feed them not.

The man shall feel that I can strike him yet.

ROSAMUND.

Babes, orphans, mothers! is that royal, Sire?

HENRY.

And I have been as royal with the Church.

He shelter’d in the Abbey of Pontigny.

There wore his time studying the canon law

To work it against me. But since he cursed

My friends at Veselay, I have let them know,

That if they keep him longer as their guest,

I scatter all their cowls to all the hells.

ROSAMUND.

And is that altogether royal?

HENRY.

Traitress!

ROSAMUND.

A faithful traitress to thy royal fame.

HENRY.

Fame! what care I for fame? Spite, ignorance, envy,

Yea, honesty too, paint her what way they will.

Fame of to-day is infamy to-morrow;

Infamy of to-day is fame to-morrow;

And round and round again. What matters? Royal — I

mean to leave the royalty of my crown

Unlessen’d to mine heirs.

ROSAMUND.

Still — thy fame too:

I say that should be royal.

HENRY.

And I say,

I care not for thy saying.

ROSAMUND.

And I say,

I care not for thy saying. A greater King

Than thou art, Love, who cares not for the word,

Makes ‘care not’ — care. There have I spoken true?

HENRY.

Care dwell with me for ever, when I cease

To care for thee as ever!

ROSAMUND.

No need! no need! . . .

There is a bench. Come, wilt thou sit? . . . My bank

Of wild-flowers [he sits]. At thy feet!

[She sits at his feet.

HENRY.  I had them clear

A royal pleasaunce for thee, in the wood,

Not leave these countryfolk at court.

ROSAMUND.        I brought them

In from the wood, and set them here. I love them

More than the garden flowers, that seem at most

Sweet guests, or foreign cousins, not half speaking

The language of the land. I love them too,

Yes. But, my liege, I am sure, of all the roses —

Shame fall on those who gave it a dog’s name —

This wild one (picking a briar-rose) — nay, I shall not prick myself —

Is sweetest. Do but smell!

HENRY.

Thou rose of the world!

Thou rose of all the roses!

[Muttering.

I am not worthy of her — this beast-body

That God has plunged my soul in — I, that taking

The Fiend’s advantage of a throne, so long

Have wander’d among women, — a foul stream

Thro’ fever-breeding levels, — at her side,

Among these happy dales, run clearer, drop

The mud I carried, like yon brook, and glass

The faithful face of heaven —

[Looking at her, and unconsciously aloud,

— thine! thine!

ROSAMUND.

I know it.

HENRY (muttering).

Not hers. We have but one bond, her hate of Becket.

ROSAMUND (half hearing).

Nay! nay! what art thou muttering? I hate Becket?

HENRY (muttering).

A sane and natural loathing for a soul

Purer, and truer and nobler than herself;

And mine a bitterer illegitimate hate,

A bastard hate born of a former love.

ROSAMUND,

My fault to name him! O let the hand of one

To whom thy voice is all her music, stay it

But for a breath.

[Puts her hand before his lips.

Speak only of thy love.

Why there — like some loud beggar at thy gate —

The happy boldness of this hand hath won it

Love’s alms, thy kiss (looking at her hand) — Sacred!

I’ll kiss it too.

[Kissing it.

There! wherefore dost thou so peruse it? Nay,

There may be crosses in my line of life.

HENRY.

Not half her hand — no hand to mate with her,

If it should come to that.

ROSAMUND.

With her? with whom?

HENRY.

Life on the hand is naked gipsy-stuff;

Life on the face, the brows-clear innocence!

Vein’d marble — not a furrow yet — and hers

[Muttering.

Crost and recrost, a venomous spider’s web ——

ROSAMUND (springing up).

Out of the cloud, my Sun — out of the eclipse

Narrowing my golden hour!

HENRY.

O Rosamund,

I would be true — would tell thee all — and something

I had to say — I love thee none the less —

Which will so vex thee.

ROSAMUND.

Something against me?

HENRY.

No, no, against myself.

ROSAMUND.

I will not hear it.

Come, come, mine hour! I bargain for mine hour.

I’ll call thee little Geoffrey.

HENRY.  Call him!

ROSAMUND.  Geoffrey!

[Enter GEOFFREY.

HENRY.

How the boy grows!

ROSAMUND.

Ay, and his brows are thine;

The mouth is only Clifford, my dear father.

GEOFFREY.

My liege, what hast thou brought me?

HENRY.        Venal imp!

What say’st thou to the Chancellorship of England?

GEOFFREY.

O yes, my liege.

HENRY.

‘O yes, my liege!’ He speaks

As if it were a cake of gingerbread.

Dost thou know, my boy, what it is to be Chancellor of England?

GEOFFREY.

Something good, or thou wouldst not give it me.

HENRY.

It is, my boy, to side with the King when Chancellor, and then to be made Archbishop and go against the King who made him, and turn the world upside down.

GEOFFREY.

I won’t have it then. Nay, but give it me, and I promise thee not to turn the world upside down.

HENRY (giving him a ball).

Here is a ball, my boy, thy world, to turn anyway and play with as thou wilt — which is more than I can do with mine. Go try it, play.

[Exit Geoffrey.

A pretty lusty boy.

ROSAMUND.

So like to thee;

Like to be liker.

HENRY.

Not in my chin, I hope!

That threatens double.

ROSAMUND.

Thou art manlike perfect.

HENRY.

Ay, ay, no doubt; and were I humpt behind,

Thou’dst say as much — the goodly way of women

Who love, for which I love them. May God grant

No ill befall or him or thee when I

Am gone.

ROSAMUND.

Is he thy enemy?

HENRY.

He? who? ay!

ROSAMUND.

Thine enemy knows the secret of my bower.

HENRY.

And I could tear him asunder with wild horses

Before he would betray it. Nay — no fear!

More like is he to excommunicate me.

ROSAMUND.

And I would creep, crawl over knife-edge flint

Barefoot, a hundred leagues, to stay his hand

Before he flash’d the bolt.

HENRY.

And when he flash’d it

Shrink from me, like a daughter of the Church.

ROSAMUND.

Ay, but he will not.

HENRY.

Ay! but if he did?

ROSAMUND.

O then! O then! I almost fear to say

That my poor heretic heart would excommunicate

His excommunication, clinging to thee

Closer than ever.

HENRY (raising ROSAMUND and kissing her).

My brave-hearted Rose!

Hath he ever been to see thee?

ROSAMUND

Here? not he.

And it is so lonely here — no confessor.

HENRY.

Thou shall confess all thy sweet sins to me.

ROSAMUND.

Besides, we came away in such a heat,

I brought not ev’n my crucifix.

HENRY.  Take this.

[Giving her the Crucifix which ELEANOR gave him.

ROSAMUND.

O beautiful! May I have it as mine, till mine

Be mine again?

HENRY (throwing it round her neck).

Thine — as I am — till death!

ROSAMUND.

Death? no! I’ll have it with me in my shroud,

And wake with it, and show it to all the Saints.

HENRY.

Nay — I must go; but when thou layest thy lip

To this, remembering One who died for thee,

Remember also one who lives for thee

Out there in France; for I must hence to brave

The Pope, King Louis, and this turbulent priest.

ROSAMUND (kneeling).

O by thy love for me, all mine for thee,

Fling not thy soul into the flames of hell:

I kneel to thee — be friends with him again.

HENRY.

Look, look! if little Geoffrey have not tost

His ball into the brook! makes after it too

To find it. Why, the child will drown himself.

ROSAMUND.

Geoffrey! Geoffrey!

[Exeunt.

Scene II

Montmirail. ‘The Meeting of the Kings.’

JOHN OF OXFORD and HENRY. Crowd in the distance.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

You have not crown’d young Henry yet, my liege?

HENRY.

Crown’d! by God’s eyes, we will not have him crown’d.

I spoke of late to the boy, he answer’d me,

As if he wore the crown already — No,

We will not have him crown’d.

‘Tis true what Becket told me, that the mother

Would make him play his kingship against mine.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

Not have him crown’d?

HENRY.

Not now — not yet! and Becket

Becket should crown him were he crown’d at all:

But, since we would be lord of our own manor,

This Canterbury, like a wounded deer,

Has fled our presence and our feeding-grounds.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

Cannot a smooth tongue lick him whole again

To serve your will?

HENRY.

He hates my will, not me.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

There’s York, my liege.

HENRY.

But England scarce would hold

Young Henry king, if only crown’d by York,

And that would stilt up York to twice himself.

There is a movement yonder in the crowd —

See if our pious — what shall I call him, John? —

Husband-in-law, our smooth-shorn suzerain,

Be yet within the field.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

I will.

[Exit.

HENRY.  Ay! Ay!

Mince and go back! his politic Holiness

Hath all but climb’d the Roman perch again,

And we shall hear him presently with clapt wing

Crow over Barbarossa — at last tongue-free

To blast my realms with excommunication

And interdict. I must patch up a peace —

A piece in this long-tugged at, threadbare-worn

Quarrel of Crown and Church — to rend again.

His Holiness cannot steer straight thro’ shoals,

Nor I. The citizen’s heir hath conquer’d me

For the moment. So we make our peace with him.

[Enter LOUIS.

Brother of France, what shall be done with Becket?

LOUIS.

The holy Thomas! Brother, you have traffick’d

Between the Emperor and the Pope, between

The Pope and Antipope — a perilous game

For men to play with God.

HENRY.

Ay, ay, good brother,

They call you the Monk-King.

LOUIS.

Who calls me? she

That was my wife, now yours? You have her Duchy,

The point you aim’d at, and pray God she prove

True wife to you. You have had the better of us

In secular matters.

HENRY.

Come, confess, good brother,

You did your best or worst to keep her Duchy.

Only the golden Leopard printed in it

Such hold-fast claws that you perforce again

Shrank into France. Tut, tut! did we convene

This conference but to babble of our wives?

They are plagues enough in-door.

LOUIS.  We fought in the East,

And felt the sun of Antioch scald our mail,

And push’d our lances into Saracen hearts.

We never hounded on the State at home

To spoil the Church.

HENRY.

How should you see this rightly?

LOUIS.

Well, well, no more! I am proud of my ‘Monk-King,’

Whoever named me; and, brother, Holy Church

May rock, but will not wreck, nor our Archbishop

Stagger on the slope decks for any rough sea

Blown by the breath of kings. We do forgive you

For aught you wrought against us.

[HENRY holds up his hand.

Nay, I pray you,

Do not defend yourself. You will do much

To rake out all old dying heats, if you,

At my requesting, will but look into

The wrongs you did him, and restore his kin,

Reseat him on his throne of Canterbury,

Be, both, the friends you were.

HENRY.  The friends we were!

Co-mates we were, and had our sport together,

Co-kings we were, and made the laws together.

The world had never seen the like before.

You are too cold to know the fashion of it.

Well, well, we will be gentle with him, gracious —

Most gracious.

Enter BECKET, after him, JOHN OF OXFORD, ROGER OF YORK, GILBERT FOLIOT, DE BROC, FITZURSE, etc.

Only that the rift he made

May close between us, here I am wholly king,

The word should come from him.

BECKET (kneeling).

Then, my dear liege,

I here deliver all this controversy

Into your royal hands.

HENRY.

Ah, Thomas, Thomas,

Thou art thyself again, Thomas again.

BECKET (rising).

Saving God’s honour!

HENRY.

Out upon thee, man!

Saving the Devil’s honour, his yes and no.

Knights, bishops, earls, this London spawn — by Mahound,

I had sooner have been born a Mussulman —

Less clashing with their priests —

I am half-way down the slope — will no man stay me?

I dash myself to pieces — I stay myself —

Puff — it is gone. You, Master Becket, you

That owe to me your power over me —

Nay, nay —

Brother of France, you have taken, cherish’d him

Who thief-like fled from his own church by night,

No man pursuing. I would have had him back.

Take heed he do not turn and rend you too:

For whatsoever may displease him — that

Is clean against God’s honour — a shift, a trick

Whereby to challenge, face me out of all

My regal rights. Yet, yet — that none may dream

I go against God’s honour — ay, or himself

In any reason, choose

A hundred of the wisest heads from England,

A hundred, too, from Normandy and Anjou:

Let these decide on what was customary

In olden days, and all the Church of France

Decide on their decision, I am content

More, what the mightiest and the holiest

Of all his predecessors may have done

Ev’n to the least and meanest of my own,

Let him do the same to me — I am content.

LOUIS.

Ay, ay! the King humbles himself enough.

BECKET.

(Aside) Words! he will wriggle out of them like an eel

When the time serves. (Aloud.) My lieges and my lords,

The thanks of Holy Church are due to those

That went before us for their work, which we

Inheriting reap an easier harvest. Yet ——

LOUIS.

My lord, will you be greater than the Saints,

More than St. Peter? whom —— what is it you doubt?

Behold your peace at hand.

BECKET.

I say that those

Who went before us did not wholly clear

The deadly growths of earth, which Hell’s own heat

So dwelt on that they rose and darken’d Heaven.

Yet they did much. Would God they had torn up all

By the hard root, which shoots again; our trial

Had so been less; but, seeing they were men

Defective or excessive, must we follow

All that they overdid or underdid?

Nay, if they were defective as St. Peter

Denying Christ, who yet defied the tyrant,

We hold by his defiance, not his defect.

O good son Louis, do not counsel me,

No, to suppress God’s honour for the sake

Of any king that breathes. No, God forbid!

HENRY.

No! God forbid! and turn me Mussulman!

No God but one, and Mahound is his prophet.

But for your Christian, look you, you shall have

None other God but me — me, Thomas, son

Of Gilbert Becket, London merchant. Out!

I hear no more.           [Exit.

LOUIS.

Our brother’s anger puts him,

Poor man, beside himself — not wise. My lord,

We have claspt your cause, believing that our brother

Had wrong’d you; but this day he proffer’d peace.

You will have war; and tho’ we grant the Church

King over this world’s kings, yet, my good lord,

We that are kings are something in this world,

And so we pray you, draw yourself from under

The wings of France. We shelter you no more.

[Exit.

JOHN OF OXFORD.

I am glad that France hath scouted him at last:

I told the Pope what manner of man he was.

[Exit.

ROGER OF YORK.

Yea, since he flouts the will of either realm,

Let either cast him away like a dead dog!

[Exit.

FOLIOT.

Yea, let a stranger spoil his heritage,

And let another take his bishoprick!

[Exit.

DE BROC.

Our castle, my lord, belongs to Canterbury.

I pray you come and take it.

[Exit.

FITZURSE.

When you will.

[Exit.

BECKET.

Cursed be John of Oxford, Roger of York,

And Gilbert Foliot! cursed those De Brocs

That hold our Saltwood Castle from our see!

Cursed Fitzurse, and all the rest of them

That sow this hate between my lord and me!

VOICES FROM THE CROWD.

Blessed be the Lord Archbishop, who hath withstood two Kings to their faces for the honour of God.

BECKET.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, praise!

I thank you, sons; when kings but hold by crowns,

The crowd that hungers for a crown in Heaven

Is my true king.

HERBERT.

Thy true King bad thee be

A fisher of men; thou hast them in thy net.

BECKET.

I am too like the King here; both of us

Too headlong for our office. Better have been

A fisherman at Bosham, my good Herbert,

Thy birthplace — the sea-creek — the petty rill

That falls into it — the green field — the gray church —

The simple lobster-basket, and the mesh —

The more or less of daily labour done —

The pretty gaping bills in the home-nest

Piping for bread — the daily want supplied —

The daily pleasure to supply it.

HERBERT.  Ah, Thomas,

You had not borne it, no, not for a day.

BECKET.

Well, maybe, no.

HERBERT.

But bear with Walter Map,

For here he comes to comment on the time.

Enter WALTER MAP.

WALTER MAP.

Pity, my lord, that you have quenched the warmth of France toward you, tho’ His Holiness, after much smouldering and smoking, be kindled again upon your quarter.

BECKET.

Ay, if he do not end in smoke again.

WALTER MAP.

My lord, the fire, when first kindled, said to the smoke, ‘Go up, my son, straight to Heaven.’ And the smoke said, ‘I go;’ but anon the North-east took and turned him South-west, then the South-west turned him North-east, and so of the other winds; but it was in him to go up straight if the time had been quieter. Your lordship affects the unwavering perpendicular; but His Holiness, pushed one way by the Empire and another by England, if he move at all, Heaven stay him, is fain to diagonalise.

HERBERT.

Diagonalise! thou art a word-monger!

Our Thomas never will diagonalise.

Thou art a jester and a verse-maker.

Diagonalise!

WALTER MAP.

Is the world any the worse for my verses if the Latin rhymes be rolled out from a full mouth? or any harm done to the people if my jest be in defence of the Truth?

BECKET.

Ay, if the jest be so done that the people

Delight to wallow in the grossness of it,

Till Truth herself be shamed of her defender.

Non defensoribus istis, Walter Map.

WALTER MAP.

Is that my case? so if the city be sick, and I cannot call the kennel sweet, your lordship would suspend me from verse-writing, as you suspended yourself after subwriting to the customs.

BECKET.

I pray God pardon mine infirmity.

WALTER MAP.

Nay, my lord, take heart; for tho’ you suspended yourself, the Pope let you down again; and tho’ you suspend Foliot or another, the Pope will not leave them in suspense, for the Pope himself is always in suspense, like Mahound’s coffin hung between heaven and earth — always in suspense, like the scales, till the weight of Germany or the gold of England brings one of them down to the dust — always in suspense, like the tail of the horologe — to and fro — tick-tack — we make the time, we keep the time, ay, and we serve the time; for I have heard say that if you boxed the Pope’s ears with a purse, you might stagger him, but he would pocket the purse. No saying of mine — Jocelyn of Salisbury. But the King hath bought half the College of Red-hats. He warmed to you to-day, and you have chilled him again. Yet you both love God. Agree with him quickly again, even for the sake of the Church. My one grain of good counsel which you will not swallow. I hate a split between old friendships as I hate the dirty gap in the face of a Cistercian monk, that will swallow anything. Farewell.

[Exit.

BECKET.

Map scoffs at Rome. I all but hold with Map.

Save for myself no Rome were left in England,

All had been his. Why should this Rome, this Rome,

Still choose Barabbas rather than the Christ,

Absolve the left-hand thief and damn the right?

Take fees of tyranny, wink at sacrilege,

Which even Peter had not dared? condemn

The blameless exile? —

HERBERT.

Thee, thou holy Thomas!

I would that thou hadst been the Holy Father.

BECKET.

I would have done my most to keep Rome holy,

I would have made Rome know she still is Rome —

Who stands aghast at her eternal self

And shakes at mortal kings — her vacillation,

Avarice, craft — O God, how many an innocent

Has left his bones upon the way to Rome

Unwept, uncared for. Yea — on mine own self

The King had had no power except for Rome.

‘Tis not the King who is guilty of mine exile,

But Rome, Rome, Rome!

HERBERT.

My lord, I see this Louis

Returning, ah! to drive thee from his realm.

BECKET.

He said as much before. Thou art no prophet,

Nor yet a prophet’s son.

HERBERT.

Whatever he say,

Deny not thou God’s honour for a king.

The King looks troubled.

Re-enter KING LOUIS.

LOUIS.

My dear lord Archbishop,

I learn but now that those poor Poitevins,

That in thy cause were stirr’d against King Henry,

Have been, despite his kingly promise given

To our own self of pardon, evilly used

And put to pain. I have lost all trust in him.

The Church alone hath eyes — and now I see

That I was blind — suffer the phrase — surrendering

God’s honour to the pleasure of a man.

Forgive me and absolve me, holy father.

[Kneels.

BECKET.

Son, I absolve thee in the name of God.

LOUIS (rising).

Return to Sens, where we will care for you.

The wine and wealth of all our France are yours;

Rest in our realm, and be at peace with all.  [Exeunt.

VOICES FROM THE CROWD.

Long live the good King Louis! God bless the great Archbishop!

Re-enter HENRY and JOHN OF OXFORD.

HENRY (looking after KING LOUIS and BECKET).

Ay, there they go — both backs are turn’d to me —

Why then I strike into my former path

For England, crown young Henry there, and make

Our waning Eleanor all but love me!        John,

Thou hast served me heretofore with Rome — and well.

They call thee John the Swearer.

JOHN OF OXFORD.  For this reason,

That, being ever duteous to the King,

I evermore have sworn upon his side,

And ever mean to do it.

HENRY (claps him on the shoulder).

Honest John!

To Rome again! the storm begins again.

Spare not thy tongue! be lavish with our coins,

Threaten our junction with the Emperor — flatter

And fright the Pope — bribe all the Cardinals — leave

Lateran and Vatican in one dust of gold —

Swear and unswear, state and misstate thy best!

I go to have young Henry crown’d by York.

Act III

Scene I

The Bower.

HENRY and ROSAMUND.

HENRY.

All that you say is just. I cannot answer it

Till better times, when I shall put away —

ROSAMUND.

What will you put away?

HENRY.

That which you ask me

Till better times. Let it content you now

There is no woman that I love so well.

ROSAMUND.

No woman but should be content with that —

HENRY.

And one fair child to fondle!

ROSAMUND.

O yes, the child

We waited for so long — heaven’s gift at last —

And how you doated on him then! To-day

I almost fear’d your kiss was colder — yes —

But then the child is such a child. What chance

That he should ever spread into the man

Here in our silence? I have done my best.

I am not learn’d.

HENRY.

I am the King, his father,

And I will look to it. Is our secret ours?

Have you had any alarm? no stranger?

ROSAMUND.        No.

The warder of the bower hath given himself

Of late to wine. I sometimes think he sleeps

When he should watch; and yet what fear? the people

Believe the wood enchanted. No one comes,

Nor foe nor friend; his fond excess of wine

Springs from the loneliness of my poor bower,

Which weighs even on me.

HENRY.

Yet these tree-towers,

Their long bird-echoing minster-aisles, — the voice

Of the perpetual brook, these golden slopes

Of Solomon-shaming flowers — that was your saying,

All pleased you so at first.

ROSAMUND.

Not now so much.

My Anjou bower was scarce as beautiful.

But you were oftener there. I have none but you.

The brook’s voice is not yours, and no flower, not

The sun himself, should he be changed to one,

Could shine away the darkness of that gap

Left by the lack of love.

HENRY.

The lack of love!

ROSAMUND.

Of one we love. Nay, I would not be bold,

Yet hoped ere this you might ——

[Looks earnestly at him.

HENRY.

Anything further?

ROSAMUND.

Only my best bower-maiden died of late,

And that old priest whom John of Salisbury trusted

Hath sent another.

HENRY.

Secret?

ROSAMUND.

I but ask’d her

One question, and she primm’d her mouth and put

Her hands together — thus — and said, God help her,

That she was sworn to silence.

HENRY.

What did you ask her?

ROSAMUND.

Some daily something — nothing.

HENRY.

Secret, then?

ROSAMUND.

I do not love her. Must you go, my liege,

So suddenly?

HENRY.

I came to England suddenly,

And on a great occasion sure to wake

As great a wrath in Becket ——

ROSAMUND.

Always Becket!

He always comes between us.

HENRY.

— And to meet it

I needs must leave as suddenly. It is raining,

Put on your hood and see me to the bounds.

[Exeunt

MARGERY (singing behind scene).

Babble in bower

Under the rose!

Bee mustn’t buzz,

Whoop — but he knows.

Kiss me, little one,

Nobody near!

Grasshopper, grasshopper,

Whoop — you can hear.

Kiss in the bower,

Tit on the tree!

Bird mustn’t tell,

Whoop — he can see.

Enter MARGERY.

I ha’ been but a week here and I ha’ seen what I ha’ seen, for to be sure it’s no more than a week since our old Father Philip that has confessed our mother for twenty years, and she was hard put to it, and to speak truth, nigh at the end of our last crust, and that mouldy, and she cried out on him to put me forth in the world and to make me a woman of the world, and to win my own bread, whereupon he asked our mother if I could keep a quiet tongue i’ my head, and not speak till I was spoke to, and I answered for myself that I never spoke more than was needed, and he told me he would advance me to the service of a great lady, and took me ever so far away, and gave me a great pat o’ the cheek for a pretty wench, and said it was a pity to blindfold such eyes as mine, and such to be sure they be, but he blinded ‘em for all that, and so brought me no-hows as I may say, and the more shame to him after his promise, into a garden and not into the world, and bad me whatever I saw not to speak one word, an’ it ‘ud be well for me in the end, for there were great ones who would look after me, and to be sure I ha’ seen great ones to-day — and then not to speak one word, for that’s the rule o’ the garden, tho’ to be sure if I had been Eve i’ the garden I shouldn’t ha’ minded the apple, for what’s an apple, you know, save to a child, and I’m no child, but more a woman o’ the world than my lady here, and I ha’ seen what I ha’ seen — tho’ to be sure if I hadn’t minded it we should all on us ha’ had to go, bless the Saints, wi’ bare backs, but the backs ‘ud ha’ countenanced one another, and belike it ‘ud ha’ been always summer, and anyhow I am as well-shaped as my lady here, and I ha’ seen what I ha’ seen, and what’s the good of my talking to myself, for here comes my lady (enter ROSAMUND), and, my lady, tho’ I shouldn’t speak one word, I wish you joy o’ the King’s brother.

ROSAMUND.

What is it you mean?

MARGERY.

I mean your goodman, your husband, my lady, for I saw your ladyship a-parting wi’ him even now i’ the coppice, when I was a-getting o’ bluebells for your ladyship’s nose to smell on — and I ha’ seen the King once at Oxford, and he’s as like the King as fingernail to fingernail, and I thought at first it was the King, only you know the King’s married, for King Louis ——

ROSAMUND.

Married!

MARGERY.

Years and years, my lady, for her husband, King Louis ——

ROSAMUND.

Hush!

MARGERY.

— And I thought if it were the King’s brother he had a better bride than the King, for the people do say that his is bad beyond all reckoning, and ——

ROSAMUND.

The people lie.

MARGERY.

Very like, my lady, but most on ‘em know an honest woman and a lady when they see her, and besides they say, she makes songs, and that’s against her, for I never knew an honest woman that could make songs, tho’ to be sure our mother ‘ill sing me old songs by the hour, but then, God help her, she had ‘em from her mother, and her mother from her mother back and back for ever so long, but none on ‘em ever made songs, and they were all honest.

ROSAMUND.

Go, you shall tell me of her some other time.

MARGERY.

There’s none so much to tell on her, my lady, only she kept the seventh commandment better than some I know on, or I couldn’t look your ladyship i’ the face, and she brew’d the best ale in all Glo’ster, that is to say in her time when she had the ‘Crown.’

ROSAMUND.

The crown! who?

MARGERY.

Mother.

ROSAMUND.

I mean her whom you call — fancy — my husband’s brother’s wife.

MARGERY.

Oh, Queen Eleanor. Yes, my lady; and tho’ I be sworn not to speak a word, I can tell you all about her, if ——

ROSAMUND.

No word now. I am faint and sleepy. Leave me. Nay — go.

What! will you anger me.

[Exit Margery.

He charged me not to question any of those

About me. Have I? no! she question’d me.

Did she not slander him? Should she stay here?

May she not tempt me, being at my side,

To question her? Nay, can I send her hence

Without his kingly leave! I am in the dark.

I have lived, poor bird, from cage to cage, and known

Nothing but him — happy to know no more,

So that he loved me — and he loves me — yes,

And bound me by his love to secrecy

Till his own time.

Eleanor, Eleanor, have I

Not heard ill things of her in France? Oh, she’s

The Queen of France. I see it — some confusion,

Some strange mistake. I did not hear aright,

Myself confused with parting from the King.

MARGERY (behind scene).

Bee mustn’t buzz,

Whoop — but he knows.

ROSAMUND.

Yet her — what her? he hinted of some her —

When he was here before —

Something that would displease me. Hath he stray’d

From love’s clear path into the common bush,

And, being scratch’d, returns to his true rose,

Who hath not thorn enough to prick him for it,

Ev’n with a word?

MARGERY (behind scene).

Bird mustn’t tell,

Whoop — he can see.

ROSAMUND.

I would not hear him. Nay — there’s more — he frown’d

‘No mate for her, if it should come to that’ —

To that — to what?

MARGERY (behind scene).

Whoop — but he knows,

Whoop — but he knows.

ROSAMUND.

O God! some dreadful truth is breaking on me —

Some dreadful thing is coming on me.

[Enter GEOFFREY.

Geoffrey!

GEOFFREY.

What are you crying for, when the sun shines?

ROSAMUND.

Hath not thy father left us to ourselves?

GEOFFREY.

Ay, but he’s taken the rain with him. I hear

Margery: I’ll go play with her.

[Exit Geoffrey.

ROSAMUND.

Rainbow, stay,

Gleam upon gloom,

Bright as my dream,

Rainbow, stay!

But it passes away,

Gloom upon gleam,

Dark as my doom —

O rainbow stay.

Scene II

Outside the Woods near ROSAMUND’S Bower.

ELEANOR. FITZURSE.

ELEANOR.

Up from the salt lips of the land we two

Have track’d the King to this dark inland wood;

And somewhere hereabouts he vanish’d. Here

His turtle builds: his exit is our adit:

Watch! he will out again, and presently,

Seeing he must to Westminster and crown

Young Henry there to-morrow.

FITZURSE.

We have watch’d

So long in vain, he hath pass’d out again,

And on the other side.

[A great horn winded.

Hark! Madam!

ELEANOR.        Ay,

How ghostly sounds that horn in the black wood!

[A countryman flying.

Whither away, man? what are you flying from?

COUNTRYMAN.

The witch! the witch! she sits naked by a great heap of gold in the middle of the wood, and when the horn sounds she comes out as a wolf. Get you hence! a man passed in there to-day: I holla’d to him, but he didn’t hear me: he’ll never out again, the witch has got him. I daren’t stay — I daren’t stay!

ELEANOR.

Kind of the witch to give thee warning tho’.

[Man flies.

Is not this wood-witch of the rustic’s fear

Our woodland Circe that hath witch’d the King?

[Horn sounded. Another flying.

FITZURSE.

Again! stay, fool, and tell me why thou fliest.

COUNTRYMAN.

Fly thou too. The King keeps his forest head of game here, and when that horn sounds, a score of wolf-dogs are let loose that will tear thee piecemeal. Linger not till the third horn. Fly!

[Exit.

ELEANOR.

This is the likelier tale. We have hit the place.

Now let the King’s fine game look to itself.

[Horn.

FITZURSE.

Again! —

And far on in the dark heart of the wood

I hear the yelping of the hounds of hell.

ELEANOR.

I have my dagger here to still their throats.

FITZURSE.

Nay, Madam, not to-night — the night is falling.

What can be done to-night?

ELEANOR.

Well — well — away.

Scene III

Traitor’s Meadow at Fréteval. Pavilions and Tents of the English and French Baronage.

BECKET and HERBERT OF BOSHAM.

BECKET.

See here!

HERBERT.

What’s here?

BECKET.

A notice from the priest,

To whom our John of Salisbury committed

The secret of the bower, that our wolf-Queen

Is prowling round the fold. I should be back

In England ev’n for this.

HERBERT.

These are by-things

In the great cause.

BECKET.

The by-things of the Lord

Are the wrong’d innocences that will cry

From all the hidden by-ways of the world

In the great day against the wronger. I know

Thy meaning. Perish she, I, all, before

The Church should suffer wrong!

HERBERT.  Do you see, my lord,

There is the King talking with Walter Map?

BECKET.

He hath the Pope’s last letters, and they threaten

The immediate thunder-blast of interdict:

Yet he can scarce be touching upon those,

Or scarce would smile that fashion.

HERBERT.        Winter sunshine!

Beware of opening out thy bosom to it,

Lest thou, myself, and all thy flock should catch

An after ague-fit of trembling. Look!

He bows, he bares his head, he is coming hither.

Still with a smile.

Enter KING HENRY and WALTER MAP.

HENRY.

We have had so many hours together, Thomas,

So many happy hours alone together,

That I would speak with you once more alone.

BECKET.

My liege, your will and happiness are mine.

[Exeunt King and Becket.

HERBERT.

The same smile still.

WALTER MAP.

Do you see that great black cloud that hath come over the sun and cast us all into shadow?

HERBERT.

And feel it too.

WALTER MAP.

And see you yon side-beam that is forced from under it, and sets the church-tower over there all a-hell-fire as it were?

HERBERT.

Ay.

WALTER MAP.

It is this black, bell-silencing, anti-marrying, burial-hindering interdict that hath squeezed out this side-smile upon Canterbury, whereof may come conflagration. Were I Thomas, I wouldn’t trust it. Sudden change is a house on sand; and tho’ I count Henry honest enough, yet when fear creeps in at the front, honesty steals out at the back, and the King at last is fairly scared by this cloud — this interdict. I have been more for the King than the Church in this matter — yea, even for the sake of the Church: for, truly, as the case stood, you had safelier have slain an archbishop than a she-goat: but our recoverer and upholder of customs hath in this crowning of young Henry by York and London so violated the immemorial usage of the Church, that, like the gravedigger’s child I have heard of, trying to ring the bell, he hath half-hanged himself in the rope of the Church, or rather pulled all the Church with the Holy Father astride of it down upon his own head.

HERBERT.

Were you there?

WALTER MAP.

In the church rope? — no. I was at the crowning, for I have pleasure in the pleasure of crowds, and to read the faces of men at a great show.

HERBERT.

And how did Roger of York comport himself?

WALTER MAP.

As magnificently and archiepiscopally as our Thomas would have done: only there was a dare-devil in his eye — I should say a dare-Becket. He thought less of two kings than of one Roger the king of the occasion. Foliot is the holier man, perhaps the better. Once or twice there ran a twitch across his face as who should say what’s to follow? but Salisbury was a calf cowed by Mother Church, and every now and then glancing about him like a thief at night when he hears a door open in the house and thinks ‘the master.’

HERBERT.

And the father-king?

WALTER MAP.

The father’s eye was so tender it would have called a goose off the green, and once he strove to hide his face, like the Greek king when his daughter was sacrificed, but he thought better of it: it was but the sacrifice of a kingdom to his son, a smaller matter; but as to the young crownling himself, he looked so malapert in the eyes, that had I fathered him I had given him more of the rod than the sceptre. Then followed the thunder of the captains and the shouting, and so we came on to the banquet, from whence there puffed out such an incense of unctuosity into the nostrils of our Gods of Church and State, that Lucullus or Apicius might have sniffed it in their Hades of heathenism, so that the smell of their own roast had not come across it ——

HERBERT.

Map, tho’ you make your butt too big, you overshoot it.

WALTER MAP.

— For as to the fish, they de-miracled the miraculous draught, and might have sunk a navy ——

HERBERT.

There again, Goliasing and Goliathising!

WALTER MAP.

— And as for the flesh at table, a whole Peter’s sheet, with all manner of game, and four-footed things, and fowls ——

HERBERT.

And all manner of creeping things too?

WALTER MAP.

— Well, there were Abbots — but they did not bring their women; and so we were dull enough at first, but in the end we flourished out into a merriment; for the old King would act servitor and hand a dish to his son; whereupon my Lord of York — his fine-cut face bowing and beaming with all that courtesy which hath less loyalty in it than the backward scrape of the clown’s heel—’great honour,’ says he, ‘from the King’s self to the King’s son.’ Did you hear the young King’s quip?

HERBERT.

No, what was it?

WALTER MAP.

Glancing at the days when his father was only Earl of Anjou, he answered:—’Should not an earl’s son wait on a king’s son?’ And when the cold corners of the King’s mouth began to thaw, there was a great motion of laughter among us, part real, part childlike, to be freed from the dulness — part royal, for King and kingling both laughed, and so we could not but laugh, as by a royal necessity — part childlike again — when we felt we had laughed too long and could not stay ourselves — many midriff-shaken even to tears, as springs gush out after earthquakes — but from those, as I said before, there may come a conflagration — tho’, to keep the figure moist and make it hold water, I should say rather, the lacrymation of a lamentation; but look if Thomas have not flung himself at the King’s feet. They have made it up again — for the moment.

HERBERT.

Thanks to the blessed Magdalen, whose day it is.

Re-enter HENRY and BECKET. (During their conference the BARONS and BISHOPS of FRANCE and ENGLAND come in at back of stage.)

BECKET.

Ay, King! for in thy kingdom, as thou knowest,

The spouse of the Great King, thy King, hath fallen —

The daughter of Zion lies beside the way —

The priests of Baal tread her underfoot —

The golden ornaments are stolen from her ——

HENRY.

Have I not promised to restore her, Thomas,

And send thee back again to Canterbury?

BECKET.

Send back again those exiles of my kin

Who wander famine-wasted thro’ the world.

HENRY.

Have I not promised, man, to send them back?

BECKET.

Yet one thing more. Thou hast broken thro’ the pales

Of privilege, crowning thy young son by York,

London and Salisbury — not Canterbury.

HENRY.

York crown’d the Conqueror — not Canterbury.

BECKET.

There was no Canterbury in William’s time.

HENRY.

But Hereford, you know, crown’d the first Henry.

BECKET.

But Anselm crown’d this Henry o’er again.

HENRY.

And thou shalt crown my Henry o’er again.

BECKET.

And is it then with thy good-will that I

Proceed against thine evil councillors,

And hurl the dread ban of the Church on those

Who made the second mitre play the first,

And acted me?

HENRY.

Well, well, then — have thy way!

It may be they were evil councillors.

What more, my lord Archbishop? What more, Thomas?

I make thee full amends. Say all thy say,

But blaze not out before the Frenchmen here.

BECKET.

More? Nothing, so thy promise be thy deed.

HENRY (holding out his hand).

Give me thy hand. My Lords of France and England,

My friend of Canterbury and myself

Are now once more at perfect amity.

Unkingly should I be, and most unknightly,

Not striving still, however much in vain,

To rival him in Christian charity.

HERBERT.

All praise to Heaven, and sweet St. Magdalen!

HENRY.

And so farewell until we meet in England.

BECKET.

I fear, my liege, we may not meet in England.

HENRY.

How, do you make me a traitor?

BECKET.

No, indeed!

That be far from thee.

HENRY.

Come, stay with us, then,

Before you part for England.

BECKET.

I am bound

For that one hour to stay with good King Louis,

Who helpt me when none else.

HERBERT.

He said thy life

Was not one hour’s worth in England save

King Henry gave thee first the kiss of peace.

HENRY.

He said so? Louis, did he? look you, Herbert.

When I was in mine anger with King Louis,

I sware I would not give the kiss of peace,

Not on French ground, nor any ground but English,

Where his cathedral stands. Mine old friend, Thomas,

I would there were that perfect trust between us,

That health of heart, once ours, ere Pope or King

Had come between us! Even now — who knows? —

I might deliver all things to thy hand —

If . . . but I say no more . . . farewell, my lord.

BECKET.

Farewell, my liege!

[Exit Henry, then the Barons and Bishops.

WALTER MAP.

There again! when the full fruit of the royal promise might have dropt into thy mouth hadst thou but opened it to thank him.

BECKET.

He fenced his royal promise with an if.

WALTER MAP.

And is the King’s if too high a stile for your lordship to overstep and come at all things in the next field?

BECKET.

Ay, if this if be like the Devil’s ‘if

Thou wilt fall down and worship me.’

HERBERT.        Oh, Thomas;

I could fall down and worship thee, my Thomas,

For thou hast trodden this wine-press alone.

BECKET.

Nay, of the people there are many with me.

WALTER MAP.

I am not altogether with you, my lord, tho’ I am none of those that would raise a storm between you, lest ye should draw together like two ships in a calm. You wrong the King: he meant what he said to-day. Who shall vouch for his to-morrows? One word further. Doth not the fewness of anything make the fulness of it in estimation? Is not virtue prized mainly for its rarity and great baseness loathed as an exception: for were all, my lord, as noble as yourself, who would look up to you? and were all as base as — who shall I say — Fitzurse and his following — who would look down upon them? My lord, you have put so many of the King’s household out of communion, that they begin to smile at it.

BECKET.

At their peril, at their peril ——

WALTER MAP.

— For tho’ the drop may hollow out the dead stone, doth not the living skin thicken against perpetual whippings? This is the second grain of good counsel I ever proffered thee, and so cannot suffer by the rule of frequency. Have I sown it in salt? I trust not, for before God I promise you the King hath many more wolves than he can tame in his woods of England, and if it suit their purpose to howl for the King, and you still move against him, you may have no less than to die for it; but God and his free wind grant your lordship a happy home-return and the King’s kiss of peace in Kent. Farewell! I must follow the King.

[Exit.

HERBERT.

Ay, and I warrant the customs. Did the King

Speak of the customs?

BECKET.

No! — To die for it —

I live to die for it, I die to live for it.

The State will die, the Church can never die.

The King’s not like to die for that which dies;

But I must die for that which never dies.

It will be so — my visions in the Lord:

It must be so, my friend! the wolves of England

Must murder her one shepherd, that the sheep

May feed in peace. False figure, Map would say.

Earth’s falses are heaven’s truths. And when my voice

Is martyr’d mute, and this man disappears,

That perfect trust may come again between us,

And there, there, there, not here I shall rejoice

To find my stray sheep back within the fold.

The crowd are scattering, let us move away!

And thence to England.

[Exeunt.

Act IV

Scene I

The Outskirts of the Bower.

GEOFFREY (coming out of the wood).

Light again! light again! Margery? no, that’s a finer thing there. How it glitters!

ELEANOR (entering).

Come to me, little one. How camest thou hither?

GEOFFREY.

On my legs.

ELEANOR.

And mighty pretty legs too. Thou art the prettiest child I ever saw. Wilt thou love me?

GEOFFREY.

No; I only love mother.

ELEANOR.

Ay; and who is thy mother?

GEOFFREY.

They call her — But she lives secret, you see.

ELEANOR.

Why?

GEOFFREY.

Don’t know why.

ELEANOR.

Ay, but some one comes to see her now and then. Who is he?

GEOFFREY.

Can’t tell.

ELEANOR.

What does she call him?

GEOFFREY.

My liege.

ELEANOR.

Pretty one, how camest thou?

GEOFFREY.

There was a bit of yellow silk here and there, and it looked pretty like a glowworm, and I thought if I followed it I should find the fairies.

ELEANOR.

I am the fairy, pretty one, a good fairy to thy mother. Take me to her.

GEOFFREY.

There are good fairies and bad fairies, and sometimes she cries, and can’t sleep sound o’ nights because of the bad fairies.

ELEANOR.

She shall cry no more; she shall sleep sound enough if thou wilt take me to her. I am her good fairy.

GEOFFREY.

But you don’t look like a good fairy. Mother does. You are not pretty, like mother.

ELEANOR.

We can’t all of us be as pretty as thou art — (aside) little bastard. Come, here is a golden chain I will give thee if thou wilt lead me to thy mother.

GEOFFREY.

No — no gold. Mother says gold spoils all. Love is the only gold.

ELEANOR.

I love thy mother, my pretty boy. Show me where thou camest out of the wood.

GEOFFREY.

By this tree; but I don’t know if I can find the way back again.

ELEANOR.

Where’s the warder?

GEOFFREY.

Very bad. Somebody struck him.

ELEANOR.

Ay? who was that?

GEOFFREY.

Can’t tell. But I heard say he had had a stroke, or you’d have heard his horn before now. Come along, then; we shall see the silk here and there, and I want my supper.

[Exeunt.

Scene II

ROSAMUND’S Bower.

ROSAMUND.

The boy so late; pray God, he be not lost.

I sent this Margery, and she comes not back;

I sent another, and she comes not back.

I go myself — so many alleys, crossings,

Paths, avenues — nay, if I lost him, now

The folds have fallen from the mystery,

And left all naked, I were lost indeed.

Enter GEOFFREY and ELEANOR.

Geoffrey, the pain thou hast put me to!

[Seeing ELEANOR.

Ha, you!

How came you hither?

ELEANOR.

Your own child brought me hither!

GEOFFREY.

You said you couldn’t trust Margery, and I watched her and followed her into the woods, and I lost her and went on and on till I found the light and the lady, and she says she can make you sleep o’ nights.

ROSAMUND.

How dared you? Know you not this bower is secret,

Of and belonging to the King of England,

More sacred than his forests for the chase?

Nay, nay, Heaven help you; get you hence in haste

Lest worse befall you.

ELEANOR.

Child, I am mine own self

Of and belonging to the King. The King

Hath divers ofs and ons, ofs and belongings,

Almost as many as your true Mussulman —

Belongings, paramours, whom it pleases him

To call his wives; but so it chances, child,

That I am his main paramour, his sultana.

But since the fondest pair of doves will jar,

Ev’n in a cage of gold, we had words of late,

And thereupon he call’d my children bastards.

Do you believe that you are married to him?

ROSAMUND.

I should believe it.

ELEANOR.

You must not believe it,

Because I have a wholesome medicine here

Puts that belief asleep. Your answer, beauty!

Do you believe that you are married to him?

ROSAMUND.

Geoffrey, my boy, I saw the ball you lost in the fork of the great willow over the brook. Go. See that you do not fall in. Go.

GEOFFREY.

And leave you alone with the good fairy. She calls you beauty, but I don’t like her looks. Well, you bid me go, and I’ll have my ball anyhow. Shall I find you asleep when I come back?

ROSAMUND.

[Exit Geoffrey.

ELEANOR.

He is easily found again. Do you believe it?

I pray you then to take my sleeping-draught;

But if you should not care to take it — see!

[Draws a dagger.

What! have I scared the red rose from your face

Into your heart. But this will find it there,

And dig it from the root for ever.

ROSAMUND.  Help! help!

ELEANOR.

They say that walls have ears; but these, it seems,

Have none! and I have none — to pity thee.

ROSAMUND.

I do beseech you — my child is so young,

So backward too; I cannot leave him yet.

I am not so happy I could not die myself,

But the child is so young. You have children — his;

And mine is the King’s child; so, if you love him —

Nay, if you love him, there is great wrong done

Somehow; but if you do not — there are those

Who say you do not love him — let me go

With my young boy, and I will hide my face,

Blacken and gipsyfy it; none shall know me;

The King shall never hear of me again,

But I will beg my bread along the world

With my young boy, and God will be our guide.

I never meant you harm in any way.

See, I can say no more.

ELEANOR.

Will you not say you are not married to him?

ROSAMUND.

Ay, Madam, I can say it, if you will.

ELEANOR.

Then is thy pretty boy a bastard?

ROSAMUND.  No.

ELEANOR.

And thou thyself a proven wanton?

ROSAMUND.  No.

I am none such. I never loved but one.

I have heard of such that range from love to love,

Like the wild beast — if you can call it love.

I have heard of such — yea, even among those

Who sit on thrones — I never saw any such,

Never knew any such, and howsoever

You do misname me, match’d with any such,

I am snow to mud.

ELEANOR.

The more the pity then

That thy true home — the heavens — cry out for thee

Who art too pure for earth.

Enter FITZURSE.

FITZURSE.

Give her to me.

ELEANOR.

The Judas-lover of our passion-play

Hath track’d us hither.

FITZURSE.

Well, why not? I follow’d

You and the child: he babbled all the way.

Give her to me to make my honeymoon.

ELEANOR.

Ay, as the bears love honey. Could you keep her

Indungeon’d from one whisper of the wind,

Dark even from a side glance of the moon,

And oublietted in the centre — No!

I follow out my hate and thy revenge.

FITZURSE.

You bad me take revenge another way —

To bring her to the dust. . . . Come with me, love,

And I will love thee. . . . Madam, let her live.

I have a far-off burrow where the King

Would miss her and for ever.

ELEANOR.

How sayst thou, sweetheart?

Wilt thou go with him? he will marry thee.

ROSAMUND.

Give me the poison; set me free of him!

[ELEANOR offers the vial.

No, no! I will not have it.

ELEANOR.

Then this other,

The wiser choice, because my sleeping-draught

May bloat thy beauty out of shape, and make

Thy body loathsome even to thy child;

While this but leaves thee with a broken heart,

A doll-face blanch’d and bloodless, over which

If pretty Geoffrey do not break his own,

It must be broken for him.

ROSAMUND.

O I see now

Your purpose is to fright me — a troubadour

You play with words. You had never used so many,

Not if you meant it, I am sure. The child. . . .

No. . . . mercy! No!      (Kneels.)

ELEANOR.

Play! . . . that bosom never

Heaved under the King’s hand with such true passion

As at this loveless knife that stirs the riot,

Which it will quench in blood! Slave, if he love thee,

Thy life is worth the wrestle for it: arise,

And dash thyself against me that I may slay thee!

The worm! shall I let her go? But ha! what’s here?

By very God, the cross I gave the King!

His village darling in some lewd caress

Has wheedled it off the King’s neck to her own.

By thy leave, beauty. Ay, the same! I warrant

Thou hast sworn on this my cross a hundred times

Never to leave him — and that merits death,

False oath on holy cross — for thou must leave him

To-day, but not quite yet. My good Fitzurse,

The running down the chase is kindlier sport

Ev’n than the death. Who knows but that thy lover

May plead so pitifully, that I may spare thee?

Come hither, man; stand there. (To ROSAMUND)

Take thy one chance;

Catch at the last straw. Kneel to thy lord Fitzurse;

Crouch even because thou hatest him; fawn upon him

For thy life and thy son’s.

ROSAMUND (rising).

I am a Clifford,

My son a Clifford and Plantagenet.

I am to die then, tho’ there stand beside thee

One who might grapple with thy dagger, if he

Had aught of man, or thou of woman; or I

Would bow to such a baseness as would make me

Most worthy of it: both of us will die,

And I will fly with my sweet boy to heaven,

And shriek to all the saints among the stars:

‘Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor of England!

Murder’d by that adulteress Eleanor,

Whose doings are a horror to the east,

A hissing in the west!’ Have we not heard

Raymond of Poitou, thine own uncle — nay,

Geoffrey Plantagenet, thine own husband’s father —

Nay, ev’n the accursed heathen Saladdeen ——

Strike!

I challenge thee to meet me before God.

Answer me there.

ELEANOR (raising the dagger).

This in thy bosom, fool,

And after in thy bastard’s!

Enter BECKET from behind. Catches hold of her arm.

BECKET.

Murderess!

[The dagger falls; they stare at one another. After a pause.

ELEANOR.

My lord, we know you proud of your fine hand,

But having now admired it long enough,

We find that it is mightier than it seems —

At least mine own is frailer: you are laming it.

BECKET.

And lamed and maim’d to dislocation, better

Than raised to take a life which Henry bad me

Guard from the stroke that dooms thee after death

To wail in deathless flame.

ELEANOR.

Nor you, nor I

Have now to learn, my lord, that our good Henry

Says many a thing in sudden heats, which he

Gainsays by next sunrising — often ready

To tear himself for having said as much.

My lord, Fitzurse ——

BECKET.

He too! what dost thou here?

Dares the bear slouch into the lion’s den?

One downward plunge of his paw would rend away

Eyesight and manhood, life itself, from thee.

Go, lest I blast thee with anathema,

And make thee a world’s horror.

FITZURSE.  My lord, I shall

Remember this.

BECKET.

I do remember thee;

Lest I remember thee to the lion, go.

[Exit Fitzurse.

Take up your dagger; put it in the sheath.

ELEANOR.

Might not your courtesy stoop to hand it me?

But crowns must bow when mitres sit so high.

Well — well — too costly to be left or lost.

[Picks up the dagger.

I had it from an Arab soldan, who,

When I was there in Antioch, marvell’d at

Our unfamiliar beauties of the west;

But wonder’d more at my much constancy

To the monk-king, Louis, our former burthen,

From whom, as being too kin, you know, my lord,

God’s grace and Holy Church deliver’d us.

I think, time given, I could have talk’d him out of

His ten wives into one. Look at the hilt.

What excellent workmanship. In our poor west

We cannot do it so well.

BECKET.

We can do worse.

Madam, I saw your dagger at her throat;

I heard your savage cry.

ELEANOR.

Well acted, was it?

A comedy meant to seem a tragedy —

A feint, a farce. My honest lord, you are known

Thro’ all the courts of Christendom as one

That mars a cause with over-violence.

You have wrong’d Fitzurse. I speak not of myself.

We thought to scare this minion of the King

Back from her churchless commerce with the King

To the fond arms of her first love, Fitzurse,

Who swore to marry her. You have spoilt the farce.

My savage cry? Why, she — she — when I strove

To work against her license for her good,

Bark’d out at me such monstrous charges, that

The King himself, for love of his own sons,

If hearing, would have spurn’d her; whereupon

I menaced her with this, as when we threaten

A yelper with a stick. Nay, I deny not

That I was somewhat anger’d. Do you hear me?

Believe or no, I care not. You have lost

The ear of the King. I have it. . . . My lord Paramount,

Our great High-priest, will not your Holiness

Vouchsafe a gracious answer to your Queen?

BECKET.

Rosamund hath not answer’d you one word;

Madam, I will not answer you one word.

Daughter, the world hath trick’d thee. Leave it, daughter;

Come thou with me to Godstow nunnery,

And live what may be left thee of a life

Saved as by miracle alone with Him

Who gave it.

Re-enter GEOFFREY.

GEOFFREY.

Mother, you told me a great fib: it wasn’t in the willow.

BECKET.

Follow us, my son, and we will find it for thee —

Or something manlier.

[Exeunt Becket, Rosamund, and Geoffrey.

ELEANOR.

The world hath trick’d her — that’s the King; if so,

There was the farce, the feint — not mine. And yet

I am all but sure my dagger was a feint

Till the worm turn’d — not life shot up in blood,

But death drawn in; — (looking at the vial) this was no feint then? no.

But can I swear to that, had she but given

Plain answer to plain query? nay, methinks

Had she but bow’d herself to meet the wave

Of humiliation, worshipt whom she loathed,

I should have let her be, scorn’d her too much

To harm her. Henry — Becket tells him this —

To take my life might lose him Aquitaine.

Too politic for that. Imprison me?

No, for it came to nothing — only a feint.

Did she not tell me I was playing on her?

I’ll swear to mine own self it was a feint.

Why should I swear, Eleanor, who am, or was,

A sovereign power? The King plucks out their eyes

Who anger him, and shall not I, the Queen,

Tear out her heart — kill, kill with knife or venom

One of his slanderous harlots? ‘None of such?’

I love her none the more. Tut, the chance gone,

She lives — but not for him; one point is gain’d.

O I, that thro’ the Pope divorced King Louis,

Scorning his monkery, — I that wedded Henry,

Honouring his manhood — will he not mock at me

The jealous fool balk’d of her will — with him?

But he and he must never meet again.

Reginald Fitzurse!

Re-enter FITZURSE.

FITZURSE.

Here, Madam, at your pleasure.

ELEANOR.

My pleasure is to have a man about me.

Why did you slink away so like a cur?

FITZURSE.

Madam, I am as much man as the King.

Madam, I fear Church-censures like your King.

ELEANOR.

He grovels to the Church when he’s black-blooded,

But kinglike fought the proud archbishop, — kinglike

Defied the Pope, and, like his kingly sires,

The Normans, striving still to break or bind

The spiritual giant with our island laws

And customs, made me for the moment proud

Ev’n of that stale Church-bond which link’d me with him

To bear him kingly sons. I am not so sure

But that I love him still. Thou as much man!

No more of that; we will to France and be

Beforehand with the King, and brew from out

This Godstow-Becket intermeddling such

A strong hate-philtre as may madden him — madden

Against his priest beyond all hellebore.

Act V

Scene I

Castle in Normandy. King’s Chamber.

HENRY, ROGER OF YORK, FOLIOT, JOCELYN OF SALISBURY.

ROGER OF YORK.

Nay, nay, my liege,

He rides abroad with armed followers,

Hath broken all his promises to thyself,

Cursed and anathematised us right and left,

Stirr’d up a party there against your son —

HENRY.

Roger of York, you always hated him,

Even when you both were boys at Theobald’s.

ROGER OF YORK.

I always hated boundless arrogance.

In mine own cause I strove against him there,

And in thy cause I strive against him now.

HENRY.

I cannot think he moves against my son,

Knowing right well with what a tenderness

He loved my son.

ROGER OF YORK.

Before you made him king.

But Becket ever moves against a king.

The Church is all — the crime to be a king.

We trust your Royal Grace, lord of more land

Than any crown in Europe, will not yield

To lay your neck beneath your citizens’ heel.

HENRY.

Not to a Gregory of my throning! No.

FOLIOT.

My royal liege, in aiming at your love,

It may be sometimes I have overshot

My duties to our Holy Mother Church,

Tho’ all the world allows I fall no inch

Behind this Becket, rather go beyond

In scourgings, macerations, mortifyings,

Fasts, disciplines that clear the spiritual eye,

And break the soul from earth. Let all that be.

I boast not: but you know thro’ all this quarrel

I still have cleaved to the crown, in hope the crown

Would cleave to me that but obey’d the crown,

Crowning your son; for which our loyal service,

And since we likewise swore to obey the customs,

York and myself, and our good Salisbury here,

Are push’d from out communion of the Church.

JOCELYN OF SALISBURY.

Becket hath trodden on us like worms, my liege;

Trodden one half dead; one half, but half-alive,

Cries to the King.

HENRY (aside).

Take care o’ thyself, O King.

JOCELYN OF SALISBURY.

Being so crush’d and so humiliated

We scarcely dare to bless the food we eat

Because of Becket.

HENRY.

What would ye have me do?

ROGER OF YORK.

Summon your barons; take their counsel: yet

I know — could swear — as long as Becket breathes,

Your Grace will never have one quiet hour.

HENRY.

What? . . . Ay . . . but pray you do not work upon me.

I see your drift . . . it may be so . . . and yet

You know me easily anger’d. Will you hence?

He shall absolve you . . . you shall have redress.

I have a dizzying headache. Let me rest.

I’ll call you by and by.

[Exeunt Roger of York, Foliot, and Jocelyn of Salisbury.

Would he were dead! I have lost all love for him.

If God would take him in some sudden way —

Would he were dead.

[Lies down.

PAGE (entering).

My liege, the Queen of England.

HENRY.

God’s eyes!            [Starting up.

Enter ELEANOR.

ELEANOR.

Of England? Say of Aquitaine.

I am no Queen of England. I had dream’d

I was the bride of England, and a queen.

HENRY.

And, — while you dream’d you were the bride of England, —

Stirring her baby-king against me? ha!

ELEANOR.

The brideless Becket is thy king and mine:

I will go live and die in Aquitaine.

HENRY.

Except I clap thee into prison here,

Lest thou shouldst play the wanton there again.

Ha, you of Aquitaine! O you of Aquitaine!

You were but Aquitaine to Louis — no wife;

You are only Aquitaine to me — no wife.

ELEANOR.

And why, my lord, should I be wife to one

That only wedded me for Aquitaine?

Yet this no wife — her six and thirty sail

Of Provence blew you to your English throne;

And this no wife has born you four brave sons,

And one of them at least is like to prove

Bigger in our small world than thou art.

HENRY.  Ay —

Richard, if he be mine — I hope him mine.

But thou art like enough to make him thine.

ELEANOR.

Becket is like enough to make all his.

HENRY.

Methought I had recover’d of the Becket,

That all was planed and bevell’d smooth again,

Save from some hateful cantrip of thine own.

ELEANOR.

I will go live and die in Aquitaine.

I dream’d I was the consort of a king,

Not one whose back his priest has broken.

HENRY.  What!

Is the end come? You, will you crown my foe

My victor in mid-battle? I will be

Sole master of my house. The end is mine.

What game, what juggle, what devilry are you playing?

Why do you thrust this Becket on me again?

ELEANOR.

Why? for I am true wife, and have my fears

Lest Becket thrust you even from your throne.

Do you know this cross, my liege?

HENRY (turning his head).  Away! Not I.

ELEANOR.

Not ev’n the central diamond, worth, I think,

Half of the Antioch whence I had it.

HENRY.        That?

ELEANOR.

I gave it you, and you your paramour;

She sends it back, as being dead to earth,

So dead henceforth to you.

HENRY.

Dead! you have murder’d her,

Found out her secret bower and murder’d her.

ELEANOR.

Your Becket knew the secret of your bower.

HENRY (calling out).

Ho there! thy rest of life is hopeless prison.

ELEANOR.

And what would my own Aquitaine say to that?

First, free thy captive from her hopeless prison.

HENRY.

O devil, can I free her from the grave?

ELEANOR.

You are too tragic: both of us are players

In such a comedy as our court of Provence

Had laugh’d at. That’s a delicate Latin lay

Of Walter Map: the lady holds the cleric

Lovelier than any soldier, his poor tonsure

A crown of Empire. Will you have it again?

(Offering the cross. He dashes it down.)

St. Cupid, that is too irreverent.

Then mine once more.    (Puts it on.)

Your cleric hath your lady.

Nay, what uncomely faces, could he see you!

Foam at the mouth because King Thomas, lord

Not only of your vassals but amours,

Thro’ chastest honour of the Decalogue

Hath used the full authority of his Church

To put her into Godstow nunnery.

HENRY.

To put her into Godstow nunnery!

He dared not — liar! yet, yet I remember —

I do remember.

He bad me put her into a nunnery —

Into Godstow, into Hellstow, Devilstow!

The Church! the Church!

God’s eyes! I would the Church were down in hell!

[Exit.

ELEANOR.

Aha!

Enter the four KNIGHTS.

FITZURSE.

What made the King cry out so furiously?

ELEANOR.

Our Becket, who will not absolve the Bishops.

I think ye four have cause to love this Becket.

FITZURSE.

I hate him for his insolence to all.

DE TRACY.

And I for all his insolence to thee.

DE BRITO.

I hate him for I hate him is my reason,

And yet I hate him for a hypocrite.

DE MORVILLE.

I do not love him, for he did his best

To break the barons, and now braves the King.

ELEANOR.

Strike, then, at once, the King would have him — See!

Re-enter HENRY.

HENRY.

No man to love me, honour me, obey me!

Sluggards and fools!

The slave that eat my bread has kick’d his King!

The dog I cramm’d with dainties worried me!

The fellow that on a lame jade came to court,

A ragged cloak for saddle — he, he, he,

To shake my throne, to push into my chamber —

My bed, where ev’n the slave is private — he —

I’ll have her out again, he shall absolve

The bishops — they but did my will — not you —

Sluggards and fools, why do you stand and stare?

You are no king’s men — you — you — you are Becket’s men.

Down with King Henry! up with the Archbishop!

Will no man free me from this pestilent priest?

[Exit.

[The KNIGHTS draw their swords.

ELEANOR.

Are ye king’s men? I am king’s woman, I.

THE KNIGHTS.

King’s men! King’s men!

Scene II

A Room in Canterbury Monastery.

BECKET and JOHN OF SALISBURY.

BECKET.

York said so?

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Yes: a man may take good counsel

Ev’n from his foe.

BECKET.

York will say anything.

What is he saying now? gone to the King

And taken our anathema with him. York!

Can the King de-anathematise this York?

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Thomas, I would thou hadst return’d to England,

Like some wise prince of this world from his wars,

With more of olive-branch and amnesty

For foes at home — thou hast raised the world against thee.

BECKET.

Why, John, my kingdom is not of this world.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

If it were more of this world it might be

More of the next. A policy of wise pardon

Wins here as well as there. To bless thine enemies ——

BECKET.

Ay, mine, not Heaven’s.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

And may there not be something

Of this world’s leaven in thee too, when crying

On Holy Church to thunder out her rights

And thine own wrong so pitilessly. Ah, Thomas,

The lightnings that we think are only Heaven’s

Flash sometimes out of earth against the heavens.

The soldier, when he lets his whole self go

Lost in the common good, the common wrong,

Strikes truest ev’n for his own self. I crave

Thy pardon — I have still thy leave to speak.

Thou hast waged God’s war against the King; and yet

We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may,

Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites

And private hates with our defence of Heaven.

[Enter EDWARD GRIM.

BECKET.

Thou art but yesterday from Cambridge, Grim;

What say ye there of Becket?

GRIM.

I believe him

The bravest in our roll of Primates down

From Austin — there are some — for there are men

Of canker’d judgment everywhere ——

BECKET.  Who hold

With York, with York against me.

GRIM.  Well, my lord,

A stranger monk desires access to you.

BECKET.

York against Canterbury, York against God!

I am open to him.

[Exit Grim.

Enter ROSAMUND as a Monk.

ROSAMUND.

Can I speak with you

Alone, my father?

BECKET.

Come you to confess?

ROSAMUND.

Not now.

BECKET.

Then speak; this is my other self,

Who like my conscience never lets me be.

ROSAMUND (throwing back the cowl).

I know him; our good John of Salisbury.

BECKET.

Breaking already from thy noviciate

To plunge into this bitter world again —

These wells of Marah. I am grieved, my daughter.

I thought that I had made a peace for thee.

ROSAMUND.

Small peace was mine in my noviciate, father.

Thro’ all closed doors a dreadful whisper crept

That thou wouldst excommunicate the King.

I could not eat, sleep, pray: I had with me

The monk’s disguise thou gavest me for my bower:

I think our Abbess knew it and allow’d it.

I fled, and found thy name a charm to get me

Food, roof, and rest. I met a robber once,

I told him I was bound to see the Archbishop;

‘Pass on,’ he said, and in thy name I pass’d

From house to house. In one a son stone-blind

Sat by his mother’s hearth: he had gone too far

Into the King’s own woods; and the poor mother,

Soon as she learnt I was a friend of thine,

Cried out against the cruelty of the King.

I said it was the King’s courts, not the King;

But she would not believe me, and she wish’d

The Church were king: she had seen the Archbishop once,

So mild, so kind. The people love thee, father.

BECKET.

Alas! when I was Chancellor to the King,

I fear I was as cruel as the King.

ROSAMUND.

Cruel? Oh, no — it is the law, not he;

The customs of the realm.

BECKET.

The customs! customs!

ROSAMUND.

My lord, you have not excommunicated him?

Oh, if you have, absolve him!

BECKET.

Daughter, daughter,

Deal not with things you know not.

ROSAMUND.  I know him.

Then you have done it, and I call you cruel.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

No, daughter, you mistake our good Archbishop;

For once in France the King had been so harsh,

He thought to excommunicate him — Thomas,

You could not — old affection master’d you,

You falter’d into tears.

ROSAMUND.

God bless him for it.

BECKET.

Nay, make me not a woman, John of Salisbury,

Nor make me traitor to my holy office.

Did not a man’s voice ring along the aisle,

‘The King is sick and almost unto death.’

How could I excommunicate him then?

ROSAMUND.

And wilt thou excommunicate him now?

BECKET.

Daughter, my time is short, I shall not do it.

And were it longer — well — I should not do it.

ROSAMUND.

Thanks in this life, and in the life to come.

BECKET.

Get thee back to thy nunnery with all haste;

Let this be thy last trespass. But one question —

How fares thy pretty boy, the little Geoffrey?

No fever, cough, croup, sickness?

ROSAMUND.  No, but saved

From all that by our solitude. The plagues

That smite the city spare the solitudes.

BECKET.

God save him from all sickness of the soul!

Thee too, thy solitude among thy nuns,

May that save thee! Doth he remember me?

ROSAMUND.

I warrant him.

BECKET.

He is marvellously like thee.

ROSAMUND.

Liker the King.

BECKET.

No, daughter.

ROSAMUND.

Ay, but wait

Till his nose rises; he will be very king.

BECKET.

Ev’n so: but think not of the King: farewell!

ROSAMUND.

My lord, the city is full of armed men.

BECKET,

Ev’n so: farewell!

ROSAMUND.

I will but pass to vespers,

And breathe one prayer for my liege-lord the King,

His child and mine own soul, and so return.

BECKET.

Pray for me too: much need of prayer have I.

[Rosamund kneels and goes.

Dan John, how much we lose, we celibates,

Lacking the love of woman and of child.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

More gain than loss; for of your wives you shall

Find one a slut whose fairest linen seems

Foul as her dust-cloth, if she used it — one

So charged with tongue, that every thread of thought

Is broken ere it joins — a shrew to boot,

Whose evil song far on into the night

Thrills to the topmost tile — no hope but death;

One slow, fat, white, a burthen of the hearth;

And one that being thwarted ever swoons

And weeps herself into the place of power;

And one an uxor pauperis Ibyci.

So rare the household honey-making bee,

Man’s help! but we, we have the Blessed Virgin

For worship, and our Mother Church for bride;

And all the souls we saved and father’d here

Will greet us as our babes in Paradise.

What noise was that? she told us of arm’d men

Here in the city. Will you not withdraw?

BECKET.

I once was out with Henry in the days

When Henry loved me, and we came upon

A wild-fowl sitting on her nest, so still

I reach’d my hand and touch’d; she did not stir;

The snow had frozen round her, and she sat

Stone-dead upon a heap of ice-cold eggs.

Look! how this love, this mother, runs thro’ all

The world God made — even the beast — the bird!

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Ay, still a lover of the beast and bird?

But these arm’d men — will you not hide yourself?

Perchance the fierce De Brocs from Saltwood Castle,

To assail our Holy Mother lest she brood

Too long o’er this hard egg, the world, and send

Her whole heart’s heat into it, till it break

Into young angels. Pray you, hide yourself.

BECKET.

There was a little fair-hair’d Norman maid

Lived in my mother’s house: if Rosamund is

The world’s rose, as her name imports her — she

Was the world’s lily.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Ay, and what of her?

BECKET.

She died of leprosy.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

I know not why

You call these old things back again, my lord.

BECKET.

The drowning man, they say, remembers all

The chances of his life, just ere he dies.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Ay — but these arm’d men — will you drown yourself?

He loses half the meed of martyrdom

Who will be martyr when he might escape.

BECKET.

What day of the week? Tuesday?

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Tuesday, my lord,

BECKET.

On a Tuesday was I born, and on a Tuesday

Baptized; and on a Tuesday did I fly

Forth from Northampton; on a Tuesday pass’d

From England into bitter banishment;

On a Tuesday at Pontigny came to me

The ghostly warning of my martyrdom;

On a Tuesday from mine exile I return’d,

And on a Tuesday ——

[TRACY enters, then FITZURSE, DE BRITO, and DE MORVILLE. MONKS following.

— on a Tuesday ——      Tracy!

A long silence, broken by FITZURSE saying, contemptuously,

God help thee!

JOHN OF SALISBURY (aside).

How the good Archbishop reddens!

He never yet could brook the note of scorn.

FITZURSE.

My lord, we bring a message from the King

Beyond the water; will you have it alone,

Or with these listeners near you?

BECKET.  As you will.

FITZURSE.

Nay, as you will.

BECKET.

Nay, as you will.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.  Why then

Better perhaps to speak with them apart.

Let us withdraw.

[All go out except the four KNIGHTS and BECKET.

FITZURSE.

We are all alone with him.

Shall I not smite him with his own cross-staff?

DE MORVILLE.

No, look! the door is open: let him be.

FITZURSE.

The King condemns your excommunicating ——

BECKET.

This is no secret, but a public matter.

In here again!

[JOHN OF SALISBURY and MONKS return.

Now, sirs, the King’s commands!

FITZURSE.

The King beyond the water, thro’ our voices,

Commands you to be dutiful and leal

To your young King on this side of the water,

Not scorn him for the foibles of his youth.

What! you would make his coronation void

By cursing those who crown’d him. Out upon you!

BECKET.

Reginald, all men know I loved the Prince.

His father gave him to my care, and I

Became his second father: he had his faults,

For which I would have laid mine own life down

To help him from them, since indeed I loved him,

And love him next after my lord his father.

Rather than dim the splendour of his crown

I fain would treble and quadruple it

With revenues, realms, and golden provinces

So that were done in equity.

FITZURSE.

You have broken

Your bond of peace, your treaty with the King —

Wakening such brawls and loud disturbances

In England, that he calls you oversea

To answer for it in his Norman courts.

BECKET.

Prate not of bonds, for never, oh, never again

Shall the waste voice of the bond-breaking sea

Divide me from the mother church of England,

My Canterbury. Loud disturbances!

Oh, ay — the bells rang out even to deafening,

Organ and pipe, and dulcimer, chants and hymns

In all the churches, trumpets in the halls,

Sobs, laughter, cries: they spread their raiment down

Before me — would have made my pathway flowers,

Save that it was mid-winter in the street,

But full mid-summer in those honest hearts.

FITZURSE.

The King commands you to absolve the bishops

Whom you have excommunicated.

BECKET.

I?

Not I, the Pope. Ask him for absolution.

FITZURSE.

But you advised the Pope.

BECKET.

And so I did.

They have but to submit.

THE FOUR KNIGHTS.

The King commands you.

We are all King’s men.

BECKET.

King’s men at least should know

That their own King closed with me last July

That I should pass the censures of the Church

On those that crown’d young Henry in this realm,

And trampled on the rights of Canterbury.

FITZURSE.

What! dare you charge the King with treachery?

He sanction thee to excommunicate

The prelates whom he chose to crown his son!

BECKET.

I spake no word of treachery, Reginald.

But for the truth of this I make appeal

To all the archbishops, bishops, prelates, barons,

Monks, knights, five hundred, that were there and heard.

Nay, you yourself were there: you heard yourself.

FITZURSE.

I was not there.

BECKET.

I saw you there.

FITZURSE.  I was not.

BECKET.

You were. I never forget anything.

FITZURSE.

He makes the King a traitor, me a liar.

How long shall we forbear him?

JOHN OF SALISBURY (drawing BECKET aside).

O my good lord.

Speak with them privately on this hereafter.

You see they have been revelling, and I fear

Are braced and brazen’d up with Christmas wines

For any murderous brawl.

BECKET.

And yet they prate

Of mine, my brawls, when those, that name themselves

Of the King’s part, have broken down our barns,

Wasted our diocese, outraged our tenants,

Lifted our produce, driven our clerics out —

Why they, your friends, those ruffians, the De Brocs,

They stood on Dover beach to murder me,

They slew my stags in mine own manor here,

Mutilated, poor brute, my sumpter-mule,

Plunder’d the vessel full of Gascon wine,

The old King’s present, carried off the casks,

Kill’d half the crew, dungeon’d the other half

In Pevensey Castle ——

DE MORVILLE.

Why not rather then,

If this be so, complain to your young King,

Not punish of your own authority?

BECKET.

Mine enemies barr’d all access to the boy.

They knew he loved me.

Hugh, Hugh, how proudly you exalt your head!

Nay, when they seek to overturn our rights,

I ask no leave of king, or mortal man,

To set them straight again. Alone I do it.

Give to the King the things that are the King’s,

And those of God to God.

FITZURSE.

Threats! threats! ye hear him.

What! will he excommunicate all the world?

[The KNIGHTS come round BECKET.

DE TRACY.

He shall not.

DE BRITO.

Well, as yet — I should be grateful —

He hath not excommunicated me.

BECKET.

Because thou wast born excommunicate.

I never spied in thee one gleam of grace.

DE BRITO.

Your Christian’s Christian charity!

BECKET.        By St. Denis ——

DE BRITO.

Ay, by St. Denis, now will he flame out,

And lose his head as old St. Denis did.

BECKET.

Ye think to scare me from my loyalty

To God and to the Holy Father. No!

Tho’ all the swords in England flash’d above me

Ready to fall at Henry’s word or yours —

Tho’ all the loud-lung’d trumpets upon earth

Blared from the heights of all the thrones of her kings,

Blowing the world against me, I would stand

Clothed with the full authority of Rome,

Mail’d in the perfect panoply of faith,

First of the foremost of their files, who die

For God, to people heaven in the great day

When God makes up his jewels. Once I fled —

Never again, and you — I marvel at you —

Ye know what is between us. Ye have sworn

Yourselves my men when I was Chancellor —

My vassals — and yet threaten your Archbishop

In his own house.

KNIGHTS.

Nothing can be between us

That goes against our fealty to the King.

FITZURSE.

And in his name we charge you that ye keep

This traitor from escaping.

BECKET.

Rest you easy,

For I am easy to keep. I shall not fly.

Here, here, here will you find me.

DE MORVILLE.  Know you not

You have spoken to the peril of your life?

BECKET.

As I shall speak again.

FITZURSE, DE TRACY, and DE BRITO.

To arms!

[They rush out, DE MORVILLE lingers.

BECKET.  De Morville,

I had thought so well of you; and even now

You seem the least assassin of the four.

Oh, do not damn yourself for company!

Is it too late for me to save your soul?

I pray you for one moment stay and speak.

DE MORVILLE.

Becket, it is too late.

[Exit.

BECKET.

Is it too late?

Too late on earth may be too soon in hell.

KNIGHTS (in the distance).

Close the great gate — ho, there — upon the town.

BECKET’S RETAINERS.

Shut the hall-doors.

[A pause.

BECKET.

You hear them, brother John;

Why do you stand so silent, brother John?

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

For I was musing on an ancient saw,

Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re,

Is strength less strong when hand-in-hand with grace?

Gratior in pulchro corpore virtus. Thomas,

Why should you heat yourself for such as these?

BECKET.

Methought I answer’d moderately enough.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

As one that blows the coal to cool the fire.

My lord, I marvel why you never lean

On any man’s advising but your own.

BECKET.

Is it so, Dan John? well, what should I have done?

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

You should have taken counsel with your friends

Before these bandits brake into your presence.

They seek — you make — occasion for your death.

BECKET.

My counsel is already taken, John.

I am prepared to die.

JOHN OF SALISBURY

We are sinners all,

The best of all not all-prepared to die.

BECKET.

God’s will be done!

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Ay, well. God’s will be done!

GRIM (re-entering).

My lord, the knights are arming in the garden

Beneath the sycamore.

BECKET.

Good! let them arm.

GRIM.

And one of the De Brocs is with them, Robert,

The apostate monk that was with Randulf here.

He knows the twists and turnings of the place.

BECKET.

No fear!

GRIM.

No fear, my lord.

[Crashes on the hall-doors. The Monks flee.

BECKET (rising).

Our dovecote flown!

I cannot tell why monks should all be cowards.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Take refuge in your own cathedral, Thomas.

BECKET.

Do they not fight the Great Fiend day by day?

Valour and holy life should go together.

Why should all monks be cowards?

JOHN OF SALISBURY.  Are they so?

I say, take refuge in your own cathedral.

BECKET.

Ay, but I told them I would wait them here.

GRIM.

May they not say you dared not show yourself

In your old place? and vespers are beginning.

[Bell rings for vespers till end of scene.

You should attend the office, give them heart.

They fear you slain: they dread they know not what.

BECKET.

Ay, monks, not men.

GRIM.

I am a monk, my lord,

Perhaps, my lord, you wrong us.

Some would stand by you to the death.

BECKET.        Your pardon.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

He said, ‘Attend the office.’

BECKET.

Attend the office?

Why then — The Cross! — who bears my Cross before me?

Methought they would have brain’d me with it, John.

[GRIM takes it.

GRIM.

I! Would that I could bear thy cross indeed!

BECKET.

The Mitre!

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Will you wear it? — there!

[BECKET puts on the mitre.

BECKET.        The Pall!

I go to meet my King!

[Puts on the pall.

GRIM.

To meet the King?

[Crashes on the doors as they go out.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

Why do you move with such a stateliness?

Can you not hear them yonder like a storm,

Battering the doors, and breaking thro’ the walls?

BECKET.

Why do the heathen rage? My two good friends,

What matters murder’d here, or murder’d there?

And yet my dream foretold my martyrdom

In mine own church. It is God’s will. Go on.

Nay, drag me not. We must not seem to fly.

Scene III

North Transept of Canterbury Cathedral. On the right hand a flight of steps leading to the Choir, another flight on the left, leading to the North Aisle. Winter afternoon slowly darkening. Low thunder now and then of an approaching storm. MONKS heard chanting the service. ROSAMUND kneeling.

ROSAMUND.

O blessed saint, O glorious Benedict, —

These arm’d men in the city, these fierce faces —

Thy holy follower founded Canterbury —

Save that dear head which now is Canterbury,

Save him, he saved my life, he saved my child,

Save him, his blood would darken Henry’s name;

Save him till all as saintly as thyself

He miss the searching flame of purgatory,

And pass at once perfect to Paradise.

[Noise of steps and voices in the cloisters.

Hark! Is it they? Coming! He is not here —

Not yet, thank heaven. O save him!

[Goes up steps leading to choir.

BECKET (entering, forced along by JOHN OF SALISBURY and GRIM).  No, I tell you!

I cannot bear a hand upon my person,

Why do you force me thus against my will?

GRIM.

My lord, we force you from your enemies.

BECKET.

As you would force a king from being crown’d.

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

We must not force the crown of martyrdom.

[Service stops. MONKS come down from the

stairs that lead to the choir.

MONKS.

Here is the great Archbishop! He lives! he lives!

Die with him, and be glorified together.

BECKET.

Together? . . . get you back! go on with the office.

MONKS.

Come, then, with us to vespers.

BECKET.  How can I come

When you so block the entry? Back, I say!

Go on with the office. Shall not Heaven be served

Tho’ earth’s last earthquake clash’d the minster-bells,

And the great deeps were broken up again,

And hiss’d against the sun?

[Noise in the cloisters.

MONKS.

The murderers, hark!

Let us hide! let us hide!

BECKET.

What do these people fear?

MONKS.

Those arm’d men in the cloister.

BECKET.  Be not such cravens!

I will go out and meet them.

GRIM and others.

Shut the doors!

We will not have him slain before our face.

[They close the doors of the transept. Knocking.

Fly, fly, my lord, before they burst the doors!

[Knocking.

BECKET.

Why, these are our own monks who follow’d us!

And will you bolt them out, and have them slain?

Undo the doors: the church is not a castle:

Knock, and it shall be open’d. Are you deaf?

What, have I lost authority among you?

Stand by, make way!

[Opens the doors. Enter MONKS from cloister.

Come in, my friends, come in!

Nay, faster, faster!

MONKS.

Oh, my lord Archbishop,

A score of knights all arm’d with swords and axes —

To the choir, to the choir!

[Monks divide, part flying by the stairs on the right, part by those on the left. The rush of these last bears BECKET along with them some way up the steps, where he is left standing alone.

BECKET.

Shall I too pass to the choir,

And die upon the Patriarchal throne

Of all my predecessors?

JOHN OF SALISBURY.

No, to the crypt!

Twenty steps down. Stumble not in the darkness,

Lest they should seize thee.

GRIM.

To the crypt? no — no,

To the chapel of St. Blaise beneath the roof!

JOHN OF SALISBURY (pointing upward and downward).

That way, or this! Save thyself either way.

BECKET.

Oh, no, not either way, nor any way

Save by that way which leads thro’ night to light.

Not twenty steps, but one.

And fear not I should stumble in the darkness,

Not tho’ it be their hour, the power of darkness,

But my hour too, the power of light in darkness!

I am not in the darkness but the light,

Seen by the Church in Heaven, the Church on earth —

The power of life in death to make her free!

[Enter the four KNIGHTS. JOHN OF SALISBURY flies to the altar of St. Benedict.

FITZURSE.

Here, here, King’s men!

[Catches hold of the last flying MONK.

Where is the traitor Becket?

MONK.

I am not he! I am not he, my lord.

I am not he indeed!

FITZURSE.

Hence to the fiend!

[Pushes him away.

Where is this treble traitor to the King?

DE TRACY.

Where is the Archbishop, Thomas Becket?

BECKET.  Here.

No traitor to the King, but Priest of God,

Primate of England.

[Descending into the transept.

I am he ye seek.

What would ye have of me?

FITZURSE.

Your life.

DE TRACY.        Your life.

DE MORVILLE.

Save that you will absolve the bishops.

BECKET.  Never, —

Except they make submission to the Church.

You had my answer to that cry before.

DE MORVILLE.

Why, then you are a dead man; flee!

BECKET.        I will not.

I am readier to be slain, than thou to slay.

Hugh, I know well thou hast but half a heart

To bathe this sacred pavement with my blood.

God pardon thee and these, but God’s full curse

Shatter you all to pieces if ye harm

One of my flock!

FITZURSE.

Was not the great gate shut?

They are thronging in to vespers — half the town.

We shall be overwhelm’d. Seize him and carry him!

Come with us — nay — thou art our prisoner — come!

DE MORVILLE.

Ay, make him prisoner, do not harm the man.

[FITZURSE lays hold of the ARCHBISHOP’S pall.

BECKET.

Touch me not!

DE BRITO.

How the good priest gods himself!

He is not yet ascended to the Father.

FITZURSE.

I will not only touch, but drag thee hence.

BECKET.

Thou art my man, thou art my vassal. Away!

[Flings him off till he reels, almost to falling.

DE TRACY (lays hold of the pall).

Come; as he said, thou art our prisoner.

BECKET.  Down!

[Throws him headlong.

FITZURSE (advances with drawn sword).

I told thee that I should remember thee!

BECKET.

Profligate pander!

FITZURSE.

Do you hear that? strike, strike.

[Strikes off the ARCHBISHOP’S mitre, and wounds him in the forehead.

BECKET (covers his eyes with his hand).

I do commend my cause to God, the Virgin,

St. Denis of France and St. Alphege of England,

And all the tutelar Saints of Canterbury.

[GRIM wraps his arms about the ARCHBISHOP.

Spare this defence, dear brother.

[TRACY has arisen, and approaches, hesitatingly, ;with his sword raised.

FITZURSE.  Strike him, Tracy!

ROSAMUND (rushing down steps from the choir).

No, No, No, No!

FITZURSE.

This wanton here. De Morville,

Hold her away.

DE MORVILLE.

I hold her.

ROSAMUND (held back by DE MORVILLE, and stretching out her arms).

Mercy, mercy,

As you would hope for mercy.

FITZURSE.

Strike, I say.

GRIM.

O God, O noble knights, O sacrilege!

Strike our Archbishop in his own cathedral!

The Pope, the King, will curse you — the whole world

Abhor you; ye will die the death of dogs!

Nay, nay, good Tracy.          [Lifts his arm.

FITZURSE.

Answer not, but strike.

DE TRACY.

There is my answer then.

[Sword falls on GRIM’S arm, and glances from it, wounding BECKET.

GRIM.

Mine arm is sever’d.

I can no more — fight out the good fight — die

Conqueror.

[Staggers into the chapel of St. Benedict.

BECKET (falling on his knees).

At the right hand of Power —

Power and great glory — for thy Church, O Lord —

Into Thy hands, O Lord — into Thy hands! ——

[Sinks prone.

DE BRITO.

This last to rid thee of a world of brawls!        (Kills him.)

The traitor’s dead, and will arise no more.

FITZURSE.

Nay, have we still’d him? What! the great Archbishop!

Does he breathe? No?

DE TRACY.

No, Reginald, he is dead.

(Storm bursts.)1

DE MORVILLE.

Will the earth gape and swallow us?

DE BRITO.        The deed’s done —

Away!

[DE BRITO, DE TRACY, FITZURSE. rush out, crying ‘King’s men!’ DE MORVILLE follows slowly. Flashes of lightning thro’ the Cathedral. ROSAMUND seen kneeling by the body of BECKET.

THE CUP: A TRAGEDY

CONTENTS

Dramatis Personæ

Act I

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Act II

Scene I

Dramatis Personæ

GALATIANS.

SYNORIX, an ex-Tetrarch.

SINNATUS, a Tetrarch.

PHŒBE.

CAMMA, wife of Sinnatus, afterwards

Priestess in the Temple of Artemis.

Attendant.

Boy.

Maid.

ROMANS

ANTONIUS, a Roman General

PUBLIUS.

Nobleman.

Messenger.

Act I

Scene I

Distant View of a City of Galatia.

As the curtain rises, Priestesses are heard singing in the Temple. Boy discovered on a pathway among Rocks, picking grapes. A party of Roman Soldiers, guarding a prisoner in chains, come down the pathway and exeunt.

Enter SYNORIX (looking round). Singing ceases.

SYNORIX.

Pine, beech and plane, oak, walnut, apricot,

Vine, cypress, poplar, myrtle, bowering-in

The city where she dwells. She past me here

Three years ago when I was flying from

My Tetrarchy to Rome. I almost touch’d her —

A maiden slowly moving on to music

Among her maidens to this Temple — O Gods

She is my fate — else wherefore has my fate

Brought me again to her own city? — married

Since — married Sinnatus, the Tetrarch here —

But if he be conspirator, Rome will chain,

Or slay him. I may trust to gain her then

When I shall have my tetrarchy restored

By Rome, our mistress, grateful that I show’d her

The weakness and the dissonance of our clans,

And how to crush them easily. Wretched race!

And once I wish’d to scourge them to the bones.

But in this narrow breathing-time of life

Is vengeance for its own sake worth the while,

If once our ends are gain’d? and now this cup —

I never felt such passion for a woman.

[Brings out a cup and scroll from under his cloak.

What have I written to her?

[Reading the scroll.

‘To the admired Camma, wife of Sinnatus, the Tetrarch, one who years ago, himself an adorer of our great goddess, Artemis, beheld you afar off worshipping in her Temple, and loved you for it, sends you this cup rescued from the burning of one of her shrines in a city thro’ which he past with the Roman army: it is the cup we use in our marriages. Receive it from one who cannot at present write himself other than

‘A GALATIAN SERVING BY FORCE IN THE ROMAN LEGION.’

[Turns and looks up to Boy.

Boy, dost thou know the house of Sinnatus?

BOY.

These grapes are for the house of Sinnatus —

Close to the Temple.

SYNORIX.

Yonder?

BOY.

Yes.

SYNORIX (aside).

That I

With all my range of women should yet shun

To meet her face to face at once! My boy,

[Boy comes down rocks to him.

Take thou this letter and this cup to Camma,

The wife of Sinnatus.

BOY.

Going or gone to-day

To hunt with Sinnatus.

SYNORIX.

That matters not.

Take thou this cup and leave it at her doors.

[Gives the cup and scroll to the Boy.

BOY.

I will, my lord.

[Takes his basket of grapes and exit.

Enter ANTONIUS.

ANTONIUS (meeting the Boy as he goes out).

Why, whither runs the boy?

Is that the cup you rescued from the fire?

SYNORIX.

I send it to the wife of Sinnatus,

One half besotted in religious rites.

You come here with your soldiers to enforce

The long-withholden tribute: you suspect

This Sinnatus of playing patriotism,

Which in your sense is treason. You have yet

No proof against him: now this pious cup

Is passport to their house, and open arms

To him who gave it; and once there I warrant

I worm thro’ all their windings.

ANTONIUS.

If you prosper,

Our Senate, wearied of their tetrarchies,

Their quarrels with themselves, their spites at Rome,

Is like enough to cancel them, and throne

One king above them all, who shall be true

To the Roman: and from what I heard in Rome,

This tributary crown may fall to you.

SYNORIX.

The king, the crown! their talk in Rome? is it so?

[ANTONIUS nods.

Well — I shall serve Galatia taking it,

And save her from herself, and be to Rome

More faithful than a Roman.

[Turns and sees CAMMA coming.

Stand aside,

Stand aside; here she comes

[Watching CAMMA as she enters with her Maid.

CAMMA (to Maid).

Where is he, girl?

MAID.

You know the waterfall

That in the summer keeps the mountain side,

But after rain o’erleaps a jutting rock

And shoots three hundred feet.

CAMMA.

The stag is there?

MAID.

Seen in the thicket at the bottom there

But yester-even.

CAMMA.

Good then, we will climb

The mountain opposite and watch the chase.

[They descend the rocks and exeunt.

SYNORIX (watching her). (Aside.)

The bust of Juno and the brows and eyes

Of Venus; face and form unmatchable!

ANTONIUS.

Why do you look at her so lingeringly?

SYNORIX.

To see if years have changed her.

ANTONIUS (sarcastically).

Love her, do you?

SYNORIX.

I envied Sinnatus when he married her.

ANTONIUS.

She knows it? Ha

SYNORIX.

She — no, nor ev’n my face.

ANTONIUS.

Nor Sinnatus either?

SYNORIX.

No, nor Sinnatus.

ANTONIUS.

Hot-blooded! I have heard them say in Rome,

That your own people cast you from their bounds,

For some unprincely violence to a woman,

As Rome did Tarquin.

SYNORIX.

Well, if this were so

I here return like Tarquin — for a crown.

ANTONIUS.

And may be foil’d like

Tarquin, if you follow

Not the dry light of Rome’s straight-going policy,

But the fool-fire of love or lust, which well

May make you lose yourself, may even drown you

In the good regard of Rome.

SYNORIX.

Tut-fear me not;

I ever had my victories among women.

I am most true to Rome.

ANTONIUS (aside).

I hate the man

What filthy tools our Senate works with! Still

I must obey them. (Aloud.) Fare you well.     [Going.

SYNORIX.

Farewell!

ANTONIUS (stopping).

A moment! If you track this Sinnatus

In any treason, I give you here an order    [Produces a paper.

To seize upon him. Let me sign it.

(Signs it.) There

‘Antonius leader of the Roman Legion.’

[Hands the paper to Synorix. Goes up pathway and exit.

SYNORIX.

Woman again! — but I am wiser now.

No rushing on the game — the net, — the net.

[Shouts of ‘Sinnatus! Sinnatus!’ Then horn.

Looking off stage.] He comes, a rough, bluff, simple-looking fellow.

If we may judge the kernel by the husk,

Not one to keep a woman’s fealty when

Assailed by Craft and Love. I’ll join with him

I may reap something from him — come upon her

Again, perhaps, to-day — her. Who are with him?

I see no face that knows me. Shall I risk it?

I am a Roman now, they dare not touch me.

I will.

[Enter SINNATUS, HUNTSMEN and hounds.

Fair Sir, a happy day to you!

You reck but little of the Roman here,

While you can take your pastime in the woods.

SINNATUS.

Ay, ay, why not? What would you with me, man?

SYNORIX.

I am a life-long lover of the chase,

And tho’ a stranger fain would be allow’d

To join the hunt.

SINNATUS.

Your name?

SYNORIX.

Strato, my name.

SINNATUS.

No Roman name?

SYNORIX.

A Greek, my lord; you know

That we Galatians are both Greek and Gaul.

[Shouts and horns in the distant

SINNATUS.

Hillo, the stag! (To SYNORIX.)

What, you are all unfurnish’d?

Give him a bow and arrows — follow — follow.

[Exit, followed by Huntsmen.

SYNORIX.

Slowly but surely — till I see my way.

It is the one step in the dark beyond

Our expectation, that amazes us.

[Distant shouts and horns.

Hillo! Hillo!

[Exit Synorix. Shouts and horns.

Scene II

A Room in the Tetrarch’s House.

Frescoed figures on the walls. Moonlight outside. A couch with cushions on it. A small table with a flagon of wine, cups, plate of grapes, etc., also the cup of Scene I. A chair with drapery on it.

CAMMA enters, and opens curtains of window.

CAMMA.

No Sinnatus yet — and there the rising moon.

[Takes up a cithern and sits on court.

Plays and sings.

Moon on the field and the foam,

Moon on the waste and the wold,

Moon bring him home, bring him home

Safe from the dark and the cold,

Home, sweet moon, bring him home,

Home with the flock to the fold —

Safe from the wolf ——

(Listening.) Is he coming? I thought I heard

A footstep. No not yet. They say that Rome

Sprang from a wolf. I fear my dear lord mixt

With some conspiracy against the wolf.

This mountain shepherd never dream’d of Rome.

(Sings.) Safe from the wolf to the fold ——

And that great break of precipice that runs

Thro’ all the wood, where twenty years ago

Huntsman, and hound, and deer were all neck-broken!

Nay, here he comes.

Enter SINNATUS followed by, SYNORIX.

SINNATUS (angrily).

I tell thee, my good fellow,

My arrow struck the stag.

SYNORIX.

But was it so?

Nay, you were further off: besides the wind

Went with my arrow.

SINNATUS.

I am sure I struck him.

SYNORIX.

And I am just as sure, my lord, I struck him.

(Aside.) And I may strike your game when you are gone.

CAMMA.

Come, come, we will not quarrel about the stag.

I have had a weary day in watching you.

Yours must have been a wearier. Sit and eat,

And take a hunter’s vengeance on the meats.

SINNATUS.

No, no — we have eaten — we are heated. Wine!

CANNA.

Who is our guest?

SINNATUS.

Strato he calls himself.

[CAMMA offers wine to SYNORIX, while SINNATUS helps himself

SINNATUS.

I pledge you, Strato.

[Drinks.

SYNORIX.

And I you, my lord.

[Drinks.

SINNATUS (seeing the cup sent to Camma).

What’s here?

CAMMA.

A strange gift sent to me to-day.

A sacred cup saved from a blazing shrine

Of our great Goddess, in some city where

Antonius past. I had believed that Rome

Made war upon the peoples not the Gods.

SYNORIX.

Most like the city rose against Antonius,

Whereon he fired it, and the sacred shrine

By chance was burnt along with it.

SINNATUS.

Had you then

No message with the cup?

CAMMA.

Why, yes, see here.

[Gives him the scroll.

SINNATUS (reads).

‘To the admired Camma, — beheld you afar off — loved you — sends you this cup — the cup we use in our marriages — cannot at present write himself other than

‘A GALATIAN SERVING BY FORCE IN THE ROMAN LEGION.’

Serving by force! Were there no boughs to hang on,

Rivers to drown in? Serve by force? No force

Could make me serve by force.

SYNORIX.

How then, my lord?

The Roman is encampt without your city —

The force of Rome a thousand-fold our own.

Must all Galatia hang or drown herself?

And you a Prince and Tetrarch in this province —

SINNATUS.

Province

SYNORIX.

Well, well, they call it so in Rome.

SINNATUS (angrily).

Province!

SYNORIX.

A noble anger! but Antonius

To-morrow will demand your tribute — you,

Can you make war? Have you alliances?

Bithynia, Pontus, Paphlagonia?

We have had our leagues of old with Eastern kings.

There is my hand — if such a league there be.

What will you do?

SINNATUS.

Not set myself abroach

And run my mind out to a random guest

Who join’d me in the hunt. You saw my hounds

True to the scent; and we have two-legg’d dogs

Among us who can smell a true occasion,

And when to bark and how.

SYNORIX.

My good Lord Sinnatus,

I once was at the hunting of a lion.

Roused by the clamour of the chase he woke,

Came to the front of the wood — his monarch mane

Bristled about his quick ears — he stood there

Staring upon the hunter. A score of dogs

Gnaw’d at his ankles: at the last he felt

The trouble of his feet, put forth one paw,

Slew four, and knew it not, and so remain’d

Staring upon the hunter: and this Rome

Will crush you if you wrestle with her; then

Save for some slight report in her own Senate

Scarce know what she has done.

(Aside.) Would I could move him,

Provoke him any way! (Aloud.) The Lady Camma,

Wise I am sure as she is beautiful,

Will close with me that to submit at once

Is better than a wholly-hopeless war,

Our gallant citizens murder’d all in vain,

Son, husband, brother gash’d to death in

And the small state more cruelly trampled on

Than had she never moved.

CAMMA.

Sir, I had once

A boy who died a babe; but were he living

And grown to man and Sinnatus will’d it, I

Would set him in the front rank of the fight

With scarce a pang. (Rises.) Sir, if a state submit

At once, she may be blotted out at once

And swallow’d in the conqueror’s chronicle.

Whereas in wars of freedom and defence

The glory and grief of battle won or lost

Solders a race together — yea — tho’ they fail,

The names of those who fought and fell are like

A bank’d-up fire that flashes out again

From century to century, and at last

May lead them on to victory — I hope so —

Like phantoms of the Gods.

SINNATUS.

Well spoken, wife.

SYNORIX (bowing).

Madam, so well I yield.

SINNATUS.

I should not wonder

If Synorix, who has dwelt three years in Rome

And wrought his worst against his native land,

Returns with this Antonius.

SYNORIX.

What is Synorix?

SINNATUS.

Galatian, and not know? This Synorix

Was Tetrarch here, and tyrant also — did

Dishonour to our wives.

SYNORIX.

Perhaps you judge him

With feeble charity: being as you tell me

Tetrarch, there might be willing wives enough

To feel dishonour, honour.

CAMMA.

Do not say so.

I know of no such wives in all Galatia.

There may be courtesans for aught I know

Whose life is one dishonour.

Enter ATTENDANT.

ATTENDANT (aside).

My lord, the men!

SINNATUS (aside).

Our anti-Roman faction?

ATTENDANT (aside).

Ay, my lord.

SYNORIX (overhearing). (Aside.)

I have enough — their anti-Roman faction.

SINNATUS (aloud).

Some friends of mine would speak with me without.

You, Strato, make good cheer till I return.

[Exit.

SYNORIX.

I have much to say, no time to say it in.

First, lady, know myself am that Galatian

Who sent the cup.

CAMMA.

I thank you from my heart.

SYNORIX.

Then that I serve with

Rome to serve Galatia.

That is my secret: keep it, or you sell me

To torment and to death.        [Coming closer.

For your ear only —

I love you — for your love to the great Goddess.

The Romans sent me here a spy upon you,

To draw you and your husband to your doom.

I’d sooner die than do it.

[Takes out paper given him by Antonius.

This paper sign’d

Antonius — will you take it, read it? there!

CAMMA.

(Reads.) ‘You are to seize on Sinnatus, — if — —’

SYNORIX (Snatches paper.)

No more.

What follows is for no wife’s eyes. O Camma,

Rome has a glimpse of this conspiracy;

Rome never yet hath spar’d conspirator.

Horrible! flaying, scourging, crucifying ——

CAMMA.

I am tender enough. Why do you practise on me?

SYNORIX.

Why should I practise on you? How you wrong me!

I am sure of being every way malign’d.

And if you should betray me to your husband ——

CAMMA.

Will you betray him by this order?

SYNORIX.

See,

I tear it all to pieces, never dream’d

Of acting on it.   [Tears the paper.

GAMMA.

I owe you thanks for ever.

SYNORIX.

Hath Sinnatus never told you of this plot?

CAMMA.

What plot?

SYNORIX.

A child’s sandcastle on the beach

For the next wave — all seen, — all calculated,

All known by Rome. No chance for Sinnatus.

CAMMA.

Why said you not as much to my brave Sinnatus?

SYNORIX.

Brave — ay — too brave, too over-confident,

Too like to ruin himself, and you, and me!

Who else, with this black thunderbolt of Rome

Above him, would have chased the stag to-day

In the full face of all the Roman camp?

A miracle that they let him home again,

Not caught, maim’d, blinded him.

[CAMMA shudders.

(Aside.) I have made her tremble.

(Aloud.) I know they mean to torture him to death.

I dare not tell him how I came to know it;

I durst not trust him with — my serving Rome

To serve Galatia: you heard him on the letter.

Not say as much? I all but said as much.

I am sure I told him that his plot was folly.

I say it to you — you are wiser — Rome knows all,

But you know not the savagery of Rome.

CAMMA.

O — have you power with Rome? use it for him!

SYNORIX.

Alas! I have no such power with Rome. All that

Lies with Antonius.

[As if struck by, a sudden thought.

Comes over to her

He will pass to-morrow

In the gray dawn before the Temple doors.

You have beauty, — O great beauty, — and Antonius,

So gracious toward women, never yet

Flung back a woman’s prayer. Plead to him,

I am sure you will prevail.

CAMMA.

Still — I should tell

My husband.

SYNORIX.

Will he let you plead for him

To a Roman?

CAMMA.

I fear not.

SYNORIX.

Then do not tell him.

Or tell him, if you will, when you return,

When you have charm’d our general into mercy,

And all is safe again. O dearest lady,

[Murmurs of ‘Synorix! Synorix!’ heard outside.

Think, — torture, — death, — and come.

CAMMA.

I will, I will.

And I will not betray you.

SYNORIX (aside). (As SINNATUS enters.)

Stand apart.

Enter SINNATUS and ATTENDANT.

SINNATUS.

Thou art that Synorix!

One whom thou hast wrong’d

Without there, knew thee with Antonius.

They howl for thee, to rend thee head from limb.

SYNORIX.

I am much malign’d. I thought to serve Galatia.

SINNATUS.

Serve thyself first, villain! They shall not harm

My guest within my house. There! (points to door) there! this door

Opens upon the forest! Out, begone

Henceforth I am thy mortal enemy.

SYNORIX.

However I thank thee (draws his sword); thou hast saved my life.

[Exit.

SINNATUS. (To Attendant.)

Return and tell them Synorix is not here.

[Exit Attendant.

What did that villain Synorix say to you?

CAMMA.

Is he — that — Synorix?

SINNATUS.

Wherefore should you doubt it?

One of the men there knew him.

CAMMA.

Only one,

And he perhaps mistaken in the face.

SINNATUS.

Come, come, could he deny it? What did he say?

CAMMA.

What should he say?

SINNATUS.

What should he say, my wife!

He should say this, that being Tetrarch once

His own true people cast him from their doors

Like a base coin.

CAMMA.

Not kindly to them?

SINNATUS.

Kindly?

O the most kindly Prince in all the world!

Would clap his honest citizens on the back,

Bandy their own rude jests with them, be curious

About the welfare of their babes, their wives,

O ay — their wives — their wives. What should he say?

He should say nothing to my wife if I

Were by to throttle him! he steep’d himself

In all the lust of Rome. How should you guess

What manner of beast it is?

CAMMA.

Yet he seem’d kindly,

And said he loathed the cruelties that Rome

Wrought on her vassals.

SINNATUS.

Did he, honest man?

CAMMA.

And you, that seldom brook the stranger here,

Have let him hunt the stag with you to-day.

SINNATUS.

I warrant you now, he said he struck the stag.

CAMMA.

Why no, he never touch’d upon the stag.

SINNATUS.

Why so I said, my arrow. Well, to sleep.

[Goes to close door.

CAMMA.

Nay, close not yet the door upon a night

That looks half day.

SINNATUS.

True; and my friends may spy him

And slay him as he runs.

CAMMA.

He is gone already.

Oh look, — yon grove upon the mountain, — white

In the sweet moon as with a lovelier snow!

But what a blotch of blackness underneath!

Sinnatus, you remember — yea, you must,

That there three years ago — the vast vine-bowers

Ran to the summit of the trees, and dropt

Their streamers earthward, which a breeze of May

Took ever and anon, and open’d out

The purple zone of hill and heaven; there

You told your love; and like the swaying vines —

Yea, — with our eyes, — our hearts, our prophet hopes

Let in the happy distance, and that all

But cloudless heaven which we have found together

In our three married years! You kiss’d me there

For the first time. Sinnatus, kiss me now.

SINNATUS.

First kiss. (Kisses her.) There then. You talk almost as if it

Might be the last.

CAMMA.

Will you not eat a little?

SINNATUS.

No, no, we found a goatherd’s hut and shared

His fruits and milk. Liar! You will believe

Now that he never struck the stag — a brave one

Which you shall see to-morrow.

CAMMA.

I rise to-morrow

In the gray dawn, and take this holy cup

To lodge it in the shrine of Artemis.

SINNATUS.

Good!

CAMMA.

If I be not back in half an hour,

Come after me.

SINNATUS.

What! is there danger?

CAMMA.

Nay,

None that I know: ‘tis but a step from here

To the Temple.

SINNATUS.

All my brain is full of sleep.

Wake me before you go, I’ll after you —

After me now!            [Closes door and exit.

CAMMA (drawing curtains).

Your shadow. Synorix —

His face was not malignant, and he said

That men malign’d him. Shall I go? Shall I go?

Death, torture —

‘He never yet flung back a woman’s prayer’ —

I go, but I will have my dagger with me.

[Exit.

Scene III

Same as Scene I.

Dawn.

Music and Singing in the Temple.

Enter SYNORIX watchfully, after him PUBLIUS and SOLDIERS.

SYNORIX.

Publius!

PUBLIUS.

Here!

SYNORIX.

Do you remember what I told you?

PUBLIUS.

When you cry ‘Rome, Rome,’ to seize

On whomsoever may be talking with you,

Or man, or woman, as traitors unto Rome.

SYNORIX.

Right. Back again. How many of you are there?

PUBLIUS.

Some halt a score.

[Exeunt Soldiers and Publius.

SYNORIX.

I have my guard about me.

I need not fear the crowd that hunted me

Across the woods, last night. I hardly gain’d

The camp at midnight. Will she come to me

Now that she knows me Synorix? Not if Sinnatus

Has told her all the truth about me. Well,

I cannot help the mould that I was cast in.

I fling all that upon my fate, my star.

I know that I am genial, I would be

Happy, and make all others happy so

They did not thwart me. Nay, she will not cone.

Yet if she be a true and loving wife

She may, perchance, to save this husband. Ay!

See, see, my white bird stepping toward the snare.

Why now I count it all but miracle,

That this brave heart of mine should shake me so,

As helplessly as some unbearded boy’s

When first he meets his maiden in a bower.

[Enter CAMMA (with cup).

The lark first takes the sunlight on his wing,

Put you, twin sister of the morning star,

Forelead the sun.

CAMMA.

Where is Antonius?

SYNORIX.

Not here as yet. You are too early for him.

[She crosses towards Temple.

SYNORIX.

Nay, whither go you now?

CAMMA.

To lodge this cup

Within the holy shrine of Artemis,

And so return.

SYNORIX.

To find Antonius here.

[She goes into the Temple, he looks after her.

The loveliest life that ever drew the light

Front heaven to brood upon her, and enrich

Earth with her shadow! I trust she will return.

These Romans dare not violate the Temple.

No, I must lure my game into the camp.

A woman I could live and die for. What!

Die for a woman, what new faith is this?

I am not mad, not sick, not old enough

To doat on one alone. Yes, mad for her,

Camma the stately, Camma the great-hearted,

So mad, I fear some strange and evil chance

Coming upon me, for by the Gods I seem

Strange to myself.

Re-enter CAMMA.

CAMMA.

Where is Antonius?

SYNORIX.

Where? As I said before, you are still too early.

CAMMA.

Too early to be here alone with thee;

For whether men malign thy name, or no,

It bears an evil savour among women.

Where is Antonius?        (Loud.)

SYNORIX.

Madam, as you know

The camp is half a league without the city;

If you will walk with me we needs must meet

Antonius coming, or at least shall find him

There in the camp.

CAMMA.

No, not one step with thee.

Where is Antonius? (Louder.)

SYNORIX (advancing towards her).

Then for your own sake,

Lady, I say it with all gentleness,

And for the sake of Sinnatus your husband,

I must compel you.

CAMMA (drawing her dagger).

Stay! — too near is death.

SYNORIX (disarming her).

Is it not easy to disarm a woman?

Enter SINNATUS (seizes him from behind by the throat).

SYNORIX (throttled and scarce audible).

Rome! Rome!

SINNATUS.

Adulterous dog!

SYNORIX (stabbing, him with Camma’s dagger).

What! will you have it?

[CAMMA utters a cry and runs to SINNATUS.

SINNATUS (falls backward).

I have it in my heart — to the Temple — fly-

For my sake — or they seize on thee. Remember

Away-farewell!        [Dies.

GAMMA (runs up the steps alto the Temple, looking back).

Farewell

SYNORIX (seeing her escape).

The women of the Temple drag her in.

Publius! Publius! No,

Antonius would not suffer me to break

Into the sanctuary. She hath escaped.

[Looking down at SINNATUS.

‘Adulterous dog!’ that red-faced rage at me!

Then with one quick short stab-eternal peace.

So end all passions. Then what use in passions?

To warm the cold bounds of our dying life

And, lest we freeze in mortal apathy,

Employ us, heat us, quicken us, help us, keep us

From seeing all too near that urn, those ashes

Which all must be. Well used, they serve us well.

I heard a saying in Egypt, that ambition

Is like the sea wave, which the more you drink,

The more you thirst — yea — drink too much, as men

Have done on rafts of wreck — it drives you mad.

I will be no such wreck, am no such gamester

As, having won the stake, would dare the chance

Of double, or losing all. The Roman Senate,

For I have always play’d into their hands,

Means me the crown. And Camma for my bride —

The people love her — if I win her love,

They too will cleave to me, as one with her.

There then I rest, Rome’s tributary king.

[Looking down on SINNATUS.

Why did I strike him? — having proof enough

Against the man, I surely should have left

That stroke to Rome. He saved my life too. Did he?

It seem’d so. I have playd the sudden fool.

And that sets her against me — for the moment.

Camma — well, well, I never found the woman

I could not force or wheedle to my will.

She will be glad at last to wear my crown.

And I will make Galatia prosperous too,

And we will chirp among our vines, and smile

At bygone things till that (pointing to SINNATUS) eternal peace.

Rome! Rome!

[Enter PUBLIUS and SOLDIERS.

Twice I cried Rome. Why came ye not before?

PUBLIUS.

Why come we now? Whom shall we seize upon?

SYNORIX (pointing to the body of Sinnatus).

The body of that dead traitor Sinnatus.

Bear him away.

Music and Singing in Temple.

Act II

Scene I

Interior of the Temple of Artemis.

Small gold gates on platform in front of the veil before the colossal statue of the Goddess, and in the centre of the Temple a tripod altar, on which is a lighted lamp. Lamps (lighted) suspended between each pillar. Tripods, vases, garlands of flowers, etc., about stage. Altar at back close to Goddess, with two cups. Solemn, music. Priestesses decorating the Temple.

(The Chorus of PRIESTESSES sing as they enter.)

Artemis, Artemis, hear us, O Mother, hear us, and bless us!

Artemis, thou that art life to the wind, to the wave, to the glebe, to the fire

Hear thy people who praise thee! O help us from all that oppress us!

Hear thy priestesses hymn thy glory! O yield them all their desire!

PRIESTESS.

Phœbe, that man from Synorix, who has been

So oft to see the Priestess, waits once more

Before the Temple.

PHŒBE.

We will let her know.

[Signs to one of the Priestesses, who goes out.

Since Camma fled from Synorix to our Temple,

And for her beauty, stateliness, and power,

Was chosen Priestess here, have you not mark’d

Her eyes were ever on the marble floor?

To-day they are fixt and bright — they look straight out.

Hath she made up her mind to marry him?

PRIESTESS.

To marry him who stabb’d her Sinnatus.

You will not easily make me credit that.

PHŒBE.

Ask her.

Enter CAMMA as Priestess (in front of the curtains).

PRIESTESS.

You will not marry Synorix?

CAMMA.

My girl, I am the bride of Death, and only

Marry the dead.

PRIESTESS.

Not Synorix then?

CAMMA.

My girl,

At times this oracle of great Artemis

Has no more power than other oracles

To speak directly.

PHŒBE.

Will you speak to him,

The messenger from Synorix who waits

Before the Temple?

CAMMA.

Why not? Let him enter.

[Comes forward on to step by tripod.

Enter a MESSENGER.

MESSENGER (kneels).

Greeting and health from Synorix! More than once

You have refused his hand. When last I saw you,

You all but yielded. He entreats you now

For your last answer. When he struck at Sinnatus —

As I have many a time declared to you —

He knew not at the moment who had fasten’d

About his throat — he begs you to forget it

As scarce his act: — a random stroke: all else

Was love for you: he prays you to believe him.

CAMMA.

I pray him to believe — that I believe him.

MESSENGER.

Why that is well. You mean to marry him?

CAMMA.

I mean to marry him — if that be well.

MESSENGER.

This very day the Romans crown him king

For all his faithful services to Rome.

He wills you then this day to marry him,

And so be throned together in the sight

Of all the people, that the world may know

You twain are reconciled, and no more feuds

Disturb our peaceful vassalage to Rome.

CAMMA.

To-day? Too sudden. I will brood upon it.

When do they crown him?

MESSENGER.

Even now.

CAMMA.

And where?

MESSENGER.

Here by your temple.

CAMMA.

Come once more to me

Before the crowning, — I will answer you.

[Exit Messenger.

PHŒBE.

Great Artemis! O Camma, can it be well,

Or good, or wise, that you should clasp a hand

Red with the sacred blood of Sinnatus?

CAMMA.

Good! mine own dagger driven by Synorix found

All good in the true heart of Sinnatus,

And quench’d it there for ever. Wise!

Life yields to death and wisdom bows to Fate,

Is wisest, doing so. Did not this man

Speak well? We cannot fight imperial Rome,

But he and I are both Galatian-born,

And tributary sovereigns, he and I

Might teach this Rome — from knowledge of our people —

Where to lay on her tribute — heavily here

And lightly there. Might I not live for that,

And drown all poor self-passion in the sense

Of public good?

PHŒBE.

I am sure you will not marry him.

CAMMA.

re you so sure? I pray you wait and see.

[Shouts (from the distance), ‘Synorix! Synorix!’

CAMMA.

Synorix, Synorix! So they cried Sinnatus

Not so long since — they sicken me. The One

Who shifts his policy suffers something, must

Accuse himself, excuse himself; the Many

Will feel no shame to give themselves the lie.

PHŒBE.

Most like it was the Roman soldier shouted.

CAMMA.

Their shield-borne patriot of the morning star

Hang’d at mid-day, their traitor of the dawn

The clamour’d darling of their afternoon

And that same head they would have play’d at ball with

And kick’d it featureless — they now would crown.

[Flourish of trumpets.

Enter a Galatian NOBLEMAN with crown on a cushion.

NOBLE (kneels).

Greeting and health from Synorix. He sends you

This diadem of the first Galatian Queen,

That you may feed your fancy on the glory of it,

And join your life this day with his, and wear it

Beside him on his throne. He waits your answer.

CAMMA.

Tell him there is one shadow among the shadows,

One ghost of all the ghosts — as yet so new,

So strange among them — such an alien there,

So much of husband in it still — that if

The shout of Synorix and Camma sitting

Upon one throne, should reach it, it would rise

He! . . . HE, with that red star between the ribs,

And my knife there — and blast the king and me,

And blanch the crowd with horror. I dare not, sir!

Throne him — and then the marriage — ay and tell him

That I accept the diadem of Galatia —

[All are amazed.

Yea, that ye saw me crown myself withal.        [Puts on the crown.

I wait him his crown’d queen.

NOBLE.

So will I tell him.

[Exit.

Music. Two Priestesses go up the steps before the shrine, draw the curtains on either side (discovering the Goddess), then open the gates and remain on steps, one on either side, and kneel. A priestess goes of and returns with a veil of marriage, then assists Phœbe to veil Camma. At the same tine Priestesses enter and stand on either side of the Temple. Camma and all the Priestesses kneel, raise their hands to the Goddess, and bow down.

[Shouts, ‘Synorix! Synorix!’ All rise.

CAMMA.

Fling wide the doors and let the new-made children

Of our imperial mother see the show.

[Sunlight pours through the doors.

I have no heart to do it. (To PHŒBE).

Look for me!

[Crouches. PHŒBE looks out.

[Shouts, ‘Synorix! Synorix!’

PHŒBE.

He climbs the throne. Hot blood, ambition, pride

So bloat and redden his face — O would it were

His third last apoplexy! O bestial

O how unlike our goodly Sinnatus.

CAMMA (on the ground).

You wrong him surely; far as the face goes

A goodlier-looking man than Sinnatus.

PHŒBE (aside).

How dare she say it?

I could hate her for it

But that she is distracted.

[A flourish of trumpets.

CAMMA.

Is he crown’d?

PHŒBE.

Ay, there they crown him.

[Crowd without shout, ‘Synorix! Synorix!’

[A Priestess brings a box of spices to Camma, who throws them on the altar-flame.

CAMMA.

Rouse the dead altar-flame, fling in the spices,

Nard, Cinnamon, amomum, benzoin.

Let all the air reel into a mist of odour,

As in the midmost heart of Paradise.

Lay down the Lydian carpets for the king.

The king should pace on purple to his bride,

And music there to greet my lord the king.            [Music.

(To PHŒBE). Dost thou remember when I wedded Sinnatus?

Ay, thou vast there — whether from maiden fears

Or reverential love for him I loved,

Or some strange second-sight, the marriage cup

Wherefrom we make libation to the Goddess

So shook within my hand, that the red wine

Ran down the marble and lookt like blood, like blood.

PHŒBE.

I do remember your first-marriage fears.

CAMMA.

I have no fears at this my second marriage.

See here — I stretch my hand out — hold it there.

How steady it is!

PHŒBE.

Steady enough to stab him!

CAMMA.

O hush! O peace! This violence ill becomes

The silence of our Temple. Gentleness,

Low words best chime with this solemnity.

Enter a procession of Priestesses and Children bearing garlands and golden goblets, and strewing flowers.

Enter SYNORIX (as King, with gold laurel-wreath crown and purple robes), followed by ANTONIUS, PUBLIUS, Noblemen, Guards, and the Populace.

CAMMA.

Hail, King!

SYNORIX.

Hail, Queen

The wheel of Fate has roll’d me to the top.

I would that happiness were gold, that I

Might cast my largess of it to the crowd!

I would that every man made feast to-day

Beneath the shadow of our pines and planes!

For all my truer life begins to-day.

The past is like a travell’d land now sunk

Below the horizon-like a barren shore

That grew salt weeds, but now all drown’d in love

And glittering at full tide — the bounteous bays

And havens filling with a blissful sea.

Nor speak I now too mightily, being King

And happy! happiest, Lady, in my power

To make you happy.

CAMMA.

Yes, sir.

SYNORIX.

Our Antonius,

Our faithful friend of Rome, tho’ Rome may set

A free foot where she will, yet of his courtesy

Entreats he may be present at our marriage.

CAMMA.

Let him come — a legion with him, if he will.

(To ANTONIUS.) Welcome, my lord Antonius, to our Temple.

(To SYNORIX.) You on this side the altar.

(To ANTONIUS.) You on that.

Call first upon the Goddess, Synorix.

[All face the Goddess. Priestesses, Children, Populace, and Guards kneel — the others remain standing.

SYNORIX.

O Thou, that dost inspire the germ with life,

The child, a thread within the house of birth,

And give him limbs, then air, and send him forth

The glory of his father — Thou whose breath

Is balmy wind to robe our hills with grass,

And kindle all our vales with myrtle-blossom,

And roll the golden oceans of our grain,

And sway the long grape-bunches of our vines,

And fill all hearts with fatness and the lust

Of plenty — make me happy in my marriage!

CHORUS (chanting).

Artemis, Artemis, hear him, Ionian Artemis!

CAMMA.

O Thou that slayest the babe within the womb

Or in the being born, or after slayest him

As boy or man, great Goddess, whose storm-voice

Unsockets the strong oak, and rears his root

Beyond his head, and strows our fruits, and lays

Our golden grain, and runs to sea and makes it

Foam over all the fleeted wealth of kings

And peoples, hear.

Whose arrow is the plague-whose quick flash splits

The mid-sea mast, and rifts the tower to the rock,

And hurls the victor’s column down with him

That crowns it, hear.

Who causest the safe earth to shudder and gape,

And gulf and flatten in her closing chasm

Domed cities, hear.

Whose lava-torrents blast and blacken a province

To a cinder, hear.

Whose winter-cataracts find a realm and leave it

A waste of rock and ruin, hear. I call thee

To make my marriage prosper to my wish!

CHORUS.

Artemis, Artemis, hear her, Ephesian Artemis!

CAMMA.

Artemis, Artemis, hear me, Galatian Artemis!

I call on our own Goddess in our own Temple.

CHORUS.

Artemis, Artemis, hear her, Galatian Artemis!

[Thunder. All rise.

SYNORIX (aside).

Thunder! Ay, ay, the storm was drawing hither

Across the hills when I was being crown’d.

I wonder if I look as pale as she?

CAMMA.

Art thou — still bent — on marrying?

SYNORIX.

Surely — yet

These are strange words to speak to Artemis.

CAMMA.

Words are not always what they seem, my King.

I will be faithful to thee till thou die.

SYNORIX.

I thank thee, Camma, — I thank thee.

CAMMA (turning to ANTONIUS).

Antonius,

Much graced are we that our Queen Rome in you

Deigns to look in upon our barbarisms.

[Turns, goes up steps to altar before the Goddess. Takes a cup from off the altar. Holds it towards ANTONIUS. ANTONIUS goes up to the foot of the steps opposite to SYNORIX.

You see this cup, my lord.

[Gives it to him.

ANTONIUS.

Most curious!

The many-breasted mother Artemis

Emboss’d upon it.

CAMMA.

It is old, I know not

How many hundred years. Give it me again.

It is the cup belonging our own Temple.

[Puts it back on altar, and takes up the cup of Act I. Showing it to ANTONIUS.

Here is another sacred to the Goddess,

The gift of Synorix; and the Goddess, being

For this most grateful, wills, thro’ me her Priestess,

In honour of his gift and of our marriage,

That Synorix should drink from his own cup.

SYNORIX.

I thank thee, Camma, — I thank thee.

CAMMA.

For — my lord —

It is our ancient custom in Galatia

That ere two souls be knit for life and death,

They two should drink together from one cup,

In symbol of their married unity,

Making libation to the Goddess. Bring me

The costly wines we use in marriages.

[They bring in a large jar of wine. CAMMA pours wine into cup.

(To SYNORIX.) See here, I fill it. (To ANTONIUS.) Will you drink, my lord?

ANTONIUS.

I? Why should I? I am not to he married.

CAMMA.

But that might bring a Roman blessing on us.

ANTONIUS (refusing cup).

Thy pardon, Priestess!

CAMMA.

Thou art in the right.

This blessing is for Synorix and for me.

See first I make libation to the Goddess,

[Makes libation.

And now I drink.

[Drinks and fills the cup again.

Thy turn, Galatian King.

Drink and drink deep — our marriage will be fruitful.

Drink and drink deep, and thou wilt make me happy.

[Synorix goes up to her. She hands him the cup. He drinks.

SYNORIX.

There, Camma! I have almost drain’d the cup —

A few drops left.

CAMMA.

Libation to the Goddess.

He throws the remaining drops on the altar and gives CAMMA the cup.

CAMMA (placing the cup on the altar).

Why then the Goddess hears.

[Comes down and forward to tripod. ANTONIUS follows.

Antonius,

Where wast thou on that morning when I came

To plead to thee for Sinnatus’s life,

Beside this temple half a year ago?

ANTONIUS.

I never heard of this request of thine.

SYNORIX (coming, forward hastily to foot of tripod steps).

I sought him and

I could not find him. Pray you,

Go on with the marriage rites.

CAMMA.

Antonius ——

‘Camma!’ who spake?

ANTONIUS.

Not I.

PHŒBE.

Nor any here.

CAMMA.

I am all but sure that some one spake. Antonius,

If you had found him plotting against Rome,

Would you have tortured Sinnatus to death?

ANTONIUS.

No thought was mine of torture or of death,

But had I found him plotting, I had counsell’d him

To rest from vain resistance. Rome is fated

To rule the world. Then, if he had not listen’d,

I might have sent him prisoner to Rome.

SYNORIX.

Why do you palter with the ceremony?

Go on with the marriage rites.

CAMMA.

They are finish’d.

SYNORIX.

How

CAMMA.

Thou halt drunk deep enough to make me happy.

Dost thou not feel the love I bear to thee

Glow thro’ thy veins?

SYNORIX.

The love I bear to thee

Glows thro’ my veins since first I look’d on thee.

But wherefore slur the perfect ceremony?

The sovereign of Galatia weds his Queen.

Let all be done to the fullest in the sight

Of all the Gods.

Nay, rather than so clip

The flowery robe of Hymen, we would add

Some golden fringe of gorgeousness beyond

Old use, to make the day memorial, when

Synorix first King, Camma, first Queen o’ the Realm,

Drew here the richest lot from Fate, to live

And die together.

This pain — what is it? — again?

I had a touch of this last year — in — Rome.

Yes, yes. (To ANTONIUS.) Your arm — a moment — It will pass.

I reel beneath the weight of utter joy —

This all too happy day, crown-queen at once.        [Staggers.

O all ye Gods — Jupiter! — Jupiter

[Falls backward.

CAMMA.

Dost thou cry out upon the Gods of Rome?

Thou art Galatian-born. Our Artemis

Has vanquish’d their Diana.

SYNORIX (on the ground).

I am poison’d.

She — close the Temple door. Let her not fly.

CAMMA (leaning on tripod).

Have I not drunk of the same cup with thee?

SYNORIX.

Ay, by the Gods of Rome and all the world,

She too — she too — the bride! the Queen! and I —

Monstrous! I that loved her.

CAMMA.

I loved him.

SYNORIX.

O murderous mad-woman!

I pray you lift me

And make me walk awhile. I have heard these poisons

May be walk’d down.

[ANTONIUS and PUBLIUS raise him up.

My feet are tons of lead,

They will break in the earth — I am sinking — hold me —

Let me alone.

[They leave him; he sinks down on ground.

Too late — thought myself wise —

A woman’s dupe. Antonius, tell the Senate

I have been most true to Rome — would have been true

To her — if — if ——      [Falls as if dead.

CAMMA (coming and leaning over him).

So falls the throne of an hour.

SYNORIX (half rising).

Throne? is it thou? the Fates are throned, not we —

Not guilty of ourselves — thy doom and mine —

Thou — coming my way too — Camma — good-night.        [Dies.

CAMMA (upheld by weeping Priestesses).

Thy way? poor worm, crawl down thine own black hole

To the lowest Hell. Antonius, is he there?

I meant thee to have follow’d — better thus.

Nay, if my people must be thralls of Rome,

He is gentle, tho’ a Roman.

[Sinks back into the arms of the Priestesses.

ANTONIUS.

Thou art one

With thine own people, and though a Roman I

Forgive thee, Camma.

CAMMA (raisin, herself).

‘CAMMA!’ — why there again

I am most sure that some one call’d. O women,

Ye will have Roman masters. I am glad

I shall not see it. Did not some old Greek

Say death was the chief good? He had my fate for it,

Poison’d. (Sinks back again.) Have I the crown on? I will go

To meet him, crown’d! crown’d victor of my will —

On my last voyage — but the wind has fail’d —

Growing dark too — but light enough to row.

Row to the blessed Isles! the blessed Isles! —

Sinnatus!

Why comes he not to meet me? It is the crown

Offends him — and my hands are too sleepy

To lift it off.        [PHŒBE takes the crown off.

Who touch’d me then? I thank you.

[Rises, with outspread arms.

There — league on league of ever-shining shore

Beneath an ever-rising sun — I see him —

‘Camma, Camma!’ Sinnatus, Sinnatus!

[Dies.

THE FALCON

CONTENTS

Dramatis Personæ

THE FALCON

Dramatis Personæ

THE COUNT FEDERIGO DEGLI ALBERIGHI.

FILIPPO, Count’s foster-brother.

THE LADY GIOVANNA.

ELISABETTA, the Count’s nurse.

THE FALCON

SCENE. — An Italian Cottage. Castle and Mountains seen through Window.

ELISABETTA discovered seated on stool in window darning. THE COUNT with Falcon on his hand comes down through the door at back. A withered wreath on the wall.

ELISABETTA.

So, my lord, the Lady Giovanna, who hath been away so long, came back last night with her son to the castle.

COUNT.

Hear that, my bird! Art thou not jealous of her?

My princess of the cloud, my plumed purveyor,

My far-eyed queen of the winds — thou that canst soar

Beyond the morning lark, and howsoe’er

Thy quarry wind and wheel, swoop down upon him

Eagle-like, lightning-like — strike, make his feathers

Glance in mid heaven.

[Crosses to chair.

I would thou hadst a mate!

Thy breed will die with thee, and mine with me:

I am as lone and loveless as thyself.

[Sits in chair.

Giovanna here! Ay, ruffle thyself — be jealous!

Thou should’st be jealous of her. Tho’ I bred thee

The full-train’d marvel of all falconry,

And love thee and thou me, yet if Giovanna

Be here again — No, no! Buss me, my bird!

The stately widow has no heart for me.

Thou art the last friend left me upon earth —

No, no again to that.

[Rises and turns.

My good old nurse,

I had forgotten thou wast sitting there.

ELISABETTA.

Ay, and forgotten thy foster-brother too.

COUNT.

Bird-babble for my falcon! Let it pass.

What art thou doing there?

ELISABETTA.

Darning your lordship.

We cannot flaunt it in new feathers now:

Nay, if we will buy diamond necklaces

To please our lady, we must darn, my lord.

This old thing here (points to necklace round her neck),

they are but blue beads — my Piero,

God rest his honest soul, he bought ‘em for me,

Ay, but he knew I meant to marry him.

How couldst thou do it, my son? How couldst thou do it?

COUNT.

She saw it at a dance, upon a neck

Less lovely than her own, and long’d for it.

ELISABETTA.

She told thee as much?

COUNT.

No, no — a friend of hers.

ELISABETTA.

Shame on her that she took it at thy hands,

She rich enough to have bought it for herself!

COUNT.

She would have robb’d me then of a great pleasure.

ELISABETTA.

But hath she yet return’d thy love?

COUNT.

Not yet!

ELISABETTA.

She should return thy necklace then.

COUNT.

Ay, if

She knew the giver; but I bound the seller

To silence, and I left it privily

At Florence, in her palace.

ELISABETTA.

And sold thine own

To buy it for her. She not know? She knows

There’s none such other ——

COUNT.

Madman anywhere.

Speak freely, tho’ to call a madman mad

Will hardly help to make him sane again.

Enter FILIPPO.

FILIPPO.

Ah, the women, the women! Ah, Monna Giovanna, you here again! you that have the face of an angel and the heart of a — that’s too positive! You that have a score of lovers and have not a heart for any of them — that’s positive-negative: you that have not the head of a toad, and not a heart like the jewel in it — that’s too negative; you that have a cheek like a peach and a heart like the stone in it — that’s positive again — that’s better!

ELISABETTA.

Sh — sh — Filippo!

FILIPPO (turns half round).

Here has our master been a-glorifying and a-velveting and a-silking himself, and a-peacocking and a-spreading to catch her eye for a dozen year, till he hasn’t an eye left in his own tail to flourish among the peahens, and all along o’ you, Monna Giovanna, all along o’ you!

ELISABETTA.

Sh — sh — Filippo! Can’t you hear that you are saying behind his back what you see you are saying afore his face?

COUNT.

Let him — he never spares me to my face!

FILIPPO.

No, my lord, I never spare your lordship to your lordship’s face, nor behind your lordship’s back, nor to right, nor to left, nor to round about and back to your lordship’s face again, for I’m honest, your lordship.

COUNT.

Come, come, Filippo, what is there in the larder?

[ELISABETTA crosses to fireplace and puts on wood.

FILIPPO.

Shelves and hooks, shelves and hooks, and when I see the shelves I am like to hang myself on the hooks.

COUNT.

No bread?

FILIPPO.

Half a breakfast for a rat!

COUNT.

Milk?

FILIPPO.

Three laps for a cat!

COUNT.

Cheese?

FILIPPO.

A supper for twelve mites.

COUNT.

Eggs?

FILIPPO.

One, but addled.

COUNT.

No bird?

FILIPPO.

Half a tit and a hern’s bill.

COUNT.

Let be thy jokes and thy jerks, man! Anything or nothing?

FILIPPO.

Well, my lord, if all-but-nothing be anything, and one plate of dried prunes be all-but-nothing, then there is anything in your lordship’s larder at your lordship’s service, if your lordship care to call for it.

COUNT.

Good mother, happy was the prodigal son,

For he return’d to the rich father; I

But add my poverty to thine. And all

Thro’ following of my fancy. Pray thee make

Thy slender meal out of those scraps and shreds

Filippo spoke of. As for him and me,

There sprouts a salad in the garden still.

(To the Falcon?) Why didst thou miss thy quarry yester-even?

To-day, my beauty, thou must dash us down

Our dinner from the skies. Away, Filippo!

[Exit, followed by Filippo.

ELISABETTA.

I knew it would come to this. She has beggared him. I always knew it would come to this! (Goes up to table as if to resume darning, and looks out of window.) Why, as I live, there is Monna Giovanna coming down the hill from the castle. Stops and stares at our cottage. Ay, ay! stare at it: it’s all you have left us. Shame upon you! She beautiful! sleek as a miller’s mouse! Meal enough, meat enough, well fed; but beautiful — bah! Nay, see, why she turns down the path through our little vineyard, and I sneezed three times this morning. Coming to visit my lord, for the first time in her life too! Why, bless the saints! I’ll be bound to confess her love to him at last. I forgive her, I forgive her! I knew it would come to this — I always knew it must come to this! (Going up to door during latter part of speech and opens it.) Come in, Madonna, come in. (Retires to front of table and curtseys as the LADY GIOVANNA enters, then moves chair towards the hearth.) Nay, let me place this chair for your ladyship.

[LADY GIOVANNA moves slowly down stage, then crosses to chair, looking about her, bows as she sees the Madonna over fireplace, then sits in chair.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Can I speak with the Count?

ELISABETTA.

Ay, my lady, but won’t you speak with the old woman first, and tell her all about it and make her happy? for I’ve been on my knees every day for these half-dozen years in hope that the saints would send us this blessed morning; and he always took you so kindly, he always took the world so kindly. When he was a little one, and I put the bitters on my breast to wean him, he made a wry mouth at it, but he took it so kindly, and your ladyship has given him bitters enough in this world, and he never made a wry mouth at you, he always took you so kindly — which is more than I did, my lady, more than I did — and he so handsome — and bless your sweet face, you look as beautiful this morning as the very Madonna her own self — and better late than never — but come when they will — then or now — it’s all for the best, come when they will — they are made by the blessed saints — these marriages.

[Raises her hands.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Marriages? I shall never marry again!

ELISABETTA (rises and turns).

Shame on her then!

LADY GIOVANNA.

Where is the Count?

ELISABETTA.

Just gone

To fly his falcon.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Call him back and say

I come to breakfast with him.

ELISABETTA.

Holy mother!

To breakfast! Oh sweet saints! one plate of prunes!

Well, Madam, I will give your message to him.

[Exit.

LADY GIOVANNA.

His falcon, and I come to ask for his falcon,

The pleasure of his eyes — boast of his hand —

Pride of his heart — the solace of his hours —

His one companion here — nay, I have heard

That, thro’ his late magnificence of living

And this last costly gift to mine own self,

[Shows diamond necklace.

He hath become so beggar’d, that his falcon

Ev’n wins his dinner for him in the field.

That must be talk, not truth, but truth or talk,

How can I ask for his falcon?

[Rises and moves as she speaks.

O my sick boy!

My daily fading Florio, it is thou

Hath set me this hard task, for when I say

What can I do — what can I get for thee?

He answers, ‘Get the Count to give me his falcon,

And that will make me well.’ Yet if I ask,

He loves me, and he knows I know he loves me!

Will he not pray me to return his love —

To marry him? — (pause) — I can never marry him.

His grandsire struck my grandsire in a brawl

At Florence, and my grandsire stabb’d him there.

The feud between our houses is the bar

I cannot cross; I dare not brave my brother,

Break with my kin. My brother hates him, scorns

The noblest-natured man alive, and I —

Who have that reverence for him that I scarce

Dare beg him to receive his diamonds back —

How can I, dare I, ask him for his falcon?

[Puts diamonds in her casket.

Re-enter COUNT and FILIPPO. COUNT turns to FILIPPO.

COUNT.

Do what I said; I cannot do it myself.

FILIPPO.

Why then, my lord, we are pauper’d out and out.

COUNT.

Do what I said!

[Advances and bows low.

Welcome to this poor cottage, my dear lady.

LADY GIOVANNA.

And welcome turns a cottage to a palace.

COUNT.

‘Tis long since we have met!

LADY GIOVANNA.

To make amends

I come this day to break my fast with you.

COUNT.

I am much honour’d — yes —

[Turns to FILIPPO.

Do what I told thee. Must I do it myself?

FILIPPO.

I will, I will. (Sighs.) Poor fellow!

[Exit.

COUNT.

Lady, you bring your light into my cottage

Who never deign’d to shine into my palace.

My palace wanting you was but a cottage;

My cottage, while you grace it, is a palace.

LADY GIOVANNA.

In cottage or in palace, being still

Beyond your fortunes, you are still the king

Of courtesy and liberality.

COUNT.

I trust I still maintain my courtesy;

My liberality perforce is dead

Thro’ lack of means of giving.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Yet I come

To ask a gift.

[Moves toward him a little.

COUNT.

It will be hard, I fear,

To find one shock upon the field when all

The harvest has been carried.

LADY GIOVANNA.

But my boy —

(Aside.) No, no! not yet — I cannot!

COUNT.

Ay, how is he,

That bright inheritor of your eyes — your boy?

LADY GIOVANNA.

Alas, my Lord Federigo, he hath fallen

Into a sickness, and it troubles me.

COUNT.

Sick! is it so? why, when he came last year

To see me hawking, he was well enough:

And then I taught him all our hawking-phrases.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Oh yes, and once you let him fly your falcon.

COUNT.

How charm’d he was! what wonder? — A gallant boy,

A noble bird, each perfect of the breed.

LADY GIOVANNA (sinks in chair).

What do you rate her at?

COUNT.

My bird? a hundred

Gold pieces once were offer’d by the Duke.

I had no heart to part with her for money.

LADY GIOVANNA.

No, not for money.

[COUNT turns away and sighs.

Wherefore do you sigh?

COUNT.

I have lost a friend of late.

LADY GIOVANNA.

I could sigh with you

For fear of losing more than friend, a son;

And if he leave me — all the rest of life —

That wither’d wreath were of more worth to me.

[Looking at wreath on wall.

COUNT.

That wither’d wreath is of more worth to me

Than all the blossom, all the leaf of this

New-wakening year.

[Goes and takes down wreath.

LADY GIOVANNA.

And yet I never saw

The land so rich in blossom as this year.

COUNT (holding wreath toward her).

Was not the year when this was gather’d richer?

LADY GIOVANNA.

How long ago was that?

COUNT.

Alas, ten summers!

A lady that was beautiful as day

Sat by me at a rustic festival

With other beauties on a mountain meadow,

And she was the most beautiful of all;

Then but fifteen, and still as beautiful.

The mountain flowers grew thickly round about.

I made a wreath with some of these; I ask’d

A ribbon from her hair to bind it with;

I whisper’d, Let me crown you Queen of Beauty,

And softly placed the chaplet on her head.

A colour, which has colour’d all my life,

Flush’d in her face; then I was call’d away;

And presently all rose, and so departed.

Ah! she had thrown my chaplet on the grass,

And there I found it.

[Lets his hands fall, holding wreath despondingly.

LADY GIOVANNA (after pause).

How long since do you say?

COUNT.

That was the very year before you married.

LADY GIOVANNA.

When I was married you were at the wars.

COUNT.

Had she not thrown my chaplet on the grass,

It may be I had never seen the wars.

[Replaces wreath whence he had taken it.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Ah, but, my lord, there ran a rumour then

That you were kill’d in battle. I can tell you

True tears that year were shed for you in Florence.

COUNT.

It might have been as well for me. Unhappily

I was but wounded by the enemy there

And then imprison’d.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Happily, however,

I see you quite recover’d of your wound.

COUNT.

No, no, not quite, Madonna, not yet, not yet.

Re-enter FILIPPO.

FILIPPO.

My lord, a word with you.

COUNT.

Pray, pardon me!

[LADY GIOVANNA crosses, and passes behind chair and takes down wreath; then goes to chair by table.

COUNT (to Filippo).

What is it, Filippo?

FILIPPO.

Spoons, your lordship.

COUNT.

Spoons!

FILIPPO.

Yes, my lord, for wasn’t my lady born with a golden spoon in her ladyship’s mouth, and we haven’t never so much as a silver one for the golden lips of her ladyship.

COUNT.

Have we not half a score of silver spoons?

FILIPPO.

Half o’ one, my lord!

COUNT.

How half of one?

FILIPPO.

I trod upon him even now, my lord, in my hurry, and broke him.

COUNT.

And the other nine?

FILIPPO.

Sold! but shall I not mount with your lordship’s leave to her ladyship’s castle, in your lordship’s and her ladyship’s name, and confer with her ladyship’s seneschal, and so descend again with some of her ladyship’s own appurtenances?

COUNT.

Why — no, man. Only see your cloth be clean.

[Exit Filippo.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Ay, ay, this faded ribbon was the mode

In Florence ten years back. What’s here? a scroll

Pinned to the wreath.

My lord, you have said so much

Of this poor wreath that I was bold enough

To take it down, if but to guess what flowers

Had made it; and I find a written scroll

That seems to run in rhymings. Might I read?

COUNT.

Ay, if you will.

LADY GIOVANNA.

It should be if you can.

(Reads.) ‘Dead mountain.’ Nay, for who could trace a hand

So wild and staggering?

COUNT.

This was penn’d, Madonna,

Close to the grating on a winter morn

In the perpetual twilight of a prison,

When he that made it, having his right hand

Lamed in the battle, wrote it with his left.

LADY GIOVANNA.

O heavens! the very letters seem to shake

With cold, with pain perhaps, poor prisoner! Well,

Tell me the words — or better — for I see

There goes a musical score along with them,

Repeat them to their music.

COUNT.

You can touch

No chord in me that would not answer you

In music.

LADY GIOVANNA.

That is musically said.

[COUNT takes guitar. LADY GIOVANNA sits listening with wreath in her hand, and quietly removes scroll and places it on table at the end of the song.

COUNT (sings, playing guitar).

‘Dead mountain flowers, dead mountain-meadow flowers,

Dearer than when you made your mountain gay,

Sweeter than any violet of to-day,

Richer than all the wide world-wealth of May,

To me, tho’ all your bloom has died away,

You bloom again, dead mountain-meadow flowers.’

Enter ELISABETTA with cloth.

ELISABETTA.

A word with you, my lord!

COUNT (singing).

‘O mountain flowers!’

ELISABETTA.

A word, my lord! (Louder).

COUNT (sings).

‘Dead flowers!’

ELISABETTA.

A word, my lord! (Louder).

COUNT.

I pray you pardon me again!

[LADY GIOVANNA looking at wreath.

COUNT (to Elisabetta.)

What is it?

ELISABETTA.

My lord, we have but one piece of earthenware to serve the salad in to my lady, and that cracked!

COUNT.

Why then, that flower’d bowl my ancestor

Fetch’d from the farthest east — we never use it

For fear of breakage — but this day has brought

A great occasion. You can take it, nurse!

ELISABETTA.

I did take it, my lord, but what with my lady’s coming that had so flurried me, and what with the fear of breaking it, I did break it, my lord: it is broken!

COUNT.

My one thing left of value in the world!

No matter! see your cloth be white as snow!

LISABETTA (pointing thro’ window).

White? I warrant thee, my son, as the snow yonder on the very tip-top o’ the mountain.

COUNT.

And yet to speak white truth, my good old mother,

I have seen it like the snow on the moraine.

ELISABETTA.

How can your lordship say so? There my lord!

[Lays cloth.

O my dear son, be not unkind to me.

And one word more.            [Going — returns.

COUNT (touching guitar).

Good! let it be but one.

ELISABETTA.

Hath she return’d thy love?

COUNT.

Not yet!

ELISABETTA.

And will she?

COUNT (looking at Lady Giovanna).

I scarce believe it!

ELISABETTA.

Shame upon her then!

[Exit.

COUNT (sings).

‘Dead mountain flowers’ ——

Ah well, my nurse has broken

The thread of my dead flowers, as she has broken

My china bowl. My memory is as dead.

[Goes and replaces guitar.

Strange that the words at home with me so long

Should fly like bosom friends when needed most.

So by your leave if you would hear the rest,

The writing.

LADY GIOVANNA (holding wreath toward him).

There! my lord, you are a poet,

And can you not imagine that the wreath,

Set, as you say, so lightly on her head,

Fell with her motion as she rose, and she,

A girl, a child, then but fifteen, however

Flutter’d or flatter’d by your notice of her,

Was yet too bashful to return for it?

COUNT.

Was it so indeed? was it so? was it so?

[Leans forward to take wreath, and touches Lady Giovanna’s hand, which she withdraws hastily; he places wreath on corner of chair.

LADY GIOVANNA (with dignity).

I did not say, my lord, that it was so;

I said you might imagine it was so.

Enter FILIPPO with bowl of salad, which he places on table.

FILIPPO.

Here’s a fine salad for my lady, for tho’ we have been a soldier, and ridden by his lordship’s side, and seen the red of the battle-field, yet are we now drill-sergeant to his lordship’s lettuces, and profess to be great in green things and in garden-stuff.

LADY GIOVANNA.

I thank thee, good Filippo.

[Exit Filippo.

Enter ELISABETTA with bird on a dish which she places on table.

ELISABETTA (close to table).

Here’s a fine fowl for my lady; I had scant time to do him in. I hope he be not underdone, for we be undone in the doing of him.

LADY GIOVANNA.

I thank you, my good nurse.

FILIPPO (re-entering with plate of prunes).

And here are fine fruits for my lady — prunes, my lady, from the tree that my lord himself planted here in the blossom of his boyhood — and so I, Filippo, being, with your ladyship’s pardon, and as your ladyship knows, his lordship’s own foster-brother, would commend them to your ladyship’s most peculiar appreciation.

[Puts plate on table.

ELISABETTA.

Filippo!

LADY GIOVANNA (COUNT leads her to table).

Will you not eat with me, my lord?

COUNT.

I cannot,

Not a morsel, not one morsel. I have broken

My fast already. I will pledge you. Wine!

Filippo, wine!

[Sits near table; FILIPPO brings flask, fills the COUNT’S goblet, then LADY GIOVANNA’S; ELISABETTA stands at the back of LADY GIOVANNA’S chair.

COUNT.

It is but thin and cold,

Not like the vintage blowing round your castle.

We lie too deep down in the shadow here.

Your ladyship lives higher in the sun.

[They pledge each other and drink.

LADY GIOVANNA.

If I might send you down a flask or two

Of that same vintage? There is iron in it.

It has been much commended as a medicine.

I give it my sick son, and if you be

Not quite recover’d of your wound, the wine

Might help you. None has ever told me yet

The story of your battle and your wound.

FILIPPO (coming forward).

I can tell you, my lady, I can tell you.

ELISABETTA.

Filippo! will you take the word out of your master’s own mouth?

FILIPPO.

Was it there to take? Put it there, my lord.

COUNT.

Giovanna, my dear lady, in this same battle

We had been beaten — they were ten to one.

The trumpets of the fight had echo’d down,

I and Filippo here had done our best,

And, having passed unwounded from the field,

Were seated sadly at a fountain side,

Our horses grazing by us, when a troop,

Laden with booty and with a flag of ours

Ta’en in the fight ——

FILIPPO.

Ay, but we fought for it back,

And kill’d ——

ELISABETTA.

Filippo!

COUNT.

A troop of horse ——

FILIPPO.

Five hundred!

COUNT.

Say fifty!

FILIPPO.

And we kill’d ‘em by the score!

ELISABETTA.

Filippo!

FILIPPO.

Well, well, well!

I bite my tongue.

COUNT.

We may have left their fifty less by five.

However, staying not to count how many,

But anger’d at their flaunting of our flag,

We mounted, and we dash’d into the heart of ‘em.

I wore the lady’s chaplet round my neck;

It served me for a blessed rosary.

I am sure that more than one brave fellow owed

His death to the charm in it.

ELISABETTA.

Hear that, my lady!

COUNT.

I cannot tell how long we strove before

Our horses fell beneath us; down we went

Crush’d, hack’d at, trampled underfoot. The night,

As some cold-manner’d friend may strangely do us

The truest service, had a touch of frost

That help’d to check the flowing of the blood.

My last sight ere I swoon’d was one sweet face

Crown’d with the wreath. That seem’d to come and go.

They left us there for dead!

ELISABETTA.

Hear that, my lady!

FILIPPO.

Ay, and I left two fingers there for dead. See, my lady!

(Showing his hand.)

LADY GIOVANNA.

I see, Filippo!

FILIPPO.

And I have small hope of the gentleman gout in my great toe.

LADY GIOVANNA.

And why, Filippo?    [Smiling absently.

FILIPPO.

I left him there for dead too!

ELISABETTA.

She smiles at him — how hard the woman is!

My lady, if your ladyship were not

Too proud to look upon the garland, you

Would find it stain’d ——

COUNT (rising).

Silence, Elisabetta!

ELISABETTA.

Stain’d with the blood of the best heart that ever

Beat for one woman. [Points to wreath on chair.

LADY GIOVANNA (rising slowly).

I can eat no more!

COUNT.

You have but trifled with our homely salad,

But dallied with a single lettuce-leaf;

Not eaten anything.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Nay, nay, I cannot.

You know, my lord, I told you I was troubled.

My one child Florio lying still so sick,

I bound myself, and by a solemn vow,

That I would touch no flesh till he were well

Here, or else well in Heaven, where all is well.

[ELISABETTA clears table of bird and salad; FILIPPO snatches up the plate of prunes and holds them to LADY GIOVANNA.

FILIPPO.

But the prunes, my lady, from the tree that his lordship ——

LADY GIOVANNA.

Not now, Filippo. My lord Federigo,

Can I not speak with you once more alone?

COUNT.

You hear, Filippo? My good fellow, go!

FILIPPO.

But the prunes that your lordship ——

ELISABETTA.

Filippo!

COUNT.

Ay, prune our company of thine own and go!

ELISABETTA.

Filippo!

FILIPPO (turning).

Well, well! the women!

[Exit.

COUNT.

And thou too leave us, my dear nurse, alone.

ELISABETTA (folding up cloth and going).

And me too! Ay, the dear nurse will leave you alone; but, for all that, she that has eaten the yolk is scarce like to swallow the shell.

[Turns and curtseys stiffly to LADY GIOVANNA, then exit. LADY GIOVANNA takes out diamond necklace from casket.

LADY GIOVANNA.

I have anger’d your good nurse; these old-world servants

Are all but flesh and blood with those they serve.

My lord, I have a present to return you,

And afterwards a boon to crave of you.

COUNT.

No, my most honour’d and long-worshipt lady,

Poor Federigo degli Alberighi

Takes nothing in return from you except

Return of his affection — can deny

Nothing to you that you require of him.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Then I require you to take back your diamonds —

[Offering necklace.

I doubt not they are yours. No other heart

Of such magnificence in courtesy

Beats — out of heaven. They seem’d too rich a prize

To trust with any messenger. I came

In person to return them.

[Count draws back.

If the phrase

‘Return’ displease you, we will say — exchange them

For your — for your ——

COUNT (takes a step toward her and then back).

For mine — and what of mine?

LADY GIOVANNA.

Well, shall we say this wreath and your sweet rhymes?

COUNT.

But have you ever worn my diamonds?

LADY GIOVANNA.  No!

For that would seem accepting of your love.

I cannot brave my brother — but be sure

That I shall never marry again, my lord!

COUNT.

Sure?

LADY GIOVANNA.

Yes!

COUNT.

Is this your brother’s order?

LADY GIOVANNA.  No!

For he would marry me to the richest man

In Florence; but I think you know the saying —

‘Better a man without riches, than riches without a man.’

COUNT.

A noble saying — and acted on would yield

A nobler breed of men and women. Lady,

I find you a shrewd bargainer. The wreath

That once you wore outvalues twentyfold

The diamonds that you never deign’d to wear.

But lay them there for a moment!

[Points to table. LADY GIOVANNA places necklace on table.

And be you

Gracious enough to let me know the boon

By granting which, if aught be mine to grant,

I should be made more happy than I hoped

Ever to be again.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Then keep your wreath,

But you will find me a shrewd bargainer still.

I cannot keep your diamonds, for the gift

I ask for, to my mind and at this present

Outvalues all the jewels upon earth.

COUNT.

It should be love that thus outvalues all.

You speak like love, and yet you love me not.

I have nothing in this world but love for you.

LADY GIOVANNA.

Love? it is love, love for my dying boy,

Moves me to ask it of you.

COUNT.

What? my time?

Is it my time? Well, I can give my time

To him that is a part of you, your son.

Shall I return to the castle with you? Shall I

Sit by him, read to him, tell him my tales,

Sing him my songs? You know that I can touch

The ghittern to some purpose.

LADY GIOVANNA.

No, not that!

I thank you heartily for that — and you,

I doubt not from your nobleness of nature,

Will pardon me for asking what I ask.

COUNT.

Giovanna, dear Giovanna, I that once

The wildest of the random youth of Florence

Before I saw you — all my nobleness

Of nature, as you deign to call it, draws

From you, and from my constancy to you.

No more, but speak.

LADY GIOVANNA.

I will. You know sick people,

More specially sick children, have strange fancies,

Strange longings; and to thwart them in their mood

May work them grievous harm at times, may even

Hasten their end. I would you had a son!

It might be easier then for you to make

Allowance for a mother — her — who comes

To rob you of your one delight on earth.

How often has my sick boy yearn’d for this!

I have put him off as often; but to-day

I dared not — so much weaker, so much worse

For last day’s journey. I was weeping for him:

He gave me his hand: ‘I should be well again

If the good Count would give me ——

COUNT.

Give me.

LADY GIOVANNA.

His falcon.

COUNT (starts back).

My falcon!

LADY GIOVANNA.

Yes, your falcon, Federigo!

COUNT.

Alas, I cannot!

LADY GIOVANNA.

Cannot? Even so!

I fear’d as much. O this unhappy world!

How shall I break it to him? how shall I tell him?

The boy may die: more blessed were the rags

Of some pale beggar-woman seeking alms

For her sick son, if he were like to live,

Than all my childless wealth, if mine must die.

I was to blame — the love you said you bore me —

My lord, we thank you for your entertainment,

[With a stately curtsey.

And so return — Heaven help him! — to our son.

[Turns —

COUNT (rushes forward).

Stay, stay, I am most unlucky, most unhappy.

You never had look’d in on me before,

And when you came and dipt your sovereign head

Thro’ these low doors, you ask’d to eat with me.

I had but emptiness to set before you,

No not a draught of milk, no not an egg,

Nothing but my brave bird, my noble falcon,

My comrade of the house, and of the field.

She had to die for it — she died for you.

Perhaps I thought with those of old, the nobler

The victim was, the more acceptable

Might be the sacrifice. I fear you scarce

Will thank me for your entertainment now.

LADY GIOVANNA (returning).

I bear with him no longer.

COUNT.

No, Madonna!

And he will have to bear with it as he may.

LADY GIOVANNA.

I break with him for ever!

COUNT.

Yes, Giovanna,

But he will keep his love to you for ever!

LADY GIOVANNA.

You? you? not you! My brother! my hard brother!

O Federigo, Federigo, I love you!

Spite of ten thousand brothers, Federigo.

[Falls at his feet.

COUNT (impetuously).

Why then the dying of my noble bird

Hath served me better than her living — then

[Takes diamonds from table.

These diamonds are both yours and mine — have won

Their value again — beyond all markets — there

I lay them for the first time round your neck.

[Lays necklace round her neck.

And then this chaplet — No more feuds, but peace,

Peace and conciliation! I will make

Your brother love me. See, I tear away

The leaves were darken’d by the battle —

[Pulls leaves off and throws them down.

— crown you

Again with the same crown my Queen of Beauty.

[Places wreath on her head.

Rise — I could almost think that the dead garland

Will break once more into the living blossom.

Nay, nay, I pray you rise.

[Raises her with both hands.

We two together

Will help to heal your son — your son and mine —

We shall do it — we shall do it.

[Embraces her.

The purpose of my being is accomplish’d,

And I am happy!

LADY GIOVANNA.

And I too, Federigo.

THE PROMISE OF MAY

CONTENTS

Dramatis Personæ

Act I

Act II

Act III

Dramatis Personæ

FARMER DOBSON.

Mr. PHILIP EDGAR (afterwards Mr. HAROLD).

FARMER STEER (DORA and EVA’S Father).

Mr. WILSON (a Schoolmaster).

HIGGINS Farm Labourer

JAMES Farm Labourer

DAN SMITH Farm Labourer.

JACKSON Farm Labourer

ALLEN Farm Labourer

DORA STEER.

EVA STEER.

SALLY ALLEN Farm Servant.

MILLY Farm Servant.

Farm Servants, Labourers, etc.

Act I

SCENE. — Before Farmhouse.

Farming Men and Women. Farming Men carrying forms, &c., Women carrying baskets of knives and forks, &c.

1ST FARMING MAN.

Be thou a-gawin’ to the long barn?

2ND FARMING MAN.

Ay, to be sewer! Be thou?

1ST FARMING MAN.

Why, o’ coorse, fur it be the owd man’s birthdaäy. He be heighty this very daäy, and ‘e telled all on us to be i’ the long barn by one o’clock, fur he’ll gie us a big dinner, and haäfe th’ parish’ll be theer, an’ Miss Dora, an’ Miss Eva, an’ all!

2ND FARMING MAN.

Miss Dora be coomed back, then?

1ST FARMING MAN.

Ay, haäfe an hour ago. She be in theer, now. (Pointing to house.) Owd Steer wur afeärd she wouldn’t be back i’ time to keep his birthdaäy, and he wur in a tew about it all the murnin’; and he sent me wi’ the gig to Littlechester to fetch ‘er; and ‘er an’ the owd man they fell a kissin’ o’ one another like two sweet-’arts i’ the poorch as soon as he clapt eyes of ‘er.

2ND FARMING MAN.

Foälks says he likes Miss Eva the best.

1ST FARMING MAN.

Naäy, I knaws nowt o’ what foälks says, an’ I caäres nowt neither. Foälks doesn’t hallus knaw thessens; but sewer I be, they be two o’ the purtiest gels ye can see of a summer murnin’.

2ND FARMING MAN.

Beänt Miss Eva gone off a bit of ‘er good looks o’ laäte?

1ST FARMING MAN.

Noä, not a bit.

2ND FARMING MAN.

Why cooem awaäy, then, to the long barn.

[Exeunt.

DORA looks out of window. Enter DOBSON.

DORA (singing).

The town lay still in the low sun-light,

The hen cluckt late by the white farm gate,

The maid to her dairy came in from the cow,

The stock-dove coo’d at the fall of night,

The blossom had open’d on every bough;

O joy for the promise of May, of May,

O joy for the promise of May.

(Nodding at DOBSON.) I’m coming down, Mr. Dobson. I haven’t seen Eva yet. Is she anywhere in the garden?

DOBSON.

Noä, Miss. I ha’n’t seed ‘er neither.

DORA (enters singing).

But a red fire woke in the heart of the town,

And a fox from the glen ran away with the hen,

And a cat to the cream, and a rat to the cheese;

And the stock-dove coo’d, till a kite dropt down,

And a salt wind burnt the blossoming trees;

O grief for the promise of May, of May,

O grief for the promise of May.

I don’t know why I sing that song; I don’t love it.

DOBSON.

Blessings on your pretty voice, Miss Dora. Wheer did they larn ye that?

DORA.

In Cumberland, Mr. Dobson.

DOBSON.

An’ how did ye leäve the owd uncle i’ Coomberland?

DORA.

Getting better, Mr. Dobson. But he’ll never be the same man again.

DOBSON.

An’ how d’ye find the owd man ‘ere?

DORA.

As well as ever. I came back to keep his birthday.

DOBSON.

Well, I be coomed to keep his birthdaäy an’ all. The owd man be heighty to-daäy, beänt he?

DORA.

Yes, Mr. Dobson. And the day’s bright like a friend, but the wind east like an enemy. Help me to move this bench for him into the sun. (They move bench.) No, not that way — here, under the apple tree. Thank you. Look how full of rosy blossom it is.

[Pointing to apple tree.

DOBSON.

Theer be redder blossoms nor them, Miss Dora.

DORA.

Where do they blow, Mr. Dobson?

DOBSON.

Under your eyes, Miss Dora.

DORA.

Do they?

DOBSON.

And your eyes be as blue as ——

DORA.

What, Mr. Dobson? A butcher’s frock?

DOBSON.

Noä, Miss Dora; as blue as ——

DORA.

Bluebell, harebell, speedwell, bluebottle, succory, forget-me-not?

DOBSON.

Noä, Miss Dora; as blue as ——

DORA.

The sky? or the sea on a blue day?

DOBSON.

Naäy then. I meän’d they be as blue as violets.

DORA.

Are they?

DOBSON.

Theer ye goäs ageän, Miss, niver believing owt I says to ye — hallus a-fobbing ma off, tho’ ye knaws I love ye. I warrants ye’ll think moor o’ this young Squire Edgar as ha’ coomed among us — the Lord knaws how — ye’ll think more on ‘is little finger than hall my hand at the haltar.

DORA.

Perhaps, Master Dobson. I can’t tell, for I have never seen him. But my sister wrote that he was mighty pleasant, and had no pride in him.

DOBSON.

He’ll be arter you now, Miss Dora.

DORA.

Will he? How can I tell?

DOBSON.

He’s been arter Miss Eva, haän’t he?

DORA.

Not that I know.

DOBSON.

Didn’t I spy ‘em a-sitting i’ the woodbine harbour togither?

DORA.

What of that? Eva told me that he was taking her likeness. He’s an artist.

DOBSON.

What’s a hartist? I doänt believe he’s iver a ‘eart under his waistcoat. And I tells ye what, Miss Dora: he’s no respect for the Queen, or the parson, or the justice o’ peace, or owt. I ha’ heärd ‘im a-gawin’ on ‘ud make your ‘air — God bless it! — stan’ on end. And wuss nor that. When theer wur a meeting o’ farmers at Littlechester t’other daäy, and they was all a-crying out at the bad times, he cooms up, and he calls out among our oän men, ‘The land belongs to the people!’

DORA.

And what did you say to that?

DOBSON.

Well, I says, s’pose my pig’s the land, and you says it belongs to the parish, and theer be a thousand i’ the parish, taäkin’ in the women and childer; and s’pose I kills my pig, and gi’es it among ‘em, why there wudn’t be a dinner for nawbody, and I should ha’ lost the pig.

DORA.

And what did he say to that?

DOBSON.

Nowt — what could he saäy? But I taäkes ‘im fur a bad lot and a burn fool, and I haätes the very sight on him.

DORA. (Looking at DOBSON.)

Master Dobson, you are a comely man to look at.

DOBSON.

I thank you for that, Miss Dora, onyhow.

DORA.

Ay, but you turn right ugly when you’re in an ill temper; and I promise you that if you forget yourself in your behaviour to this gentleman, my father’s friend, I will never change word with you again.

Enter FARMING MAN from barn.

FARMING MAN.

Miss, the farming men ‘ull hev their dinner i’ the long barn, and the master ‘ud be straänge an’ pleased if you’d step in fust, and see that all be right and reg’lar fur ‘em afoor he coöm.

[Exit.

DORA.

I go. Master Dobson, did you hear what I said?

DOBSON.

Yeas, yeas! I’ll not meddle wi’ ‘im if he doänt meddle wi’ meä. (Exit Dora.) Coomly, says she. I niver thowt o’ mysen i’ that waäy; but if she’d taäke to ma i’ that waäy, or ony waäy, I’d slaäve out my life fur ‘er. ‘Coomly to look at,’ says she — but she said it spiteful-like. To look at — yeas, ‘coomly’; and she mayn’t be so fur out theer. But if that be nowt to she, then it be nowt to me. (Looking off stage.) Schoolmaster! Why if Steer han’t haxed schoolmaster to dinner, thaw ‘e knaws I was hallus ageän heving schoolmaster i’ the parish! fur him as be handy wi’ a book bean’t but haäfe a hand at a pitchfork.

Enter WILSON.

Well, Wilson. I seed that one cow o’ thine i’ the pinfold ageän as I wur a-coomin’ ‘ere.

WILSON.

Very likely, Mr. Dobson. She will break fence. I can’t keep her in order.

DOBSON.

An’ if tha can’t keep thy one cow i’ horder, how can tha keep all thy scholards i’ horder? But let that goä by. What dost a knaw o’ this Mr. Hedgar as be a-lodgin’ wi’ ye? I coom’d upon ‘im t’other daäy lookin’ at the coontry, then a-scrattin upon a bit o’ paäper, then a-lookin’ ageän; and I taäked ‘im fur soom sort of a land-surveyor — but a beänt.

WILSON.

He’s a Somersetshire man, and a very civil-spoken gentleman.

DOBSON.

Gentleman! What be he a-doing here ten mile an’ moor fro’ a raäil? We laäys out o’ the waäy fur gentlefoälk altogither — leastwaäys they niver cooms ‘ere but fur the trout i’ our beck, fur they be knaw’d as far as Littlechester. But ‘e doänt fish neither.

WILSON.

Well, it’s no sin in a gentleman not to fish.

DOBSON.

Noa, but I haätes ‘im.

WILSON.

Better step out of his road, then, for he’s walking to us, and with a book in his hand.

DOBSON.

An’ I haätes booöks an’ all, fur they puts foälk off the owd waäys.

Enter EDGAR, reading — not seeing DOBSON and WILSON.

EDGAR.

This author, with his charm of simple style

And close dialectic, all but proving man

An automatic series of sensations,

Has often numb’d me into apathy

Against the unpleasant jolts of this rough road

That breaks off short into the abysses — made me

A Quietist taking all things easily.

DOBSON. (Aside.)

There mun be summut wrong theer, Wilson, fur I doänt understan’ it.

WILSON. (Aside.)

Nor I either, Mr. Dobson.

DOBSON. (Scornfully.)

An’ thou doänt understan’ it neither — and thou schoolmaster an’ all.

EDGAR.

What can a man, then, live for but sensations,

Pleasant ones? men of old would undergo

Unpleasant for the sake of pleasant ones

Hereafter, like the Moslem beauties waiting

To clasp their lovers by the golden gates.

For me, whose cheerless Houris after death

Are Night and Silence, pleasant ones — the while —

If possible, here! to crop the flower and pass.

DOBSON.

Well, I never ‘eard the likes o’ that afoor.

WILSON. (Aside.)

But I have, Mr. Dobson. It’s the old Scripture text, ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ I’m sorry for it, for, tho’ he never comes to church, I thought better of him.

EDGAR.

‘What are we,’ says the blind old man in Lear?

‘As flies to the Gods; they kill us for their sport.’

DOBSON. (Aside.)

Then the owd man i’ Lear should be shaämed of hissen, but noän o’ the parishes goä’s by that naäme ‘ereabouts.

EDGAR.

The Gods! but they, the shadows of ourselves,

Have past for ever. It is Nature kills,

And not for her sport either. She knows nothing.

Man only knows, the worse for him! for why

Cannot he take his pastime like the flies?

And if my pleasure breed another’s pain,

Well — is not that the course of Nature too,

From the dim dawn of Being — her main law

Whereby she grows in beauty — that her flies

Must massacre each other? this poor Nature!

DOBSON.

Natur! Natur! Well, it be i’ my natur to knock ‘im o’ the ‘eäd now; but I weänt.

EDGAR.

A Quietist taking all things easily — why —

Have I been dipping into this again

To steel myself against the leaving her?

(Closes book, seeing WILSON.)

Good day!

WILSON.

Good day, sir.

(DOBSON looks hard at EDGAR.)

EDGAR. (To DOBSON.)

Have I the pleasure, friend, of knowing you?

DOBSON.

Dobson.

EDGAR.

Good day, then, Dobson.

[Exit.

DOBSON.

‘Good daäy then, Dobson!’ Civil-spoken i’deed! Why, Wilson, tha ‘eärd ‘im thysen — the feller couldn’t find a Mister in his mouth fur me, as farms five hoonderd haäcre.

WILSON.

You never find one for me, Mr. Dobson.

DOBSON.

Noä, fur thou be nobbut schoolmaster; but I taäkes ‘im fur a Lunnun swindler, and a burn fool.

WILSON.

He can hardly be both, and he pays me regular every Saturday.

DOBSON.

Yeas; but I haätes ‘im.

Enter STEER, FARM MEN and WOMEN.

STEER. (Goes and sits under apple tree.)

Hev’ ony o’ ye seen Eva?

DOBSON.

Noä, Mr. Steer.

STEER.

Well, I reckons they’ll hev’ a fine cider-crop to-year if the blossom ‘owds. Good murnin’, neighbours, and the saäme to you, my men. I taäkes it kindly of all o’ you that you be coomed — what’s the newspaäper word, Wilson? — celebrate — to celebrate my birthdaäy i’ this fashion. Niver man ‘ed better friends, and I will saäy niver master ‘ed better men: fur thaw I may ha’ fallen out wi’ ye sometimes, the fault, mebbe, wur as much mine as yours; and, thaw I says it mysen, niver men ‘ed a better master — and I knaws what men be, and what masters be, fur I wur nobbut a laäbourer, and now I be a landlord — burn a plowman, and now, as far as money goäs, I be a gentleman, thaw I beänt naw scholard, fur I ‘ednt naw time to maäke mysen a scholard while I wur maäkin’ mysen a gentleman, but I ha taäen good care to turn out boäth my darters right down fine laädies.

DOBSON.

An’ soä they be.

1ST FARMING MAN.

Soä they be! soä they be!

2ND FARMING MAN.

The Lord bless boäth on ‘em!

3RD FARMING MAN.

An’ the saäme to you, Master.

4TH FARMING MAN.

And long life to boäth on ‘em. An’ the saäme to you, Master Steer, likewise.

STEER.

Thank ye!

Enter EVA.

Wheer ‘asta been?

EVA. (Timidly.)

Many happy returns of the day, father.

STEER.

They can’t be many, my dear, but I ‘oäpes they’ll be ‘appy.

DOBSON.

Why, tha looks haäle anew to last to a hoonderd.

STEER.

An’ why shouldn’t I last to a hoonderd? Haäle! why shouldn’t I be haäle? fur thaw I be heighty this very daäy, I niver ‘es sa much as one pin’s prick of paäin; an’ I can taäke my glass along wi’ the youngest, fur I niver touched a drop of owt till my oän wedding-daäy, an’ then I wur turned huppads o’ sixty. Why shouldn’t I be haäle? I ha’ plowed the ten-aäcre — it be mine now — afoor ony o’ ye wur burn — ye all knaws the ten-aäcre — I mun ha’ plowed it moor nor a hoonderd times; hallus hup at sunrise, and I’d drive the plow straäit as a line right i’ the faäce o’ the sun, then back ageän, a-follering my oän shadder — then hup ageän i’ the faäce o’ the sun. Eh! how the sun ‘ud shine, and the larks ‘ud sing i’ them daäys, and the smell o’ the mou’d an’ all. Eh! if I could ha’ gone on wi’ the plowin’ nobbut the smell o’ the mou’d ‘ud ha’ maäde ma live as long as Jerusalem.

EVA.

Methusaleh, father.

STEER.

Ay, lass, but when thou be as owd as me thou’ll put one word fur another as I does.

DOBSON.

But, Steer, thaw thou be haäle anew I seed tha a-limpin’ up just now wi’ the roomatics i’ the knee.

STEER.

Roomatics! Noä; I laäme’t my knee last night running arter a thief. Beänt there house-breäkers down i’ Littlechester, Dobson — doänt ye hear of ony?

DOBSON.

Ay, that there be. Immanuel Goldsmiths was broke into o’ Monday night, and ower a hoonderd pounds worth o’ rings stolen.

STEER.

So I thowt, and I heärd the winder — that’s the winder at the end o’ the passage, that goäs by thy chaumber. (Turning to EVA.) Why, lass, what maäakes tha sa red? Did ‘e git into thy chaumber?

EVA.

Father!

STEER.

Well, I runned arter thief i’ the dark, and fell ageän coalscuttle and my kneeä gev waäy or I’d ha’ cotched ‘im, but afoor I coomed up he got thruff the winder ageän.

EVA.

Got thro’ the window again?

STEER.

Ay, but he left the mark of ‘is foot i’ the flowerbed; now theer be noän o’ my men, thinks I to mysen, ‘ud ha’ done it ‘cep’ it were Dan Smith, fur I cotched ‘im once a-stealin’ coäls an’ I sent fur ‘im, an’ I measured his foot wi’ the mark i’ the bed, but it wouldn’t fit — seeäms to me the mark wur maäde by a Lunnun boot. (Looks at EVA.) Why, now, what maäkes tha sa white?

EVA.

Fright, father!

STEER.

Maäke thysen eäsy. I’ll hev the winder naäiled up, and put Towser under it.

EVA. (Clasping her hands.)

No, no, father! Towser’ll tear him all to pieces.

STEER.

Let him keep awaäy, then; but coom, coom! let’s be gawin. They ha’ broached a barrel of aäle i’ the long barn, and the fiddler be theer, and the lads and lasses ‘ull hev a dance.

EVA. (Aside.)

Dance! small heart have I to dance. I should seem to be dancing upon a grave.

STEER.

Wheer be Mr. Edgar? about the premises?

DOBSON.

Hallus about the premises!

STEER.

So much the better, so much the better. I likes ‘im, and Eva likes ‘im. Eva can do owt wi’ ‘im; look for ‘im, Eva, and bring ‘im to the barn. He ‘ant naw pride in ‘im, and we’ll git ‘im to speechify for us arter dinner.

EVA.

Yes, father!

[Exit.

STEER.

Coom along then, all the rest o’ ye! Churchwarden be a coomin, thaw me and ‘im we niver ‘grees about the tithe; and Parson mebbe, thaw he niver mended that gap i’ the glebe fence as I telled ‘im; and Blacksmith, thaw he niver shoes a herse to my likings; and Baäker, thaw I sticks to hoäm-maäde — but all on ‘em welcome, all on ‘em welcome; and I’ve hed the long barn cleared out of all the machines, and the sacks, and the taäters, and the mangles, and theer’ll be room anew for all o’ ye. Foller me.

ALL.

Yeas, yeas! Three cheers for Mr. Steer!

[All exeunt except DOBSON into barn.

Enter EDGAR.

DOBSON (who is going, turns).

Squire! — if so be you be a squire.

EDGAR.

Dobbins, I think.

DOBSON.

Dobbins, you thinks; and I thinks ye weärs a Lunnun boot.

EDGAR.

Well?

DOBSON.

And I thinks I’d like to taäke the measure o’ your foot.

EDGAR.

Ay, if you’d like to measure your own length upon the grass.

DOBSON.

Coom, coom, that’s a good un. Why, I could throw four o’ ye; but I promised one of the Misses I wouldn’t meddle wi’ ye, and I weänt.

[Exit into barn.

EDGAR.

Jealous of me with Eva! Is it so?

Well, tho’ I grudge the pretty jewel, that I

Have worn, to such a clod, yet that might be

The best way out of it, if the child could keep

Her counsel. I am sure I wish her happy.

But I must free myself from this entanglement.

I have all my life before me — so has she —

Give her a month or two, and her affections

Will flower toward the light in some new face.

Still I am half-afraid to meet her now.

She will urge marriage on me. I hate tears.

Marriage is but an old tradition. I hate

Traditions, ever since my narrow father,

After my frolic with his tenant’s girl,

Made younger elder son, violated the whole

Tradition of our land, and left his heir,

Born, happily, with some sense of art, to live

By brush and pencil. By and by, when Thought

Comes down among the crowd, and man perceives that

The lost gleam of an after-life but leaves him

A beast of prey in the dark, why then the crowd

May wreak my wrongs upon my wrongers. Marriage!

That fine, fat, hook-nosed uncle of mine, old Harold,

Who leaves me all his land at Littlechester,

He, too, would oust me from his will, if I

Made such a marriage. And marriage in itself —

The storm is hard at hand will sweep away

Thrones, churches, ranks, traditions, customs, marriage

One of the feeblest! Then the man, the woman,

Following their best affinities, will each

Bid their old bond farewell with smiles, not tears;

Good wishes, not reproaches; with no fear

Of the world’s gossiping clamour, and no need

Of veiling their desires.

Conventionalism,

Who shrieks by day at what she does by night,

Would call this vice; but one time’s vice may be

The virtue of another; and Vice and Virtue

Are but two masks of self; and what hereafter

Shall mark out Vice from Virtue in the gulf

Of never-dawning darkness?

Enter EVA.

My sweet Eva,

Where have you lain in ambush all the morning?

They say your sister, Dora, has return’d,

And that should make you happy, if you love her!

But you look troubled.

EVA.

Oh, I love her so,

I was afraid of her, and I hid myself.

We never kept a secret from each other;

She would have seen at once into my trouble,

And ask’d me what I could not answer. Oh, Philip,

Father heard you last night. Our savage mastiff,

That all but kill’d the beggar, will be placed

Beneath the window, Philip.

EDGAR.

Savage, is he?

What matters? Come, give me your hand and kiss me

This beautiful May-morning.

EVA.

The most beautiful

May we have had for many years!

EDGAR.

And here

Is the most beautiful morning of this May.

Nay, you must smile upon me! There — you make

The May and morning still more beautiful,

You, the most beautiful blossom of the May.

EVA.

Dear Philip, all the world is beautiful

If we were happy, and could chime in with it.

EDGAR.

True; for the senses, love, are for the world;

That for the senses.

EVA.

Yes.

EDGAR.

And when the man,

The child of evolution, flings aside

His swaddling-bands, the morals of the tribe,

He, following his own instincts as his God,

Will enter on the larger golden age;

No pleasure then taboo’d: for when the tide

Of full democracy has overwhelm’d

This Old world, from that flood will rise the New,

Like the Love-goddess, with no bridal veil,

Ring, trinket of the Church, but naked Nature

In all her loveliness.

EVA.

What are you saying?

EDGAR.

That, if we did not strain to make ourselves

Better and higher than Nature, we might be

As happy as the bees there at their honey

In these sweet blossoms.

EVA.

Yes; how sweet they smell!

EDGAR.

There! let me break some off for you.

[Breaking branch off.

EVA.

My thanks.

But, look, how wasteful of the blossom you are!

One, two, three, four, five, six — you have robb’d poor father

Of ten good apples. Oh, I forgot to tell you

He wishes you to dine along with us,

And speak for him after — you that are so clever!

EDGAR.

I grieve I cannot; but, indeed ——

EVA.

What is it?

EDGAR.

Well, business. I must leave you, love, to-day.

EVA.

Leave me, to-day! And when will you return?

EDGAR.

I cannot tell precisely; but ——

EVA.

But what?

EDGAR.

I trust, my dear, we shall be always friends.

EVA.

After all that has gone between us — friends!

What, only friends?     [Drops branch.

EDGAR.

All that has gone between us

Should surely make us friends.

EVA.

But keep us lovers.

EDGAR.

Child, do you love me now?

EVA.

Yes, now and ever.

EDGAR.

Then you should wish us both to love for ever.

But, if you will bind love to one for ever,

Altho’ at first he take his bonds for flowers,

As years go on, he feels them press upon him,

Begins to flutter in them, and at last

Breaks thro’ them, and so flies away for ever;

While, had you left him free use of his wings,

Who knows that he had ever dream’d of flying?

EVA.

But all that sounds so wicked and so strange;

‘Till death us part’ — those are the only words,

The true ones — nay, and those not true enough,

For they that love do not believe that death

Will part them. Why do you jest with me, and try

To fright me? Tho’ you are a gentleman,

I but a farmer’s daughter ——

EDGAR.

Tut! you talk

Old feudalism. When the great Democracy

Makes a new world ——

EVA.

And if you be not jesting,

Neither the old world, nor the new, nor father,

Sister, nor you, shall ever see me more.

EDGAR (moved).

Then — (aside) Shall I say it? — (aloud) fly with me to-day.

EVA.

No! Philip, Philip, if you do not marry me,

I shall go mad for utter shame and die.

EDGAR.

Then, if we needs must be conventional,

When shall your parish-parson bawl our banns

Before your gaping clowns?

EVA.

Not in our church —

I think I scarce could hold my head up there.

Is there no other way?

EDGAR.

Yes, if you cared

To fee an over-opulent superstition,

Then they would grant you what they call a licence

To marry. Do you wish it?

EVA.

Do I wish it?

EDGAR.

In London.

EVA.

You will write to me?

EDGAR.

I will.

EVA.

And I will fly to you thro’ the night, the storm —

Yes, tho’ the fire should run along the ground,

As once it did in Egypt. Oh, you see,

I was just out of school, I had no mother —

My sister far away — and you, a gentleman,

Told me to trust you: yes, in everything —

That was the only true love; and I trusted —

Oh, yes, indeed, I would have died for you.

How could you — Oh, how could you? — nay, how could I?

But now you will set all right again, and I

Shall not be made the laughter of the village,

And poor old father not die miserable.

DORA (singing in the distance).

O joy for the promise of May, of May,

O joy for the promise of May.

EDGAR.

Speak not so loudly; that must be your sister.

You never told her, then, of what has past

Between us.

EVA.

Never!

EDGAR.

Do not till I bid you.

EVA.

No, Philip, no.            [Turns away.

EDGAR (moved).

How gracefully there she stands

Weeping — the little Niobe! What! we prize

The statue or the picture all the more

When we have made them ours! Is she less loveable,

Less lovely, being wholly mine? To stay —

Follow my art among these quiet fields,

Live with these honest folk —

And play the fool!

No! she that gave herself to me so easily

Will yield herself as easily to another.

EVA.

Did you speak, Philip?

EDGAR.

Nothing more, farewell.

[They embrace.

DORA (coming nearer).

O grief for the promis May, of May,

O grief for the promise of May.

EDGAR (still embracing her).

Keep up your heart until we meet again.

EVA.

If that should break before we meet again?

EDGAR.

Break! nay, but call for Philip when you will,

And he returns.

EVA.

Heaven hears you, Philip Edgar!

EDGAR (moved).

And he would hear you even from the grave.

Heaven curse him if he come not at your call!

[Exit.

Enter DORA.

DORA.

Well, Eva!

EVA.

Oh, Dora, Dora, how long you have been away from home! Oh, how often I have wished for you! It seemed to me that we were parted for ever.

DORA.

For ever, you foolish child! What’s come over you? We parted like the brook yonder about the alder island, to come together again in a moment and to go on together again, till one of us be married. But where is this Mr. Edgar whom you praised so in your first letters? You haven’t even mentioned him in your last?

EVA.

He has gone to London.

DORA.

Ay, child; and you look thin and pale. Is it for his absence? Have you fancied yourself in love with him? That’s all nonsense, you know, such a baby as you are. But you shall tell me all about it.

EVA.

Not now — presently. Yes, I have been in trouble, but I am happy — I think, quite happy now.

DORA (taking EVA’S hand).

Come, then, and make them happy in the long barn, for father is in his glory, and there is a piece of beef like a house-side, and a plum-pudding as big as the round haystack. But see they are coming out for the dance already. Well, my child, let us join them.

Enter all from barn laughing. EVA sits reluctantly under apple tree. STEER enters smoking, sits by EVA.

Dance.

Act II

Five years have elapsed between Acts I. and II.

SCENE. — A meadow. On one side a pathway going over a rustic bridge. At back the farmhouse among trees. In the distance a church spire.

DOBSON and DORA.

DOBSON.

So the owd uncle i’ Coomberland be deäd, Miss Dora, beänt he?

DORA.

Yes, Mr. Dobson, I’ve been attending on his death-bed and his burial.

DOBSON.

It be five year sin’ ye went afoor to him, and it seems to me nobbut t’other day. Hesn’t he left ye nowt?

DORA.

No, Mr. Dobson.

DOBSON.

But he were mighty fond o’ ye, warn’t he?

DORA.

Fonder of poor Eva — like everybody else.

DOBSON (handing DORA basket of roses).

Not like me, Miss Dora; and I ha’ browt these roses to ye — I forgits what they calls ‘em, but I hallus gi’ed soom on ‘em to Miss Eva at this time o’ year. Will ya taäke ‘em? fur Miss Eva, she set the bush by my dairy winder afoor she went to school at Littlechester — so I allus browt soom on ‘em to her; and now she be gone, will ye taäke ‘em, Miss Dora?

DORA.

I thank you. They tell me that yesterday you mentioned her name too suddenly before my father. See that you do not do so again!

DOBSON.

Noä; I knaws a deal better now. I seed how the owd man wur vext.

DORA.

I take them, then, for Eva’s sake.

[Takes basket, places some in her dress.

DOBSON.

Eva’s saäke. Yeas. Poor gel, poor gel! I can’t abeär to think on ‘er now, fur I’d ha’ done owt fur ‘er mysen; an’ ony o’ Steer’s men, an’ ony o’ my men ‘ud ha’ done owt fur ‘er, an’ all the parish ‘ud ha’ done owt fur ‘er, fur we was all on us proud on ‘er, an’ them theer be soom of her oän roses, an’ she wur as sweet as ony on ‘em — the Lord bless ‘er—’er oän sen; an’ weänt ye taäke ‘em now, Miss Dora, fur ‘er saäke an’ fur my saäke an’ all?

DORA.

Do you want them back again?

DOBSON.

Noä, noä! Keep ‘em. But I hed a word to saäy to ye.

DORA.

Why, Farmer, you should be in the hayfield looking after your men; you couldn’t have more splendid weather.

DOBSON.

I be a going theer; but I thowt I’d bring tha them roses fust. The weather’s well anew, but the glass be a bit shaäky. S’iver we’ve led moäst on it.

DORA.

Ay! but you must not be too sudden with it either, as you were last year, when you put it in green, and your stack caught fire.

DOBSON.

I were insured, Miss, an’ I lost nowt by it. But I weänt be too sudden wi’ it; and I feel sewer, Miss Dora, that I ha’ been noän too sudden wi’ you, fur I ha’ sarved for ye well nigh as long as the man sarved for ‘is sweet’art i’ Scriptur’. Weänt ye gi’e me a kind answer at last?

DORA.

I have no thought of marriage, my friend. We have been in such grief these five years, not only on my sister’s account, but the ill success of the farm, and the debts, and my father’s breaking down, and his blindness. How could I think of leaving him?

DOBSON.

Eh, but I be well to do; and if ye would nobbut hev me, I would taäke the owd blind man to my oän fireside. You should hev him allus wi’ ye.

DORA.

You are generous, but it cannot be. I cannot love you; nay, I think I never can be brought to love any man. It seems to me that I hate men, ever since my sister left us. Oh, see here. (Pulls out a letter.) I wear it next my heart. Poor sister, I had it five years ago. ‘Dearest Dora, — I have lost myself, and am lost for ever to you and my poor father. I thought Mr. Edgar the best of men, and he has proved himself the worst. Seek not for me, or you may find me at the bottom of the river. — EVA.’

DOBSON.

Be that my fault?

DORA.

No; but how should I, with this grief still at my heart, take to the milking of your cows, the fatting of your calves, the making of your butter, and the managing of your poultry?

DOBSON.

Naä’y, but I hev an owd woman as ‘ud see to all that; and you should sit i’ your oän parlour quite like a laädy, ye should!

DORA.

It cannot be.

DOBSON.

And plaäy the pianner, if ye liked, all daäy long, like a laädy, ye should an’ all.

DORA.

It cannot be.

DOBSON.

And I would loove tha moor nor ony gentleman ‘ud I loove tha.

DORA.

No, no; it cannot be.

DOBSON.

And p’raps ye hears ‘at I soomtimes taäkes a drop too much; but that be all along o’ you, Miss, because ye weänt hev me; but, if ye would, I could put all that o’ one side eäsy anew.

DORA.

Cannot you understand plain words, Mr. Dobson? I tell you, it cannot be.

DOBSON.

Eh, lass! Thy feyther eddicated his darters to marry gentlefoälk, and see what’s coomed on it.

DORA.

That is enough, Farmer Dobson. You have shown me that, though fortune had born you into the estate of a gentleman, you would still have been Farmer Dobson. You had better attend to your hayfield. Good afternoon.

[Exit.

DOBSON.

‘Farmer Dobson’! Well, I be Farmer Dobson; but I thinks Farmer Dobson’s dog ‘ud ha’ knaw’d better nor to cast her sister’s misfortin inter ‘er teeth arter she’d been a-readin’ me the letter wi’ ‘er voice a-shaäkin’, and the drop in ‘er eye. Theer she goäs! Shall I foller ‘er and ax ‘er to maäke it up? Noä, not yet. Let ‘er cool upon it; I likes ‘er all the better fur taäkin’ me down, like a laädy, as she be. Farmer Dobson! I be Farmer Dobson, sewer anew; but if iver I cooms upo’ Gentleman Hedgar ageän, and doänt laäy my cartwhip athurt ‘is shou’ders, why then I beänt Farmer Dobson, but summun else — blaäme’t if I beänt!

Enter HAYMAKERS with a load of hay.

The last on it, eh?

1ST HAYMAKER.

Yeas.

DOBSON.

Hoäm wi’ it, then.

[Exit surlily.

1ST HAYMAKER.

Well, it be the last loäd hoäm.

2ND HAYMAKER.

Yeas, an’ owd Dobson should be glad on it. What maäkes ‘im allus sa glum?

SALLY ALLEN.

Glum! he be wus nor glum. He coom’d up to me yisterdaäy i’ the haäyfield, when meä and my sweet’art was a workin’ along o’ one side wi’ one another, and he sent ‘im awaäy to t’other end o’ the field; and when I axed ‘im why, he telled me ‘at sweet’arts niver worked well togither; and I telled ‘im ‘at sweet’arts allus worked best togither; and then he called me a rude naäme, and I can’t abide ‘im.

JAMES.

Why, lass, doänt tha knaw he be sweet upo’ Dora Steer, and she weänt sa much as look at ‘im? And wheniver ‘e sees two sweet’arts togither like thou and me, Sally, he be fit to bust hissen wi’ spites and jalousies.

SALLY.

Let ‘im bust hissen, then, for owt I cares.

1ST HAYMAKER.

Well but, as I said afoor, it be the last loäd hoäm; do thou and thy sweet’art sing us hoäm to supper—’The Last Loäd Hoäm.’

ALL.

Ay! ‘The Last Loäd Hoäm.’

Song.

What did ye do, and what did ye saäy,

Wi’ the wild white rose, an’ the woodbine sa gaä’y,

An’ the midders all mow’d, an’ the sky sa blue —

What did ye saäy, and what did ye do,

When ye thowt there were nawbody watchin’ o’ you,

And you an’ your Sally was forkin’ the haäy,

At the end of the daäy,

For the last loäd hoäm?

What did we do, and what did we saäy,

Wi’ the briar sa green, an’ the willer sa graäy,

An’ the midders all mow’d, an’ the sky sa blue —

Do ye think I be gawin’ to tell it to you,

What we mowt saäy, and what we mowt do,

When me an’ my Sally was forkin’ the haäy,

At the end of the daäy,

For the last loäd hoäm?

But what did ye saäy, and what did ye do,

Wi’ the butterflies out, and the swallers at plaä’y,

An’ the midders all mow’d, an’ the sky sa blue?

Why, coom then, owd feller, I’ll tell it to you;

For me an’ my Sally we swear’d to be true,

To be true to each other, let ‘appen what maäy,

Till the end of the daäy

And the last loäd hoäm.

ALL.

Well sung!

JAMES.

Fanny be the naäme i’ the song, but I swopt it fur she.

[Pointing to SALLY.

SALLY.

Let ma aloän afoor foälk, wilt tha?

1ST HAYMAKER.

Ye shall sing that ageän to-night, fur owd Dobson’ll gi’e us a bit o’ supper.

SALLY.

I weänt goä to owd Dobson; he wur rude to me i’ tha haäyfield, and he’ll be rude to me ageän to-night. Owd Steer’s gotten all his grass down and wants a hand, and I’ll goä to him.

1ST HAYMAKER.

Owd Steer gi’es nubbut cowd tea to ‘is men, and owd Dobson gi’es beer.

SALLY.

But I’d like owd Steer’s cowd tea better nor Dobson’s beer. Good-bye.

[Going.

JAMES.

Gi’e us a buss fust, lass.

SALLY.

I tell’d tha to let ma aloän!

JAMES.

Why, wasn’t thou and me a-bussin’ o’ one another t’other side o’ the haäycock, when owd Dobson coom’d upo’ us? I can’t let tha aloän if I would, Sally.

[Offering to kiss her.

SALLY.

Git along wi’ ye, do!

[Exit.

[All laugh; exeunt singing.

‘To be true to each other, let ‘appen what maäy,

Till the end o’ the daä’y

An’ the last loäd hoäm.’

Enter HAROLD.

HAROLD.

Not Harold! ‘Philip Edgar, Philip Edgar!’

Her phantom call’d me by the name she loved.

I told her I should hear her from the grave.

Ay! yonder is her casement. I remember

Her bright face beaming starlike down upon me

Thro’ that rich cloud of blossom. Since I left her

Here weeping, I have ranged the world, and sat

Thro’ every sensual course of that full feast

That leaves but emptiness.

Song.

‘To be true to each other, let ‘appen what maäy,

To the end o’ the daä’y

An’ the last loäd hoäm.’

HAROLD.

Poor Eva! O my God, if man be only

A willy-nilly current of sensations —

Reaction needs must follow revel — yet —

Why feel remorse, he, knowing that he must have

Moved in the iron grooves of Destiny?

Remorse then is a part of Destiny,

Nature a liar, making us feel guilty

Of her own faults.

My grandfather — of him

They say, that women —

O this mortal house,

Which we are born into, is haunted by

The ghosts of the dead passions of dead men;

And these take flesh again with our own flesh,

And bring us to confusion.

He was only

A poor philosopher who call’d the mind

Of children a blank page, a tabula rasa.

There, there, is written in invisible inks

‘Lust, Prodigality, Covetousness, Craft,

Cowardice, Murder’ — and the heat and fire

Of life will bring them out, and black enough,

So the child grow to manhood: better death

With our first wail than life —

Song (further off).

‘Till the end o’ the daäy

An’ the last loäd hoäm,

Load hoäm.’

This bridge again!        (Steps on the bridge.)

How often have I stood

With Eva here! The brook among its flowers!

Forget-me-not, meadowsweet, willow-herb.

I had some smattering of science then,

Taught her the learned names, anatomized

The flowers for her — and now I only wish

This pool were deep enough, that I might plunge

And lose myself for ever.

Enter DAN SMITH (singing).

Gee oop! whoä! Gee oop! whoä!

Scizzars an’ Pumpy was good uns to goä

Thruf slush an’ squad

When roäds was bad,

But hallus ud stop at the Vine-an’-the-Hop,

Fur boäth on ‘em knaw’d as well as mysen

That beer be as good fur ‘erses as men.

Gee oop! whoä! Gee oop! whoä!

Scizzars an’ Pumpy was good uns to goä.

The beer’s gotten oop into my ‘eäd. S’iver I mun git along back to the farm, fur she tell’d ma to taäke the cart to Littlechester.

Enter DORA.

Half an hour late! why are you loitering here? Away with you at once.

[Exit DAn Smith.

(Seeing HAROLD on bridge.)

Some madman, is it,

Gesticulating there upon the bridge?

I am half afraid to pass.

HAROLD.

Sometimes I wonder,

When man has surely learnt at last that all

His old-world faith, the blossom of his youth,

Has faded, falling fruitless — whether then

All of us, all at once, may not be seized

With some fierce passion, not so much for Death

As against Life! all, all, into the dark —

No more! — and science now could drug and balm us

Back into nescience with as little pain

As it is to fall asleep.

This beggarly life,

This poor, flat, hedged-in field — no distance — this

Hollow Pandora-box,

With all the pleasures flown, not even Hope

Left at the bottom!

Superstitious fool,

What brought me here? To see her grave? her ghost?

Her ghost is everyway about me here.

DORA (coming forward).

Allow me, sir, to pass you.

HAROLD.

Eva!

DORA.

Eva!

HAROLD.

What are you? Where do you come from?

DORA.

From the farm

Here, close at hand.

HAROLD.

Are you — you are — that Dora,

The sister. I have heard of you. The likeness

Is very striking.

DORA.

You knew Eva, then?

HAROLD.

Yes — I was thinking of her when — O yes,

Many years back, and never since have met

Her equal for pure innocence of nature,

And loveliness of feature.

DORA.

No, nor I.

HAROLD.

Except, indeed, I have found it once again

In your own self.

DORA.

You flatter me. Dear Eva

Was always thought the prettier.

HAROLD.

And her charm

Of voice is also yours; and I was brooding

Upon a great unhappiness when you spoke.

DORA.

Indeed, you seem’d in trouble, sir.

HAROLD.

And you

Seem my good angel who may help me from it.

DORA (aside).

How worn he looks, poor man! who is it, I wonder.

How can I help him? (Aloud.) Might I ask your name?

HAROLD.

Harold.

DORA.

I never heard her mention you.

HAROLD.

I met her first at a farm in Cumberland —

Her uncle’s.

DORA.

She was there six years ago.

HAROLD.

And if she never mention’d me, perhaps

The painful circumstances which I heard —

I will not vex you by repeating them —

Only last week at Littlechester, drove me

From out her memory. She has disappear’d,

They told me, from the farm — and darker news.

DORA.

She has disappear’d, poor darling, from the world —

Left but one dreadful line to say, that we

Should find her in the river; and we dragg’d

The Littlechester river all in vain:

Have sorrow’d for her all these years in vain.

And my poor father, utterly broken down

By losing her — she was his favourite child —

Has let his farm, all his affairs, I fear,

But for the slender help that I can give,

Fall into ruin. Ah! that villain, Edgar,

If he should ever show his face among us,

Our men and boys would hoot him, stone him, hunt him

With pitchforks off the farm, for all of them

Loved her, and she was worthy of all love.

HAROLD.

They say, we should forgive our enemies.

DORA.

Ay, if the wretch were dead I might forgive him;

We know not whether he be dead or living.

HAROLD.

What Edgar?

DORA.

Philip Edgar of Toft Hall

In Somerset. Perhaps you know him?

HAROLD.

Slightly.

(Aside.) Ay, for how slightly have I known myself.

DORA.

This Edgar, then, is living?

HAROLD.

Living?     well —

One Philip Edgar of Toft Hall in Somerset

Is lately dead.

DORA.

Dead! — is there more than one?

HAROLD.

Nay — now — not one, (aside) for I am Philip Harold.

DORA.

That one, is he then — dead!

HAROLD.

(Aside.) My father’s death,

Let her believe it mine; this, for the moment,

Will leave me a free field.

DORA.

Dead! and this world

Is brighter for his absence as that other

Is darker for his presence.

HAROLD.

Is not this

To speak too pitilessly of the dead?

DORA.

My five-years’ anger cannot die at once,

Not all at once with death and him. I trust

I shall forgive him — by-and-by — not now.

O sir, you seem to have a heart; if you

Had seen us that wild morning when we found

Her bed unslept in, storm and shower lashing

Her casement, her poor spaniel wailing for her,

That desolate letter, blotted with her tears,

Which told us we should never see her more —

Our old nurse crying as if for her own child,

My father stricken with his first paralysis,

And then with blindness — had you been one of us

And seen all this, then you would know it is not

So easy to forgive — even the dead.

HAROLD.

But sure am I that of your gentleness

You will forgive him. She, you mourn for, seem’d

A miracle of gentleness — would not blur

A moth’s wing by the touching; would not crush

The fly that drew her blood; and, were she living,

Would not — if penitent — have denied him her

Forgiveness. And perhaps the man himself,

When hearing of that piteous death, has suffer’d

More than we know. But wherefore waste your heart

In looking on a chill and changeless Past?

Iron will fuse, and marble melt; the Past

Remains the Past. But you are young, and — pardon me —

As lovely as your sister. Who can tell

What golden hours, with what full hands, may be

Waiting you in the distance? Might I call

Upon your father — I have seen the world —

And cheer his blindness with a traveller’s tales?

DORA.

Call if you will, and when you will. I cannot

Well answer for my father; but if you

Can tell me anything of our sweet Eva

When in her brighter girlhood, I at least

Will bid you welcome, and will listen to you.

Now I must go.

HAROLD.

But give me first your hand:

I do not dare, like an old friend, to shake it.

I kiss it as a prelude to that privilege

When you shall know me better.

DORA.

(Aside.) How beautiful

His manners are, and how unlike the farmer’s!

You are staying here?

HAROLD.

Yes, at the wayside inn

Close by that alder-island in your brook,

‘The Angler’s Home.’

DORA.

Are you one?

HAROLD.

No, but I

Take some delight in sketching, and the country

Has many charms, altho’ the inhabitants

Seem semi-barbarous.

DORA.

I am glad it pleases you;

Yet I, born here, not only love the country,

But its inhabitants too; and you, I doubt not,

Would take to them as kindly, if you cared

To live some time among them.

HAROLD.

If I did,

Then one at least of its inhabitants

Might have more charm for me than all the country.

DORA.

That one, then, should be grateful for your preference.

HAROLD.

I cannot tell, tho’ standing in her presence.

(Aside.) She colours!

DORA.

Sir!

HAROLD.

Be not afraid of me,

For these are no conventional flourishes.

I do most earnestly assure you that

Your likeness —

[Shouts and cries without.

DORA.

What was that? my poor blind father —

Enter FARMING MAN.

FARMING MAN.

Miss Dora, Dan Smith’s cart hes runned ower a laädy i’ the holler laäne, and they ha’ ta’en the body up inter your chaumber, and they be all a-callin’ for ye.

DORA.

The body! — Heavens! I come!

HAROLD.

But you are trembling.

Allow me to go with you to the farm.

[Exeunt.

Enter DOBSON.

DOBSON.

What feller wur it as ‘a’ been a-talkin’ fur haäfe an hour wi’ my Dora? (Looking after him.) Seeäms I ommost knaws the back on ‘im — drest like a gentleman, too. Damn all gentlemen, says I! I should ha’ thowt they’d hed anew o’ gentlefoälk, as I telled ‘er to-daäy when she fell foul upo’ me.

Minds ma o’ summun. I could sweär to that; but that be all one, fur I haätes ‘im afoor I knaws what ‘e be. Theer! he turns round. Philip Hedgar o’ Soomerset! Philip Hedgar o’ Soomerset! — Noä — yeas — thaw the feller’s gone and maäde such a litter of his faäce.

Eh lad, if it be thou, I’ll Philip tha! a-plaäyin’ the saäme gaäme wi’ my Dora — I’ll Soomerset tha.

I’d like to drag ‘im thruff the herse-pond, and she to be a-lookin’ at it. I’d like to leather ‘im black and blue, and she to be a-laughin’ at it. I’d like to fell ‘im as deäd as a bullock! (Clenching his fist.)

But what ‘ud she saäy to that? She telled me once not to meddle wi’ ‘im, and now she be fallen out wi’ ma, and I can’t coom at ‘er.

It mun be him. Noä! Fur she’d niver ‘a been talkin’ haäfe an hour wi’ the divil ‘at killed her oän sister, or she beänt Dora Steer.

Yeas! Fur she niver knawed ‘is faäce when ‘e wur ‘ere afoor; but I’ll maäke ‘er knaw! I’ll maäke ‘er knaw!

Enter HAROLD.

Naäy, but I mun git out on ‘is waäy now, or I shall be the death on ‘im.

[Exit.

HAROLD.

How the clown glared at me! that Dobbins, is it,

With whom I used to jar? but can he trace me

Thro’ five years’ absence, and my change of name,

The tan of southern summers and the beard?

I may as well avoid him.

Ladylike!

Lilylike in her stateliness and sweetness!

How came she by it? — a daughter of the fields,

This Dora!

She gave her hand, unask’d, at the farm-gate;

I almost think she half return’d the pressure

Of mine. What, I that held the orange blossom

Dark as the yew? but may not those, who march

Before their age, turn back at times, and make

Courtesy to custom? and now the stronger motive,

Misnamed free-will — the crowd would call it conscience —

Moves me — to what? I am dreaming; for the past

Look’d thro’ the present, Eva’s eyes thro’ her’s —

A spell upon me! Surely I loved Eva

More than I knew! or is it but the past

That brightens in retiring? Oh, last night,

Tired, pacing my new lands at Littlechester,

I dozed upon the bridge, and the black river

Flow’d thro’ my dreams — if dreams they were. She rose

From the foul flood and pointed toward the farm,

And her cry rang to me across the years,

‘I call you, Philip Edgar, Philip Edgar!

Come, you will set all right again, and father

Will not die miserable.’ I could make his age

A comfort to him — so be more at peace

With mine own self. Some of my former friends

Would find my logic faulty; let them. Colour

Flows thro’ my life again, and I have lighted

On a new pleasure. Anyhow we must

Move in the line of least resistance when

The stronger motive rules.

But she hates Edgar.

May not this Dobbins, or some other, spy

Edgar in Harold? Well then, I must make her

Love Harold first, and then she will forgive

Edgar for Harold’s sake. She said herself

She would forgive him, by-and-by, not now —

For her own sake then, if not for mine — not now —

But by-and-by.

Enter DOBSON behind.

DOBSON.

By-and-by — eh, lad, dosta knaw this paäper? Ye dropt it upo’ the road. ‘Philip Edgar, Esq.’ Ay, you be a pretty squire. I ha’ fun’ ye out, I hev. Eh, lad, dosta knaw what tha meäns wi’ by-and-by? Fur if ye be goin’ to sarve our Dora as ye sarved our Eva — then, by-and-by, if she weänt listen to me when I be a-tryin’ to saäve ‘er — if she weänt — look to thysen, for, by the Lord, I’d think na moor o’ maäkin’ an end o’ tha nor a carrion craw — noä — thaw they hanged ma at ‘Size fur it.

HAROLD.

Dobbins, I think!

DOBSON.

I beänt Dobbins.

HAROLD.

Nor am I Edgar, my good fellow.

DOBSON.

Tha lies! What hasta been saäyin’ to my Dora?

HAROLD.

I have been telling her of the death of one Philip Edgar of Toft Hall, Somerset.

DOBSON.

Tha lies!

HAROLD (pulling out a newspaper).

Well, my man, it seems that you can read. Look there — under the deaths.

DOBSON.

‘O’ the 17th, Philip Edgar, o’ Toft Hall, Soomerset.’ How coom thou to be sa like ‘im, then?

HAROLD.

Naturally enough; for I am closely related to the dead man’s family.

DOBSON.

An ‘ow coom thou by the letter to ‘im?

HAROLD.

Naturally again; for as I used to transact all his business for him, I had to look over his letters. Now then, see these (takes out letters). Half a score of them, all directed to me — Harold.

DOBSON.

‘Arold! ‘Arold! ‘Arold, so they be.

HAROLD.

My name is Harold! Good day, Dobbins!

[Exit.

DOBSON.

‘Arold! The feller’s cleän daäzed, an’ maäzed, an’ maäted, an’ muddled ma. Deäd! It mun be true, fur it wur i’ print as black as owt. Naäay, but ‘Good daäy, Dobbins.’ Why, that wur the very twang on ‘im. Eh, lad, but whether thou be Hedgar, or Hedgar’s business man, thou hesn’t naw business ‘ere wi’ my Dora, as I knaws on, an’ whether thou calls thysen Hedgar or Harold, if thou stick to she I’ll stick to thee — stick to tha like a weasel to a rabbit, I will. Ay! and I’d like to shoot tha like a rabbit an’ all. ‘Good daäy, Dobbins.’ Dang tha!

Act III

A room in STEER’S House. Door leading into bedroom at the back.

DORA (ringing a handbell).

Milly!

Enter MILLY.

MILLY.

The little ‘ymn? Yeäs, Miss; but I wur so ta’en up wi’ leädin’ the owd man about all the blessed murnin’ ‘at I ha’ nobbut larned mysen haäfe on it.

‘O man, forgive thy mortal foe,

Nor ever strike him blow for blow;

For all the souls on earth that live

To be forgiven must forgive.

Forgive him seventy times and seven:

For all the blessed souls in Heaven

Are both forgivers and forgiven.’

But I’ll git the book ageän, and larn mysen the rest, and saäy it to ye afoor dark; ye ringed fur that, Miss, didn’t ye?

DORA.

No, Milly; but if the farming-men be come for their wages, to send them up to me.

MILLY.

Yeäs, Miss.

[Exit.

DORA (sitting at desk counting money).

Enough at any rate for the present. (Enter FARMING MEN.) Good afternoon, my friends. I am sorry Mr. Steer still continues too unwell to attend to you, but the schoolmaster looked to the paying you your wages when I was away, didn’t he?

MEN.

Yeäs; and thanks to ye.

DORA.

Some of our workmen have left us, but he sent me an alphabetical list of those that remain, so, Allen, I may as well begin with you.

ALLEN (with his hand to his ear).

Halfabitical! Taäke one o’ the young ‘uns fust, Miss, fur I be a bit deaf, and I wur hallus scaäred by a big word; leästwaäys, I should be wi’ a lawyer.

DORA.

I spoke of your names, Allen, as they are arranged here (shows book) — according to their first letters.

ALLEN.

Letters! Yeas, I sees now. Them be what they larns the childer’ at school, but I were burn afoor schoolin-time.

DORA.

But, Allen, tho’ you can’t read, you could whitewash that cottage of yours where your grandson had the fever.

ALLEN.

I’ll hev it done o’ Monday.

DORA.

Else if the fever spread, the parish will have to thank you for it.

ALLEN.

Meä? why, it be the Lord’s doin’, noän o’ mine; d’ye think I’d gi’e ‘em the fever? But I thanks ye all the saäme, Miss. (Takes money.)

DORA (calling out names).

Higgins, Jackson, Luscombe, Nokes, Oldham, Skipworth! (All take money.) Did you find that you worked at all the worse upon the cold tea than you would have done upon the beer?

HIGGINS.

Noä, Miss; we worked naw wuss upo’ the cowd tea; but we’d ha’ worked better upo’ the beer.

DORA.

Come, come, you worked well enough, and I am much obliged to all of you. There’s for you, and you, and you. Count the money and see if it’s all right.

MEN.

All right, Miss; and thank ye kindly.

[Exeunt Luscombe, Nokes, Oldham, Skipworth.

DORA.

Dan Smith, my father and I forgave you stealing our coals.

[DAN SMITH advances to DORA.

DAN SMITH (bellowing).

Whoy, O lor, Miss! that wur sa long back, and the walls sa thin, and the winders brokken, and the weather sa cowd, and my missus a-gittin’ ower ‘er lyin’-in.

DORA.

Didn’t I say that we had forgiven you? But, Dan Smith, they tell me that you — and you have six children — spent all your last Saturday’s wages at the ale-house; that you were stupid drunk all Sunday, and so ill in consequence all Monday, that you did not come into the hayfield. Why should I pay you your full wages?

DAN SMITH.

I be ready to taäke the pledge.

DORA.

And as ready to break it again. Besides it was you that were driving the cart — and I fear you were tipsy then, too — when you lamed the lady in the hollow lane.

DAN SMITH (bellowing).

O lor, Miss! noä, noä, noä! Ye sees the holler laäne be hallus sa dark i’ the arternoon, and wheere the big eshtree cuts athurt it, it gi’es a turn like, and ‘ow should I see to laäme the laädy, and meä coomin’ along pretty sharp an’ all?

DORA.

Well, there are your wages; the next time you waste them at a pothouse you get no more from me. (Exit Dan Smith.) Sally Allen, you worked for Mr. Dobson, didn’t you?

SALLY (advancing).

Yeäs, Miss; but he wur so rough wi’ ma, I couldn’t abide ‘im.

DORA.

Why should he be rough with you? You are as good as a man in the hayfield. What’s become of your brother?

SALLY.

‘Listed for a soädger, Miss, i’ the Queen’s Real Hard Tillery.

DORA.

And your sweetheart — when are you and he to be married?

SALLY.

At Michaelmas, Miss, please God.

DORA.

You are an honest pair. I will come to your wedding.

SALLY.

An’ I thanks ye fur that, Miss, moor nor fur the waäge.

(Going — returns.)

‘A cotched ma about the waäist, Miss, when ‘e wur ‘ere afoor, an’ axed ma to be ‘is little sweet-art, an soä I knaw’d ‘im when I seed ‘im ageän an I telled feyther on ‘im.

DORA.

What is all this, Allen?

ALLEN.

Why, Miss Dora, meä and my maätes, us three, we wants to hev three words wi’ ye.

HIGGINS.

That be ‘im, and meä, Miss.

JACKSON.

An’ meä, Miss.

ALLEN.

An’ we weänt mention naw naämes, we’d as lief talk o’ the Divil afoor ye as ‘im, fur they says the master goäs cleän off his ‘eäd when he ‘eärs the naäme on ‘im; but us three, arter Sally’d telled us on ‘im, we fun’ ‘im out a-walkin’ i’ West Field wi’ a white ‘at, nine o’clock, upo’ Tuesday murnin’, and all on us, wi’ your leave, we wants to leather ‘im.

DORA.

Who?

ALLEN.

Him as did the mischief here, five year’ sin’.

DORA.

Mr. Edgar?

ALLEN.

Theer, Miss! You ha’ naämed ‘im — not me.

DORA.

He’s dead, man — dead; gone to his account — dead and buried.

ALLEN.

I beä’nt sa sewer o’ that, fur Sally knaw’d ‘im; Now then?

DORA.

Yes; it was in the Somersetshire papers.

ALLEN.

Then yon mun be his brother, an’ — we’ll leather ‘im.

DORA.

I never heard that he had a brother. Some foolish mistake of Sally’s; but what! would you beat a man for his brother’s fault? That were a wild justice indeed. Let bygones be bygones. Go home.’ Goodnight! (All exeunt.) I have once more paid them all. The work of the farm will go on still, but for how long? We are almost at the bottom of the well: little more to be drawn from it — and what then? Encumbered as we are, who would lend us anything? We shall have to sell all the land, which Father, for a whole life, has been getting together, again, and that, I am sure, would be the death of him. What am I to do? Farmer Dobson, were I to marry him, has promised to keep our heads above water; and the man has doubtless a good heart, and a true and lasting love for me: yet — though I can be sorry for him — as the good Sally says, ‘I can’t abide him’ — almost brutal, and matched with my Harold is like a hedge thistle by a garden rose. But then, he, too — will he ever be of one faith with his wife? which is my dream of a true marriage. Can I fancy him kneeling with me, and uttering the same prayer; standing up side by side with me, and singing the same hymn? I fear not. Have I done wisely, then, in accepting him? But may not a girl’s love-dream have too much romance in it to be realised all at once, or altogether, or anywhere but in Heaven? And yet I had once a vision of a pure and perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, only differing as the stronger and the weaker, should walk hand in hand together down this valley of tears, as they call it so truly, to the grave at the bottom, and lie down there together in the darkness which would seem but for a moment, to be wakened again together by the light of the resurrection, and no more partings for ever and for ever. (Walks up and down. She sings.)

‘O happy lark, that warblest high

Above thy lowly nest,

O brook, that brawlest merrily by

Thro’ fields that once were blest,

O tower spiring to the sky,

O graves in daisies drest,

O Love and Life, how weary am I,

And how I long for rest.’

There, there, I am a fool! Tears! I have sometimes been moved to tears by a chapter of fine writing in a novel; but what have I to do with tears now? All depends on me — Father, this poor girl, the farm, everything; and they both love me — I am all in all to both; and he loves me too, I am quite sure of that. Courage, courage! and all will go well. (Goes to bedroom door; opens it.) How dark your room is! Let me bring you in here where there is still full daylight. (Brings EVA forward.) Why, you look better.

EVA.

And I feel so much better that I trust I may be able by-and-by to help you in the business of the farm; but I must not be known yet. Has anyone found me out, Dora?

DORA.

Oh, no; you kept your veil too close for that when they carried you in; since then, no one has seen you but myself.

EVA.

Yes — this Milly.

DORA.

Poor blind Father’s little guide, Milly, who came to us three years after you were gone, how should she know you? But now that you have been brought to us as it were from the grave, dearest Eva, and have been here so long, will you not speak with Father today?

EVA.

Do you think that I may? No, not yet. I am not equal to it yet.

DORA.

Why? Do you still suffer from your fall in the hollow lane?

EVA.

Bruised; but no bones broken.

DORA.

I have always told Father that the huge old ashtree there would cause an accident some day; but he would never cut it down, because one of the Steers had planted it there in former times.

EVA.

If it had killed one of the Steers there the other day, it might have been better for her, for him, and for you.

DORA.

Come, come, keep a good heart! Better for me! That’s good. How better for me?

EVA.

You tell me you have a lover. Will he not fly from you if he learn the story of my shame and that I am still living?

DORA.

No; I am sure that when we are married he will be willing that you and Father should live with us; for, indeed, he tells me that he met you once in the old times, and was much taken with you, my dear.

EVA.

Taken with me; who was he? Have you told him I am here?

DORA.

No; do you wish it?

EVA.

See, Dora; you yourself are ashamed of me (weeps), and I do not wonder at it.

DORA.

But I should wonder at myself if it were so. Have we not been all in all to one another from the time when we first peeped into the bird’s nest, waded in the brook, ran after the butterflies, and prattled to each other that we would marry fine gentlemen, and played at being fine ladies?

EVA.

That last was my Father’s fault, poor man. And this lover of yours — this Mr. Harold — is a gentleman?

DORA.

That he is, from head to foot. I do believe I lost my heart to him the very first time we met, and I love him so much —

EVA.

Poor Dora!

DORA.

That I dare not tell him how much I love him.

EVA.

Better not. Has he offered you marriage, this gentleman?

DORA.

Could I love him else?

EVA.

And are you quite sure that after marriage this gentleman will not be shamed of his poor farmer’s daughter among the ladies in his drawing-room?

DORA.

Shamed of me in a drawing-room! Wasn’t Miss Vavasour, our schoolmistress at Littlechester, a lady born? Were not our fellow-pupils all ladies? Wasn’t dear mother herself at least by one side a lady? Can’t I speak like a lady; pen a letter like a lady; talk a little French like a lady; play a little like a lady? Can’t a girl when she loves her husband, and he her, make herself anything he wishes her to be? Shamed of me in a drawing-room, indeed! See here! ‘I hope your Lordship is quite recovered of your gout?’ (Curtsies.) ‘Will your Ladyship ride to cover to-day? (Curtsies.) I can recommend our Voltigeur.’ ‘I am sorry that we could not attend your Grace’s party on the 10th!’ (Curtsies.) There, I am glad my nonsense has made you smile!

EVA.

I have heard that ‘your Lordship,’ and ‘your Ladyship,’ and ‘your Grace’ are all growing old-fashioned!

DORA.

But the love of sister for sister can never be old-fashioned. I have been unwilling to trouble you with questions, but you seem somewhat better to-day. We found a letter in your bedroom torn into bits. I couldn’t make it out. What was it?

EVA.

From him! from him! He said we had been most happy together, and he trusted that some time we should meet again, for he had not forgotten his promise to come when I called him. But that was a mockery, you know, for he gave me no address, and there was no word of marriage; and, O Dora, he signed himself ‘Yours gratefully’ — fancy, Dora, ‘gratefully’! ‘Yours gratefully’!

DORA.

Infamous wretch! (Aside.) Shall I tell her he is dead? No; she is still too feeble.

EVA.

Hark! Dora, some one is coming. I cannot and I will not see anybody.

DORA.

It is only Milly.

Enter MILLY, with basket of roses.

DORA.

Well, Milly, why do you come in so roughly? The sick lady here might have been asleep.

MILLY.

Pleäse, Miss, Mr. Dobson telled me to saäy he’s browt some of Miss Eva’s roses for the sick laädy to smell on.

DORA.

Take them, dear. Say that the sick lady thanks him! Is he here?

MILLY.

Yeäs, Miss; and he wants to speäk to ye partic’lar,

DORA.

Tell him I cannot leave the sick lady just yet.

MILLY.

Yea’s, Miss; but he says he wants to tell ye summut very partic’lar.

DORA.

Not to-day. What are you staying for?

MILLY.

Why, Miss, I be afeard I shall set him a-sweäring like onythink.

DORA.

And what harm will that do you, so that you do not copy his bad manners? Go, child. (Exit Milly.) But, Eva, why did you write ‘Seek me at the bottom of the river’?

EVA.

Why? because I meant it! — that dreadful night! that lonely walk to Littlechester, the rain beating in my face all the way, dead midnight when I came upon the bridge; the river, black, slimy, swirling under me in the lamplight, by the rotten wharfs — but I was so mad, that I mounted upon the parapet —

DORA.

You make me shudder!

EVA.

To fling myself over, when I heard a voice, ‘Girl, what are you doing there? It was a Sister of Mercy, come from the death-bed of a pauper, who had died in his misery blessing God, and the Sister took me to her house, and bit by bit — for she promised secrecy — I told her all.

DORA.

And what then?

EVA.

She would have persuaded me to come back here, but I couldn’t. Then she got me a place as nursery governess, and when the children grew too old for me, and I asked her once more to help me, once more she said, ‘Go home;’ but I hadn’t the heart or face to do it. And then — what would Father say? I sank so low that I went into service — the drudge of a lodging-house — and when the mistress died, and I appealed to the Sister again, her answer — I think I have it about me — yes, there it is!

DORA (reads).

‘My dear Child, — I can do no more for you. I have done wrong in keeping your secret; your Father must be now in extreme old age. Go back to him and ask his forgiveness before he dies. — SISTER AGATHA.’ Sister Agatha is right. Don’t you long for Father’s forgiveness?

EVA.

I would almost die to have it!

DORA.

And he may die before he gives it; may drop off any day, any hour. You must see him at once. (Rings bell. Enter MILLY.) Milly, my dear, how did you leave Mr. Steer?

MILLY.

He’s been a-moänin’ and a-groänin’ in ‘is sleep, but I thinks he be wakkenin’ oop.

DORA.

Tell him that I and the lady here wish to see him. You see she is lamed, and cannot go down to him.

MILLY.

Yeäs, Miss, I will.

[Exit Milly.

DORA.

I ought to prepare you. You must not expect to find our Father as he was five years ago. He is much altered; but I trust that your return — for you know, my dear, you were always his favourite — will give him, as they say, a new lease of life.

EVA (clinging to DORA).

Oh, Dora, Dora!

Enter STEER, led by MILLY.

STEER.

Hes the cow cawved?

DORA.

No. Father.

STEER.

Be the colt deäd?

DORA.

No, Father.

STEER.

He wur sa bellows’d out wi’ the wind this murnin’, ‘at I tell’d ‘em to gallop ‘im. Be he deäd?

DORA.

Not that I know.

STEER.

That hasta sent fur me, then, fur?

DORA (taking STEER’S arm).

Well, Father, I have a surprise for you.

STEER.

I ha niver been surprised but once i’ my life, and I went blind upon it.

DORA.

Eva has come home.

STEER.

Hoäm? fro’ the bottom o’ the river?

DORA.

No, Father, that was a mistake. She’s here again.

STEER.

The Steers was all gentlefoälks i’ the owd times, an’ I worked early an’ laäte to maäke ‘em all gentle-foälks ageän. The land belonged to the Steers i’ the owd times, an’ it belongs to the Steers ageän: I bowt it back ageän; but I couldn’t buy my darter back ageän when she lost hersen, could I? I eddicated boäth on em to marry gentlemen, an’ one on ‘em went an’ lost hersen i’ the river.

DORA.

No, father, she’s here.

STEER.

Here! she moänt coom here. What would her mother saäy? If it be her ghoäst, we mun abide it. We can’t keep a ghoäst out.

EVA (falling at his feet).

O forgive me! forgive me!

STEER.

Who said that? Taäke me awaäy, little gell. It be one o’ my bad daäys.

[Exit Steer led by Milly.

DORA (smoothing EVA’S forehead).

Be not so cast down, my sweet Eva. You heard him say it was one of his bad days. He will be sure to know you to-morrow.

EVA.

It is almost the last of my bad days, I think. I am very faint. I must lie down. Give me your arm. Lead me back again.

[Dora takes Eva into inner room.

Enter MILLY.

MILLY.

Miss Dora! Miss Dora!

DORA (returning and leaving the bedroom door ajar).

Quiet! quiet! What is it?

MILLY.

Mr. ‘Arold, Miss.

DORA.

Below?

MILLY.

Yeäs, Miss. He be saäyin’ a word to the owd man, but he’ll coom up if ye lets ‘im.

DORA.

Tell him, then, that I’m waiting for him.

MILLY.

Yeäs, Miss.

[Exit. DORA sits pensively and waits.

Enter HAROLD.

HAROLD.

You are pale, my Dora! but the ruddiest cheek

That ever charm’d the plowman of your wolds

Might wish its rose a lily, could it look

But half as lovely. I was speaking with

Your father, asking his consent — you wish’d me —

That we should marry: he would answer nothing,

I could make nothing of him; but, my flower,

You look so weary and so worn! What is it

Has put you out of heart?

DORA.

It puts me in heart

Again to see you; but indeed the state

Of my poor father puts me out of heart.

Is yours yet living?

HAROLD.

No — I told you.

DORA.

When?

HAROLD.

Confusion! — Ah well, well! the state we all

Must come to in our spring-and-winter world

If we live long enough! and poor Steer looks

The very type of Age in a picture, bow’d

To the earth he came from, to the grave he goes to,

Beneath the burthen of years.

DORA.

More like the picture

Of Christian in my ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ here,

Bow’d to the dust beneath the burthen of sin.

HAROLD.

Sin! What sin?

DORA.

Not his own.

HAROLD.

That nursery-tale

Still read, then?

DORA.

Yes; our carters and our shepherds

Still find a comfort there.

HAROLD.

Carters and shepherds!

DORA.

Scorn! I hate scorn. A soul with no religion —

My mother used to say that such a one

Was without rudder, anchor, compass — might be

Blown everyway with every gust and wreck

On any rock; and tho’ you are good and gentle,

Yet if thro’ any want —

HAROLD.

Of this religion?

Child, read a little history, you will find

The common brotherhood of man has been

Wrong’d by the cruelties of his religions

More than could ever have happen’d thro’ the want

Of any or all of them.

DORA.

— But, O dear friend,

If thro’ the want of any — I mean the true one —

And pardon me for saying it — you should ever

Be tempted into doing what might seem

Not altogether worthy of you, I think

That I should break my heart, for you have taught me

To love you.

HAROLD.

What is this? some one been stirring

Against me? he, your rustic amourist,

The polish’d Damon of your pastoral here,

This Dobson of your idyll?

DORA.

No, Sir, no!

Did you not tell me he was crazed with jealousy,

Had threaten’d ev’n your life, and would say anything?

Did I not promise not to listen to him,

Not ev’n to see the man?

HAROLD.

Good; then what is it

That makes you talk so dolefully?

DORA.

I told you —

My father. Well, indeed, a friend just now,

One that has been much wrong’d, whose griefs are mine,

Was warning me that if a gentleman

Should wed a farmer’s daughter, he would be

Sooner or later shamed of her among

The ladies, born his equals.

HAROLD.

More fool he!

What I that have been call’d a Socialist,

A Communist, a Nihilist — what you will! ——

DORA.

What are all these?

HAROLD.

Utopian idiotcies.

They did not last three Junes. Such rampant weeds

Strangle each other, die, and make the soil

For Cæsars, Cromwells, and Napoleons

To root their power in. I have freed myself

From all such dreams, and some will say because

I have inherited my Uncle. Let them.

But — shamed of you, my Empress! I should prize

The pearl of Beauty, even if I found it

Dark with the soot of slums.

DORA.

But I can tell you,

We Steers are of old blood, tho’ we be fallen.

See there our shield. (Pointing to arms on mantelpiece.)

For I have heard the Steers

Had land in Saxon times; and your own name

Of Harold sounds so English and so old

I am sure you must be proud of it.

HAROLD.

Not I!

As yet I scarcely feel it mine. I took it

For some three thousand acres. I have land now

And wealth, and lay both at your feet.

DORA.

And what was

Your name before?

HAROLD.

Come, come, my girl, enough

Of this strange talk. I love you and you me.

True, I have held opinions, hold some still,

Which you would scarce approve of: for all that,

I am a man not prone to jealousies,

Caprices, humours, moods; but very ready

To make allowances, and mighty slow

To feel offences. Nay, I do believe

I could forgive — well, almost anything —

And that more freely than your formal priest,

Because I know more fully than he can

What poor earthworms are all and each of us,

Here crawling in this boundless Nature. Dora,

If marriage ever brought a woman happiness

I doubt not I can make you happy.

DORA.

You make me

Happy already.

HAROLD.

And I never said

As much before to any woman living.

DORA.

No?

HAROLD.

No! by this true kiss, you are the first

I ever have loved truly.

[They kiss each other.

EVA (with a wild cry).

Philip Edgar!

HAROLD.

The phantom cry! You — did you hear a cry?

DORA.

She must be crying out ‘Edgar’ in her sleep.

HAROLD.

Who must be crying out ‘Edgar’ in her sleep?

DORA.

Your pardon for a minute. She must be waked.

HAROLD.

Who must be waked?

DORA.

I am not deaf: you fright me.

What ails you?

HAROLD.

Speak.

DORA.

You know her, Eva.

HAROLD.

Eva!

[EVA opens the door and stands in the entry.

She!

EVA.

Make her happy, then, and I forgive you.

[Falls dead.

DORA.

Happy! What? Edgar? Is it so? Can it be?

They told me so. Yes, yes! I see it all now.

O she has fainted. Sister, Eva, sister!

He is yours again — he will love you again;

I give him back to you again. Look up!

One word, or do but smile! Sweet, do you hear me?

[Puts her hand on EVA’S heart.

There, there — the heart, O God! — the poor young heart

Broken at last — all still — and nothing left

To live for.

[Falls on body of her sister.

HAROLD.

Living . . . dead . . . She said ‘all still.

Nothing to live for.’

She — she knows me — now . . .

(A pause.)

She knew me from the first, she juggled with me,

She hid this sister, told me she was dead —

I have wasted pity on her — not dead now —

No! acting, playing on me, both of them.

They drag the river for her! no, not they!

Playing on me — not dead now — a swoon — a scene —

Yet — how she made her wail as for the dead!

Enter MILLY.

MILLY.

Pleäse, Mister ‘Arold.

HAROLD (roughly).

Well?

MILLY.

The owd man’s coom’d ageän to ‘issen, an’ wants

To hev a word wi’ ye about the marriage.

HAROLD.

The what?

MILLY.

The marriage.

HAROLD.

The marriage?

MILLY.

Yeäs, the marriage.

Granny says marriages be maäde i’ ‘eaven.

HAROLD.

She lies! They are made in Hell. Child, can’t you see?

Tell them to fly for a doctor.

MILLY.

O law — yeäs, Sir!

I’ll run fur ‘im mysen.            [Exit.

HAROLD.

All silent there,

Yes, deathlike! Dead? I dare not look: if dead,

Were it best to steal away, to spare myself,

And her too, pain, pain, pain?

My curse on all

This world of mud, on all its idiot gleams

Of pleasure, all the foul fatalities

That blast our natural passions into pains!

Enter DOBSON.

DOBSON.

You, Master Hedgar, Harold, or whativer

They calls ye, for I warrants that ye goäs

By haäfe a scoor o’ naämes — out o’ the chaumber.

[Dragging him past the body.

HAROLD.

Not that way, man! Curse on your brutal strength!

I cannot pass that way.

DOBSON.

Out o’ the chaumber!

I’ll mash tha into nowt.

HAROLD.

The mere wild-beast!

DOBSON.

Out o’ the chaumber, dang tha!

HAROLD.

Lout, churl, clown!

[While they are shouting and struggling DORA rises and comes between them.

DORA (to DOBSON).

Peace, let him be: it is the chamber of Death!

Sir, you are tenfold more a gentleman,

A hundred times more worth a woman’s love,

Than this, this — but I waste no words upon him:

His wickedness is like my wretchedness —

Beyond all language.

(To HAROLD.)

You — you see her there!

Only fifteen when first you came on her,

And then the sweetest flower of all the wolds,

So lovely in the promise of her May,

So winsome in her grace and gaiety,

So loved by all the village people here,

So happy in herself and in her home —

DOBSON (agitated).

Theer, theer! ha’ done. I can’t abeär to see her.

[Exit.

DORA.

A child, and all as trustful as a child!

Five years of shame and suffering broke the heart

That only beat for you; and he, the father,

Thro’ that dishonour which you brought upon us,

Has lost his health, his eyesight, even his mind.

HAROLD (covering his face).

Enough!

DORA.

It seem’d so; only there was left

A second daughter, and to her you came

Veiling one sin to act another.

HAROLD.

No!

You wrong me there! hear, hear me! I wish’d, if you ——      [Pauses.

DORA.

If I ——

HAROLD.

Could love me, could be brought to love me

As I loved you —

DORA.

What then?

HAROLD.

I wish’d, I hoped

To make, to make ——

DORA.

What did you hope to make?

HAROLD.

‘Twere best to make an end of my lost life.

O Dora, Dora!

DORA.

What did you hope to make?

HAROLD.

Make, make! I cannot find the word — forgive it —

Amends.

DORA.

For what? to whom?

HAROLD.

To him, to you!

[Falling at her feet.

DORA.

To him! to me!

No, not with all your wealth,

Your land, your life! Out in the fiercest storm

That ever made earth tremble — he, nor I —

The shelter of your roof — not for one moment —

Nothing from you!

Sunk in the deepest pit of pauperism,

Push’d from all doors as if we bore the plague,

Smitten with fever in the open field,

Laid famine-stricken at the gates of Death —

Nothing from you!

But she there — her last word

Forgave — and I forgive you. If you ever

Forgive yourself, you are even lower and baser

Than even I can well believe you. Go!

[He lies at her feet. Curtain falls.

THE FORESTERS: ROBIN HOOD AND MAID MARIAN

Tennyson’s final drama was produced in New York in 1892, featuring incidental music in nine movements composed by Arthur Sullivan. The success of the performance led to productions in seven other American cities and a new production opened in London in 1893. Although the play was not well received in England, Sullivan’s incidental music was praised. Sullivan and Tennyson had worked together before, on a song cycle for tenor, The Window, written and composed in 1867–68, but not published until 1871. They had not found working together congenial and did not attempt to do so again for over twenty years.

In the mean time, Tennyson had written The Cup, which was produced with success by Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in 1881. Encouraged by this, Tennyson started work on a play based on the Robin Hood legend, completing it after a visit to Sherwood Forest in October 1881. But Irving rejected the play on the grounds that it was not dramatic enough for his audiences at the Lyceum, who were accustomed to more sensational productions. Tennyson turned to other projects, setting The Foresters aside for several years. In 1888, American actress Mary Anderson decided to produce The Cup and Tennyson suggested that she should also produce The Foresters, but again the play was set aside. However, in 1891 Anderson’s brother, Joseph wrote to the American impresario Augustin Daly recommending that The Foresters would be a good project for him and his star actress Ada Rehan. Daly was enthusiastic about the play and, by September 1891 they arranged a New York production. By this time Tennyson was 82 years old.

Formed of blank verse and prose, the play contains songs and dances which Daly, at Tennyson’s suggestion, approached Sullivan to compose. Daly made numerous changes to Tennyson’s text, cutting dialogue, moving events from one act to another and re-assigning songs and dialogue to different characters. Sullivan completed the score by December 1891 and the play opened in New York on 17 March 1892. The piece starred Rehan as Marian and John Drew Jr. as Robin. It was an instant hit, becoming Tennyson’s greatest theatrical success. By the time that an English production opened at the new Daly’s Theatre, in London, on 3 October 1893, the author had died.

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900) was an English composer, best known for his series of 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including such popular works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado.

John Drew, Jr. (1853–1927) was an American stage actor noted for his roles in Shakespearean comedy, society drama and light comedies. He also played the lead role of Robin Hood in the first production of ‘The Foresters’.

CONTENTS

Dramatis Personæ

Act I

Scene I - The Bond

Scene II - The Outlawry

Scenes II, III, The Outlawry

Scene III - The Outlawry

Act II

Scene I - The Flight of Marian.

Scene II - Another Glade in the Forest.

Act III

Scene I - The Crowning of Marian.

Act IV

Scene I - The Conclusion.

The programme for the 1893production

Dramatis Personæ

ROBIN HOOD, Earl of Huntingdon.

KING RICHARD, Coeur de Lion.

PRINCE JOHN.

Followers of Robin Hood:

LITTLE JOHN,

WILL SCARLET,

FRIAR TUCK,

MUCH,

A JUSTICIARY.

SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM.

ABBOT OF St. MARY’S.

WALTER LEA, son of Sir Richard Lea.

MAID MARIAN, daughter of Sir Richard Lea.

KATE, attendant on Marian.

OLD WOMAN.

Retainers, Messengers, Merry Men, Mercenaries, Friars, Beggars, Sailors, Peasants (men and women), &c.

Act I

Scene I - The Bond

SCENE I. — The garden before SIR RICHARD LEA’S castle.

KATE (gathering flowers).

These roses for my Lady Marian; these lilies to lighten Sir Richard’s black room, where he sits and eats his heart for want of money to pay the abbot.

[Sings.

The warrior Earl of Allendale,

He loved the Lady Anne;

The lady loved the master well,

The maid she loved the man.

All in the castle garden,

Or ever the day began,

The lady gave a rose to the earl,

The maid a rose to the man.

‘I go to fight in Scotland

With many a savage clan;’

The lady gave her hand to the earl,

The maid her hand to the man.

‘Farewell, farewell, my warrior earl!’

And ever a tear down ran.

She gave a weeping kiss to the earl,

And the maid a kiss to the man.

Enter four ragged RETAINERS.

FIRST RETAINER.

You do well, Mistress Kate, to sing and to gather roses. You be fed with tit-bits, you, and we be dogs that have only the bones, till we be only bones our own selves.

SECOND RETAINER.

I am fed with tit-bits no more than you are, but I keep a good heart and make the most of it; and, truth to say, Sir Richard and my Lady Marian fare wellnigh as sparely as their people.

THIRD RETAINER.

And look at our suits, out at knee, out at elbow. We be more like scarecrows in a field than decent servingmen; and then, I pray you, look at Robin Earl of Huntingdon’s men.

FIRST RETAINER.

She hath looked well at one of ‘em, Little John.

THIRD RETAINER.

Ay, how fine they be in their liveries, and each of ‘em as full of meat as an egg, and as sleek and as round-about as a mellow codlin.

FOURTH RETAINER.

But I be worse off than any of you, for I be lean by nature, and if you cram me crop-full I be little better than Famine in the picture, but if you starve me I be Gaffer Death himself. I would like to show you, Mistress Kate, how bare and spare I be on the rib: I be lanker than an old horse turned out to die on the common.

KATE.

Spare me thy spare ribs, I pray thee; but now I ask you all, did none of you love young Walter Lea?

FIRST RETAINER.

Ay, if he had not gone to fight the King’s battles, we should have better battles at home.

KATE.

Right as an Oxford scholar, but the boy was taken prisoner by the Moors.

FIRST RETAINER.

Ay.

KATE.

And Sir Richard was told he might be ransomed for two thousand marks in gold.

FIRST RETAINER.

Ay.

KATE.

Then he borrowed the moneys from the Abbot of York, the Sheriff’s brother. And if they be not paid back at the end of the year, the land goes to the abbot.

FIRST RETAINER.

No news of young Walter?

KATE.

None, nor of the gold, nor the man who took out the gold; but now ye know why we live so stintedly, and why ye have so few grains to peck at. Sir Richard must scrape and scrape till he get to the land again. Come, come, why do ye loiter here? Carry fresh rushes into the dining-hall, for those that are there they be so greasy and smell so vilely that my Lady Marian holds her nose when she steps across it.

FOURTH RETAINER.

Why there, now! that very word ‘greasy’ hath a kind of unction in it, a smack of relish about it. The rats have gnawed ‘em already. I pray Heaven we may not have to take to the rushes.

[Exeunt.

KATE.

Poor fellows!

The lady gave her hand to the earl,

The maid her hand to the man.

Enter LITTLE JOHN

LITTLE JOHN.

My master, Robin the Earl, is always a-telling us that every man, for the sake of the great blessed Mother in heaven, and for the love of his own little mother on earth, should handle all womankind gently, and hold them in all honour, and speak small to ‘em, and not scare ‘em, but go about to come at their love with all manner of homages, and observances, and circumbendibuses.

KATE.

The lady gave a rose to the earl,

The maid a rose to the man.

LITTLE JOHN (seeing her).

O the sacred little thing! What a shape! what lovely arms! A rose to the man! Ay, the man had given her a rose, and she gave him another.

KATE.

Shall I keep one little rose for Little John? No.

LITTLE JOHN.

There, there! You see I was right. She hath a tenderness toward me, but is too shy to show it. It is in her, in the woman, and the man must bring it out of her.

KATE.

She gave a weeping kiss to the earl,

The maid a kiss to the man.

LITTLE JOHN.

Did she? But there I am sure the ballad is at fault. It should have told us how the man first kissed the maid. She does n’t see me. Shall I be bold? shall I touch her? shall I give her the first kiss? O sweet Kate, my first love, the first kiss, the first kiss!

KATE (turns and kisses him).

Why lookest thou so amazed?

LITTLE JOHN.

I cannot tell; but I came to give thee the first kiss, and thou hast given it me.

KATE.

But if a man and a maid care for one another, does it matter so much if the maid give the first kiss?

LITTLE JOHN.

I cannot tell, but I had sooner have given thee the first kiss. I was dreaming of it all the way hither.

KATE.

Dream of it, then, all the way back, for now I will have none of it.

LITTLE JOHN.

Nay, now thou hast given me the man’s kiss, let me give thee the maid’s.

KATE.

If thou draw one inch nearer, I will give thee a buffet on the face.

LITTLE JOHN.

Wilt thou not give me rather the little rose for Little John?

KATE (throws it down and tramples on it).

There!

[Kate, seeing MARIAN, exit hurriedly.

Enter MARIAN (singing).

Love flew in at the window,

As Wealth walk’d in at the door.

‘You have come for you saw Wealth coming,’ said I.

But he flutter’d his wings with a sweet little cry,

‘I’ll cleave to you rich or poor.’

Wealth dropt out of the window,

Poverty crept thro’ the door.

‘Well, now you would fain follow Wealth,’ said I,

But he flutter’d his wings as he gave me the lie,

‘I cling to you all the more.’

LITTLE JOHN.

Thanks, my lady — inasmuch as I am a true believer in true love myself, and your ladyship hath sung the old proverb out of fashion.

MARIAN.

Ay, but thou hast ruffled my woman, Little John. She hath the fire in her face and the dew in her eyes. I believed thee to be too solemn and formal to be a ruffler. Out upon thee!

LITTLE JOHN.

I am no ruffler, my lady; but I pray you, my lady, if a man and a maid love one another, may the maid give the first kiss?

MARIAN.

It will be all the more gracious of her if she do.

LITTLE JOHN.

I cannot tell. Manners be so corrupt, and these are the days of Prince John.

[Exit.

Enter SIR RICHARD LEA (reading a bond).

SIR RICHARD.

Marian!

MARIAN.

Father!

SIR RICHARD.

Who parted from thee even now?

MARIAN.

That strange starched stiff creature, Little John, the earl’s man. He would grapple with a lion like the King, and is flustered by a girl’s kiss.

SIR RICHARD.

There never was an earl so true a friend of the people as Lord Robin of Huntingdon.

MARIAN.

A gallant earl. I love him as I hate John.

SIR RICHARD.

I fear me he hath wasted his revenues in the service of our good King Richard against the party of John, as I have done, as I have done: and where is Richard?

MARIAN.

Cleave to him, father! he will come home at last.

SIR RICHARD.

I trust he will, but if he do not I and thou are but beggars.

MARIAN.

We will be beggar’d then, and be true to the King.

SIR RICHARD.

Thou speakest like a fool or a woman. Canst thou endure to be a beggar whose whole life hath been folded like a blossom in the sheath, like a careless sleeper in the down; who never hast felt a want, to whom all things, up to this present, have come as freely as heaven’s air and mother’s milk?

MARIAN.

Tut, father! I am none of your delicate Norman maidens who can only broider and mayhap ride a-hawking with the help of the men. I can bake and I can brew, and by all the saints I can shoot almost as closely with the bow as the great earl himself. I have played at the foils too with Kate: but is not to-day his birthday?

SIR RICHARD.

Dost thou love him indeed, that thou keepest a record of his birthdays? Thou knowest that the Sheriff of Nottingham loves thee.

MARIAN.

The sheriff dare to love me? me who worship Robin the great Earl of Huntingdon? I love him as a damsel of his day might have loved Harold the Saxon or Hereward the Wake. They both fought against the tyranny of the kings, the Normans. But then your sheriff, your little man, if he dare to fight at all, would fight for his rents, his leases, his houses, his moneys, his oxen, his dinners, himself. Now your great man, your Robin, all England’s Robin, fights not for himself but for the people of England. This John — this Norman tyranny — the stream is bearing us all down, and our little sheriff will ever swim with the stream! but our great man, our Robin, against it. And how often in old histories have the great men striven against the stream, and how often in the long sweep of years to come must the great man strive against it again to save his country and the liberties of his people! God bless our well-beloved Robin, Earl of Huntingdon!

SIR RICHARD.

Ay, ay. He wore thy colours once at a tourney. I am old and forget. Was Prince John there?

MARIAN.

The Sheriff of Nottingham was there — not John.

SIR RICHARD.

Beware of John and the Sheriff of Nottingham. They hunt in couples, and when they look at a maid they blast her.

MARIAN.

Then the maid is not high-hearted enough.

SIR RICHARD.

There — there — be not a fool again. Their aim is ever at that which flies highest — but O girl, girl, I am almost in despair. Those two thousand marks lent me by the abbot for the ransom of my son Walter — I believed this abbot of the party of King Richard, and he hath sold himself to that beast John — they must be paid in a year and a month, or I lose the land. There is one that should be grateful to me overseas, a count in Brittany — he lives near Quimper. I saved his life once in battle. He has moneys. I will go to him. I saved him. I will try him. I am all but sure of him. I will go to him.

MARIAN.

And I will follow thee, and God help us both!

SIR RICHARD.

Child, thou shouldst marry one who will pay the mortgage. This Robin, this Earl of Huntingdon — he is a friend of Richard — I know not, but he may save the land, he may save the land.

MARIAN (showing a cross hung around her neck).

Father, you see this cross?

SIR RICHARD.

Ay, the King, thy godfather, gave it thee when a baby.

MARIAN.

And he said that whenever I married he would give me away, and on this cross I have sworn [kisses it] that, till I myself pass away, there is no other man that shall give me away.

SIR RICHARD.

Lo there! — thou art fool again — I am all as loyal as thyself, but what a vow! what a vow!

Re-enter LITTLE JOHN.

LITTLE JOHN.

My Lady Marian, your woman so flustered me that I forgot my message from the earl. To-day he hath accomplished his thirtieth birthday, and he prays your ladyship and your ladyship’s father to be present at his banquet to-night.

MARIAN.

Say, we will come.

LITTLE JOHN.

And I pray you, my lady, to stand between me and your woman, Kate.

MARIAN.

I will speak with her.

LITTLE JOHN.

I thank you, my lady, and I wish you and your ladyship’s father a most exceedingly good morning.

[Exit.

SIR RICHARD.

Thou hast answered for me, but I know not if I will let thee go.

MARIAN.

I mean to go.

SIR RICHARD.

Not if I barred thee up in thy chamber, like a bird in a cage.

MARIAN.

Then I would drop from the casement, like a spider.

SIR RICHARD.

But I would hoist the drawbridge, like thy master.

MARIAN.

And I would swim the moat, like an otter.

SIR RICHARD.

But I would set my men-at-arms to oppose thee, like the lord of the castle.

MARIAN

And I would break through them all, like the King of England.

SIR RICHARD.

Well, thou shalt go, but O the land! the land! my great great great grandfather, my great great grandfather, my great grandfather, my grandfather, and my own father — they were born and bred on it — it was their mother — they have trodden it for half a thousand years, and whenever I set my own foot on it I say to it, ‘Thou art mine,’ and it answers, ‘I am thine to the very heart of the earth’ — but now I have lost my gold, I have lost my son, and I shall lose my land also. Down to the devil with this bond that beggars me!

[Flings down the bond.

MARIAN.

Take it again, dear father, be not wroth at the dumb parchment. Sufficient for the day, dear father! let us be merry to-night at the banquet.

Scene II - The Outlawry

Scenes II, III, The Outlawry

Scene II. — A banqueting-hall in the house of ROBIN HOOD the Earl of Huntingdon. Doors open into a banqueting-hall where he is at feast with his friends.

DRINKING SONG.

Long live Richard,

Robin and Richard!

Long live Richard!

Down with John!

Drink to the Lion-heart

Every-one!

Pledge the Plantagenet,

Him that is gone!

Who knows whither?

God’s good Angel

Help him back hither,

And down with John!

Long live Robin,

Robin and Richard!

Long live Robin

And down with John!

Enter PRINCE JOHN disguised as a monk and the SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM. Cries of ‘Down with John,’ ‘Long live King Richard,’ ‘Down with John.’

PRINCE JOHN.

Down with John! ha! Shall I be known? is my disguise perfect?

SHERIFF.

Perfect — who should know you for Prince John, so that you keep the cowl down and speak not?

[Shouts from the banquet-room.

PRINCE JOHN.

Thou and I will still these revelries presently.

[Shouts, ‘Long live King Richard!’

I come here to see this daughter of Sir Richard of the Lea and if her beauties answer their report. If so —

SHERIFF.

If so —

[Shouts, ‘Down with John!’

PRINCE JOHN.

You hear!

SHERIFF.

Yes, my lord, fear not. I will answer for you.

Enter LITTLE JOHN, SCARLET, MUCH, etc., from the banquet singing a snatch of the Drinking Song

LITTLE JOHN.

I am a silent man myself, and all the more wonder at our earl. What a wealth of words — O Lord, I will live and die for King Richard — not so much for the cause as for the earl. O Lord, I am easily led by words, but I think the earl hath right. Scarlet, hath not the earl right? What makes thee so down in the mouth?

SCARLET.

I doubt not, I doubt not, and though I be down in the mouth, I will swear by the head of the earl.

LITTLE JOHN.

Thou Much, miller’s son, hath not the earl right?

MUCH.

More water goes by the mill than the miller wots of, and more goes to make right than I know of, but for all that I will swear the earl hath right. But they are coming hither for the dance —

Enter FRIAR TUCK.

be they not, Friar Tuck? Thou art the earl’s confessor and shouldst know.

TUCK.

Ay, ay, and but that I am a man of weight, and the weight of the church to boot on my shoulders, I would dance too. Fa, la, la, fa, la, la!

[Capering.

MUCH.

But doth not the weight of the flesh at odd times overbalance the weight of the church, ha, friar?

TUCK.

Homo sum. I love my dinner — but I can fast, I can fast; and as to other frailties of the flesh — out upon thee! Homo sum, sed virgo sum; I am a virgin, my masters, I am a virgin.

MUCH.

And a virgin, my masters, three yards about the waist, is like to remain a virgin, for who could embrace such an armful of joy?

TUCK.

Knave, there is a lot of wild fellows in Sherwood Forest who hold by King Richard. If ever I meet thee there, I will break thy sconce with my quarterstaff.

Enter from the banqueting-hall SIR RICHARD LEA, ROBIN HOOD, etc.

ROBIN.

My guests and friends, Sir Richard, all of you

Who deign to honour this my thirtieth year,

And some of you were prophets that I might be,

Now that the sun our King is gone, the light

Of these dark hours; but this new moon, I fear,

Is darkness. Nay, this may be the last time

When I shall hold my birthday in this hall:

I may be outlaw’d, I have heard a rumour.

ALL.

God forbid!

ROBIN.

Nay, but we have no news of Richard yet,

And ye did wrong in crying ‘Down with John;’

For be he dead, then John may be our King.

ALL.

God forbid!

ROBIN.

Ay, God forbid,

But if it be so we must bear with John.

The man is able enough — no lack of wit,

And apt at arms and shrewd in policy.

Courteous enough too when he wills; and yet

I hate him for his want of chivalry.

He that can pluck the flower of maidenhood

From off the stalk and trample it in the mire,

And boast that he hath trampled it. I hate him,

I hate the man. I may not hate the King

For aught I know,

So that our barons bring his baseness under.

I think they will be mightier than the King.

[Dance music.

MARIAN enters with other damsels.

ROBIN.

The high Heaven guard thee from his wantonness,

Who art the fairest flower of maidenhood

That ever blossom’d on this English isle!

MARIAN.

Cloud not thy birthday with one fear for me.

My lord, myself and my good father pray

Thy thirtieth summer may be thirty-fold

As happy as any of those that went before.

ROBIN.

My Lady Marian, you can make it so

If you will deign to tread a measure with me.

MARIAN.

Full willingly, my lord.

[They dance.

ROBIN (after dance).

My lady, will you answer me a question?

MARIAN.

Any that you may ask.

ROBIN.

A question that every true man asks of a woman once in his life.

MARIAN.

I will not answer it, my lord, till King Richard come home again.

PRINCE JOHN.(to SHERIFF).

How she looks up at him, how she holds her face!

Now if she kiss him, I will have his head.

SHERIFF.

Peace, my lord; the earl and Sir Richard come this way.

ROBIN.

Must you have these moneys before the year and the month end?

SIR RICHARD.

Or I forfeit my land to the abbot. I must pass overseas to one that I trust will help me.

ROBIN.

Leaving your fair Marian alone here.

SIR RICHARD.

Ay, for she hath somewhat of the lioness in her, and there be men-at-arms to guard her.

[Robin, Sir Richard, and Marian pass on.

PRINCE JOHN (to SHERIFF).

Why that will be our opportunity

When I and thou will rob the nest of her.

SHERIFF.

Good prince, art thou in need of any gold?

PRINCE JOHN.

Gold? why? not now.

SHERIFF.

I would give thee any gold,

So that myself alone might rob the nest.

PRINCE JOHN.

Well, well then, thou shalt rob the nest alone.

SHERIFF.

Swear to me by that relic on thy neck.

PRINCE JOHN.

I swear then by this relic on my neck —

No, no, I will not swear by this; I keep it

For holy vows made to the blessed Saints,

Not pleasures, women’s matters.

Dost thou mistrust me? Am I not thy friend?

Beware, man, lest thou lose thy faith in me.

I love thee much; and as I am thy friend,

I promise thee to make this Marian thine.

Go now and ask the maid to dance with thee,

And learn from her if she do love this earl.

SHERIFF. (advancing toward MARIAN and ROBIN.)

Pretty mistress!

ROBIN.

What art thou, man? Sheriff of Nottingham?

SHERIFF.

Ay, my lord. I and my friend, this monk, were here belated, and seeing the hospitable lights in your castle, and knowing the fame of your hospitality, we ventured in uninvited.

ROBIN.

You are welcome, though I fear you be of those who hold more by John than Richard.

SHERIFF.

True, for through John I had my sheriffship. I am John’s till Richard come back again, and then I am Richard’s. Pretty mistress, will you dance?

[They dance.

ROBIN. (talking to PRINCE JOHN).

What monk of what convent art thou? Why wearest thou thy cowl to hide thy face?

[PRINCE JOHN shakes his head.

Is he deaf, or dumb, or daft, or drunk belike?

[PRINCE JOHN shakes his head.

Why comest thou like a death’s head at my feast?

[PRINCE JOHN points to the SHERIFF, who is dancing with MARIAN.

Is he thy mouthpiece, thine interpreter?

[PRINCE JOHN nods.

SHERIFF. (to MARIAN as they pass).

Beware of John!

MARIAN.

I hate him.

SHERIFF.      Would you cast

An eye of favour on me, I would pay

My brother all his debt and save the land.

MARIAN.

I cannot answer thee till Richard come.

SHERIFF.

And when he comes?

MARIAN.

Well, you must wait till then.

LITTLE JOHN. (dancing with KATE).

Is it made up? will you kiss me?

KATE.

You shall give me the first kiss.

LITTLE JOHN.

There (kisses her). Now thine.

KATE.

You shall wait for mine till Sir Richard has paid the abbot.

[They pass on.

[The SHERIFF leaves MARIAN with her father and comes toward ROBIN.

ROBIN. (to Sheriff, Prince John standing by).

Sheriff, thy friend, this monk, is but a statue.

SHERIFF.

Pardon him, my lord: he is a holy palmer, bounden by a vow not to show his face, nor to speak word to any one, till he join King Richard in the Holy Land.

ROBIN.

Going to the Holy Land to Richard! Give me thy hand and tell him — Why, what a cold grasp is thine! — as if thou didst repent thy courtesy even in the doing it. That is no true man’s hand. I hate hidden faces.

SHERIFF.

Pardon him again, I pray you; but the twilight of the coming day already glimmers in the east. We thank you, and farewell.

ROBIN.

Farewell, farewell. I hate hidden faces.

[Exeunt Prince John and Sheriff.

SIR RICHARD. (coming forward with MAID MARIAN).

How close the sheriff peer’d into thine eyes!

What did he say to thee?

MARIAN.  Bade me beware

Of John: what maid but would beware of John?

SIR RICHARD.

What else?

MARIAN.

I care not what he said.

SIR RICHARD.        What else?

MARIAN.

That if I cast an eye of favour on him,

Himself would pay this mortgage to his brother,

And save the land.

SIR RICHARD.

Did he say so, the sheriff?

ROBIN.

I fear this Abbot is a heart of flint,

Hard as the stones of his abbey.

O good Sir Richard,

I am sorry my exchequer runs so low

I cannot help you in this exigency;

For though my men and I flash out at times

Of festival like burnished summer-flies,

We make but one hour’s buzz, are only like

The rainbow of a momentary sun.

I am mortgaged as thyself.

SIR RICHARD.

Ay! I warrant thee — thou canst not be sorrier than I am. Come away, daughter.

ROBIN.

Farewell, Sir Richard; farewell, sweet Marian.

MARIAN.

Till better times.

ROBIN.

But if better times should never come?

MARIAN.

Then I shall be no worse.

ROBIN.

And if the worst time come?

MARIAN.

Why, then I will be better than the time.

ROBIN.

This ring my mother gave me: it was her own

Betrothal ring. She pray’d me, when I loved

A maid with all my heart, to pass it down

A finger of that hand which should be mine

Thereafter. Will you have it? Will you wear it?

MARIAN.

Ay, noble earl, and never part with it.

SIR RICHARD LEA(coming up).

Not till she clean forget thee, noble earl.

MARIAN.

Forget him — never — by this Holy Cross

Which good King Richard gave me when a child —

Never!

Not while the swallow skims along the ground,

And while the lark flies up and touches heaven!

Not while the smoke floats from the cottage roof,

And the white cloud is roll’d along the sky!

Not while the rivulet babbles by the door,

And the great breaker beats upon the beach!

Never —

Till Nature, high and low, and great and small

Forgets herself, and all her loves and hates

Sink again into chaos!

SIR RICHARD LEA.  Away! away!

[Exeunt to music.

Scene III - The Outlawry

Scene III. — Same as Scene II.

ROBIN and his men.

ROBIN.

All gone! — my ring — I am happy — should be happy.

She took my ring. I trust she loves me — yet

I heard this sheriff tell her he would pay

The mortgage if she favour’d him. I fear

Not her, the father’s power upon her.

Friends, (to his men)

I am only merry for an hour or two

Upon a birthday: if this life of ours

Be a good glad thing, why should we make us merry

Because a year of it is gone? but Hope

Smiles from the threshold of the year to come

Whispering ‘It will be happier;’ and old faces

Press round us, and warm hands close with warm hands,

And thro’ the blood the wine leaps to the brain

Like April sap to the topmost tree, that shoots

New buds to heaven, whereon the throstle rock’d

Sings a new song to the new year — and you,

Strike up a song, my friends, and then to bed.

LITTLE JOHN.

What will you have, my lord?

ROBIN.

‘To sleep! to sleep!’

LITTLE JOHN.

There is a touch of sadness in it, my lord,

But ill befitting such a festal day.

ROBIN.

I have a touch of sadness in myself.

SONG.

To sleep! to sleep! The long bright day is done,

And darkness rises from the fallen sun.

To sleep! to sleep!

Whate’er thy joys, they vanish with the day;

Whate’er thy griefs, in sleep they fade away.

To sleep! to sleep!

Sleep, mournful heart, and let the past be past!

Sleep, happy soul! all life will sleep at last.

To sleep! to sleep!

[A trumpet blown at the gates.

ROBIN.

Who breaks the stillness of the morning thus?

LITTLE JOHN. (going out and returning)

It is a royal messenger, my lord:

I trust he brings us news of the King’s coming.

Enter a PURSUIVANT who reads.

O yes, O yes, O yes! In the name of the Regent. Thou, Robin Hood Earl of Huntingdon, art attainted and hast lost thine earldom of Huntingdon. Moreover, thou art dispossessed of all thy lands, goods, and chattels; and by virtue of this writ, whereas Robin Hood Earl of Huntingdon, by force and arms hath trespassed against the King in divers manners, therefore by the judgment of the officers of the said Lord King, according to the law and custom of the kingdom of England, Robin Hood Earl of Huntingdon is outlawed and banished.

ROBIN.

I have shelter’d some that broke the forest laws.

This is irregular and the work of John.

[‘Irregular, irregular! (tumult) Down with him, tear his coat from his back!’

MESSENGER.

Ho there! ho there, the sheriff’s men without!

ROBIN.

Nay, let them be, man, let them be. We yield.

How should we cope with John? The London folkmote

Has made him all but King, and he hath seized

On half the royal castles. Let him alone!

(to his men)

A worthy messenger! how should he help it?

Shall we too work injustice? what, thou shakest!

Here, here — a cup of wine — drink and begone!

[Exit Messenger.

We will away in four-and-twenty hours,

But shall we leave our England?

TUCK.      Robin, Earl —

ROBIN.

Let be the ‘Earl.’ Henceforth I am no more

Than plain man to plain man.

TUCK.

Well, then, plain man,

There be good fellows there in merry Sherwood

That hold by Richard, tho’ they kill his deer.

ROBIN.

In Sherwood Forest. I have heard of them.

Have they no leader?

TUCK.

Each man for his own.

Be thou their leader, and they will all of them

Swarm to thy voice like bees to the brass pan.

ROBIN.

They hold by Richard — the wild wood! to cast

All threadbare household habit, mix with all

The lusty life of wood and underwood,

Hawk, buzzard, jay, the mavis and the merle,

The tawny squirrel vaulting thro’ the boughs,

The deer, the highback’d polecat, the wild boar,

The burrowing badger — by Saint Nicholas,

I have a sudden passion for the wild wood —

We should be free as air in the wild wood —

What say you? shall we go? Your hands, your hands!

[Gives his hand to each.

You, Scarlet, you are always moody here.

SCARLET.

‘Tis for no lack of love to you, my lord,

But lack of happiness in a blatant wife.

She broke my head on Tuesday with a dish.

I would have thwack’d the woman, but I did not,

Because thou sayest such fine things of women,

But I shall have to thwack her if I stay.

ROBIN.

Would it be better for thee in the wood?

SCARLET.

Ay, so she did not follow me to the wood.

ROBIN.

Then, Scarlet, thou at least wilt go with me.

Thou, Much, the miller’s son, I knew thy father:

He was a manly man, as thou art, Much,

And gray before his time, as thou art, Much.

MUCH.

It is the trick of the family, my lord.

There was a song he made to the turning wheel —

ROBIN.

‘Turn! turn!’ but I forget it.

MUCH.

I can sing it.

ROBIN.

Not now, good Much! And thou, dear Little John,

Who hast that worship for me which Heaven knows

I ill deserve — you love me, all of you,

But I am outlaw’d, and if caught I die.

Your hands again. All thanks for all your service;

But if you follow me, you may die with me.

ALL.

We will live and die with thee, we will live and die with thee!

Act II

Scene I - The Flight of Marian.

SCENE I. — A broad forest glade; woodman’s hut at one side with half-door; Foresters are looking to their bows and arrows, or polishing their swords.

FORESTERS sing (as they disperse to their work).

There is no land like England,

Where’er the light of day be;

There are no hearts like English hearts,

Such hearts of oak as they be.

There is no land like England,

Where’er the light of day be;

There are no men like Englishmen,

So tall and bold as they be.

(Full chorus).

And these will strike for England,

And man and maid be free,

To foil and spoil the tyrant

Beneath the greenwood tree.

There is no land like England,

Where’er the light of day be;

There are no wives like English wives,

So fair and chaste as they be.

There is no land like England,

Where’er the light of day be;

There are no maids like English maids,

So beautiful as they be.

(Full chorus)

And these shall wed with freemen,

And all their sons be free,

To sing the songs of England

Beneath the greenwood tree.

ROBIN. (alone).

My lonely hour!

The king of day hath stept from off his throne,

Flung by the golden mantle of the cloud,

And sets, a naked fire. The King of England

Perchance this day may sink as gloriously,

Red with his own and enemy’s blood — but no!

We hear he is in prison. It is my birthday.

I have reign’d one year in the wild wood. My mother,

For whose sake, and the blessed Queen of Heaven,

I reverence all women, bade me, dying,

Whene’er this day should come about, to carve

One lone hour from it, so to meditate

Upon my greater nearness to the birthday

Of the after-life, when all the sheeted dead

Are shaken from their stillness in the grave

By the last trumpet.

Am I worse or better?

I am outlaw’d. I am none the worse for that.

I held for Richard, and I hated John.

I am a thief, ay, and a king of thieves.

Ay! but we rob the robber, wrong the wronger,

And what we wring from them we give the poor.

I am none the worse for that, and all the better

For this free forest-life, for while I sat

Among my thralls in my baronial hall

The groining hid the heavens; but since I breathed,

A houseless head beneath the sun and stars,

The soul of the woods hath stricken thro’ my blood,

The love of freedom, the desire of God,

The hope of larger life hereafter, more

Tenfold than under roof.

[Horn blown.

True, were I taken

They would prick out my sight. A price is set

On this poor head; but I believe there lives

No man who truly loves and truly rules

His following but can keep his followers true.

I am one with mine. Traitors are rarely bred

Save under traitor kings. Our vice-king John,

True king of vice — true play on words — our John,

By his Norman arrogance and dissoluteness,

Hath made me king of all the discontent

Of England up thro’ all the forest land

North to the Tyne: being outlaw’d in a land

Where law lies dead, we make ourselves the law.

Why break you thus upon my lonely hour?

Enter LITTLE JOHN and KATE.

LITTLE JOHN.

I found this white doe wandering thro’ the wood,

Not thine, but mine. I have shot her thro’ the heart.

KATE.

He lies, my lord. I have shot him thro’ the heart.

ROBIN.

My God, thou art the very woman who waits

On my dear Marian. Tell me, tell me of her!

Thou comest a very angel out of heaven.

Where is she? and how fares she?

KATE.

O my good lord,

I am but an angel by reflected light.

Your heaven is vacant of your angel. John —

Shame on him! —

Stole on her — she was walking in the garden —

And after some slight speech about the sheriff

He caught her round the waist, whereon she struck him

And fled into the castle. She and Sir Richard

Have past away, I know not where; and I

Was left alone, and knowing as I did

That I had shot him thro’ the heart, I came

To eat him up and make an end of him.

LITTLE JOHN.

In kisses?

KATE.

You, how dare you mention kisses?

But I am weary pacing thro’ the wood.

Show me some cave or cabin where I may rest.

ROBIN.

Go with him.    I will talk with thee anon.

[Exeunt Little John and Kate.

She struck him, my brave Marian, struck the prince,

The serpent that had crept into the garden

And coil’d himself about her sacred waist.

I think I should have stricken him to the death.

He never will forgive her. O, the sheriff

Would pay this cursed mortgage to his brother

If Marian would marry him; and the son

Is most like dead — if so the land may come

To Marian, and they rate the land fivefold

The worth of the mortgage, and who marries her

Marries the land. Most honourable sheriff!

(Passionately) Gone, and it may be gone for evermore!

O, would that I could see her for a moment

Glide like a light across these woodland ways!

Tho’ in one moment she should glance away,

I should be happier for it all the year.

O, would she moved beside me like my shadow!

O, would she stood before me as my queen,

To make this Sherwood Eden o’er again,

And these rough oaks the palms of Paradise!

Ah! but who be those three yonder with bows? — not of my band — the sheriff, and by heaven, Prince John himself and one of those mercenaries that suck the blood of England! My people are all scattered I know not where. Have they come for me? Here is the witch’s hut. The fool-people call her a witch — a good witch to me! I will shelter here.

[Knocks at the door of the hut.

OLD WOMAN comes out.

OLD WOMAN (kisses his hand).

Ah, dear Robin! ah, noble captain, friend of the poor!

ROBIN.

I am chased by my foes. I have forgotten my horn that calls my men together. Disguise me — thy gown and thy coif.

OLD WOMAN.

Come in, come in; I would give my life for thee, for when the sheriff had taken all our goods for the King without paying, our horse and our little cart —

ROBIN.

Quick, good mother, quick!

OLD WOMAN.

Ay, ay, gown, coif, and petticoat, and the old woman’s blessing with them to the last fringe.

[They go in.

Enter PRINCE JOHN, SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM, and MERCENARY.

PRINCE JOHN.

Did we not hear the two would pass this way?

They must have past. Here is a woodman’s hut.

MERCENARY.

Take heed, take heed! in Nottingham they say

There bides a foul witch somewhere hereabout.

SHERIFF.

Not in this hut, I take it.

PRINCE JOHN.

Why not here?

SHERIFF.

I saw a man go in, my lord.

PRINCE JOHN.

Not two?

SHERIFF.

No, my lord, one.

PRINCE JOHN.

Make for the cottage then!

Interior of the hut.

ROBIN disguised as old woman.

PRINCE JOHN (without).

Knock again! knock again!

ROBIN (to OLD WOMAN).

Get thee into the closet there, and make a ghostly wail ever and anon to scare ‘em.

OLD WOMAN.

I will, I will, good Robin.

[Goes into closet.

PRINCE JOHN (without).

Open, open, or I will drive the door from the doorpost.

ROBIN (opens door).

Come in, come in.

PRINCE JOHN.

Why did ye keep us at the door so long?

ROBIN (curtseying).

I was afeard it was the ghost, your worship.

PRINCE JOHN.

Ghost! did one in white pass?

ROBIN (curtseying).

No, your worship.

PRINCE JOHN.

Did two knights pass?

ROBIN (curtseying).

No, your worship.

SHERIFF.

I fear me we have lost our labour, then.

PRINCE JOHN.

Except this old hag have been bribed to lie.

ROBIN.

We old hags should be bribed to speak truth, for, God help us, we lie by nature.

PRINCE JOHN.

There was a man just now that enter’d here?

ROBIN.

There is but one old woman in the hut.

[OLD WOMAN yells.

ROBIN.

I crave your worship’s pardon. There is yet another old woman. She was murdered here a hundred year ago, and whenever a murder is to be done again she yells out i’ this way — so they say, your worship.

MERCENARY.

Now, if I had n’t a sprig o’ wickentree sewn into my dress, I should run.

PRINCE JOHN.

Tut! tut! the scream of some wild woodland thing.

How came we to be parted from our men?

We shouted, and they shouted, as I thought,

But shout and echo play’d into each other

So hollowly we knew not which was which.

ROBIN.

The wood is full of echoes, owls, elfs, ouphes, oafs, ghosts o’ the mist, wills-o’-the- wisp; only they that be bred in it can find their way a-nights in it.

PRINCE JOHN.

I am footsore and famish’d therewithal.

Is there aught there?

[Pointing to cupboard.

ROBIN.

Naught for the likes o’ you.

PRINCE JOHN.

Speak straight out, crookback.

ROBIN.

Sour milk and black bread.

PRINCE JOHN.

Well, set them forth. I could eat anything.

[He sets out a table with black bread.

This is mere marble. Old hag, how should thy one tooth drill thro’ this?

ROBIN.

Nay, by Saint Gemini, I ha’ two; and since the sheriff left me naught but an empty belly, they can meet upon anything thro’ a millstone. You gentles that live upon’ manchet-bread and marchpane, what should you know o’ the food o’ the poor? Look you here, before you can eat it you must hack it with a hatchet, break it all to pieces, as you break the poor, as you would hack at Robin Hood if you could light upon him (hacks it and flings two pieces).There’s for you, and there’s for you — and the old woman’s welcome.

PRINCE JOHN.

The old wretch is mad, and her bread is beyond me; and the milk — faugh! Hast thou anything to sweeten this?

ROBIN.

Here’s a pot o’ wild honey from an old oak, saving your sweet reverences.

SHERIFF.

Thou hast a cow then, hast thou?

ROBIN.

Ay, for when the sheriff took my little horse for the King without paying for it —

SHERIFF.

How hadst thou then the means to buy a cow?

ROBIN.

Eh, I would ha’ given my whole body to the King had he asked for it, like the woman at Acre when the Turk shot her as she was helping to build the mound against the city. I ha’ served the King living, says she, and let me serve him dead, says she; let me go to make the mound: bury me in the mound, says the woman.

SHERIFF.

Ay, but the cow?

ROBIN.

She was given me.

SHERIFF.

By whom?

ROBIN.

By a thief.

SHERIFF.

Who, woman, who?

ROBIN (sings).

He was a forester good;

He was the cock o’ the walk;

He was the king o’ the wood.

Your worship may find another rhyme if you care to drag your brains for such a minnow.

SHERIFF.

That cow was mine. I have lost a cow from my meadow. Robin Hood was it? I thought as much. He will come to the gibbet at last.

[OLD WOMAN yells.

MERCENARY.

O sweet sir, talk not of cows. You anger the spirit.

PRINCE JOHN.

Anger the scritch-owl.

MERCENARY.

But, my lord, the scritch-owl bodes death, my lord.

ROBIN.

I beseech you all to speak lower. Robin may be hard by wi’ three-score of his men. He often looks in here by the moonshine. Beware of Robin.

[OLD WOMAN yells.

MERCENARY.

Ah, do you hear? There may be murder done.

SHERIFF.

Have you not finished, my lord?

ROBIN.

Thou hast crost him in love, and I have heard him swear he will be even wi’ thee.

[OLD WOMAN yells.

MERCENARY.

Now is my heart so down in my heels that if I stay I can’t run.

SHERIFF.

Shall we not go?

ROBIN.

And, old hag tho’ I be, I can spell the hand. Give me thine. Ay, ay, the line o’ life is marked enow; but look, there is a cross line o’ sudden death. I pray thee go, go, for tho’ thou wouldst bar me fro’ the milk o’ my cow, I would n’t have thy blood on my hearth.

PRINCE JOHN.

Why do you listen, man, to the old fool?

SHERIFF.

I will give thee a silver penny if thou wilt show us the way back to Nottingham.

ROBIN (with a very low curtsey).

All the sweet Saints bless your worship for your alms to the old woman! but make haste then, and be silent in the wood. Follow me.

[Takes his bow.

(They come out of the hut and close the door carefully.)

Outside hut..

ROBIN.

Softly! softly! there may be a thief in every bush.

PRINCE JOHN.

How should this old lamester guide us? Where is thy goodman?

ROBIN.

The Saints were so kind to both on us that he was dead before he was born.

PRINCE JOHN.

Half-witted and a witch to boot! Mislead us, and I will have thy life! and what doest thou with that, who art more bow-bent than the very bow thou carriest?

ROBIN.

I keep it to kill nightingales.

PRINCE JOHN.

Nightingales!

ROBIN.

You see, they are so fond o’ their own voices that I cannot sleep o’ nights by cause on ‘em.

PRINCE JOHN.

True soul of the Saxon churl for whom song has no charm.

ROBIN.

Then I roast ‘em, for I have naught else to live on (whines). O your honour, I pray you too to give me an alms. (To PRINCE JOHN.)

SHERIFF.

This is no bow to hit nightingales; this is a true woodman’s bow of the best yew-wood to slay the deer. Look, my lord, there goes one in the moonlight. Shoot!

PRINCE JOHN (shoots).

Missed! There goes another. Shoot, sheriff!

SHERIFF (shoots).

Missed!

ROBIN.

And here comes another. Why, an old woman can shoot closer than you two.

PRINCE JOHN.

Shoot then, and if thou miss I will fasten thee to thine own doorpost and make thine old carcase a target for us three.

ROBIN. (raises himself upright, shoots, and hits.)

Hit! Did I not tell you an old woman could shoot better?

PRINCE JOHN.

Thou standest straight. Thou speakest manlike. Thou art no old woman — thou art disguised — thou art one of the thieves.

[Makes a clutch at the gown, which comes in pieces and falls, showing Robin in his forester’s dress.

SHERIFF.

It is the very captain of the thieves!

PRINCE JOHN.

We have him at last; we have him at advantage. Strike, sheriff! Strike, mercenary!

[They draw swords and attack him; he defends himself with his.

Enter LITTLE JOHN.

LITTLE JOHN.

I have lodged my pretty Katekin in her bower.

How now? Clashing of swords — three upon one, and that one our Robin! Rogues, have you no manhood?

[Draws and defends ROBIN.

Enter SIR RICHARD LEA (draws his sword).

SIR RICHARD LEA.

Old as I am, I will not brook to see

Three upon two.

(MAID MARIAN in the armour of a Red-cross Knight follows, half unsheathing her sword and half seen.

Back! back! I charge thee, back! Is this a game for thee to play at? Away!

(She retires to the fringe of the copse.)

[He fights on Robin’s side.    The other three are beaten off and exeunt.

Enter FRIAR TUCK.

FRIAR TUCK.

I am too late then with my quarterstaff?

ROBIN.

Quick, friar, follow them!

See whether there be more of ‘em in the wood.

FRIAR TUCK.

On the gallop, on the gallop, Robin, like a deer from a dog, or a colt from a gadfly, or a stump-tailed ox in May-time, or the cow that jumped over the moon.

[Exit.

ROBIN.

Nay, nay, but softly, lest they spy thee, friar!

[To Sir Richard Lea who reels.

Take thou mine arm. Who art thou, gallant knight?

SIR RICHARD.

Robin, I am Sir Richard of the Lea.

Who be those three that I have fought withal?

ROBIN.

Prince John, the sheriff, and a mercenary.

SIR RICHARD.

Prince John again! We are flying from this John.

The sheriff — I am grieved it was the sheriff;

For, Robin, he must be my son-in-law.

Thou art an outlaw, and couldst never pay

The mortgage on my land. Thou wilt not see

My Marian more. So — so — I have presumed

Beyond my strength.    Give me a draught of wine.

[MARIAN comes forward.

This is my son but late escaped from prison,

For whom I ran into my debt to the abbot,

Two thousand marks in gold. I have paid him half.

That other thousand — shall I ever pay it?

A draught of wine.

ROBIN.

Our cellar is hard by.

Take him, good Little John, and give him wine.

[Exit Sir Richard leaning on Little John.

A brave old fellow, but he angers me.

[To MAID MARIAN who is following her father.

Young Walter, nay, I pray thee, stay a moment.

MARIAN.

A moment for some matter of no moment!

Well — take and use your moment, while you may.

ROBIN.

Thou art her brother, and her voice is thine,

Her face is thine, and if thou be as gentle

Give me some news of my sweet Marian.

Where is she?

MARIAN.

Thy sweet Marian? I believe

She came with me into the forest here.

ROBIN.

She follow’d thee into the forest here?

MARIAN.

Nay — that, my friend, I am sure I did not say.

ROBIN.

Thou blowest hot and cold. Where is she then?

MARIAN.

Is she not here with thee?

ROBIN.

Would God she were!

MARIAN.

If not with thee I know not where she is.

She may have lighted on your fairies here,

And now be skipping in their fairy-rings,

And capering hand in hand with Oberon.

ROBIN.      Peace!

MARIAN.

Or learning withcraft of your woodland witch,

And how to charm and waste the hearts of men.

ROBIN.

That is not brother-like.

MARIAN (pointing to the sky).

Or there perchance

Up yonder with the man i’ the moon.

ROBIN.

No more!

MARIAN.

Or haply fallen victim to the wolf.

ROBIN.

Tut! be there wolves in Sherwood?

MARIAN.

The wolf, John!

ROBIN.

Curse him! but thou art mocking me. Thou art

Her brother — I forgive thee.   Come, be thou

My brother too.   She loves me.

MARIAN.

Doth she so?

ROBIN.

Do you doubt me when I say she loves me, man?

MARIAN.

No, but my father will not lose his land;

Rather than that would wed her with the sheriff.

ROBIN.

Thou hold’st with him?

MARIAN.

Yes, in some sort I do.

He is old and almost mad to keep the land.

ROBIN.

Thou hold’st with him?

MARIAN.

I tell thee, in some sort.

ROBIN (angrily).

Sort! sort! what sort? what sort of man art thou

For land, not love? Thou wilt inherit the land,

And so wouldst sell thy sister to the sheriff,

O thou unworthy brother of my dear Marian!

And, now I do bethink me, thou wast by

And never drewest sword to help the old man

When he was fighting.

MARIAN.

There were three to three.

ROBIN.

Thou shouldst have ta’en his place, and fought for him.

MARIAN.

He did it so well there was no call for me.

ROBIN.

My God!

That such a brother — she marry the sheriff!

Come now, I fain would have a bout with thee.

It is but pastime — nay, I will not harm thee.

Draw!

MARIAN.

Earl, I would fight with any man but thee.

ROBIN.

Ay, ay, because I have a name for prowess.

MARIAN.

It is not that.

ROBIN.

That! I believe thou fell’st into the hands

Of these same Moors thro’ nature’s baseness, criedst

‘I yield’ almost before the thing was ask’d,

And thro’ thy lack of manhood hast betray’d

Thy father to the losing of his land.

Come, boy! ‘tis but to see if thou canst fence.

Draw!

[Draws.

MARIAN.

No, Sir Earl, I will not fight to-day.

ROBIN.

To-morrow then?

MARIAN.

Well, I will fight to-morrow.

ROBIN.

Give me thy glove upon it.

MARIAN (pulls off her glove and gives it to him).            There!

ROBIN.  O God!

What sparkles in the moonlight on thy hand?

[Takes her hand.

In that great heat to wed her to the sheriff

Thou hast robb’d my girl of her betrothal ring.

MARIAN.

No, no!

ROBIN.

What! do I not know mine own ring?

MARIAN.

I keep it for her.

ROBIN.

Nay, she swore it never

Should leave her finger. Give it me, by heaven,

Or I will force it from thee.

MARIAN.        O Robin, Robin!

ROBIN.

O my dear Marian,

Is it thou? is it thou? I fall before thee, clasp

Thy knees. I am ashamed. Thou shalt not marry

The sheriff, but abide with me who love thee.

[She moves from him, the moonlight falls upon her.

O, look! before the shadow of these dark oaks

Thou seems’t a saintly splendour out from heaven,

Clothed with the mystic silver of her moon.

Speak but one word, not only of forgiveness,

But to show thou art mortal.

MARIAN.

Mortal enough,

If love for thee be mortal. Lovers hold

True love immortal. Robin, tho’ I love thee,

We cannot come together in this world.

Not mortal! after death, if after death ——

ROBIN.

Life, life! I know not death.  Why do you vex me

With raven-croaks of death and after death?

MARIAN.

And I and he are passing overseas:

He has a friend there will advance the moneys;

So now the forest lawns are all as bright

As ways to heaven, I pray thee give us guides

To lead us thro’ the windings of the wood.

ROBIN.

Must it be so? If it were so, myself

Would guide you thro’ the forest to the sea.

But go not yet, stay with us, and when thy brother —

MARIAN.

Robin, I ever held that saying false

That Love is blind, but thou hast proven it true.

Why — even your woodland squirrel sees the nut

Behind the shell, and thee however mask’d

I should have known. But thou — to dream that he

My brother, my dear Walter — now, perhaps,

Fetter’d and lash’d, a galley-slave, or closed

For ever in a Moorish tower, or wreckt

And dead beneath the midland ocean, he

As gentle as he’s brave — that such as he

Would wrest from me the precious ring I promised

Never to part with — No, not he, nor any!

I would have battled for it to the death.

[In her excitment she draws her sword.

See, thou hast wrong’d my brother and myself.

ROBIN (kneeling).

See then, I kneel once more to be forgiven.

Enter SCARLET, MUCH, several of the FORESTERS, rushing on.

SCARLET.

Look! look! he kneels! he has anger’d the foul witch,

Who melts a waxen image by the fire,

And drains the heart and marrow from a man.

MUCH.

Our Robin beaten, pleading for his life!

Seize on the knight! wrench his sword from him!

[They all rush on MARIAN.

ROBIN (springing up and waving his hand).

Back!

Back all of you! this is Maid Marian

Flying from John — disguised.

MEN.

Maid Marian? she?

SCARLET.

Captain, we saw thee cowering to a knight

And thought thou wert bewitch’d.

MARIAN.

You dared to dream

That our great earl, the bravest English heart

Since Hereward the Wake, would cower to any

Of mortal build! Weak natures that impute

Themselves to their unlikes, and their own want

Of manhood to their leader! he would break,

Far as he might, the power of John — but you —

What rightful cause could grow to such a heat

As burns a wrong to ashes, if the followers

Of him who heads the movement held him craven?

Robin — I know not, can I trust myself

With your brave band? in some of these may lodge

That baseness which for fear or moneys, might

Betray me to the wild prince.

ROBIN.

No, love, no!

Not any of these, I swear!

MEN.

No, no, we swear.

Scene II - Another Glade in the Forest.

ROBIN and MARIAN passing.    Enter FORESTER.

FORESTER.

Knight, your good father had his draught of wine,

And then he swooned away. He had been hurt,

And bled beneath his armour. Now he cries,

‘The land! the land!’ Come to him.

MARIAN.

O my poor father!

ROBIN.

Stay with us in this wood till he recover.

We know all balms and simples of the field

To help a wound. Stay with us here, sweet love,

Maid Marian, till thou wed what man thou wilt.

All here will prize thee, honour, worship thee,

Crown thee with flowers; and he will soon be well:

All will be well.

MARIAN.

O, lead me to my father!

[As they are going out, enter LITTLE JOHN and KATE, who falls on the neck of MARIAN.

KATE.

No, no, false knight, thou canst not hide thyself

From her who loves thee.

LITTLE JOHN.

What!

By all the devils in and out of hell!

Wilt thou embrace thy sweetheart ‘fore my face?

Quick with my sword! the yeoman braves the knight.

There!  (strikes her with the flat of his sword).

MARIAN (laying about her).

Are the men all mad? there then, and there!

KATE.

O, hold thy hand! this is our Marian.

LITTLE JOHN.

What! with this skill of fence! let go mine arm.

ROBIN.

Down with thy sword! she is my queen and thine,

The mistress of the band.

MARIAN (sheathing her sword).

A maiden now

Were ill-bested in these dark days of John,

Except she could defend her innocence.

O, lead me to my father!

[Exeunt Robin and Marian.

LITTLE JOHN.

Speak to me,

I am like a boy now going to be whipt;

I know I have done amiss, have been a fool;

Speak to me, Kate, and say you pardon me!

KATE.

I never will speak word to thee again.

What! to mistrust the girl you say you love

Is to mistrust your own love for your girl!

How should you love if you mistrust your love?

LITTLE JOHN.

O Kate, true love and jealousy are twins,

And love is joyful, innocent, beautiful,

And jealousy is wither’d, sour, and ugly;

Yet are they twins and always go together.

KATE.

Well, well, until they cease to go together,

I am but a stone and a dead stock to thee.

LITTLE JOHN.

I thought I saw thee clasp and kiss a man,

And it was but a woman. Pardon me.

KATE.

Ay, for I much disdain thee; but if ever

Thou see me clasp and kiss a man indeed,

I will again be thine, and not till then.

[Exit.

LITTLE JOHN.

I have been a fool, and I have lost my Kate.

[Exit.

Re-enter ROBIN.

ROBIN

He dozes.  I have left her watching him.

She will not marry till her father yield.

The old man dotes.

Nay — and she will not marry till Richard come,

And that’s at latter Lammas — never perhaps.

Besides, tho’ Friar Tuck might make us one,

An outlaw’s bride may not be wife in law.

I am weary.  [Lying down on a bank.

What’s here? a dead bat in the fairy ring —

Yes, I remember, Scarlet hacking down

A hollow ash, a bat flew out at him

In the clear noon, and hook’d him by the hair,

And he was scared and slew it. My men say

The fairies haunt this glade; — if one could catch

A glimpse of them and of their fairy queen —

Have our loud pastimes driven them all away?

I never saw them; yet I could believe

There came some evil fairy at my birth

And cursed me, as the last heir of my race:

‘This boy will never wed the maid he loves,

Nor leave a child behind him’ (yawns).  Weary — weary

As tho’ a spell were on me (he dreams).

[The whole stage lights up, and fairies are seen swinging on boughs and nestling in hollow trunks.

TITANIA on a hill. Fairies on either side of her. The moon above the hill.

FIRST FAIRY.

Evil Fairy! do you hear?

So he said who lieth here.

SECOND FAIRY.

We be fairies of the wood.

We be neither bad nor good.

SECOND FAIRY.

Back and side and hip and rib,

Nip, nip him for his fib.

TITANIA.

Nip him not, but let him snore.

We must flit for evermore.

FIRST FAIRY.

Tit, my queen, must it be so?

Wherefore, wherefore should we go?

TITANIA.

I Titania bid you flit,

And you dare to call me Tit.

FIRST FAIRY.

Tit, for love and brevity,

Not for love of levity.

TITANIA.

Pertest of our flickering mob,

Wouldst thou call my Oberon Ob?

SECOND FAIRY.

Nay, an please your Elfin Grace,

Never Ob before his face.

TITANIA.

Fairy realm is breaking down

When the fairy slights the crown.

SECOND FAIRY.

No, by wisp and glowworm, no!

Only wherefore should we go?

TITANIA.

We must fly from Robin Hood

And this new queen of the wood.

SECOND FAIRY.

True, she is a goodly thing.

Jealousy, jealousy of the king!

TITANIA.

Nay, for Oberon fled away

Twenty thousand leagues to-day.

CHORUS

Look, there comes a deputation

From our finikin fairy nation.

Enter several FAIRIES.

THIRD FAIRY.

Crush’d my bat whereon I flew,

Found him dead and drench’d in dew,

Queen.

FOURTH FAIRY.

Quash’d my frog that used to quack

When I vaulted on his back,

Queen.

FIFTH FAIRY.

Kill’d the sward where’er they sat,

Queen.

SIXTH FAIRY.

Lusty bracken beaten flat,

Queen.

SEVENTH FAIRY.

Honest daisy deadly bruised,

Queen.

EIGHTH FAIRY.

Modest maiden lily abused,

Queen.

NINTH FAIRY.

Beetle’s jewel armour crack’d,

Queen.

TENTH FAIRY.

Reed I rock’d upon broken-back’d,

Queen.

FAIRIES (in chorus).

We be scared with song and shout,

Arrows whistle all about.

All our games be put to rout.

All our rings be trampled out.

Lead us thou to some deep glen,

Far from solid foot of men,

Never to return again,

Queen.

TITANIA (to FIRST FAIRY).

Elf, with spiteful heart and eye,

Talk of jealousy? You see why

We must leave the wood and fly.

(To all the FAIRIES who sing at intervals with TITANIA.)

Up with you, out of the forest and over the hills and away,

And over this Robin Hood’s bay!

Up thro’ the light of the seas by the moon’s long-silvering ray!

To a land where the fay,

Not an eye to survey,

In the night, in the day,

Can have frolic and play.

Up with you, all of you, out of it! hear and obey.

Man, lying here alone,

Moody creature,

Of a nature

Stronger, sadder than my own,

Were I human, were I human,

I could love you like a woman,

Man, man,

You shall wed your Marian,

She is true, and you are true.

And you love her and she loves you;

Both be happy, and adieu for ever and for evermore — adieu!

ROBIN (half waking).

Shall I be happy? Happy vision, stay.

TITANIA.

Up with you, all of you, off with you, out of it, over

the wood and away!

Note. — In the stage copy of my play I have had this Fairy Scene transfered to the end of the Third Act, for the sake of modern dramatic effect.

Act III

Scene I - The Crowning of Marian.

MARIAN and KATE (in Forester’s green).

KATE.

What makes you seem so cold to Robin, lady?

MARIAN.

What makes thee think I seem so cold to Robin?

KATE.

You never whisper close as lovers do,

Nor care to leap into each other’s arms.

MARIAN.

There is a fence I cannot overleap,

My father’s will.

KATE.

Then you will wed the sheriff?

MARIAN.

When heaven falls, I may light on such a lark!

But who art thou to catechize me — thou

That hast not made it up with Little John?

KATE.

I wait till Little John makes up to me.

MARIAN.

Why, my good Robin fancied me a man,

And drew his sword upon me, and Little John

Fancied he saw thee clasp and kiss a man.

KATE.

Well, if he fancied that I fancy a man

Other than him, he is not the man for me.

MARIAN.

And that would quite unman him, heart and soul,

For both are thine.

(Looking up.)

But listen — overhead —

Fluting, and piping, and luting, ‘Love, love, love’ —

Those sweet tree-Cupids half-way up in heaven,

The birds — would I were one of ‘em! O good Kate —

If my man-Robin were but a bird-Robin,

How happily would we lilt among the leaves,

‘Love, love, love, love’ — what merry madness — listen!

And let them warm thy heart to Little John.

Look where he comes!

KATE.

I will not meet him yet,

I’ll watch him from behind the trees, but call

Kate when you will, for I am close at hand.

KATE stands aside and enter ROBIN, and after him at a little distance LITTLE JOHN, MUCH the miller’s son, and SCARLET with an oaken chaplet, and other FORESTERS.

LITTLE JOHN.

My lord — Robin — I crave pardon — you always seem to me my lord — I Little John, he Much the miller’s son, and he Scarlet, honouring all womankind, and more especially my lady Marian, do here, in the name of all our woodmen, present her with this oaken chaplet as queen of the wood, I Little John, he, young Scarlet, and he, old Much, and all the rest of us.

MUCH.

And I, old Much, say as much, for being every inch a man I honour every inch of a woman.

ROBIN.

Friend Scarlet, art thou less a man than Much? Why art thou mute? Dost thou not honour woman?

SCARLET.

Robin, I do, but I have a bad wife.

ROBIN.

Then let her pass as an exception, Scarlet.

SCARLET.

So I would, Robin, if any man would accept her.

MARIAN (puts on the chaplet).

Had I a bulrush now in this right hand

For sceptre, I were like a queen indeed.

Comrades, I thank you for your loyalty,

And take and wear this symbol of your love;

And, were my kindly father sound again,

Could live as happy as the larks in heaven,

And join your feasts and all your forest games

As far as maiden might. Farewell, good fellows!

[Exeunt several foresters, the others withdraw to the back.

ROBIN.

Sit here by me, where the most beaten track

Runs thro’ the forest, hundreds of huge oaks,

Gnarl’d — older than the thrones of Europe — look,

What breadth, height, strength — torrents of eddying bark!

Some hollow-hearted from exceeding age —

That never be thy lot or mine! — and some

Pillaring a leaf-sky on their monstrous boles,

Sound at the core as we are. Fifty leagues

Of woodland hear and know my horn, that scares

The baron at the torture of his churls,

The pillage of his vassals.

O maiden-wife,

The oppression of our people moves me so

That, when I think of it hotly, Love himself

Seems but a ghost, but when thou feel’st with me

The ghost returns to Marian, clothes itself

In maiden flesh and blood, and looks at once

Maid Marian, and that maiden freedom which

Would never brook the tyrant. Live thou maiden!

Thou art more my wife so feeling, than if my wife

And siding with these proud priests, and these barons,

Devils, that make this blessed England hell.

MARIAN.

Earl ——

ROBIN.

Nay, no earl am I. I am English yeoman.

MARIAN.

Then I am yeo-woman.  O the clumsy word!

ROBIN.

Take thou this light kiss for thy clumsy word.

Kiss me again.

MARIAN.

Robin, I will not kiss thee,

For that belongs to marriage; but I hold thee

The husband of my heart, the noblest light

That ever flash’d across my life, and I

Embrace thee with the kisses of the soul.

ROBIN.

I thank thee.

MARIAN.

Scarlet told me — is it true? —

That John last week return’d to Nottingham,

And all the foolish world is pressing thither.

ROBIN.

Sit here, my queen, and judge the world with me.

Doubtless, like judges of another bench,

However wise, we must at times have wrought

Some great injustice, yet, far as we knew,

We never robb’d one friend of the true King.

We robb’d the traitors that are leagued with John;

We robb’d the lawyer who went against the law;

We spared the craftsman, chapman, all that live

By their own hands, the labourer, the poor priest;

We spoil’d the prior, friar, abbot, monk,

For playing upside down with Holy Writ.

‘Sell all thou hast and give it to the poor;’

Take all they have and give it to thyself!

Then after we have eased them of their coins

It is our forest custom they should revel

Along with Robin.

MARIAN.

And if a woman pass ——

ROBIN.

Dear, in these days of Norman license, when

Our English maidens are their prey, if ever

A Norman damsel fell into our hands,

In this dark wood when all was in our power

We never wrong’d a woman.

MARIAN.

Noble Robin.

LITTLE JOHN (coming forward).

Here come three beggars.

Enter the three BEGGARS.

LITTLE JOHN.

Toll!

FIRST BEGGAR.

Eh! we be beggars, we come to ask o’ you. We ha’ nothing.

SECOND BEGGAR.

Rags, nothing but our rags.

THIRD BEGGAR.

I have but one penny in pouch, and so you would make it two I should be grateful.

MARIAN.

Beggars, you are sturdy rogues that should be set to work. You are those that tramp the country, filch the linen from the hawthorn, poison the house-dog, and scare lonely maidens at the farmstead. Search them, Little John.

LITTLE JOHN.

These two have forty gold marks between them, Robin.

ROBIN.

Cast them into our treasury, the beggars’ mites. Part shall go to the almshouses at Nottingham, part to the shrine of our Lady. Search this other.

LITTLE JOHN.

He hath, as he said, but one penny.

ROBIN.

Leave it with him and add a gold mark thereto. He hath spoken truth in a world of lies.

THIRD BEGGAR.

I thank you, my lord.

LITTLE JOHN.

A fine, a fine! he hath called plain Robin a lord. How much for a beggar?

ROBIN.

Take his penny and leave him his gold mark.

LITTLE JOHN.

Sit there, knaves, till the captain call for you.

[They pass behind the trunk of an oak on the right.

MARIAN.

Art thou not hard upon them, my good Robin?

ROBIN.

They might be harder upon thee, if met in a black lane at midnight: the throat might gape before the tongue could cry who?

LITTLE JOHN.

Here comes a citizen, and I think his wife.

Enter CITIZEN and WIFE.

CITIZEN.

That business which we have in Nottingham ——

LITTLE JOHN.

Halt!

CITIZEN.

O dear wife, we have fallen into the hands

Of Robin Hood.

MARIAN.

And Robin Hood hath sworn —

Shame on thee, Little John, thou hast forgotten —

That by the blessed Mother no man, so

His own true wife came with him, should be stay’d

From passing onward. Fare you well, fair lady!

[Bowing to her.

ROBIN.

And may your business thrive in Nottingham!

CITIZEN.

I thank you, noble sir, the very blossom

Of bandits.  Courtesy to him, wife, and thank him.

WIFE.

I thank you, noble sir, and will pray for you

That you may thrive, but in some kindlier trade.

CITIZEN.

Away, away, wife, wilt thou anger him?

[Exeunt Citizen and his Wife.

LITTLE JOHN.

Here come three friars.

ROBIN.

Marian, thou and thy woman

(looking round),

Why, where is Kate?

MARIAN (calling).

Kate!

KATE.

Here!

ROBIN.

Thou and thy woman are a match for three friars. Take thou my bow and arrow, and compel them to pay toll.

MARIAN.

Toll!

Enter three FRIARS.

FIRST FRIAR (advancing).

Behold a pretty Dian of the wood,

Prettier than that same widow which you wot of.

Ha, brother! Toll, my dear? the toll of love.

MARIAN (drawing bow).

Back! how much money hast thou in thy purse?

FIRST FRIAR.

Thou art playing with us. How should poor friars have money?

MARIAN.

How much? how much? Speak, or the arrow flies.

FIRST FRIAR.

How much? well, now I bethink me, I have one mark in gold which a pious son of the Church gave me this morning on my setting forth.

MARIAN (bending bow at the second).

And thou?

SECOND FRIAR.

Well, as he said, one mark in gold.

MARIAN (bending bow at the third).

And thou?

THIRD FRIAR.

One mark in gold.

MARIAN.

Search them, Kate, and see if they have spoken truth.

KATE.

They are all marked men. They have all told but a tenth of the truth: they have each ten marks in gold.

MARIAN.

Leave them each what they say is theirs, and take the twenty-seven marks to the captain’s treasury. Sit there till you be called for.

FIRST FRIAR.

We have fallen into the hands of Robin Hood.

[MARIAN and KATE return to Robin.

[The Friars pass behind an oak on the left.

ROBIN.

Honour to thee, brave Marian, and thy Kate!

I know them arrant knaves in Nottingham.

One half of this shall go to those they have wrong’d,

One half shall pass into our treasury.

Where lies that cask of wine whereof we plunder’d

The Norman prelate?

LITTLE JOHN.

In that oak, where twelve

Can stand upright, nor touch each other.

ROBIN.   Good!

Roll it in here. These friars, thieves, and liars,

Shall drink the health of our new woodland queen.

And they shall pledge thee, Marian, loud enough

To fright the wild swan passing overhead,

The mouldwarp underfoot.

MARIAN.

They pledge me, Robin?

The silent blessing of one honest man

Is heard in heaven — the wassail yells of thief

And rogue and liar echo down in hell,

And wake the devil, and I may sicken by ‘em.

Well, well, be it so, thou strongest thief of all,

For thou hast stolen my will, and made it thine.

FRIAR TUCK, LITTLE JOHN, MUCH, and SCARLET roll in cask.

FRIAR TUCK.

I marvel is it sack or Malvoisie?

ROBIN.

Do me the service to tap it, and thou wilt know.

FRIAR TUCK.

I would tap myself in thy service, Robin.

ROBIN.

And thou wouldst run more wine than blood.

FRIAR TUCK.

And both at thy service, Robin.

ROBIN.

I believe thee, thou art a good fellow, though a friar.

[They pour the wine into cups.

FRIAR TUCK.

Fill to the brim. Our Robin, King o’ the woods,

Wherever the horn sound, and the buck bound,

Robin, the people’s friend, the King o’ the woods!

[They drink.

ROBIN.

To the brim and over till the green earth drink

Her health along with us in this rich draught,

And answer it in flowers! The Queen o’ the woods,

Wherever the buck bound, and the horn sound,

Maid Marian, Queen o’ the woods!

[They drink.

Here, you three rogues,

[They come out.

You caught a lonely woodman of our band,

And bruised him almost to the death, and took

His moneys.

THIRD BEGGAR.

Captain, nay, it was n’t me.

ROBIN.

You ought to dangle up there among the crows.

Drink to the health of our new Queen o’ the woods,

Or else be bound and beaten.

FIRST BEGGAR.

Sir, sir — well,

We drink the health of thy new Queen o’ the woods.

ROBIN.

Louder! louder! Maid Marian, Queen o’ the woods!

BEGGARS (shouting).

Maid Marian, Queen o’ the woods! Queen o’ the woods!

FIRST and SECOND BEGGARS (aside).

The black fiend grip her!

[They drink.

ROBIN (to the FRIARS).

And you three holy men,

[They come out.

You worshippers of the Virgin, one of you

Shamed a too trustful widow whom you heard

In her confession; and another — worse! —

An innocent maid. Drink to the Queen o’ the woods,

Or else be bound and beaten.

FIRST FRIAR.

Robin Hood,

These be the lies the people tell of us,

Because we seek to curb their viciousness.

However — to this maid, this Queen o’ the woods!

ROBIN.

Louder, louder, ye knaves! Maid Marian!

Queen o’ the woods!

FRIARS (shouting).

Maid Marian, Queen o’ the woods!

FIRST FRIAR (aside).

Maid?

SECOND FRIAR (aside).

Paramour!

THIRD FRIAR (aside).

Hell take her!

[They drink.

FRIAR TUCK.

Robin, will you not hear one of these beggars’ catches? They can do it. I have heard ‘em in the market at Mansfield.

LITTLE JOHN.

No, my lord, hear ours — Robin — I crave pardon, I always think of you as my lord, but I may still say my lady; and, my lady, Kate and I have fallen out again, and I pray you to come between us again, for, my lady, we have made a song in your honour, so your ladyship care to listen.

ROBIN.

Sing, and by Saint Mary these beggars and these friars shall join you. Play the air, Little John.

LITTLE JOHN.

Air and word, my lady, are maid and man. Join them and they are a true marriage; and so, I pray you, my lady, come between me and my Kate, and make us one again. Scarlet, begin.

[Playing the air on his viol.

SCARLET.

By all the deer that spring

Thro’ wood and lawn and ling,

When all the leaves are green;

By arrow and gray goosewing,

When horn and echo ring,

We care so much for a King;

We care not much for a Queen —

For a Queen, for a Queen o’ the woods.

MARIAN.

Do you call that in my honour?

SCARLET.

Bitters before dinner, my lady, to give you a relish. The first part — made before you came among us — they put it upon me because I have a bad wife. I love you all the same. Proceed.

[All the rest sing.

By all the leaves of spring,

And all the birds that sing

When all the leaves are green;

By arrow and by bowstring,

We care so much for a King

That we would die for a Queen —

For a Queen, for a Queen o’ the woods.

Enter FORESTER.

FORESTER.

Black news, black news from Nottingham! I grieve

I am the raven who croaks it. My lord John,

In wrath because you drove him from the forest,

Is coming with a swarm of mercenaries

To break our band and scatter us to the winds.

MARIAN.

O Robin, Robin! See that men be set

Along the glades and passes of the wood

To warn us of his coming! then each man

That owns a wife or daughter, let him bury her

Even in the bowels of the earth to scape

The glance of John ——

ROBIN.

You hear your Queen, obey!

Act IV

Scene I - The Conclusion.

SCENE. — A forest bower, cavern in background. Sunrise.

MARIAN (rising to meet ROBIN).

Robin, the sweet light of a mother’s eye,

That beam of dawn upon the opening flower,

Has never glanced upon me when a child.

He was my father, mother, both in one.

The love that children owe to both I give

To him alone.

(ROBIN offers to caress her.)

MARIAN.

Quiet, good Robin, quiet!

You lovers are such clumsy summer-flies

For ever buzzing at your lady’s face.

ROBIN.

Bees rather, flying to the flower for honey.

MARIAN (sings).

The bee buzz’d up in the heat:

‘I am faint for your honey, my sweet.’

The flower said, ‘Take, it my dear,

For now is the spring of the year.

So come, come!’

‘Hum!’

And the bee buzz’d down from the heat.

And the bee buzz’d up in the cold

When the flower was wither’d and old.

‘Have you still any honey, my dear?’

She said, ‘It’s the fall of the year,

But come, come!’

‘Hum!’

And the bee buzz’d off in the cold.

ROBIN.

Out on thy song!

MARIAN.

Did I not sing it in tune?

ROBIN.

No, sweetheart! out of tune with Love and me.

MARIAN.

And yet in tune with Nature and the bees.

ROBIN.

Out on it, I say, as out of tune and time!

MARIAN.

Till thou thyself shalt come to sing it — in time.

ROBIN. (taking a tress of her hair in his hand).

Time! if his backward-working alchemy

Should change this gold to silver, why, the silver

Were dear as gold, the wrinkle as the dimple.

Thy bee should buzz about the court of John.

No ribald John is Love, no wanton prince,

The ruler of an hour, but lawful King,

Whose writ will run thro’ all the range of life.

Out upon all hard-hearted maidenhood!

MARIAN.

And out upon all simple bachelors!

Ah, well! thou seest the land has come between us,

And my sick father here has come between us,

And this rich sheriff too has come between us;

So, is it not all over now between us?

Gone, like a deer that hath escaped thine arrow!

ROBIN.

What deer when I have mark’d him ever yet

Escaped mine arrow? over is it? wilt thou

Give me thy hand on that?

MARIAN.

Take it.

ROBIN (kisses her hand).

The sheriff!

This ring cries out against thee. Say it again,

And, by this ring, the lips that never breathed

Love’s falsehood to true maid will seal Love’s truth

On those sweet lips that dare to dally with it.

MARIAN.

Quiet, quiet! or I will to my father.

ROBIN.

So, then, thy father will not grace our feast

With his white beard to-day.

MARIAN.

Being so sick.

How should he, Robin?

ROBIN.

Then that bond he hath

Of the abbot — wilt thou ask him for it?

MARIAN.         Why?

ROBIN.

I have sent to the abbot and justiciary

To bring their counter-bond into the forest.

MARIAN.

But will they come?

ROBIN.

If not I have let them know

Their lives unsafe in any of these our woods,

And in the winter I will fire their farms.

But I have sworn by our Lady if they come

I will not tear the bond, but see fair play

Betwixt them and Sir Richard — promised too,

So that they deal with us like honest men,

They shall be handled with all courteousness.

MARIAN.

What wilt thou do with the bond then?

ROBIN.

Wait and see.

What wilt thou do with the sheriff?

MARIAN.

Wait and see.

I bring the bond.

[Exit Marian.

Enter LITTLE JOHN, FRIAR TUCK, and MUCH, and FORESTERS and PEASANTS laughing and talking.

ROBIN.

Have you glanced down thro’ all the forest ways,

And mark’d if those two knaves from York be coming?

LITTLE JOHN.

Not yet, but here comes one of bigger mould.

Enter KING RICHARD.

Art thou a knight?

KING RICHARD.

I am.

ROBIN.

And walkest here

Unarmour’d? all these walks are Robin Hood’s,

And sometimes perilous.

KING RICHARD.

Good! but having lived

For twenty days and nights in mail, at last

I crawl’d like a sick crab from my old shell,

That I might breathe for a moment free of shield

And cuirass in this forest where I dream’d

That all was peace — not even a Robin Hood —

(Aside) What if these knaves should know me for their King?

ROBIN.

Art thou for Richard, or allied to John?

KING RICHARD.

I am allied to John.

ROBIN.

The worse for thee.

KING RICHARD.

Art thou that banish’d lord of Huntingdon,

The chief of these outlaws who break the law?

ROBIN.

I am the yeoman, plain Robin Hood, and being out of the law how should we break the law? if we broke into it again we should break the law, and then we were no longer outlaws.

KING RICHARD.

But, earl, if thou be he ——

FRIAR TUCK.

Fine him! fine him! he hath called plain

Robin an earl. How much is it, Robin, for a knight?

ROBIN.

A mark.

KING RICHARD (gives it).

There.

ROBIN.

Thou payest easily, like a good fellow,

But being o’ John’s side we must have thy gold.

KING RICHARD.

But I am more for Richard than for John.

ROBIN.

What, what, a truckler! a word-eating coward!

Nay, search him then. How much hast thou about thee?

KING RICHARD.

I had one mark.

ROBIN.

What more?

KING RICHARD.

No more, I think.

But how then if I will not bide to be search’d?

ROBIN.

We are four to one.

KING RICHARD.

And I might deal with four.

ROBIN.

Good, good, I love thee for that! but if I wind

This forest-horn of mine I can bring down

Fourscore tall fellows on thee.

KING RICHARD.

Search me then.

I should be hard beset with thy fourscore.

LITTLE JOHN (searching KING RICHARD).

Robin, he hath No more. He hath spoken truth.

ROBIN.

I am glad of it. Give him back his gold again.

KING RICHARD.

But I had liefer than this gold again —

Not having broken fast the livelong day —

Something to eat.

ROBIN.

And thou shalt have it, man.

Our feast is yonder, spread beneath an oak,

Venison, and wild boar, wild goose, besides

Hedge-pigs, a savoury viand, so thou be

Squeamish at eating the King’s venison.

KING RICHARD.

Nay, Robin, I am like thyself in that

I look on the King’s venison as my own.

FRIAR TUCK.

Ay, ay, Robin, but let him know our forest laws: he that pays not for his dinner must fight for it. In the sweat of thy brow, says Holy Writ, shalt thou eat bread, but in the sweat of thy brow and thy breast, and thine arms, and thy legs, and thy heart, and thy liver, and in the fear of thy life shalt thou eat the King’s venison — ay, and so thou fight at quarterstaff for thy dinner with our Robin, that will give thee a new zest for it, though thou wert like a bottle full up to the cork, or as hollow as a kex, or the shambles-oak, or a weasel-sucked egg, or the head of a fool, or the heart of Prince John, or any other symbol of vacuity.

[They bring out the quarterstaffs, and the foresters and peasants crowd round to see the games, and applaud at intervals.

KING RICHARD.

Great woodland King, I know not quarterstaff.

LITTLE JOHN.

A fine! a fine! He hath called plain Robin a king.

ROBIN.

A shadow, a poetical fiction — did ye not call me king in your song? — a mere figure. Let it go by.

FRIAR TUCK.

No figure, no fiction, Robin. What, is not man a hunting animal? And look you now, if we kill a stag, our dogs have their paws cut off, and the hunters, if caught, are blinded, or worse than blinded. Is that to be a king? If the King and the law work injustice, is not he that goes against the King and the law the true King in the sight of the King of kings? Thou art the King of the forest, and I would thou wert the King of the land.

KING RICHARD.

This friar is of much boldness, noble captain.

ROBIN.

He hath got it from the bottle, noble knight.

FRIAR TUCK.

Boldness out of the bottle! I defy thee.

Boldness is in the blood, Truth in the bottle.

She lay so long at the bottom of her well

In the cold water that she lost her voice,

And so she glided up into the heart

O’ the bottle, the warm wine, and found it again.

In vino veritas.    Shall I undertake

The knight at quarterstaff, or thou?

ROBIN.

Peace, magpie!

Give him the quarterstaff. Nay, but thyself

Shalt play a bout with me, that he may see

The fashion of it.

[Plays with FRIAR TUCK at quarterstaff.

KING RICHARD.

Well, then, let me try.

[They play.

I yield, I yield. I know no quarterstaff.

ROBIN.

Then thou shalt play the game of buffets with us.

KING RICHARD.

What’s that?

ROBIN.

I stand up here, thou there. I give thee

A buffet, and thou me. The Holy Virgin

Stand by the strongest! I am overbreathed,

Friar, by my two bouts at quarterstaff.

Take him and try him, friar.

FRIAR TUCK.

There!

[Strikes.

KING RICHARD (strikes).

There!

[FRIAR falls.

FRIAR TUCK.  There!

Thou hast roll’d over the Church militant

Like a tod of wool from wagon into warehouse.

Nay, I defy thee still. Try me an hour hence.

I am misty with my thimbleful of ale.

ROBIN.

Thou seest, Sir Knight, our friar is so holy

That he’s a miracle-monger, and can make

Five quarts pass into a thimble. Up, good Much.

FRIAR TUCK.

And show thyself more of a man than me.

MUCH.

Well, no man yet has ever bowl’d me down.

SCARLET.

Ay, for old Much is every inch a man.

ROBIN.

We should be all the more beholden to him.

MUCH.

Much and more! much and more! I am the oldest of thy men, and thou and thy youngsters are always muching and moreing me.

ROBIN.

Because thou art always so much more of a man than my youngsters, old Much.

MUCH.

Well, we Muches be old.

ROBIN.

Old as the hills.

MUCH.

Old as the mill. We had it i’ the Red King’s time, and so I may be more of a man than to be bowled over like a ninepin. There!

[Strikes.

KING RICHARD.

There!

[MUCH falls.

ROBIN.

‘Much would have more,’ says the proverb; but Much hath had more than enough. Give me thy hand, Much; I love thee (lifts him up). At him, Scarlet.

SCARLET.

I cannot cope with him: my wrist is strain’d.

KING RICHARD.

Try, thyself, valorous Robin!

ROBIN.

I am mortally afeard o’ thee, thou big man,

But seeing valour is one against all odds,

There!

KING RICHARD.

There!

[ROBIN falls back, and is caught in the arms of LITTLE JOHN.

ROBIN.

Good, now I love thee mightily, thou tall fellow.

Break thine alliance with this faithless John,

And live with us and the birds in the green wood.

KING RICHARD.

I cannot break it, Robin, if I wish’d.

Still I am more for Richard than for John.

LITTLE JOHN.

Look, Robin, at the far end of the glade

I see two figures crawling up the hill.

[Distant sound of trumpets.

ROBIN.

The Abbot of York and his justiciary.

KING RICHARD (aside).

They know me. I must not as yet be known.

Friends, your free sports have swallow’d my free hour.

Farewell at once, for I must hence upon

The King’s affair.

ROBIN.

Not taste his venison first?

FRIAR TUCK.

Hast thou not fought for it, and earn’d it? Stay,

Dine with my brethren here, and on thine own.

KING RICHARD.

And which be they?

FRIAR TUCK.

Wild geese, for how canst thou be thus allied

With John, and serve King Richard save thou be

A traitor or a goose? but stay with Robin;

For Robin is no scatterbrains like Richard,

Robin’s a wise man, Richard a wiseacre,

Robin’s an outlaw, but he helps the poor;

While Richard hath outlaw’d himself, and helps

Nor rich nor poor. Richard’s the king of courtesy;

For if he did me the good grace to kick me

I could but sneak and smile and call it courtesy,

For he’s a king.

And that is only courtesy by courtesy —

But Robin is a thief of courtesy

Whom they that suffer by him call the blossom

Of bandits. There — to be a thief of courtesy —

There is a trade of genius, there’s glory!

Again, this Richard sacks and wastes a town

With random pillage, but our Robin takes

From whom he knows are hypocrites and liars.

Again, this Richard risks his life for a straw,

So lies in prison — while our Robin’s life

Hangs by a thread, but he is a free man.

Richard, again, is King over a realm

He hardly knows, and Robin King of Sherwood,

And loves and dotes on every dingle of it.

Again, this Richard is the lion of Cyprus,

Robin the lion of Sherwood — may this mouth

Never suck grape again, if our true Robin

Be not the nobler lion of the twain!

KING RICHARD.

Gramercy for thy preachment! if the land

Were rulable by tongue, thou shouldst be King.

And yet thou know’st how little of thy King!

What was this realm of England, all the crowns

Of all this world, to Richard when he flung

His life, heart, soul into those holy wars

That sought to free the tomb-place of the king

Of all the world? thou, that art churchman too

In a fashion, and shouldst feel with him. Farewell!

I left mine horse and armour with a squire,

And I must see to ‘em.

ROBIN.

When wilt thou return?

KING RICHARD.

Return, I? when? when Richard will return.

ROBIN.

No sooner? when will that be? canst thou tell?

But I have ta’en a sudden fancy to thee.

Accept this horn! if e’er though be assail’d

In any of our forests, blow upon it

Three mots, this fashion — listen! (blows) Canst thou do it?

[KING RICHARD blows.

Blown like a true son of the woods. Farewell!

[Exit King Richard.

Enter ABBOTT and JUSTICIARY.

FRIAR TUCK.

Church and Law, halt and pay toll!

JUSTICIARY.

Rogue, we have thy captain’s safe-conduct; though he be the chief of rogues, he hath never broken his word.

ABBOT.

There is our bond.

[Gives it to ROBIN

ROBIN.

I thank thee.

JUSTICIARY

Ay, but where,

Where is this old Sir Richard of the Lea?

Thou told’st us we should meet him in the forest,

Where he would pay us down his thousand marks.

ROBIN.

Give him another month, and he will pay it.

JUSTICIARY.

We cannot give him a month.

ROBIN.

Why, then a week.

JUSTICIARY.

No, not an hour: the debt is due to-day.

ABBOT.

Where is this laggard Richard of the Lea?

ROBIN.

He hath been hurt, was growing whole again,

Only this morning, in his agony

Lest he should fail to pay these thousand marks,

He is stricken with a slight paralysis.

Have you no pity? must you see this man?

JUSTICIARY.

Ay, ay, what else? how else can this be settled?

ROBIN.

Go, men, and fetch him hither on the litter.

[SIR RICHARD LEA is brought in. MARIAN comes with him.

MARIAN.

Here is my father’s bond.

[Gives it to ROBIN HOOD.

ROBIN.

I thank thee, dear.

JUSTICIARY.

Sir Richard, it was agreed when you borrowed these moneys from the abbot that, if they were not repaid within a limited time, your land should be forfeit.

SIR RICHARD.

The land! the land!

MARIAN.

You see he is past himself.

What would you more?

ABBOT.

What more? one thousand marks,

Or else the land.

You hide this damsel in your forest here,

[Pointing to MARIAN.

You hope to hold and keep her for yourself,

You heed not how you soil her maiden fame,

You scheme against her father’s weal and hers;

For, so this maid would wed our brother, he

Would pay us all the debt at once, and thus

This old Sir Richard might redeem his land.

He is all for love, he cares not for the land.

SIR RICHARD.

The land! the land!

ROBIN (giving two bags to the Abbot).

Here be one thousand marks

Out of our treasury to redeem the land.

[Pointing to each of the bags.

Half here, half there.

[Plaudits from his band.

JUSTICIARY.

Ay, ay, but there is use, four hundred marks.

ROBIN (giving a bag to JUSTICIARY).

There then, four hundred marks.

[Plaudits.

JUSTICIARY.

What did I say?

Nay, my tongues tript — five hundred marks for use.

ROBIN (giving another bag to him).

A hundred more? There then, a hundred more.

[Plaudits.

JUSTICIARY.

Ay, ay, but you see the bond and the letter of the law. It is stated there that these moneys should be paid in to the abbot at York, at the end of the month at noon, and they are delivered here in the wild wood an hour after noon.

MARIAN.

The letter — O, how often justice drowns

Between the law and letter of the law!

O God, I would the letter of the law

Were some strong fellow here in the wild wood,

That thou mightst beat him down at quarterstaff!

Have you no pity?

JUSTICIARY.

You run down your game,

We ours. What pity have you for your game?

ROBIN.

We needs must live. Our bowmen are so true

They strike the deer at once to death — he falls

And knows no more.

MARIAN.

Pity, pity — There was a man of ours

Up in the north, a goodly fellow too,

He met a stag there on so narrow a ledge —

A precipice above, and one below —

There was no room to advance or to retire.

The men lay down — the delicate-footed creature

Came stepping o’er him, so as not to harm him —

The hunter’s passion flash’d into the man,

He drove his knife into the heart of the deer,

The deer fell dead to the bottom, and the man

Fell with him, and was crippled ever after.

I fear I had small pity for that man. —

You have the moneys and the use of them.

What would you more?

JUSTICIARY.

What? must we dance attendance all the day?

ROBIN.

Dance! ay, by all the saints and all the devils, ye shall dance! When the Church and the Law have forgotten God’s music, they shall dance to the music of the wild wood. Let the birds sing, and do you dance to their song! What, you will not? Strike up our music, Little John. (He plays.) They will not! Prick ‘em in the calves with the arrow-points prick ‘em in the calves!

ABBOT.

Rogue, I am full of gout. I cannot dance.

ROBIN.

And Sir Richard cannot redeem his land. Sweat out your gout, friend, for, by my life, you shall dance till he can. Prick him in the calves!

JUSTICIARY.

Rogue, I have a swollen vein in my right leg, and if thou prick me there I shall die.

ROBIN.

Prick him where thou wilt, so that he dance.

ABBOT.

Rogue, we come not alone.

JUSTICIARY.

Not the right.

ABBOT.

We told the prince and the sheriff of our coming.

JUSTICIARY.

Take the left leg, for the love of God.

ABBOT.

They follow us.

JUSTICIARY.

You will all of you hang.

ROBIN.

Let us hang, so thou dance meanwhile; or, by that same love of God, we will hang thee, prince or no prince, sheriff or no sheriff.

JUSTICIARY.

Take care, take care! I dance — I will dance — I dance

[ABBOT and JUSTICIARY dance to music, each holding a bag in each hand.

Enter SCARLET.

SCARLET.

The sheriff! the sheriff, follow’d by Prince John

And all his mercenaries! We sighted ‘em

Only this moment. By Saint Nicholas

They must have sprung like ghosts from underground,

Or like the devils they are, straight up from hell.

ROBIN.

Crouch all into the bush!

[The FORESTERS and PEASANTS hide behind the bushes.

MARIAN.

Take up the litter!

SIR RICHARD.

Move me no more! I am sick and faint with pain!

MARIAN.

But, sir, the sheriff —

SIR RICHARD.

Let me be, I say!

The sheriff will be welcome! let me be!

MARIAN.

Give me my bow and arrows. I remain.

Beside my father’s litter.

ROBIN.

And fear not thou!

Each of us has an arrow on the cord;

We all keep watch.

Enter SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM.

SHERIFF.

Marian!

MARIAN.

Speak not. I wait upon a dying father.

SHERIFF.

The debt hath not been paid. She will be mine.

What are you capering for? By old Saint Vitus,

Have you gone mad? Has it been paid?

ABBOT (dancing).

O, yes.

SHERIFF.

Have I lost her then?

JUSTICIARY (dancing).

Lost her? O, no, we took

Advantage of the letter — O Lord, the vein!

Not paid at York — the wood — prick me no more!

SHERIFF.

What pricks thee, save it be thy conscience, man?

JUSTICIARY.

By my halidome, I felt him at my leg still.

Where be they gone to?

SHERIFF.

Thou art alone in the silence of the forest,

Save for this maiden and thy brother abbot,

And this old crazeling in the litter there.

Enter on one side FRIAR TUCK from the bush, and on the other PRINCE JOHN and his SPEARMEN, with banners and trumpets, etc.

JUSTICIARY (examining his leg)

They have miss’d the vein.

ABBOT.

And we shall keep the land.

SHERIFF.

Sweet Marian, by the letter of the law

It seems thy father’s land is forfeited.

SIR RICHARD.

No! let me out of the litter. He shall wed thee:

The land shall still be mine. Child, thou shalt wed him,

Or thine old father will go mad — he will,

He will — he feels it in his head.

MARIAN.

O, peace!

Father, I cannot marry till Richard comes.

SIR RICHARD.

And then the sheriff!

MARIAN.  Ay, the sheriff, father,

Would buy me for a thousand marks in gold —

Sell me again perchance for twice as much.

A woman’s heart is but a little thing,

Much lighter than a thousand marks in gold;

But pity for a father, it may be,

Is weightier than a thousand marks in gold.

I cannot love the sheriff.

SIR RICHARD.

But thou wilt wed him?

MARIAN.

Ay, save King Richard, when he comes, forbid me.

Sweet heavens, I could wish that all the land

Were plunged beneath the waters of the sea,

Tho’ all the world should go about in boats.

FRIAR TUCK.

Why, so should all the love-sick be sea-sick.

MARIAN.

Better than heart-sick, friar.

PRINCE JOHN to SHERIFF).

See you not

They are jesting at us yonder, mocking us?

Carry her off, and let the old man die.

[Advancing to MARIAN.

Come, girl, thou shalt along with us on the instant.

FRIAR TUCK (brandishing his staff).

Then on the instant I will break thy head.

SHERIFF.

Back, thou fool-friar! Knowest thou not the prince?

FRIAR TUCK (muttering).

He may be prince; he is not gentleman.

PRINCE JOHN.

Look! I will take the rope from off thy waist,

And twist it round thy neck and hang thee by it.

Seize him and truss him up, and carry her off.

[FRIAR TUCK slips into the bush.

MARIAN (drawing the bow).

No nearer to me! back! My hand is firm,

Mine eye most true to one hair’s-breadth of aim.

You, prince, our King to come — you that dishonour

The daughters and the wives of your own faction —

Who hunger for the body, not the soul —

This gallant prince would have me of his — what?

Household? or shall I call it by that new term

Brought from the sacred East, his harem? Never,

Tho’ you should queen me over all the realms

Held by King Richard, could I stoop so low

As mate with one that holds no love is pure,

No friendship sacred, values neither man

Nor woman save as tools — God help the mark! —

To his own unprincely ends. And you, you, sheriff,

[Turning to the sheriff.

Who thought to buy your marrying me with gold,

Marriage is of the soul, not of the body.

Win me you cannot, murder me you may,

And all I love, Robin, and all his men,

For I am one with him and his; but while

I breathe Heaven’s air, and Heaven looks down on me,

And smiles at my best meanings, I remain

Mistress of mine own self and mine own soul.

[Retreating, with bow drawn, to the bush.

Robin!

ROBIN.

I am here, my arrow on the cord.

He dies who dares to touch thee.

PRINCE JOHN.

Advance, advance!

What, daunted by a garrulous, arrogant girl!

Seize her, and carry her off into my castle.

SHERIFF.

Thy castle!

PRINCE JOHN.

Said I not, I love thee, man?

Risk not the love I bear thee for a girl.

SHERIFF.

Thy castle!

PRINCE JOHN.

See thou thwart me not, thou fool!

When Richard comes he is soft enough to pardon

His brother; but all those that held with him,

Except I plead for them, will hang as high

As Haman.

SHERIFF.

She is mine. I have thy promise.

PRINCE JOHN.

O, ay, she shall be thine — first mine, then thine,

For she shall spend her honeymoon with me.

SHERIFF.

Woe to that land shall own thee for her King!

PRINCE JOHN.

Advance, advance!

[They advance shouting. The KING in armour reappears from the wood.

KING RICHARD.

What shouts are these that ring along the wood?

FRIAR TUCK (coming forward).

Hail, knight, and help us. Here is one would clutch

Our pretty Marian for his paramour,

This other, willy-nilly, for his bride.

KING RICHARD.

Damsel, is this the truth?

MARIAN.

Ay, noble knight.

FRIAR TUCK.

Ay, and she will not marry till Richard come.

KING RICHARD (raising his visor).

I am here, and I am he.

PRINCE JOHN (lowering his, and whispering to his men).

It is not he — his face — tho’ very like —

No, no! we have certain news he died in prison.

Make at him, all of you, a traitor coming

In Richard’s name — it is not he — not he.

[The men stand amazed.

FRIAR TUCK (going back to the bush).

Robin, shall we not move?

ROBIN.

It is the King

Who bears all down. Let him alone awhile.

He loves the chivalry of his single arm.

Wait till he blow the horn.

FRIAR TUCK (coming back).

If thou be King,

Be not a fool! Why blowest thou not the horn?

KING RICHARD.

I that have turn’d their Moslem cresent pale —

I blow the horn against this rascal rout!

[FRIAR TUCK plucks the horn from him and blows. RICHARD dashes alone against the SHERIFF and JOHN’S men, and is almost borne down, when ROBIN and his men rush in and rescue him.

KING RICHARD (to ROBIN HOOD).

Thou hast saved my head at the peril of thine own.

PRINCE JOHN.

A horse! a horse! I must away at once;

I cannot meet his eyes. I go to Nottingham.

Sheriff, thou wilt find me at Nottingham.

[Exit.

SHERIFF.

If anywhere, I shall find thee in hell.

What! go to slay his brother, and make me

The monkey that should roast his chestnuts for him!

KING RICHARD.

I fear to ask who left us even now.

ROBIN.

I grieve to say it was thy father’s son.

Shall I not after him and bring him back?

KING RICHARD.

No, let him be. Sheriff of Nottingham,

[SHERIFF kneels.

I have been away from England all these years,

Heading the holy war against the Moslem,

While thou and others in our kingless realms

Were fighting underhand unholy wars

Against your lawful King.

SHERIFF.

My liege, Prince John —

KING RICHARD.

Say thou no word against my brother John.

SHERIFF.

Why then, my liege, I have no word to say.

KING RICHARD. (to ROBIN).

My good friend Robin, Earl of Huntingdon,

For earl thou art again, hast thou no fetters

For those of thine own band who would betray thee?

ROBIN.

I have; but these were never worn as yet.

I never found one traitor in my band.

KING RICHARD.

Thou art happier than thy King. Put him in chains.

[They fetter the SHERIFF.

ROBIN.

Look o’er these bonds, my liege.

[Shows the KING the bonds. They talk together.

KING RICHARD.

You, my lord Abbot, you Justiciary,

[The ABBOT and JUSTICIARY kneel.

I made you abbot, you justiciary:

You both are utter traitors to your King.

JUSTICIARY.

O my good liege, we did believe you dead.

ROBIN.

Was justice dead because the King was dead?

Sir Richard paid his moneys to the abbot.

You crost him with a quibble of your law.

KING RICHARD.

But on the faith and honour of a King

The land is his again.

SIR RICHARD.

The land! the land!

I am crazed no longer, so I have the land.

[Comes out of the litter and kneels.

God save the King!

KING RICHARD (raising Sir Richard).

I thank thee, good Sir Richard.

Maid Marian.

MARIAN.

Yes, King Richard.

KING RICHARD.

Thou wouldst marry

This sheriff when King Richard came again

Except —

MARIAN.

The King forbade it. True, my liege.

KING RICHARD.

How if the King command it?

MARIAN.

Then, my liege,

If you would marry me with a traitor sheriff,

I fear I might prove traitor with the sheriff.

KING RICHARD.

But if the King forbid thy marrying

With Robin, our good Earl of Huntingdon?

MARIAN.

Then will I live forever in the wild wood.

ROBIN (coming forward).

And I with thee.

KING RICHARD.

On nuts and acorns, ha!

Or the King’s deer? Earl, thou when we were hence

Hast broken all our Norman forest-laws,

And scruplest not to flaunt it to our face

That thou wilt break our forest laws again

When we are here. Thou art overbold.

ROBIN.

My King,

I am but the echo of the lips of love.

KING RICHARD.

Thou hast risk’d thy life for mine: bind these two men.

[They take the bags from the ABBOT and JUSTICIARY, and proceed to fetter them.

JUSTICIARY.

But will the King, then, judge us all unheard?

I can defend my cause against the traitors

Who fain would make me traitor. If the King

Condemn us without trial, men will call him

An Eastern tyrant, not an English king.

ABBOT.

Besides, my liege, these men are outlaws, thieves,

They break thy forest laws — nay, by the rood,

They have done far worse — they plunder — yea, even bishops,

Yea, even archbishops — if thou side with these,

Beware, O King, the vengeance of the Church.

FRIAR TUCK (brandishing his staff).

I pray you, my liege, let me execute the vengeance of the Church upon them. I have a stout crabstick here, which longs to break itself across their backs.

ROBIN.

Keep silence, bully friar, before the King.

FRIAR TUCK.

If a cat may look at a King, may not a friar speak to one?

KING RICHARD.

I have had a year of prison-silence, Robin,

And heed him not — the vengeance of the Church!

Thou shalt pronounce the blessing of the Church

On those two here, Robin and Marian.

MARIAN.

He is but hedge-priest, Sir King.

KING RICHARD.

And thou their Queen.

Our rebel abbot then shall join your hands,

Or lose all hope of pardon from us — yet

Not now, not now — with after-dinner grace.

Nay, by the dragon of Saint George, we shall

Do some injustice if you hold us here

Longer from our own venison. Where is it?

I scent it in the green leaves of the wood.

MARIAN.

First, King, a boon!

KING RICHARD.

Why, surely ye are pardon’d,

Even this brawler of harsh truths — I trust

Half truths, good friar: ye shall with us to court.

Then, if ye cannot breathe but woodland air,

Thou, Robin, shalt be ranger of this forest,

And have thy fees, and break the law no more.

MARIAN.

It is not that, my lord.

KING RICHARD.

Then what, my lady?

ROBIN.

This is the gala-day of thy return.

I pray thee for the moment, strike the bonds

From these three men, and let them dine with us,

And lie with us among the flowers, and drink —

Ay, whether it be gall or honey to ‘em —

The King’s good health in ale and Malvoisie.

KING RICHARD.

By Mahound, I could strive with Beelzebub!

So now which way to the dinner?

MARIAN.

Past the bank

Of foxglove, then to left by that one yew.

You see the darkness thro’ the lighter leaf.

But look! who comes?

Enter SAILOR.

SAILOR.

We heard Sir Richard Lea was here with Robin.

O good Sir Richard, I am like the man

In Holy Writ, who brought his talent back;

For tho’ we touch’d at many pirate ports,

We ever fail’d to light upon thy son.

Here is thy gold again. I am sorry for it.

SIR RICHARD.

The gold — my son — my gold, my son, the land —

Here abbot, sheriff — no — no, Robin Hood.

ROBIN.

Sir Richard, let that wait till we have dined.

Are all our guests here?

KING RICHARD.

No — there’s yet one other:

I will not dine without him. Come from out

Enter WALTER LEA.

That oak-tree. This young warrior broke his prison

And join’d my banner in the Holy Land.

And cleft the Moslem turban at my side.

My masters, welcome gallant Walter Lea.

Kiss him, Sir Richard — kiss him, my sweet Marian.

MARIAN.

O Walter, Walter, is it thou indeed

Whose ransom was our ruin, whose return

Builds up our house again? I fear I dream.

Here — give me one sharp pinch upon the cheek

That I may feel thou art no phantom — yet

Thou art tann’d almost beyond my knowing, brother.

[They embrace.

WALTER LEA.

But thou art fair as ever, my sweet sister.

SIR RICHARD.

Art thou my son?

WALTER LEA.

I am, good father, I am.

SIR RICHARD.

I had despair’d of thee — that sent me crazed.

Thou art worth thy weight in all those marks of gold,

Yea, and the weight of the very land itself,

Down to the inmost centre.

ROBIN.

Walter Lea,

Give me that hand which fought for Richard there.

Embrace me, Marian, and thou, good Kate

[To KATE entering.

Kiss and congratulate me, my good Kate.

[She kisses him.

LITTLE JOHN.

Lo now! lo now!

I have seen thee clasp and kiss a man indeed,

For our brave Robin is a man indeed.

Then by thine own account thou shouldst be mine.

KATE.

Well then, who kisses first?

LITTLE JOHN.

Kiss both together.

[They kiss each other.

ROBIN.

Then all is well. In this full tide of love,

Wave, heralds, wave: thy match shall follow mine (to LITTLE JOHN).

Would there were more — a hundred lovers more

To celebrate this advent of our King!

Our forest games are ended, our free life,

And we must hence to the King’s court. I trust

We shall return to the wood. Meanwhile, farewell,

Old friends, old patriarch oaks. A thousand winters

Will strip you bare as death, a thousand summers

Robe you life-green again. You seem, as it were,

Immortal, and we mortal. How few Junes

Will heat our pulses quicker! How few frosts

Will chill the hearts that beat for Robin Hood!

MARIAN.

And yet I think these oaks at dawn and even,

Or in the balmy breathings of the night,

Will whisper evermore of Robin Hood.

We leave but happy memories to the forest.

We dealt in the wild justice of the woods.

All those poor serfs whom we have served will bless us,

All those pale mouths which we have fed will praise us —

All widows we have holpen pray for us,

Our Lady’s blessed shrines throughout the land

Be all the richer for us. You, good friar,

You Much, you Scarlet, you dear Little John,

Your names will cling like ivy to the wood.

And here perhaps a hundred years away

Some hunter in day-dreams or half asleep

Will hear out arrows whizzing overhead,

And catch the winding of a phantom horn.

ROBIN.

And surely these old oaks will murmur thee,

Marian, along with Robin. I am most happy —

Art thou not mine? — and happy that our King

Is here again, never, I trust, to roam

So far again, but dwell among his own.

Strike up a stave, my masters, all is well.

SONG WHILE THEY DANCE A COUNTRY DANCE.

Now the King is home again, and nevermore to roam again.

Now the King is home again, the King will have his own again,

Home again, home again, and each will have his own again,

All the birds in merry Sherwood sing and sing him home again.

The Biographies

Farringford House, a large manor house on the Isle of Wight, was the home of Tennyson during much of his tenure as Poet Laureate until his death in 1892.

Farringford, 1910

Tennyson, c. 1880

TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS by Hallam, Lord Tennyson

Named after his father’s much loved friend, Hallam Tennyson was educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Cambridge, but his political aspirations ended when the age and ill-health of his parents obliged him to leave his education to become their personal secretary. It was partly for his son’s benefit that Alfred Tennyson accepted a peerage in 1884, the year Hallam married Audrey Boyle, after being disappointed in his love for Mary Gladstone, daughter of William Ewart Gladstone. On his father’s death in 1892, Hallam inherited the title Baron Tennyson, and also the role of official biographer.

Like his famous father, Tennyson was an ardent imperialist and in 1883 he had become a council member of the Imperial Federation League, a group established to support the imperialist ideas of the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. It was this connection, as well as the Tennyson name, that led Chamberlain to offer Tennyson the position of Governor of South Australia in 1899. He was still in this position when the Governor-General of Australia, the Earl of Hopetoun, resigned suddenly in May 1902. Tennyson left Australia in January 1904 and spent the rest of his life in the Isle of Wight, serving as deputy governor from 1913.

As well as publishing a four volume biography of his father in 1897, Hallam Tennyson also edited this large collection of memoirs, letters and verses collected from various literary figures and personal friends and relations of the great poet.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

RECOLLECTIONS OF MY EARLY LIFE by Emily, Lady Tennyson

TENNYSON AND LINCOLNSHIRE by Willingham Rawnsley

TENNYSON AND HIS BROTHERS FREDERICK AND CHARLES by Charles Tennyson

TENNYSON ON HIS CAMBRIDGE FRIENDS

TENNYSON AND LUSHINGTON by Sir Henry Craik, K.C.B., M.P.

TENNYSON, FITZGERALD, CARLYLE, AND OTHER FRIENDS by Dr. Warren

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON’S TALK FROM 1835 TO 1853

TENNYSON AND THACKERAY by Lady Ritchie

TENNYSON ON HIS FRIENDS OF LATER LIFE

TENNYSON AND BRADLEY (DEAN OF WESTMINSTER) by Margaret L. Woods

NOTES ON CHARACTERISTICS OF TENNYSON by the late Master of Balliol (Professor Jowett)

TENNYSON, CLOUGH, AND THE CLASSICS by Henry Graham Dakyns

RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON by the Rev. H. Montagu Butler, D.D.

TENNYSON AND W. G. WARD AND OTHER FARRINGFORD FRIENDS by Wilfrid Ward

TENNYSON AND ALDWORTH by Sir James Knowles, K.C.V.O.

THE FUNERAL OF DICKENS

FRAGMENTARY NOTES OF TENNYSON’S TALK by Arthur Coleridge

MUSIC, TENNYSON, AND JOACHIM by Sir Charles Stanford

THE ATTITUDE OF TENNYSON TOWARDS SCIENCE by Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S.

TENNYSON AS A STUDENT AND POET OF NATURE by Sir Norman Lockyer, F.R.S.

MEMORIES by E. V. B.

TENNYSON AND HIS TALK ON SOME RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS by the Right Rev. the Bishop of Ripon

TENNYSON AND SIR JOHN SIMEON, AND TENNYSON’S LAST YEARS by Louisa E. Ward

TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK by the Right Hon. Sir Alfred Lyall, G.C.B.

TENNYSON: THE POET AND THE MAN by Professor Henry Butcher

JAMES SPEDDING by W. Aldis Wright

ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM by Dr. John Brown

APPENDICES

Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, (1852–1928)

DEDICATED TO

THE FRIENDS OF TENNYSON

BY HIS SON

PREFACE

To those who have contributed to this volume their memories of my father, criticisms of his work, or records of his friends, I owe a deep debt of gratitude. Three of the writers, Henry Butcher, Sir Alfred Lyall, and Graham Dakyns, have lately, to my great loss, passed away — into that fuller “light of friendship” —

“a clearer day

Than our poor twilight dawn on earth.”

TENNYSON.

[The following chapters about my father are arranged, as far as possible, according to the sequence of his life. Further reminiscences by the Duke of Argyll, Gladstone, Jowett, Lecky, Locker-Lampson, Palgrave, Lord Selborne, Tyndall, Aubrey de Vere, and other friends, will be found in Tennyson, a Memoir.]

(Dedication of “The Death of Œnone” to Emily, Lady Tennyson)

There on the top of the down,

The wild heather round me and over me June’s high blue,

When I look’d at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown,

I thought to myself I would offer this book to you,

This, and my love together,

To you that are seventy-seven,

With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,

And a fancy as summer-new

As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather.

Emery Walker, Ph.sc.

Emily Lady Tennyson from a drawing by G. F. Watts, R.A.

RECOLLECTIONS OF MY EARLY LIFE by Emily, Lady Tennyson

Written for her son in 1896

You ask me to tell you something of my life before marriage at Horncastle in Lincolnshire. It would be hard indeed not to do anything you ask of me if within my power. To say the truth, this particular thing you want is somewhat painful. The first thing I remember of my father is his looking at me with sad eyes after my mother’s death. Her I recollect, passing the window in a velvet pelisse, and then in a white shawl on the sofa, and then crowned with roses — beautiful in death. I recollect, too, being carried to her funeral; but I asked what they were doing, and in all this had no idea of death.

My life before marriage was in many ways sad: in one, however, unspeakably happy. No one could have had a better father, or been happier with her two sisters, Anne and Louisa. Although, if we were too merry and noisy in the mornings, we were summoned by my Aunt Betsy (who lived with us) all three into her room, to hold out our small hands for stripes from a certain little riding-whip; or if, later in the day, our needlework was not well done we had our fingers pricked with a needle, or if the lessons were not finished, we had fools’ caps put on our heads, and were banished to a corner of the room. My aunt’s nature was by no means cruel; she was, on the whole, kind and dutiful to us, yet no doubt with effort on her part, for she had no instinctive love of children.

Among our neighbours we had as friends the Tennysons, the Rawnsleys, the Bellinghams, and the Massingberds. The death of my cousin, Mr. Cracroft, was among my early tragedies. He had been on public business at Lincoln: and on his return to Horncastle, was seized at our house with Asiatic cholera, a solitary case, which proved fatal. Ourselves and his daughters heard of it in a strange way. We were in a tent at a sheep-shearing, the great rustic festival of that day. A village boy came into our tent, and swarmed up the pole, saying to us, “I know something; your father is dead.” We hurried home, and we, three sisters, were put by my aunt (to keep us quiet) to the hitherto-unwonted task of stoning raisins. This made me so indignant that I threw my raisins over the edge of the bowl, and forthwith my aunt caught me up, and — so rough was the treatment of children then — banged my head against the door of our old wainscoted rooms, until I called out for my father, crying aloud, “Murder”; when he rushed in and saved me.

My next memory of my father is his giving me Latin lessons; and at this time I somehow came across a copy of Cymbeline, which I read with great delight. Then we had our first riding-lessons. I well recall my dislike of riding, when my pony was fastened to a circus stake, which I had to go round and round. Unfortunately, much as my father wished it, I never became a good horsewoman. He himself was so good a rider, when all the gentlemen of the county were volunteers, that he could ride horses which no one else could ride — so my grandmother would tell me with pride — adding, “Your father and his brother (both six foot three) were the handsomest men among them all.” At that time he kept guard with his fellow-volunteers over the French prisoners, who, he said, were always cheerful and always singing their patriotic songs.

But to return to my sisters and myself. For exercise we generally took long walks in the country, and I remember that when staying at my father’s house in Berkshire we often used to wander up to a tower among our woods where a gaunt old lady lived, called Black Jane, who told our fortunes. We had our favourite theatricals, too, like other children. Our dramatic performances were frequent, and our plays were, some of them, drawn from Miss Edgeworth’s tales. I was always fond of music, and used to sing duets with my soldier cousin, Richard Sellwood.

At eight years old I was sent, with my sisters, to some ladies for daily lessons, and later to schools in Brighton and London, for my father disliked having a governess in the house. So, much as he objected to young girls being sent from home, school in our case seemed the lesser evil. My sisters liked school; to me it was dreadful. As soon as I reached the Brighton seminary, I remember that for weeks I appeared to be in a horrible dream, and the voices of the mistresses and the girls around me seemed to be all thin, like voices from the grave. I could not be happy away from my father, who was my idol, though after a while I grew more accustomed to the strange life. My father would never let us go the long, cold journey at Christmas time from Brighton to Horncastle, but came up to town for the vacation, and took us for treats to the National Gallery, and other places of interest. Great was the joy, when the summer holidays arrived, and after travelling by coach through the day and night, we three sisters saw Whittlesea-mere gleaming under the sunrise. It seemed as if we were within sight of home.

When I was eighteen, my Aunt Betsy left us to live by herself alone. We spent rather recluse lives, but we were perfectly happy, my father reading to us every evening from about half-past eight to ten, the hour at which we had family prayers. Most delightful were the readings; for instance, all of Gibbon that could be read to us, Macaulay’s Essays, Sir Walter Scott’s novels. For my private reading he gave me Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso, Molière, Racine, Corneille. Later I read Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter; and for English — Pearson, Paley’s Translation of the Early Fathers, Coleridge’s works, Wordsworth, and of course Milton and Shakespeare. We had walks and drives and music and needlework. Now and again we dined in the neighbourhood, and some of the neighbours dined with us; and once a year my father asked all the legal luminaries of Horncastle to dinner with him.

Before my sister Louy married your Uncle Charles (Tennyson-Turner) in 1836, my cousin, Catherine Franklin, daughter of Sir Willingham Franklin, took up her abode with us, and we had several dances at our house. Two fancy-dress dances I well remember. Louy and I disliked visiting in London and in country-houses, and so we always refused, and sent Anne in our stead. My first ball, I thought an opening of the great portals of the world, and I looked forward to it almost with awe. It is rather curious that at one of my very few balls, Mr. Musters (Jack Musters his intimates called him), who married Byron’s Mary Chaworth, should have asked for, and obtained, an introduction to me.

In 1842 came Catherine’s marriage to our true friend, Drummond Rawnsley, the parson of the Rawnsley family; and then my sister Anne married Charles Weld. After this my father and I lived together alone. The only change we had from our routine life was a journey, one summer, to Tours, with Anne and Charles Weld, and his brother Isaac Weld, the accomplished owner of Ravenswell, near Bray, in Ireland.

At your father’s home, Somersby, we used to have evenings of music and singing. Your Aunt Mary played on the harp as her father used to do. She was a splendid-looking girl, and would have made a beautiful picture. Then your Aunt Emily (beloved of Arthur Hallam) had wonderful eyes — depths on depths they seemed to have — and a fine profile. “Testa Romana” an old Italian said of her. She had more of the colouring of the South, inherited, perhaps, from a member of Madame de Maintenon’s family who married one of the Tennysons. Your father had also the same kind of colouring. All, brothers and sisters, were fair to see. Your father was kingly, masses of fine, wavy hair, very dark, with a pervading shade of gold, and long, as it was then worn. His manner was kind, simple, and dignified, with plenty of sportiveness flashing out from time to time. During my ten years’ separation from him the doctors believed I was going into a consumption, and the Lincolnshire climate was pronounced to be too cold for me; and we moved to London, to look for a home in the south of England. We found one at last at Hale near Farnham, which was called by your father “my paradise.” The recollection of this delightful country made me persuade your father eventually to build a house near Haslemere. We were married on June 13, 1850, at Shiplake on the Thames.

TENNYSON AND LINCOLNSHIRE by Willingham Rawnsley

I

Tennyson’s Country

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

And on these dews that drench the furze,

And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold.

Calm and still light on yon great plain

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main.

Lincolnshire is a big county, measuring seventy-five miles by forty-five, but it is perhaps the least well known of all the counties of England. The traveller by the Great Northern main line passes through but a small portion of its south-western fringe near Grantham; and if he goes along the eastern side from Peterborough to Grimsby or Hull, he gains no insight into the picturesque parts of the county, for the line takes him over the rich flat fenlands with their black vegetable mould devoid of any kind of stone or pebble, and intersected by those innumerable dykes or drains varying from 8 to 80 feet across, which give the southern division of Lincolnshire an aspect in harmony with its Batavian name “the parts of Holland.”

The Queen of this flat fertile plain is Boston, with her wonderful church-tower and lantern 280 feet high, a marvel of symmetry when you are near it, and visible for more than twenty miles in all directions. Owing to its slender height it seems, from a distance, to stand up like a tall thick mast or tree-trunk, and is hence known to all the countryside as “Boston stump.”

At this town, the East Lincolnshire line divides: one section goes to the left to Lincoln; the other, following the bend of the coast at about seven miles’ distance from the sea, turns when opposite Skegness and runs, at right angles to its former course, to Louth, — Louth whose beautiful church spire was painted by Turner in his picture of “The Horse Fair.”

The more recent Louth-to-Lincoln line completes the fourth side of a square having Boston, Burgh, Louth, and Lincoln for its corners, which contains the fairest portion of the Lincolnshire wolds, and within this square is Somersby, Tennyson’s birthplace and early home. It is a tiny village surrounded by low green hills; and close at hand, here nestling in a leafy hollow, and there standing boldly on the “ridgèd wold,” are some half a dozen churches built of the local “greensand” rock, from whose towers the Poet in his boyhood heard:

The Christmas bells from hill to hill

Answer each other in the mist —

the mist which lay athwart those “long gray fields at night,” and marked the course of the beloved Somersby brook.

If we go past the little gray church with its perfect specimen of a pre-Reformation cross hard by the porch, and past the modest house almost opposite, which was for over thirty years the home of the Tennysons, we shall come at once to the point where the road dips to a little wood through which runs the rivulet so lovingly described by the Poet when he was leaving the home of his youth:

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea

Thy tribute wave deliver:

No more by thee my steps shall be,

For ever and for ever.

and again:

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain,

At noon or when the lesser wain

Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,

And flood the haunts of hern and crake;

Or into silver arrows break

The sailing moon in creek and cove.

Northward, beyond the stream, the white road climbs the wold above Tetford, and disappears from sight. These wolds are chalk; the greensand ridge being all to the south of the valley, except just at Somersby and Bag-Enderby, where the sandrock crops up by the roadside, and in the little wood by the brook.

This small deep channelled brook with sandy bottom — over which one may on any bright day see, as described in “Enid,”

a shoal

Of darting fish, that on a summer morn...

Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand,

But if a man who stands upon the brink

But lift a shining hand against the sun,

There is not left the twinkle of a fin

Betwixt the cressy islets white with flower —

was very dear to Tennyson. When in his “Ode to Memory” he bids Memory

Come from the woods which belt the gray hillside,

The seven elms, the poplars four

That stand beside my father’s door,

he adds:

And chiefly from the brook that loves

To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand,

Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,

Drawing into his narrow earthen urn

In every elbow and turn,

The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland,

O! hither lead thy feet!

If we follow this

pastoral rivulet that swerves

To left and right thro’ meadowy curves,

That feed the mothers of the flock,

we, too, shall hear

the livelong bleat

Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds

Upon the ridgèd wolds.

And shall see the cattle in the rich grass land, and mark on the right the green-gray tower of Spilsby, where so many of the Franklin family lived and died, the family of whom his future bride was sprung.

Still keeping by the brook, we shall see, past the tower of Bag-Enderby which adjoins Somersby, “The gray hill side” rising up behind the Old Hall of Harrington, and

The Quarry trenched along the hill

And haunted by the wrangling daw,

above which runs the chalky “ramper” or turnpike-road which leads along the eastern ridge of the wold to Alford, whence you proceed across the level Marsh to the sea at Mablethorpe.

The Marsh in Lincolnshire is a word of peculiar significance. The whole country is either fen, wold, or marsh. The wolds, starting from Keal and Alford, run in two ridges on either side of the Somersby Valley, one going north to Louth and onwards, and one west by Spilsby and Horncastle to Lincoln. Here it joins the great spine-bone of the county on which, straight as an arrow for many a mile northwards, runs the Roman Ermine Street; and but for the Somersby brook these two ridges from Louth and Lincoln would unite at Spilsby, whence the greensand formation, which begins at Raithby, sends out two spurs, one eastwards, ending abruptly at Halton, while the other pushes a couple of miles farther south, until at Keal the road drops suddenly into the level fen, giving a view — east, south, and west — of wonderful extent and colour, ending to the east with the sea, and to the south with the tall pillar of Boston Church standing up far above the horizon. This flat land is the fen; all rich cornland and all well drained, but with few habitations, and with absolutely no hill or even rise in the ground until, passing Croyland or Crowland Abbey, which once dominated a veritable land of fens only traversable by boats, you come, on the farther side of Peterborough, to the great North Road. Such views as this from Keal, and the similar one from Lincoln Minster, which looks out far to the south-west over a similar large tract of fen, are not to be surpassed in all the land.

But the Poet’s steps from Somersby would not as a rule go westwards. The coast would oftener be his aim; and leaving Spilsby to the right, and the old twice-plague-stricken village of Partney, where the Somersby rivulet becomes a river, he would pass from “the high field on the bushless pike” to Miles-cross-hill, whence the panorama unfolds which he has depicted in Canto XI. of “In Memoriam”:

Calm and still light on yon great plain,

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main.

Thence descending from the wold he would go through Alford, and on across the sparsely populated pasture-lands, till he came at last to

Some lowly cottage whence we see

Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,

Where from the frequent bridge,

Like emblems of infinity,

The trenchèd waters run from sky to sky.

This describes the third section of Lincolnshire called the Marsh, a strip between five and eight miles wide, running parallel with the coast from Boston to Grimsby, and separating the wolds from

the sandbuilt ridge

Of heaped hills that mound the sea.

This strip of land is not marsh in the ordinary sense of the word, but a belt of the richest grass land, all level and with no visible fences, each field being surrounded by a broad dyke or ditch with deep water, hidden in summer by the tall feathery plumes of the “whispering reeds.” Across this belt the seawind sweeps for ever. The Poet may allude to this when, in his early poem, “Sir Galahad,” he writes:

But blessed forms in whistling storms

Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields;

and “the hard grey weather” sung by Kingsley breeds a race of hardy gray-eyed men with long noses, the manifest descendants of the Danes who peopled all that coast, and gave names to most of the villages there, nine-tenths of which end in “by.”

This rich pasture-land runs right up to the sand-dunes, — Nature’s own fortification made by the winds and waves which is just outside the Dutch and Roman embankments, and serves better than all the works of man to keep out the waters of the North Sea from the low-lying levels of the Marsh and Fen.

The lines in the “Lotos-Eaters”:

They sat them down upon the yellow sand

Between the sun and moon upon the shore,

describes what the Poet might at any time of full moon have seen from that “sand-built ridge” with the red sun setting over the wide marsh, and the full moon rising out of the eastern sea; and “The wide winged sunset of the misty marsh” recalls one of the most noticeable features of that particular locality, where, across the limitless windy plain, the sun would set in regal splendour; and when “cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn” his rising over the sea would be equally magnificent in colour.

Having crossed the “Marsh” by a raised road with deep wide dykes on either side, and no vestige of hedge or tree in sight, except where a row of black poplars or aspens form a screen from the searching wind round a group of the plainest of farm buildings, red brick with roofing of black glazed pan-tiles, you come to the once tiny village of Mablethorpe, sheltering right under the sea-bank, the wind-blown sands of which are held together by the penetrating roots of the tussocks of long, coarse, sharp-edged grass, and the prickly bushes of sea buckthorn, gray-leaved and orange-berried.

You top the sand-ridge, and below, to right and left, far as eye can see, stretch the flat, brown sands. Across these the tide, which at the full of the moon comes right up to the barrier, goes out for three-quarters of a mile; of this the latter half is left by the shallow wavelets all ribbed, as you see it on the ripple-marked stone of the Horsham quarries, and shining with the bright sea-water which reflects the low rays of the sun; while far off, so far that they seem to be mere toys, the shrimper slowly drives his small horse and cart, to the tail of which is attached the primitive purse net, the other end of it being towed by the patient, long-haired donkey, ridden by a boy whose bare feet dangle in the shallow wavelets. Farther to the south the tide ebbs quite out of sight. This is at “Gibraltar Point,” near Wainfleet Haven, where Somersby brook at length finds the sea, a place very familiar to the Poet in his youth. The skin of mud on the sands makes them shine like burnished copper in the level rays of the setting sun, which here have no sandbank to intercept them, but at other times it is a scene of dreary desolation, such as is aptly described in “The Passing of Arthur”:

a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

It was near this part of the shore that, as a young man, he often walked, rolling out his lines aloud or murmuring them to himself, a habit which was also that of Wordsworth, and led in each case to the peasants supposing the Poet to be “craäzed,” and caused the Somersby cook to wonder “what Mr. Awlfred was always a-praying for,” and caused also the fisherman, whom he met on the sands once at 4 A.M. as he was walking without hat or coat, and to whom he bid good-morning, to reply, “Thou poor fool, thou doesn’t knaw whether it be night or daä.”

But at Mablethorpe the sea does not go out nearly so far, and at high tide it comes right up to the bank with splendid menacing waves, the memory of which furnished him, five and thirty years after he had left Lincolnshire for ever, with the famous simile in “The Last Tournament”:

as the crest of some slow-arching wave,

Heard in dead night along that table shore,

Drops flat, and after the great waters break

Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,

Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,

From less and less to nothing.

This accurately describes the flat Lincolnshire coast with its “interminable rollers” breaking on the endless sands, than which waves the Poet always said that he had never anywhere seen grander, and the clap of the wave as it fell on the hard sand could be heard across that flat country for miles. Doubtless this is what prompted the lines in “Locksley Hall”:

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

“We hear in this,” says the “Lincolnshire Rector,” writing in Macmillan’s Magazine of December 1873, “the mighty sound of the breakers as they fling themselves at full tide with long-gathered force upon the slope sands of Skegness or Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, nowhere is ocean grander in a storm; nowhere is the thunder of the sea louder, nor its waves higher, nor the spread of their waters on the beach wider.”

It is not only of the breakers that the Poet has given us pictures. Along these sands it was his wont, no doubt, as it has often been that of the writer,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,

And tender curving lines of creamy spray,

and it is still Skegness and Mablethorpe which may have furnished him with his simile in “The Dream of Fair Women”:

So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land

Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,

Torn from the fringe of spray.

Walking along the shore as the tide goes out, you come constantly on creeks and pools left by the receding waves,

A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand,

Left on the shore; that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land

Their moon-led waters white.

or little dimpled hollows of brine, formed by the wind-swept water washing round some shell or stone:

As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long

A little bitter pool about a stone

On the bare coast.

Many characteristics of Lincolnshire scenery and of Somersby in particular are introduced in “In Memoriam.”

In Canto LXXXIX. the poet speaks of the hills which shut in the Somersby Valley on the north:

Nor less it pleased in lustier moods

Beyond the bounding hill to stray.

In XCV. he speaks of the knolls, elsewhere described as “The hoary knolls of ash and haw,” where the cattle lie on a summer night:

Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d

The knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,

The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field:

and in Canto C. he calls to mind:

The sheepwalk up the windy wold,

and many other features seen in his walks with Arthur Hallam at Somersby.

In “Mariana” we have:

From the dark fen the oxen’s low

Came to her: without hope of change,

In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn,

About the lonely moated grange.

But no picture is more complete and accurate and remarkable than that of a wet day in the Marsh and on the sands of Mablethorpe:

Here often when a child I lay reclined:

I took delight in this fair strand and free:

Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,

And here the Grecian ships all seem’d to be.

And here again I come, and only find

The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,

Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind,

Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.

From what we have said it will be clear to the reader that while it is the fen land only that the railway traveller sees, it is the Marsh and the Wolds — and particularly in Lord Tennyson’s mind the Wolds — that make the characteristic charm of the county, a charm of which so many illustrations are to be found throughout his poems. Certainly in her wide extended views, in the open wolds with the villages and their gray church towers nestling in the sheltered nooks at the wold foot, and also (to quote again from the “Lincolnshire Rector”) “in her glorious parish churches and gigantic steeples, Lincolnshire has charms and beauties of her own. And as to fostering genius, has she not proved herself to be the ‘meet nurse of a poetic child’? for here, be it remembered, here in the heart of the land, in Mid-Lincolnshire, Alfred Tennyson was born, here he spent all his earliest and freshest days; here he first felt the divine afflatus, and found fit material for his muse:

The Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the Camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.”

II

The Somersby Friends

We leave the well-beloved place

Where first we gazed upon the sky;

The roofs, that heard our earliest cry,

Will shelter one of stranger race.

·······

I turn to go: my feet are set

To leave the pleasant fields and farms;

They mix in one another’s arms

To one pure image of regret.

It is no wonder that the Tennysons loved Somersby. They were a large family, and here they grew up together, making their own world and growing ever more fond of the place for its associations. “How often have I longed to be with you at Somersby!” writes Alfred Tennyson’s sister, Mary, thirteen years after leaving the old home. “How delightful that name sounds to me! Visions of sweet past days rise up before my eyes, when life itself was new,

And the heart promised what the fancy drew.”

Here, when childhood’s happy days were over, the Tennyson girls rejoiced in the society of their brothers’ Cambridge friends, and, though the village was so remote that they only got a post two or three times a week, here they not only drank in contentedly the beauty of the country, but also passed delightful days with talk and books, with music and poetry, and dance and song, when, on the lawn at Somersby, one of the sisters

brought the harp and flung

A ballad to the brightening moon.

Here, as Arthur Hallam said, “Alfred’s mind was moulded in silent sympathy with the everlasting forms of Nature.”

I have said that they made their own world; and they were well able to do it, for they were a very remarkable family. The Doctor was a very tall, dark man, very strict with his boys, to whom he was schoolmaster as well as parent. He was a scholar, and unusually well read, and possessed a good library. Clever, too, he was with his hands, and carved the stone chimney-piece in the dining-room, which his man Horlins built under his direction. He and his wife were a great contrast, for she was very small and gentle and highly sensitive.

Edward Fitzgerald speaks of her as “one of the most innocent and tender-hearted ladies I ever saw”; and the Poet depicts her in “Isabel,” where he speaks of her gentle voice, her keen intellect and her

Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign

The summer calm of golden charity.

Mary was the letter-writer of the family, and a very clever woman, and her letters show that she knew her Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge as well as her brother’s poems.

They were a united family, but Charles and Alfred were nearest to her in age. She writes to one of her great friends: “O my beloved, what creatures men are! my brothers are the exception to this general rule.” Accordingly, of Charles she writes: “If ever there was a sweet delightful character it is that dear Charley,” and of Alfred: “A. is one of the noblest of his kind. You know my opinion of men in general is much like your own; they are not like us, they are naturally more selfish and not so affectionate.” She adds:

Alfred is universally beloved by all his friends, and was long so before he came to any fame....

We look upon him as the stay of the family; you know it is to him we go when anything is to be done. Something lately occurred here which was painful; we wrote to Alfred and he came immediately, after, I am told, not speaking three days scarcely to any one from distress of mind, and that not for himself, mind, but for others. Did this look like selfishness?

After leaving Somersby she felt the loss of these brothers sorely.

Alfred’s devotion to his mother was always perfect. In October 1850 Mary writes from Cheltenham:

Yesterday, Mamma, I, and Fanny went to look for houses, as Alfred has written to say that he should like to live by his Mother or in the same house with us, if we could get one large enough, and he would share the rent, which would be a great deal better. He wishes us to take a house in the neighbourhood of London, if we can give up ours, with him, or to take a small house for him and Emily on the outskirts of Cheltenham till we can move; so what will be done I know not, but this I know that Alfred must come here and choose for himself, so we have written to him to come immediately, and we are daily expecting him.

But though life at Cheltenham when the brothers were all away was dull for Mary, it had not been so at Somersby; for there they had home interests sufficient to keep them always occupied, and they were not without neighbours. Ormsby was close at hand, to the north, where lived as Rector, Frank Massingberd, afterwards Chancellor of Lincoln, a man of cultivation and old-world courtesy. His wife Fanny was one of the charming Miss Barings of Harrington, which was but a couple of miles off to the east. Her sister Rosa was that “sole rose of beauty, loveliness complete,” to whom the Poet wrote such charming little birthday verses; and sixty-five years afterwards Rosa, then Mrs. Duncombe Shafto, still spoke with enthusiasm of those happy days. Mrs. Baring had married for her second husband, Admiral Eden, a man of great conversational powers, and with a very large circle of interesting friends. He took the old Hall of Harrington, with its fine brick front, from the Cracrofts, who moved to Hackthorn near Lincoln, and thus the families at Harrington and Somersby saw a great deal of one another.

There were two Eden daughters, the strikingly handsome Dulcibella and her sister, who looked after the house and its guests. Hence their nicknames of “Dulce” and “Utile.”

A mile or two beyond Harrington was Langton, where Dr. Johnson came to visit his friend Bennet Langton, who died only seven years before Dr. Tennyson came to Somersby. But, though the Langtons were friends of the Doctor’s, this was not a house the young people much frequented. Mary, having come back to the old neighbourhood, writes from Scremby: “I am going to Langton to-morrow to spend a few days with the Langtons, don’t you pity me? I hope I shall get something more out of Mrs. Langton than Indeed, Yes, No!”

Adjoining Langton the Tennysons had friends in the Swans of Saucethorpe, and a little farther eastwards was Partney, where George Maddison and his mother lived. He was a hero, of whom tales were told of many courageous deeds, such as his going single-handed and taking a desperate criminal who, being armed, had barricaded himself in an old building and set all the police at defiance. It was a question whether people most admired the courage of the man or the beauty of his charming wife, Fanny, one of the three good-looking daughters of Sir Alan Bellingham, who all found husbands in that neighbourhood. In the Lincolnshire poem, “The Spinster’s Sweet-Arts,” the Poet has immortalized their name:

Goä to the laäne at the back, and loök thruf Maddison’s gaäte!

From Partney the hill rises to Dalby, where lived John Bourne, whose wife was an aunt of the young Tennysons, and here they would meet the handsome Miss Bournes of Alford; one, Margaret, was dark, the other was Alice, a beautiful fair girl. They married brothers, Marcus and John Huish. Mrs. John Bourne was the Doctor’s sister Mary, and the young Tennysons would have been oftener at Dalby had it been their Aunt Elizabeth Russell who lived there, of whom they always spoke in terms of the strongest affection.

The old house at Dalby was burnt down in 1841. About this Mr. Marcus Huish tells me that his mother wrote in a diary at the time:

Jan. 5, 1841. — On this day Dalby House, the seat of the Bournes, and round whose simple Church, standing embosomed in trees, my family, including my dear sister Mary Hannah, lie buried, was burnt to the ground;

and on the 7th Mrs. Huish wrote:

I have this morning received intelligence that the dear House at Dalby was on Tuesday night burnt down, and is now a wreck. I feel very deeply this disastrous circumstance, endeared as it was to me by ties of time and association. Mr. Tennyson has written to me as follows on this catastrophe.

The letter was a long one, two pages being left for it in the diary, but unfortunately it was never copied in.

The villages here are very close together, and going from Partney, two miles eastward, you come to Skendleby, where Sir Edward Brackenbury lived, whose elder brother Sir John was Consul at Cadiz, and used to send over some good pictures and some strong sherry, known by the diners-out as “the Consul’s sherry.” The Rector of the next village of Scremby was also a Brackenbury, and here Mary Tennyson most loved to visit. Mrs. Brackenbury, whom she always calls “Gloriana,” was adored by all who knew her. Mary says, “She is so sweet a character, and she has always been so kind and so anxious for our family ... I look upon her as already a saint.” Two of the Rectors of Halton had also been Brackenburys — a father and son in succession, and they were followed by two generations of Rawnsleys — Thomas Hardwicke and his son Drummond.

Adjoining Scremby is Candlesby, where Tennyson’s genial friend, John Alington, who had married another of the beautiful Miss Bellinghams, was Rector; and within half a mile is Gunby, the delightful old home of the Massingberds. In Dr. Tennyson’s time Peregrine Langton, who had married the heiress of the Massingberds and taken her name, was living there.

It was from Gunby that Algernon Massingberd disappeared, going to America and never being heard of again, which gave rise to a romance in “Novel” form, that came out many years later called The Lost Sir Massingberd. Going on eastward still, by Boothby, where Dr. Tennyson’s friends the Walls family lived, in a house to which you drove up across the grass pasture, the sheep grazing right up to the front door, a thing still common in the Lincolnshire Marsh, you come to Burgh, with its magnificent Church tower and old carved woodwork. Here was the house of Sir George Crawford, and here from the edge of the high ground on which the Church stands you plunge down on to the level Marsh across which, at five miles’ distance, is Skegness, at that time only a handful of fishermen’s cottages, with “Hildred’s Hotel,” one good house occupied by a large tenant farmer, and a reed-thatched house right on the old Roman sea bank, built by Miss Walls, only one room thick, so that from the same room she could see both the sunrise and the sunset. Here all the neighbourhood at different times would meet, and enjoy the wide prospect of sea and Marsh and the broad sands and the splendid air. When the tide was out the only thing to be seen, as far as eye could reach, were the two or three fishermen, like specks on the edge of the sea, and the only sounds were the piping of the various sea-birds, stints, curlews, and the like, as they flew along the creeks or over the gray sand-dunes. Mablethorpe was nearer to Somersby, but had no house of any size at which, as here, the dwellers on the wold knew that they were always welcome.

But we have other houses to visit, so let us return by Burgh and Bratoft, where above the chancel arch of the ugly brick Church is a remarkable picture of the Spanish Armada, represented as a huge red dragon, with the ships of Effingham’s fleet painted in the corner of the picture.

Passing Bratoft, the next thing we come to is the Somersby brook, which is here “the Halton River,” and on the greensand ridge, overlooking the fen as far as “Boston Stump,” stands the fine Church of Halton Holgate. In this Church, as at Harrington, Alfred as a boy must have seen the old stone effigy of a Crusader as described in “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”

with his feet upon the hound,

Cross’d! for once he sailed the sea to crush the Moslem in his pride.

The road ascends the “hollow way” cut through the greensand, and a timber footbridge is flung across it leading from the Church to the Rectory. Dr. Tennyson could tell the story of how his old friend T. H. Rawnsley, the Rector, and Mr. Eden, brother of the Admiral, being in London, looked in at the great Globe in Leicester Square and heard a man lecturing on Geology. They listened till they heard “This Greensand formation here disappears” (he was speaking of Sussex) “and crops up again in an obscure little village called Halton Holgate in Lincolnshire.” “Come along, Eden!” said the Rector; “this is a very stupid fellow.”

Halton was the house, and Mr. and Mrs. Rawnsley the people, whom Dr. Tennyson most loved to visit. She had been previously known to him as the beautiful Miss Walls of Boothby. The Rector was the most genial and agreeable of men, and her charm of look and manner made his wife a universal favourite.

Here are two characteristic letters from Dr. Tennyson to Mr. Rawnsley:

Tuesday 28th, 1826.

Dear Rawnsley — In your not having come to see me for so many months, when you have little or nothing to do but warm your shins over the fire while I, unfortunately, am frozen or rather suffocated with Greek and Latin, I consider myself as not only slighted but spifflicated. You deserve that I should take no notice of your letter whatever, but I will comply with your invitation partly to be introduced to the agreeable and clever lady, but more especially to have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Rawnsley, whom, you may rest assured, I value considerably more than I do you. Mrs. T. is obliged by your invitation, but the weather is too damp and hazy, Mr. Noah, — so I remain your patriarchship’s neglected servant,

G. C. Tennyson.

This letter was addressed to the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, Halton Parsonage. The next was addressed to Halton Palace, and runs thus:

Somersby, Monday.

Dear Rawnsley — We three shall have great pleasure in dining with you to-morrow. We hope, also, that Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and yourselves will favour us with their and your company to dinner during their stay. I like them very much, and shall be very happy to know more of them. — Very truly yours,

G. C. Tennyson.

P.S. — How the devil do you expect that people are to get up at seven o’clock in the morning to answer your notes? However, I have not kept your Ganymede waiting.

The friendship between the families, which was further cemented when the Rector’s son Drummond married Kate Franklin, whose cousin, Emily Sellwood, afterwards became the Poet’s wife, has been maintained for three generations. Alfred shared his father’s opinion of Halton, and often wrote both to the Rector and his wife. In one letter to her, after pleading a low state of health and spirits as his reason for not joining her party at Halton, he says: “At the same time, believe me it is not without considerable uneasiness that I absent myself from a house where I visit with greater pleasure than at any other in the country, if indeed I may be said to visit any other.”

After leaving Somersby, he wrote on Jan. 28, 1838, from High Beech, Epping Forest:

My dear Mrs. Rawnsley — I have long been intending to write to you, for I think of you a great deal, and if I had not a kind of antipathy against taking pen in hand I would write to you oftener; but I am nearly as bad in this way as Werner, who kept an express (horse and man) from his sister at an inn for two months before he could prevail upon himself to write an answer to her, and her letter to him was, nevertheless, on family business of the last importance. But my chief motive in writing to you now is the hope that I may prevail upon you to come and see us as soon as you can. I understood from some of my sisters that Mr. Rawnsley was coming in February to visit his friend Sir Gilbert. Now I trust that you and Sophy will come with him — of course he would not pass without calling, whether alone or not. I was very sorry not to have seen Drummond. I wish he would have dropt me a line a few days before, that I might have stayed at home and been cheered with the sight of a Lincolnshire face; for I must say of Lincolnshire, as Cowper said of England,

With all thy faults I love thee still.

You hope our change of residence is for the better. The only advantage in it is that one gets up to London oftener. The people are sufficiently hospitable, but it is not in a good old-fashioned way, so as to do one’s feelings any good. Large set dinners with stores of venison and champagne are very good things of their kind, but one wants something more; and Mrs. Arabin seems to me the only person about who speaks and acts as an honest and true nature dictates: all else is artificial, frozen, cold, and lifeless.

Now that I have said a good word for Lincolnshire and a bad one for Essex, I hope I have wrought upon your feelings, and that you will come and see us with Mr. Rawnsley. Pray do. You could come at the same time with Miss Walls when she pays her visit to the Arabins, and so have all the inside of the mail to yourselves; for though you were very heroic last summer on the high places of the diligence, I presume that this weather is sufficient to cool any courage down to zero. — Believe me, with love from all to all, always yours,

A. Tennyson.

Beech Hill, High Beech, Loughton, Essex.

To this letter Mrs. Tennyson, the Poet’s mother, adds a postscript, though she complains that Alfred has scarcely left her room to do so. The letter is dated in her hand.

The Halton family consisted of Edward, Drummond, and Sophy. The latter, with Rosa Baring, were two of Alfred’s favourite partners at the Spilsby and Horncastle balls. Sophy Rawnsley became Mrs. Ed. Elmhirst; she often talked of the old Halton and Somersby days. “He was,” she said, “so interesting, because he was so unlike other young men; and his unconventionality of manner and dress had a charm which made him more acceptable than the dapper young gentleman of the ordinary type at ball or supper party. He was a splendid dancer, for he loved music, and kept such time; but you know,” she would say, “we liked to talk better than to dance together at Horncastle, or Spilsby, or Halton; he always had something worth saying, and said it so quaintly.” Rosa at eighty-three recalled the same times with animation, and said to me, “You know we used to spoil him, for we sat at his feet and worshipped him; and he read to us, and how well he read! and when he wrote us those little poems we were more than proud. Ah, those days at Somersby and Harrington and Halton, how delightful they were!”

The Halton family were a decade younger than Charles, Alfred, and Mary Tennyson, but Drummond married eight years before Alfred. Emily Sellwood, just before her marriage with Alfred, wrote to Mrs. Drummond Rawnsley:

My dearest Katie — You and Drummond are among the best and kindest friends I have in the world, and let me not be ungrateful, I have some very good and very kind — Thy loving sister

Emily.

The use of the thy is very frequent with the Sellwoods, and in all Mary Tennyson’s letters too.

It was at Halton, in the time of its next Rector, Drummond Rawnsley, that the farmer Gilbey Robinson gave his son Canon H. D. Rawnsley the famous advice which the Poet has preserved in his Lincolnshire poem “The Churchwarden and the Curate”:

But creeäp along the hedge bottoms an thou’ll be a Bishop yit.

And it was at Halton that Mr. Hoff, a large tenant farmer, lived of whom Dr. Tennyson heard many a story from the Rector. He was quite a character, and the Lord Chancellor Brougham was brought over by Mr. Eden from Harrington to see and talk with him. I knew Mr. Hoff, and have heard the Rector describe the lively afternoon they had. Farming was one of Lord Brougham’s hobbies, and he talked of farming to his heart’s content, and was delighted with the old fellow’s shrewdness and independence, and his racy sayings in the Lincolnshire dialect, the kind of sayings which Tennyson has preserved in his “Northern Farmer.” The farmer, too, was pleased with his visitor, but he said to the Rector afterwards, “He is straänge cliver mon is Lord Brougham, and he knaws a vast, noä doubt, but he knaws nowt about ploughing.” It was the same farmer who was introduced by the Rector to the leading Barrister at the Spilsby sessions, where both the Rector and Dr. Tennyson were always in request to dine with the bar, when the Judge was at Spilsby, for the charm of their presence and the brightness of their conversation. Mr. Hoff had seen “Councillor Flowers” in Court in his wig and gown, but meeting him now in plain clothes, and finding him a very small man, he said to him straight out, “Why, you’re nobbut a meän-looking little mon after all.” These tenant farmers, whether in the Marsh, wold, or fen, were very considerable people in days when agriculture was at its best. In the Marsh, one in particular, Marshal Heanley, was always termed the Marsh King. He it was who at the Ram-show dinner at Halton, when Ed. Stanhope, the Minister for War, had spoken of the future which was opening for the great agriculturists, and, after alluding to Lord Brougham’s visit to the Shire and the sending of some farmers’ sons to the Bar, had suggested the possibility of one of them arriving at the top of the tree and sitting some day on the Woolsack. The “Marsh King” got up and said, “I allus telled yer yer must graw wool; but when you’ve grawed it, yer mustn’t sit on it, yer must sell it.”

There was a good deal of humour and also of characteristic independence about both the farmers and their men in those days; the Doctor’s own man, when found fault with, had flung the harness in a heap on the drawing-room floor, saying, “Cleän it yersen then.” And at Halton Rectory an old Waterloo cavalryman was coachman, who kept in the saddle-room the sword he had drawn at Quatre-Bras, a delight to us boys to see and hear about. He had a way of thinking aloud, and when, driving once at Skegness, he saw the Halton schoolmaster, his particular aversion, Mrs. Rawnsley heard him say, “If there ain’t that conceäted aäpe of ourn.” On a later occasion, when, at a rent-day dinner, he was handing round the beer, and the schoolmaster asked, “Is it ale or porter?” in a voice heard by all the table he replied, “It’s näyther aäle nor poörter, but very good beer, much too good for the likes o’ you, so taäke it and be thankful.” Perhaps his most famous saying was addressed to my younger brother who, when attempting to copy his elders who always jumped the quickset hedge opposite the saddle-room as a short cut to the house, had stuck in the thorns and cried, “Grayson, Grayson, come and help me out!” The old man slowly wiped his hands, and with his usual deliberation said, “Yis, I’m a-coming.” “But look sharp, confound you, it’s pricking me.” “Oh, if you’re going to sweër you may stay theër, and be damned to you.”

From Halton the way is short to Spilsby, the market town where the Franklins had lived, and the statue of Sir John resting his hand on an anchor looks down every Monday on the chaffering Market folk at one end of the Market Place, whilst the women still crowd round the old Butter-cross at the other end. In the Church is the Willoughby chapel, full of interesting monuments.

Many of the Franklin family lie in the Churchyard, and on the Church wall are three tablets to the three most distinguished brothers, — James, the soldier, who made the first ordnance survey of India; Sir Willingham, the Judge of the Supreme Court of Madras; and Sir John, the discoverer of the North-West Passage. Hundleby adjoins Spilsby where Mr. John Hollway lived, of whom the Poet wrote: “People say and I feel that you are the man with the finest taste and knowledge in literary matters here.” Next to Hundleby comes Raithby, the home of the Edward Rawnsleys, where the Poet was a frequent visitor, and thence passing Mavis-Enderby on the left, the road runs on the Ridge of the Wold through Hagworthingham to Horncastle, the home of the Sellwoods. Mavis-Enderby is referred to in Jean Ingelow’s poem, “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571”:

Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!

······

The brides of Mavis Enderby.

After a visit to Raithby in 1874 Alfred wrote to Mrs. Edward Rawnsley:

My dear Mary — I stretch out arms of love to you all across the distance, — all the Rawnsleys are dear to me, and you, though not an indigenous one, have become a Rawnsley, and I invoke you in the same embrace of the affection, tho’ memory has not so much to say about you.

At Keal, east of Mavis-Enderby, the Cracrofts, whom the Doctor knew well, were living; and below the far-famed Keal Hill, in the flat fen, lay Hagnaby Priory, the home of Thomas Coltman, whose nephews Tom and George were often there. George, a genial giant of the heartiest kind, became Rector of Stickney, half-way between Keal and Boston; he was one of the Poet’s closest friends. In a letter to the Rector of Halton he says, “Remember me to all old friends, particularly to George Coltman”; and in after years he seldom met a Lincolnshire man without asking, “How is George Coltman? He was a good fellow.” Agricultural depression has altered things in Lincolnshire. Among the farmers the larger holders have disappeared in many places, and in the pleasant homes of Halton and Somersby, such men as the Rectors in those Georgian and early Victorian days, Nature does not repeat.

The departure of the Tennyson family made a blank which could never be filled. The villagers whom they left behind never forgot them, and even in extreme old age they were still full of memories of the family, and talked of the learning and cleverness of “the owd Doctor,” the fondness of the children for their mother and, most noticeable of all, their “book-larning,”

And boöks, what’s boöks? thou knaws thebbe naither ‘ere nor theer.

The old folk all seemed to think that “to hev owt to do wi boöks” was a sign of a weak intellect. “The boys, poor things! they would allus hev a book i’ their hands as they went along.” A few years ago there was still one old woman in Somersby who remembered going, seventy-one years back, when she was eleven years old, for her first place to the Tennysons. What she thought most of was “the young laädies.” She was blind, but she said, “I can see ‘em all now plaän as plaän; and I would have liked to hear Mr. Halfred’s voice ageän — sich a voice it wer.”

Frederick Tennyson.

TENNYSON AND HIS BROTHERS FREDERICK AND CHARLES by Charles Tennyson

My uncle Frederick lived near St. Heliers, and my father and I visited him (1887) in his house, overlooking the town and harbour of St. Heliers, Elizabeth Castle, and St. Aubyn’s Bay. The two old brothers talked much of bygone days; of the “red honey gooseberry,” and the “golden apples” in Somersby garden, and of the tilts and tourneys they held in the fields; of the old farmers and “swains”; of their college friends; and of the waste shore at Mablethorpe: and then turned to later days, and to the feelings of old age. My father said of Frederick’s poems that “they were organ-tones echoing among the mountains.” Frederick told Alfred as they parted that “not for twenty years had he spent such a happy day.” — Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son.

To C. T.

True poet, surely to be found

When Truth is found again.

Of all the brothers of Alfred Tennyson the closest akin to him were Frederick and Charles. The three were born in successive years, Frederick in 1807, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. They slept together in a little attic under the roof of the old white Rectory at Somersby, they played together, read together, studied together under the guidance of their father, and all three left home to go together to the school at Louth, which Alfred and Charles at least held in detestation until their latest years. Frederick was the first to break up the brotherhood, for, in 1817, he left Louth for Eton, but to the end of his long life — he outlived all his brothers — he seems to have looked back on the days of his childhood through the medium of this fraternal trinity. Years afterwards he wrote of their common submission to the influence of Byron, who “lorded it over them, with an immitigable tyranny,” and a fire at Farringford in 1876 brings to his mind the destruction of their Aunt Mary’s house at Louth, in the gardens of which he wrote: “I, and Charles, and Alfred, enthusiastic children, used to play at being Emperors of China, each appropriating a portion of the old echoing garden as our domain, and making them reverberate our tones of authority.”

At school the brothers seem to have kept much to themselves; they took little interest in the school sports, in which their great size and strength would have well qualified them to excel, and passed their time chiefly in reading and wandering over the rolling wold and flat shores of their native Lincolnshire. They began at an early age their apprenticeship to poetry. Alfred, at least, had written a considerable volume of verse by the time he was fourteen, and all three contributed to the Poems by Two Brothers, which were published at Louth in 1827, when Frederick, the author of four of the poems, had just entered St. John’s, Cambridge (his father’s old College). Charles used to tell how, when the tiny volume was published, he and Alfred hired a conveyance out of the £10 which the publisher had given them, and drove off for the day to their favourite Mablethorpe, where they shouted themselves hoarse on the shore as they rolled out poem by poem in one another’s ears. The notes and headings to the poems give some idea of the breadth and variety of reading for which the brothers had found opportunity in their quiet country life, for the volume contains twenty quotations from Horace, eight from Virgil, six from Byron, five from Isaiah, four from Ossian, three from Cicero, two apiece from Moore, Xenophon, Milton, Claudian, and the Book of Jeremiah, with others from Addison, John Clare, Juvenal, Ulloa’s Voyages, Beattie, Rennel’s Herodotus, Savary’s Letters, Tacitus’ Annals, Pliny, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Racine, the Mysteries of Udolpho, La Auruncana, the Songs of Jayadeva, Sir William Jones (History of Nadir Shah, Eastern Plants, and Works, vol. vi.), Cowper, Ovid, Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful, Dr. Langhorne’s Collins, Mason’s Caractacus, Rollin, Contino’s Epitaph on Camoens, Hume, Scott, the Books of Joel and Judges, Berquin, Young, Sale’s Koran, Apollonius of Rhodes, Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature, Sallust, Terence, Lucretius, Coxe’s Switzerland, Rousseau, the Ranz des Vaches, Baker on Animalculae, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman and various old English ballads, while many notes give odd scraps of scientific, geographical, and historical learning.

Alfred and Charles followed Frederick to Cambridge in 1828 and entered Trinity, whither their elder brother had just migrated from John’s. All the three brothers attained a certain amount of rather unconventional distinction at the University; Frederick, who had taken a high place on his entrance into Eton and subsequently became Captain of the Oppidans, obtained the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode (in Sapphic metre) on the Pyramids, the last cadence of which, “ὀλλυμένων γὰρ ἄχθων ἐξαπολειται,” is the only fragment which tradition has preserved. Charles obtained a Bell Scholarship in 1829, chiefly through the beauty of his translations into English (one line, “And the ruddy grape shall droop from the desert thorn,” was always remembered by Alfred), and the youngest brother secured, as is well known, the University Prize for English Verse with his “Timbuctoo.” None of the brothers, however, attained great distinction in the schools, though Frederick and Charles graduated B.A. in 1832. With the end of their Cambridge careers the brotherhood finally dissolved. It was at first proposed that all three should (in deference to the wish of their grandfather), become clergymen. Frederick had always shown a certain independence and intractability of character. At Eton, though a skilful and ardent cricketer, he acquired a reputation for eccentricity, and Sir Francis Doyle describes him as “rather a silent, solitary boy, not always in perfect harmony with Keate,” — a gentleman with whom most spirits, however ardent, generally found it convenient to agree.

Sir Francis recounts one typical incident: Frederick, then in the sixth form, had returned to school four days late after the Long Vacation. Keate sent for him and demanded an explanation. None was forthcoming. Keate stormed in his best manner, his prominent eyebrows shooting out, and his Punch-like features working with fury, Frederick remaining all the while cynically calm. Finally the fiery doctor insists with many objurgations on a written apology from the boy’s father, whereupon the culprit leisurely produces a crumpled letter from his pocket and hands it coolly to the head-master. A fresh tirade follows, accusing Frederick of every defect of character and principle known to ethics, and concluding, “and showing such a temper too”!

How little Frederick regarded himself as fitted for Holy Orders may be judged from a letter he wrote in 1832 to his friend John Frere: “I expect,” he says, “to be ordained in June, without much reason, for hitherto I have made no kind of preparation, and a pretty parson I shall make, I’m thinking.” The grandfather came apparently to share this conclusion, for the ordination never took place.

It must have been about this time that Frederick made the acquaintance of Edward FitzGerald, who was two years his junior. The pair maintained a close correspondence for many years, and “Fitz” became godfather to one of his friend’s sons and left a legacy to be divided among his three daughters.

Frederick’s fine presence and frank, tempestuous, independent nature seem to have made a powerful appeal to the younger man, for he had the great height, noble proportions, and dome-like forehead of the Tennyson family, and was so robustly built that it is said that in later years, when he lived in Florence, a new servant girl, on seeing him for the first time speeding up his broad Italian staircase in British knee-breeches, fell back against the wall in astonishment, exclaiming, “Santissima Madonna, che gambe!” Unlike his brothers, however, his hair (which he wore rather longer than was common even at that time) was fair and his eyes blue.

“I remember,” wrote Fitz in 1843, “the days of the summer when you and I were together quarrelling and laughing.... Our trip to Gravesend has left a perfume with me. I can get up with you on that everlastingly stopping coach on which we tried to travel from Gravesend to Maidstone that Sunday morning: worn out with it we got down at an Inn and then got up on another coach, and an old smiling fellow passed us holding out his hat — and you said, “That old fellow must go about as Homer did,” and numberless other turns of road and humour, which sometimes pass before me as I lie in bed.”

And in the next year he writes:

How we pulled against each other at Gravesend! You would stay — I wouldn’t — then I would — then we did. Do you remember that girl at the bazaar ... then the gentleman who sang at Ivy Green?

And seven years later Gravesend and its ἀνήριθμοι shrimps are still in his memory.

Very soon, however, after leaving Cambridge, Frederick, who had inherited a comfortable property at Grimsby, set out for Italy, and in Italy and near the Mediterranean he remained, with the exception of an occasional visit to England, until 1859.

He was passionately fond of travel, which, as he used to say, “makes pleasure solemn and pain sweet,” and even his marriage in 1839 to Maria Giuliotti, daughter of the chief magistrate of Siena, could not induce him to make a settled home. In 1841 we hear of him (through “Fitz”) in Sicily, playing a cricket match against the crew of the Bellerophon on the Parthenopaean Hills, and “sacking the sailors by ninety runs.” “I like that such men as Frederick should be abroad,” adds the writer, “so strong, haughty, and passionate,” and in 1842 “Fitz” pictures him “laughing and singing, and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying beakers full of the warm South.” All the while he continued to write to FitzGerald “accounts of Italy, finer” (says the latter) “than any I ever heard.”

Once he describes himself coming suddenly upon Cicero’s Formian villa, with its mosaic pavement leading through lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain bubbling up “as fresh as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator sitting there in the stillness of the noonday, devoting the siesta hours to study.” FitzGerald replies with letters full of affection; he sighs for Frederick’s “Englishman’s humours” — for their old quarrels: “I mean quarrel in the sense of a good, strenuous difference of opinion, supported on either side by occasional outbursts of spleen. Come and let us try,” he adds, “you used to irritate my vegetable blood.” “I constantly think of you,” he writes, “and as I have often sincerely told you, with a kind of love I feel towards but two or three friends ... you, Spedding, Thackeray, and only one or two more.” And again: “It is because there are so few F. Tennysons in the world that I do not like to be wholly out of hearing of the one I know.... I see so many little natures that I must draw to the large.”

All this time Frederick was writing verse and Fitz constantly urges him to publish. “You are now the only man I expect verse from,” he writes in 1850, after he had given Alfred up as almost wholly fallen from grace. “Such gloomy, grand stuff as you write.” Again: “We want some bits of strong, genuine imagination.... There are heaps of single lines, couplets, and stanzas that would consume the —— s and —— s like stubble.”

Much of their correspondence is taken up with the discussion of music. They both agree in placing Mozart above all other composers. Beethoven they find too analytical and erudite. Original, majestic, and profound, they acknowledge him, but at times bizarre and morbid.

“We all raved about Byron, Shelley, and Keats,” wrote Frederick long after, in 1885, “but none of them have retained their hold on me with the same power as that little tone poet with the long nose, knee-breeches, and pigtail.” Indeed he was at different times told by two mediums that the spirit of Mozart in these same knee-breeches and pigtail accompanied him, invisibly to the eye of sense, as a familiar. Music was the passion of Frederick Tennyson’s life. It was said among his friends that when he settled in Florence (as he did soon after 1850), he lived in a vast Hall designed by Michael Angelo, surrounded by forty fiddlers, and he used to improvise on a small organ until he was over eighty years of age.

“After all,” he wrote in 1874, “Music is the Queen of the Arts. What are all the miserable concrete forms into which we endeavour to throw ‘thoughts too deep for tears’ or too rapturous for mortal mirth, compared with the divine, abstract, oceanic utterances of that voice which can multiply a thousandfold and exhaust in infinite echoes the passions that on canvas, in marble, or even in poesy (the composite style in aesthetics), so often leave us cold and emotionless! I believe Music to be as far above the other Arts as the affections of the soul above the rarest ingenuity of the perfect orator! Perhaps you are far from agreeing with me. Indeed the common charge brought against her by her sisters among the Pierides — and by the transcendentalists and philosophical Critics — is that She has no type like the other Arts on which to model her creations and to regulate her inspirations. I say her inexhaustible spring is the soul itself, and its fiery inmost — the chamber illuminated from the centre of Being — as the finest and most subtle ethers are begotten of, and flow nearest to the Sun.”

Frederick lived at Florence till 1857 and found there, after years of wandering, his first settled home. The idea of settling tickled his humour, and in 1853 he writes: “I am a regular family man now with four children (the last of whom promises to be the most eccentric of a humorous set) and an Umbrella.” In Florence he came in contact with Caroline Norton and her son Brinsley, of the latter of whom he writes an amusing account:

Young Norton has married a peasant girl of Capri, who, not a year ago, was scampering bare-footed and bare-headed over the rocks and shingles of that island. He has turned Roman Catholic among other accomplishments — being in search, he said, of a “graceful faith.”... Parker has just published a volume of his which he entitled “Pinocchi: or Seeds of the Pine,” meaning that out of this small beginning he, Brin, would emerge, like the pine, which is to be “the mast of some great Admiral,” from its seedling. He is quite unable to show the applicability of this title, and, seeing that the book has been very severely handled in one of the periodicals under the head of “Poetical Nuisances,” some are of opinion that “Pedocchi” would have been a more fitting name for it. However, to do him no injustice, he has sparks of genius, plenty of fancy and improvable stuff in him, and is, moreover, a young gentleman of that irrepressible buoyancy which, to use the language of the Edinburgh Review, “rises by its own rottenness....” As I said, he is not more than three-and-twenty, but is very much in the habit of commencing narrative in this manner: “In my young days when I used to eat off gold plate!” to which I reply, “Really a fine old gentleman like you should have more philosophy than to indulge in vain regrets.”

While we were located at Villa Brichieri, up drove one fine day the famous Caroline, his mother, who, not to speak of her personal attractions, is really, I should say, a woman of genius, if only judged by her novel, Stuart of Dunleath, which is full of deep pathos to me. I asked Brin one day what his mother thought of me. He stammers very much, and he said, “She th-th-th-thinks very well of you, but I d-d-don’t think she likes your family.” “Good heavens! here’s news,” I said. Well, afterwards she told me of having met Alfred at Rogers’, and of having heard that he had taken a dislike to her. “Why, Mrs. Norton,” I said, “that must be nearly thirty years ago, and do you harbour vindictive feelings so long?” “Oh!” she said, “why, I’m not thirty!”

Again, one day we met her in a country house where we were invited to meet her, and soon after she had shaken hands with me she said, with a dubious kind of jocosity, “I should like to see all the Tennysons hung up in a row before the Villa Brichieri.” Upon the whole, I thought her a strange creature, and she has not yet lost her beauty — a grand Zenobian style certainly, but, like many celebrated beauties, she seems to have won the whole world. Among other things she said in allusion to some incident, “What mattered it to me whether it was an old or a young man — I who all my life have made conquests?” It seemed to me that to dazzle in the great world was her principal ambition, and literary glory her second.

But Frederick was too much of a man of moods to care for society. He used to describe himself as a “person of gloomy insignificance and unsocial monomania.” Society he dismissed contemptuously as “Snookdom,” and would liken it gruffly to a street row. The “high-jinks of the high-nosed” (to use another phrase of his) angered him, as did all persons “who go about with well-cut trousers and ill-arranged ideas.” The consequence was that his acquaintance in Florence long remained narrow. In 1854, shortly after the birth of his second son, he wrote:

Sponsors I have succeeded in hooking, one in this manner: A friend of mine called yesterday and introduced a Mr. Jones. “Sir,” said I, “happy to see you. Like to be a godfather?” “Really,” he said, not quite prepared for the honour, “do my best.” “Thank you, then I’ll call for you on my way to the church”; so Mr. Jones was booked.

One hears, however, of a visit of Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide Kemble) in 1854. “I had not seen her for twenty years,” writes Frederick; “she is grown colossal, but all her folds of fat have not extinguished the love of music in her.” But one friendship which Frederick made in Florence was destined to be a lifelong pleasure to him. In 1853 he writes:

The Brownings I have but recently become acquainted with. They really are the very best people in the world, and a real treasure to that Hermit, a Poet. Browning is a wonderful man with inexhaustible memory, animal spirits, and bonhomie. He is always ready with the most apropos anecdote, and the happiest bon mot, and his vast acquaintance with out-of-the-way knowledge and the quaint Curiosity Shops of Literature make him a walking encyclopaedia of marvels. Mrs. B., who never goes out — being troubled like other inspired ladies with a chest — is a little unpretending woman, yet full of power, and, what is far better, loving-kindness; and never so happy as when she can get into the thick of mysterious Clairvoyants, Rappists, Ecstatics, and Swedenborgians. Only think of their having lived full five years at Florence with all these virtues hidden in a bushel to me!

In 1854 he published his first volume of verse, Days and Hours. The book was, on the whole, well received. Charles Kingsley (whose early and discriminating recognition of the merits of George Meredith places him high among the critics of his day) wrote: “The poems are the work of a finished scholar, of a man who knows all schools, who has profited more or less by all, and who often can express himself, while revelling in luxurious fancies, with a grace and terseness which Pope himself might have envied.” There was, however, a good deal of adverse criticism, and it was probably mainly owing to his irritation at many of the strictures (often futile enough) which were passed upon him at this time that he kept silence for the next thirty-six years. At any rate, he was always ready to the end of his life for a growl or a thunder at the critics.

In 1857 Frederick Tennyson left Florence and after spending some time in Pisa and Genoa finally settled in Jersey, where he made his home for nearly forty years. During all this period he maintained a regular and detailed correspondence with Mrs. Brotherton, the wife of his friend Augustus Brotherton, the artist, with whom he had begun to exchange letters while still at Florence. His life was now a very quiet one, for, except for an occasional visit to England, he never left home. His children with their families visited him from time to time. His brother Charles came with his wife to see him in 1867, as did the Brownings on their way to Italy, and Alfred also paid him visits, the last of which was in 1892. On the whole, however, his days, for one who had been so passionately fond of travel and of a life of colour, warmth, and excitement, were singularly peaceful. But he retained to the last his astonishing vitality. His health remained tolerably good in spite of the nervous irritability and reactions of melancholy which were inseparable from the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his temperament. “Poor Savile Morton used to stare at me with wonder,” he writes. “‘I cannot conceive,’ he said, ‘how a man with such a stomach can be subject to hypochondria.’” In 1867, at the age of sixty, he batted for an hour to his nephew Lionel’s bowling, hoping thereby to be able “to revive the cricket habit,” and his mind continued extraordinarily active; not a movement in world politics or thought escaped him; he read voraciously and continued to write verse in a rather desultory fashion. His appetite for beauty, too, remained as keen as ever and even developed. “The longer I live,” he wrote in 1885, “the more delicate become my perceptions of beautiful nature.” And that appetite found ample food in the scenery of the bowery island, the whole ambit of which, with its curling tree-tops and distant lawny spaces dappled with sunshine and surrounded, as it seemed, by the whole immensity of the globe, could be seen from a point near his house.

In his isolation, however, his active mind tended to become more and more possessed by certain ideas, with which everything he read and heard was brought into relation. While still at Florence he had (possibly under the influence of Mrs. Browning) become greatly interested in the teachings of Swedenborg and the phenomena of spiritualism which seemed to him a natural development of Swedenborg’s theories. At first he was apt to speak rather lightly of spirit revelations. In 1852 he wrote to Alfred:

“Powers the sculptor here, who is a Swedenborgian, says he once had a vision of two interwoven angels upon a ground of celestial azure clearly revealed to him by supernatural light after he had put out his candle and was lying awake in bed, and believes that these are only the beginning of wonders; the spirits themselves announce the dawn of a new time and the coming of the Millennium, and he firmly believes that all we now do by costly material processes will in the returning Golden Age of the world be accomplished for us by ministering spirits. ‘Thou shalt see the angels of heaven ascending and descending on the Son of man.’ I go with him as far as to believe that these are spiritual revelations, but I confess I cannot accompany him in his belief in their beneficent intentions. God speaks to the heart of man by His Spirit, not thro’ table legs; the miracles of Christ were of inestimable worth, but these unfortunate ghosts either drivel like schoolgirls or bounce out at once into the most shameful falsehoods, and by their actual presence, pretending to be in their final state, they seem to have for their object, tho’ they carefully avoid touching on those subjects, to undermine in the hearts of Christians the spiritual doctrines of the Resurrection of the spiritual body and of the judgment to come. And the more effectually to unsettle the old Theology, the cant of these spirits is that God is a God of Love, Love, Love, continually repeated ad nauseam. So He is, but ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor My ways your ways,’ ‘He scourgeth every son that He receiveth,’ ‘He loveth those whom He chasteneth,’ ‘it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,’ ‘the pitiful God trieth the hearts and the reins.’ But these spirits, by for ever harping upon the Love of God in their insipid language, seem to me to be anxious to persuade us that He is a ‘fine old country gentleman with large estate,’ or something of that kind, seated in a deeply-cushioned armchair, and patting the heads of His rebellious children when they come whimpering to Him, yielding to anything in the shape of intercession, and, rather than that St. Joseph or any other saint should be offended, ready to admit a brigand into Heaven. So that I thoroughly distrust your spirits and expect no virtue will come out of them. They only seem to me last links in the chain of modern witchcrafts which will probably end with the Devil.” And a little later he writes: “Owen the Socialist and a host of infidels by a peculiar logical process of their own, after seeing a table in motion, instantly believe in the immortality of the Soul. To me it is astounding and even awful, that in this nineteenth century after Christ — whose resurrection of the body rests on as strong a ground of proof as many of the best attested historical events — men should be beginning again with that vague and unsatisfactory phantom of a creed which must have been old in the time of Homer.”

It was not long before he became a complete convert to Swedenborgianism and firmly convinced of the reality of the Spiritualistic phenomena with which the press and literature of the day began to be flooded. Indeed at one time he believed that spirits communicated with himself by a kind of electrical ticking, which he was constantly hearing in his room at night, and used at their dictation to do a certain amount of automatic writing. The results, however, were so unsatisfactory that he was forced to conclude the spirits to be of an evil and untrustworthy nature, and he therefore abandoned the practice of spiritualism altogether. He remained, however, convinced of the fact that living men were able to communicate with the spirits of the departed, who had been able, since the end (in 1757) of the second dispensation (according to Swedenborg) and the abolition of the intermediate state of purgatory which accompanied it, to establish direct intercourse with our world, and he believed that this rapid increase of communication was a sign of the approach of the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, of the total abolition of all barriers between the material and spiritual worlds, and the actual physical regeneration of man in the Millennium predicted by Christ and the prophets. The natural and political tumults of which the nineteenth century was so prolific seemed to him to point in the same direction, and to fall in with the prophecy of Daniel which he was never tired of quoting.

Frederick abandoned these views at the end of his life, but it is not difficult to see how they came to acquire such a hold on him. He was essentially a mystic and clung most fervently to the belief in a future life, where all good things should be taken up into the spiritual life and glorified.

“My daylight,” he wrote in 1853, “is sombered by a natural instinct of unearthliness, a looking backwards and forwards for that sunny land which Imagination robes in unfailing Summer where no tears dim the Light, and no graves lie underneath our feet, by the side of which Riches, honors, even Health the first of blessings, all, in short, that is commonly called Happiness, looks cold and imperfect — while the great Shadow of Death fills up the distance, and the steps to it lie over withered garlands and dry bones.” And again: “For an illustration of the bliss and delight of that higher state of being which under the influence of that Spirit-Sun shall hereafter rise daily to its appointed task, whatever that may be, with full heart and mind — I go back to ‘the days that are no more,’ when I used to dive into the sunny morn, rejoicing in my strength, refreshed with dreamless sleep ‘like a giant with wine,’ carrying my whole soul with me without fears or regrets, with a joy focussed like sunlight through a lens, on the infinite present moment! Such memories, tho’ mournful, are blessed if they bring with them analogies of the ‘Higher State to Be.’ For the angel is but the infant sublimated — the rapture and the innocence, with the Wisdom and the Power adjoined, and crowned with Immortality! That is to say his will being in all things conformable to the Divine — he receives the divine influences which are heaven! And surely my unshakable belief is that all created beings — even those who have chosen the lowest Hell — will be eventually redeemed, exalted, and glorified — or there would be an Infinite Power of Good unable or unwilling to subdue Finite Evil.”

His mind, however, was too independent to accept any of the creeds of orthodoxy. He is perpetually thundering against the “frowzy diatribes of black men with white ties — too often the only white thing about them” (one can hear him rap out the parenthesis), and the “little papacies” that dominate a country town or village. Rome he regarded with an excessive hatred, and Oxford and Cambridge, twin homes of orthodoxy, did not escape his wrath.

Indeed, he regarded most modern Christianity as a perversion of the original truth, and Atheism in all its guises he hated with an even greater bitterness, as the following letter shows:

This, as you truly say, is the age of Atheism — both practical and professional. But it is not only Bradlaugh and Mrs. —— who distinguish it as such — multitudes of most worthy and respectable people (in their own estimation) are classifiable under this category. Indeed all worldly people whose religion consists in saving appearances, all self-interested folk whose lives are passed in struggles with their neighbour for their own advantage — all such as wear down heart and mind and even physical well-being in the feverish ambition to pile up riches, not knowing who shall gather them or purely for the renown of possessing them. All ritualists who think they get to heaven by peculiar haberdashery, and intoning the prayers, which makes a farce of them by depriving them of articulate meaning. All believers in the vicarious atonement of faith alone, which creed signifies that all has been done instead of all has to be done for them. All who hurry to conventicles on Sunday with gilt-edged prayer-books, and begin on Monday morning to slander, ill-treat, or cheat their neighbours. In short all that excludes the spiritual from this life — which generally indicates unbelief in any other and virtually denies the necessity, and therefore the existence, of a Divine Governor. All Professors —— and —— in Physical science, all Herbert Spencers, etc. in metaphysical — who arrive by different courses at the same conclusion, viz. that God is unknowable [sic] and that therefore they need not take the trouble to know Him. All this is but Atheism virtual and avowed.

And materialism he considered little better than rank Atheism.

It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should have come to regard the phenomena of spiritualism as the strongest evidence of those beliefs which were to him more important than life itself, and, this conviction once established, submission to the strange genius of Swedenborg followed almost as a matter of course, for by his “science of correspondencies,” the new phenomena seemed to fall naturally and inevitably into their proper place in that strange dual scheme of spirit and matter into which Swedenborg had resolved the Universe. When he had once embarked upon Occultism, other curious beliefs followed in the train of these main convictions. He became greatly impressed with the work of a certain Mr. Melville who believed that he had rediscovered an ancient and long forgotten method of reading the stars which was in fact the original mystery of Freemasonry. Frederick took eagerly to this idea which seemed to fall naturally into place with the Swedenborgian science of correspondencies, and in 1872 he actually came to England with Mr. Melville in the hope of being able to convince the Freemasons that all modern Masonry with its boasted mysteries was futile and meaningless without the key of Mr. Melville’s discovery in which lay the true explanation of all the masonic signs and symbols. Unfortunately an interview with the Duke of Leinster, the then Grand Master, gave the two apostles little satisfaction. It was on this visit that Frederick saw FitzGerald for the last time, and the latter described him to Mrs. Kemble as being “quite grand and sincere in this as in all else; with the Faith of a gigantic child — pathetic and yet humorous to consider and consort with.”

The influence of these ideas gradually coloured Frederick’s view on all current subjects. His years in Florence had been spent in the “hubbub of imminent war,” and he writes indignantly of “the rottenness of these pitiable petty States and the incredible fantastic tricks of their abominable rulers.” None the less, though he hated and despised most existing monarchies, he was too much imbued with the romance and dignity of the past to look with a very favourable eye on revolution. At first he dismissed Mazzini as “deserving a hempen collar with Nana Sahib and the King of Delhi,” an opinion which the experience of later years compelled him to reverse. The story of nineteenth-century Europe seemed to him chaos, but it was the chaos which was to precede the new spiritual dispensation, and political prejudice never hindered him from the true appreciation of progress. Thus he writes in 1869:

It is certain that Evil has never been more rampant than during the last century — witness the great French Revolution, subsequent wars, minor revolutions, and minor wars throughout the globe, the hundreds of millions wasted on warlike machinery, the countless numbers of young men sacrificed to the fiends of ambition and racial jealousy, society honeycombed with frauds, conspiracies, and class animosities, etc. etc. On the other hand, never has knowledge of all kinds been more progressive, never have the Arts and Sciences and Literature been so rapidly multiplied and so various. Never were charitable institutions more widely extended or practically beneficent. Never, in short, were the researches into all kinds of truths, especially those which concern the relations of man to God and his neighbour, more earnest, and if this seems to contradict the notorious fact that we are living at present in a world of Atheism and Materialism — which is the same thing — it does not really do so, for the two movements, though separate, are parallel and simultaneous. In short, “The Time of the End” is a transitional state — which will eventually issue in the triumph of Good over Evil once and for ever.

France he always hated as the leader of materialism, and he would repeat with a snort of disgust the remark of M. Bert, who, during the debate in the Chamber on the secularization of Education, observed that it was superfluous to exclude what did not exist. The debacle of 1870 seemed a just if tragic retribution.

“One cannot help, however,” he wrote on October 19, 1870, “feeling for beautiful Paris as one would for a Marie Antoinette passing on her way to execution. There she is in her solitude and in her beauty. Around her a circle of iron and fire — within her a restless seething of tumultuous passions embittering the present — her future a prospect of burning and famine. Such a downfall is unparalleled in history, and the agonies of her expiration — if things are carried to their bitter end — promise to equal those of the terrible siege of Jerusalem.”

As might be expected, he tended to Conservatism in politics; Home Rule was anathema, and Disraeli, endeared to him as the possible leader of a United Israel, he regarded as a sincerer statesman than Gladstone. None the less he was able to applaud Gladstone’s action on the occasion of the Bulgarian atrocities, though “even he” seemed to have yielded so much

... to the delicacies and squeamish sensibility, and fluttering nerves of a lolling generation — an age of sofas and carpets — the rousing of which even in the justest of causes, the vindication of the rights of unoffending humanity outraged by savages in comparison with whom niggers and Red Indians are angels, is not to be attempted without careful thought — and though a great cry has gone through the land I fear there will be little wool. There is, however, one consolation — neither Turkey, nor Egypt, nor any ruffian with a bundle of dirty clothes upon his head instead of a hat, will ever get another farthing of our money.

None the less he hated a bigoted Toryism, and thought that “a proper democratic spirit which aims at a reconstruction of society on the principle of ‘each for all and all for each,’ the correlation of privileges and duties, worth and honour, wealth and charity (in its best sense), the substitution of altruism for egoism, ought to find its echo in every loyal heart — and would in fact be the very ‘end of Sin, and bringing in of the Everlasting Righteousness’ foretold.”

In literature, too, his mind — in spite of an occasional failure to recognize individual genius — was remarkably alive to the progressive movements of the day. Indeed, for a man so steeped in classicism, his freedom from prejudice was remarkable. Browning’s poetry, however, in spite of his affection for the author, he could never appreciate. He wrote to Mrs. Brotherton:

“What you say of Browning’s Ring and the Book,” he says, soon after the publication of that work, “I have no doubt is strictly applicable, however slashing.... I confess, however, that I have never had the courage to read the book. He is a great friend of mine.... But it does not follow that I should put up with obsolete horrors, and unrhythmical composition. What has come upon the world that it should take any metrical (?) arrangement of facts for holy Poesy? It has been my weakness to believe that the Fine Arts and Imaginative Literature should do something more than astonish us by tours de force, black and white contrasts, outrageous inhumanities, or anything criminally sensational, or merely intellectually potent. As you say a good heart is better than a clever head, so I say better a page of feeling than a volume of spasms. Spasms, I fear, is the order of the day. The late Lord Robertson, a legal celebrity at Edinburgh, pleading on behalf of some one, said, with his serious face, which was more tickling than the happiest efforts of Pantaloon: ‘We are bound to respect his feelings as a man and a butcher.’ Here the man and the butcher are bound up in one. Now, in Browning’s case, I separate the man from the butcher. I have nothing to say to him in his blue apron and steel by his side, but if I meet him in plain clothes I honour him as a gentleman.” And in 1885 he writes: “The Public, it would seem, is beginning to rouse itself to a perception of the unreliability of the Browningian school — I have seen several articles on that subject. How is it that it has never struck his partisans that the probability of one man being so infinitely superior to his contemporaries as to be totally unintelligible to them — is infinitely small?

“One thing appears to me certain in Browning, that all his performances are pure brain-work — whatever that may be worth — but as for the ‘divine heat of temperament,’ where is it? I can find nothing but the inextricably hard and the extravagantly fantastical. On such diet I cannot live.”

Nevertheless, it was always the future of Art, not its past, which stirred his interest, and a letter of his written in 1885, when he was seventy-eight, shows a youth and vitality of mind truly remarkable in one whose life had been so cloistered.

“There can never,” he says, “be a second Shakespeare, that is to say, given a man of equal Genius he cannot in this complex and analytical age of Literature embody himself in the metrical and dramatic form if his purpose is to ‘hold up the mirror to Nature, and to give the Time its form and pressure.’ The form of prose fiction is a vastly greater one, indeed it may be termed all-comprehensive, and admits of the introduction of lyric or epic verse, in all varieties, as well as the profoundest analysis of character and motive, and is susceptible of the highest range of eloquence and unrhythmical poetry, and whatever it may lose in metrical melody (which, however, is not greatly regarded in dramatic dialogue) it gains immeasurably in its other elements. All things considered, I am of opinion that if a man were endowed with such faculties as Shakespeare’s, they would be more freely and effectively exercised in prose fiction with its wider capabilities than when ‘cribbed, cabined, and confined’ in the trammels of verse.”

It may be that the very remoteness of his life was in part the cause of this lasting freshness and freedom of his mind. He lived so far from the world as to be almost entirely removed from any bias of self-interest — the most fruitful source of prejudice. Ambition played no part in his life.

“Once,” he wrote in 1888, “I used to have some ambition — that is when I was a boy at school — I verily believe that at that early age I exhausted the demoniacal passion which chains you to fixed purposes like a Prometheus and preys upon you like a Vulture. Though many great works have been accomplished under the spur of this (so-called) noble passion, think how much chaotic rubbish has been projected into Space and Time which ought to have been imprisoned to Eternity — how many heart-burnings, jealousies, and disappointments — how often the love of the Beautiful and True is entirely subordinated to that of mere distinction to be won at any cost. How seldom do we hear writers of the same school speak well of one another. Especially poisonous are poets, I think, wherever they apprehend a rival — Honey-suckers like the Bee, they know how to use their stings even while sipping the flowers. The unambitious man is at any rate free to use his eyes, to walk up to and contemplate in the pure clear air and solitude of his mountain-top the face and form of Nature, and like Turner a-fishing, see wonderful effects never to be come at by the hosts of those who get on (or off) by copying one another. I daresay you will disapprove all this and attribute it to indolent epicurism.

“Latterly since the supernatural and the Future Life, and its conditions ‘such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive,’ have occupied and absorbed my whole soul to the exclusion of almost every subject which the Gorillas of this world most delight in, whether scientific, political, or literary — I have been led to see what men in general consider a proper use of their stewardship, i.e. ruin of body and soul by inordinate superhuman struggles for supremacy — Samson-like heavings to upset the neighbour, or supplant him — carbonic acid-breathing creepings along the dark floors of stifling caverns such as may enable them to scrape together a preponderance of a certain mineral, etc. etc. — as the most lamentable examples of Phrenitis — arising simply from the ineradicable instinct — of Immortality it is true, but misplaced Immortality — Immortality in this life.”

The death of his wife in 1880 was a severe blow to him.

“In answer to your kind letters of sympathy,” he wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Brotherton, “I can say but little. Sorrow such as mine when it falls upon the aged is virtual paralysis, mental and bodily. I know not what I may do for the brief period remaining to me in this world. At present my daughter-in-law attends to household matters, and I still have the presence of children and grandchildren to remind me that I am not left entirely desolate. But my chief consolation is that the beloved of my youth and the friend of my age is already risen, and has cast off the burthen of her mortal cares and pains, and my only hope that, God willing, I may follow quickly.”

A great but less tremendous shock to him was the death in 1887 of his sister Emily, once the betrothed of Arthur Hallam. On this occasion he sent the following lines to his friend:

Farewell, dear sister, thou and I

Will meet no more beneath the sky:

But in the high world where thou art

Mind speaks to Mind, and Heart to Heart,

Not in faint wavering tones, but heard

As twin sweet notes that sound accord.

Thy dwelling in the Angel sphere

Looks forth on a sublimer whole,

Where all that thou dost see and hear

Is in true concord with thy soul —

A great harp of unnumbered strings

Answering to one voice that sings:

Where thousand blisses spring and fade

Swiftly, as in diviner dream,

And inward motions are portrayed

In outward shows that move with them:

After the midnight and dark river

No more to be o’erpast for ever.

Behold the lover of thy youth,

That spirit strong as Love and Truth,

Many a long year gone before,

Awaits thee on the sunny shore:

In that high world of endless wonder

Nor Space, nor Time can hold asunder

Twin souls — as Space and Time have done —

Whom kindest instincts orb in One.

It was inevitable that the later years of one so aged and so solitary should be more and more filled with the chronicle and anticipation of death. But he never sank into lethargy, as the following letter, written in his eighty-first year, shows:

My own sorrow is indeed continually revived by memories continually reawakened, not only by the comparatively recent occurrence of my own temporarily final separation from my best friend — but also by that bird’s-eye — so to speak — retrospect, which carries the imagination over lovely landscapes of the days of youth — out of the golden morning light of which emerge, in that unaccountable manner which is quite involuntary, even the most trivial circumstances — moments of no moment — yet somehow clothed in a more glittering light than the vast tracts drowned in the general splendour of the dawn, some tiny pinnacle that reflects the sun, some far off rillet that gushes out from the wayside.

Even when in his eighty-fourth year his sight began to fail him and the loss drove him still more back into his inner life, the old eagerness of mind remained, though finding a melancholy occupation in noting the changes to which age was daily subjecting his mental and physical constitution. The note of hope is, however, ineradicable:

An old man of my great age is already dead — old age being the only Death — and the faculties which I once possessed receive no impulse, as of old, for activity — no joyous inspiration. The intellect is cold and frozen like the mountain streams in Winter, a moonless midnight; and were it not for the increasing illumination of the immortal spirit which already beholds the dawn of a greater Day beyond the mountains, I should indeed be desolate, lost! For I am 84 years of age next June — and in looking back through my long life — it often seems to me like a dream — many movements, intellectual and physical, seem to me like impossibilities. When I see my little grandson Charlie skipping and hear him shouting and singing, and the light-limbed and light-hearted girls darting like living lightning down the staircase (which if I were to attempt to imitate I should undoubtedly break my neck), I say to myself, is it possible that I can ever have been like them? Alas! for old age. What can be more mournful than a retrospect of the days of childhood? But a truce to solemn thoughts — the Spring is come again, the leaves are unfolding, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, and surely, next to the human countenance, this is the most lovely emblem, the most beautiful representative material of inner spiritualities and the resurrection, and ought to have been so regarded since the dawn of Christianity; for as sure as Winter blossoms into Summer, the Winter of old age will spring into the Eternal Life. Fear not, hope all things! What a contrast to these consoling aspirations is presented in the touching fragment of the old Greek poet Moschus which no doubt expresses the scepticism of the ancient world — I give a free translation:

Aye, aye the garden mallows, mint and thyme

When they have wither’d in the winter clime,

After a little space do reappear,

And live again and see another year:

But we, the brave, the noble, and the wise,

When once for all pale Death hath closed our eyes,

Sink into dread oblivion dark and deep,

The everlasting, never-waking sleep.

With the approach of death he seemed to himself to undergo a kind of physical regeneration.

“Apropos to spiritual matters,” he writes in 1890, “I have had recently for several consecutive days some very strange experiences. One morning I awoke and seemed to have lost my natural memory. Objects daily presented to me for years seemed no longer familiar as of old — but as when a man after years of travel returning to his home and the chamber he formerly occupied takes some time and labour of thought to bring back to his recollection the whereabouts of objects once (as it were) instinctively known to him — I had the same difficulty in recovering my relations to my own surroundings. And this for days was supplemented by a strange sense of having been far away and conversant with wonderful things — movements and tumults — which only immeasurable distance deadened to my perception like great music borne away by the wind. Ever and anon there flashed up within me what I can only describe symbolically as Iridescences of feeling as when the prismatic colours of a rainbow succeed one another, or the coloured lights in Pyrotechnics cause objects in midnight darkness to assume their own hues. But all this, wonderful though it may seem, is not the only change that has come upon me — I am happy to say that simultaneously with these phenomena a revolution in my spiritual economy of far greater moment has, I believe, taken place. I have always prayed for that regeneration, or second birth (‘Thou must be born again,’ said the Lord to Nicodemus), to be shielded from selfhood — and as the divine answer to such prayers continually repeated, I can declare, without any self-delusion, that the answer has actually been a sensible change in the nature of my affections. Never have I felt towards those around me, such tender inclinations, such earnest desire to do them all possible good regardless of self-interest, such a spirit of forgiveness of any wrongs; and my earnest prayerful thankfulness for such inestimable benefits has been invariably acknowledged by that Voice from the Lord Himself by which He has repeatedly ratified to my spiritual ear His promise of blessing and the continuation thereof — and that ‘Thou hast nothing to fear, for I am with thee night and day, body and soul!’ Think of this! But for God’s sake do not attribute these statements of mine, which are comprehended in a period of many years, to self-delusion or self-righteousness. God knows, from whom nothing is hid, that I have never approached Him except in the spirit of profound humility and self-condemnation, and the answer has always been, ‘Thou hast nothing to fear. I am with thee.’”

As age settled upon him the violence of many of his views abated. His faith in Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism lost their hold on him and gave way to a more philosophic condition of mind. His activity, however, continued unabated. In 1890, after a silence of thirty-six years, he published his Isles of Greece, and the success of the volume encouraged him to give to the world two others, Daphne and other Poems in 1891, and Poems of the Day and Year (in which were included some of the verses contained in the volume of 1854) in 1898. In 1896 he left Jersey to join his eldest son, Captain Julius Tennyson, in whose house in Kensington he died on February 26, 1898.

It would be difficult to imagine two persons more strongly contrasted in life and character than Frederick and Charles. Charles (who was always Alfred’s favourite brother) had nothing of the powerful, erratic, tempestuous mind of his elder brother. One does not think of him, as FitzGerald did of Frederick, as a being born for the warmth and glow of the South, yet in appearance he was (like Alfred) far more Southern than the eldest brother. So Spanish were his swarthy complexion, brown eyes, and curly, dark hair, that Thackeray, meeting him in middle age, called him a “Velasquez tout craché.” Like Alfred, too, he had a magnificent deep bass voice; and even in dress the two brothers seem to have maintained their affinity, for Charles used to wear a soft felt hat and flowing black cloak much like those which the Millais portrait has identified with his brother, and these garments, with the addition of white cuffs, which he wore turned back over his coat sleeves, intensified the strangely foreign effect of his appearance. But the kinship of the two brothers extended beyond purely physical resemblance. They remained inseparable companions till Charles was ordained, and there was hardly a taste possessed by either which the other did not share. They read, played, and rambled together; both were extremely fond of dancing (one of Charles’s last Sonnets was “On a County Ball”) and were much sought after as partners at the balls of their countryside. The Poems by Two Brothers, which were almost entirely the work of Alfred and Charles, while displaying the differing qualities of each, were a joint production, the fruit of common reading and common enthusiasm. Both the brothers were regarded by their contemporaries at Cambridge as destined to achieve poetical greatness. Both possessed the unwearying patience of the craftsman, the same devotion to science and the same power of close and loving observation. Charles, however, lacked the fire and energy of temperament which made Frederick’s character remarkable and was to a great extent shared by Alfred. With all Alfred’s sensitiveness and shrinking from society, he had little of that sympathetic and passionate interest in the hopes and achievements of their age which drove the younger brother ever more and more into public life.

Charles Tennyson-Turner.

Nothing quieter and less eventful than Charles Tennyson’s life can well be imagined. He was ordained in 1835 (three years after taking his degree) and immediately obtained a Curacy at Tealby. In the same year he became Vicar of Grasby, a small village in the Lincolnshire wolds between Caistor and Brigg.

In the following year he married Louisa Sellwood, whose sister was to become Alfred’s wife, and from that time until just before his death on April 25, 1879, his life, save for an occasional holiday and too frequent lapses from health, knew little variation. Like all the Tennysons, Charles was of a nervous temperament, and this condition often induced acute suffering. So severe indeed was his struggle with this disorder and the still more perilous condition which resulted from it that at one time, soon after his marriage, he was compelled to leave his parish for some months in search of strength. Throughout these trying interludes the devotion of his wife, a woman of great humour and power of mind and character, was of the utmost service to him. Indeed, his debt to her was great at all times of his life. She would often act almost as a curate to him in the straggling parish, tirelessly visiting and nursing the sick (a duty which they both unflinchingly observed even in the epidemics of small-pox which were then frequent), keeping all his accounts, both personal and parochial, and even sometimes writing his sermons. The devotion of the pair was remarkable, retaining a certain youthful ardour to the end, and when Charles died his wife was carried to the grave within a month.

As early as 1830, Charles had published a small volume of sonnets, which (as is well known) earned the hearty commendation of Coleridge and Leigh Hunt. As in the case of Frederick, however, there followed a prolonged silence, the next volume not making its appearance till 1864; others followed in 1868 and 1873, and all were collected and republished, with a sage, benevolent, and affectionate Introduction by his friend James Spedding, in 1880. The reason for this long silence was a slightly different one from that which was responsible for Frederick’s intermission. In both cases, no doubt, the feeling that it would be impertinent for another person of the name of Tennyson to put his work before the public had some influence. In Charles’s case, however, there were further considerations. The violent shock which his health sustained by that prolonged early illness and his subsequent troubles to some extent numbed his powers. “The edge of thought was blunted by the stress of the hard world,” and the same cause probably increased his natural modesty till it became almost morbid. He was perpetually haunted by the fear that his poetry was not original, and the only word of satisfaction which Spedding ever heard him use of any of his sonnets was with regard to one which owed its origin to a period of deep affliction, of which the poet said that he thought it was good because he knew it to be true. Whatever the cause, however, during these thirty-four years Charles Turner published nothing and, indeed, hardly even wrote anything. Spedding, in his Introduction, has collected a few fragments which were gathered from the poet’s notebooks, and show that his mind still occasionally noted a stray simile or description, doubtless intended to be subsequently worked up into a poem. A few of these are in his happiest manner. One may quote the following picture of goldfish in a glass bowl:

As though King Midas did the surface touch,

Constraining the clear water to their change

With shooting motions and quick trails of light.

Now a rich girth and then a narrow gleam,

And now a shaft and now a sheet of gold.

and the lines on the opening of the tomb of Charlemagne:

They rove the marble where the ancient King,

Like one forspent with sacred study sate,

Robed like a King, but as a scholar pale.

His mind, too, was always working in the same direction on his rambles about the countryside, and he would sometimes, when walking with Agnes Weld, “the little, ambling, stile-clearing niece,” who was often his guest, hit on some phrase which took his fancy and was imparted to his companion, who remembers his description of the slanting light-bars on a cloudy day as “the oars of the golden Galley of the sun,” and many another phrase as happy as any of the homely and perfect touches in his published works.

But though these years were barren of actual output, they were of value in many ways, and not the least as a period of incubation, for many a phrase or idea first formed in them was subsequently perfected and published. The intermission, too, left him freer to study and to labour among his parishioners. At the beginning and end of his life, poetry occupied a great deal of his time, for each of his sonnets, in spite of their apparent facility, was the result of much toil. He would work at the same lines morning after morning, and read the results aloud to his wife, or niece, or other companion after dinner, the same poem going through a great succession of forms. A letter to Miss Weld, in answer to some suggestion of a subject connected with the then recent excavations at Mycenae, shows his method of work and something of the manifold interests of his secluded life:

“I never can undertake to work to order,” he writes, “though the order comes from the dearest of customers. If I get a good hold of that poor, noble, nodding head I will put him on board of a respectable sonnet and try to save his memory from drowning.... Mycenae is a very exciting subject, but I have Kelsey Moor Chapel to write on — a commission from Mrs. Townsend ... and a poor dead dog haunts me” (see Sonnet 97 — Collected Edition).

During these barren years Charles Turner’s devotion to his parochial work was intense. Grasby was a somewhat barbarous village when he obtained the living. Belief in witchcraft was still rife, and one of the popular charms against its influence was to cut a sheep in half, put the body on a scarlet cloth, and walk between the pieces. Such religion as there was among the poor was of a rather harsh spirit, as may be seen from an anecdote preserved by Miss Weld of an old cottager, who, hearing Mrs. Turner mention the name of Hobbes, exclaimed to his wife: “Why, loovey, that’s the graate Hobbes that’s in hell!” The climate, too, was as harsh as the character of the people, for the village stands high and bleak. Friends remember Louisa Turner going about her ministrations in clogs, and during one particularly sharp winter she writes: “I am in a castle now of double cotton wool petticoat and thick baize drawers and waistcoat.” The Turners soon found it necessary to leave the house at Caistor, three miles off, where Sam Turner, Charles’s uncle, the preceding vicar, had lived, for the distance made any real intimacy with the people impossible. Charles had inherited a small property from his uncle (the event was the occasion of his change of name), and this made it possible for him to build a new vicarage and to further enrich the village with new schools and a new church. He also took the very practical step of buying the village inn and putting it in charge of a reliable servant, a scheme which, for a time at least, had excellent effects on the temperance of the inhabitants.

There were no children of the marriage, but the pair adopted the children of the whole village, opening their house and grounds to them for Christmas trees and summer festivities. Children and animals were always devoted to Charles Turner, as he to them. He was, as the villagers said, “Strangen gone upon birds and things.” He never shot after that tragedy of the swallow which he never forgot (see Sonnet 200), and birds of every kind flocked to him daily as he fed them on his lawn. Flowers and trees, too, he loved almost as keenly as he did children. He quarrelled seriously with one of his curates whom he found exorcising the flowers, which were to be used for church decoration, by means of the service contained in the Directorium Anglicanum, maintaining stoutly that if any spirits dwelt in flowers they must be angels and not devils. His garden was a jungle of old-fashioned flowers, golden-rod, sweet-william, convolvulus, and rose of Sharon; figs and apricots ripened on his walls, and the house was covered with roses, honeysuckle, white clematis, and blue ceanothus. The grounds, too, boasted some fine timber, which Charles never would allow to be pruned or cut, even permitting the willow-props to outgrow and destroy the rose trees (Sonnet 270), and once, when it was proposed to fell some large trees within sight of his house, he threatened to throw up his living and leave Grasby.

In this peaceful world Charles found plenty to occupy his time. He saw little of society except when Alfred or Frederick, or one of his old college friends, came to visit him, and the resources of the neighbourhood were strained to the utmost to afford them entertainment. He found, however, a congenial companion in Mr. Townsend, a neighbouring clergyman of wide culture much interested in science. And the care of his parish occupied the greater part of his time. Theology, too, was a favourite study with him. He began life as an Evangelical, but in later years tended (partly under the influence of his wife, who would often, on the vigil of a saint, spend half the night on her knees) more and more towards the High Church.

“I have been reading,” he wrote to Alfred in 1865, “Pusey’s Daniel the Prophet, which (thank God) completely — as I think and as very many will think with me — disposes of the rickety and crotchety arguments of those who vainly thought they had found a ποῦ στῶ in him whereby to upheave all prophecy and miracle. It is a noble book from its learning and its logic. I knew he was a holy and noble-minded and erudite man, but for some reason I had not credited him with such ‘act offence’ and powers of righteous satire.... I have never in my old desultory reading days found such a charm and interest as in the study of the Queen Science, as Trench calls Theology, and those who assume that they will find there no food for the mature reason will be surprised at its large provision for the intellect and rich satisfaction of the highest imagination. It is reading round about a subject and not the subject itself which damages the intellect so much. Maurice said the study of the Prophets had saved him from the Tyranny of books.”

He and his wife also spent much time in the study of Italian, in which they were assisted by their occasional visits to and from the Frederick Tennysons. Charles’s Italian Grammar is annotated with numberless quaint rhymes made to fix its rules in his memory. On one page one finds in his wonderfully neat fluent hand (strangely like those of Frederick and Alfred):

From use of the following is no ban,

“The fair of the fair is Mistress Ann”

or “Smith’s a learned, learned man”

In English or Italian,

Though the English use is far less common

Speaking of Doctor or fine woman.

On another:

Say profeta, profeti

Or else I shall bate ye.

On another a couplet which has all the subtle romance of Edward Lear:

Rare and changeless, firm and few,

Are the Italian nouns in U.

The life at Grasby Vicarage was of the simplest. The hall-floor rattled with loose tiles, the furniture was reduced to the barest necessities. Breakfast and lunch were movable feasts, for Charles had all a poet’s carelessness of time, lingering over morning prayers while his agonized guest saw the bacon cooling to the consistency of marble before his eyes, and prolonging his mid-day walk to such distances in the study of flower and bird and butterfly that it sometimes took a half-hour’s tolling of the outdoor bell to recall him. The cook (who in times of scarcity was at the service of the whole village) must have led a life of irritation, yet servants stayed long at the Vicarage.

This sweet, even life knew little variety. The days of quiet service filled the year, and were succeeded by evenings no less quiet in the book-lined study, or, if the season were warm, in the hayfield near the house, where husband and wife would sit reading and talking to each other till the evening glow died away and left the haycocks and the steep side of the wold, which backed the red-brick Vicarage, gray and cold and silent.

Troubles they had beyond the recurrent anxiety for Charles’s health. A rascally agent, a man of great plausibility and charm of manner, pillaged them for some years, and they were only able to recover a portion of his plunderings (most of which Charles subsequently devoted to the repair of the church) after a great deal of trouble. It is characteristic that in after years they always spoke of this gentleman as though he had been the person who had suffered most in the transaction and deserved most pity. Charles was indeed possessed of an almost saintly patience, and no crisis could ever wring from him any ejaculation more forcible than a half-humorous “I wish we were all in heaven.” His wife’s letters occasionally give us glimpses of days when the wish must often have been upon his lips, as when he was reluctantly compelled to join in a Harvest-Festival gathering in another parish. First of all we read how “poor Cubbie” (his wife’s pet name for him) “was caught and dressed in a surplice which hung about him like a clothes bag.” “Then he must join in a procession, with much singing and chanting, and then read the lessons in spite of a bad cold and hoarseness, and finally at the end of the day, in the full hubbub of a garden party, at which all the neighbourhood were present in their finery (poor Cubbie!), a cannon, which had been charged with blank cartridge for the occasion, went off unexpectedly and knocked down three boys who were standing in front of it. The boys, whose clothes were torn to rags and their faces burnt black, shrieked as though in the death agony, women fainted and men stampeded — and Cubbie ‘wished we were all in heaven.’”

But Charles Turner’s poems are, after all, the best mirror of his life. With Frederick it is otherwise. In spite of his great lyric gift, Frederick lacked the persistence and enthusiasm necessary for full self-expression. The want of proportion, which gave his ardent, erratic personality so much charm, prevented his longer poems being really successful. In spite of much beauty of phrase and richness of feeling, they lack architecture and have not sufficient unity to make them vital. Had he continued to work at lyrical writing after his first volume, he might have avoided falling into the desultory method, which marred his later work, and left a really large body of first-class poetry.

In the best of Charles’s Sonnets, in all, that is, which spring from his daily experience, there breathes a spirit perpetually quickened by the beauty and holiness of common life and common things, an imagination which saw a life and a purpose not only in the ways of men and of all wild creatures and growing things, but in the half-human voice of the buoy-bell ringing on the shoals, the sad imprisoned heart-beat of the water-ram in the little wood-girt field, the welcome of the sunbeam in the copse running through the yielding shade to meet the wanderer, in the “mystic stair” of the steam thrashing-machine:

Accepting our full harvests like a God

With clouds about his shoulders.

and the “mute claim” of the old rocking-horse:

In the dim window where disused, he stands

While o’er him breaks the flickering limewalks’ shade;

No provender, no mate, no groom has he —

His stall and pasture is your memory.

But in spite of the intimate correspondence between Charles Turner’s life and his art, an intimacy which only the seclusion of that life made possible, one cannot help regretting that fortune did not force upon him some calling which would have afforded a progressive stimulus to his creative powers. These years of devotion amongst the bleak hill-sides and flowery dingles of his remote parish did for him what a life of ease and sunshine did for Frederick. Both had great talents, but neither the tender felicity of Charles nor Frederick’s heart of cloud and fire ever came to full development. They represent two extremes of the Tennyson temperament, the mean and perfection of which is found in Alfred. In the elder the lyric fury, in the younger the craftsman’s humility of the more perfect poet were developed to excess, and both suffered for the affection and respect in which they held him whom they knew to be their master. Yet each has left himself a monument, some part at least of which is worthy to rank with the more complete achievement of their younger brother.

TENNYSON ON HIS CAMBRIDGE FRIENDS

A. H. H. Obiit 1833.

ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM

I past beside the reverend walls

In which of old I wore the gown;

I roved at random thro’ the town,

And saw the tumult of the halls;

And heard once more in college fanes

The storm their high-built organs make,

And thunder-music, rolling, shake

The prophet blazon’d on the panes;

And caught once more the distant shout,

The measured pulse of racing oars

Among the willows; paced the shores

And many a bridge, and all about

The same gray flats again, and felt

The same, but not the same; and last

Up that long walk of limes I past

To see the rooms in which he dwelt.

Another name was on the door:

I linger’d; all within was noise

Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys

That crash’d the glass and beat the floor;

Where once we held debate, a band

Of youthful friends, on mind and art,

And labour, and the changing mart,

And all the framework of the land;

When one would aim an arrow fair,

But send it slackly from the string;

And one would pierce an outer ring,

And one an inner, here and there;

And last the master-bowman, he,

Would cleave the mark. A willing ear

We lent him. Who, but hung to hear

The rapt oration flowing free

From point to point, with power and grace

And music in the bounds of law,

To those conclusions when we saw

The God within him light his face,

And seem to lift the form, and glow

In azure orbits heavenly-wise;

And over those ethereal eyes

The bar of Michael Angelo.

TO JAMES SPEDDING

ON THE DEATH OF HIS BROTHER

The wind, that beats the mountain, blows

More softly round the open wold,

And gently comes the world to those

That are cast in gentle mould.

And me this knowledge bolder made,

Or else I had not dared to flow

In these words toward you, and invade

Even with a verse your holy woe.

‘Tis strange that those we lean on most,

Those in whose laps our limbs are nursed,

Fall into shadow, soonest lost:

Those we love first are taken first.

God gives us love. Something to love

He lends us; but, when love is grown

To ripeness, that on which it throve

Falls off, and love is left alone.

This is the curse of time. Alas!

In grief I am not all unlearn’d;

Once thro’ mine own doors Death did pass;

One went, who never hath return’d.

He will not smile — not speak to me

Once more. Two years his chair is seen

Empty before us. That was he

Without whose life I had not been.

Your loss is rarer; for this star

Rose with you thro’ a little arc

Of heaven, nor having wander’d far

Shot on the sudden into dark.

I knew your brother; his mute dust

I honour and his living worth:

A man more pure and bold and just

Was never born into the earth.

I have not look’d upon you nigh,

Since that dear soul hath fall’n asleep.

Great Nature is more wise than I:

I will not tell you not to weep.

And tho’ mine own eyes fill with dew,

Drawn from the spirit thro’ the brain,

I will not even preach to you,

“Weep, weeping dulls the inward pain.”

Let Grief be her own mistress still.

She loveth her own anguish deep

More than much pleasure. Let her will

Be done — to weep or not to weep.

I will not say, “God’s ordinance

Of Death is blown in every wind”;

For that is not a common chance

That takes away a noble mind.

His memory long will live alone

In all our hearts, as mournful light

That broods above the fallen sun,

And dwells in heaven half the night.

Vain solace! Memory standing near

Cast down her eyes, and in her throat

Her voice seem’d distant, and a tear

Dropt on the letters as I wrote.

I wrote I know not what. In truth,

How should I soothe you anyway,

Who miss the brother of your youth?

Yet something I did wish to say:

For he too was a friend to me:

Both are my friends, and my true breast

Bleedeth for both; yet it may be

That only silence suiteth best.

Words weaker than your grief would make

Grief more. ‘Twere better I should cease

Although myself could almost take

The place of him that sleeps in peace.

Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace:

Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,

While the stars burn, the moons increase,

And the great ages onward roll.

Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet.

Nothing comes to thee new or strange.

Sleep full of rest from head to feet;

Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.

TO EDWARD FITZGERALD

(Dedication of “Tiresias,” written in 1882)

Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange,

Where once I tarried for a while,

Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,

And greet it with a kindly smile;

Whom yet I see as there you sit

Beneath your sheltering garden-tree,

And while your doves about you flit,

And plant on shoulder, hand and knee,

Or on your head their rosy feet,

As if they knew your diet spares

Whatever moved in that full sheet

Let down to Peter at his prayers;

Who live on milk and meal and grass;

And once for ten long weeks I tried

Your table of Pythagoras,

And seem’d at first “a thing enskied”

(As Shakespeare has it) airy-light

To float above the ways of men,

Then fell from that half-spiritual height

Chill’d, till I tasted flesh again

One night when earth was winter-black,

And all the heavens flash’d in frost;

And on me, half-asleep, came back

That wholesome heat the blood had lost,

And set me climbing icy capes

And glaciers, over which there roll’d

To meet me long-arm’d vines with grapes

Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold

Without, and warmth within me, wrought

To mould the dream; but none can say

That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought,

Who reads your golden Eastern lay,

Than which I know no version done

In English more divinely well;

A planet equal to the sun

Which cast it, that large infidel

Your Omar; and your Omar drew

Full-handed plaudits from our best

In modern letters, and from two,

Old friends outvaluing all the rest,

Two voices heard on earth no more;

But we old friends are still alive,

And I am nearing seventy-four,

While you have touch’d at seventy-five,

And so I send a birthday line

Of greeting; and my son, who dipt

In some forgotten book of mine

With sallow scraps of manuscript,

And dating many a year ago,

Has hit on this, which you will take

My Fitz, and welcome, as I know

Less for its own than for the sake

Of one recalling gracious times,

When, in our younger London days,

You found some merit in my rhymes,

And I more pleasure in your praise.

EPILOGUE AT END OF “TIRESIAS”

“One height and one far-shining fire”

And while I fancied that my friend

For this brief idyll would require

A less diffuse and opulent end,

And would defend his judgment well,

If I should deem it over nice —

The tolling of his funeral bell

Broke on my Pagan Paradise,

And mixt the dream of classic times

And all the phantoms of the dream,

With present grief, and made the rhymes,

That miss’d his living welcome, seem

Like would-be guests an hour too late,

Who down the highway moving on

With easy laughter find the gate

Is bolted, and the master gone.

Gone into darkness, that full light

Of friendship! past, in sleep, away

By night, into the deeper night!

The deeper night? A clearer day

Than our poor twilight dawn on earth —

If night, what barren toil to be!

What life, so maim’d by night, were worth

Our living out? Not mine to me

Remembering all the golden hours

Now silent, and so many dead,

And him the last; and laying flowers,

This wreath, above his honour’d head,

And praying that, when I from hence

Shall fade with him into the unknown,

My close of earth’s experience

May prove as peaceful as his own.

TO JOHN MITCHELL KEMBLE

My hope and heart is with thee — thou wilt be

A latter Luther, and a soldier-priest

To scare church-harpies from the master’s feast;

Our dusted velvets have much need of thee:

Thou art no sabbath-drawler of old saws,

Distill’d from some worm-canker’d homily;

But spurr’d at heart with fieriest energy

To embattail and to wall about thy cause

With iron-worded proof, hating to hark

The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone

Half God’s good sabbath, while the worn-out clerk

Brow-beats his desk below. Thou from a throne

Mounted in heaven wilt shoot into the dark

Arrows of lightnings. I will stand and mark.

TO J. W. BLAKESLEY

AFTERWARDS DEAN OF LINCOLN

I

Clear-headed friend, whose joyful scorn,

Edged with sharp laughter, cuts atwain

The knots that tangle human creeds,

The wounding cords that bind and strain

The heart until it bleeds,

Ray-fringed eyelids of the morn

Roof not a glance so keen as thine:

If aught of prophecy be mine,

Thou wilt not live in vain.

II

Low-cowering shall the Sophist sit;

Falsehood shall bare her plaited brow:

Fair-fronted Truth shall droop not now

With shrilling shafts of subtle wit.

Nor martyr-flames, nor trenchant swords

Can do away that ancient lie;

A gentler death shall Falsehood die,

Shot thro’ and thro’ with cunning words.

III

Weak Truth a-leaning on her crutch,

Wan, wasted Truth in her utmost need,

Thy kingly intellect shall feed,

Until she be an athlete bold,

And weary with a finger’s touch

Those writhed limbs of lightning speed;

Like that strange angel which of old,

Until the breaking of the light,

Wrestled with wandering Israel,

Past Yabbok brook the livelong night,

And heaven’s mazed signs stood still

In the dim tract of Penuel.

TO R. C. TRENCH

AFTERWARDS ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN

(Dedication of “The Palace of Art”)

I send you here a sort of allegory,

(For you will understand it) of a soul,

A sinful soul possess’d of many gifts,

A spacious garden full of flowering weeds,

A glorious Devil, large in heart and brain,

That did love Beauty only, (Beauty seen

In all varieties of mould and mind)

And Knowledge for its beauty; or if Good,

Good only for its beauty, seeing not

That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge, are three sisters

That doat upon each other, friends to man,

Living together under the same roof,

And never can be sunder’d without tears.

And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be

Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie

Howling in outer darkness. Not for this

Was common clay ta’en from the common earth

Moulded by God, and temper’d with the tears

Of angels to the perfect shape of man.

TO THE REV. W. H. BROOKFIELD

Brooks, for they call’d you so that knew you best,

Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes,

How oft we two have heard St. Mary’s chimes!

How oft the Cantab supper, host and guest,

Would echo helpless laughter to your jest!

How oft with him we paced that walk of limes,

Him, the lost light of those dawn-golden times,

Who loved you well! Now both are gone to rest.

You man of humorous-melancholy mark,

Dead of some inward agony — is it so?

Our kindlier, trustier, Jaques, past away!

I cannot laud this life, it looks so dark:

Σκιᾶς ὄναρ — dream of a shadow, go —

God bless you. I shall join you in a day.

TO EDMUND LUSHINGTON

ON HIS MARRIAGE WITH CECILIA TENNYSON

O true and tried, so well and long,

Demand not thou a marriage lay;

In that it is thy marriage day

Is music more than any song.

Nor have I felt so much of bliss

Since first he told me that he loved

A daughter of our house; nor proved

Since that dark day a day like this;

Tho’ I since then have number’d o’er

Some thrice three years: they went and came,

Remade the blood and changed the frame,

And yet is love not less, but more;

No longer caring to embalm

In dying songs a dead regret,

But like a statue solid-set,

And moulded in colossal calm.

Regret is dead, but love is more

Than in the summers that are flown,

For I myself with these have grown

To something greater than before;

Which makes appear the songs I made

As echoes out of weaker times,

As half but idle brawling rhymes,

The sport of random sun and shade.

But where is she, the bridal flower,

That must be made a wife ere noon?

She enters, glowing like the moon

Of Eden on its bridal bower:

On me she bends her blissful eyes

And then on thee; they meet thy look

And brighten like the star that shook

Betwixt the palms of paradise.

O when her life was yet in bud,

He too foretold the perfect rose.

For thee she grew, for thee she grows

For ever, and as fair as good.

And thou art worthy; full of power;

As gentle; liberal-minded, great,

Consistent; wearing all that weight

Of learning lightly like a flower.

But now set out: the noon is near,

And I must give away the bride;

She fears not, or with thee beside

And me behind her, will not fear.

For I that danced her on my knee,

And watch’d her on her nurse’s arm,

That shielded all her life from harm

At last must part with her to thee;

Now waiting to be made a wife,

Her feet, my darling, on the dead;

Their pensive tablets round her head,

And the most living words of life

Breathed in her ear. The ring is on,

The “wilt thou” answer’d, and again

The “wilt thou” ask’d, till out of twain

Her sweet “I will” has made you one.

Now sign your names, which shall be read,

Mute symbols of a joyful morn,

By village eyes as yet unborn;

The names are sign’d, and overhead

Begins the clash and clang that tells

The joy to every wandering breeze;

The blind wall rocks, and on the trees

The dead leaf trembles to the bells.

O happy hour, and happier hours

Await them. Many a merry face

Salutes them — maidens of the place,

That pelt us in the porch with flowers.

O happy hour, behold the bride

With him to whom her hand I gave.

They leave the porch, they pass the grave

That has to-day its sunny side.

To-day the grave is bright for me,

For them the light of life increased,

Who stay to share the morning feast,

Who rest to-night beside the sea.

Let all my genial spirits advance

To meet and greet a whiter sun;

My drooping memory will not shun

The foaming grape of eastern France.

It circles round, and fancy plays,

And hearts are warm’d and faces bloom,

As drinking health to bride and groom

We wish them store of happy days.

Nor count me all to blame if I

Conjecture of a stiller guest,

Perchance, perchance, among the rest,

And, tho’ in silence, wishing joy.

But they must go, the time draws on,

And those white-favour’d horses wait;

They rise, but linger; it is late;

Farewell, we kiss, and they are gone.

A shade falls on us like the dark

From little cloudlets on the grass,

But sweeps away as out we pass

To range the woods, to roam the park,

Discussing how their courtship grew,

And talk of others that are wed,

And how she look’d, and what he said,

And back we come at fall of dew.

Again the feast, the speech, the glee,

The shade of passing thought, the wealth

Of words and wit, the double health,

The crowning cup, the three-times-three,

And last the dance; — till I retire:

Dumb is that tower which spake so loud,

And high in heaven the streaming cloud,

And on the downs a rising fire:

And rise, O moon, from yonder down,

Till over down and over dale

All night the shining vapour sail

And pass the silent-lighted town,

The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,

And catch at every mountain head,

And o’er the friths that branch and spread

Their sleeping silver thro’ the hills;

And touch with shade the bridal doors,

With tender gloom the roof, the wall;

And breaking let the splendour fall

To spangle all the happy shores

By which they rest, and ocean sounds,

And, star and system rolling past,

A soul shall draw from out the vast

And strike his being into bounds,

And, moved thro’ life of lower phase,

Result in man, be born and think,

And act and love, a closer link

Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look

On knowledge; under whose command

Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand

Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,

For all we thought and loved and did,

And hoped, and suffer’d, is but seed

Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod

This planet, was a noble type

Appearing ere the times were ripe,

That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

CHARLES TENNYSON-TURNER

Midnight, June 30, 1879

I

Midnight — in no midsummer tune

The breakers lash the shores:

The cuckoo of a joyless June

Is calling out of doors:

And thou hast vanish’d from thine own

To that which looks like rest,

True brother, only to be known

By those who love thee best.

II

Midnight — and joyless June gone by,

And from the deluged park

The cuckoo of a worse July

Is calling thro’ the dark:

But thou art silent underground,

And o’er thee streams the rain,

True poet, surely to be found

When Truth is found again.

III

And, now to these unsummer’d skies

The summer bird is still,

Far off a phantom cuckoo cries

From out a phantom hill;

And thro’ this midnight breaks the sun

Of sixty years away,

The light of days when life begun,

The days that seem to-day,

When all my griefs were shared with thee,

As all my hopes were thine —

As all thou wert was one with me,

May all thou art be mine!

Edmund Lushington (Who married Cecilia Tennyson, and was Professor of Greek in the University of Glasgow).

TENNYSON AND LUSHINGTON by Sir Henry Craik, K.C.B., M.P.

Amongst the group of men attached to Lord Tennyson by bonds of early and life-long friendship, and of reverent affection, there is none in whose case the tie is surrounded with more of peculiar interest than Edmund Lushington. Those who in later years were privileged to know the Poet’s brother-in-law, and learned to appreciate his character, could well understand the closeness of the sympathy between them.

Edmund Law Lushington was the son of Edmund Henry Lushington, who at one time held important office in Ceylon. The eldest of four gifted brothers, Edmund was born on the 10th of January 1811. The family house was, at first, at Hanwell, from which, some years later, they moved to Park House, near Maidstone. That continued to be the home to which Edmund Lushington returned at every break in his work at Glasgow, and was his permanent residence from his retirement in 1875 until his death on the 13th of July 1893. Young Lushington went to Charterhouse School, and there — as afterwards for a time at Trinity — he had Thackeray as his contemporary. To the friendship thus early begun Thackeray, in long after years, paid a gracious tribute in The Virginians, where he cites the Professor at Glasgow and one at Cambridge (W. H. Thompson) as scholars who could more than hold their own against the great names of older days.

As his junior at Trinity, Lushington had at first no acquaintance with Tennyson, and he has himself told us how he first came to know him by sight, when Arthur Hallam declaimed his prize essay in the College Chapel, and Tennyson sat on the bench just below listening intently to the words of his friend. Already Tennyson’s name was well known in the University; many of his poems were handed about in manuscript, and the rank to which they were entitled was a topic of discussion in College societies. It was only after two years at Cambridge that Lushington’s friendship with Tennyson began, and as joint members of the “Apostles’” Society they were thrown into close intercourse. In 1832 Lushington was Senior Classic in a notable list, which contained also the names of Shilleto, the famous coach; Alford, afterwards Dean of Canterbury and Biblical commentator; and William Hepworth Thompson, afterwards Master of Trinity. Six years later, in 1838, he was chosen as Professor of Greek in Glasgow from a field which comprised competitors so notable as Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, and Archibald Campbell Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. As bearing on this we may quote — as a specimen of his quaint and kindly humour — a letter which Lushington wrote to Tennyson from Addington Park, where he was staying on a visit to the Archbishop on October 13, 1880:

On Monday there came on a visit Lord Sherbrooke (R. Lowe).... It was good that yesterday morning one pony chaise held three men who, forty-two years ago, were regarded as rival candidates for the Greek Chair at Glasgow, whereby you will at once admit the cogency of the argument that if I had not become Greek Professor I should probably have been either Archbishop of Canterbury or Chancellor of the Exchequer — possibly both, as no doubt in old times the same back has borne both offices.

This appointment, which banished young Lushington from all the scenes of his early days, did not break the friendship with Tennyson, which had quickly ripened into closest intimacy. In 1840 Tennyson came to visit at Park House, — still Lushington’s home during the long summer vacation, — and in 1842 he was present at that festival of the Maidstone Institute which is described in the opening verses of “The Princess.” The same summer saw the bond drawn tighter by the marriage of Lushington to the Poet’s youngest and best-loved sister, Cecilia. It is that marriage which is acclaimed in immortal words in the Epilogue to “In Memoriam,” and the tribute there paid to the bridegroom is one which comes home to all who knew him, as a faithful epitome of his personality:

And thou art worthy; full of power;

As gentle, liberal-minded, great,

Consistent; wearing all that weight

Of learning lightly like a flower.

The marriage became one link more in that enduring friendship. Those who knew Mrs. Lushington in later years — when jet-black hair and brilliant clearness of complexion were still marvellously preserved — can easily picture her earlier beauty, which must have had much of that “profile like that on a coin” — which, we are told, was characteristic of Emily, the betrothed of Arthur Hallam. Mrs. Lushington had a fine contralto voice, with something of the music that one felt in the Poet’s rich tones. She was a charming and even a brilliant companion, and, when in good health, enjoyed society. But Glasgow College — as it was then generally called, amidst the murky surroundings of its old site, close to the reeking slums of the New Vennel — was an abode little fitted for one accustomed to warmer suns and more congenial scenes. Mrs. Lushington’s health was grievously broken, and the northern chills and fogs told heavily on her spirits. She could rarely join her husband at Glasgow, and it became necessary for him, during the session which lasted through the six winter months, to take a house in Edinburgh and rejoin his wife only for week-ends. Attached as Lushington was to his home and his family, the burden of ill-health that lay heavily on his household was a grievous one. It caused him much anxiety. Long pain often racked the nerves and dulled the bright spirit of his wife; his only son died after a long and painful illness, and took the light from his life; a daughter followed that son to the grave; and his brother Henry, whose brilliant poetic gifts had been fully proved in the volume of poems entitled Points of War, which he wrote in conjunction with his brother Franklin, died at Paris in the fulness of his powers. He learned, as he writes in one of his letters to Tennyson, that “the roots of love and sorrow are verily twined together abysmally deep.” But never once, in all his letters, or in any of his views of his fellow-men, did grief or sorrow drive him into bitterness or cynicism, or make him bate a jot of his calm and reverent fortitude or of his deep and generous charity to his fellow-men.

Throughout that long life, sustained by great thoughts, enriched by wide and varied learning, and blessed by ties of closest affection, Lushington preserved consistently the ideals of the early days, and remained to the last the same strong yet gentle friend, at once generous in admiration and judicial in criticism, that he had been when Tennyson drew his portrait in those immortal lines. We know what were the interests and tastes of these early days. Dean Bradley, in his reminiscences of visits to Park House in 1841 and 1842, tells us how the brothers, and especially the Professor—”Uncle Edmund” — seemed as much at home in the language of the Greek dramatists as if it was their native tongue; and the present writer remembers how, fifty years later, he heard Lord Tennyson recall the quotation from the Ecclesiazousae, by which one or other of the brothers, on an occasion at Park House which must have been almost contemporaneous with the Dean’s reminiscences, marked the propensity of the ladies of the party to assiduous attendance at Church. Dean Bradley remarks how remote was their outlook on the world from that of the Oxford of his time, dominated by the Tractarian movement. Tolerance, breadth of view, balanced judgment, and deep reverence for all that was noblest in human thought and achievement — these gave the keynote to their minds and energies. Partisanship, sectarian controversy, ecclesiastical disputes, seemed to belong to an alien world.

To those who knew him as Professor at Glasgow the secret of Lushington’s influence was not far to seek. He came there into surroundings singularly unlike those of his earlier days, and with little to compensate in their grimy aspect for the beauty of his home and the hallowed associations of Trinity. It was not long before he had attuned himself to the scene of his new work, and gathered about him a circle of cherished friends, and had won the respect and regard of the great body of these Scottish students drawn from every class. For those who were touched by his enthusiastic love of the Greek language and its literature, his influence was something far deeper. He made no stirring appeals, and followed no startling methods. His perfect courtesy, combined with a firmness which needed no emphasis of manner to assert itself, sufficed to maintain absolute order amongst those large classes whose traditions made them not always amenable to discipline. But for those to whom his teaching was something of an inspiration, there was much more in his personality than this. Consummate dignity, combined with absolute simplicity of manner, a voice rich and melodious in tone, a diction graceful and harmonious but never studied or artificial — these, with a massive head and features of almost ideal beauty, made him a figure in the life of the College, deepened the impression of his calm and reverent enthusiasm for all that was noblest in thought and language, and gave to his influence an abiding force throughout the lifetime of his pupils. He offered no ready intimacy, and sought to form no following. But his words, few and well chosen, made themselves felt as pure gold, and a sentence of praise or of sympathy sank into the heart, and brought to life and work something that stirred reverence and enthusiasm. His work planted its root deeply, and sought for no outward recognition. It was only after his long career at Glasgow ended by his retirement in 1875 that what he had achieved in reviving an ideal of Greek scholarship was felt; and it was abiding enough to make him the choice of the students for an honour, rarely accorded to a former Professor — that of election as Lord Rector of the University in 1884. He pursued the even tenor of his way with no thought of self-aggrandizement; only slowly did that absolute modesty, linked with unassailable dignity, make itself felt as a power, radiating into the hearts of others his own illuminating enthusiasm for the ideals of noblest literature.

No poet could have had, bound to him by ties of closest affection, a critic more sympathetic, more reverent, and withal, more faithful in his appreciation. In the genius of Tennyson, he found the central joy and pride of his life; but his judgment was the more valuable, in that it was at all times absolutely sincere:

“You took my criticism on ‘Maud’ like an angel,” he writes in 1856, “which was very good indeed of you. I wish only you could be as glad whenever I thoroughly admire your poems, as I am sorry whenever I cannot.”

One reference to a hint of criticism in a letter of June 1857, after the publication of the early Idylls “Enid” and “Nimue (Vivien)” is not without interest. Lushington writes to Tennyson:

I am very much grieved if anything that I wrote distrest you. I said it all in love, and only my love could have prompted me to say it. My tenderness for your fame will not let me be silent when I fear anything that may cast a shade upon it, and few things can be more certain to me than that these two poems, coming out by themselves, would not receive their due of admiration. It would be quite different if they were, as I hope they will be, supported by others of varied matter and interest, giving more completeness and beauty of circular grouping and relation. Such a work I want you to produce, and believe you can, which would surpass all you have written yet.

The Idylls always had a peculiar interest for Lushington, and he had long encouraged their production. “I am beyond measure delighted,” he writes in 1856, “to hear of Merlin and his compeers”; and again in the same year, and in his deepest pangs of anxiety about his boy, he does not forget the wish, “All genial inspiration from home breezes come to ‘Enid.’” “Is anything of the Arthurian plan getting into shape?” he writes again in 1859. He was fervent in his admiration of the Dedication to Prince Albert of the new edition of the Idylls in 1862: “Its truth and loftiness and tenderness will be felt in a hundred years as much as now.” “Anything of our own Arthur?” he writes again in 1866, “That’s the true subject.”

His letters (published and unpublished) to Tennyson convey not only the picture of a circle knit by warmest affection, but estimates of others always generous, and sometimes warm with enthusiastic admiration. Carlyle he met at Edinburgh in 1866, and was “struck with the beauty and sweetness of his face; through all its grimness ... there seems to be an infinite freshness of spirit with infinite sadness. His laugh is exactly like a boy’s.” In 1856 he writes: “Have you seen Browning’s new volumes? I have been trying to construe them, and no gold had ever to be digged out through more stubborn rocks. But he is a poet as well as good fellow.”

Through all these long years, with their vicissitudes of joy and sorrow, their long partings, and amid varied and widely separate occupations, the friendship remained as fresh as in the early days, an association of common delight in all that was noblest in literature, inspired by a bond of deepest poetic sympathy. To those who knew and venerated Lushington, it might seem that his deep and abiding reverence for the genius of one knit to him, as Tennyson was, by more than a brother’s love, had in it something which inspired him in his work, and came in place of all thought of personal ambition. His learning enriched his life, and gave to his work as teacher its perfection and its illumination; but it never prompted him to publication, and he gave nothing to the press under his own name except his opening address as professor, his address to the students as Lord Rector, and a short Life of his friend Professor Ferrier, whose posthumous works he edited. In the one friendship he found the chief solace of his life. In the last letter addressed to Tennyson on the anniversary of his birthday, August 6, 1892 — only three months before the Poet’s death — Lushington wrote:

May the day be blest to you and all who are dear to you, and may the year bring more blessing as it goes forward, must be the warm wish of all who have felt the knowledge of you and your writings to be among the greatest blessings of their life. Year after year my deep love and admiration has grown, though I have not often of late had the opportunity of expressing it, as we now so seldom meet. But I think you know how largely indebted to you I feel for whatever is best and truest in myself — a debt one cannot hope to repay.

No better picture of the friendship could be given than that enshrined in these words. Lushington survived Tennyson less than a year.

TENNYSON, FITZGERALD, CARLYLE, AND OTHER FRIENDS by Dr. Warren

President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and now Professor of Poetry

Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange,

Where once I tarried for a while,

Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,

And greet it with a kindly smile;

Whom yet I see as there you sit

Beneath your sheltering garden-tree

And watch your doves about you flit,

And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee,

Or on your head their rosy feet,

As if they knew your diet spares

Whatever moved in that full sheet

Let down to Peter at his prayers.

·······

And so I send a birthday line

Of greeting; and my son, who dipt

In some forgotten book of mine

With sallow scraps of manuscript,

And dating many a year ago,

Has hit on this, which you will take

My Fitz, and welcome, as I know

Less for its own than for the sake

Of one recalling gracious times,

When, in our younger London days,

You found some merit in my rhymes,

And I more pleasure in your praise.

To E. FitzGerald (Tiresias and other Poems, p. 1).

Alfred Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald; In Memoriam and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; “The Eternal Yea” and “The Eternal No,” “the larger hope” and “the desperate sort of thing unfortunately at the bottom of all thinking men’s minds, made Music of” — few friendships, few conjunctions, personal or literary, could be more interesting or more piquant.

What adds to the interest of the friendship is that it remained so long unknown to the literary or the general world, and is even now, perhaps, only partially appreciated. Yet it subsisted for nearly fifty years. It was close and constant. Though, as time went on, the two friends met less and less often, it was maintained by a steady interchange of letters and messages. The letters were naturally more on FitzGerald’s side. Like most, though not perhaps quite all good letter-writers, FitzGerald was a great letter-writer. He was, as he often said, an idle man, and as he also said, he rather liked writing letters, “unlike most Englishmen (but I am Irish),” he added. Indeed, he seemed almost to prefer communication with his friends by letter to personal meetings, though these he enjoyed greatly when brought to the point.

Tennyson and FitzGerald were old friends, born in the same year, the notable year 1809. It is true that though they were at Cambridge together they were not then known to each other, except by sight. “I remember him there well,” said FitzGerald, speaking of Tennyson, “a sort of Hyperion.” They had many friendships, acquaintances, associations in common. Carlyle, Thackeray, Spedding, Merivale, Trench, W. H. Thompson, J. D. Allen, W. B. Donne, Brookfield, Cowell, Mrs. Kemble, Samuel Laurence, were known to them both. In their formative years they fell under the same influences, and read many of the same books. It was about 1835 that they became acquainted. They were brought together probably by their common and uncommon friend, James Spedding. They certainly met at his father’s house, Mirehouse, near Bassenthwaite Lake, in the spring of 1835.

Tennyson had begun writing “In Memoriam” a little before this, i.e. early in 1834, soon after his friend Hallam’s sudden death and sad home-bringing in the winter of 1833. He kept it on the stocks, as all know, for some seventeen years. It was published, at first anonymously, in 1850. The secret of its authorship was soon revealed, the poem found immediate acceptance and popularity. It became and has remained one of the most widely read poems in the language. In the meantime Tennyson, though not so famous as “In Memoriam” made him, had become well known through the 1842 volumes.

FitzGerald, on the contrary, was at that time quite unknown, except by his friendships, and to his friends. An Irishman, with the easygoing and dolce far niente qualities which so often temper the brilliant genius of that race, sufficiently provided with means, he was naturally inclined for a quiet and easy, not to say indolent life. He deliberately chose from the first the fallentis semita vitae. He had some literary ambitions, and he wrote a few early poems, one or two of rare promise and beauty. One gift in particular was his — not, it is true, always leading him to action, yet in its passive or dynamic form constant and abundant almost to excess — loyalty in friendship. Once and fatally, it led him to take or submit to a positive step. He had been the attached friend of Bernard Barton the Quaker poet, the friend of Charles Lamb. When Barton died, from a mistaken sense of duty, FitzGerald not only collected his poems, a task more pious than profitable, but afterward, having meanwhile hesitated and halted too long in offering himself to one who was his real love, married his daughter who was not this. He left her, not indeed as is sometimes said, on the morrow of the wedding, but after separations and repeated attempts — in town and country — at reunion, and lived, as he had done before, alone and somewhat drearily ever afterwards.

Speculation has busied itself about his unfortunate marriage. The briefest but also the best pronouncement is probably his own letter written at the time to Mrs. Tennyson:

31 Portland Street, London,

March 19th, 1858.

Dear Mrs. Tennyson — My married life has come to an end: I am back again in the old quarters, living as for the last thirty years — only so much older, sadder, uglier, and worse! — If people want to go further for the cause of this blunder, than the fact of two people of very determined habits and temper first trying to change them at close on fifty — they may lay nine-tenths of the blame on me. I don’t want to talk more of the matter, but one must say something.

The old life to which he returned was monotonous, recluse, unconventional. He spent most of his days in East Anglia, an unromantic region, yet not unbeautiful or wanting a charm of its own; in summer emerging into the sunshine, sitting on a chair in his garden as Tennyson’s poem paints him, or on another chair on the deck of his boat, coasting the shores, or sailing up and down the creeks and estuaries with which that country abounds; in winter crouching over the fire, and in either chair smoking and endlessly reading.

In the earlier part of his life he moved about from one home to another, though never very far. In 1860 he settled down at Woodbridge in Suffolk, a pleasant, old-fashioned, provincial town, a sort of East Anglian Totnes, where the Deben, like the more famous Dart, seems to issue from a doorway of close-guarding hills to meet the salt tide, and begins the last stage of its cheerful journey to the open sea.

Just before this, in January of 1859, FitzGerald printed a small edition of a translation of a poem by a Persian astronomer, who died about 1123 A.D. The whole production of this famous piece seemed almost an accident. FitzGerald had been introduced, some half-dozen years earlier, to the study of Persian by his friend Mr. E. B. Cowell, a brother East Anglian, then in business in Ipswich. Cowell, wishing to pursue his studies further and take a Degree, went in 1851 as a married and somewhat mature student to Oxford, and there, in the Bodleian Library, came on a rare MS. of the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.” It is a beautiful little volume, written upon parchment sprinkled with gold dust, in a fine black ink, with blue headings, gold divisions, and delicate Oriental illuminations in blue, gold, and green, at the beginning and the end, and is the earliest known MS. of the poem, dating from 1450 A.D. Of this he made a copy for FitzGerald, who kept it by him, and gradually produced a translation, if not rather a paraphrase. “I also amuse myself,” he wrote in December 1853, “with poking out some Persian which E. Cowell would inaugurate me with. I go on with it because it is a point in common with him and enables me to study a little together.”

In 1858 he had got his version into a shape somewhat to his mind, and sent it to Fraser’s Magazine. It was kept for about a year, when FitzGerald asked for it back, and had 250 copies printed early in 1859. He gave away a few and sent the rest to Quaritch.

What ensued is one of the curiosities of literature. FitzGerald did not expect any success or vogue for the work. True, he had toiled at it. “Very few People,” he said, “have ever taken such Pains in Translation as I have; though certainly not to be literal.” And when he had finished he liked “to make an end of the matter by print.” But that was all. “I hardly know,” he added, “why I print any of these things which nobody buys.”

Quaritch, as FitzGerald expected, found no sale for Omar. He reduced the price from five shillings to one shilling, and then to one penny. Rossetti heard of it through Whitley Stokes, and showed it to Swinburne. They were attracted by it and bought sixpenny-worth. Quaritch raised his price to twopence. They carried off a few more, and the rest, a little later, were eagerly bought up at a guinea or more apiece. Yet the poem remained long known to very few. Quaritch published a second edition, again a small one, nine years later in 1868, and four years later still, a third small edition in 1872, and in 1879 a fourth edition, including Salámán and Absál. The third edition came out just about the time I was going to Oxford as an undergraduate, and it was then that I first heard of it through J. A. Symonds and H. G. Dakyns, who gave me in 1874 a copy which Symonds had presented to him, and which I still possess. Even at Oxford I found only a few, either graduates or undergraduates, who heeded it or knew anything about it. Professor Henry Smith was the only senior I can remember who spoke to me about it, telling me of the previous editions, and praising its merits one day as we turned it over together in Parker’s shop. But stealthily and underground it made its way. Edition followed edition, with increasing rapidity. Suddenly it became ubiquitously popular, and it is now certainly one of the best-known pieces of the kind in the language. Messrs. Macmillan put it, in 1899, after a dozen times reprinting it, into their Golden Treasury Series. They had to reprint three times in that year, and this edition has been in constant demand. But there are ever so many others. The poem has been reproduced in a hundred forms, both in England and America, illustrated, illuminated, decorated, annotated. A reprint of the first edition is once more sold for a penny. It has been translated into Latin verse. There is a Concordance to it. A whole literature has sprung up around it. An “Omar Khayyam Club” was founded in 1892. Pious pilgrimages have been made to the translator’s tomb, and Omar’s roses planted over it, and verses recited in celebration of both poet and poem.

Of all this immense vogue and success, as his letters show, FitzGerald himself never dreamed. Even when in 1885 Tennyson published, as the dedication of Tiresias and other Poems, the lines “To E. FitzGerald,” the translator of Omar was still, for most readers, “a veiled prophet.” To-day, when the poem has become one of the utterances of the century, lovers of paradox have even ventured to hint that instead of FitzGerald being known as the friend of Tennyson, Tennyson might be known hereafter as the friend of FitzGerald.

FitzGerald is certainly known on his own account. The publication of his letters by his loyal old friend, Dr. Aldis Wright, revealed the man himself to the world. The publication of Tennyson’s Life by his son aided the process. Every one will remember the part which FitzGerald plays there, beginning with the meeting at James Spedding’s house in the Lakes in 1835, his early enthusiastic admiration, when he fell in love both with the man and his poems, and then his ever-constant friendship, tempered by grumbling, and what appears sometimes almost grudging criticism. He became the friend, it must be remembered, not only of Alfred, but of the whole family, and especially of Frederick, the eldest brother. “All the Tennysons are to be wished well,” he says in a letter of 1845. Though he affected to think little of society and hated snobbery as much as Tennyson or his other friend Thackeray himself, he greatly admired the better qualities of the English gentry, and had even a kindly weakness for their foibles. When Frederick went to live in Italy he wrote: “I love that such men as Frederick should be abroad: so strong, haughty, and passionate.”

When FitzGerald first met Alfred, the poetic family was still living on at Somersby after their father’s death. He went there and fell in love with their mother, and with their mode of life, and with the region, where “there were not only such good seas, but such fine Hill and Dale among the Wolds as people in general scarce thought on.” It was characteristic of him that he used to say that Alfred should never have left Lincolnshire.

FitzGerald kept up the friendship mainly, as he did most of his friendships, by letter. In particular, he made a point of writing to the Alfred Tennysons twice a year, once in the summer and again about Christmas time. He addressed himself sometimes to the Poet himself, sometimes to Mrs. Tennyson, and in later days to their eldest son. To Frederick Tennyson, who went to live in Italy, as the readers of Dr. Aldis Wright’s volume will remember, he wrote a whole series of letters, many of them very long and full. Of all these letters — to his father, his mother, himself, and his uncle — the present Lord Tennyson has placed a collection in my hands for the purpose of this article. The story of the friendship which it is an attempt to sketch will best be told by pretty full quotations from them. Many of them, and indeed most of those to his father and mother, are now published for the first time.

FitzGerald did not always succeed, and indeed did not expect to succeed, in drawing a reply from Tennyson himself. In a letter written in the summer of 1860 to Mrs. Tennyson he makes a very amusing reference to this, and also throws some light on his own habits:

Thank old Alfred for his letter which was an unexpected pleasure. I like to hear of him and you once or twice in the year: but I know he is no dab at literature at any time, poor fellow. “Paltry Poet” — Let him believe it is anything but want of love for him that keeps me out of the Isle of Wight: nor is it indolence neither. — But to say what it is would make me write too much about myself. Only let him believe what I do say.

Their relations were always of this playful, intimate kind, resting on long acquaintance. If FitzGerald was amused by “Alfred,” Tennyson, on the other hand, was well used to his old friend’s humour. When we spoke about him, he dwelt, I recollect, on this particular trait, and told me, to illustrate it, the story which is now, I think, pretty well known, how, when some common acquaintance had bored them with talking about his titled friends, “Old Fitz,” as at last he took up his candle to go to bed, turned to Tennyson and said, quietly and quaintly, “I knew a Lord once, but he’s dead.”

When Tennyson spoke of Omar he said, what he has said in verse, that he admired it greatly:

Than which I know no version done

In English more divinely well;

A planet equal to the sun

Which cast it.

But of course he was aware that it was by no means always faithful to the original. It is indeed a liberal, rather than a literal translation — how liberal, all know who have been at the pains to compare FitzGerald’s poem with any of the many literal versions to which it has given rise.

In quite the early Twickenham days, just after their marriage, he would invite himself to dine or stay with Tennyson and his wife, nay more, would ask to bring friends to see them, such as the Cowells and W. B. Donne. In 1854 he stayed at Farringford for a fortnight, a visit he always remembered, and often referred to, with pleasure. Together he and Tennyson worked at Persian. He also sketched, and botanized with the Poet. But he could not be got to repeat the visit; and indeed, as he said himself, it was the last of the kind he paid anywhere, except to Mrs. Kemble. When he reached London, just after this visit, he wrote to Tennyson:

60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields,

June 15th, 1854.

My dear Alfred — I called at Quaritch’s to look for another Persian Dictionary. I see he has a copy of Eastwick’s Gulistan for ten shillings: a translation (not Eastwick’s, however, but one quite sufficient for the purpose) can be had for five shillings. Would you like me to buy them and send them down to you by the next friend who travels your way: or will you wait till some good day I can lend you my Eastwick (which is now at Oxford)? I could mark some of the pieces which I think it might not offend you to read: though you will not care greatly for anything in it.

Oh, such an atmosphere as I am writing in! — Yours,

E. F. G.

I left my little Swedenborg at Farringford. Please keep it for me, as it was a gift from my sister.

The note of the letters is always the same — warm affection, deep underlying admiration and regard, superficial banter and play of humour, and humorous, half-grumbling criticism. When they met face to face, after being parted for twenty years, they fell at once into exactly the old vein. FitzGerald was surprised at this, but he need not have been. Both were the sincerest and most natural of men, and nothing but distance and absence had occurred to sever them.

From the first he had conceived an intense and almost humble-minded admiration for Alfred. One of his earliest utterances describes his feelings, and strikes, with his keen critical perception, the true note. “I will say no more of Tennyson,” he wrote, “than that the more I have seen of him, the more cause I have to think him great. His little humours and grumpinesses were so droll that I was always laughing, — I must, however say further, that I felt, what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of depression at times from the over-shadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own — I could not be mistaken in the universality of his mind.”

His descriptions in Euphranor, published some sixteen years later, of “the only living and like to live poet he had known,” tell the same tale. They speak of Tennyson’s union of passion and strength. “As King Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin he, though as a great Poet comprehending all the softer stops of human Emotion in that Register where the Intellectual, no less than what is called the Poetical, faculty predominated. As all who knew him know, a Man at all points, Euphranor — like your Digby, of grand proportion and feature....”

There was no one for whose opinion he had so much regard, grumble though he might, and criticize as he would. He had a special preference for the poems at whose production he had assisted, which he had seen in MS., or heard rehearsed orally. Toward the later poems his feeling was not the same. The following extracts are all equally characteristic:

Markethill, Woodbridge,

November 20th, 1861.

My dear old Alfred — It gives me a strange glow of pleasure when I come upon your verses, as I now do in every other book I take up, with no name of author, as every other person knows whose they are. I love to light on the verses for their own sake, and to remember having heard nearly all I care for — and what a lot that is! — from your own lips.

Markethill, Woodbridge,

December 14th, 1862.

My dear old Alfred — Christmas coming reminds me of my half-yearly call on you.

I have, as usual, nothing to tell of myself: boating all the summer and reading Clarissa Harlowe since. You and I used to talk of the Book more than twenty years ago. I believe I am better read in it than almost any one in existence now — No wonder: for it is almost intolerably tedious and absurd — But I can’t read the “Adam Bedes,” “Daisy Chains,” etc., at all. I look at my row of Sir Walter Scott and think with comfort that I can always go to him of a winter evening, when no other book comes to hand.

To Frederick Tennyson.

November 15th, 1874.

I wrote my yearly letter to Mrs. Alfred a fortnight ago, I think; but as yet have had no answer. Some Newspaper people make fun of a Poem of Alfred’s, the “Voice and the Peak,” I think: giving morsels of which of course one could not judge. But I think he had better have done singing: he has sung well — tempus silere, etc.

But his love for the man and his underlying belief in his opinion and genius never varied. “I don’t think of you so little, my dear old Alfred,” he wrote one day in the middle of their friendship, “but rejoice in the old poems and in yourself, young or old, and worship you (I may say) as I do no other man, and am glad I can worship one man still.”

His delight when he found that Alfred had really liked Omar was unusually naïf and keen. He forgot his grumbling, and wrote to Mrs. Tennyson:

To Mrs. Tennyson.

November 4/67.

To think of Alfred’s approving my old Omar! I never should have thought he even knew of it. Certainly I should never have sent it to him, always supposing that he would not approve anything but a literal Prose translation — unless from such hands as can do original work and therefore do not translate other People’s! Well: now I have got Nicolas and sent a copy to Cowell, and when he is at liberty again we shall beat up old Omar’s Quarters once more.

I’ll tell you a very pretty Book. Alfred Tennyson’s Pastoral Poems, or rather Rural Idylls (only I must hate the latter word) bound up in a volume, Gardener’s, Miller’s, Daughters; Oak; Dora; Audley Court, etc.

Oh the dear old 1842 days and editions! Spedding thinks I’ve shut up my mind since. Not to “Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud.” When I ask People what Bird says that of an evening, they say “The Thrush.”

I wish you would make one of your Boys write out the “Property” Farmer Idyll. Do now, pray.

E. F. G.

When he had first “discovered” Omar, and was beginning to work upon him, Tennyson (who was then finishing the early “Idylls of the King”) had been one of the first to whom he wrote. It is worth remembering that FitzGerald was then in deep depression. It was the middle of the sad period of his brief, unhappy married life. This had proved a failure in London. It was proving a failure now in the country. He wrote:

Gorlestone, Great Yarmouth,

July 1857.

My dear old Alfred — Please direct the enclosed to Frederick. I wrote him some months ago getting Parker to direct; but have had no reply. You won’t write to me, at which I can’t wonder. I keep hoping for King Arthur — or part of him. I have got here to the seaside — a dirty, Dutch-looking sea, with a dusty Country in the rear; but the place is not amiss for one’s Yellow Leaf. I keep on reading foolish Persian too: chiefly because of it’s connecting me with the Cowells, now besieged in Calcutta. But also I have really got hold of an old Epicurean so desperately impious in his recommendations to live only for To-day that the good Mahometans have scarce dared to multiply MSS. of him. He writes in little quatrains, and has scarce any of the iteration and conceits to which his people are given. One of the last things I remember of him is that—”God gave me this turn for drink, perhaps God was drunk when he made me” — which is not strictly pious. But he is very tender about his roses and wine, and making the most of this poor little life.

All which is very poor stuff you will say. Please to remember me to the Lady. I don’t know when I shall ever see you again; and yet you can’t think how often I wish to do so, and never forget you, and never shall, my dear old Alfred, in spite of Epicurus. But I don’t grow merrier. — Yours ever,

E. F. G.

In 1872 he was busy with the third edition of Omar, and wrote to consult Tennyson. The first edition had contained only seventy-five quatrains. The second was a good deal longer, containing one hundred and ten. The third was again shortened to one hundred and one:

Woodbridge, March 25th, 1872.

My dear Alfred — It would be impertinent in me to trouble you with a question about my grand Works. But, as you let me know (through Mrs. T.) that you liked Omar, I want to know whether you read the First or Second Edition; and, in case you saw both, which you thought best? The reason of my asking you is that Quaritch (Publisher) has found admirers in America who have almost bought up the whole of the last enormous Edition — amounting to 200 copies, I think — so he wishes to embark on 200 more, I suppose: and says that he, and his Readers, like the first Edition best: so he would reprint these.

Of course I thought the second best: and I think so still: partly (I fear) because the greater number of verses gave more time for the day to pass from morning till night.

Well, what I ask you to do is, to tell me which of the two is best, if you have seen the two. If you have not, I won’t ask you further: — if you have, you can answer in two words. And your words would be more than all the rest.

This very little business is all I have eyes for now; except to write myself once more ever your’s and Mrs. Tennyson’s,

E. F. G.

Another letter a little later refers to the same reprinting of Omar:

My dear Alfred — I must thank you, as I ought, for your second note. The best return I can make is not to listen to Mrs. Tennyson’s P.S., which bids me send another Omar: — for I have only got Omar the Second, I am sure now you would not like him so well as the first (mainly because of “too much”). I think he might disgust you with both.

So though two lines from you would have done more to decide on his third appearance (if Quaritch still wishes that), I will not put you to that trouble, but do as I can alone — cutting out some, and retaining some; and will send you the result if it comes into type.

You used to talk of my crotchets: but I am quite sure you have one little crotchet about this Omar: which deserves well in its way, but not so well as you write of it. You know that though I do not think it worth while to compete with you in your paltry poetical capacity, I won’t surrender in the critical, not always, at least. And, at any rate, I have been more behind the scenes in this little matter than you. But I do not the less feel your kindness in writing about it: for I think you would generally give £100 sooner than write a letter. And I am — Yours ever,

E. F. G.

The next year, in 1873, he wrote again, touching on the same theme and others:

Dear Mrs. Tennyson — I remember Franklin Lushington perfectly — at Farringford in 1854; almost the last visit I paid anywhere: and as pleasant as any, after, or before. I have still some sketches I made of the place: “Maud, Maud, Maud,” etc., was then read to me, and has rung in my ears ever after. Mr. Lushington, I remember, sketched also. If he be with you still, please tell him that I hope his remembrance of me is as pleasant as mine of him.

I think I told you that Frederick came here in August, having (of course) missed you on his way. The Mistress of Trinity wrote to me some little while ago, telling me, among other things, that she, and others, were much pleased with your son Hallam, whom they thought to be like the “Paltry Poet” (poor fellow).

The Paltry one’s Portrait is put in a frame and hung up at my château, where I talk to it sometimes, and every one likes to see it. It is clumsy enough, to be sure; but it still recalls the old man to me better than the bearded portraits which are now the fashion.

But oughtn’t your Hallam to have it over his mantelpiece at Trinity?

The first volume of Forster’s Dickens has been read to me of a night, making me love him, up to 30 years of age at any rate; till then, quite unspoilt, even by his American triumphs, and full of good humour, generosity, and energy. I wonder if Alfred remembers dining at his house with Thackeray and me, me taken there, quite unaffected, and seeming to wish any one to show off rather than himself. In the evening we had a round game at cards and mulled claret. Does A. T. remember?

I have had my yearly letter from Carlyle, who writes of himself as better than last year. He sends me a Mormon Newspaper, with a very sensible sermon in it from the life of Brigham Young, as also the account of a visit to a gentleman of Utah with eleven wives and near forty children, all of whom were very happy together. I am just going to send the paper to Archdeacon Allen to show him how they manage these things over the Atlantic.

About Omar I must say that all the changes made in the last copy are not to be attributed to my own perverseness; the same thought being constantly repeated with directions, whether by Omar or others, in the 500 quatrains going under his name. I had not eyes, nor indeed any further appetite, to refer to the Original, or even to the French Translation; but altered about the “Dawn of Nothing” as A. T. pointed out its likeness to his better property. I really didn’t, and don’t, think it matters what changes are made in that Immortal Work which is to last about five years longer. I believe it is the strong-minded American ladies who have chiefly taken it up; but they will soon have something wickeder to digest, I dare say.

I am going to write out for Alfred a few lines from a Finnish Poem which I find quoted in Lowell’s “Among my Books” — which I think a good Book. But I must let my eyes rest now.

In September 1876 a lucky chance brought Tennyson and himself face to face again after twenty years. The Poet was travelling with his son, and together they visited him at Woodbridge. They found him, as Tennyson describes, in his garden at Little Grange. He was delighted to see them, and specially pleased with the son’s relation and attitude to his father.

Together he and Tennyson walked about the garden and talked as of old. When Tennyson complained of the multitude of poems which were sent him, Old Fitz recommended him to imitate Charles Lamb and throw them into his neighbour’s cucumber frames. Tennyson noticed a number of small sunflowers, with a bee half-dying — probably from the wet season — on each, “Like warriors dying on their shields, Fitz,” he said. He reverted, of course, to his favourite Crabbe, and told the story of how Crabbe (when he was a chaplain in the country) felt an irresistible longing to see the sea, mounted a horse suddenly, rode thirty miles to the coast, saw it, and rode back comforted.

FitzGerald did not compliment them on their looks, because, he said, he had always noticed men said, “How well you are looking!” whenever you were going to be very ill. Therefore he had ceased saying it to any one. He told, too, a story of a vision, how he had one day clearly seen from outside his sister and her children having tea round the table in his dining-room. He then saw his sister quietly withdraw from the room, so as not to disturb the children. At that moment she died in Norfolk.

He wrote shortly after this visit to Tennyson:

Little Grange, Woodbridge,

October 31st, 1876.

My dear Alfred — I am reading delightful Boccacio through once more, escaping to it from the Eastern Question as the company he tells of from the Plague. I thought of you yesterday when I came to the Theodore and Honoria story, and read of Teodoro “un mezzo meglio per la pineta entrato”—”More than a Mile immersed within the wood,” as you used to quote from Glorious John. This Decameron must be read in its Italian, as my Don in his Spanish: the language fits either so exactly. I am thinking of trying Faust in German, with Hayward’s Prose Translation. I never could take to it in any Shape yet: and — don’t believe in it: which I suppose is a piece of Impudence.

But neither this, nor The Question are you called on to answer — much use if I did call. But I am — always yours,

E. F. G.

When I thought of you and Boccacio, I was sitting in the Sun on that same Iron Seat with the pigeons about us, and the Trees still in Leaf.

One of the poems after 1842 which he liked was the “Ode on the Duke of Wellington,” though characteristically he made a somewhat fastidious criticism on the “vocalization” of the opening.

“I mumble over your old verses in my memory as often as any one’s,” he wrote, “and was lately wishing you had found bigger vowels for the otherwise fine opening of the Duke’s Funeral:

‘Twas at the Royal Feast for Persia won, etc.

(Dryden.)

Bury the great Duke, etc.

(A. T.)

So you see I am always the same crotchetty

Fitz.”

The paradox is that it was FitzGerald who was always urging “Alfred” to go on, and finding fault with him for not doing more, and not singing in grander, sterner strains, — not becoming the Tyrtaeus of his country. In truth, Tennyson’s strength and physical force and his splendid appearance in youth, added to his mental grandeur, seem to have deeply impressed his youthful contemporaries. He was, they felt, heroic, and made for heroic songs and deeds. When he did go on, in his own way, FitzGerald did not like it, or only half liked it. For Tennyson did go forward on his own lines. He had not a little to daunt and deter him. He, too, had his sensitiveness and capacity for feeling and passion not less exquisite than FitzGerald’s own. FitzGerald said his friendships were more like loves. He was not alone in this attitude. “What passions our friendships were,” wrote Thackeray, another of the set, the early friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. But of no friendship could such language be used more truly than of that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. When, however, the sundering blow fell, and the friendship which was a love lay shattered, Tennyson braced himself and went on. For

It becomes no man to nurse despair,

But in the teeth of clench’d antagonisms

To follow up the worthiest till he die.

His faith, even to the last, was still at times dashed with doubt, for, with “the universality of his mind,” he could not help seeing many sides of a question. But he “followed the Gleam,” as he has himself described. FitzGerald did the opposite. He drifted, he dallied, he delayed, he despaired. He ruined his own life in great measure by his marriage. His early ambitions seemed to wither prematurely, and he let his career slide. Yet he was always, as Mr. A. C. Benson has excellently brought out, admirable in his sincerity, his friendly kindliness, his innocence, his conscientious adherence to his literary standards. Too much has been made of his unconventionality, his slovenliness and slackness, his love of low or common company. He remained a gentleman and a man of business. Thackeray, a man of the world, when he was starting for America, wanted to leave him the legal guardian of his daughters. He was an Epicurean, not a Pyrrhonist. He took life seriously. He showed at times an austerity of spirit which was surprising. His Omar has often, and naturally, been compared to Lucretius and to Ecclesiastes. There is probably more of Lucretius about the poem, but more of Ecclesiastes about the translator.

There is another Epicurean, with whose tenets he might have been thought to show even more sympathy — the easy-going poet-critic Horace. Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam is the constant burden of FitzGerald’s strain. His friendship, early formed, with Tennyson, the contrast of their divergent views, might be compared with the friendship of Horace and Virgil. For Virgil, too, began as an Epicurean. But FitzGerald was not content with Horace. “Why is it,” he wrote, “that I can never take up with Horace, so sensible, agreeable, elegant, and sometimes even grand?” It was, perhaps, just that masculine and worldly element that put him off. Yet he not seldom quotes Horace, and perhaps liked him better than he knew. “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,” he wrote in a copy of Polonius which he gave to a special friend, and Nature was what he was always seeking in poetry. Still he preferred Virgil, just as he really preferred Tennyson.

Though he was destined to produce a poem which bids as fair for immortality as any of its time, he did not think highly of his own powers as a poet. But he did plume himself on being a critic. “I pretend to no Genius,” he said, “but to Taste, which according to my aphorism is the feminine of Genius.” This was another gift in common. Tennyson was himself a consummate critic, as FitzGerald was the first to recognize.

FitzGerald had his limitations and his prejudices — his “crotchets.” He did not like many even of those whom the world has agreed to admire. He did not like Euripides or even Homer. With Goethe’s poems he could not get on. He eschewed Victor Hugo. He liked, indeed, very little of the prose and none of the poetry of his contemporaries, except that of the Tennysons. He could not away with Browning. Arnold, he wrote down “a pedant.” He thought very little of Rossetti and Swinburne, though the former, especially, was a great admirer not only of Omar but of Jami and some of the Spanish translations. He tried to read Morris’s Jason, but said, “No go.” He “could not read the Adam Bedes and the Daisy Chains.” All this must be remembered when we read his criticism of Tennyson’s later work which belonged to the period of these writers and their productions. But within certain limits he was a very fine critic. It cannot be said of him as of his special favourite among Greek poets, Sophocles, that

He saw life steadily and saw it whole.

As he was aware himself, he by no means saw it whole. But with his detachment and his critical gift, it may, perhaps, be said:

He saw life lazily, but saw it plain.

To the question of Browning’s merits, or want of merits, he is always returning. A very characteristic letter is a long, discursive one, written to Tennyson himself in 1867:

Markethill, Woodbridge,

November 3rd, 1867.

My dear old Alfred — I abuse Browning myself; and get others to abuse him; and write to you about it; for the sake of easing my own heart — not yours. Why is it (as I asked Mrs. Tennyson) that, while the Magazine critics are belauding him, not one of the men I know, who are not inferior to the writers in the Athenæum, Edinburgh, etc., can endure, and (for the most part) can read him at all? I mean his last poem. Thus it has been with the Cowells, Trinity Thompsons, Donnes, and some others whom you don’t know, but in whose candour and judgment I have equal confidence, men and women too.

Since I wrote to your wife, Pollock, a great friend of Browning’s, writes to me. “I agree with you about Browning and A. T. I can’t understand it. Ter conatus eram to get through the Ring and the Book — and failing to perform the feat in its totality, I have stooped to the humiliation to point out extracts for me (they having read it all quite through three times) and still could not do it. So I pretend to have read it, and let Browning so suppose when I talk to him about it. But don’t you be afraid”? (N.B. I am not, only angry) “things will come round, and A. T. will take his right place again, and R. B. will have all the honours due to his learning, wit and philosophy.”

Then I had the curiosity to ask Carlyle in my yearly letter to him. He also is, or was, a friend of B.’s, and used to say that he looked on him as a sort of light-cavalry man to follow you. Well, Carlyle writes, “Browning’s book I read — insisted on reading: it is full of talent, of energy, and effort, but totally without backbone, or basis of common sense. I think among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted man.” (Italics are his.)

Who, then, are the people that write the nonsense in the Reviews? I believe the reason at the bottom is that R. B. is a clever London diner-out, etc., while A. T. holds aloof from the newspaper men, etc. “Long life to him!” But I don’t understand why Venables, or some of the men who think as I do, and wield trenchant pens in high places, why they don’t come out, and set all this right. I only wish I could do it: but I can only see the right thing, but not prove it to others. “I do not like you, Dr. Fell,” etc.

I found a Memorandum the other day (I can’t now light on it) of a Lincolnshire story about “Haxey Wood” or “Haxey Hood” — which — if I had not told it to you, but left it as by chance in your way some thirty years ago, you would have turned into a shape to outlast all R. B.’s poems put together. There is no use in my finding and sending it now, because it doesn’t do (with Paltry Poets) to try and drag them to the water. The two longest and worst tales (I think) in Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall, were suggested to him by Sir S. Romilly, and “a lady in Wiltshire.” I wish Murray would let me make a volume of “Selections from Crabbe” — which I know I could, so that common readers would wish to read the whole original; which now scarce any one does; nor can one wonder they do not. But Crabbe will flourish when R. B. is dead and buried. Lots of lines which he cut out of his MS. would be the beginning of a little fortune to others. I happened on this couplet the other day:

The shapeless purpose of a soul that feels,

And half suppresses wrath and half reveals.

Not that Crabbe is to live by single couplets or epigrams, but by something far better, as you know better than I. There is a long passage in the Tales of the Hall (Old Bachelor) which always reminds me of you, A. T., where the Old Bachelor recounts how he pleaded with his Whig father to be allowed to marry the Tory Squire’s daughter; when,

Coolly my father looked, and much enjoy’d

The broken eloquence his eye destroy’d, etc.

and then pleads to the Tory mother of the girl.

Methinks I have the tigress in my eye, etc.

Do look at this, A. T., when you get the Book, and don’t let my praise set you against it.

I have written you a very long letter, you see, with one very bad eye too. I thought it had mended, by help of cold water and goggles; but these last three days it has turned rusty again. I believe it misses the sea air.

δεινῶν τ᾽ ἄημα πνευμάτων ἐκοίμισε

στένοντα πόντον

Do you quite understand this ἐκοίμισε? But what lines, understood or not! The two last words go alongside of my little ship with me many a time. Well, Alfred, neither you, nor the Mistress, are to answer this letter, which I still hope may please you, as it is (all the main part) written very loyally, and is all true. Now, good-bye, and remember me as your old

E. F. G.

Ne cherchez point, Iris, à percer les ténèbres

Dont les Dieux sagement ont voilé l’Avenir;

Et ne consultez point tant de Devins célèbres

Pour chercher le moment qui doit nous désunir.

Livrez-vous au plaisir; tout le reste est frivole;

Et songez que, trop court pour de plus longs projets,

Tandis que nous parlons le Temps jaloux s’envole,

Et que ce Temps, hélas! est perdu pour jamais.

But wait — before I finish I must ask why you assure Clark of Trinity that it is the rooks who call “Maud, Maud, etc.” Indeed it is the Thrush, as I have heard a hundred times in a summer’s evening, when scared in the evergreens of a garden. Therefore:

Rooks in a classroom quarrel up in the tall trees caw’d;

But ‘twas the thrush in the laurel, that kept crying, Maud, Maud, Maud.

Keats he put very high indeed. “I have been again reading Lord Houghton’s Life of Keats” he wrote, “whose hastiest doggrel should show Browning, Morris & Co., that they are not what the newspapers tell them they are.” “What a fuss the cockneys make about Shelley just now, surely not worth Keats’ little finger,” he wrote on another occasion. And again, “Is Mr. Rossetti a Great Poet like Browning and Morris? So the Athenæum tells me. Dear me, how thick Great Poets do grow nowadays.” And yet again, “I can’t read G. Eliot as I presume you can; I really conclude that the fault lies in me, not in her; so with Goethe (except in his letters, Table-Talk, etc.), whom I try in vain to admire.”

His real love was for Crabbe, the poet, not of “realism” but of reality.

Life’s sternest painter and its best —

the poet of disillusionment. This love, which has been felt in different generations by Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Bishop Gore, he could get few of his friends to share with him. Tennyson himself was one of the few. “I keep reading Crabbe from time to time,” he writes to Tennyson; “nobody else does unless it be another ‘paltry Poet’ whom I know. The edition only sells at a shilling a volume — second-hand. I don’t wonder at young people and women (I mean no disparagement at all) not relishing even the good parts: and certainly there is plenty of bad for all readers.”

What he loved before all was “touches of nature,” the humour, the pathos, of ordinary life. He liked home-thrusts at human foibles and frailty, and again the outwelling of native nobility, generosity, or love. Newman’s early Sermons, “Plain and Parochial” as they were, perhaps for this very reason he much affected. “The best that were ever written in my judgment,” he said. He remained an admirer of Newman, and speaks enthusiastically of the Apologia and its “sincerity.” But he did not like the ritualism of the Oxford movement. His traditions were Evangelical, — one reason perhaps why he liked Newman. John Wesley was “one of his heroes,” and he had much sympathy with, and was at one period personally drawn by, evangelical and revivalist Mission preaching.

He would have sympathized with Keble’s lines teaching that his fellow-creatures should not

Strive to wind themselves too high

For sinful man beneath the sky.

This was probably one of the reasons why he did not like “In Memoriam.” He said indeed that he thought it too artistic, too machine-made. He said that he thought Tennyson became gradually altogether too artistic and lost in spontaneity, vigour, and freshness. Yet he himself was a most laborious artist, both in his verse and in his prose. Omar is most carefully elaborated, with correction on correction, and so are the best parts of Euphranor. His reasons were really deeper, and went more against the matter than the form. He did not like the early “Idylls of the King.” “The Holy Grail” he liked as he had liked the “Vision of Sin.” But what moved him to tears was the old-style “Northern Farmer,” the “substantial, rough-spun Nature he knew,” and “the old brute, invested by the poet with the solemn humour of Humanity like Shakespeare’s Shallow.” Yet even here a “crotchet” cropped up, as appears from the following note:

Woodbridge, May 20th, 1877.

The enclosed scrap from Notes and Queries reminded me (as probably the writer has been reminded) of your Old Farmer, the only part of which that goes against me is the “canter and canter away” of the last line. I can scarce tell you (as usual with me) why I don’t like Doctor Fell; but you know I must be right.

By the by, my old Crabbe in the Parish Register (Burials), says

Bless me! I die — and not a warning giv’n —

With much to do on earth, and all for Heaven:

No preparation for my soul’s affairs,

No leave petitioned for the Barn’s repairs, etc.

not very good; and (N.B.) I don’t mean it suggested anything in Shakespeare’s Northern Farmer — for that may pair off with Shallow.

Again, when it appeared in 1865, he was greatly taken with the “Captain.” It was a return to the old personal mood and simple direct depiction of character:

Markethill, Woodbridge,

October 22nd, 1865.

Dear Mrs. Tennyson — Talking of ships again, I liked much The Captain in the People’s Alfred. Was the last stanza (which I like also) an afterthought? — I think a really sublime thing is the end of Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!” — (which I never could read through) — The Chase of the Ships: the Hero’s being struck blind at the moment of revenge: then his being taken to see his rival and crew at the bottom of the sea. Kingsley is a distressing writer to me: but I must think this (the inspiration of it) of a piece with Homer and the Gods — which you won’t at all.

He liked, too, “Gareth and Lynette,” which again he thought more natural and direct than some of the earlier Idylls. He liked, as might have been expected, the “Ballads and other Poems.” But what is most significant, perhaps, among his likes and dislikes, is his love for “Audley Court,” “one of my old favourites,” he calls it. Why did FitzGerald like “Audley Court”? It is not one of the poems which are generally best known and most admired. Indeed, while it is in many ways beautiful and contains some splendid things, such as the sonorous line

The pillar’d dusk of sounding sycamores,

it is just one of those poems which the severe critic of Tennyson picks out for fault-finding and even for ridicule. It has what such critics call the over-elaborate, the “drawing-room” manner. Like Milton’s picture of Eve’s déjeuner, though with more humour and appropriateness, it employs the grand and sumptuous style to describe trifles, such as the venison pasty:

Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,

Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks

Imbedded and injellied.

But on a closer consideration it will be seen that it has just what “Old Fitz” himself loved — the easy realism, the contentment with the things of this world; above all, that flavour of

After-dinner talk

Across the walnuts and the wine

which he also found and loved in that other favourite, “The Miller’s Daughter,” the harmless gossip about old friends

who was dead,

Who married, who was like to be, and how

The races went, and who would rent the hall.

This suited “Old Fitz’s” temper absolutely. The humorous pococurantism, for cynicism it hardly is, of the quatrains put into the mouth of the Poet’s friend, each ending “but let me live my life,” breathes the very spirit of his own indolent, kindly Epicureanism, and indeed the poem might almost be taken as a record of a dialogue between the two friends in their early days.

He loved, too, the “Lord of Burleigh,” “The Vision of Sin,” and “The Lady of Shalott.” The delicious idealism of these youthful pieces did not displease him. They had for him a “champagne flavour.” They were part of his own youth. For a brief hour of that fast-fleeting day, the wine of life had sparkled in his own glass, but then too soon turned flat and flavourless.

For two or three things every lover of Tennyson must thank FitzGerald. He it was who, about 1838, soon after their friendship began, got his friend, Samuel Laurence, to paint the earliest portrait of the Poet, “the only one of the old days and still the best of all to my thinking,” as he wrote in 1871. He, too, preserved and gave to Tennyson the drawing by Thackeray of the “Lord of Burleigh.” When the Poet was rather dilatory in calling at Spedding’s house to claim this portrait, FitzGerald wrote: “Tell him I don’t think Browning would have served me so, and I mean to prefer his poems for the future.” He also rescued from the flames some of the pages of the famous “Butcher’s Book,” the tall, ledger-like MS. volume, in which many of the early poems he so much loved were written, and gave them to the Library of Trinity College. About this he wrote:

Markethill, Woodbridge,

December 4th, 1864.

Dear Alfred — Now I should be almost ready to be “yours ever, etc.” if I didn’t remember to ask you if you have any objection to my giving two or three of the leaves of your old “Butcher’s Book” (do you remember?) to the Library at Trinity College? An admirer of your’s there told me they would be glad of some such thing — It was in 1842, when you were printing the two good old volumes: — in Spedding’s rooms — and the “Butcher’s Book,” after its margins serving for pipe-lights, went leaf by leaf into the fire: and I told you I would keep two or three leaves of it as a remembrance. So I took a bit of my old favourite “Audley Court”: and a bit of another, I forget which: for I can’t lay my hands on them just now. But when I do, I shall give them to Trinity College unless you are strongly opposed. I dare say, however, you would give them the whole MS. of one of your later poems: which probably they would value more.

Tennyson appreciated “Old Fitz’s” fine qualities as a critic, but he recognized their limitations, and in particular his “crotchets” and prejudices. He was himself, as is now generally recognized, a consummate critic, and withal a most kindly and catholic one. In my first conversation with him he said that he used to think Goethe a good critic. “He always discovered all the good he could in a man.” To his own contemporaries, especially towards Browning, for example, his attitude was very different, as FitzGerald acknowledged, from FitzGerald’s own. I did not like, I remember, to ask him what he thought of Browning, but his son encouraged me to do so. “You ask him,” he said. “He’ll tell you at once.” At last I did so. “A true genius, but wanting in art,” he said. And on another occasion he spoke rather more in detail to the same purpose.

A special friend of both Tennyson and FitzGerald was Thackeray. With him FitzGerald had been intimate even earlier than with Tennyson. They were friends at college, and had gone as young men together to Paris, Thackeray ostensibly to study art. FitzGerald knew Paris of old. His father had a home there when he was a child, and went there for a few months every year for some years.

When he was nearing seventy FitzGerald wrote the following delightful account of some of his recollections to Thackeray’s daughter:

Woodbridge, May 18th, 1875.

Dear Annie Thackeray — I suppose you love Paris as your Father did — as I used to do till it was made so other than it was, in the days of Louis XVIII. when I first lived in it. Then it was all irregular and picturesque; with shops, hotels, cafés, theatres, etc. intermixed all along the Boulevards, all of different sorts and sizes.

Think of my remembering the then Royal Family going in several carriages to hunt in the Forest of St. Germain’s — Louis XVIII. first, with his Gardes du Corps, in blue and silver: then Monsieur (afterwards Charles X.) with his Guard in green and gold — French horns blowing—”tra, tra, tra” (as Madame de Sévigné says), through the lines of chestnut and limes — in flower. And then Madame (of Angoulême) standing up in her carriage, blear-eyed, dressed in white with her waist at her neck — standing up in the carriage at a corner of the wood to curtsey to the English assembled there — my mother among them. This was in 1817. Now you would have made a delightful description of all this; you will say I have done so, but that is not so. And yet I saw, and see, it all.

Whenever you write again — (I don’t wish you to write now) tell me what you think of Irving and Salvini; of the former of whom I have very different reports, Macready’s Memoirs seem to me very conscientious and rather dull; toujours Megready (as one W. M. T. irreverently called him). He seems to me to have had no humour — which I also observed in his acting. He would have made a better scholar or divine, I think: a very honourable, good man anywhere and anyhow.

With Thackeray himself he always maintained the same cordial relations as he did with Tennyson. But his literary attitude shifted and varied in the same way. Here, again, he preferred the early work which he had seen in process of creation. In later years, when they met him at Woodbridge, he said to “Alfred” and his son, “I hardly dare take down Thackeray’s early books, because they are so great. It’s like waking the Thunder.” He wrote of Thackeray in 1849: “He is just the same. All the world ‘admires Vanity Fair,’ and the author is courted by Dukes and Duchesses and wits of both sexes. I like Pendennis much, and Alfred said he thought it was quite delicious: it seemed to him so mature he said.” But a little later he took alarm at the Dukes and Duchesses, and wrote to Frederick Tennyson: “I am come to London, but I do not go to Operas or Plays, and have scarce time (and it must be said, scarce inclination) to hunt up many friends — I get shyer and shyer even of those I knew. Thackeray is in such a great world that I am afraid of him; he gets tired of me and we are content to regard each other at a distance. You, Alfred, Spedding, and Allen, are the only men I ever care to see again.... As you know, I admire your poems, the only poems by a living writer I do admire, except Alfred’s.”

He told Hallam Tennyson that he greatly admired the charming scene in “Philip” where the young lady unexpectedly discovered her lover (Philip) on the box of the diligence, and quieted the screaming children inside by saying, “Hush! he’s there.”

In particular, he was very severe on anything he called “cockney,” speaking, that is, the language of the town, not of the country; in other words, dealing with nature and human nature at second-hand. To this his letters again and again return. Of “fine writing,” as he called it, even when it occurred in his own early work, he was unsparingly critical. Thus of Euphranor he wrote to Mrs. Kemble: “The Dialogue is a pretty thing in some respects but disfigured by some confounded smart writing in parts.” He thought this fault in particular, so he says in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, “the loose screw in American literature,” and deplored its presence in Lowell, a writer whom otherwise he liked. “I honestly admire his work in the main,” he says, “and I think he is altogether the best critic we have, something of what Ste. Beuve is in French.” He thought that Tennyson came to suffer from these defects in his later days, and that the artist overpowered the man.

The latest of Tennyson’s poems, of course, he did not live to see. He did not see, for instance, “Crossing the Bar.” What would he have thought of it? Another old friend of Tennyson, also a fastidious critic, the Duke of Argyll, in an unpublished letter of February 1, 1892, writing of this and of the lines on the “Death of the Duke of Clarence,” says: “Magnificent, is all I can say of your lines in the Nineteenth. The two last things of yours that I have seen, this and the ‘Bar,’ are both perfect in their several ways, and such as no other man could have written. The ‘Bar’ is the type of what I define Poetry to be, great thought in true imagery and unusual expression. All the three are needed for the type thing. Much fine poetry is to me only eloquence, which is quite another thing.” With the last sentence FitzGerald would certainly have agreed, for it is what in other words he was himself constantly saying. But he seemed to require something more than great thoughts and true images and choice diction. Poignant and revealing touches, what he called in Crabbe “shrewd hits”; feeling, as well as, if not more than, thought — this was what he asked for. All Browning’s genius seemed to him emphase, cleverness, curiosity, “cockneyism.”

“The Dramatic Idylls,” he writes to Frederick Tennyson, “seemed to me ‘Ingoldsby.’ It seems to me as if the Beautiful being already appropriated by former men of genius, those who are not inspired, can only try for a Place among them by recourse to the Quaint, Grotesque, and Ugly in all the Arts, — what I call the Gargoyle style.” And again: “I always said he must be a cockney, and now I find he is Camberwell-born —

It once was the Pastoral cockney,

It now is the cockney Profound.”

The establishment of the Browning Society tried him specially. “Imagine a man abetting all this,” he writes. Tennyson had, through life, a high opinion of FitzGerald’s powers of criticism. They had often in their youth discussed the classics of all time and all times together, and also, with the poetic freedom of young men, their seniors, Shelley, and Byron, and Wordsworth. It was FitzGerald who invented for the last the name by which he went in their circle, of the “Daddy.” They had fought for the ownership of the Wordsworthian line, the “weakest blank verse in the language”:

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.

It really was FitzGerald’s description, given in conversation, of the gentleman who was going to marry his sister. When he died in 1862 FitzGerald, writing to Tennyson, reminded him of the line.

“This letter,” he writes, “ought to be on a black-edged paper in a black-edged cover: for I have just lost a brother-in-law — one of the best of Men. If you ask, ‘Who?’ I reply, in what you once called the weakest line ever enunciated:

A Mister Wilkinson, a Clergyman.

You can’t remember this: in Old Charlotte Street, ages ago!”

In the valedictory verses Tennyson makes allusion to this critical habit:

And when I fancied that my friend

For this brief idyll would require

A less diffuse and opulent end,

And would defend his judgment well,

If I should deem it over nice, ——

He himself was more catholic and generous. It was his generosity as well as their admiration for him which gave him the place he held among his brother poets and especially after he himself had won recognition among the younger men.

His relation to Browning, Patmore, and P. J. Bailey, to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, to Watson and Kipling as to Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, are well known. There is one writer who ought to be added to the list, who received some of his earliest encouragement from Tennyson — George Meredith. A letter, hitherto unpublished, written in January 1851, may illustrate this. He had just, in some trepidation, sent Tennyson his first volume of poems, containing the now well-known “Love in the Valley.” As Meredith told me himself, Tennyson replied with an exceedingly kind and “pretty” letter, saying that there was one poem in the book he could have wished he had written, and inviting Meredith to come to see him. The following is Meredith’s answer:

Sir — When I tell you that it would have been my chief ambition in publishing the little volume of poems you have received, to obtain your praise, you may imagine what pride and pleasure your letter gave me; though, indeed, I do not deserve so much as your generous appreciation would bestow, and of this I am very conscious. I had but counted twenty-three years when the book was published, which may account for, and excuse perhaps many of the immaturities. When you say you would like to know me, I can scarcely trust myself to express with how much delight I would wait upon you — a privilege I have long desired. As I suppose the number of poetic visits you receive are fully as troublesome as the books, I will not venture to call on you until you are able to make an appointment. My residence and address is Weybridge, but I shall not return to Town from Southend before Friday week. If in the meantime you will fix any day following that date, I shall gladly avail myself of the honour of your invitation. My address here is care of Mrs. Peacock, Southend, Essex. I have the honour to be, most faithfully yours,

George Meredith.

Alfred Tennyson, Esq.

The complement to “Old Fitz” was Carlyle. He was the friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. Gruff, grumbling, self-centred, satirical, at times even rude and rough, as he was, both of them seemed to have got not so much on his blind, as on his kind side from the first, and always to have remained there. Carlyle’s descriptions of Tennyson as a young man in the early “forties” and of the pleasure he had in his company are well known. “He seemed to take a fancy to me,” Tennyson said himself one day while we talked about him at Farringford. They foregathered a good deal at this period, sat and smoked silently, walked and talked together, both by day and night. FitzGerald told Hallam Tennyson, years after, during the visit to Woodbridge, that Carlyle was much concerned at this period about his father’s poverty, and said to him, “Alfred must have a pension.” The story of the way in which he spurred on “Dicky” Milnes to secure the pension is now classical. What his special effect, if he had any, on Tennyson was, it might be difficult to estimate or analyse.

The younger generation to-day does not remember the period of Carlyle’s immense influence. It lasted just into the youth of my contemporaries and myself, or perhaps a little longer, and then began to wane and die away. He certainly was a “radio-active” force in the days and with the men of Tennyson’s youth, — Maurice, and Sterling, and “Dicky” Milnes, as he was a little later with Ruskin and Kingsley. FitzGerald, with his detachment and his fearless sincerity, estimated him as fairly as any one. “Do you see Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets?” he wrote. “They make the world laugh, and his friends rather sorry for him. But that is because people will still look for practical measures from him. One must be content with him as a great satirist who can make us feel when we are wrong, though he cannot set us right. There is a bottom of truth in Carlyle’s wildest rhapsodies.”

He wrote to Frederick Tennyson in 1850: “When I spoke of the ‘Latter-Day Prophet’ I conclude you have read or heard of Carlyle’s Pamphlets. People are tired of them and of him; he only foams, snaps, and howls and no progress people say. This is about true, and yet there is vital good in all he has written.” Again, in 1854, he says, “Carlyle I did not go to see, for I have really nothing to tell him, and I am tired of hearing him growl, tho’ I admire him as much as ever.” “I wonder if he ever thinks how much sound and fury he has vented,” he writes on another occasion.

But the posthumous publication of Carlyle’s Letters, as he wrote about a fortnight before his own death, “raised him in FitzGerald’s esteem”; and his last effort was to go to Chelsea to see his statue, and the old house hard by which he had not seen for five-and-twenty years, to find it, alas, “deserted, neglected, and ‘To let!’”

Carlyle was indeed much what “Old Fitz” describes. He was a powerful solvent of his age. He destroyed many shams, “Hebrew rags,” “old clothes,” as he called them. Both by his own example and his fiery energy he inculcated the “Gospel of Work.” He was not a modern realist, but a man who dealt in realities, who perceived that virtue and beauty and faith are as real as vice and ugliness and unfaith, nay, perhaps more real; but that certainly neither are shams, neither God nor the Devil, though of shams, of false gods and false devils, there are many. His appreciation of poetry was, as is well known, but scant and intermittent. He used to banter Tennyson and call him “a Life-Guardsman spoiled by making poetry,” but he became converted even to his poems, though, as he said, this was surprising to himself. He “felt the pulse of a real man’s heart” in the 1842 volumes. “Ulysses” was a special favourite. He quoted again and again the lines:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles whom we knew.

“These lines do not make me weep,” he said, “but there is in me what would fill whole Lachrymatories as I read.” He, fortunately, also “took a fancy” to Mrs. Tennyson when he met her as a bride at Tent Lodge, Coniston, partly because, in answer to one of his wild grumbles, she said, “That is not sane, Mr. Carlyle.” An unpublished letter from Carlyle of the date October 1850, describes an admirer of Tennyson’s poems, an ill-starred but brave man, a skilful physician, a friend of Dr. John Carlyle at Leamington, who, after losing the greater part of his face by caries of the bone, had at last been cured, though awfully disfigured. “He fled to Keswick,” writes Carlyle, “and there he now resides, not idle still, nor forsaken of friends, or hope, or domestic joy — a monument of human courtesy, and really a worthy and rather interesting man. Such is your admirer and mine. Heaven be good to him and us.”

FitzGerald, in a letter to Frederick Tennyson, quotes with approval a criticism of Lowell’s that Carlyle “was a poet in all but rhythm”; and it would not be difficult to find “parallel passages” between Tennyson and Carlyle, between Sartor Resartus and “In Memoriam.” The Life of Sterling, too, should be read by any student anxious to “reconstitute the atmosphere” in which that poem grew up, and which, to a certain extent, it still breathes. But “parallel passages” are misleading. Suffice it to say that both went through the storm and stress of a doubting age, both took their stand on the solid rock of God and of real, healthy human nature, — both emerged in the “Eternal Yea.”

Froude, in his history of Carlyle’s Life in London, has a most interesting autobiographic passage about Carlyle’s position and influence in 1843, the time of the publication of Past and Present, which brings this out with special force. He says:

In this condition the best and bravest of my own contemporaries determined to have done with insincerity, to find ground under their feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and what we could honestly regard as true and believe that and live by it. Tennyson became the voice of this feeling in poetry, Carlyle in what was called prose, though prose it was not, but something by itself with a form and melody of its own.

Tennyson’s Poems, the group of Poems which closed with “In Memoriam,” became to many of us what the “Christian Year” was to orthodox Churchmen. We read them, and they became part of our minds, the expression in exquisite language of the feelings which were working in ourselves. Carlyle stood beside him as a prophet and teacher; and to the young, the generous, to every one who took life seriously, who wished to make an honourable use of it and could not be content with sitting down and making money, his words were like the morning reveille.

Others may come at last to the sad conclusion that nothing can be known about the world, that the external powers, whatever they may be, are indifferent to human action or human welfare. To such an opinion some men, and those not the worst, may be driven after weary observation of life. But the young will never believe it; or if they do they have been young only in name.

If the first paragraphs aptly “place” Tennyson and Carlyle, the last, though not intentionally, exactly suits their friend, the translator of the Rubáiyát. FitzGerald remained, as his friend the Master of Trinity College (W. H. Thompson) said, in “Doubting Castle.” Tennyson was the most hopeful, as well as the most balanced and sane, and therefore the most helpful of the three.

Toward the end of his life, Carlyle, in the Inaugural Address given by him as Rector of Edinburgh University, in which he summed up so many of the convictions of a lifetime, put forward the following description of the completely healthy human spirit. “A man all lucid and in equilibrium. His intellect a clear mirror, geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to all objects and impressions made on it, and imaging all things in their correct proportions, not twisted up into convex or concave and distorting everything so that he cannot see the truth of the matter without endless groping and manipulation — healthy, clear and free, and discerning all round about him.” He put this picture before young men as the ideal to be aimed at by the intellectual student, and in particular by the man of letters. “But,” he said, “we can never never attain that at all.” Perhaps not altogether. Perhaps even he who invented the phrase for the poet’s duty of “holding the mirror up to Nature,” did not wholly attain to it. But, according to his measure, it is no bad description of Alfred Tennyson, with the “universality of his mind,” the simplicity of his good sense, the childlike sincerity of his spirit. This quality it was that both Carlyle and FitzGerald found and liked in him.

It has been said that Tennyson and FitzGerald read the same books. One of the best instances of this is to be found in a long letter of FitzGerald’s about posthumous fame and literary immortality. It was written to Cowell in 1847, and is given by Dr. Aldis Wright in his first collection. After speaking of Homer and the Iliad, FitzGerald writes:

Yet as I often think it is not the poetical imagination, but bare Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the Iliad; the history of the world, the great infinitudes of Space and Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me. And when we think that Man must go on in the same plodding way, one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of discovery will distance all his imaginations and dissolve the language in which they are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now after two thousand years: a space that seems long to us whose lives are so brief; but a moment, the twinkling of an eye, if compared (not to Eternity alone), but to the ages which it is now known the world must have existed, and (unless for some external violence) must continue to exist.

Lyell in his book about America, says that the Falls of Niagara, if (as seems certain) they have worked their way back southwards for seven miles, must have taken over 35,000 years to do so at the rate of something over a foot a year! Sometimes they fall back on a stratum that crumbles away from behind them more easily: but then again they have to roll over rock that yields to them scarce more perceptibly than the anvil to the serpent. And these very soft strata, which the Cataract now erodes, contain evidences of a race of animals, and of the action of seas washing over them, long before Niagara came to have a distinct current; and the rocks were compounded ages and ages before those strata! So that, as Lyell says, the geologist, looking at Niagara forgets even the roar of its waters in the contemplation of the awful processes of time that it suggests. It is not only that the vision of Time must wither the Poet’s hope of immortality, but it is in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.

This train of thought was evidently often present to FitzGerald’s mind. It oppressed him. It makes itself felt in the Rubáiyát. It was one of the many great ideas he imported into, or educed from, the old Persian Astronomer.

And fear not lest existence closing your

Account, and mine, should know the like no more;

The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has poured

Millions of Bubbles like us and will pour

When you and I behind the Veil are past:

Oh but the long long while the world shall last,

Which of our coming and departure heeds

As the Sev’n Seas should heed a pebble-cast.

It was even more constantly present to the mind of Tennyson. Astronomy and Geology had been among his favourite studies from his early youth, and remained so all his life. When I was walking with him toward the Needles and looking at the magnificent chalk cliff below the downs, and spoke about his felicitous epithet for it—”the milky steep,” he said, “The most wonderful thing about that cliff is to think it was all once alive.” The allusions to it in his poems are innumerable:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree,

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

He was always “hearing the roll of the ages.” He, too, had read his Lyell, and the contemplation of geological time suggested to him exactly the same reflections which FitzGerald draws out. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that he himself may have imparted them to FitzGerald. For he has embodied just these thoughts in that noble late poem “Parnassus,” with a resemblance which is startling. But while the parallel between “Parnassus” and FitzGerald’s letter is extraordinarily close up to a certain point, the contrast, when it is reached, is even more striking, and is the fundamental contrast between the two men and their creeds:

What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain,

Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain?

On those two known peaks they stand, ever spreading and heightening;

Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning!

Look, in their deep double shadow the crown’d ones all disappearing!

Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing!

Sounding for ever and ever? pass on! the sight confuses —

These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses!

So far Tennyson agrees with Omar:

Ah make the most of what we yet may spend

Before we too into the dust descend;

Dust into dust and under dust to lie,

Sans wine, sans song, sans singer and sans end!

But then comes the divergence, conveyed with the exquisitely sympathetic change of rhythm:

If the lips were touch’d with fire from off a pure Pierian altar,

Tho’ their music here be mortal, need the singer greatly care?

Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter;

Let the golden Iliad vanish, Homer here is Homer there.

The beautiful lines which form the Envoy to “Tiresias,” already alluded to, never reached their address. I remember well, when we spoke of FitzGerald, the sadness with which Tennyson said to me, “He never saw them. He died before they were sent him.” After his death Tennyson added the Epilogue on the same note. It is touching to see that in his closing lines to his old friend he had hinted with tender delicacy at the same creed to which he always clung:

Gone into darkness, that full light

Of friendship! past, in sleep, away

By night, into the deeper night!

The deeper night? A clearer day

Than our poor twilight dawn on earth —

If night, what barren toil to be!

What life, so maim’d by night, were worth

Our living out? Not mine to me

Remembering all the golden hours

Now silent, and so many dead

And him the last; and laying flowers,

This wreath, above his honour’d head,

And praying that, when I from hence

Shall fade with him into the unknown,

My close of earth’s experience

May prove as peaceful as his own.

Like many rough and overbearing men Carlyle liked those who stood up to him and gave him back, in his own phrase, “shake for shake.” FitzGerald was one of these. He made his better acquaintance by contradicting and correcting him about the battlefield and the buried warriors of Naseby Fight. Carlyle took it all in excellent part, and they became close friends. Carlyle went to visit him and invited the many letters which FitzGerald wrote. In his later years he sent one of these letters to C. E. Norton as a “slight emblem and memorial of the peaceable, affectionate, ultra-modest man and his innocent far niente life”; “and,” he adds, “the connection (were there nothing more) of Omar, the Mahometan Blackguard, and Oliver Cromwell, the English Puritan.”

But “Old Fitz” could criticize and sum up Carlyle equally effectively. He most happily pointed out his inconsistency in praising the “Hebrew rags” of the old Evangelical beliefs when seen in Cromwell and his generals, and not being willing to let them still serve for humble folk in his own day. His tone here is singularly like that of Tennyson’s well-known lines, beginning:

Leave thou thy sister when she prays.

“We may be well content,” FitzGerald writes, “even to suffer some absurdities in the Form if the Spirit does well on the whole.” He would probably have agreed with much of Tennyson’s “Akbar’s Dream,” which he did not live to read. For the tenets of “Omar,” “The Mahometan Blackguard,” must not be taken as representing the whole of FitzGerald’s philosophy, any more than his eccentricities and negligent habits must be taken as a complete expression of his life.

Too exclusive attention has been paid to both. Dr. Aldis Wright, one of the few surviving friends who knew him really well, speaks justly of “the exaggerated stories of his slovenliness and his idleness,” and “of the way in which he has been made responsible for all the oddities of his family.” “Every tale,” he says, “that may be true of some of his kin, is fathered upon him.”

And FitzGerald’s own Preface to his translation of Omar shows what his real moral and religious attitude toward the Rubáiyát was. He felt bound, so far as the spirit, if not the letter, went, to present it faithfully, if not literally; but he speaks very gravely of it. “The quatrains here selected,” he writes in the Preface, “are strung into something of an Eclogue, with perhaps a less than equal proportion of the ‘Drink and make merry’ which (genuine or not), recurs over frequently in the original. Either way, the result is sad enough, saddest perhaps when most ostentatiously merry, more apt to move sorrow than Anger toward the old Tentmaker, who, after vainly endeavouring to unshackle his steps from Destiny and to catch some authentic Glimpse of To-morrow, fell back upon To-day (which has outlived so many To-morrows!) as the only ground he got to stand upon, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet.”

The truth is, Old Fitz’s foibles, and indeed his faults, were only too patent to others and to himself. But if noscitur a sociis holds good, Carlyle and Tennyson and Thackeray, Spedding, Thompson, the Cowells, and Mrs. Kemble, the friends of his whole lifetime, Lowell and C. E. Norton, those of his later years, may be permitted to outweigh his at times too tolerant cultivation and indulgence of his burly Vikings. Tennyson’s relation to him was summed up in his letter to Sir Frederick Pollock which Dr. Aldis Wright quotes, but which may fitly here be quoted again: “I had no truer friend; he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit.”

These words, with Tennyson’s poetic picture already quoted, with Carlyle’s epithets, “innocent, far niente, ultra-modest,” with his own writings taken as a whole and not Omar alone, especially his Letters, may be left to speak for him in life and in death, — these and the epitaph which he asked to have placed upon his gravestone:

“It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.”

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON’S TALK FROM 1835 TO 1853

[Many more were in a Notebook, which I have now lost. — E. F. G.]

By Edward FitzGerald

(Given to Hallam Lord Tennyson)

1835

(Resting on our oars one calm day on Windermere, whither we had gone for a week from dear Spedding’s Mirehouse at the end of May 1835, — resting on our oars, and looking into the lake quite unruffled and clear, he quoted from the lines he had lately read us from the MS. of “Morte d’Arthur” about the lonely lady of the Lake and Excalibur.)

Nine days she wrought it, sitting all alone

Upon the hidden bases of the Hills.

“Not bad that, Fitz, is it?”

(One summer day looking from Richmond Star and Garter.)

“I love those woods that go triumphing down to the river.”

“Somehow water is the element which I love best of all the four.” (He was passionately fond of the sea and of babbling brooks. — Ed.)

“Some one says that nothing strikes one more on returning from the Continent than the look of our English country towns. Houses not so big, nor such rows of them as abroad; but each house, little or big, distinct from one another, each man’s castle, built according to his own means and fancy, and so indicating the Englishman’s individual humour.

“I have been two days abroad — no further than Boulogne this time, but I am struck as always on returning from France with the look of good sense in the London people.”

(Standing before a Madonna, by Murillo, at the Dulwich Gallery — her eyes fixed on you.)

“Yes — but they seem to look at something beyond — beyond the Actual into Abstraction. I have seen that in a human face.” (I, E. F. G., have seen it in his. Some American spoke of the same in Wordsworth. I suppose it may be so with all Poets.)

1850

“When I was sitting by the banks of Doon — I don’t know why — I wasn’t in the least spoony — not thinking of Burns (but of the lapsing of the Ages) — when all of a sudden I gave way to a passion of tears.”

“I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two bumpkins who stood by said there was no one in the two parishes who could do it. I was then about twenty-five.” (He could carry his mother’s pony round the dinner-table. — E. F. G.)

“The Sea at Mablethorpe is the grandest I know, except perhaps at Land’s End.” (That is as he afterwards explained to me in a letter.)

“Thackeray is the better artist, Dickens the [more affluent] Genius. He, like Hogarth, has the moral sublime sometimes: but not the ideal sublime. Perhaps I seem talking nonsense; I mean Hogarth could not conceive an Apollo or a Jupiter.” (Or Sigismunda. — E. F. G.)—”I think Hogarth greater than Dickens.”

(Looking at an engraving of the Sistine Madonna in which only She and the Child, I think, were represented.)

“Perhaps finer than the whole composition in so far as one’s eyes are more concentrated on the subject. The Child seems to me the furthest result of human art. His attitude is that of a man — his countenance a Jupiter’s — perhaps rather too much so.”

(He afterwards said (1852) that his own little boy, Hallam, explained the expression of Raffaelle’s. He said he thought he had known Raffaelle before he went to Italy — but not Michael Angelo — not only Statues and Frescoes, but some picture (I think) of a Madonna “dragging a ton of a Child over her Shoulder.”)

Seaford: December 27th-28th, 1852

“Babies delight in being moved to and from anything: that is amusement to them. What a Life of Wonder — every object new. This morning he (his own little boy) worshipp’d the Bed-post when a gleam of sunshine lighted on it.”

“I am afraid of him. It is a Man. Babes have an expression of grandeur that children lose. I used to think that the old Painters overdid the Expression and Dignity of their infant Christs: but I see they did not.”

“I was struck at the Duke’s (Wellington’s) Funeral with the look of sober Manhood and Humanity in the British Soldiers.”

(Of Laurence’s chalk drawing of — —’s head—”rather diplomatic than inhuman” — he said in fun. — E. F. G.)

Brighton, 1852-1853

“The finest Sea I have seen is at Valentia (Ireland), without any wind and seemingly without a Wave, but with the momentum of the Atlantic behind it, it dashes up into foam — blue diamond it looked like — all along the rocks — like ghosts playing at Hide and Seek.”

(At some other time on the same subject.)

“When I was in Cornwall it had blown a storm of wind and rain for days — all of a sudden fell into perfect calm; I was a little inland of the cliffs, when, after a space of perfect silence, a long roll of Thunder — from some wave rushing into a cavern, I suppose — came up from the Distance and died away. I never felt Silence like that.”

“This” (looking from Brighton Pier) “is not a grand sea: only an angry curt sea. It seems to shriek as it recoils with its pebbles along the beach.”

“The Earth has light of her own — so has Venus — perhaps all the other Planets — electrical light, or what we call Aurora. The light edge of the dark hemisphere of the moon — the ‘old Moon in the new Moon’s arms.’”

“Nay, they say she has no atmosphere at all.”

(I do not remember when this was said, nor whether I have exactly set it down; therefore must not make A. T. answerable for what he did not say, or for what after-discovery may have caused him to unsay. He had a powerful brain for Physics as for the Ideal. I remember his noticing that the forward-bending horns of some built-up mammal in the British Museum would never force its way through jungle, etc., and I observed on an after-visit that they had been altered accordingly.)

“Sometimes I think Shakespeare’s Sonnets finer than his Plays — which is of course absurd. For it is the knowledge of the Plays that makes the Sonnets so fine.”

“Do you think the Artist ever feels satisfied with his Song? Not with the Whole, I think; but perhaps the expression of parts.”

(Standing one day with him looking at two busts — one of Dante, the other of Goethe, in a London shop, I asked, “What is wanting to make Goethe’s as fine as the other’s?”)

“The Divine.” (“Edel sei der Mensch” was a poem in which he thought he found “The Divine.” — Ed.)

(Taking up and reading some number of Pendennis at my lodging.) “It’s delicious — it’s so mature.”

(Of Richardson’s Clarissa, etc.) “I love those great, still Books.”

“What is it in Dryden? I always feel that he is greater than his works.” (Though he thought much of “Theodore and Honoria,” and quoted emphatically:

More than a mile immerst within the wood.)

“Two of the finest similes in poetry are Milton’s — that of the Fleet hanging in the air (Paradise Lost), and the gunpowder-like ‘So started up in his foul shape the Fiend.’ (Which latter A. T. used to enact with grim humour, from the crouching of the Toad to the Explosion.) Say what you please, I feel certain that Milton after Death shot up into some grim Archangel.” N.B. — He used in earlier days to do the sun coming out from a cloud, and returning into one again, with a gradual opening and shutting of eyes and lips, etc. And, with a great fluffing up of his hair into full wig, and elevation of cravat and collar, George the Fourth in as comical and wonderful a way.

“I could not read through Palmerin of England, nor Amadis of Gaul, or any of those old romances — not even ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ though with so many fine things in it — But all strung together without Art.”

Old Hallam had been speaking of Shakespeare as the greatest of men, etc. A. T. “Well, he was the Man one would have wished to introduce to another Planet as a sample of our kind.”

Àpropos of physical stature, A. T. had been noticing how small Guizot looked beside old Hallam (when he went with Guizot, Hallam, and Macaulay over the Houses of Parliament. — Ed.).

“I was skating one day at full swing and came clash against a man of my own stature who was going at the same. We both fell asunder — got up — and laughed. Had we been short men we might have resented.”

(I blamed some one for swearing at the servant girl in a lodging.) “I don’t know if women don’t like it from men: they think it shows Vigour.” (Not that he ever did so himself.)

“There is a want of central dignity about him — he excuses himself, etc.”

“Most great men write terse hands.”

“I like those old Variorum Classics — all the Notes make the Text look precious.”

(Of some dogmatic summary.) “That is the quick decision of a mind that sees half the truth.”

TENNYSON AND THACKERAY by Lady Ritchie

... You ask me what I can remember of your Father and of mine in early days. I seem to know more than I actually remember....

In looking over old letters and papers, I have found very few mentions of the many actual meetings between them, though again and again the Poet’s name is quoted and recorded, nor can I recall the time when I did not hear it spoken of with trust and admiring regard. To this day we possess “The Day Dream,” copied out from beginning to end in my Father’s writing.

He was about twenty years of age when one day, in May 1832, he wrote down in his diary:

Kemble and Hallam sat here for an hour. Read an article in Blackwood about A. Tennyson, abusing Hallam for his essay in The Englishman.

Then again ...

Kemble read me some very beautiful verses of Tennyson’s.

And again:

Found that B. and I did not at all agree about Tennyson. B. is a clever fellow nevertheless, and makes money by magazine writing, in which I should much desire to follow his example.

After my Father’s marriage, when he was living in Coram Street, Tennyson and FitzGerald both came to see him there. In an old letter of my mother’s she describes Mr. Tennyson coming and my sitting at the table beside her in a tall chair and with a new pinafore for the occasion. FitzGerald, I think, also spoke of one of these meetings, and of my Father exclaiming suddenly, “My dear Alfred, you do talk d —— well.”

As we grew up, the Tennyson books were a part of our household life. I can especially remember one volume, which came out when I was a little girl and which my Father lent to a friend, and I also remember his laughing vexation and annoyance when she returned the book all scored and defaced with absurd notes and marks of exclamation everywhere.

I once published an article in an American magazine from which I venture to quote a passage which tells of one of the early meetings:

I can remember vaguely, on one occasion through a cloud of smoke, looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave head of the Poet Laureate. He was sitting with my Father in the twilight after some family meal in the old house in Kensington; it was Tennyson himself who afterwards reminded me how upon this occasion, while my Father was speaking, my little sister looked up suddenly from the book over which she had been absorbed, saying, in her sweet childish voice, “Papa, why do you not write books like Nicholas Nickleby?” Then again, I seem to hear across that same familiar table, voices, without shape or name, talking and telling each other that Mr. Tennyson was married, that he and his wife had been met walking on the terrace at Clevedon Court, and then the clouds descend again, except, indeed, that I can still see my Father riding off on his brown cob to Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson’s house at Twickenham to attend the christening of Hallam their eldest son.

Being themselves, when men, such as these two men, appreciate each other’s work, they know, with their great instinct for truth and directness, what to admire — smaller people are apt to admire the men rather than the work. When Tennyson and my Father met, it was as when knights meet in the field.

How my Father appreciated the Idylls will be seen from the following letter, which came as an answer to his own:

Farringford, I.W.

My dear Thackeray — Should I not have answered you ere this 6th of November! surely; what excuse — none that I know of; except indeed that perhaps your very generosity — boundlessness of approval — made me in a measure shamefaced. I could scarcely accept it, being, I fancy, a modest man and always more or less doubtful of my own efforts in any line; but I may tell you that your little note gave me more pleasure than all the journals and monthlies and quarterlies which have come across me, not so much from being the Great Novelist, I hope, as from your being my good old friend — or perhaps of your being both of these in one. Well — let it be. I have been ransacking all sorts of old albums and scrap-books, but cannot find anything worthy sending you. Unfortunately, before your letter arrived, I had agreed to give Macmillan the only available poem I had by me. I don’t think he would have got it (for I dislike publishing in magazines), except that he had come to visit me in my island, and was sitting and blowing his weed vis-à-vis....

Whenever you feel your brains as “the remainder biscuit,” or indeed whenever you will, come over to me and take a blow on these downs where the air, as Keats said, “is worth sixpence a pint,” and bring your girls too. — Yours always,

A. Tennyson.

I can remember all my Father’s pleasure when Alfred Tennyson gave him “Tithonus” for one of the early numbers of the Cornhill Magazine.

He was once at Farringford, but this was before the time of the Cornhill.

From America, where people store their kindly records and from whence so many echoes of the past are apt to reach us again, — some in worthy, and some, I fear, in less worthy voices, — I have received from time to time, the gift of an hour from the past, vivid and unalloyed. One day in the Century magazine, I came upon a page which retold for me the whole story of a happy hour and of my Father’s affectionate regard for that chivalrous American, Bayard Taylor, who came to see him, and for whom he had wished to do his best, by sending him to Farringford. All this came back to me when Alfred Tennyson’s letter was reproduced in the Century, his charming answer to my Father, and my Father’s own note in the margin.... Bayard Taylor himself has put the date to it all — June 1857.

My Father writes to Bayard Taylor:

My dear B. T. — I was so busy yesterday that I could not keep my agreeable appointment with Thompson, and am glad I didn’t fetch you to Greenwich. Here’s a note which concerns you and I am ever yours,

W. M. T.

The letter from Lord Tennyson runs as follows:

Farringford, I.W.

My dear Thackeray — Your American friend and poet-traveller has never arrived; he has, I suppose, changed his mind. I am sure I should have been very glad to see him, for my castle was never yet barricaded and entrenched against good fellows. I write now, this time to say that after the 30th I shall not be here.

My best remembrances to your daughters, whom I have twice seen, once as little girls, and again a year or so back. — Yours ever,

A. Tennyson.

Afterwards Bayard Taylor found his way to Farringford, and he has written a happy account of the visit.

I hardly know whether or not to give the record of a meeting which I myself remember. Once after a long visit to Freshwater I returned home to Palace Green, and hearing that Alfred Tennyson had come up soon after to stay for a few days at Little Holland House close by, I told my Father, and together we planned a visit, to which I eagerly looked forward, with much pride and youthful excitement. It was not far to walk, the high road leads straight to Holland House, in the grounds of which Little Holland House then stood among the trees. Mr. and Mrs. Prinsep were living there and Mr. Watts. When we reached the House and were let in, we saw Mr. Watts in his studio; he seemed to hesitate to admit us; then came the ladies. Mr. Tennyson was upstairs, we were told, not well. He had hurt his shin. “He did not wish for visitors, nevertheless certainly we were to go up,” they said, and we mounted into a side wing by some narrow staircase and came to a door, by which cans of water were standing in a row. As we entered, a man-servant came out of the little room.

Tennyson was sitting in a chair with his leg up, evidently ill and out of spirits.

“I am sorry to find you laid up,” said my Father.

“They insisted upon my seeing the doctor for my leg,” said Alfred, “and he prescribed cold water dressing.”

“Yes,” said my Father, “there’s nothing like it, I have tried it myself.”

And then no more! No high conversation — no quotations — no recollections. After a minute or two of silence we came away. My tall Father tramped down the little wooden staircase followed by a bitterly disappointed audience.

When I was writing that same magazine article from which I have already given an extract, I asked Edward FitzGerald if he could help me, and if I might quote anything from his letters and from Euphranor:

“My dear Anne Ritchie” — Mr. FitzGerald wrote—”Your letter found me at Aldburgh on our coast where I come to hear my old sea talk to me, as more than sixty years ago, and to get a blow out on his back. Pray quote anything you please, provided with Alfred’s permission and no compliments to the author.

“I do not think my fanfaron about him would be of any such service as you suppose; strangers usually take all that as the flourish of a friendly adviser, and would rather have some facts, such as that perhaps of his words about the Raphael and the little Hallam’s worship of the bed-post. I suppose it was in 1852 at Seaford near Brighton. I can swear absolutely and can now hear and see him as he said it; so don’t let him pretend to gainsay or modify that, whether he may choose to have it quoted or not.

“Ah, I have often thought that I might have done some good service if I had kept to him and followed him and noted the fine true things which fell from his lips on every subject, practical or aesthetic, as they call it.

“Bayard Taylor, in some essays lately published, quotes your Father saying that Tennyson was the wisest man he knew — which, by the way, would tell more in America than all I could write or say.

“Your finding it hard to make an article about A. T. will excuse my inability to help you, as you asked. I did not know (as in the case of your Father also) where to begin or how to go on without a beginning. — Ever yours,

E. F. G.”

In 1863, just after our Father’s death, my sister and I came to Freshwater. It seemed to us that perhaps there more than anywhere else we might find some gleam of the light of our home, with the friend who had known him and belonged to his life and whom he trusted.

We arrived late in the afternoon. It was bitter weather, the snow lying upon the ground. Mrs. Cameron had lent us a cottage, and the fires were already burning, and as we rested aimlessly in the twilight, we seemed aware of a tall figure standing in the window, wrapped in a heavy cloak, with a broad-brimmed hat. This was Tennyson, who had walked down to see us in silent sympathy.

TENNYSON ON HIS FRIENDS OF LATER LIFE

TO W. C. MACREADY

1851

Farewell, Macready, since to-night we part;

Full-handed thunders often have confessed

Thy power, well-used to move the public breast.

We thank thee with our voice, and from the heart.

Farewell, Macready, since this night we part,

Go, take thine honours home; rank with the best,

Garrick and statelier Kemble, and the rest

Who made a nation purer through their art.

Thine is it that our drama did not die,

Nor flicker down to brainless pantomime,

And those gilt gauds men-children swarm to see.

Farewell, Macready; moral, grave, sublime;

Our Shakespeare’s bland and universal eye

Dwells pleased, through twice a hundred years, on thee.

TO THE REV. F. D. MAURICE

Come, when no graver cares employ,

Godfather, come and see your boy:

Your presence will be sun in winter,

Making the little one leap for joy.

For, being of that honest few,

Who give the Fiend himself his due,

Should eighty-thousand college-councils

Thunder “Anathema,” friend, at you;

Should all our churchmen foam in spite

At you, so careful of the right,

Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome

(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight;

Where, far from noise and smoke of town,

I watch the twilight falling brown

All round a careless-order’d garden

Close to the ridge of a noble down.

You’ll have no scandal while you dine,

But honest talk and wholesome wine,

And only hear the magpie gossip

Garrulous under a roof of pine:

For groves of pine on either hand,

To break the blast of winter, stand;

And further on, the hoary Channel

Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand;

Where, if below the milky steep

Some ship of battle slowly creep,

And on thro’ zones of light and shadow

Glimmer away to the lonely deep,

We might discuss the Northern sin

Which made a selfish war begin;

Dispute the claims, arrange the chances;

Emperor, Ottoman, which shall win:

Or whether war’s avenging rod

Shall lash all Europe into blood;

Till you should turn to dearer matters,

Dear to the man that is dear to God;

How best to help the slender store,

How mend the dwellings, of the poor;

How gain in life, as life advances,

Valour and charity more and more.

Come, Maurice, come: the lawn as yet

Is hoar with rime, or spongy-wet;

But when the wreath of March has blossom’d,

Crocus, anemone, violet,

Or later, pay one visit here,

For those are few we hold as dear;

Nor pay but one, but come for many,

Many and many a happy year.

January, 1854.

TO SIR JOHN SIMEON

IN THE GARDEN AT SWAINSTON

Nightingales warbled without,

Within was weeping for thee:

Shadows of three dead men

Walk’d in the walks with me,

Shadows of three dead men and thou wast one of the three.

Nightingales sang in his woods:

The Master was far away:

Nightingales warbled and sang

Of a passion that lasts but a day;

Still in the house in his coffin the Prince of courtesy lay.

Two dead men have I known

In courtesy like to thee:

Two dead men have I loved

With a love that ever will be:

Three dead men have I loved and thou art last of the three.

TO EDWARD LEAR, ON HIS TRAVELS IN GREECE

Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls

Of water, sheets of summer glass,

The long divine Peneïan pass,

The vast Akrokeraunian walls,

Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,

With such a pencil, such a pen,

You shadow forth to distant men,

I read and felt that I was there:

And trust me while I turn’d the page,

And track’d you still on classic ground,

I grew in gladness till I found

My spirits in the golden age.

For me the torrent ever pour’d

And glisten’d — here and there alone

The broad-limb’d Gods at random thrown

By fountain-urns; — and Naiads oar’d

A glimmering shoulder under gloom

Of cavern pillars; on the swell

The silver lily heaved and fell;

And many a slope was rich in bloom

From him that on the mountain lea

By dancing rivulets fed his flocks

To him who sat upon the rocks,

And fluted to the morning sea.

TO THE MASTER OF BALLIOL

(PROFESSOR JOWETT)

I

Dear Master in our classic town,

You, loved by all the younger gown

There at Balliol,

Lay your Plato for one minute down,

II

And read a Grecian tale re-told,

Which, cast in later Grecian mould,

Quintus Calaber

Somewhat lazily handled of old;

III

And on this white midwinter day —

For have the far-off hymns of May,

All her melodies,

All her harmonies echo’d away? —

IV

To-day, before you turn again

To thoughts that lift the soul of men,

Hear my cataract’s

Downward thunder in hollow and glen,

V

Till, led by dream and vague desire,

The woman, gliding toward the pyre,

Find her warrior

Stark and dark in his funeral fire.

TO THE DUKE OF ARGYLL

O Patriot Statesman, be thou wise to know

The limits of resistance, and the bounds

Determining concession; still be bold

Not only to slight praise but suffer scorn;

And be thy heart a fortress to maintain

The day against the moment, and the year

Against the day; thy voice, a music heard

Thro’ all the yells and counter-yells of feud

And faction, and thy will, a power to make

This ever-changing world of circumstance,

In changing, chime with never-changing Law.

The Drive at Farringford, showing on the left the “Wellingtonia” planted by Garibaldi. From a drawing by W. Biscombe Gardner.

TO GIFFORD PALGRAVE

I

Ulysses, much-experienced man,

Whose eyes have known this globe of ours,

Her tribes of men, and trees, and flowers,

From Corrientes to Japan,

II

To you that bask below the Line,

I soaking here in winter wet —

The century’s three strong eights have met

To drag me down to seventy-nine

III

In summer if I reach my day —

To you, yet young, who breathe the balm

Of summer-winters by the palm

And orange grove of Paraguay,

IV

I tolerant of the colder time,

Who love the winter woods, to trace

On paler heavens the branching grace

Of leafless elm, or naked lime,

V

And see my cedar green, and there

My giant ilex keeping leaf

When frost is keen and days are brief —

Or marvel how in English air

VI

My yucca, which no winter quells,

Altho’ the months have scarce begun,

Has push’d toward our faintest sun

A spike of half-accomplish’d bells —

VII

Or watch the waving pine which here

The warrior of Caprera set,

A name that earth will not forget

Till earth has roll’d her latest year —

VIII

I, once half-crazed for larger light

On broader zones beyond the foam,

But chaining fancy now at home

Among the quarried downs of Wight,

IX

Not less would yield full thanks to you

For your rich gift, your tale of lands

I know not, your Arabian sands;

Your cane, your palm, tree-fern, bamboo,

X

The wealth of tropic bower and brake;

Your Oriental Eden-isles,

Where man, nor only Nature smiles;

Your wonder of the boiling lake;

XI

Phra-Chai, the Shadow of the Best,

Phra-bat the step; your Pontic coast;

Crag-cloister; Anatolian Ghost;

Hong-Kong, Karnac, and all the rest.

XII

Thro’ which I follow’d line by line

Your leading hand, and came, my friend,

To prize your various book, and send

A gift of slenderer value, mine.

TO THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA

I

At times our Britain cannot rest,

At times her steps are swift and rash;

She moving, at her girdle clash

The golden keys of East and West.

II

Not swift or rash, when late she lent

The sceptres of her West, her East,

To one, that ruling has increased

Her greatness and her self-content.

III

Your rule has made the people love

Their ruler. Your viceregal days

Have added fulness to the phrase

Of “Gauntlet in the velvet glove.”

IV

But since your name will grow with Time,

Not all, as honouring your fair fame

Of Statesman, have I made the name

A golden portal to my rhyme:

V

But more, that you and yours may know

From me and mine, how dear a debt

We owed you, and are owing yet

To you and yours, and still would owe.

VI

For he — your India was his Fate,

And drew him over sea to you —

He fain had ranged her thro’ and thro’,

To serve her myriads and the State, —

VII

A soul that, watch’d from earliest youth,

And on thro’ many a brightening year,

Had never swerved for craft or fear,

By one side-path, from simple truth;

VIII

Who might have chased and claspt Renown

And caught her chaplet here — and there

In haunts of jungle-poison’d air

The flame of life went wavering down;

IX

But ere he left your fatal shore,

And lay on that funereal boat,

Dying, “Unspeakable” he wrote

“Their kindness,” and he wrote no more;

X

And sacred is the latest word;

And now the Was, the Might-have-been,

And those lone rites I have not seen,

And one drear sound I have not heard,

XI

Are dreams that scarce will let me be,

Not there to bid my boy farewell,

When That within the coffin fell,

Fell — and flash’d into the Red Sea,

XII

Beneath a hard Arabian moon

And alien stars. To question, why

The sons before the fathers die,

Not mine! and I may meet him soon;

XIII

But while my life’s late eve endures,

Nor settles into hueless gray,

My memories of his briefer day

Will mix with love for you and yours.

TO W. E. GLADSTONE

We move, the wheel must always move,

Nor always on the plain,

And if we move to such a goal

As Wisdom hopes to gain,

Then you that drive, and know your Craft,

Will firmly hold the rein,

Nor lend an ear to random cries,

Or you may drive in vain,

For some cry “Quick” and some cry “Slow,”

But, while the hills remain,

Up hill “Too-slow” will need the whip,

Down hill “Too-quick,” the chain.

TO MARY BOYLE

(Dedicating “The Progress of Spring.”)

I

“Spring-flowers”! While you still delay to take

Your leave of Town,

Our elmtree’s ruddy-hearted blossom-flake

Is fluttering down.

II

Be truer to your promise. There! I heard

Our cuckoo call.

Be needle to the magnet of your word,

Nor wait, till all

III

Our vernal bloom from every vale and plain

And garden pass,

And all the gold from each laburnum chain

Drop to the grass.

IV

Is memory with your Marian gone to rest,

Dead with the dead?

For ere she left us, when we met, you prest

My hand, and said

V

“I come with your spring-flowers.” You came not, friend;

My birds would sing,

You heard not. Take then this spring-flower I send,

This song of spring,

VI

Found yesterday — forgotten mine own rhyme

By mine old self,

As I shall be forgotten by old Time,

Laid on the shelf —

VII

A rhyme that flower’d betwixt the whitening sloe

And kingcup blaze,

And more than half a hundred years ago,

In rick-fire days,

VIII

When Dives loathed the times, and paced his land

In fear of worse,

And sanguine Lazarus felt a vacant hand

Fill with his purse.

IX

For lowly minds were madden’d to the height

By tonguester tricks,

And once — I well remember that red night

When thirty ricks,

X

All flaming, made an English homestead Hell —

These hands of mine

Have helpt to pass a bucket from the well

Along the line,

XI

When this bare dome had not begun to gleam

Thro’ youthful curls,

And you were then a lover’s fairy dream,

His girl of girls;

XII

And you, that now are lonely, and with Grief

Sit face to face,

Might find a flickering glimmer of relief

In change of place.

XIII

What use to brood? this life of mingled pains

And joys to me,

Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains

The Mystery.

XIV

Let golden youth bewail the friend, the wife,

For ever gone.

He dreams of that long walk thro’ desert life

Without the one.

XV

The silver year should cease to mourn and sigh —

Not long to wait —

So close are we, dear Mary, you and I

To that dim gate.

XVI

Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes

Or many or few,

He rests content, if his young music wakes

A wish in you

XVII

To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm

Of sound and smoke,

For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm

And whispering oak.

TO W. G. WARD

IN MEMORIAM

Farewell, whose living like I shall not find,

Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,

My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,

Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward,

How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,

How loyal in the following of thy Lord!

TO SIR RICHARD JEBB

Fair things are slow to fade away,

Bear witness you, that yesterday

From out the Ghost of Pindar in you

Roll’d an Olympian; and they say

That here the torpid mummy wheat

Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet

As that which gilds the glebe of England,

Sunn’d with a summer of milder heat.

So may this legend for awhile,

If greeted by your classic smile,

Tho’ dead in its Trinacrian Enna,

Blossom again on a colder isle.

TO GENERAL HAMLEY

(Prologue of “The Charge of the Heavy Brigade.”)

Our birches yellowing and from each

The light leaf falling fast,

While squirrels from our fiery beech

Were bearing off the mast,

You came, and look’d and loved the view

Long-known and loved by me,

Green Sussex fading into blue

With one gray glimpse of sea;

And, gazing from this height alone,

We spoke of what had been

Most marvellous in the wars your own

Crimean eyes had seen;

And now — like old-world inns that take

Some warrior for a sign

That therewithin a guest may make

True cheer with honest wine —

Because you heard the lines I read

Nor utter’d word of blame,

I dare without your leave to head

These rhymings with your name,

Who know you but as one of those

I fain would meet again,

Yet know you, as your England knows

That you and all your men

Were soldiers to her heart’s desire,

When, in the vanish’d year,

You saw the league-long rampart-fire

Flare from Tel-el-Kebir

Thro’ darkness, and the foe was driven,

And Wolseley overthrew

Arâbi, and the stars in heaven

Paled, and the glory grew.

EPITAPH ON LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Thou third great Canning, stand among our best

And noblest, now thy long day’s work hath ceased,

Here silent in our Minster of the West

Who wert the voice of England in the East.

EPITAPH ON GENERAL GORDON

IN THE GORDON BOYS’ NATIONAL MEMORIAL HOME NEAR WOKING

Warrior of God, man’s friend, and tyrant’s foe,

Now somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan,

Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know

This earth has never borne a nobler man.

G. F. WATTS, R.A.

Divinely, thro’ all hindrance, finds the man

Behind it, and so paints him that his face,

The shape and colour of a mind and life,

Lives for his children, ever at its best.

TENNYSON AND BRADLEY (DEAN OF WESTMINSTER) by Margaret L. Woods

Alum Bay, near Farringford, is now greatly changed. A big hotel stands up dwarfing its cliffs, from which the famous layers of various-coloured sand are being continually scooped into bottles, and on many a cottage mantelpiece in the island there is a glass bottle showing a picture of a lighthouse, or something else curiously wrought in Alum Bay sand. The jagged white Needles still tip the westward point of its crescent, still seeming to salute with greeting or farewell the majestic procession of great ocean-going ships, and to smile on the frolic wings of yachts, that all the summer long flirt and dance over the blue waters of the Solent, like a flight of white butterflies. Formerly the rough track to the Bay led over a lonely bit of common called the Warren, where furze grew, and short brown-tasselled rushes marked the course of a hardly visible stream. The Warren Farm lies on the landward edge of the Warren, and there on a sunny 6th of August 1855, a third birthday was being solemnized with tea and a tent. It was a blue tent on the top of a haystack, and under it between her baby boy and girl, sat a blue-eyed mother, with the bloom of youth and the freshness of the sea on her beauty. The mother and the two children, lovely, too, with more than the usual loveliness of childhood, were keeping their tiny festival with a gay simplicity, and I do not doubt that on that as on other birthdays, Edith, the birthday queen, was wearing on her golden curls a garland of rosebuds and mignonette. The wheels of a carriage were heard driving up to the farm gate, and in a minute a tall dark man, like a Spanish señor in his long cloak and sombrero, appeared under the haystack. The young woman noted the tall figure, the hat and cloak, the long, dark, clear-cut face, with the beardless and finely modelled mouth and chin, the splendid eyes under the high forehead, and the deep furrows running from nose to chin. She perceived at once it was Alfred Tennyson, whose poems she knew and loved so well. Meantime the Poet, sensitive as all artists must be to human loveliness, looked surely with delight on the pretty picture, the haystack and the blue tent, the young mother and her babes: a picture which was to form as it were a gracious frontispiece to a whole volume of friendship. He bade her “throw the little maid into his arms,” caught the child and asked her how old she was. “Three to-day,” answered little Edith proudly. “Then you and I,” said he, “have the same birthday.”

The friendship thus preluded was to last until death closed it. The record of it lies here in old diaries and in sheaves of letters, faithfully treasured; a chronicle of some forty years with all the little troubles, the joys and sorrows of the two households, intimately shared. It was a four-cornered friendship, one of husband and wife with husband and wife, but the correspondence passed almost entirely between the wives. Men had already for the most part abandoned the practice of letter-writing outside their business and families, but at the little rosewood drawing-room escritoires at which we of the many documents are tempted to smile, Victorian women fed the flame of friendship with — here the metaphor becomes a little mixed — a constant flow of ink. Not that the two women who kept up this correspondence were idle. All that Emily Tennyson on her invalid sofa did for her Poet, is it not written in the book of his Biography? Her friend, Marian Bradley, was yet busier than she, having the cares and duties of a mother of a large family, besides those incident to the wife of a man who was successively Head Master of a great school, Head of an Oxford College, and Dean of Westminster.

Granville Bradley was twelve years younger than Alfred Tennyson; an interval in age which permits at once of veneration and of intimacy. It was at the Lushingtons’ house that my father, as an undergraduate of one-and-twenty, first met the young Poet, and became his admirer; but it was not until twelve years later that the admirer became also the friend.

My mother tells in her diary how in that summer of the birthday meeting, the two men roamed the country together, poetizing, botanizing, geologizing. The enthusiasm of science had begun to seize on all thinking humanity, and if botany was considered the only suitable science for ladies, geology had something like a boom among the privileged males. I can see my father now, a slight, active little figure, armed with a hammer and girt with a capacious knapsack, setting forth joyous as a chamois-hunter, for a day’s sport among the fossils of the Isle of Wight cliffs. But above all it was the communion of spirit, the play of ideas which interested the two and drew them together. “They talked from 12 noon to 10 P.M., almost incessantly, this day,” writes my mother, “Tennyson walking back with him (some three miles) to the Warren farm, still talking.”

One pictures the tall, long-cloaked Bard and the vivacious little scholar pacing side by side, inconscient of time and distance, down the shingly drive of Farringford, through the warm and dusky night of the deep-hedged lanes, overhung with the heavy darkness of August trees, until they came out on the clear pale spaces of the open seaward land, and the whisper and scent of the sea. And one would guess this to be a picture of two very young men, absorbed in the first joy of one of the romantic friendships of youth, did one not know that the Poet was a man of middle age and the scholar in the maturing thirties. But the artists know their way to the Fountain of youth and meet there. Tennyson, the great creative artist, retained all his life the simplicity of a child. My father was no creator, but he, too, was in his way an artist; he was the artist as scholar and teacher. Language and Style were to him things almost as splendid and sacred as they were wont to be to a Renaissance scholar, and sins against them roused the only bad passions of an otherwise sweet nature. History to him was not history, it was real life; the rhythm and harmony of poetry were what music is to the ardent music-lover. From childhood to old age he was for ever crooning some favourite fragment of verse. With what delight, then, he found himself crossing the threshold of a great poet’s mind; the mind of one who did not, so to speak, keep his friends waiting in the vestibule, but opened to them freely the palace chambers, rich with the treasures of his knowledge, thought, and imagination.

Those passages in my mother’s diary in which she speaks of the happiness it gave my father and herself to make acquaintance with the Poet, and to find him just what they would have wished him to be, have already appeared in the Biography. Also her description of those evenings in the Farringford drawing-room, so often recurring and through so many years, when he would “talk of what was in his heart,” or read aloud some poem, often yet unpublished, while they listened, looking out on the lovely landscape and the glimpse of sea which, “framed in the dark-arched bow-window,” seemed, like some beautiful picture, almost to form part of the room.

My father now bought a small estate between Yarmouth and Freshwater, and built a house — Heathfield — upon it, in which to spend his holidays. The Freshwater side of the Isle of Wight was not at that time a fashionable neighbourhood. The lovely, lonely bays on the blue Solent, innocent of lodging-house or bathing-machine, succeeded each other from Yarmouth to the Needles. They were approached over open land, or by little stony chines, deep in gorse and bracken, down which tiny streams trickled, to spread themselves out shiningly on the sands and melt into the sea. I remember my young mother killing a red adder in our chine with a well-aimed stone, as we came up from our morning dip in the waves. There was room for wild creatures and open country and for poetry then on the little island. The islanders, smugglers from generation to generation, had in them more of the wild creature than of poetry. Droll stories used to be told of their inability to appreciate the honour done to Freshwater by the Poet’s residence there. But perhaps the days when his “greatness” was measured by the man-servant test were more comfortable days for the Bard than those when his movements were marked and followed through telescopes.

There was a constant coming and going between Heathfield and Farringford, the children of each house being equally at home in the other. I see now the long Farringford drawing-room, full of the green shade of a cedar tree which grew near the great window, and the slight figure of Lady Tennyson rising from the red sofa — it was a red room — and gliding towards my mother with a smile upon her lips. She always wore a soft gray cashmere gown, and it was always made in the same simple fashion; much as dresses were worn in the days of Cruikshank, only that the gathered skirt was longer and less full than the skirts of Cruikshank’s ladies. Her silky auburn-brown hair, partly hidden by lace lappets, was untouched with gray, and her complexion kept its rose-leaf delicacy, just as her strong and cultivated intellect kept its alertness, to the last days of her life. No sooner were the greetings over than ten to one the door would open, and the Poet would come slowly, softly, silently, into the room, dressed in an old-fashioned black tail-coat, and fixing my mother with his distant short-sighted gaze. One day, she being seated with her back to the cedar-green window, he approached her with such extreme deference, and so solemn a courtesy, as made her all amazed; until in a minute, with a flash of amusement, both discovered that he had mistaken her for — the Queen. Still more surely one or both of the long-haired, gray-tunicked boys would appear, less silently; and away the children scampered to their endless play about the rambling house and grounds. But even the children’s play was informed with the vital interest of the two houses: the story of King Arthur and his knights. The first “Idylls of the King” had appeared, and others were appearing. It was a red-letter evening indeed when Poet and new poem were ready for a reading, either in the little upstairs study, or in the drawing-room, where dessert was always laid after dinner, and he sat at the head of the round table in a high carved chair. Country life was in those days very simple and dinners early, so that even young children appeared with the dessert, and my mother’s description of those evenings recalls very clearly some of the earliest of the pictures in memory’s picture-book, as well as some later ones. I remember now a story of Tennyson’s which tickled my childish sense of humour exceedingly, the point of it lying in a bit of bad French, the badness of which I could appreciate. My father had a vein of dry humour, which being akin to that of the Poet, doubtless assisted to knit the bonds of friendship, since to find the same thing humorous is almost essential to real intimacy. There was between the two the natural give-and-take of friendship, and to the warm appreciation given as well as received, Emily Tennyson’s letters bear constant witness. “Mr. Bradley’s intellectual activity, so warmed by the heart, is very good for my Ally,” she writes; and again: “I know you would be pleased if you could hear Ally recur to his talks with Mr. Bradley, and one particular talk about the Resurrection and [illegible]. It is difficult to express admiration, so I won’t say any more, except God bless you both.”

My father was now in the full stress of his great work at Marlborough, and spent his summer holidays for the most part in Switzerland, but Christmas and Easter still often found us at Freshwater. In 1866 Tennyson’s eldest son, Hallam, was sent to school at Marlborough. “I am not sending my son to Marlborough — I am sending him to Bradley,” he said in reply to the Queen’s question. On another occasion he said: “I am sending him to Marlborough because Bradley is a friend of mine, and Stanley tells me that Marlborough is the best school in England.” There followed three visits to Marlborough during the four years longer that my father remained there. The second one, when Lady Tennyson came with her husband, was brought about by the severe illness of the cherished son, and lasted seven weeks. At first the anxiety about the boy was too great to admit of pleasure either to them or to my parents, to whom — especially to my mother — Hallam was almost as a son of their own. But later, and during the Poet’s other visits, there were walks and drives in Savernake forest, beautiful at all seasons of the year, and over the windy spaces of the gray silent downland, where “the chronicles of wasted Time” are written in worn and mysterious hieroglyphs of stone, and fosse, and hillock. During the first visit “The Victim” was written by him in the room called the green dressing-room, looking out on the clipped yews and tall lime-circle of Lady Hertford’s old garden. In summer-time he had great pleasure in the peaceful beauty of Marlborough and its landscape, and also in the wealth of flowers with which my mother surrounded herself in her house and garden; for she was a great gardener before it became fashionable to be so. In the drawing-room at the Lodge, masters and their wives — then all young — and Sixth Form boys gathered around the Poet. At that time he had for years been living a life apart from the crowd, and it must have been an effort to him to project himself into this young and wholly strange school society. But he did it gallantly and seemed happy among the young people. There were science evenings and poetry evenings. That is, there were evenings when masters interested in science exhibited the wonders of the microscope, and evenings when Tennyson read aloud his own poetry or Hood’s comic verses. I remember well being allowed to stay up to hear him read “Guinevere” to the Upper Sixth Form. He had a great deep voice like the booming of waves in a sea-cave, and although the situation in the poem was not one to appeal to a child, yet his reading of the farewell of Arthur to Guinevere affected me so much that I crawled into a corner and wept two pocket-handkerchiefs full of tears.

During this visit Tennyson, who suffered sometimes from nervous depression, said more than once that he envied my father’s life of active and incessant goodness. In the man who at the height of his fame could experience and express such a feeling, there was still something of the heart of a good child — its simplicity, its humility, its “wanting to be good.”

In June 1867, Aldworth — called at first Greenhill — appears in the letters. Emily Tennyson writes to my mother: “We have agreed to buy thirty-five acres of beautifully situated land. It is a ledge on a hill nearly 1000 feet high, all copse and foxgloves almost, and a steep descent of wood and field below; the ledge looking over an immense plain, and backed by a hill slightly higher than itself.” I quote what follows because it shows how simple had been the Freshwater life. “The order is gone for a small sociable landau. This seems so luxurious that I am afraid I am perversely more ready to cry than to laugh over it.”

Aldworth was meant to be a small house, but somehow it grew to be a large one. The Tennysons’ own design for it was followed in the main by Mr. (afterwards Sir James) Knowles. The winds and rains of the great height have weathered stone and slate until the house and the balustrade of its wide terrace seem to have stood there two centuries, rather than not yet half of one. The planting of the Italian cypresses along the edge of the terrace was the Poet’s own particular fancy. It is strange that they should have grown so grandly on this exposed English hill-side. The darkness of their foliage, the severity of their lines, put an accent on the visionary beauty of the immense view which lies spread below and beyond them. There is the Sussex Weald, so far down that its hills and dales appear one plain, the range of the South Downs, rising yonder to Chanctonbury Ring, dropping nearer to a chalky gap which lets in the distant glitter of the sea. Hindhead, the Surrey ranges, Windsor Forest — the list grows too long of all that may be seen from Aldworth terrace, and from the heathy height above, whence seven counties are said to be visible. For my part, when looking from such heights, over the great everlasting marriage festivals of Earth and Sky, it is with difficulty, almost with reluctance, that I bring myself to connect them with the map.

All things grow with a peculiar luxuriance on Black Down, and the immediate surroundings of the house were beautiful from the first, though the garden with its flowers and trees has added a beauty to those natural ones. The Sussex country was lonely forty years ago, and the Poet could pace his heathery ridge, brooding upon his verse, untroubled by any risk of human intrusion.

My parents and their family came to know and love this new home as well as the old one at Freshwater, and although it represents a later stage of Tennyson’s life, the interest of the house is almost as great. The fine Laurence portrait is there, besides the admirable Watts portrait of the Poet’s wife, and that of his sons as boys. And many other pictures and things of interest and value have accumulated within its walls.

In his old age a change, easily understood, came over the old Bard. He lost his shyness of “the crowd,” and seemed thoroughly to enjoy his glimpses of London society. He never visited us at Oxford, but when my father succeeded Dean Stanley at Westminster, my parents once more enjoyed some delightful visits from him. He was there in company with his eldest son and his daughter-in-law, on the occasion of his taking his seat in the House of Peers. Then and at other times there were memorable meetings of great men — Gladstone and others — with the Poet, in the fitting frame of the ancient Deanery.

My mother writes of Tennyson in 1888, after thirty-three years of friendship, “he grows more and more unselfish and thoughtful for others.” She noted how the self-absorption and melancholy of his earlier years passed away in the calm sunshine of his old age.

The passing years had brought changes to others. The brilliant little scholar with the tongue which had once held in check the boldest offender against the laws of God or the Latin Grammar — although it never smote to defend or advance himself — had ripened into the constant peacemaker; one of the gentlest and humblest of that little band, who really walk in the footsteps of their Master Christ, and make those footsteps clearer for ever to all whose privilege it has been to live in their intimacy.

At length the day came when, full of years and honours, the famous singer, the Great Voice of Victorian England, lay silenced in the solemn shade of Westminster Abbey, with the clamour of London about him instead of the roar of his sea. It was his old friend, he who had walked and talked with him those long hours of the summer day and night thirty-seven years before, who pronounced the last blessing above his grave. And now that friend also sleeps, as it were, in the next room.

NOTES ON CHARACTERISTICS OF TENNYSON by the late Master of Balliol (Professor Jowett)

Absolute truthfulness, absolutely himself, never played tricks.

Never got himself puffed in the newspapers.

A friend of liberty and truth.

Extraordinary vitality.

Great common sense and a strong will.

The instinct of common sense at the bottom of all he did.

Not a man of the world (in the ordinary sense) but a man who had the greatest insight into the world, and often in a word or a sentence would flash a light.

Intensely needed sympathy.

A great and deep strength.

He mastered circumstances, but he was also partly mastered by them, e.g. the old calamity of the disinheritance of his father and his treatment by rogues in the days of his youth.

Very fair towards other poets, including those who were not popular, such as Crabbe.

He had the high-bred manners not only of a gentleman but of a great man.

He would have wished that, like Shakespeare, his life might be unknown to posterity.

Conversation.

In the commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius. He had abundance of fire, never talked poorly, never for effect. As Socrates described Plato, “Like no one whom I ever knew before.”

The three subjects of which he most often spoke were “God,” “Free-Will,” and “Immortality,” yet always seeming to find an (apparent) contradiction between the “imperfect world,” and “the perfect attributes of God.”

Great charm of his ordinary conversation, sitting by a very ordinary person and telling stories with the most high-bred courtesy, endless stories, not too high or too low for ordinary conversation.

The persons and incidents of his childhood very vivid to him, and the Lincolnshire dialect and the ways of life.

Loved telling a good story, which he did admirably, and also hearing one.

He told very accurately, almost in the same words, his old stories, though, having a powerful memory, he was impatient of a friend who told him a twice-repeated tale.

His jests were very amusing.

At good things he would sit laughing away — laughter often interrupted by fits of sadness.

His absolute sincerity, or habit of saying all things to all kinds of persons.

He ought always to have lived among gentlemen only.

Of his early friends (after Arthur Hallam) FitzGerald, Spedding, Sir John Simeon, Lushington — A. T. was enthusiastic about them.

Spedding very gifted and single-minded. He spent his life in defending the character of Bacon.

TENNYSON, CLOUGH, AND THE CLASSICS by Henry Graham Dakyns

You ask me to write a little paper for you on my reminiscences of Farringford, the Pyrenees, and, later, Aldworth; and, although I am still beset by something of the old horror of biography which so obsessed me when I had the chance that I religiously abstained from taking notes at the time, I cannot refuse the opportunity you offer me of having my say also about your father and mother, and certain others whose friendship was and is so precious to me in its affection, and their image ineffaceable. To your cairn of memories I wish to add my pebble. I might seem lacking in affection otherwise, and that would be to do myself an injustice, and yourselves, your father and mother, an injury, that of seeming insensible to their true worth. Semper ego auditor tantum? Nunquamne reponam?

This then is, if somewhat meagre, a faithful record of what I recollect. To avoid repetition and for reverence’ sake, I shall speak of Lord and Lady Tennyson as Him and Her, and of yourselves, my two pupils, by your names. If I have occasion to mention myself (your old tutor), I will use the symbol Δ, the first letter of Δακυνίδιον, which, being interpreted, is “Little Dakyns,” by which name your father spoke of me, at least on one occasion.

Tennyson and his two Sons. By Julia Margaret Cameron.

My first Introduction to her and the two Boys, and presently to him, at Farringford, March (?) 1861

I shall never forget the beauty of the scene — I wish I could actualize it — and it was accompanied by what appealed not only to the eye, but to the heart, a mysterious sense of at-homeness. Your mother, as I think I have often told you, was seated half-reclining on the sofa which stood with its back to the window, with that wonderful view of capes and sea beyond. And you two stood leaning against her, one on either side. She was, and always remained, supremely beautiful, not only in feature and the bodily frame, but still more from the look in her eyes, the motion of her lips, and the deep clear music of her voice. Such a combination of grace and dignity with simplicity and frankness and friendliness of accost as never was. Such gentle trustfulness and sincerity of welcome as must have won a less susceptible heart than that of the diffidently intrusive παιδαγωγὸς Δ. I thought she must be a queen who had stept down from mediæval days into these more prosaic times which she ennobled. And the two Boys. If I cannot speak about them to you, you will guess the reason. But for the benefit of a younger generation, I appeal to the portraits of her by Watts (now at Aldworth), and of Hallam and Lionel — surely among the best he ever painted — which are given in your father’s Memoir (vol. i. facing p. 330 and p. 370).

And then he came in, a truly awful moment, but in an instant of time he too had not only banished the nervousness of Δ, but won his heart. His welcome resembled hers in its sincerity. And even if I had been ten times more nervous than I was, and awe-stricken I was, no doubt, something set me at my ease at once. Of his look and manner I find it not only hard, but absurd to attempt to speak. He must have been at that date somewhat over fifty. I was twenty-three, not quite thirty years younger. His figure, so well known in the photographs of the time, was imposing, and it was awe-inspiring to be in the presence of the great Poet we had hero-worshipped in our youth (though he, I think, was not the only divinity in our Pantheon, there was Clough also — Browning at that date had not appeared). But even so formidable as he was on these grounds, the humanity of the man, and what I came to regard as the most abiding, perhaps the deepest-seated, characteristic, his eternal youthfulness, acted as a spell, and timidity melted into affection. I can still feel his hand-grip, soft at once and large and strong, as he stood there peering down on the relatively small mortal before him — so sane, and warm, and trustful.

As to his so-called gruffness of manner, I will speak about that later on, but I want at once to make clear a certain quality of mind which I believe helped things, so that he was not troubled by the presence of a stranger, either then or when Δ was no longer a stranger, ever afterwards. I suppose if there had been any occasion for comparing notes he might have discovered much to object to in my attitude to the universe, especially during my turbulent youth, but we had much in common, he in his great grand way illimitably, and I in my tentative fashion diminutively. The quality I refer to as a bond was a heartfelt detestation on Δ’s part of what I venture to call the pseudo-biographic mania. The notion of collecting tiny pinhead facts, or words actually spoken but separated from their context: the idea of collecting these and calling the result biography I loathed. So when I found, as I did at once, that the great man, the poet, and the equally great woman his wife, held similar views, I applauded myself and became more and more rigidly unbiographic. Of course, I see now that Δ was possibly over-scrupulous. Instead of depending on mere recollection, how much more sensible, and not a whit the less reverential, it would have been to have taken down at many a conversation some catchword of what he said, and his remarks were apt to be as incisive as they were laconic. And the Poet’s fore-ordained biographer would have blessed the inspiration. Would Tennyson himself have been equally pleased? I am not so sure. But what he really deprecated was after all only the vulgar tales of the spurious biographer. “In life the owls — at death the ghouls.”

With this apology I come to some among the dicta current in my time. I think it was the first night I happened to use the word “knowledge,” pronouncing it as I had been brought up to do with the ō long, whereupon he complimented me. “You say ‘knōwledge,’” and explained that “knŏwledge” to rhyme with “college” was the only permissible exception. I felt pleased with my domestic training. Then he went on to denounce a solecism, the use of “like” with a verb, “like he did,” instead of “as he did,” and humorously he begged me to correct any one guilty of such barbarism, a pledge I undertook, and acted up to, correcting speakers right and left till it came to the superior clergy, bishops, and so forth, in the pulpit; then I desisted....

But to proceed. Apropos of Voltaire saying that to listen to English people talking was to overhear the hissing of serpents, he commented, “and to listen to German was to overhear k’s like the scrunching of egg-shells.” He had two or three pithy sayings, which came straight home to me and became part of my mental furniture, so much so that I have at times given myself the credit of innovating them. One of these was that the defect of most people — not critics only, but others, la foule in general — is “to impute themselves.” I felt this to be at the root of the matter, a profound if humorous extension of the wise man’s saw, πάντων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος. He said it often and most seriously. The other I might call the “elogium vatis” par excellence. It took the form of a caution against “mixing up things that differ,” and to this also among his sententiae I assented quod latius patet. I think I once used it incidentally to him, and he at once pulled me up. “That’s mine.” He certainly did so when I asked him his own riddle: “My first’s a kind of butter, my second’s a kind of liquor, and my whole’s a kind of charger.” Answer: “Ramrod.” And he exclaimed, “That’s my riddle.” Then there is the old story how the Englishman, wishing to direct the garçon not to let the fire go out, gently growled, “Ne permettez pas sortir le fou,” whereupon the garçon locks up the other Englishman. I think it was brought up by Frank Lushington as now told against the Poet, and Tennyson gave us the correct version; originally he had invented it himself of Edmund Lushington when they were in Paris, chaffing his friend’s French. But it was a case of biter bit. In the vulgar version I find the Poet with his long hair is made to play the part of the fou. Thus far these trifles. I come to memorabilia more precious to me and of larger import. I will head the section

Tennyson and the Classics, English and Other,

and it is what you asked for. And let me make two preliminary remarks. In reference to the defect of self-imputation above mentioned, I wish to point out to any, consciously or unconsciously, critically minded person, that the striking thing to me was the wide sympathy, the catholicity of the Poet’s mind, his width of view. Thus he — I will not use the word “displayed,” as if it were an external habit of any sort — but simply and naturally he had ingrained in him the greatest generosity in his feeling for, in his criticism of, contemporary authors. And this applies to his appreciation of the great classical authors of the past. I do not say, of course, that he had not his favourites, as we all have, especially, perhaps, the smaller we are. For instance — and here other of his contemporaries, Clough, Jowett, etc., would have borne him out — his appreciation of Δ’s favourite poet Shelley was not so spontaneous nor, I venture to think, so profound as, let us say, his appreciation of Wordsworth (whom he also “criticized”) or Victor Hugo, or, to take an opposite instance, his ready appreciation of Walt Whitman, or of Browning, or possibly of Clough. But all this is admirably discussed in your Memoir. I only wish to add my testimony, and I take as my text a saying of his about Goethe, which I seem to recollect if I recollect rightly: “In his smaller poems, e.g. those in Wilhelm Meister, Goethe shows himself to be one of the great artists of the world. He is also a great critic, yet he always said the best he could of an author. Good critics are rarer than good authors” (cp. his own “And the critic’s rarer still”).

And I must further premise that the samples given of quotations from the Classics are from the particular ones he chanced upon — the artist in him, perhaps, instinctively selecting — for the particular youth, and what he needed, or because they fitted on to things on which his mind was working at that date. Here, at all events, they are, or some of them. I omit continual references to Shakespeare, to Dante, to Virgil, to Homer. He was perpetually quoting Homer and Virgil, and to my mind there was nothing for grandeur of sound like his pronunciation of Latin and Greek as he recited whole passages or single lines in illustration of some point, of metre, perhaps, or thought, or feeling; for instance, the line from Homer:

βῆ δ᾽ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης,

commenting on the possibility of pronouncing οι not in our English fashion like oy in boy, but like the German ö — o of “wood” — phlösböo — imitating the lisping whisper of the tideless Mediterranean on a soft summer day. Then how he rolled out his Virgil, giving first the thunder, then the wash of the sea in these lines:

Fluctus ut in medio coepit quum albescere ponto

Longius, ex altoque sinum trahit; utque volutus

Ad terras immane sonat per saxa, neque ipso

Monte minor procumbit; at ima exaestuat unda

Verticibus, nigramque alte subiectat arenam.

He used to say, “The Horatian alcaic is, perhaps, the stateliest metre except the Virgilian hexameter at its best.”

I take my samples in chance order. I suppose I knew my Catullus fairly well before, but I am sure that, in a deeper sense, I learnt to know “the tenderest of Roman poets” for the first time that day when he read to me in that voice of his, with half-sad Heiterkeit, and with that refinement of pronunciation which seemed — I am sure was — the right thing absolutely, those well-known poems about his lady-love’s pet sparrow (translated roughly here in case a reader should chance not to know Latin):

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,

Quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,

Cui primum digitum dare appetenti

Et acris solet incitare morsus,

Cum desiderio meo nitenti

Carum nescio quid libet iocari.

Credo ut, cum gravis acquiescet ardor,

Tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem

Et tristis animi levare curas!

Sparrow, pet of my lady-love, with you she will play; she will hold you in her bosom and give you her finger-tips to peck at, and tease to quicken your sharp bite, when my shining heart’s desire is in the humour for some darling jest. Doubtless, when the fever of passion dies away she seeks to find some little solace for her pain. Oh, if I could only play with you as she does, and so relieve the gloomy sorrow of my soul!

And then the tear-moving sequel in the minor:

Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque,

Et quantum est hominum venustiorum.

Passer mortuus est meae puellae,

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,

Quem plus illa oculis suis amabat;

Nam mellitus erat suamque norat

Ipsam tam bene quam puella matrem,

Nec sese a gremio illius movebat,

Sed circumsiliens modo huc modo illuc

Ad solam dominam usque pipillabat.

Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum

Illuc, unde negant redire quemquam.

At vobis male sit, malae tenebrae

Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis:

Tam bellum mihi passerem abstulistis.

Vae factum male! Vae miselle passer!

Tua nunc opera meae puellae

Flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli.

Mourn, all ye Goddesses of Love, and all ye Cupids mourn: mourn, all ye sons of men that know what love is. My lady’s sparrow is dead, dead; her sparrow, my lady’s pet, whom she loved more than her own eyes, for he was honey-sweet, and knew his own mistress as well as any girl her mother; nor would he stir from his lady’s bosom, but hopping about, now here, now there, he piped his little treble to her and her alone. But now he goes along the darksome road, to that place whence they say no one returns. Ah, my curse upon you! Cursed shades of Orcus, that devour all things beautiful! So beautiful a sparrow have ye taken from me! Alas for the ill deed done! Alas, poor little sparrow! Now, because of you my lady’s dear eyes are swollen, they are red with weeping.

The tenderness of his voice when he came to the eleventh and twelfth lines, and the measured outburst of passionate imprecation, come back almost audibly. I wish I could reproduce the pathos. But in the poem he next read to me, the tenderness of Catullus and his perfection of form reach, I think, a climax. So I think he felt, he who so revived his manner in “Frater Ave atque Vale,” and his reading gave me that impression. I refer to the passionate poem:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

Rumoresque senium severiorum

Omnes unius aestimemus assis.

Soles occidere et redire possunt:

Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,

Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

Deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.

Dein, quum millia multa fecerimus,

Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

Aut nequis malus invidere possit,

Cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Let us live, my Lesbia, live and love; and, as for the slanderous tongues of greybeards, value them all at a farthing’s worth. Suns may set and suns may rise again, but for us, when our short day has ended, one long night comes, a night of sleep that knows no ending. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, and then another thousand and a second hundred, and then once more a thousand and again a hundred, on and on. And then, when we have made up many thousands, we will overturn the reckoning that we may not know the number, nor any villain cast an evil eye on us, though he discover all that huge amount of kisses.

Can’t you overhear his voice? Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, deep-toned and fast, like a pent-up stream in spate, bursting its barriers, till the tale is told.

Two other poems of Catullus I must mention. The first of these he had much on his mind, for he was just then in the mood for experiments on metre, and the famous poem “Boädicea” was, I think, the first of these, echoing the galliambics of Catullus in the “Attis”:

Super alta vectus Attis celeri rate maria.

How far his own metre corresponds to Catullus’ is a question for experts like Bridges, Mayor, R. C. Trevelyan, etc., to determine, but I heard him more than once read first the Attis poem and then his “Boädicea,” and I thought at the time there was an extraordinary resemblance in rhythm. He wished that the “Boädicea” were musically annotated, so that it might be read with proper quantity and pace.

The last of the Catullus poems I want to refer to he never read to me as a whole. It is the lovely Epithalamium in honour of Junia and Manlius, calling on Hymenaeus to attend and bless the marriage:

Collis o Heliconii

Cultor, Uraniae genus,

Qui rapis teneram ad virum

Virginem, o Hymenaee Hymen,

O Hymen Hymenaee!

Dweller on the mount of Helicon,

Seed of the Heavenly One,

Thou that bearest off the tender maiden to her bridegroom,

O Hymenaean Hymen,

O Hymen Hymenaean!

I do not know if he ever read it as a whole to any one. It would have been splendid to hear, but towards the end of the long poem, where the poet, like Spenser, prays, “Send us the timely fruit of this same marriage night,” comes a verse he was very fond of quoting, and in particular the third line:

Torquatus volo parvulus

Matris a gremio suae

Porrigens teneras manus

Dulce rideat ad patrem

Semhiante labello.

I want a baby-boy Torquatus to stretch out his little hands from his mother’s lap, and sweetly to smile upon his father with half-opened lips.

These, I think, were the most remarkable of the Catullus poems he showed me, though of course there were others. I come now to the kindred Greek genius, who had a special fascination for him, the poetess Sappho. He loved her Sapphics, and greatly disliked the Sapphics of Horace, “with their little tightly curled pigtails.” I believe I owe it to him that I am a worshipper of that most marvellous muse of Sappho....

[Editorial Note. — Unhappily Mr. Dakyns never completed his paper. For, while still engaged on it, he died suddenly, June 21, 1911. A friend, Miss F. M. Stawell, has added the following notes from recollections of what Mr. Dakyns said or wrote to her on the subject.]

Mr. Dakyns’s manuscript breaks off abruptly, but he left some headings for what he intended to write: Sappho, Goethe, Béranger, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, Life at Farringford, The French Tour and Clough, Clough and the Pyrenees. I think he would have quoted first from Sappho the lines beginning:

οἷον τὸ γλυκυμᾶλον ἐρεύθεται ἀκρῷ ἐπ᾽ ὐσδῷ

Like the sweet apple that reddens upon the topmost bough,

for he loved the passage, and the book was left open at this page.

No doubt he would have gone on to quote others that were favourites both with the Poet and with himself. Such as the heart-sick cry of love:

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα

καὶ Πληιάδες, μέσαι δὲ

νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾽ ἔρχετ᾽ ὥρα,

ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

The moon has set, the Pleiades have gone;

Midnight! The hour has past, and I

Sleep here alone.

Or again:

γλυκεῖα μᾶτερ, οὔτοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἱστόν,

πόθῳ δαμεῖσα παιδὸς βραδινὰν δι᾽ ᾽Αφροδίταν

Dear mother mine, I cannot weave my web —

My heart is sick with longing for my dear,

Through Aphrodite fair.

And he would probably have included that longer poem of passion which has been the wonder of the world, that invocation to

Starry-throned, immortal Aphrodite.

ποικιλόθρον᾽, ἀθάνατ᾽ ᾽Αφροδίτα.

Mr. Dakyns did not tell me himself what he had learnt of Simonides from Tennyson, but Tennyson quoted the following poems to his eldest son, Hallam. The sad, comforting, beautiful chant of Danaë to her baby, afloat on the waters, was quoted in one of Mr. Dakyns’s last letters to me, when his mind was full of his unfinished article. He wrote: “Isn’t that lovely and tear-drawing? true and tender and sempiternal?” And then he copied out the whole song, in case I should chance not to have the text at hand, with J. A. Symonds’s translation beside it:

ὅτε λάρνακι ἐν δαιδαλέᾳ

ἄνεμός τέ μιν πνέων κινηθεῖσά τε λίμνα

δείματι ἤριπεν, οὔτ᾽ ἀδιάντοισι παρειαῖς,

ἀμφί τε Περσέϊ βάλλε φίλην χεῖρα,

εἶπέ τ᾽· ὦ τέκος, οἷον ἔχω πόνον.

σὺ δ᾽ ἀωτεῖς, γαλαθηνῷ τ᾽ ἤτορι κνώσσεις ἐν ἀτερπεῖ

δούρατι χαλκεογόμθῳ,

νυκτὶ ἀλαμπεῖ κυανέῳ τε δνόφῳ σταλείς·

ἅλμαν δ᾽ ὕπερθε τεᾶν κομᾶν βαθειᾶν

παριόντος κύματος οὐκ ἀλέγεις,

οὐδ᾽ ἀνέμου φθόγγον,

πορφυρέᾳ κείμενος ἐν χλανίδι, καλὸν πρόσωπον.

εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τό γε δεινὸν ἦν,

καί κεν ἐμῶν ῥημάτων λεπτὸν ὑπεῖχες οὖας.

κέλομαι δ᾽, εὗδε βρέφος, εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος,

εὑδέτω δ᾽ ἄμετρον κακόν·

μεταιβολία δέ τις φανείη, Ζεῦ πάτερ, ἐκ σέο·

ὅτι δὲ θαρσάλεον ἔπος

εὔχομαι νόσφιν δίκας, συγγνῶθί μοι.

When in the carven chest

The winds that blew and waves in wild unrest

Smote her with fear, she not with cheeks unwet

Her arms of love round Perseus set,

And said: “O child, what grief is mine!

But thou dost slumber, and thy baby breast

Is sunk in rest.

Here in the cheerless, brass-bound bark,

Tossed amid starless night and pitchy dark,

Nor dost thou heed the scudding brine

Of waves that wash above thy curls so deep,

Nor the shrill winds that sweep —

Lapped in thy purple robe’s embrace

Fair little face!

But if this dread were dreadful, too, to thee,

Then would’st thou lend thy listening ear to me;

Therefore I cry, Sleep, babe, and sea be still,

And slumber our unmeasured ill!

Oh, may some change of fate, sire Zeus, from Thee

Descend our woes to end!

But if this prayer, too overbold, offends

Thy justice, — yet be merciful to me.

It was natural also that the heroic poems of Simonides should have appealed to both men, and of special interest to know the delight that Tennyson took in one of these, and perhaps because of the similarity shown by his own splendid lines in the “Duke of Wellington” Ode:

He, that ever following her commands,

On with toil of heart and knees and hands,

Thro’ the long gorge to the far light has won

His path upward, and prevail’d,

Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled

Are close upon the shining table-lands

To which our God Himself is moon and sun.

ἔστι τις λόγος

τὰν ἀρέταν ναίειν δυσανβάτοις ἐπὶ πέτραις·

ἁγνὰν δέ μιν θεὰν χῶρον ἁγνὸν ἀμφέπειν.

οὐδὲ πάντων βλεφάροις θνατῶν ἔσοπτος,

ῳ μὴ δακέθυμος ἱδρῶς

ἔνδοθεν μόλῃ, ἵκῃ τ᾽ ἐς ἄκρον

ἀνδρείας.

There is a tale

That Valour dwells above the craggy peaks

Hard, hard to scale,

A goddess pure in a pure land, and none

May see her face,

Save those who by keen Toil and sweat have won

That highest place,

That goal of manhood.

And with these heroic lines go the others on the men who fell at Thermopylae:

τῶν ἐν Θερμοπύλαις θανόντων

εὐκλεὴς μὲν ἁ τύχα, καλὸς δ᾽ ὁ πότμος,

βωμὸς δ᾽ ὁ τάφος, πρὸ γόων δὲ μνᾶστις, ὁ δ᾽ οἶκτος ἔπαινος·

ἐντάφιον δὲ τοιοῦτον οὔτ᾽ εὐρὼς

οὔθ᾽ ὁ πανδαμάτωρ ἀμαυρώσει χρόνος.

ἀνδρῶν ἀγαθῶν ὅδε σακὸς οἰκέταν εὐδοξίαν

‘Ελλάδος εἵλετο· μαρτυρεῖ δὲ Λεωνίδας,

ὁ Σπάρτας βασιλεύς, ἀρετᾶς μέγαν λελοιπὼς

κόσμον ἀέναόν τε κλέος.

Of those who fell at far Thermopylae,

Fair is the fate and high the destiny:

Their tomb an altar, memory for tears

And praise for lamentation through the years.

On such a monument comes no decay,

And Time that conquers all takes not away

Their greatness: for this holy Sepulchre

Of valiant men has called to dwell with her

The glory of all Greece. Bear witness, Sparta’s king,

Leonidas! thy ever-flowing spring

Of fame and the high beauty of thy deed!

There is a kindred note echoing through the popular catch in praise of the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, one of the first bits of Greek that Tennyson made his sons learn:

ἐν μύρτου κλαδὶ τὸ ξίφος φορήσω,

ὥσπερ ‘Αρμόδιος καὶ ᾽Αριστογείτων,

ὅτε τὸν τύραννον κτανέτην

ἰσονόμους τ᾽ ᾽Αθήνας ἐποιησάτην.

In myrtle I wreathe my sword

As they wreathed it, the brave,

Brave Harmodius, Aristogeiton,

When they slew the oppressor, the lord,

And to Athens her freedom gave.

Mr. Dakyns must have rejoiced in a spirit that could feed boys on such gallant stuff as this.

From Goethe he would have selected the noble proem to Faust:

Ihr naht Euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten,

for there was a note among his papers to that effect.

And there is one note about Béranger (written in a letter):

It was he too who introduced me to Béranger, e.g. “Le Roi d’Yvetot,” and the refrain:

Toute l’aristocratie à la lanterne!

And how he read it! Like the Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus of Catullus quoted above — with fire and fury, tauriformis Aufidus-like — a refrain which, like the “Marseillaise,” stirred my republican spirit νόσφιν δίκας, inordinately, I mean, and in a monstrous cruel sort of way: but what he liked was the form and force of the language, the pure art and horror of it, I imagine.

Mr. Dakyns, in the short time I knew him, often spoke to me about Tennyson, and always with stress on “the width of his humanity,” and how he could appreciate works at which a smaller man might have been shocked; how, for example, he sympathized with the inmost spirit of Hugo’s cry to the awful vastness of God:

Je sais que vous avez bien autre chose à faire

Que de nous plaindre tous;

saw nothing irreverent in it, as lesser critics have done; found in it rather a fortifying quality against “the grief that saps the mind.” “I wish you could have heard him read it,” he wrote afterwards, “in his organ-voice.” Once he said to me how much he had wanted Tennyson to write the Ode on the Stars which was always floating before his mind: “He could have done it, for he had the sense of vastness. And it would have been a far finer work than the ‘Idylls of the King.’”

Tennyson also, he told me, was the first man to tell him about Walt Whitman, and the first passage he showed him was one of the most daring Whitman ever wrote. On his side Whitman had a deep feeling for Tennyson and used to write of him affectionately as “the Boss,” a touch that pleased Mr. Dakyns greatly, for he admired and loved Walt. He gave me a vivid impression of Tennyson’s large-heartedness in all kinds of ways: for instance, his own opinions were always intensely democratic, and the Tennysons sympathized rather with the old Whig and Unionist policy, but he said it never made any difference or any jar between them. “I remember his coming into my little study at the top of the house and finding me absorbed in Shelley, and asking me what I was reading, and I was struck at the time by the quiet satisfied way in which he took my answer, no cavil or criticism, though I knew he did not feel about Shelley as I did.... I don’t know how to give in writing the true impression of his dear genial nature. It often came out in what might seem like roughnesses when they were written down. He was very fond of Clough: and Clough at that time was very taciturn — he was ill really, near his death — and I remember once at a discussion on metre Clough would not say one word, and at last Tennyson turned to him with affectionate impatience, quoting Shakespeare in his deep, kindly voice, ‘Well, goodman Dull, what do you say?’ How can I put that down? I can’t give the sweet humorous tone that made the charm of it. And then people called him ‘gruff.’ His ‘gruffness’ only gripped one closer.”

Another time he told me with keen enjoyment of Tennyson’s discovering a likeness to him in some drawing on the cover of the old Cornhill — I think it was the figure of a lad ploughing — pointing to it like a child and saying, “Little Dakyns.” He would speak with delight of Tennyson’s humour, far deeper and wilder, he said, than most people would have guessed, Rabelaisian even in the noble sense of the word, and always fresh and pure.

“I remember an instance of my own audacity,” he said, “at which I almost shudder now. We were riding into a French town, it was the evening of a fête, and the whole population seemed to be capering about with the most preposterous antics. It struck a jarring note, and the Poet said to me, ‘I can’t understand them, it’s enough to make one weep.’ Somehow I couldn’t help answering — but can you imagine the audacity? I assure you I trembled myself as I did so—’Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.’ And he took it, he took it! He did indeed!”

The memories of Clough also were very dear to Mr. Dakyns, and he said he could never help regretting that he had not heard him read his last long work, “In Mari Magno,” to the Poet. “Tennyson said to me afterwards, ‘Clough’s Muse has lost none of her power,’ and I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt that I had not been asked to hear the reading: perhaps it was vanity on my part.”

Clough always came down to see them bathe. He was very fond of bathing himself, but could not take part in it then on account of his health. “I never feel the water go down my back now,” Mr. Dakyns said, “without thinking of Clough.”

But the sweetest of all the memories was, I think, the memory of the valley at Cauteretz, sacred to Tennyson because of Arthur Hallam. I heard Mr. Dakyns speak of that the first time he was at our house. My mother chanced to ask him what he did after taking his degree, and he said, “I was with the Tennysons as tutor to their boys, and we went to the Pyrenees.” The name and something in his tone made me start. “Oh,” I said, “were you with them at Cauteretz?” He turned to me with his smile, “Yes, I was, and if I had not already a family motto of which I am very proud, I should take for my legend ‘Dakyns isn’t a fool’” (the last phrase in a gruffly tender voice). And then he told us: “There was a fairly large party of us, the Tennysons, Clough, and myself, some walking and some driving. Tennyson walked, and I being the young man of the company, was the great man’s walking-stick. When we came to the valley — I knew it was a sacred place — I dropped behind to let him go through it alone. Clough told me afterwards I had done well. He had noticed it, and the Poet said — and it was quite enough—’Dakyns isn’t a fool!’”

It was that evening that Tennyson wrote “All along the Valley.”

RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON by the Rev. H. Montagu Butler, D.D.

(Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.)

You have asked me to put on paper some recollections of the many happy visits which it was my good fortune to pay to Farringford and Aldworth between 1860 and 1890. I wish that I could respond to this kind request more worthily; but the truth is, that, though I have always counted those visits among the happiest events of my life, and though my memory of the general impression left upon me on each occasion is perfectly clear, it is not clear, but on the contrary most confused and hazy, as to any particular incidents.

Speaking first generally in the way of preface, I may say that it would be difficult to exaggerate the hero-worship with which I regarded the great Poet, ever since I was a boy. Before I went up to Trinity in 1851, he had been the delight of my friends and myself at Harrow. And further, through members of the Rawnsley family, I had heard much of his early days when the Tennysons lived at Somersby.

During my life at Trinity, from 1851 to 1855, and then, with long intervals of absence, till the end of 1859, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Tennyson, but especially Tennyson, were the three poets of the nineteenth century who mainly commanded the reverence and stirred the enthusiasm of the College friends with whom I lived. Robert Browning became a power among them almost immediately after, but by that time I had gone back to Harrow. Matthew Arnold and Clough and Kingsley also attracted us greatly in their several ways, and of course Shelley and Keats, but Tennyson was beyond a doubt our chief luminary. “In Memoriam” in particular, followed by “Maud” and the first four “Idylls of the King,” was constantly on our lips, and, I may truly say, in our hearts, in those happy hours.

It was with these feelings, then, and these prepossessions that I was prepared to make the acquaintance of the great Poet, should such an honour ever be granted me. It came first, to the best of my recollection, when my late brother-in-law, Francis Galton, and I were taking one of our delightful walking trips or tramps in the Easter holidays. Galton used to plan everything — district, hours, stopping-places, length of each day’s march. One Easter — I forget which, but it must have been about 1859 — was devoted to the New Forest. From there we crossed over to the Isle of Wight; and after visiting Shanklin and Bonchurch, we walked round to Freshwater. To leave Freshwater without paying our homage to the Poet at Farringford was impossible. Whether we had any definite introduction to him, I cannot now remember, but we had reason to think that we should be kindly received. My brother Arthur had lately been paying more than one visit to that part of the Island, and had keenly enjoyed several long walks with him. His report of these was not lost upon me.

Galton had known intimately some of Tennyson’s friends, such as Sumner Maine, W. G. Clark, Franklin Lushington, and specially “Harry” Hallam, younger brother of Arthur. He was, I think, as full of hero-worship for the Poet as I was myself. The fame which he has since won in connexion with Science may make it difficult, even for his later friends, to understand the passion — I can use no weaker word — which he then cherished for some branches of imaginative literature, in particular for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and for at least three of Kingsley’s novels, Alton Locke, Yeast, and Westward Ho! These we used in the course of our Easter rambles to read out in the open air after an al-fresco lunch.

Tennyson’s works were all very familiar to Galton. He had known them at Cambridge as each came out, and had discussed them eagerly with admiring friends, some of them first-rate critics. He delighted not only in the subtlety and elevation and freedom of the thoughts, but also in the beauty and perfection and melody of the expression.

We went, as I have said, to call on the Poet. We went together with rather beating hearts. He received us cordially as Trinity men, but unfortunately I can remember no detail of any kind. I am not sure whether we were even introduced to Mrs. Tennyson. All I remember is that we left the house happy and exhilarated.

But my real acquaintance with the Tennyson family dates from the end of 1861 and the early days of 1862. My first marriage had been on December 19, 1861, and a few days afterwards we came to Freshwater, and stayed at the hotel close to the sea, where Dr. and Mrs. Vaughan had sometimes stayed during his Harrow Mastership. It was then that we first met the Granville Bradleys, destined to be our dear friends for life, and it was in their company that we soon found ourselves most kindly welcomed guests at Farringford.

The two first incidents that I remember were the Poet showing us the proof of his “Dedication of the Idylls,” and, at our request, reading out to us “Enoch Arden.” The “Dedication” must have been composed almost immediately after the death of the Prince Consort on December 14. He seemed himself pleased with it. I thought at the time, and I have felt ever since, that these lines rank high, not only among his other tributes of the same kind, but in the literature of epitaphs generally. We felt it a proud privilege to be allowed to stand at his side as he looked over the proof just arrived by the post, and it led us of course to talk sympathetically of the late Prince and the poor widowed Queen.

Very soon after, the Bradleys and we dined at Farringford. The dinner hour was, I think, as early as six, and then, after he had retreated to his sanctum for a smoke, he would come down to the drawing-room, and read aloud to his guests. On this occasion he read to us “Enoch Arden,” then only in manuscript. I had before heard much of his peculiar manner of reading, with its deep and often monotonous tones, varied with a sudden lift of the voice as if into the air, at the end of a sentence or a clause. It was, as always, a reading open to criticism on the score of lack of variety, but my dear bride and I were in no mood to criticize. The spell was upon us. Every note of his magnificent voice spoke of majesty or tenderness or awe. It was, in plain words, a prodigious treat to have heard him. We walked back through the winter darkness to our hotel, conscious of having enjoyed a unique privilege.

During this vacation I had, as often in after years, not a few walks with him on the downs, leaving the Beacon on the left and going on to the Needles. It was a walk of about two hours. It is here that my memory so sadly fails me as to his talk. In tone it was friendly, manly, and perfectly simple, without a touch of condescension. He seemed quite unconscious that he was a great man, one of the first Englishmen of his time, talking to one young and utterly obscure. Almost any subject interested him, grave or gay. He would often talk of metres, Greek and Latin; of attempts to translate Homer; of the weak points in the English hexameter; or again of more serious topics, on which he had thought much and felt strongly, such as the life after death, the so-called “Eternity of Future Punishment,” the unreality of the world as known to the senses, the grander Human Race, the “crowning race,” still to be born.

Occasionally, not very often in these days, he would speak of his own poems. Once, I remember, a few days after an examination of the sixth form at Harrow, I told him that we had set for Greek Iambics the fine passage in “Elaine,” where Lancelot says to Lavaine:

... in me there dwells

No greatness, save it be some far-off touch

Of greatness to know well I am not great.

There is the man,

pointing to King Arthur. “Yes,” he said in substance, “when I wrote that, I was thinking of Wordsworth and myself.”

I noticed that he never spoke of Wordsworth without marked reverence. Obviously, with his exquisite ear for choice words and rhythm, he must have been more sensitive than most men to the prosaic, bathetic side of Wordsworth; but I never heard him say a word implying that he felt this, whereas I have heard him qualify his admiration for Robert Browning’s genius and his affection for his person by some allusion to the roughness of his style. This, he thought, must lead to his being less read than he deserved in years to come, and he evidently regretted it.

It was in the period, roughly speaking, between 1862 and 1880 that I saw most of him, for it was then our habit to make frequent visits to Freshwater or Alum Bay, generally at Christmas, and we were always received with the same cordial kindness. It was then that the long walks and the readings of his poetry after dinner continued as a kind of institution, and never palled. Among the poems that he read out to us were “Aylmer’s Field,” the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” parts of “Maud,” “Guinevere,” “The Holy Grail,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Revenge,” “The Defence of Lucknow,” “In the Valley of Cauteretz.” With regard to this beautiful poem I cannot help recalling an amusing and most unexpected laugh. He had read the third and fourth lines in his most sonorous tones:

All along the valley, where thy waters flow,

I walked with one I loved two and thirty years ago;

and then suddenly, changing his voice, he said gruffly, “A brute of a —— has discovered that it was thirty-one years and not thirty-two. Two-and-thirty is better than one-and-thirty years ago, isn’t it? But perhaps I ought to alter it.”

It was at this time that we used often to meet Mr. Jowett and also the Poet’s great friend and admirer, the gifted Mrs. Cameron and her dignified and gray-bearded husband, who looked like a grand Oriental Chief.

One trifling incident occurs to me as I write, the Poet’s remarkable skill at battledore. One duel with him in particular comes back to my mind, in which I found it hard to hold my own. He was a very hard hitter. He did not care merely to “keep up” long scores. He liked each bout to be a trial of strength, and to aim the shuttlecock where it would be difficult for his opponent to deal with it. In spite of his being short-sighted he played a first-rate game. With the exception of my brother Arthur, I never came upon so formidable an antagonist.

But I must leave these earlier years, of which I cannot find any written record, and pass on to the end of 1886, when, nearly four years after the death of my dear wife and a year and a half after my leaving Harrow, I was, to my great surprise, appointed Master of Trinity.

On December 3 I was installed, and on December 13 I was invited to Farringford, with the prospect of returning on the 16th to Davos Platz, where I had left my invalid daughter. Of this short visit I find I have made a few notes. The Poet was as cordial as ever. After dinner he took me to his sanctum, and read me his new Jubilee Ode in Catullian metre, and then “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.” Next morning there came a letter from Dr. W. H. Thompson’s executor containing an early poem of Tennyson’s of 1826, and a Sonnet, once famous, complaining of defects in the College system of his day:

Therefore your Halls, your ancient Colleges,

Your portals statued with old kings and queens,

Your gardens, myriad-volumed libraries,

Wax-lighted chapels, and rich carven screens,

Your doctors, and your proctors, and your deans,

Shall not avail you, when the Day-beam sports

New-risen o’er awaken’d Albion. No!

Nor yet your solemn organ-pipes that blow

Melodious thunders thro’ your vacant courts

At noon and eve, because your manner sorts

Not with this age wherefrom ye stand apart,

Because the lips of little children preach

Against you, you that do profess to teach

And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.

About eleven o’clock the Poet took me out alone. We went first to Freshwater Gate, where he said the “maddened scream of the sea” in “Maud” had been first suggested to him. He talked of our late friend, Philip Stanhope Worsley, the translator of the Odyssey and half of the Iliad, who was living there a good many years ago, and whom I had met at his table. He admired him much. He talked also, but I forget to what effect, of “The Holy Grail” and the old Arthur myth, but before this we talked of the Cambridge Sonnet just mentioned. “There was no love,” he said, “in the system.” I understood him to mean that the dons, as a rule, were out of sympathy with the young men. He spoke also of the bullying he had undergone at his first school; how, when he was a new boy of only seven and a half, he was sitting on the school steps crying and homesick. Up came a big fellow, between seventeen and eighteen, and asked him roughly who he was and what he was crying for, and then gave him a kick in the wind! This experience had evidently rankled in his mind for more than seventy years. Again, in April 1890, he told me the same story.

But to return to our morning walk of December 14, 1886. Something led me to speak of my favourite lines:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Spedding, it seems, and others had wanted him to alter the “one good custom.” “I was thinking” he said, “of knighthood.” He went on to speak of his “Experiments in Quantity,” and in particular of the Alcaic Ode to Milton, beginning:

O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies.

“I thought that,” he said, “a bit of a tour de force,” and surely he was right there. He tilted a little at C. S. Calverley for demurring to

God-gifted organ-voice of England.

“I didn’t mean it to be like your

‘September, October, November’;

I was imitating, not Horace, but the original Greek Alcaic, though Horace’s is perhaps the finest metre.” The two Latin metres which I have more than once heard him admire were the Hexameter and the Alcaic.

I find that in my Journal I wrote as regards this walk: “I wish I could remember more. He was wholly facilis, and I never felt less afraid of him or more reverent.” Perhaps I should add that during the walk he told me an extraordinary number of ghost stories — a man appearing to several people, and then vanishing before their eyes.

After dinner that evening we went to his sanctum to hear him read the last Act of the “Promise of May.” “Well, isn’t that tragic?” he naïvely asked at one point, I think where Eva falls down dead.

Next morning, I had to leave quite early for London. He just appeared at the top of the stairs, and offered to come down to say good-bye, but I would not let him. “I can remember little more of this delightful visit,” so I wrote at the time. “He was full, as usual, of the public lies, and the necessity of England being strong at sea.”

I did not see him again till after my second marriage, which took place on August 9, 1888. We paid a flying visit to Lambert’s Hotel, Freshwater, in April 1889. Of this I have made only the scantiest record. Something led us to speak of the famous line in the chorus of the Agamemnon:

ὀμμάτων ἐν ἀχηνίαις.

“So modern,” he remarked. He also spoke of the pathos of Euripides, and of the grandeur of the “Passing of Oedipus” in the Oedipus Coloneus, and Theseus

χεῖρ᾽ ἀντέχοντα κρατός.

He referred again to lack of sympathy in his time between dons and undergraduates. This seemed to be a memory often present to his mind.

Our next visit was in March 1890, when, with my wife’s sister, we stayed at Lambert’s Hotel. On Friday, March 28, we went to tea at Farringford, and found him in his little sun-trap of a summer-house, the evening sun playing full upon us, and bringing into perfect beauty the green lawn, the spreading trees, and the clumps of daffodils. He began by speaking of himself as depressed, but soon smiled away all such symptoms, and made us laugh with a story of the Duke of Wellington, when some prosy personage addressed him with a flattering compliment. He always seemed to enjoy anecdotes of the Great Duke. He was wearing a red cap which, in the sunlight, became him well; but he said playfully that Lady Tennyson disliked it as too suggestive of a “bonnet rouge.” Something, I forget what, led to a reference to the well-known verse:

Birds in the high Hall-garden

When twilight was falling,

Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,

They were crying and calling.

He once asked a rather gushing lady what sort of birds she supposed these to be. “Nightingales,” was the rather sentimental answer. “Who ever heard a nightingale say ‘Maud’?” was the somewhat stern reply. “They were rooks of course.”

My wife mentioned that she and her sister had been reading the “Idylls” of late. “Do you mean my Īdylls,” he said; “I am glad you don’t call them Ĭdylls.” We soon got talking of his recently published “Crossing the Bar.” When asked what was the precise grammatical reference in the third line of the verse:

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,

he answered rather emphatically, “I meant both human life and the water.” He went on, “They say I write so slowly. Well, that poem came to me in five minutes. Anyhow, under ten minutes.” Afterwards, when I had some quiet talk with Lady Tennyson, she confirmed what he had implied as to the rapidity with which he usually composed.

At this point I shall do well to insert extracts from my dear wife’s journal, describing a few incidents in what proved our last visit to Farringford. It was at the end of January 1892, when the Poet, born on August 6, 1809, was well on in his eighty-third year. She writes as follows:

VISIT TO FARRINGFORD, JANUARY 1892

By Mrs. Montagu Butler

On January 26 Montagu and I left our two small boys at Eton Villa, Shanklin, to spend the night at Lambert’s Hotel, Freshwater. After leaving our traps at the hotel we walked up to Farringford in time for two o’clock lunch. I sat next the Poet at table, and had some talk with him. He spoke of the metres of Horace, and said that he always thought his Sapphics uninteresting and monotonous. “What a relief it is,” he said, “when he does allow himself some irregularity, for instance:

Laurea donandus Apollinari.”

On the other hand, he admired his Alcaics immensely. The discovery for which he always hoped the most was of some further writings of Sappho herself. He considered the metre beautiful under her treatment.

Then we spoke of Schliemann, of whom I had just been reading in Schuchardt’s book, and he said he had no faith in him. “How could a great city have been built on a little ridge like that (meaning Hissarlik)? Where would have been the room for Priam’s fifty sons and fifty daughters?”

He also thought the supposed identifications of topography absurd, and preferred to believe that Homer’s descriptions were entirely imaginary. When I said that I thought that a disappointing view, he called me “a wretched localizer.” “They try to localize me too,” he said. “There is one man wants to make out that I describe nothing I have not seen.” Also, with some irritation, of other accounts of himself: “Full of lies, and —— made me tell a big one at the end.”

Next day we walked up at about 12.20 to accompany him in his morning walk. Montagu and he were in front, Hallam Tennyson and I behind. Montagu tells me how he was indignant with Z. for charging him with general plagiarism, in particular about Lactantius and other classics, “of whom,” he said, “I haven’t read a word.” Also, of taking from Sophocles, “whom I never read since I was a young man”; and of owing his “moanings of the sea” to Horace’s gementis litora Bospori. Some one charged him with having stolen the “In Memoriam” metre from some very old poet of whom he had never heard. He said, in answer to Montagu’s question, that the metres of both “Maurice” and “The Daisy” were original. He had never written in the metre of Gray’s Elegy, except epitaphs in Westminster Abbey. He admired the metre much, and thought the poem immortal.

Hartley Coleridge, he said, spoke of Pindar as the “Newmarket Poet.” He thought the loss of his Dithyrambs most serious, judging from the remaining fragment. He had from early boyhood been familiar with the fact that Wolsey and Cromwell in Henry VIII. were by Fletcher, but he felt absolutely certain that the description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold was by Shakespeare’s own hand. He quoted it, as well as several lines from Wolsey. When I said how glad I was he had written about the Duke of Clarence, he said, “Yes, but I wouldn’t write an Installation Ode for the Chancellor.”

So far Montagu reported. After this we others came up, and the old Poet and I walked home together.

We spoke a little of our projected tour to Greece. He had never been there, but would have greatly liked to go — in a private yacht—”but they tell me an old man is safest at home, and I dare say it is true; and I couldn’t stand the vermin!” I told him I was hoping to study classical architecture a little before going out, and he said that he thought, after all, Gothic architecture was finer than classic. “It is like blank verse,” he said; “it will suit the humblest cottage and the grandest cathedral. It has more mystery than the classic.” He thought many of our cathedrals spoiled by their vile glass. He had been disappointed, in his late visit to Cambridge, to notice that the windows in King’s seemed to be losing their brilliancy and to look dark.

After we had been walking a few minutes in silence, he said to me, “Do you see what the beauty is in the line,

That all the Thrones are clouded by your loss?” —

quoting from his still unpublished poem on the young Prince. I said I thought it very beautiful; but he asked if I saw why he had used the word clouded instead of darkened or another. “It makes you think of a great mountain,” he explained. Then he spoke of the great richness of the English language due to its double origin, the Norman and Saxon words. How hard it would be for a foreigner to feel the difference in the line

An infant crying for the light,

had the word baby been substituted, which would at once have made it ridiculous. He told me that his lines “came to” him; he did not make them up, but that, when they had come, he wrote them down, and looked into them to see what they were like. This was very interesting, especially as he had told Montagu, at Easter, 1890, that he had composed “Crossing the Bar” in less than ten minutes.

Then he said again, what I have heard him say before, that though a poet is born, he will not be much of a poet if he is not made too. Then he asked me if I was fond of Pindar. I am very glad that he admires him greatly. He could not believe Paley’s theory that Pindar is earlier than Homer. I vented my dislike of Paley’s horribly prosaic translations in his notes on Aeschylus, and he said he had always used Blomfield, he found his Glossary such a help.

We were now indoors, and in a few minutes went in to luncheon. I was again seated next him, and we had some more talk. He got upon the subject of College life, and told me anecdotes of himself and his friends, one very amusing one about Tom Taylor. During some vacation Tom Taylor’s rooms were lent by the College authorities to a farmer, a member of an Agricultural Society which they were entertaining. Taylor knew this perfectly well; but in the middle of the night suddenly entered the room, in a long traveller’s cloak and with a lantern in his hand, “Pray, what are you doing in my room, sir, and in my bed?” feigning great surprise and indignation. The poor old farmer tried to explain that he was honoured by being the guest of the College, but Taylor refused to be pacified; when suddenly, in the midst of their altercation, enter Charles Spring Rice, brother of Stephen, personating the Senior Dean, who forthwith laid forcible hands on Tom Taylor. Thereupon ensued a regular scuffle, in which they both tumbled on to the bed, and Tom Taylor got so much the worst of it that the kindly agriculturist began to intercede, “Oh, please, Mr. Dean, don’t be too hard on the young man!”

Tennyson himself had been proctorized once or twice. Once, during the first few days of his College life, he came out to receive a parcel by a midnight mail. “Pray, sir, what are you doing at this time of night?” said the Proctor. “And pray, sir, what business of yours is it to ask me?” replied the Freshman, who in his innocence knew nothing about the Proctor. He was told to call upon him next day, but then explained his ignorance, and was let off.

On one occasion a throng of University men outside the Senate House had been yelling against Whewell. Tennyson was standing by the door of Macmillan’s shop, and raised a counter-cry for Whewell. He was, however, seen standing, and was sent for to Whewell. “I was surprised, sir, to see you among that shouting mob the other day.” “I was shouting for you,” was the reply. Whewell was greatly pleased, and grunted his approbation.

Another funny story. A wine-party was going on in Arthur Hallam’s rooms in the New Court, when enter angrily the Senior Dean, “Tommy Thorp.” “What is the meaning, Mr. Hallam, of all this noise?” “I am very sorry, sir,” said Hallam, “we had no idea we were making a noise.” “Well, gentlemen, if you’ll all come down into the Court, you’ll hear what a noise you’re making.” “Perhaps,” admits Tennyson, “I may have put in the all.”

So ends my wife’s short journal, and it only remains for me to sum up very briefly the impressions left upon me, after a lapse of fifty, forty, thirty, twenty years, by these visits to Farringford which once made so large a part of my interest and my happiness.

Little as I am able to put these impressions into words, I can say with truth that no personality with which I have ever come in close touch, either seemed to me at the time, or has seemed in later recollection, to cover so large, so rich, and so diverse a field for veneration, wonder, and regard.

Tennyson was, and is, to me the most remarkable man that I have ever met. Often when I was with him, whether in long walks or in his study, and when I came to think of him silently afterwards, I used to recall his own lines on Wellington:

Our greatest yet with least pretence...,

Rich in saving common-sense,

And, as the greatest only are,

In his simplicity sublime.

Simple, natural, shrewd, humorous; feeling strongly on a vast variety of subjects, and saying freely just what he felt; passing rapidly and easily from the gravest matters of speculation or conduct to some trifling or amusing incident of the moment, or some recollection of the years of his youth; he seemed to me unconscious of being a great man, though he must have known himself to be one of the foremost thinkers, and quite the foremost poet of his day. He was wholly free from affectation. He was never an actor of a part. There was about him always an atmosphere of truth.

Truth-teller was our Alfred named,

was a line that again and again recurred to the memory as one heard him speak out his mind either on men, or on politics, or on the deepest mysteries of philosophy or religion. He was pre-eminently one of the Children of Light. Of light, whether from science, or from literary criticism, or from the progress of the human conscience, he hailed thankfully and expectantly every fresh disclosure. There was a deep reverence in him for the Unseen, the Undiscovered, the as yet Unrevealed. This on the intellectual side; and on the moral side there was a manly, a devout, and a tender veneration for purity and innocence and trustfulness, and, to borrow his own stately words, written early in his life:

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.

I regret that I cannot convey more worthily what I have felt in the presence of this great and truly noble man. To go to either of his beautiful homes, to see him as the husband of his wife and the father of his sons, was to me and mine for many years a true pilgrimage, both of the mind and of the heart. That I was once able to feel this, and that I am able to feel it gratefully even now, I count among the richer blessings of a long and happy life.

TENNYSON AND W. G. WARD AND OTHER FARRINGFORD FRIENDS by Wilfrid Ward

Among Tennyson’s friends in his later years was my father — William George Ward — who was his neighbour at Freshwater from 1870 to 1882. I have been asked to contribute to the picture of “Tennyson and his Friends” some account of their intercourse, and at the same time to set down some of the extremely interesting comments on his own poems which I myself was privileged yet later to hear from the Poet. I need not say that such an act of piety in regard of two men for whom I have so deep a reverence is a work of love, and I only regret that my recollections of what so well deserves recording should be so imperfect and fragmentary.

Tennyson’s friendship with my father began at a date considerably subsequent to their first acquaintance. My father came rather unexpectedly into the family property in the Isle of Wight in 1849 when his uncle died without a son; but he did not desire to leave the house Pugin had built for him in Hertfordshire, where he had settled immediately after he joined the Catholic Church in 1845. He and the late Cardinal Vaughan were, in the ‘fifties, doing a work for ecclesiastical education at St. Edmund’s College, Ware — a work which came to my father naturally as the sequel to his share in the Oxford Movement. Therefore, when Tennyson in 1853 came to live in the Isle of Wight my father was an absentee. He tried in 1858 for two years to live at his grandfather’s old home near Cowes, Northwood Park, but his health broke down, and he returned to Hertfordshire. In the ‘sixties, however, he used to pay long visits to Freshwater, in the scenery of which he delighted; and, on one of these occasions, Tennyson was introduced to him by their common friend, Dean Bradley. The meeting was not, I think, a great success on either side. Later on, however, in 1870, when my father, despairing of the Cowes climate, built a house at Freshwater, he was Tennyson’s near neighbour, and they soon became great friends.

Arthur Tennyson.

Tennyson’s friendship with my father grew up from close neighbourhood, and from the fact that they had so much more in common with each other than with most of their other Isle of Wight neighbours. It was cemented by my father’s devotion to Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Tennyson, who, in her conversation, he always said, reminded him of the John Henry Newman of Oxford days. Also they had many friends in common — such as Dean Stanley, Lord Selborne, and Jowett — who often visited Freshwater. They were both members of the Metaphysical Society, and loved to discuss in private problems of religious faith which formed the subject of the Society’s debates. They were also both great Shakespearians. But most of all they were drawn together by a simplicity and directness of mind, in which, I think, they had few rivals — if I may say of my own father what every one else said. Nevertheless, their intimacy was almost as remarkable for diversity of interests as for similarity. It might seem at first sight to be a point of similarity between them that each revelled in his way in the scenery of the beautiful island which was their home. Yet the love of external nature was very different in the two men. It had that marked contrast which Ruskin has described in his Modern Painters. Ruskin contrasts three typical ways of being affected by what is beautiful. There is first “the man who perceives rightly because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose — a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself — a little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be that crowd around it.”

My father’s imagination was of the second order, Tennyson’s of the third. My father often perceived wrongly, or not at all, because he felt so strongly. Consequently, while the bold outlines of mountain scenery and the large vistas of sea and down in the Isle of Wight moved him greatly, he did not look at them with the accurate eye of an artist; and the minute beauty of flowers and trees was non-existent for him. Tennyson, on the contrary, had the most delicate and true perception of the minute as well as the great. Each man chose for his home a site which suited his taste. Weston was on a high hill with a wide view. Farringford was lower down and buried in trees. The two men used sometimes to walk together on the great Down which stretches from the Needles rocks to Freshwater Bay, on which the boundary between Tennyson’s property and my father’s is marked by the dyke beyond the Tennyson memorial cross. At other times they walked in the Freshwater lanes. And there was a suggestion in these different surroundings of their sympathy and of their difference. The immense expanse of scenery visible from the Beacon Down was equally inspiring to both, but the lanes and fields which were full of inspiration to Tennyson had nothing in them which appealed to W. G. Ward. If he heard a bird singing, the only suggestion it conveyed to him was of a tiresome being who kept him awake at night. Trees were only the unpleasant screens which stood in the way of the view of the Solent from his house, and which he cut down as fast as they grew up. To Tennyson, on the contrary — as we see constantly in his poetry — there was a whole world of interest in Nature created by his knowledge of botany and natural history, as well as by his exceptionally accurate and observant eye.

Let me quote the words of a great critic — the late Mr. Hutton — on this characteristic of the Poet:

No poet has so many and such accurate references to the vegetable world, and yet at the same time references so thoroughly poetic. He calls dark hair

More black than ash-buds in the front of March;

auburn hair,

In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell

Divides three-fold to show the fruit within.

He is never tired of reflecting in his poetry the physiology of flowers and trees and buds. The “living smoke” of the yew is twice commemorated in his poems. He tells us how the sunflower, “shining fair,”

Rays round with flames her disk of seed;

observes on the blasts “that blow the poplars white”; and, to make a long story short — for the list of instances might be multiplied to hundreds — in his latest published “Idylls of the King,” he thus dates an early hour in the night:

Nigh upon that hour

When the lone hern forgets his melancholy,

Lets down his other leg, and, stretching, dreams

Of goodly supper in the distant pool.

When Tennyson and W. G. Ward walked together there was then a most curious contrast in their attitude towards the Nature that surrounded them, — Tennyson noting every bird, every flower, every tree, as he passed it, Ward buried in the conversation, and alive only to the great, broad effects in the surrounding country.

W. G. Ward was himself not only no poet, but almost barbarously indifferent to poetry, with some few exceptions. He was exceedingly frank with Tennyson, and plainly intimated to him that there was very little in his poetry that he understood or cared for. But this fact never impaired their friendship. Indeed, I think Tennyson enjoyed his almost eccentric candour in this and in other matters, and he used, in later years, to tell me stories which illustrated it. Once when the question of persecution had been debated at the Metaphysical Society he remarked to my father, “You know you would try to get me put into prison if the Pope told you to.” “Your father would not say ‘No,’” Tennyson said to me. “He only replied, ‘The Pope would never tell me to do anything so foolish.’”

I think his intercourse with my father did a good deal to diminish a certain prejudice against Roman Catholicism; and his intimacy with my father’s chaplain — Father Haythornthwaite, a man as opposed to the popular conception of a Jesuit as could well be imagined — told in the same direction. “When Haythornthwaite dies,” Tennyson once said, “I shall write as his epitaph: ‘Here lies Peter Haythornthwaite, Human by nature, Roman by fate!’”

W. G. Ward’s own extreme frankness led Tennyson to remark to a friend: “The popular idea of Roman Catholics as Jesuitical and untruthful is contrary to my own experience. The most truthful man I ever met was an Ultramontane. He was grotesquely truthful.”

Tennyson would sometimes retort in kind to my father’s frank criticisms, and once, after vainly trying to decipher one of his letters, observed that the handwriting was “like walking-sticks gone mad,” a curiously true description of my father’s very peculiar characters.

As with scenery, so with poetry; my father only took in broad effects and simple pathos, and would single out for special admiration such a poem as the “Children’s Hospital,” over which he shed many tears.

Tennyson soon accustomed himself to my father’s indifference to his poetry in general. But he hoped that, at all events, his metaphysical poems would interest his neighbour, and sent him the MS. of “De Profundis” when he wrote it; but the reply was only an entreaty that he would put explanatory notes to it when it should be published. One exception, however, must be made in favour of “Becket,” which Tennyson read aloud to Ward, who, greatly to his own surprise, admired it enthusiastically. “How do you like it?” Tennyson asked, and the reply was, “Very much, though I did not expect to like it at all. It is quite splendid. The development of character in Chancellor and Archbishop is wonderfully drawn. Where did you learn it all?”

I used to think there was a good deal that was alike between the intercourse of Tennyson with my father and his intercourse with my father’s old friend, Dr. Jowett of Balliol. In both cases there was the same complete frankness — an unanswerable reply to those who gave it out that Tennyson best enjoyed the society of flatterers. Jowett, however, understood Tennyson’s poetry far better than my father did. It was sometimes strange to see that impassive figure, so little given to emotion, so ready to snub in others any display of feeling, under the spell of the Poet’s lines. I recollect once at Farringford listening with Jowett after dinner to Tennyson’s reading of his “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.” It was a poem which his peculiar chant made most moving, and he read the concluding lines with special pathos:

Speak no more of his renown,

Lay your earthly fancies down,

And in the vast cathedral leave him;

God accept him, Christ receive him.

Tennyson then turned to address some observation to Jowett, but no reply came, and we soon saw that the Master was unable to speak. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. I ventured to allude to this some time later in talking to Jowett, and he said, “What would you have? The two Englishmen for whom I have the deepest feeling of reverence are Tennyson and the great Duke of Wellington. And one of them was reading what he had himself written in admiration of the other!”

When my father died Tennyson visited his grave in company with Father Haythornthwaite, who spoke to me of the visit directly afterwards. A cross of fresh flowers had been placed on the grave until the monument should be erected. Tennyson quoted Shirley’s couplet:

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust.

And then, standing over the grave, he recited the whole of the beautiful poem from which these lines are taken. Tennyson’s eldest son wrote to me at the same time:

His wonderful simplicity in faith and nature, together with his subtle and far-reaching grasp of intellect, make up a man never to be forgotten. My father and mother and myself will miss him more than I can say; I loved him somehow like an intimate college friend.

A few years later Tennyson published the memorial lines in the volume called Demeter and other Poems, which show how closely his observant mind had taken in the character of his friend:

Farewell, whose living like I shall not find,

Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,

My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,

Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward,

How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,

How loyal in the following of thy Lord!

Horatio Tennyson.

Freshwater was in those days seething with intellectual life. The Poet was, of course, its centre, and that remarkable woman, Mrs. Cameron, was stage-manager of what was for us young people a great drama. For Tennyson was still writing the “Idylls of the King,” which had so greatly moved the whole country, and we felt that we were in the making of history. There were many in Freshwater who were keenly alive to their privilege. Even among the permanent residents in the neighbourhood there were not a few who were worthy of remark, and Farringford was very hospitable and often added to their number some of the most interesting people in England. Mrs. Cameron herself was one of the well-known Miss Pattles, a sister of the late Lady Somers and Lady Dalrymple. She was a great wit and a most original and unconventional woman, with an enthusiasm for genius and for art. Her large artistic photographs are a permanent record of the remarkable people who congregated from time to time round the Poet’s home in the island. They include Carlyle, Ruskin, Tyndall, Darwin, Lord Dufferin, Palgrave, D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Lecky, Aubrey de Vere, Sir Henry Taylor, Herschell, Longfellow, Auberon, Herbert, Pollock, Allingham, and many another. Among other residents I would name the Rev. Christopher Bowen, a man of very unusual ability, though he never had enough ambition to become famous. His sons — Lord Justice Bowen and Mr. Edward Bowen of Harrow — are better known. Then there were the Poet’s two remarkable brothers, Horatio and Arthur Tennyson, and two fine old admirals, Sir Graham Hamond and Admiral Crozier. Then again from 1874 onwards we had at the Briary G. F. Watts, and Mrs. Cameron’s sister, Mrs. Prinsep and her husband, with Mr. Val Prinsep as an occasional guest. A little earlier Sir John Simeon was still living at Swainston, and was one of Tennyson’s most intimate friends. Again, Mrs. Grosvenor Hood and Mrs. Brotherton were both people for whom literature and art counted for much.

The large group of people who came to Freshwater in the summer for the sole reason that Tennyson’s writings and himself were among the greatest things in their lives, sometimes formed an almost unique society. Several figures are especially prominent in my memory. One great friend of the Tennysons’ was Sir Richard Jebb — intensely shy and intensely refined — with whom, I may add, by the way, my first meeting at Haslemere was unpromising. I got into the Tennysons’ large old-fashioned brougham to drive to Aldworth on a dark night, and laid rough hands on what I took to be a heap of rugs in the corner. I received in return a mild remonstrance from the fellow-guest, of whose coat-collar I found myself possessed! Jowett and Sir Alfred Lyall I often met at the Tennysons’ and elsewhere. Each was in his way memorable, and congenial to the Poet’s taste, which was fastidious owing to his very simplicity, to his love of reality and dislike of affectation. The singular charm — both in person and in conversation — of Samuel Henry Butcher, another great friend, stands out vividly from the past. In addition to his brilliant gifts and acquirements he was endowed in a remarkable degree with that justice of mind which Tennyson so greatly prized. One used to feel for how much this counted in the Poet’s mind when he talked of the “wisdom” of his old friend, James Spedding. Henry Irving I once saw at Aldworth, though never at Farringford, and it was curious to meet at close quarters one with whom I had had for years the stranger’s intimacy which one has with a favourite actor. But Irving was never an intimate friend of Tennyson’s, nor among the typical figures of his circle. To my mind the friend of Tennyson’s whose saintliness most completely had his sympathy was Aubrey de Vere, of whom Sarah Coleridge said that he had more entirely a poet’s nature even than her own father, or any other of the great poets she had known. Aubrey de Vere’s simplicity and deep piety were as remarkable as his keen perception and close knowledge on the subject which most interested Tennyson himself. I wish I had seen more of the intercourse of two men whose friendship was almost lifelong, and showed Tennyson at his very best in conversation.

Speaking generally, it was a society in which good breeding, literary taste, general information, and personal distinction counted for much more than worldly or official status. I think that we young people looked upon a government official of average endowment as rather an outsider. Genius was all in all for us — officialdom and conventionality in general were unpopular in Freshwater.

Indeed, how could conventionality obtain a footing in a society in which Mrs. Cameron and Tennyson were the central figures? I recall Mrs. Cameron pressing my father’s hand to her heart, and addressing him as “Squire Ward.” I recall her, during her celebrated private theatricals at Dimbola, when a distinguished audience tittered at some stage misadventure which occurred during a tragic scene, mounting a chair and insisting loudly and with angry gesticulation, “You must not laugh; you must cry.” I recall her bringing Tennyson to my father’s house while she was photographing representatives for the characters in the “Idylls of the King,” and calling out directly she saw Cardinal Vaughan (to whom she was a perfect stranger), “Alfred, I have found Sir Lancelot.” Tennyson’s reply was, “I want a face well worn with evil passion.”

My own intercourse with the Poet was chiefly after my father’s death in 1882. Tennyson was then an old man who had passed his threescore years and ten. His deeply serious mind brooded constantly on the prospect for the future, and the meaning of human life, which was, for him, nearly over.

There is much of autobiography in some of the poems of those years which he discussed with me. I have elsewhere described his impressive analysis of the “De Profundis.” I will here set down the substance of his comments on two other poems dealing with his deep problems of human life, the “Ancient Sage” and “Vastness.” “The Ancient Sage” is in form dramatic, and the personality of the two interlocutors is a very important element in it viewed as a work of art. An aged seer of high, ascetic life, a thousand years before the birth of Christ, holds intercourse with a younger man:

that loved and honour’d him, and yet

Was no disciple, richly garb’d, but worn

From wasteful living...

The younger man has set down his reflections on the philosophy of life in a set of verses which the Ancient Sage reads, making his comments as the reading proceeds. There seems to be a deep connection between the personal characteristics of the two men — their habits and modes of living — and their respective views. The younger man is wearied with satiety, impatient for immediate pleasure:

Yet wine and laughter, friends! and set

The lamps alight, and call

For golden music, and forget

The darkness of the pall.

He is dismayed by the first appearance of difficulty and pain in the world, as he had been satisfied for a time with the immediate pleasures within his reach. He is unable to steady the nerve of his brain (so to speak), and trace the riddle of pain and trouble in the universe to its ultimate solution. In thought, as in conduct, he is filled and swayed by the immediate inclination and the first impression, without self-restraint and without the habits of concentrated reflection which go hand in hand with self-restraint. Failing, in consequence, to have any steady view of his own soul or of the spiritual life within, he is impressed, probably by experience, with this one truth, that uncontrolled self-indulgence leads to regret and pain; and he is consequently pessimistic in his ultimate view of things. The absence of spiritual light makes him see only the immediate pain and failure in the universe. He has no patience to look beyond or to reflect if there be not an underlying and greater purpose which temporary failure in small things may further, as the death of one cell in the human organism is but the preparation for its replacement by another, and a part of the body’s natural development. It is a dissipated character and a dissipated mind. The intangible beauty of moral virtue finds nothing in the character capable of assimilating it; the spiritual truth of Gods existence and the spiritual purpose of the universe elude the mind.

In marked contrast stands forth the “Ancient Sage.” He has no taste for the dissipations of the town:

I am wearied of our city, son, and go

To spend my one last year among the hills.

His gospel is a gospel of self-restraint and long-suffering, of action for high ends.

Let be thy wail and help thy fellow-men,

And make thy gold thy vassal, not thy king,

And fling free alms into the beggar’s bowl,

And send the day into the darken’d heart;

Nor list for guerdon in the voice of men,

A dying echo from a falling wall:

·······

Nor roll thy viands on a luscious tongue,

Nor drown thyself with flies in honied wine.

·······

And more — think well! Do-well will follow thought.

And the patience and self-control which enable him to work for great purposes and spiritual aims, characterize also his thought. “Things are not what they seem,” he holds. The first view is ever incomplete, though he who has not patience of thought will not get beyond the first view. That concentration and that purity of manners which keep the spiritual soul and self undimmed, and preserve the moral voice within articulate, are indispensable if we are to understand anything beyond the most superficial phenomena about us. The keynote is struck in the very first words which the Seer speaks:

This wealth of waters might but seem to draw

From yon dark cave, but, son, the source is higher,

Yon summit half-a-league in air — and higher,

The cloud that hides it — higher still, the heavens

Whereby the cloud was moulded, and whereout

The cloud descended. Force is from the heights.

“Force is from the heights” is the thought which underlies the Sage’s interpretation of all that perplexes the younger man. We cannot fully understand what is beyond and above us, but if we are wise we shall steadily look upwards, and enough light will eventually be gained for our guidance. “Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum.” As God’s law is enough to guide our footsteps, though we cannot hope to understand His full counsel, so the light by which the spiritual world is disclosed is sufficient for those who look for it, though its disclosure is only gradual and partial. If we are said not to know what we cannot submit in its entirety to scientific tests, we can never know anything worth knowing. If, again, we are to disbelieve in the spiritual world because it is filled with mystery, what are we to say of the mysteries which face us in this earth — inexplicable yet undeniable? The conception of God is not more mysterious than the thought that a grain of sand may be divided a million times, and yet be no nearer its ultimate division than it is now. Time and space are full of mystery. A man under chloroform has been known to pass many hours of sensation in a few minutes. Time is made an objective measure of things, and yet its phenomena are so subjective that Kant conceived it to have no real existence. When the younger man complains that “the Nameless Power or Powers that rule were never heard nor seen,” the Sage thus replies:

If thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive

Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,

There, brooding by the central altar, thou

May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,

By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,

As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;

For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake

That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there

But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,

The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within

The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,

And in the million-millionth of a grain,

Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,

And ever vanishing, never vanishes,

To me, my son, more mystic than myself,

Or even than the Nameless is to me.

And so, too, when the youth calls for further proof of the “Nameless,” the Sage reminds him that there are universally acknowledged truths incapable of formal proof. The thought which the poet here dwells upon is similar to Cardinal Newman’s teaching in the Grammar of Assent, though Tennyson’s use of words does not here, as elsewhere, harmonize with Catholic doctrine. There are truths, the knowledge of which is so intimately connected with our own personality, that the material for complete formal proof eludes verbal statement. We reject, for example, with a clear and unerring instinct, the notion that when we converse with our friends, the words and thoughts which come to us proceed possibly from some principle within us and not from an external cause, and yet it is not a matter on which we can offer logical proof. The same sensations could conceivably be produced from within, as they are in a dream. Logical proof, then, has (so the Ancient Sage maintains) to be dispensed with in much that is of highest moment:

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no

Nor yet that thou art mortal — nay, my son,

Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,

Am not thyself in converse with thyself,

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

Nor yet disproven.

And close upon this follows the beautiful passage in which the hopeful and wistful upward gaze of faith is described. While melancholy and perplexity constantly attend on the exercises of the speculative intellect, we are to “cling to faith”:

She reels not in the storm of warring words,

She brightens at the clash of “Yes” and “No,”

She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,

She feels the Sun is hid but for a night.

She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wailed “Mirage”!

These lines present to the reader the hopefulness of the spiritual mind, hopefulness not akin to the merely sanguine temperament, but based on a deep conviction of the reality of the spiritual world, and on unfailing certainty that there is in it a key to the perplexities of this universe of which we men understand so little. We know from experience that material Nature is working out her ends, however little we understand the process, and however unpromising portions of her work might appear without this knowledge. That an acorn should have within it forces which compel earth, air, and water to come to its assistance and become the oak tree, would seem incredible were it not so habitually known as a fact; and the certainty which such experiences give in the material order, the eye of faith gives in the spiritual order. However perplexing the universe now seems to us we have this deep trust that there is an explanation, and that when we are in a position to judge the whole, instead of looking on from this corner of time and space, the truth of the spiritual interpretation of its phenomena will be clear—”ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis et vincas cum iudicaris.” This view runs not only through the passages I have just quoted, but through all the poem. The poet pleads for steadfast trust and hope in the face of difficulty, as we would trust a known and intimate friend in the face of ominous suspicions.

It is, of course, just that keen realization of the plausibleness of the sceptical view of life, to which some of our modern critics object as a sign of weakness, which gives this poem its strength. Such assistance as Tennyson gives us in seeing and realizing the spiritual view is needed only or mainly by those to whom agnosticism in its various forms is a plausible, and, at first sight, a reasonable attitude. The old-fashioned “irrefragable arguments” are of little use by themselves to persons in such a condition. However evident spiritual truths may be to an absolutely purified reason, they are not evident to intellects which are impregnated with a view of things opposed to the religious view. Moreover, we do not consult a doctor with much confidence if he does not believe in the reality of our illness; and one who finds the sceptical view persuasive will have little trust in those who tell him that it has no plausibility at all. With Tennyson, as with Cardinal Newman, half the secret of his influence in this respect is that the sceptically minded reader finds those very disturbing thoughts which had troubled his own mind anticipated and stated. And yet a truer and deeper view is likewise depicted, which sees beyond these thoughts, which detects through the clouds the light in the heavens beyond.

In the “Ancient Sage” there is a striking instance of this characteristic. The young philosopher, filled with the failure of fair promise and the collapse of apparent purpose in Nature and in man, pours forth his sceptical lament. Here is a selection from it, typical of the rest:

The years that made the stripling wise

Undo their work again,

And leave him, blind of heart and eyes,

The last and least of men;

······

His winter chills him to the root,

He withers marrow and mind;

The kernel of the shrivell’d fruit

Is jutting thro’ the rind;

The tiger spasms tear his chest,

The palsy wags his head;

The wife, the sons, who love him best

Would fain that he were dead;

······

The statesman’s brain that sway’d the past

Is feebler than his knees;

The passive sailor wrecks at last

In ever-silent seas;

The warrior hath forgot his arms,

The Learned all his lore;

The changing market frets or charms

The merchant’s hope no more;

The prophet’s beacon burn’d in vain,

And now is lost in cloud;

The plowman passes, bent with pain,

To mix with what he plow’d;

The poet whom his Age would quote

As heir of endless fame —

He knows not ev’n the book he wrote,

Not even his own name.

For man has overlived his day,

And, darkening in the light,

Scarce feels the senses break away

To mix with ancient Night.

The Sage — far from denying the force of what he says — contends for a deeper and wider view. The “darkness is in man.” It is the result of the incompleteness of his knowledge. That is to say, what is black to his imperfect view, and taken by itself, may be a necessary part of a great scheme. Not that the things are not really sad, but that the whole is not sad. As there may be pain in tears of joy, and yet it is lost in exquisite pleasure, so the dark elements of life, when our ultimate destiny is attained and we can view age and suffering as part of the whole, may be so entirely eclipsed, that we may say with truth that the “world is wholly fair”:

My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,

So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.

Who knows but that the darkness is in man?

The doors of Night may be the gates of Light;

For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then

Suddenly heal’d, how would’st thou glory in all

The splendours and the voices of the world!

And we, the poor earth’s dying race, and yet

No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore

Await the last and largest sense to make

The phantom walls of this illusion fade,

And show us that the world is wholly fair.

“The doors of night may be the gates of light,” says the Sage; and in unison with this note are his replies to some of the details of the younger man’s wail, while his very argument presupposes that all cannot now be answered until we have the “last and largest sense.” Thus, when the dreary, hopeless vision of bodily decay, which seems to point to total dissolution of a noble nature, is referred to, he says:

The shell must break before the bird can fly.

The breaking of the shell might seem, at first sight, total destruction, but the forthcoming of the bird transforms the conception of decay into a conception of new birth. And so, too, in answer to the complaint that “the shaft of scorn that once had stung, but wakes the dotard smile,” he suggests that a more complete view may show it to be “the placid gleam of sunset after storm.” The transition may be not from intense life to apathy, but from blinding passion to a calmer, a serener vision.

Another of the later poems—”Vastness” — brings into especial relief a parallel I have often noted between Lord Tennyson and Cardinal Newman in their keen sense of the mysteries of the universe, which religion helps us to bear with but does not solve. So far as this planet goes, and our own human race, Cardinal Newman has expressed this sense in the Apologia, and the parallel between his view and Tennyson’s is sufficiently instructive to make it worth while to quote the passage in full:

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers and truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described by the Apostle, “having no hope and without God in the world,” all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution.

Lord Tennyson takes in a wider range of considerations than the Cardinal. He paints graphically, not only the mystery of the lot of mankind, but the further sense of bewilderment which arises when we contemplate the aimlessness of this vast universe of which our earth is such an inappreciable fragment. Logically the poem asks only the question: “Great or small, grand or ignoble, what does anything matter if we are but creatures of the day with no eternal destiny?” But its grandeur consists in the manner in which it sweeps from end to end of human experience and knowledge, from thoughts overwhelming in their vastness, from ideas carrying the mind over the length and breadth of space and over visions of all eternity, to pictures of this planet, with its microscopic details, the hopes, anxieties, plans, pleasures, griefs which make up the immediate life of man. The imagination vacillates between a keen sense of the importance of all, even the smallest, and the worthlessness of all, even the greatest. At one moment comes the thought that one life out of the myriads of lives passed on this tiny planet, if it be lived and given up for righteousness, is of infinite and eternal value, and the next moment comes the sense that the whole universe is worthless and meaningless, if, indeed, the only percipient beings who are affected by it are but creatures who feel for a day and then pass to nothingness. Each picture of the various aspects of human life rouses an instinctive sympathy, and a feeling in the background, “it can’t be worthless and meaningless,” and yet the poet relentlessly forces us to confess that it is only some far wider view of human nature and destiny than this world alone can justify, which can make the scenes he depicts of any value. What Mill called “the disastrous feeling of ‘not worth while’” threatens the reader at every turn; though the pictures of life in its innumerable aspects of happiness, misery, sensuality, purity, selfishness, self-devotion, ambition, aspiration, craft, cruelty, are so intensely real and rivet the imagination so strongly, that he refuses to yield to the feeling. I subjoin some of the couplets where good and bad, great and small, alternate:

Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish’d face,

Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish’d race.

Raving politics, never at rest — as this poor earth’s pale history runs, —

What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

············

Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools;

Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow’d up by her vassal legion of fools.

············

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone;

Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty: Flattery gilding the rift in a throne.

············

Love for the maiden, crown’d with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been,

Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean;

National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire;

Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapt in a moment of fire;

He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind;

He that has nail’d all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind;

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth;

All new-old revolutions of Empire — change of the tide — 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 corpse-coffins at last,

Swallowed 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 hive?

The thought which seems to oppress the seer is the insignificance of everything when compared to a standard — ever conceivable and ever actual — above it. The ruts of a ploughed field may seem to the diminutive insect as vast and overcoming as the Alps seem to us. Then contrast the thought of Mont Blanc with that of the whole globe; proceed from the globe to the solar system, and from that to the myriads of systems lost in space. All that is great to us is relatively great, and becomes small at once when the mind rises higher. So, too, in the moral order, all those aspects of human life which sway our deepest emotions are but “a murmur of gnats in the gloom,” if regard be had to our comparative insignificance. The ground yields at every step, and the mind looks for some terra firma, some absolute basis of trust, and this is only to be found in the conception of man as possessing an eternal destiny. The infinite value of all that concerns an immortal being stands proof against the thoughts that bewildered our vision. “He that has nailed all flesh to the cross till self died out in the love of his kind” may be but a speck in the universe, but faith measures him by a standard other than that of spacial vastness. The idea of the eternal worth of morality steps in to calm the imagination, and this idea in its measure justifies the conception of the value and importance of all the phases of human existence which make up the drama of life. Human Love is the side of man’s nature which the poet looks to as conveying the sense of his immortal destiny. The undying union of spirit with spirit is a union which the grave cannot end. The bewildering nightmare of the nothingness and vanity of all things is abruptly cut short, as the sense of what is deepest in the human heart promptly gives the lie to what it cannot solve in detail:

Peace, let it be! for I loved him and love him for ever.

The dead are not dead but alive.

The South Side of Entrance from below the Terrace, Aldworth. Drawn by W. Biscombe Gardner.

TENNYSON AND ALDWORTH by Sir James Knowles, K.C.V.O.

Farringford he never forsook, though he added another home to it; and assuredly no poet has ever before called two such residences his own. Both of them were sweetened by the presence there, so graciously prolonged, of her to whom the lovers of song owe so deep a debt of gratitude. The second home was as well chosen as the first. It lifted England’s great poet to a height from which he could gaze on a large portion of that English land which he loved so well, see it basking in its most affluent summer beauty, and only bounded by “the inviolate sea.” Year after year he trod its two stately terraces with men the most noted of their time; statesmen, warriors, men of letters, science, and art, some of royal race, some famous in far lands, but none more welcome to him than the friends of his youth. Nearly all of those were taken from him by degrees; but many of them stand successively recorded in his verse. The days which I passed there yearly with him and his were the happiest days of each year. They will retain a happy place in my memory during whatever short period my life may last; and the sea-murmurs of Freshwater will blend with the sighing of the woods around Aldworth, for me, as for many more worthy, a music, if mournful, yet full of consolation.

MS. Note, Aubrey de Vere.

When I was “little more than a boy” I made, accidentally, my first acquaintance with Tennyson as a poet, long before I knew him as a man. I came by chance upon a copy of “In Memoriam,” then just published anonymously. I was quite entirely ignorant and indifferent in those days about all poetry, and did not in the least know or guess who had written it, but, opening it haphazard at the Geological Stanzas, was so impressed and riveted by them, — for I was a student of Geology at the time, — that I could not put the book down until I had read it all through and from end to end. I was caught up and enthralled by its spirit, and my eyes seemed suddenly opened on a whole new world. It made an epoch in my life and an ineffaceable impression. I soon came to know my Tennyson almost by heart, and was taunted by my friends for my worship of the “divine Alfred,” as I reverently called him. In this frame of mind it was that I made the bold venture of asking his leave to dedicate to him my little book on King Arthur and his Knights, his kind acceptance of which homage I have already mentioned in my former article.

My first personal acquaintance with him was in the autumn of 1866, when I was staying at Freshwater. I felt that I must call upon him and offer him my respects and thanks before I left, but put it off through shyness until the day before my holiday was to end. Then I took my courage in both hands and went to Farringford. “Mr. Tennyson was out walking, but Mrs. Tennyson was at home and would be happy to see me.” It was a disappointment, but Mrs. Tennyson received me most kindly and graciously, and begged me to return later in the evening if I could, and see her husband who would like to meet me. When I did return I was shown upstairs to the top of the house and into an attic which was the Poet’s own study, and presently, with my heart in my mouth, I heard his great steps as he climbed up the little wooden stairs. His bodily presence seemed as kingly as I felt it ought to be, though a little grim and awful at first; but he made me very welcome, and then groped about for and lighted a pipe, and sat down and began to speak of King Arthur as being a subject of common interest and sympathy.

This soon thawed the chill of my spirits and I began to feel more at home, until I felt I could make the request I was longing to do — would he read to me one of his Poems, as I desired earnestly to hear from his own lips what I already knew and loved? Then came a great surprise and delight, for it was not reading as usually understood, but intoning on a note, almost chanting, which I heard, and which brought the instant conviction that this was the proper vehicle for poetry as distinguished from prose. I was so enchanted that I begged for more and more; and then I suppose may have begun a personal sympathy which grew and lasted always afterwards till his death. For when I made to go he took me all about the house, showing me the pictures and drawings with which his walls were lined, peering into them so closely with a lighted candle that I thought he would set them or himself on fire. This was, perhaps, another common ground, — I having been all my life interested in art and in a small way a collector of drawings and pictures.

Before I left he told me to come and claim acquaintance if ever we met before I came to Farringford again, for if not his short sight would prevent his knowing me. On this friendly request I acted in the spring of the following year, 1867, when my wife and I were going to pay a visit at Haslemere. At Haslemere station, to my surprise, I saw him standing on the platform, and went up and spoke to him, reminding him of his desire that I should do so. I then introduced my wife to him, and he explained how he came to be there — namely, because he was in search of a site where he might build a cottage to take refuge in from the tourists who made his life a burden to him in the Isle of Wight. He added, “You are an architect, why should you not make the plans of it for me?” I said, “With the greatest possible pleasure, upon one condition that I may act professionally without making any professional charge; for I cannot be paid twice over, and you, Mr. Tennyson, have over-paid me already long ago — in the pleasure and delight your works have given me — for any little work I could do for you.” He protested, but in the end accepted my terms.

The cottage, as he first proposed it, was to be a small square, four-roomed house, with a door in the middle, like one in which he was then staying near Haslemere. I went there to see him and to describe plans and the question of a site. After inspecting several with him, he took me secretly to one which a friend had found out as being possibly procurable, and on which Aldworth was finally built. It was a natural terrace, formed just below the summit of Black Down, and was known as Green Hill. There was a potato-patch where the house now stands, — a little flat clearance in the midst of sloping coppices that covered all the southern side of the hill; and it was a spot of ideal seclusion, just wide enough and no more for a moderately sized house, quite perfect for his objects, — almost too perfect in the way of inaccessibility, for it took years of negotiation and trouble to obtain a practicable road to it. The view from it was simply perfect, extending over the whole of woody Sussex to the South Downs and the sea. “It wants nothing,” he said as he gazed at it, “but a great river looping along through the midst of it.” “Gloriously crimson flowers set along the edge of the terrace would burn like lamps against the purple distance” — as presently was realized.

The plans for a four-roomed cottage gave way somewhat as I talked the matter over with Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson, the latter giving me certain rough ideas which she could not quite express by drawing, but which I understood enough to put into shape; and presently I went to Farringford with designs for a less unimportant dwelling. It grew and grew as it was talked over and considered, the details being all discussed with Mrs. Tennyson, while he contented himself by pretending to protest against any addition and improvement.

At last, one day, when I brought sketches for an arcaded porch to complete the design, he put his foot down and said he would have nothing to do with it — that he would have no more additions — that it would ruin him and could not be entertained for a moment. He walked to and fro, coming back from time to time to the table where the drawing lay and looking at it. He admitted that he liked it more and more the more he looked at it, but presently cried out with simulated fury, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” and ran out of the room. Then I knew that the porch was won. When it was built he got to be very fond of it, and used to call attention to the way in which the landscape was framed by the arches of it. He even had a picture of it made by a friend to show this effect.

He laid the foundation-stone of it on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1868, few being there besides his great friend, Sir John Simeon, myself, and my wife, whom he dragged up the steep hillside in the blazing sunshine. He interfered very little about the progress of the work, except as to various little accidental things which moved his fancy. For instance, a stone shield in the gable of one of the dormer windows had remained blank when all the rest were carved — simply because of a hesitation how best to fill it up. But when the time came at which it must be finished, if done at all, he stood spying up at it through his eyeglass for a long while, and then decided to leave it blank, — so that the last touch to the work might be decided hereafter by Fate, accident having kept it open so long.

He was reminded by it of the blank shield in his own Idylls, of which Merlin asks, “Who shall blazon it? — when and how?” and adds, “Perchance when all our wars are done the brand Excalibur will be cast away.” In a similar way he would not let the figure of a stone Falcon be removed which had been set up as a model for approval at one corner of the parapet, but was never intended to stay there. He looked at it long and curiously, and laughed and said it seemed to grow queerer, that it was a pity to take it down; and there it remained ever after in its original solitariness, to his great content and amusement, which had a touch of seriousness in it.

He made a great point of his favourite motto, Gwyr yn erbyn y byd (“Truth against the world”), being prominently emblazoned in tile mosaic at the threshold of the front door and in the pavement of the Hall. The text, “Gloria Deo in Excelsis,” in the carved band which surrounds the house was the selection of Mrs. Tennyson. The formation of the terrace lawn in front of the house, with its boundary balustrade, interested him extremely; and when the vases were filled with splendid blossoms, standing out against the blue landscape, the vision he had foreseen from the potato-patch was realized to his full satisfaction. The invariable and tormenting delays in finishing the house, however, annoyed him greatly; for he longed to get into it away from the tourists, and used to say he should never live to enjoy it long enough. When he did move in, he said he wanted to have each room for his own, and at first adopted for sleeping in, the central top attic on the south front, which opened on to the lead flat of the large bay window on the first floor. He called it his balcony-room, and loved to stand out on the flat and watch the changes in the great prospect spread out before him. He ultimately gave this up for a guest’s room, and took to the finer room below, which was always flooded with light, and was filled with bright moonshine when he died in it. On one occasion, when I was sleeping in the balcony-room, I was suddenly waked up by a thundering at the door and his great voice calling out, “Get up and look out of the window.” I jumped out of bed accordingly, and saw the whole wide aspect turned into a flat white billowy ocean, with no trace of land at all, but with waves beginning to move and roll in it. The sun was just rising, and I stood to watch the gradual creation of a world as it were. From moment to moment the vast ocean broke up and rose away into clouds, uncovering the landscape bit by bit — the hills first and the valleys last, until the whole great prospect came together again into its normal picture. It was delightful to see his enjoyment of everything in the new house, from the hot-water bathroom downwards, for at first the hot bath seemed to attract him out of measure. He would take it four or five times a day, and told me he thought it the height of luxury “to sit in a hot bath and read about little birds.”

The following notes of a visit paid to him at Aldworth show the usual manner of his daily life there.

He usually dined rather early, at 7 or 7.30 o’clock, and Mrs. Tennyson would generally carve (or in later times Hallam), according to the old-fashioned custom. He talked freely, with an abundance of anecdote and story, and full of humour, and “chaff” (no touch of pedantry or priggism could live in his presence); and always when at home made a move for dessert to another room — the morning room at Aldworth — where he would begin his bottle (pint) of port, and with the exception of a glass or so, would finish it, talking all the time with entire geniality and abandon, and full of reminiscences of men and things. Sometimes he would recur to his grievances at the hands of his publishers, and pour out his complaints about them, until finally landed, to his entire satisfaction, with Macmillan.

After dessert he would retire to his study and his after-dinner pipe, which he took quite by himself; and would then come into the drawing-room, whither the others had repaired some time, and join in general talk again and perhaps read, at some one’s request, some of his own poems, till the ladies left for bed. Then he would invite some favoured guest or guests to his study, and begin the confidential discussions and soliloquies which it was a priceless privilege — the most valued and treasured of privileges — to share and to listen to. At such times all his inmost thoughts and feelings, recollections and speculations of his life came out with the open simplicity of a child and the keen insight and far sight of a prophet; and one had glimpses into the mystery of things beyond one’s own power of seeing, and as if seen through a telescope.

I have before stated how he more than once summed up his personal religion in the words: “There’s a Something That watches over us, and our Individuality endures.” On one occasion he added, “I do not say endures for ever, but I say endures after this life at any rate.” When in answer to the question, What was his deepest desire of all? he said, “A clearer vision of God,” it exactly expressed the continued strivings of his spirit for more light upon every possible question, which so constantly appear in his poems, which led him to join in founding the Metaphysical Society, and induced him to write the introductory sonnet in the Nineteenth Century. Out of all such talks, at many times and places repeated, I came to know his actual personal position, in those years at any rate of the growth of old age, concerning the most vital problems of this world and this life. Many scores of such times have fallen to my happy lot, and my life has been all the richer for them.

THE FUNERAL OF DICKENS

I remember, when he went with me to Westminster Abbey to hear Dean Stanley preach Dickens’s funeral sermon, we sat within the rails of the Sacrarium so as to be near the pulpit, and when we came away he told me the story of the Oriental traveller who mistook the organ for the Church’s God. He was very fond of the story, and often repeated it. As he told it, the traveller was made to say: “We went into one of their temples to see their worship. The temple is only opened sometimes, and they keep their God shut up in a great gold box at one end of it. When we passed inside the doors we heard him grumbling and growling as if out of humour at being disturbed in his solitude; and as the worshippers came in they knelt down and seemed to supplicate him and try to propitiate him. He became quieter for a while, only now and then grumbling for a few moments, but then he got louder again and the whole body of the people stood up and cried to him together, and after a while persuaded him to be still. Presently he began once more and then, after praying all together several times, they deputed one of their number to stand up alone and address him earnestly on their behalf, deprecating his anger. He spoke so long without an interruption that it seemed the God had either fallen asleep or been finally persuaded into a better temper; but suddenly at last he broke out into a greater passion than ever, and with such tremendous noise and roarings that all the worshippers rose from their seats in fright and ran out of the temple.”

There was an immense congregation that day in the Abbey — and when the service was over — we stood up waiting a long time to pass out through the rails. But instead of dispersing by the outer door the people all turned eastward and flocked towards the altar, pressing closer and closer up to the Sacrarium. The chances of getting out became less and less, and I turned to Tennyson and said, “I don’t know what all this means, but we seem so hemmed in that it is useless to move as yet.” Then a man, standing close by me whispered, “I don’t think they will go, sir, so long as your friend stands there.” Of course I saw at once what was happening — it had got to be known that Tennyson was present, and the solid throng was bent on seeing him. Such a popularity had never occurred to me or to him, and justified his nervous unwillingness to be seen in crowded places. I was obliged to tell him what was going on, upon which he urgently insisted on being let out some quiet way and putting an end to the dilemma.

FRAGMENTARY NOTES OF TENNYSON’S TALK by Arthur Coleridge

But for the suggestion of the present Lord Tennyson, I should shrink from the presumption of posing as a friend of his illustrious father, who for three Easters made of me a companion, sometimes for two, more often three hours daily, for three weeks at a time together. I should be safe in saying that the most gifted men I have ever known, Tennyson, Browning, and Cory, were in the realms of thought, philosophy, and imagination foremost in an age which in two instances acknowledged their supremacy whilst they lived, and in the third has ungrudgingly admitted him as one taking high rank amongst the English poets of the second order. I link his name with that of the two great men, for I have abundant materials for forming my opinion of him in the shape of three volumes of correspondence, begun in my boyhood and continued for years during my friend’s lifetime.

Mr. Fitzherbert was a welcome friend of Dr. Johnson’s. “Ursa Major” warmed to him, though perfectly conscious that Fitz was anything but a star of the first magnitude. He says: “There was no sparkle, no brilliancy in Fitzherbert, but I never knew a man who was so generally acceptable. He made everybody quite easy, overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said.” “Such characters,” says Mr. Raleigh, “are the oil of society, yet a society made wholly of such characters would have no taste.”

Tennyson’s fidelity and patience with me were very much of a mystery; possibly I may have fitted his hand as a pet walking-stick; anyhow, I was “Man Friday to his Crusoe” as the play-actors say, and “constitutionals” with the Poet Laureate and his dogs, a wolf-hound or a deer-hound, Karénina or Lufra, were matters of daily occurrence in my Freshwater days. After 5 o’clock tea I left the Poet to “his sacred half-hour,” and his pipe of tobacco. By the way, he smoked straight-stemmed Dublin clay-pipes, and hated new pipes, which he would soak in coffee.

I believe that in the early days of our acquaintance the Poet, seeing me with what appeared to be a notebook under my arm, suspected me of Boswellizing, but I was duly warned and reassured him of my innocence. I simply recorded very briefly in my diary a few of his “dicta” which I wished to have for the benefit of my children, one of whom was a frequent and delighted listener to the Laureate’s reading of his own poems. Mary Coleridge, at that time a shy, timid girl, was more than once asked to dictate the particular poems she wanted him to recite. I can hear him saying, “Give me my seven-and-sixpenny” (meaning the single volume edition), and then we listened to the “high Orphic chant,” rather than the conventional reading of many of our favourite poems. I often asked for the “Ode on the Duke of Wellington,” and on one occasion, in the presence of Sir Charles Stanford — then organist of Trinity College, Cambridge — the Poet, lowering his voice at the words, “God accept him, Christ receive him,” added: “It’s a mighty anthem, that’s what it is.” Stanford’s music to “The Voyage of Mældune” was written at Freshwater, and four of us visitors sang a lovely quartet in that work for the first time in the Poet’s presence. It was rather nervous work, for the composer and ourselves were anxious to satisfy the Poet in a work intended as a novelty for the Leeds Festival. The verdict was rather enigmatical: “I like the ripple of your music.” It met with a good reception at Leeds, and Madame Albani expressed a confident hope in my hearing that the work would become popular. I wish the prophecy had been adequately fulfilled, but English audiences, though, like the Athenians of old, clamouring for a new thing, are very cautious in giving more than one or two trials to musical novelties. It is lamentable to see works which have cost long years, perhaps a lifetime, of skilled experience, shelved in musical libraries or relegated to foreign audiences for adjudication of their real value.

It was my daily habit during the Easter holidays for three years to call at Farringford at 10.30, and present myself in the Poet’s sanctum, where I found him at his desk in the very act of hatching a poem or amending an old one. He would greet me with “Here comes my daily bread.” Then I read the newspaper or a book until we started for our morning walk. The dialogue would begin abruptly, starting from some impressions left by our musical rehearsals on the previous day. “Why is Stanford unable to set to music the word ‘cosmopolite’?” (See Appendix B.) The reasons seemed to me quite intelligible, but not so to a poet as fastidious as Wordsworth when discussing the Installation Ode with Professor Walmisley. I expect Purcell had more than one bad half-hour with Dryden, for the laws and regulations of musical accent may often conflict with the cadences and scansion adopted by the poet. Sir Charles Stanford and Sir Hubert Parry (lucida sidera) are rare instances of musical composers with an instinctive appreciation of the fitness and adaptability of poetry offered for musical treatment.

Tennyson was loyal to the core on the subject of his old university, and amongst his constant visitors were some of my old contemporaries, Bradshaw, Lightfoot, and Montagu Butler. These, the fleurs fines of my day, were constant topics, and I eagerly listened to his recollections of the Cambridge men of his own generation. “Thompson” (afterwards Master of Trinity), he said, “was the last man I saw at Cambridge. I saw him standing at the door of the Bull Inn — his handsome face under a street lamp. We have been friends ever since.” He enjoyed the master’s witticisms, and especially “even the youngest among us is not infallible.”

The Professorship of Greek carried with it a Canonry of Ely, and Thompson’s times of residence were rather dreaded by the new holders of the office. His health, never of the best, was tried by the atmosphere, and finding the loneliness of his bachelor life insupportable, he begged an old College contemporary to pay him a visit. The friend came and was duly installed, but the sleeping accommodation was found wanting, and in answer to his petition for another bedroom with a good fire in it his host observed, “So sorry, my dear fellow, but I put five of my sermons into that bedroom, and if they have failed to dry it, nothing else will.”

T. “My tailor at Cambridge was a man of the name of Law. When he made his way into our rooms, and worried us about paying our bills, we used to say, ‘This is Law’s Serious Call.’ I capped this story with a similar Oxford tradition. The name of the Oxford tailor was Joy, and the undergraduates, soaked with port wine, used to say, ‘Heaviness may endure for a night, but Joy cometh in the morning.’”

T. “You cannot wonder at my horror of all the libels and slanders; people began to slander me in early days. For example, after my marriage we spent the honeymoon on Coniston Lake in a cottage lent to me by James Marshall. Shortly after this, a paragraph appeared in an American newspaper to the following effect: ‘We hope, now that Mr. Tennyson is married and has returned to his native lakes, that he will give up opium.’ The penny-a-liners evidently confounded your uncle, S. T. Coleridge, with myself — anyhow, if he wasn’t quite certain, he gave your relative the benefit of the doubt.”

“Again, I was once persuaded by an adventuress (who wrought upon me by her tale of hopeless poverty) to hear her read in my own drawing-room. She was in my house for exactly half an hour, and profited by her experience in telling her audiences that she had seen me thrashing my wife, and carried away drunk by two men-servants to my bedroom.”

One day we visited the grave of Lord Tennyson’s shepherd; he died at the age of ninety-one. On his death-bed Hallam asked him if he would remember in his will his two sons in Australia who had entirely ignored and neglected him. “No,” he said firmly; and he left his 17s. 6d. a year to the poorest man in the parish of Freshwater. On his tombstone are engraved the Laureate’s own words from “In Memoriam”:

God’s finger touched him and he slept.

I showed Lord Tennyson some manuscript verses by my friend Bernard Drake, who died at Madeira in 1853. He read them twice through, slowly and aloud. I had told him of Drake’s history, and then showed him the verses; their sadness impressed him greatly:

ON ILLNESS

I

Thou roaring, roaming Sea!

When first I came into this happy isle,

I loved to listen evermore to thee,

And meditate the while.

II

But now that I have grown

Homesick, and weary of my loneliness,

It makes me sad to hear thy plaintive moan

And fills me with distress.

III

It speaks of many a friend,

Whom I shall meet no more on Life’s dark road,

It warns that here I must await the end

And cast no look abroad.

IV

Thou ever roaring Sea!

I love thee, for that o’er thy waters come

The stately ships, breasting them gloriously,

That bring me news of home.

V

I cannot pray for grace —

My soul is heavy, and my sickness sore —

Wilt Thou, O God, for ever hide Thy face?

O! turn to me once more.

Madeira, November 30, 1853.

Drake’s career at Eton and Cambridge really interested him, for my old friend was an ardent worshipper of the Poet in days before Tennyson’s fame had become a national asset. I showed with some pride “Of old sat Freedom on the heights,” translated into Latin Alcaics, a version very popular with Etonians and King’s men. Scholarship has made gigantic strides since it appeared; “those who know” can read and see if we overvalued it.

OF OLD SAT FREEDOM

Idem — Latine redditum

Of old sat Freedom on the heights,

The thunders breaking at her feet:

Above her shook the starry lights:

She heard the torrents meet.

There in her place she did rejoice,

Self-gather’d in her prophet-mind,

And fragments of her mighty voice

Came rolling on the wind.

Then stept she down thro’ town and field

To mingle with the human race,

And part by part to men reveal’d

The fulness of her face —

Grave mother of majestic works,

From her isle-altar gazing down,

Who, God-like, grasps the triple forks,

And, King-like, wears the crown:

Her open eyes desire the truth.

The wisdom of a thousand years

Is in them. May perpetual youth

Keep dry their light from tears;

That her fair form may stand and shine,

Make bright our days and light our dreams,

Turning to scorn with lips divine

The falsehood of extremes!

Olim insedebat montibus arduis

Disiecta cernens sub pede fulmina

Divina Libertas; superque

Astra faces agitare vidit;

Et confluentes audiit undique

Amnes, opertis in penetralibus

Exultat, et ritu Sibyllae

Mente sua latet involuta,

Sed vocis altae fragmina praepetes

Venti ferebant. — Inde novalia

Per culta discendens, per urbes

Diva homines aditura venit,

Ut vultus aegros ante oculos virûm

Sensim pateret — mox parit integram

Virtutem et altari marino

Suppositum speculatur orbem —

Quae seu deorum more acies gerit

Dextra trifurcas, seu caput induit

Regina regali corona.

Expetit, insequiturque verum.

Quae mille victrix experientiam

Collegit annos: o Dea, sic tibi

Aeterna si duret iuventus

Neu lacrymis oculi madescant;

Sic enitebis, sic dabis aureos

Dies alumnis, aurea somnia;

Sic ore divino refelles

Quae properat malesuadus error.

When distinguished visitors came to the Island, who were on terms of friendship with the Poet, I gave him warning that I should not appear on the scene and spoil their pleasure; but to this condition he would not assent, and I can recall frequent occasions when I must have been a fly in the ointment, and the Jowetts, Bradleys, and distinguished Americans would have wished me at Jericho. Once I felt entirely at my ease, for I determined to start the subject of Dr. Johnson, worshipped by me from my boyhood. I knew my Birkbeck Hill pretty well by heart, having quite recently read the six volumes of his edition of Boswell, notes and all, to a blind friend who rejoiced in hearing them. Further than that, I had made a pilgrimage to Lichfield, and by the kindness of a Mr. Lomax, who owned the relics, had examined and handled a varied assortment of goods and chattels, once undoubtedly the property of the great Samuel. The pedigree was thus accounted for by my courteous showman. After Dr. Johnson’s death, Barber, his black servant, migrated from London to Lichfield, “bringing his sheaves with him”; amongst the spolia opima were a huge teapot and a manuscript copy of Devotions. Fortified with the recollections of this pilgrimage, and some out-of-the-way facts told to me by the residentiary Canon, my dear old friend Bishop Abraham, I started on a two hours’ walk with the Poet and Professor Jowett. It was easy to lead up to the theme of conversation — there was no difficulty whatever. I thought of Johnson’s own plan of extinguishing subjects which he intended at all costs to avoid. When Mrs. Neale asked his opinion of the conversational powers of Charles James Fox, “he talked to me one day at the Club,” said he, “concerning Catiline’s conspiracy, so I withdrew my attention and thought about Tom Thumb.” Every moment of that afternoon walk, Dr. Johnson was our theme, and we capped one another with long quotations from Boswell. Jowett chirped, the Poet gave wonderful emphasis and point to the oracles, often pausing suddenly in his walk, and cross-examining me on my remembered version of the actual words. I noted the upshot of our talk. Lord Tennyson agreed with the Master of Balliol “that Boswell was a man of real genius, and resembled Goldsmith in many points of character.”

Miss L —— , Doctor Johnson’s godchild, used to tell a disagreeable story about him. Tennyson said about this:

T. “One should not lay stress on these oddities and angularities of great men. They should never be hawked about.”

T. “‘Break, break’ was made one early summer morning, in a Lincolnshire lane. ‘Crossing the Bar’ cost me five minutes one day last November.”

T. “At ten years of age I wrote an epic poem of great length — it was in the ‘Marmion’ style. I used to rush about the fields, with a stick for a sword, and fancied myself a conqueror advancing upon an enemy’s country.”

T. “My prize poem ‘Timbuctoo’ was an altered version of a work I had written at home and called ‘The Battle of Armageddon.’ I fell out with my father, for I had no wish to compete for the prize and he insisted on my writing. To my amazement, the prize was awarded to me. I couldn’t face the public recitation in the Senate House, feeling very much as Cowper felt; Merivale declaimed my poem for me in the Senate House.”

T. “Arthur Hallam said to me in 1832: ‘To-day I have seen the last English King going in State to the last English Parliament.’”

I believe that one of Tennyson’s first idylls was addressed to Miss K. Bradshaw, sister of my beloved friend Henry Bradshaw (fellow and librarian of King’s College, Cambridge), whose relationship to the Judge who condemned Charles I. was rather a tender point with H. B., both at Eton and King’s.

Because she bore the iron name

Of him who doomed his king to die,

I deemed her one of stately frame

And looks to awe her stander by.

But find a maiden, tender, shy,

With fair blue eyes and winning sweet,

And longed to kiss her hand, and lie

A thousand summers at her feet.

I pressed the Poet more than once to put on record his own interpretation of passages in “In Memoriam” and others which needed the authority of his own explanation. “Surely you took ‘four square to all the winds that blow’ from Dante’s

Ben tetragono ai colpi della Ventura?”

“No, it was not in my mind.” Again, I quoted his expression, “hollow shapes enclosing hearts of flame,” thinking it had arisen from Beckford’s Vathek. The answer was “No, merely spectral visions.”

T. “Some of my poems depend on single sayings, single lines which have served me for a theme. My poem of ‘The Brigand’ is founded on a story told in the Autobiography of that great and gallant gentleman, Walter Scott.”

T. “Edward FitzGerald and I used to weary of the hopelessly prosaic lines in some books of ‘The Excursion,’ and we had a contest, the prize for which was to be for the weakest line by mutual consent that we could either of us invent. FitzGerald declared the line was his — it really was mine—’A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.’” I wish I could have told him of Jem Stephen’s commentary on “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” “That is no reason why we should lie about Heaven in our old age.” Among other passages he quotes with admiration Wordsworth’s lines on the “Simplon Pass.”

T. “I am sorry that I am turned into a school-book at Harrow; the boys will say of me, ‘That horrible Tennyson.’ The cheapness of English classics makes the plan acceptable to schoolmasters and parents.”

He quoted with approval Byron’s line —

Then farewell, Horace, whom I hated so.

“He was quite right. I, too, was so overdosed with Horace as a boy, that I don’t do him justice now I am old. I suppose Horace was the most popular poet that ever lived?”

Rough dissonant words in great poets were a trial to him; he declared that those horrid words, Eingeweide and Beschützer, are the ruin of Goethe’s otherwise perfect lyrics.

T. “At Weimar the Grand Duchess sent an apology for not receiving me in person. After visiting Goethe’s study, bedroom and sitting-room, I was shocked by the meanness of the streets, and the horrid smells in the town itself. I felt as tetchy and vexed as Macbeth with his ‘out, out, brief candle,’ a passage so utterly misunderstood by Macready, who dropped his voice and gave the words a pathos that I am quite sure was never intended.”

T. “The Tempest has been dreadfully damaged by scenes intercalated by some common stage-adapter. At one time of my life I thought the Sonnets greater than the Plays. Some of the noblest things are in Troilus and Cressida.”

Perseverance, dear my Lord, keeps honour bright, etc.

T. “Have you observed a solecism in Milton’s Penseroso?

But let my due feet never fail

To walk the studious cloisters pale,

And love the high embowed roof

With antique pillars massy proof, etc.”

T. “I do not remember getting from your cousin Hartley Coleridge the Sonnet you speak of, still less can I account for its being in the Library in the South Kensington Museum.”

This Sonnet is headed

Sonnet to Alfred Tennyson

After meeting him for the first time

Long have I known thee as thou art in song,

And long enjoyed the perfume that exhales

From thy pure soul, and odour sweet entails,

And permanence on thoughts that float along

The stream of life to join the passive throng

Of shades and echoes that are memory’s being,

Hearing we hear not, and we see not seeing

If Passion, Fancy, Faith, move not among

The never frequent moments of reflection.

Long have I view’d thee in the chrystal sphere

Of verse, that like the Beryl makes appear

Visions of hope, begot of recollection.

Knowing thee now, a real earth-treading man

Not less I love thee, and no more I can.

Hartley Coleridge.

T. “I liked Hartley Coleridge, ‘Massa’ Hartley’ as the rustics called him. He was a lovable little fellow. Once he said to me, ‘Had I been Colonel Burns (the Poet’s eldest son) I would have kicked Wordsworth for delivering that preachment.’ On one occasion Hartley, who was very eccentric, was asked to dine with the family of a stiff Presbyterian clergyman residing in the Lake district. The guests, Trappist fashion, sat a long time in the drawing-room waiting for the announcement of dinner. Not a word was uttered, and Hartley was bored to extinction. At last he suddenly jumped up from the sofa, kissed the clergyman’s wife, and rushed out of the house. He was wonderfully eloquent, and, I fancy, resembled his father in that respect.”

T. “I doubt that fine poem ‘Kubla Khan’ having been written in sleep; I have often imagined new poems in my sleep, but I couldn’t remember them in the morning. Your uncle’s words: ‘Tennyson has no sense of rhythm and scansion,’ have been constantly quoted against me. The truth is that in my youth I used no hyphens in writing composite words, and a reader might fancy that from this omission I had no knowledge of the length and measure of words and expressions.”

T. “Burns was a great genius, but dreadfully coarse sometimes. When he attempts to write in pure English, he breaks down utterly.” He quoted many things of Burns’s: “O my Luv’s like a red, red rose,” and “Gae fetch to me a pint o’ wine,” etc., with the greatest admiration, and “Mary Morison” and “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon,” etc. “They have utterly ruined the lilt of the last,” he said, “when they added words for the musical setting.”

He was fond of talking about great pictures and fine sculpture. Birket Foster joined us one day, and Tennyson asked him to define the word “picturesque,” and to say why tumble-down cottages in the Isle of Wight were such favourite subjects with painters. B. F. answered that it was the breaking of the straight line. We talked of Frederick Walker, and B. F. told us many stories of his wit and conscientiousness. “I mean to paint a picture,” said he, “the key-note of which is to be onion-seed.”

Primrose Day. — T. “All the floral displays for which we Isle of Wighters suffer are based on a mistaken version of the Queen’s meaning, when she sent a wreath of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield’s grave, inscribed with ‘His favourite flower.’ She meant Prince Albert’s, not Lord Beaconsfield’s partiality for the flower in question.”

T. “I could imitate the hoot of an owl, and once practised successfully enough to attract one which flew in through my window. The bird soon made friends with me, would sit on my shoulder and kiss my face. My pet monkey became jealous, and one day pushed the owl off a board that I had had raised some feet from the ground. The owl was not hurt, but he died afterwards a Narcissus death from vanity. He fell into a tub of water contemplating his own beauty, and was drowned.”

The Poet admired Carlyle’s French Revolution, but he seemed surprised at my having read Carlyle’s Frederick the Great; the length of it had been too much for him. I was vexed by the author’s omission of an account of Sebastian Bach’s famous interview with the king at Potsdam, and pressed on my old friend Sir George Grove to inquire the reasons of so strange an omission. He ascertained that Carlyle not only knew the fact, but the actual day and date of the occurrence. The omission, therefore, was really of malice aforethought. Quantz, the flute-player, has his appropriate niche in the monumental work, but the great Sebastian is out of it altogether; the tootler takes the cake and be hanged to him.

Great sailors and soldiers were very favourite subjects. The Poet had personally known well one naval officer who had served with Nelson.

T. “Among many odd letters I have received, an American curate wrote to me that he made a sudden resolution one Sunday that he would read ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ instead of his ordinary sermon. An old Dorsetshire soldier who had fought at Balaclava, happened to be in the congregation, though the preacher was unaware of the fact. The verses had the happy result of the soldier giving up a bad, reckless life, and completely reforming. My poem was never meant to convey any spiritual lesson, but the very curious fact of the chance soldier and the parson’s sudden resolution has often set me thinking.”

T. “Twice, I am glad to say, I have been taken into battle; once by Sir Fenwick Williams of Kars; another officer wrote after a fight: ‘I escaped with my life and my Tennyson.’ I admire General Hamley, a good writer and accomplished soldier.”

T. “When the Prince Regent explored the field of Waterloo with the Duke himself as guide, the Duke’s horse plunged and threw his rider. The Prince remarked, ‘I can now say what nobody else in the world can, that I saw the Duke of Wellington overthrown on the Field of Waterloo.’ His Grace was not over pleased with the observation.”

T. “Keats would have become one of the very greatest of all poets, had he lived. At the time of his death there was apparently no sign of exhaustion or having written himself out; his keen poetical instinct was in full process of development at the time. Each new effort was a steady advance on that which had gone before. With all Shelley’s splendid imagery and colour, I find a sort of tenuity in his poetry.”

T. “‘Locksley Hall’ is thought by many to be an autobiographical sketch; it’s nothing of the sort — not a word of my history in it. Read FitzGerald’s Euphranor and let me know what you think of it.”

One day we talked of Winchester and the rather meagre list of great men educated there. I rejoiced in the college boasting of an alumnus in Lord Seaton, the famous leader of the 52nd Regiment at Waterloo. “I remember,” T. said, “addressing a coachman by whose side I was sitting as we drove in a coach through that place, and I asked him, ‘What sort of a place is Winchester?’ Answer: ‘Debauched, sir, debauched, like all other Cathedral cities.’”

T. “I am inclined to agree with Swinburne’s view of Mary Queen of Scots; she was brought up in a Court that studied the works of Brantôme.”

We often talked of Farrar’s book and Maurice’s opinions on Eternal Punishment. The Poet was fond of quoting Dante’s line:

Fecemi somma Sapienza ed il sommo Amore,

insisting on Dante’s intense belief in a God of Love. He more than once repeated the famous lines of Moschus, adding, “I think those the finest lines in all Greek antiquity.”

T. “My friend, Sir Henry Taylor, on being called a Christian Jupiter, remarked, ‘I wish I was much more of a jovial Christian.’”

T. “I once asked Rogers, ‘Did you ever write a sonnet?’ He answered, ‘No, I never dance in fetters.’”

T. “I am told that the best prose version of the Odyssey is by Professor Palmer of Cambridge University, America. Since Matthew Arnold’s lectures on Homer, a new translation has appeared annually in that country. It would take me ten years to translate the Iliad into Bible English.” He liked Worsley’s translation of the Odyssey.

“The purest English is talked in South Lincolnshire. The dialect begins at Spilsby in Mid-Lincolnshire, and that is the dialect of my Lincolnshire poems.”

He was fond of telling Lincolnshire stories. T. “An old farmer, at the time when railways were beginning, receiving a visit from the parson, moved uneasily in his bed, crying out, ‘What with faäth, and what with real bad harvests, and what with them graät, horrid steäm-kettles, and what with the soön goin’ raound the earth, and the earth goin’ raound the soön, as soom saäy she do, I am cleän maäzed an’ the sooner I gits out of this ‘ere world, the better;’ and he turned his face to the wall and died.”

I close my chapter of fragments and echoes still abiding with me; men privileged as I was can hear the voice and hate a gramophone. My aim has been to show the everyday life, the plain unvarnished words which were the daily change with the first man of his age and a rank-and-file acquaintance just able, and no more, to appreciate such kindness.

Haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

MUSIC, TENNYSON, AND JOACHIM by Sir Charles Stanford

My acquaintance, or rather my friendship, with Alfred Tennyson (for he had an all-compelling power of making real friends of, and being a true friend to, those far junior to himself) dated only from 1879, when he was in years seventy, but in mental vigour the contemporary of the youngest man he happened to be with. Previously, however, in 1875, I had had experience of his thoughtful kindness. He had chosen me, an unknown and untried composer, to write the incidental music to his tragedy of “Queen Mary” for its production at the Lyceum Theatre, then under the management of Mrs. Bateman. Many difficulties were put in the way of the performance of the music, into the causes of which I had neither the wish nor the means to penetrate. Finally, however, the management gave as an explanation that the music could not be performed, as the number of orchestral players required for its proper presentment would necessitate the sacrifice of two rows of stalls. To my young and disappointed soul came the news of a generous action which would have been a source of pride to many a composer of assured position and fame. The Poet had offered, unknown to me, to bear the expense of the sacrificed seats for many nights, in order to allow my small share of the work to be heard. The offer was refused, but the generous action remains — one amongst the thousands of such quiet and stealthy kindnesses which came as second nature to him, and were probably as speedily forgotten by himself as they were lastingly remembered by their recipients.

He little knew that, when I was in my early ‘teens and had the most absurdly exaggerated notions of my song-writing powers, I had had the presumption to ask my cousin, Mr. Stephen Spring Rice, if he would induce his old friend to send me a MS. poem to set. Happily, I only got a kindly but necessary rap over the knuckles for my impertinence; the request was consigned to the waste-paper basket and mercifully never reached Farringford. I tremble now to recall the incident, although I verily believe that if Mr. Spring Rice had been cruel enough to send my letter on, the smile which it must have provoked would in no wise have been a contemptuous one. I can imagine his saying then, what I have often heard him say in later days, “Maxima debetur pueris reverentia.” I had seen so much of Aubrey de Vere all through my boyhood that I almost felt as if I knew Tennyson too, so vivid were his accounts of him, and his descriptions of his ways and surroundings.

Joachim also, who all through the British part of his international career was in close touch with the Tennyson circle, used often to speak of him with the deep reverence and whole-hearted enthusiasm which he reserved for a very few. On the staircase at Farringford hangs Mrs. Cameron’s early (and still unsurpassed) photograph of the great violinist. My host pointed at it one day as he passed upstairs: “That’s Joachim. He’s a fine fellow. Why did he cover up that fine jowl with a beard?” — quite forgetful of the possible retort that he had committed the same wickedness himself. On the comparatively rare occasions when he came up to London, and was surrounded by all the stars in the literary and political firmament, Joachim and his Stradivarius were as brilliant a centre of attraction as any of his guests. Joachim’s setting of Merlin’s song in “The Coming of Arthur” was an especial favourite of his, as both in atmosphere and in declamation it exactly fulfilled the intention of his verse. Joachim once told me that he always had great hankerings after setting “The Revenge,” but that he repressed them because he felt that it could only be tackled in the true English spirit by a Britisher.

The clue to Tennyson’s great critical power in declamation was obvious to any one who heard him recite his own work. His manner of reading poetry has often been described. It was a chant rather than a declamation. A voice of deep and penetrating power, varied only by alteration of note and by intensity of quality. The notes were few, and he rarely read on more than two, except at the cadence of a passage, when the voice would slightly fall. He often accompanied his reading by gentle rippling gestures with his fingers. As a rule he adhered more to the quantity of a line than the ordinary reciter, for he had the rare gift of making the accent felt, without perceptibly altering the prosody. Without being a musician, he had a great appreciation of the fitness of music to its subjects, and was an unfailing judge of musical declamation. As he expressed it himself, he disliked music which went up when it ought to go down, and went down when it ought to go up. I never knew him wrong in his suggestions on this point. The most vivid instance I can recall was about a line in “The Revenge”:

Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew.

When I played him my setting, the word “devil” was set to a higher note in the question than it was in the answer, and the penultimate word “they” was unaccented. He at once corrected me, saying that the second word “devil” must be higher and stronger than the first, and the “they” must be marked. He was perfectly right, and I altered it accordingly. It was apparently a small point, but it was this insisting on perfection of detail which made him the most valuable teacher of accurate declamation that it was possible for a composer to learn from. Of all his poems which I heard him read, those he made most impressive were “The Revenge” and the “Ode on the Duke of Wellington.” It may be interesting to record a point in the latter which, he said, was often misread. The line

Let the bell be toll’d,

he read with strong emphasis upon the first as well as the third and fifth words:

— ◡ — ◡ —

not

◡ ◡ — ◡ —

He said it wanted three strokes of the bell, not two. “Maud” he also read with a most extraordinary warmth and charm, particularly the climax of “Come into the garden,” and still more the stanza about the shell (Part II.), which he gave in a peculiarly thin and ghostly tone of voice, a quality he also used with great mastery in the Choric Song of the “Lotus Eaters.” Nor was he less impressive when reciting Greek or German. Greek he vastly preferred as pronounced in the English fashion. He said it lost all its sonority and grandeur if modernized; and, indeed, to hear his illustration was in itself sufficient to convince. German he pronounced with a strong English accent, and yet I feel sure that Goethe himself would have acknowledged his reading of “Kennst du das Land” to be a masterpiece. He was a great admirer of Goethe, and especially of this poem. He only disliked one line —

O mein Beschützer, ziehn,

of which he said, “How could Goethe break one’s teeth with those z’s, while the rest is so musical?” Curiously enough, it is now known that Goethe erased “Beschützer” and substituted “Geliebter.” He once read to me from his works for nearly half an hour.

He was extremely particular about clear diction in singing, the lack of which in the majority of singers of his day was far more marked than it is nowadays. He intuitively grasped the true basis of that most difficult of tasks, the composing of a good song which is at once practical and grateful to sing. He knew that the poem should be the key to the work, and should be so clearly enunciated that every word can reach the listener; and that the composer must never over-balance the voice with the illustrative detail of the accompaniment. When I was setting “The Voyage of the Mældune” I happened to be at Freshwater; and after finishing the solo quartet, “The Under-sea Isle,” four amateurs sang it through for him. His only (and I fear very just) comment on the performance was, “I did not hear a word you said from beginning to end.” But he thought afterwards that we might feel somewhat crushed, and as I was going away some little time later, and was passing his door, he put his head out and said with a humorous smile, “I’m afraid I was rather rude just now, but I liked the way your music rippled away when they fall into the water.” This was a most curious instance of his faculty for recognizing a subtle piece of musical characterization as rapidly as, and often more rapidly than, a listener who was fully equipped with musical technique.

His ear was capable of such fine distinctions of vowel quality, that it has always been a mystery to me why this gift, so highly developed in him, did not bring a mastery of music in its train. By one of the odd dispensations of nature, Robert Browning, who had none of this fineness of ear, knew enough of music to be able even to read it from a score with his eyes. Such words as “true” and “too,” which in most people’s mouths have an identical vowel sound, were differentiated by him, the “oo” full and round, the “ue” inclining imperceptibly to “u.” His “a” also had far more varied colours than is usual even with singers. One modification in especial, the quality of which can best be described as approaching that of “Eh, mon,” in broad Scotch, gave a breadth and a dignity to such words as “Nation,” “Lamentation,” “Pāgeant” (he never used the horrible pronunciation “Padgent”), which added vastly to the musical values of his verse. It is this perfection of vowel balance which makes his poetry so difficult to set to music satisfactorily. So musical is it in itself that very little is left for actual music to supply. It is often the very incompleteness of some poetry which makes it suggestive to a composer, the qualities lacking in the one calling out for the assistance of the other to supply them, a condition of combination which Wagner deliberately carried to a fine art in his double capacity of poet and composer. With Tennyson there is no gap to fill, and all that music can do is to illustrate the surrounding atmosphere, and to leave the poetry to tell its own story with its declamation and inflections accurately preserved.

The best reproduction of the peculiar quality of Tennyson’s reading which I have heard was Irving’s rendering of the lines about the bird in the last act of “Becket”:

We came upon

A wild-fowl sitting on her nest, so still,

I reach’d my hand and touch’d; she did not stir;

The snow had frozen round her, and she sat

Stone-dead upon a heap of ice-cold eggs.

The mastery of sound-painting in this line, the chilly “o’s” and “e’s” which the Poet knew so well how to place, Irving declaimed with a quiet reverence which made the sentence so pathetic that it will always live in the memory of those who heard it. It is interesting to record that all the actors I have met who witnessed the play invariably hit on those lines as the high-water mark of Irving’s powers.

The rehearsals of “Becket,” many of which I was privileged to witness, soon made it clear that Irving’s Becket was going to be, as it eventually proved to be, the finest both in conception and in accomplishment of all his creations. The part fitted him like a glove. So completely did he live in it, that a friend of his (who related his experience to me), who went round to see him after a performance, was dismissed by him on leaving with a fervent benediction delivered with up-raised hand, so sincerely and impressively delivered that he positively seemed to be an actual Prince of the Church.

With Irving’s arrangement of the play I never wholly agreed. He made of it as a whole a workable piece, but in doing so he sacrificed one scene which, beyond all question, is one of the most vivid and most characteristic in the play, the scene of the beggars’ feast. He lost sight of the fact that its omission spoilt the balance of the middle section. There was no foil to the brilliancy of the Council at Northampton. Tennyson (like Shakespeare) knew better the value of contrast, and put in at this point that touch of divine humour which only heightens pathos. The drama needed it. He balanced the traitorous splendour of the nobles with the homely loyalty of the halt, maimed, and blind. Irving also omitted the poem which gave the true lyrical touch to the first Bower scene; a little dialogue which, if it had been sung as was intended after the curtain rose on an empty stage, would have given the same atmosphere to the act, which the Rainbow song at its close drives home. These were, however, almost the only blots upon an otherwise admirably reverent adaptation. Irving told me that he always came down to listen behind the curtain to the last entr’acte (the Martyrdom), in order to get into the right mood for the final scene. Coming from an actor, who knew nothing of musical technique beyond an extraordinarily acute sense of what was fitting or not fitting for stage purposes, this was a great gratification and a still greater encouragement to one of the many composers whom he so loyally befriended. The production of “Becket” was a memorable red-letter day for the modern English stage; the more so as the tragedy came and conquered a public which was little prepared for the finest specimen of its type which had been seen since the days of Shakespeare. It was fitting that the reign of the greatest Queen since Elizabeth should have such a play inscribed in its annals, an appropriate and worthy counterpart to those of her great predecessor’s days.

THE ATTITUDE OF TENNYSON TOWARDS SCIENCE by Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S.

Henry Sidgwick wrote in 1860 concerning Tennyson that he “regarded him as pre-eminently the Poet of Science”; and to explain his meaning he contrasts the attitude of Wordsworth to Nature with that of Tennyson:

The Nature for which Wordsworth stirred our feelings was Nature as known by simple observation and interpreted by religious and sympathetic intuition.

— an attitude which left Science unregarded. But, for Tennyson,

the physical world is always the world as known to us through physical science; the scientific view of it dominates his thought about it, and his general acceptance of this view is real and sincere, even when he utters the intensest feeling of its inadequacy to satisfy our deepest needs.

It is probable that what was then written is now a commonplace of letters, and requires no emphasizing, but as a professed Student of Science, whose life has extended over the greater part of the time which has elapsed since “In Memoriam” was published, I welcome the opportunity of adding my testimony in continued support of the estimate made by Professor Sidgwick half a century ago.

It is generally admitted, and has been recently emphasized, that wherever reference is made to facts of nature in the poems or the fringe of Science touched on, — as it so often is, — the reference is satisfying and the touch precise. Observers of Nature have often called attention to the beautiful accuracy with which natural phenomena are described, with every mark of first-hand personal experience, as distinct from merely remembered conventional modes of expression; and the same sort of feeling is aroused in the mind of a Student of Science as he comes across one after another of the subjects which have kindled discussion during the Victorian epoch, — he is inevitably struck with the clear comprehension of the fundamental aspects of the themes treated which the poems display, he sees that the Poet is never led into misrepresentation or sacrifice of precision in the quest for beauty of form. The two are wedded together “like noble music unto perfect words.”

To quote examples might only be tedious, and would assuredly be misleading. It is not that the bare facts of Science are recorded, — such record could not constitute poetry — certainly not high poetry, — it is not merely his acquaintance with contemporary scientific discovery, natural to a man who numbered leading men of Science among his friends; — it is not any of this that arouses our feeling of admiring fellowship, but it is that with all his lordship of language and power of expression so immensely superior to our own, he yet moves in the atmosphere of Science not as an alien, but as an understanding and sympathetic friend.

Look back upon the epoch in which he lived — what a materialistic welter it seems! The mind of man was going through a period of storm; antiquated beliefs were being jettisoned and everything spiritual seemed to be going by the board; the point of view of man was rapidly changing and the whole of existence appeared capable of reducing itself to refined and intricate mechanism.

Poets generally must have felt it as a terrible time. What refuge existed for a poet save to isolate himself from the turmoil, shut himself into his cabin, and think of other times and other surroundings, away from the uproar and the gale. Those who did not thus shelter themselves were liable to bewail the time because the days were evil; as Arnold did, and Clough. But thus did not Tennyson. Out through the tempest he strode, open-eyed and bare-headed, with figure erect, glorying in the conflict of the elements, and summoning the men of his generation to reverence and worship.

Doubt, yes doubt he justified — doubt, so it were straightforward and honest. Forms and accessories — these he was willing to let go — though always with respect and care for the weaker brothers and sisters to whom they stood for things of value; but Faith beyond those forms he clung to, faith fearless and triumphant, uprising out of temporary moods of despondency into ever securer conviction of righteous guidance throughout creation and far-seeing divine Purpose at the heart of things.

Other men retained their faith too, but many only attained security by resolutely closing their eyes and bolting the doors of their water-tight compartments. But the glory of Tennyson’s faith was that it never led him to be unfaithful to the kinds of truth that were being revealed to his age. That, too, was an age of revelation, and he knew it; the science of his epoch was true knowledge, as far as it went; it was over-emphatic and explosive, and to weaker or less inspired minds was full of danger, but it was genuine cargo, nevertheless, which must be taken on board; there was a real overload of superstition which had to be discarded; and it was his mission, and that of a few other noble souls, to help us to accomplish with calmness and something like wisdom the task of that revolutionary age.

In the conflict between Science and Faith our business was to accept the one without rejecting the other: and that he achieved. Never did his acceptance of the animal ancestry of man, for instance, upset his belief in the essential divinity of the human soul, its immortality, its supremacy, its eternal destiny. Never did his recognition of the materialistic aspect of nature cloud his perception of its spiritual aspect as supplementing and completing and dominating the mechanism. His was a voice from other centuries, as it were, sounding through the nineteenth; and by his strong majestic attitude he saved the faith of thousands who else would have been overwhelmed; and his writings convey to our own age a magnificent expression of that which we too have still not fully accepted, but which we are on the way to believe.

If asked to quote in support of this statement I will not quote more than the titles of some of the chief poems to which I appeal. Not always the greatest poems perhaps do I here refer to, but those which most clearly uphold the contention of the Poet’s special service to humanity during the period of revolution in thought through which mankind has been passing.

Let me instance, therefore, first and most obviously, “In Memoriam”; and thereafter poems such as “De Profundis,” “The Two Voices,” “The Ancient Sage,” “Ulysses,” “Vastness,” “By an Evolutionist,” “Demeter and Persephone,” “Akbar’s Dream,” “God and the Universe,” “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” “The Higher Pantheism,” “The Voice and the Peak,” “Wages,” and “Morte d’Arthur.”

If I do not add to this list the great poem “To Virgil,” who in his day likewise assimilated knowledge of diverse kinds and in the light of spiritual vision glorified all he touched, it is only because the atmosphere of the Ancient poet is so like that of the Modern one that it is not by any single poem that their sympathy and kinship has to be displayed, but rather by the similarity of their whole attitude to the Universe.

By the term “Poet of Science” I understand one who assimilates the known truths of Science and Philosophy, through the pores, so to speak, without effort and with intuitive accuracy, one who bears them lightly and raises them above the region of bare fact into the realm of poetry. Such a poet is one who transfuses fact with beauty, he is ready to accept the discoveries of his age, no matter how prosaic and lamentable they seem, and is able to perceive and display the essential beauty and divinity which runs through them all and threads them all together. That is the service which a great poet can perform for Science in his day and generation. The qualities beyond this — exhibited for the most part perhaps in other poems — which enable him to live for all time, are qualities above any that I have the right or the power to estimate.

To be overwhelmed and mastered by the material and the mechanical, even to the extent of being blind to the existence of every other aspect, is common and human enough. But to recognize to the full the reign of law in Nature, the sequence of cause and effect, the strength of the chain-armour of necessity which men of science weave, and yet to discern in it the living garment of God — that is poetic and divine.

TENNYSON AS A STUDENT AND POET OF NATURE by Sir Norman Lockyer, F.R.S.

When Tennyson passed from life, not only did England lose one of her noblest sons, but the world a poet who, beyond all others who have ever lived, combined the gift of expression with an unceasing interest in the causes of things and in the working out of Nature’s laws.

When from this point of view we compare him with his forerunners, Dante is the only one it is needful to name; but although Dante’s knowledge was well abreast of his time, he lacked the fullness of Tennyson, for the reason that in his day science was restricted within narrow limits. In Dante’s time, indeed — he was born some 300 years before Galileo and Tycho Brahe — science apart from cosmogony had chiefly to do with the various constellations and measurements of the passing of time and the daily and yearly motions of the sun, for the observation of which long before his epoch our ancient monuments were erected; the physical and biological sciences were still unborn. Dante’s great work is full of references to the science of his day; his science and song went hand in hand as Tennyson’s did in later, fuller times. This in strong contrast with such writers as Goethe who, although both poet and student of science, rarely commingled the two strands of thought.

It is right and fitting that the highest poetry should be associated with the highest knowledge. Tennyson’s great achievement has been to show us that in the study of science we have one of the bases of the fullest poetry, a poetry which appeals at the same time to the deepest emotions and the highest and broadest intellects of mankind. Tennyson, in short, has shown that science and poetry, so far from being antagonistic, must for ever advance side by side.

So far as my memory serves me I was introduced to the late Lord Tennyson by Woolner about the year 1864. I was then living in Fairfax Road, West Hampstead, and I had erected my 6-inch Cooke Equatorial in the garden. I soon found that he was an enthusiastic astronomer, and that few points in the descriptive part of the subject had escaped him. He was therefore often in the observatory. Some of his remarks still linger fresh in my memory. One night when the moon’s terminator swept across the broken ground round Tycho he said, “What a splendid Hell that would make.” Again, after showing him the clusters in Hercules and Perseus he remarked musingly, “I cannot think much of the county families after that.” In 1866 my wife was translating Guillemin’s Le Ciel and I was editing and considerably expanding it; he read many of the proof sheets and indeed suggested the title of the English edition, The Heavens.

In the ‘seventies, less so in the ‘eighties, he rarely came to London without discussing some points with me, and in these discussions he showed himself to be full of knowledge of the discoveries then being made.

Once I met him accidentally in Paris; he was most anxious to see Leverrier and the Observatory. Leverrier had the reputation of being difficile; I never found him so, but I certainly never saw him so happy as when we three were together, and he told me afterwards how delighted he had been that Tennyson should have wished to pay him a visit. I visited Tennyson at Aldworth in 1890 when he was in his 82nd year. I was then writing the Meteoritic Hypothesis, and he had asked for proof sheets. When I arrived there I was touched to find that he had had them bound together for convenience in reading, and from the conversation we had I formed the impression that he had read every line. It was a subject after his own heart, as will be shown farther on. One of the nights during my stay was very fine, and he said to me, “Now, Lockyer, let us look at the double stars again,” and we did. There was a 2-inch telescope at Aldworth. His interest in Astronomy was persistent until his death.

The last time I met him (July 1892), he would talk of nothing but the possible ages of the sun and earth, and was eager to know to which estimates scientific opinion was then veering.

So far I have referred, and in very condensed fashion, to Tennyson’s knowledge of and interest in Astronomy as they came out in our conversations. I have done this because I was naturally most struck with it, but only a short acquaintance was necessary to show me that this interest in my own special subject was only a part of a general interest in and knowledge of scientific questions.

This was borne home to me very forcibly in about the year 1866 or 1867. The evenings of Mondays were then given up to friends who came in, sans cérémonie, to talk and smoke. Clays from Broseley, including “churchwardens” and some of larger size (Frank Buckland’s held an ounce of tobacco), were provided, and the confirmed smokers (Tennyson, an occasional visitor, being one of them) kept their pipes, on which the name was written, in a rack for future symposia. One night it chanced that many travellers — Bates, Baines, and Winwoode Reade among them — were present, and the question of a certain kind of dust-storms came on the tapis. Tennyson, who had not started the subject, listened for some time and then remarked how difficult it was for a student to gain certain knowledge on such subjects, and he then astonished the company by giving the names of eight authors, four of whom had declared they had seen such dust-storms as had been described, the other four insisting that they could not be produced under any known meteorological conditions and that with the best opportunities they had never seen them.

In many of our talks I came across similar evidences of minute knowledge in various fields; nothing in the natural world was trivial to him or to be neglected. This great grasp was associated with a minute accuracy, and it was this double habit of mind which made Tennyson such a splendid observer, and therefore such a poet, for the whole field of nature from which to cull the most appropriate epithets was always present in his mind.

Hence those exquisite presentations of facts, in which true poetry differs from prose, and which in Tennyson’s poetry appeal at once both to the brain and heart.

But even this is not all that must be said on this point. Much of Tennyson’s finest is so fine that it wants a knowledge on a level with his own to appreciate its truth and beauty; many of the most exquisite and profound touches I am convinced are missed by thousands of his readers on this account. The deep thought and knowledge are very frequently condensed into a simple adjective instead of being expanded into something of a longer breath to make them apparent enough to compel admiration. This it strikes me he consistently avoided.

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

Although many of the poems seem to me to be clothed with references to natural phenomena as with a garment, it can on the whole, I think, be gathered from them, as I gathered from our conversations, that the subject deepest in his thoughts was the origin of things in its widest sense, a Systema Mundi, which should explain the becoming of the visible universe and define its different parts at different periods in its history. In this respect we have:

Three poets in three ages born.

Dante, Milton, and Tennyson, with their minds saturated with the same theme, and I can fancy nothing in the history of human thought more interesting or encouraging than the studies of this theme as presented to us in their works published we may say, speaking very roughly, three centuries apart.

This of course is another story, but a brief reference to it is essential for my present purpose.

All the old religions of the world were based upon Astronomy, that and Medicine being the only sciences in existence. Sun, Moon, and Stars were all worshipped as Gods, and thus it was that even down to Dante’s time Astronomy and religion were inseparably intertwined in the prevalent Cosmogonies. The Cosmogony we find in Dante, the peg on which he hangs his Divina Commedia, with the seven heavens surrounding the earth and seven hells inside it, had come down certainly from Arab and possibly prior sources; the Empyrean, the primum mobile, the seven Purgatories, and the Earthly Paradise (the antipodes of Jerusalem) were later additions, the latter being added so soon as it was generally recognized that the earth was round, though the time of the navigator was not yet.

Dante constructed none of this machinery, he used it merely; it represented the knowledge, that is, the belief, of his time.

Between Dante and Milton there was a gap; but what a gap! It was filled by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco da Gama, to mention no more, and the astronomers and geographers between them smashed the earth-centred heavens, the interior hells, and the earthly paradise into fragments.

It was while this smashing was working its way into men’s minds that Milton wrote his poem, and he, like Dante, centred it on a cosmogony. Well might Huxley call it “the Miltonic Hypothesis”! but how different from the former one, from which it was practically a retreat, carefully concealed in an important particular, but still a retreat from the old position.

Milton in his poem uses, so far as heaven is concerned, the cosmogony of Dante, but he carefully puts words into Raphael’s mouth to indicate that after all the earth-centred scheme of the seven heavens must give way. But the most remarkable part of “Paradise Lost” is the treatment of hell.

Milton’s greatness as a poet, as a maker, to my mind is justly based upon the new and vast conceptions which he there gave to the world and to which the world still clings.

To provide a new hell which had been “dismissed with costs” from the earth’s centre, he boldly halves heaven and creates chaos and an external hell out of the space he filches from it. “Hellgate” is now the orifice in the primum mobile towards the empyrean.

In Tennyson we find the complete separation of Science from Dogmatic Theology, thus foreshadowed by Milton, finally achieved. In him we find, as in Dante and Milton, one fully abreast with the science and thought of the time, and after another gap, this one filled up by Newton, Kant, Herschel, Laplace, and Darwin, we are brought face to face with the modern Cosmogony based upon science and Evolution. The ideas of heaven and hell in the mediaeval sense no longer form a necessary part of it, in Tennyson they have absolutely disappeared. In those parts of his poems in which he introduces cosmogonic ideas we have to deal with the facts presented by the heavens and the earth which can throw light upon the ancient history of our planet and its inhabitants.

The modern Systema Mundi which Tennyson dwells on over and over again is dominated by

Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses.

To come back from this parenthesis I must finally point out that although some of the most pregnant and beautiful passages in Tennyson’s poems have reference to the modern views of the origin of things, almost all natural phenomena are referred to, in one place or another, in language in which both the truest poetry and most accurate science are blended.

The breadth of the outlook upon Nature shown by the references in the Poet’s works is only equalled by the minute accuracy of observation displayed. Astronomy, geology, meteorology, biology, and, indeed, all branches of science except chemistry, are thus made to bring their tribute, so that finally we have a perfect poetic garland, which displays for us the truths of Nature and Human Nature intertwined.

MEMORIES by E. V. B.

How kind to ask for some of my few small memories of your father — treasured memories which no length of years can ever rub out. And how much I like to recall them, though, alas! there is so little; it was so seldom that we met in those unforgotten times. Once, I remember, I sent him a rose from my garden, a black beauty, rather rare in those old days—”L’Empereur de Maroque,” now quite cut out by “Prince Camille de Rohan.” I keep the little word of thanks that came afterwards in return:

My dear E. V. B. — Many thanks for your more amiable than beautiful Black Rose. I don’t mean to be personal, but am, yours always,

Tennyson.

Another of his notes is the one wherein he gave me leave to illustrate “The May Queen.” His words in the note were: “I would rather you than any one else should do it.” His poems were a joy to me, even in childhood — from the days when, dull lesson hours, etc., being done, I could steal away and no one know, and, sitting on the carpet by the home book-shelves, read over and over on the sly from a bound volume (one of Blackwood’s Magazines), where were long extracts from Tennyson’s poems, especially the earlier ones, and amongst them one called “Adeline.” There was certainly a magic in the poetry, scarce found elsewhere — magic even for a child of ten.

Summer-house at Farringford, where “Enoch Arden” was written. Carved and painted by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Do you remember how you used to tell me that your father had a great love for the red rose? He sent me, for my Ros Rosarum, lines on a Rosebud by himself:

The Rosebud

The night with sudden odour reel’d,

The southern stars a music peal’d,

Warm beams across the meadow stole,

For Love flew over grove and field,

Said, “Open, Rosebud, open, yield

Thy fragrant soul.”

I know he loved the poet’s colour — lilac. A long-past scene in the garden at Farringford still remains in the mind’s eye fresh and vivid — painted in with memory’s fast colours among the pictures of remembrance.

The sunshine of a morning at Farringford in early summer when we came up the long middle walk, bordered on either side with lilac-flowered aubretia, led up to the open summer-house where Tennyson, with two or three friends, sat in the sun, enjoying the warmth and the lovely lines of lilac. We turned towards the house after a time, going under the budding trees of the grove. There he pointed out some young bushes of Alexandrian laurel — the same, he told us, whose small narrow leaves were used to make the crown for victors in the Olympian games....

Then — can I ever forget? — that delightful evening at Aldworth, when, after dinner, he invited me to his room upstairs. There he smoked his pipe in his high-backed, cane arm-chair, while I sat near. On a little table by the fire were arranged several more of these well-smoked Dublin pipes. Such a large, comfortable “smoke-room”! — with books about everywhere, on tables and chairs. Then he read to me aloud from “Locksley Hall.” I think he read all the poem from the beginning to the end; and as Tennyson read on — one seemed almost to feel the pungent, salt sea-breeze blowing from over desolate seas — almost saw visions of the dreary sands lengthening far away. I remember I ventured to ask why the stanza which follows after that line, “And all the wonder that should be,” was afterwards omitted:

In the hall there hangs a picture — Amy’s arms about my neck,

Happy children in a sunbeam, sitting on the ribs of wreck.

In my life there was a picture — she that clasp’d my neck is flown,

I was left within the shadow, sitting on the wreck alone.

I began saying the lines, but he knew them quite well and repeated them. I can’t think how it is, the answer he returned about this is now, alas! forgot.... Such troublous years have come and gone since that happy Long-Ago. (The omitted stanza would have gone, too, had it not been written down for me by a long-lost friend, Sir Robert Morier.)

So the reading aloud went on, with talk between (and clouds of smoke!), until, I think, past eleven o’clock, when you opened the door, and that — for me — rare dream of poetry and charm abruptly broke.

I saw Tennyson, for the last time, as I followed down the wooded path at Aldworth, on his way to the garden door opening on the heath, his fine, big, Russian hound pacing closely after.

No — once more I saw him, his likeness with all the distinctness sometimes known in the slow-moving white clouds of some glorious autumn day. It was after the end had come, and not long before the grave in Westminster Abbey had received him. I was travelling home on the Great-Western from Somerset. Gazing up idly at the assembled multitude of sun-steeped silver clouds above, suddenly, clear and distinct, my eyes beheld the image of his noble profile as if lying back asleep; the eyes were closed, the head at rest upon the pillow — a sculptured cloud in a snowy cloudland, outlined upon an azure sky.... Not until after several minutes did the vision pass, slowly fading into the infinite blue.

TENNYSON AND HIS TALK ON SOME RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS by the Right Rev. the Bishop of Ripon

Among the happy memories of my life, and they are many, the memory of the kindly welcome accorded to me at Aldworth and at Farringford must always possess a special charm. This will readily be understood by those of my own age; for Tennyson was a name to conjure with in the days of my youth. Slowly but surely his influence crept into our lives: we read in text-books at school that the

Poet in a golden age was born, with golden stars above,

Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love.

The thought and the words appealed to me from the first. Then, how I know not, we became familiar with part, at least, of “In Memoriam.” Its phrases caught our fancy, and some of our early attempts at versification were cast in the same metre. Then came the “Idylls of the King,” and I remember how, when the rest of the party went out one holiday afternoon, I stayed indoors and read the “Idylls” at one sitting. Thus in our youth Tennyson became poet and hero to us. Any one who had seen him or known him became for us invested with a kind of sacred and awful interest; my uncle who lived at Cheltenham grew greater in our eyes when we learned that he had corresponded with him.

Thus our hero-worship grew. We knew indeed that there were those who did not welcome the coming Poet with ardour; we lived, in fact, through the age of his disparagement to the time of his unchallenged supremacy. It will be interesting, I think, to many to read the following letter written by Rev. Frederick W. Robertson when he was experiencing the freer and fresher intellectual atmosphere of Oxford after the stifling oppressiveness of Cheltenham:

I had nearly forgotten to tell you that Tennyson is deeply admired here by all the brilliant men. Stanley, our first genius, rates him highly; Hannah, who has guided nearly all the first and double-first class men for the last three years to honours, told me he considers his poetical and psychological powers more varied than any poet he knows. And the “Dread,” a choice selection of the most brilliant among the rising men, have pronounced him to be the first poet of the day. So you see I have some to keep me company in my judgment. And at all events he is above ridicule.

Pray inform Miss D —— of all this. One of our first professors raves about him.

When I went up to Cambridge in 1860, Tennyson was the oracle poet among the younger men; but the feeling of doubt still remained among the older men. I recall a friendly dispute between the Senior and a Junior Fellow of my own College. The elder man charged Tennyson with being “misty”; the younger man defended: the elder man cited a passage from “In Memoriam,” and challenged the younger to say what it meant. The elder man was so far successful that he drove the younger man to declare that though he could not explain it then, he hoped to enter into its meaning later on. It was a typical conflict; the older generation could not understand; the younger was under the spell of the Poet, and though unable to interpret everything, believed in Tennyson’s message to his own age.

There were charges levelled against Tennyson more serious and more absurd than that of obscurity. The words Scepticism, Pantheism, and even Atheism were heard. One newspaper in a review of “In Memoriam” exclaimed: “Here the poet barely escapes Atheism and plunges into the abyss of Pantheism.” Another foolish writer, commenting on the lines:

But what am I?

An infant crying in the night,

An infant crying for the light,

And with no language but a cry,

remarked, with superb naïveté, “May we remind Mr. Tennyson that the darkness is past and that the true light now shineth?” I remember, as late as 1867 or 1868, an evening party at Blackheath when the question was started—”Who is the greatest living poet?” To my amazement and amusement a self-satisfied, but very good man, instantly and oracularly replied, “Bonar — without doubt — Bonar.” He meant that excellent and devout-minded man, the Rev. Horatius Bonar, the hymn-writer. These were, no doubt, extreme cases, but stupidity is always extreme. I recall these incidents because they are parts of the story which tells of the difficulties through which Tennyson fought the way to his throne. They serve to recall the prejudices which provoked the resentment and stimulated the attachment of those who, like myself, were brought early under the spell of his enchantment. His story repeated familiar features; he had at first a select circle of studious admirers; by degrees the general public became aware of the existence in their midst of a true poet. Then timid partisans awoke and demanded credentials of orthodoxy. Persons of this type did not like to be told that —

There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

But meanwhile he had drawn the younger generation to his side: they believed in him, and they were right. In spite of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, Tennyson followed the gleam: he would not stoop to make his judgment blind or prevaricate for popularity’s sake. He beat his music out, and those who knew him, as I was privileged to do, during the later years of his life, could realize how truly he had made a larger faith his own.

It fell out naturally when I met him that conversation turned on religion or theological subjects. His mind, courageous, inquiring, honest, sought truth beyond the forms of truth. On the occasion of my first visit to Aldworth, in the smoking-room we talked of the problem of pain, of determinism, of apparent contradictions of faith. That night, indeed, we seemed to talk —

Of faith, free will, foreknowledge absolute.

But the impression left upon my mind was that we were engaged in no mere scholastic discussion; it was no mere intellectually satisfactory creed which was sought: it was something deeper and more abiding than anything which may be modified in form from age to age; the soul needs an anchorage, and to find it there must be no ignoring of facts and no juggling with them once they are found. In illustration of this I may relate how once, when walking with him among the heather-clad heights round Aldworth, he spoke of the apparent dualism in Nature: the forces of darkness and light seemed to meet in conflict. “If I were not a Christian,” he said, “I should be perhaps a Parsee.” He felt, however, that if once we accepted the view that this life was a time of education, then the dark things might be found to have a meaning and a value. In the retrospect hereafter the pain and suffering would seem trivial. I think that this idea must have taken hold of his thought as we were conversing; for he suddenly stopped in his walk, and, standing amid the purple landscape, he declaimed the lines, then unpublished:

The Lord spake out of the skies

To a man good and a wise:

“The world and all within it

Will be nothing in a minute.”

Then a beggar began to cry:

“Give me food or else I die.”

Is it worth his while to eat,

Or mine to give him meat,

If the world and all within it

Were nothing the next minute?

He once quoted to me Hinton’s view that we were not in a position to judge the full meaning of life; that we were in fact looking at the wrong side of things. We saw the work from the underside, and we could not judge of the pattern which was perhaps clear enough on the upper side.

Next day I was able to remind him that he had approved this view of life. He was not well, and I think that the darker aspects loomed larger in his mind; at any rate, he was speaking more gloomily than usual. When I remarked that God did not take away men till their work was done, he said, “He does; look at the promising young fellows cut off.” Then I brought up Hinton’s theory and illustration, and asked whether we could judge when a man had finished his appointed work. Immediately he acquiesced; the view evidently satisfied him.

He took a deep interest in those borderland questions which sometimes seem so near an answer and yet never are answered. At the hour of death what are the sights which rush upon the vision? Of these he would sometimes speak; he told me how William Allingham, when dying, said to his wife, “I see things beyond your imagination to conceive.” Some vision seemed to come to such at death. One lady in the Isle of Wight exclaimed, as though she saw “Cherubim and Seraphim.” But these incidents did not disturb the steady thought and trust which found its strength far deeper down than in any surface phenomena. He never shirked the hard and dismaying facts of life. Once he made me take to my room Winwoode Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. There never was such a passionate philippic against Nature as this book contained. The universe was one vast scene of murder; the deep aspirations and noble visions of men were the follies of flies buzzing for a brief moment in the presence of inexorable destruction. Life was bottled sunshine; death the silent-footed butler who withdrew the cork. The book, with its fierce invective, had a strange rhapsodical charm. It put with irate and verbose extravagance the fact that sometimes

Nature, red in tooth and claw,

With ravin shrieked against his creed;

but it failed to see any but one side of the question. The writer saw clearly enough what Tennyson saw, but Tennyson saw much more. He could not make his judgment blind against faith any more than he would make it blind against facts. He saw more clearly because he saw more largely. He distrusted narrow views from whatever side they were advanced. The same spirit which led him to see the danger of the dogmatic temper in so-called orthodox circles led him to distrust it when it came from other quarters. There was a wholesome balance about his mind. Nothing is farther from the truth than to suppose that men of great genius lack mental balance. Among the lesser lights there may be a brilliant but unbalanced energy, but among the greater men it is not so; there is a large and wholesome sanity among these. There is sufficient breadth of grasp to avoid extremes in Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; it was the same with Tennyson. We may be right, for instance, in classing Tennyson among those

Whose faith has centre everywhere

Nor cares to fix itself to form;

but we should be wholly wrong if we supposed that he did not realize the value of form. He knew that faith did not lie in the form, but he knew also the protective value of form to faith; the shell was not the kernel, but the kernel ripened all the better in the shelter of the shell. He realized how sacred was the flesh and blood to which truth divine might be linked, and he uttered the wise caution:

Hold thou the good: defend it well

For fear divine philosophy

Should push beyond her mark and be

Procuress to the lords of Hell.

In his view, as it seemed to me, there were two attitudes of mind towards dogmatic forms — the one impatient of form because form was never adequate to express the whole truth, the other impatient of form because impatient of the truth itself. These two attitudes of mind were poles asunder; they must never be confused together.

I may be allowed to illustrate this discriminating spirit by one or two reminiscences. I once asked him whether they were right who interpreted the three ladies who accompanied King Arthur on his last voyage as Faith, Hope, and Charity. He replied with a touch of (shall I call it?) intellectual impatience: “They do and they do not. They are those graces, but they are much more than those. I hate to be tied down to say, ‘This means that,’ because the thought in the image is much more than the definition suggested or any specific interpretation advanced.” The truth was wider than the form, yet the form was a shelter for the truth. It meant this, but not this only; truth must be able to transcend any form in which it may be presented.

Hence he could see piety under varying forms: for example, he described those who were “pious variers from the Church.” This phrase, it may here be related, had a remarkable influence on one man’s life, as the following letter, written by a clergyman who had formerly been a Nonconformist, will show. The writer died some few years ago; two of his sons are now good and promising clergymen of the Church of England:

Oxford Villas, Guiseley, Leeds,

January 16, 1901.

My Lord Bishop — In reference to your volume on the Poets, may I intrude upon your attention one moment to say that it was Tennyson’s phrase in reference to dissenters:

variers from the Church,

in his “Sea Dreams” that first kindled me to earnest thought (some twenty years since) as to my own position in relationship to the Church of the land. The force that moved me lay in the word “pious.” Were dissenters more pious than Church people? I regret to say I thought them much less so; and as this conviction deepened I was compelled to make the change for which I am every day more thankful. — I am, my Lord Bishop, your Lordship’s devoted servant,

W. Hayward Elliott.

I have already spoken of his recognition of the apparent dualism in Nature. His outlook on the universe could not ignore the dark and dismaying facts of existence, and his faith, which rose above the shriek of Nature, was not based upon arguments derived from any survey of external, physical Nature. When he confined his outlook to this, he could see power and mechanism, but he could not from these derive faith. His vision must go beyond the mere physical universe; he must see life and see it whole; he must include that which is highest in Nature, even man, and only then could he find the resting-place of faith. He thus summed up the matter once when we had been walking up and down the “Ball-room” at Farringford: “It is hard,” he said, “it is hard to believe in God; but it is harder not to believe. I believe in God, not from what I see in Nature, but from what I find in man.” I took him to mean that the witness of Nature was only complete when it included all that was in Nature, and that the effort to draw conclusions from Nature when man, the highest-known factor in Nature, was excluded, could only lead to mistake. I do not think he meant, however, that external Nature gave no hints of a superintending wisdom or even love, for his own writings show, I think, that such hints had been whispered to him by flower and star; I think he meant that faith did not find her platform finally secure beneath her feet till she had taken count of man. In short, he seemed to me to be near to the position of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, who said that truth as soon as learned was felt to be held on a much deeper and more unshakable ground than any authority which appealed to mere intellect, namely, on its own discerned truthfulness. The response to all that is highest in Nature is found in the heart of man, and man cannot deny this highest, because it is latent in himself already. But I must continue Tennyson’s own words: “It is hard to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe in Him. I don’t believe in His goodness from what I see in Nature. In Nature I see the mechanician; I believe in His goodness from what I find in my own breast.” I said, “Then you believe that Man is the highest witness of God?” “Certainly,” he replied. I said, “Is not that what Christ said and was? He was in man the highest witness of God to Man,” and I quoted the recorded words, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” He assented, but said that there were, of course, difficulties in the idea of a Trinity — the Three. “But mind,” he said, “Son of God is quite right — that He was.” He said that, of course, we must have doctrine, and then he added, “After all, the greatest thing is Faith.” Having said this, he paused, and then recited with earnest emphasis the lines which sang of faith in the reality of the Unseen and Spiritual, of a faith, therefore, which can wait the great disclosure:

Doubt no longer, that the Highest is the wisest and the best,

Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope, or break thy rest,

Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling

Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest.

Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart’s desire;

Thro’ the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.

Wait till death has flung them open, when the man will make the Maker

Dark no more with human hatred in the glare of deathless fire.

He was alive to the movements of modern thought. He saw in evolution, if not a fully proved law, yet a magnificent working hypothesis; he could not regard it as a theory hostile to ultimate faith; but far beyond the natural wish to reconcile faith and thought, which he shared with all right-thinking men, was the conviction of the changeless personal relationship between God and man. He might find difficulties about faith and about certain dogmas of faith, such as the Trinity. No doubt, however, the Poet’s conception brought the divine into all human life; it showed God in touch with us at all epochs of our existence — in our origin, in our history, in our final self-realization, for He is

Our Father and our Brother and our God.

Religion largely lies in the consciousness of our true relation to Him who made us; and the yearning for the realization of this consciousness found constant expression in Tennyson’s works and conversation. Perhaps its clearest expression is to be found in his instructions to his son: “Remember, I want ‘Crossing the Bar’ to be always at the end of all my works.”

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crossed the Bar.

TENNYSON AND SIR JOHN SIMEON, AND TENNYSON’S LAST YEARS by Louisa E. Ward

From the misty dawn of early childhood rises the first image of one who was to fill so large a place in my life and that of those dear to me. As I, not yet four years old, lay in my father’s arms and he said to me the “Morte d’Arthur,” there blended with the picture of the wild winter mere and the mighty King carried, dying, to its shore, a vision of the man who, my father told me, lived somewhere amongst us and who could write words which seemed to me more beautiful than anything I had ever heard.

It was several years before I again came upon the “Morte d’Arthur,” when I was a girl of ten or eleven, and I remember how eagerly I seized upon it, and how the fairy glamour of my infancy came back to me as I read it.

It was in the autumn of 1852 that Lord and Lady (then Mr. and Mrs.) Tennyson came to Farringford. They had been looking for a house, and they found themselves one summer evening on the terrace walk, with the rosy sunset lighting up the long line of coast to St. Catherine’s Point, and the gold-blue sea with its faint surf line mingling with the rosiness: and they said, “We will go no further, this must be our home.” An ideal home it was, ideal in its loveliness, its repose, in its wild but beautiful gardens, and more than all ideal in its calm serenity, the hospitable simplicity, the high thought and utter nobleness of aim and life which that pair brought with them, and which through the long years of change, of sickness, and of sorrow, of which every home must be the scene, made the atmosphere of Farringford impossible to be forgotten by those who had the happiness of breathing it.

The Corner of the Study at Farringford where Tennyson wrote, with his Deerhound “Lufra” and the Terrier “Winks” in the Foreground. From a drawing by W. Biscombe Gardner.

Hallam was at that time a baby, and very soon after their arrival at Farringford beautiful Lionel came to gladden the hearts of his parents. It was on the day of Lionel’s christening that my father paid his first visit to Farringford, and found the family party just returning from church. My father had already been introduced to Tennyson at Lady Ashburton’s house in London, on which occasion he had walked away with Carlyle and had expressed to him his pleasure at meeting so great a man as Tennyson. “Great man,” said Carlyle, “yes, he is nearly a great man, but not quite; he stands on a dunghill with yelping dogs about him, and if he were quite a great man, he would call down fire from Heaven, and burn them up”—”but,” he went on, speaking of his poetry, “he has the grip on it.”

My father had entertained the greatest admiration for Tennyson’s poetry since the day when, both being undergraduates at Christchurch, his friend Charles Wynne brought him the first published volume, saying to him, “There is something new for you who love poetry.” And his delight may be imagined in now having the Poet for a neighbour. The intimacy between Farringford and Swainston grew apace. My mother and Lady Tennyson, though poor health and numerous occupations interfered with their frequent meetings, conceived a very real affection for each other, which was only cut short by my mother’s early death, which left Lady Tennyson with a deep feeling and pity for her children.

During the early years of Farringford, it was one of my father’s great and frequent pleasures to ride or drive over in the summer afternoons; he, in turn with her husband, would draw Lady Tennyson in her garden chair, and with the two boys skipping on before them, they would go long expeditions through the lanes, and even up the downs; then back through the soft evening air to dinner, and the long evening of talk and reading which knitted that “fair companionship” and made of it “such a friendship as had mastered time,” and which we may well believe has re-formed itself still more perfectly now that both those beloved souls have “crossed the bar.” The Tennysons sometimes came over to Swainston for a few days, and I remember his being there on the wonderful July night in 1858 when the tail of the great comet passed over Arcturus. His admiration and excitement knew no bounds; he could not sit at the dinner-table, but rushed out perpetually to look at the glorious sight, repeating: “It is a besom of destruction sweeping the sky.”

Little Lionel was that same night taken from his bed to the window, and, opening his sleepy eyes on the unaccustomed splendour, he said, “Am I in Heaven?”

The writing and publication of “Maud” in 1855 was largely due to my father.

Looking through some papers one day at Farringford with his friend, he came upon the exquisite lyric “O that ‘twere possible,” and said, “Why do you keep these beautiful lines unpublished?” Tennyson told him that the poem had appeared years before in the Tribute, an ephemeral publication, but that it was really intended to belong to a dramatic poem which he had never been able to carry out. My father gave him no peace till he had persuaded him to set about the poem, and not very long after, he put “Maud” into his hand.

It was about this time, but I do not remember what year, that Tennyson gave my father the manuscript of “In Memoriam.” He had often asked him to give him a manuscript poem, and he had put him off, but one day at Swainston he asked my father to reach him a particular book from a shelf in the library, and as he did so, down fell the MS. which Tennyson had put there as a surprise. Never was gift more valued and appreciated by its recipient. I have always felt grateful to him for the continual pleasure which it gave my father during the whole of his life.

Tennyson’s visits were eagerly looked forward to by us children. He would talk to us a good deal, and was fond of puzzling and mystifying us in a way that was very fascinating. He would take the younger ones on his knee, and give them sips of his port after dinner, and I remember my father saying to one of my sisters: “Never forget that the greatest of poets has kissed you and made you drink from his glass.”

As I got older I was sometimes allowed to drive over to Farringford with my father, and, need I say, I looked forward to these as the red-letter days of my life. Not only were the talk and intellectual atmosphere intoxicating to me, but I became passionately attached to Lady Tennyson. Praise of her would be unseemly; but I may quote what my father was fond of saying of her, that she was “a piece of the finest china, the mould of which had been broken as soon as she was made.” It was not, however, till after my mother’s death in 1860 that my real grown-up intimacy with them began, and that Farringford became the almost second home which for some years it was to me. During my father’s absences in London or elsewhere, I was free to go and stay there as often and for as long as I liked, and was almost on the footing of a daughter of the house. I used to go for long walks, sometimes alone with Tennyson, sometimes in the company of other guests, of whom Mr. Jowett was one of the most frequent. I wish I had written down the talks with which he made the hours pass like minutes during our walks. Forgetful of the youth and ignorance of his companion, he would rise to the highest themes, thread his way through the deepest speculations, till I caught the infection of his mind, and the questions of matter and spirit, of space and the infinite, of time and of eternity, and such kindred subjects, became to me the burning questions, the supreme interests of life! But however absorbed he might be in earnest talk, his eye and ear were always alive to the natural objects around him: I have known him stop short in a sentence to listen to a blackbird’s song, to watch the sunlight glint on a butterfly’s wing, or to examine a field flower at his feet. The lines on “The Flower” were the result of an investigation of the “love-in-idleness” growing on a wall in the Farringford garden. He made them nearly on the spot, and said them to me next day. Trees and plants had a special attraction for him, and he longed to see the vegetation of the Tropics. Years ago he scolded my husband more than half in earnest for not having told him in time that he was going to winter in Madeira, that he might have gone with him.

But to return to my girlish days at Farringford! The afternoon walks were followed by the long talks in the firelight by the side of Lady Tennyson’s sofa, talks less eager, less thrilling than those I have recalled; but so helpful, so tender, full of the wisdom of one who had learnt to look upon life and all it embraces from one standpoint only, and that the very highest! Then dinner with the two boys (their long fair hair hanging over their shoulders and their picturesque dresses as they are seen in Mr. Watts’s picture in the drawing-room at Aldworth) waiting as little pages on the guests at table, followed by the delightful dessert, for which, according to the old College fashion, we adjourned to the drawing-room. The meal was seasoned with merry genial talk, unexpected guests arriving, and always finding the same warm welcome, for none came who were not tried and trusted friends. After dessert Tennyson went up to his study (the little room at the top of the house, from the leads outside which such sky pageants have been seen, shooting stars, eclipses, and Northern Lights) with any men friends who were in the house. They smoked there for an hour or two, and then came down to tea, unless, as sometimes happened, we all joined them upstairs; and then there was more talk or reading aloud of published or, still better, unpublished poems. He would sometimes read from other poets; Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and some lyrics of Campbell being what he often chose; and he taught me to know and appreciate Crabbe, whom he placed very high in the rank of English poets.

One day Tennyson came behind me as I sat at breakfast, and dropped on my plate the MS. of the “Higher Pantheism” which he had composed, or at any rate perfected, during the night. Another day he took me into the garden to see a smoking yew, and said the lines on it which he had just made and afterwards interpolated in “In Memoriam.” My father was with him when they came upon a bed of forget-me-not in the garden and he exclaimed “the heavens upbreaking through the earth,” the lines which he afterwards applied to the bluebells in the description of the spring ride of Guinevere and Lancelot to Arthur’s court. Once he pleased and touched me inexpressibly: he was talking of the different way in which friends speak before your face and behind your back, and he said, “Now I should not mind being behind the curtain while L. S. was talking of me, and there are very few of whom I could say that.”

Years went on, and changes came; my father’s re-election to Parliament in 1865 made our seasons in London longer and more regular than they had been, and though there was still constant and delightful intercourse with Farringford during the autumn and winter, there was necessarily less during the Session. Some glorious days there were, however, when at Easter or at Whitsuntide my father went down to Swainston, and I sometimes accompanied him. We always went over to Farringford either to spend a night or two, or to drive back through the spring night with its scented breath and its mad revelry of cuckoos and nightingales vying with each other as to which could outshout the other, and my father, fresh from communion with his friend, would open himself out as he rarely did at any other time or place.

It was about this time that Tennyson and his wife, worried beyond bearing by the rudeness and vulgarity of the tourists, who considered that they could best show admiration for the Poet by entirely refusing to respect his privacy, determined to find another house for themselves during the summer months, and turned their thoughts to Blackdown and its neighbourhood. One summer they rented a farm on Blackdown called, I think, Greyshott, and on a fine morning, April 23, 1868, we stood, a party of some fifteen friends, to see the foundation-stone laid of Aldworth, the new home which, to more recent, though not to the older friends, has become almost as much associated with its owner as Farringford, and received the sorrowful consecration of having been the scene of his passing away.

About this time Tennyson took to coming oftener to London. On one occasion he took me with him to the British Museum, and we did not get beyond the Elgin Marbles, such was their fascination for him. Another day he came to our house at luncheon time; most of the family happened to be out, and he proposed that we should go to the Zoological Gardens. London was at its fullest, and I feared, though I did not say it, that he would not escape recognition, which was of all things what he most hated. However, all went well for some time until we went into the Aquarium, and he became greatly absorbed in the sea monsters, when I heard a whisper in the crowd, “That’s Tennyson,” and knew that in another minute he would be surrounded; so I suddenly discovered that the heat of the Aquarium was unbearable and carried him off unwillingly to a quieter part of the gardens — he never found out my ruse.

My mind lingers willingly on the last years of the sixties. As I look back the two-and-twenty years seem, as did another “two and thirty years,” a “mist that rolls away.” Of the circle of dear friends who were so much to one another some still remain to gladden us with their presence, but how many have gone where “beyond these voices there is peace” — Mr. George Venables, Mr. John Ball, Mr. Browning, Sir F. Pollock, Mr. Brookfield, Mr. Henry Cowper, Mr. Laurence Oliphant. The circle was complete as the Table of Arthur before the fatal quest had made its gaps; here death was the quest, and each one who sought, alas, has found it!

The first to pass away was my father, and as his best friend walked in the garden at Swainston on the day, May 31, 1870, on which he came to see him laid to rest, he made those verses, than which few lovelier tributes were ever paid from friend to friend, and which will keep the name of the “Prince of Courtesy” green even in the long years to come.

The autumn and winter ‘71-’72 my eldest brother and I spent together at Freshwater. We rented Mrs. Cameron’s little house which opens by a door of communication into the large hall of Dimbola, the house in which she lived. The evening we arrived, she suddenly appeared in our drawing-room saying, “When strangers take this house I keep the door between us locked, with friends never”; and locked it never was. We lived almost as part of the family, and it was a real enjoyment to be in such close intimacy with one of the most original, and at the same time most tender-hearted and generous women I have ever known. She was on very intimate terms at Farringford, and would speak her mind to the Poet in a very amusing way. On one occasion a party of Americans came to Freshwater, and Mrs. Cameron sent them up to Farringford with a note of introduction. Tennyson was tired or busy, and they were not admitted. They returned to Mrs. Cameron full of their disappointment, and she put on her bonnet (I can see her now as she walked through the lanes, her red or blue Chuddah shawl always trailing behind her, and apparently not much the worse for the dust that fringed it), and insisted upon their going back with her to Farringford. Having made her way to Tennyson, she said to him solemnly, “Alfred, these good people have come 3000 miles to see a lion and they have found a bear.” He laughed, relented, and received the strangers most courteously.

Mrs. Cameron’s beautiful white-haired old husband in his royal purple dressing-gown was a most interesting personality. In addition to the large experience of men and things which his many years of official life in India had given him, and which made his society delightful, he was a very fine classical scholar of the old school, and in his old age, when blindness and infirmity debarred him in great measure from his books, it was his solace to repeat by heart odes of Horace, pages of Virgil, and long passages from the Greek poets.

Easter 1872 brought a bright and merry gathering to Freshwater. One of Mrs. Cameron’s charming relations (they had lived with her for years as adopted daughters) was about to marry, and go out with her husband to India, and the “Primrose wedding” brought a large influx of young people, friends and relations of Mrs. Cameron and the bride, in addition to the visitors who always made Easter a pleasant time. The weather was perfect, the “April airs that fan the Isle of Wight” especially soft and balmy. Parties of twenty or thirty met every evening in Mrs. Cameron’s hall or in the Farringford drawing-room. Nearly every one there knew or got to know Lord and Lady Tennyson. He was in particularly genial health and spirits; he joined the young people in their midnight walks to the sea, in their flower-seeking expeditions, in one of which some one was fortunate enough to find a grape hyacinth in one of the Farringford fields. He read aloud nearly as much as he was asked to, and danced as vigorously as the youngest present at two dances that were given. It was during the first of these dances that a young neighbour became engaged to the lady whom he shortly afterwards married. Very soon after the decisive moment had passed, and when the event was naturally supposed to be a profound secret, Tennyson put the girl’s mother, with whom he happened to be sitting, completely out of countenance by saying, without a suspicion of malice, and without for the moment recognizing the young couple who passed him, “I wot they be two lovyers dear.” When he was shortly afterwards told of the engagement, he twinkled very much over his rather premature but very apposite announcement.

My marriage took place in the autumn of 1872, and my husband, who already knew the Tennysons, was at once received into their intimacy, and their friendship was henceforth one of the greatest privileges of our joint life. Tennyson and Hallam were present at our wedding, and the former held our eldest boy in his arms when he was but a day or two old.

The Easter of 1873 saw us again at Freshwater with another pleasant meeting of friends. On that occasion Tennyson said to me, “Why do you not ask me to dinner?” It need not be said that we at once gave the invitation, though not a little nervous at the thought of the lodging-house fare and arrangements to which we were bidding him; but our dear old landlady did her very best. We asked a small party (Lady Florence Herbert and Leslie Stephen were our guests) to meet him and Hallam; he was himself in the best of spirits, and our little dinner-party proved a great success.

A few years later the Tennysons took a house in London three or four years running (one spring they had my stepmother’s house in Eaton Place). Tennyson appeared to have in great measure lost his dislike to mixing in general society, and they collected about them a very interesting and varied circle of friends. I cannot help recalling an incident which occurred one evening at their house, which, though painful at the moment, is pleasant to look back upon on account of the affectionate and generous apology it elicited. A large party was at their house one evening, and Tennyson was persuaded to read aloud, and chose the “Revenge.” Something or other, I suppose the “Inquisition Dogs” and the “Devildoms of Spain,” excited him as he read, and by the time he had finished he had worked himself into a state, which I have occasionally, but seldom, seen at other times, of fury against the Catholic Church, as exemplified by the Inquisition, persecution of heretics, etc.; in fact, all the artillery of prejudice at which Catholics can afford to laugh. It happened, however, that my husband, one of my sisters, and myself were the only Catholics there, and were sitting together in the same part of the room. As he talked he turned towards us and addressed us personally in a violent tirade which loyalty to our convictions made it impossible for us not to answer, though our attempts at explanation and contradiction were drowned in his fierce and eloquent denunciations. Every one in the room looked very uncomfortable. I myself hardly knew whether to laugh or cry, and was never more relieved than, when his flow of words had exhausted itself, he began to read another poem. Before the end of the evening, however, he felt that his outbreak had not been kind or courteous, and before we left he took us all three into his study, and made so sweet and gracious an amende that we loved him, if possible, more than ever.

Any one who has read carefully the “Idylls of the King,” “Sir Galahad,” “St. Agnes,” among many of his poems, still more any one who has spoken with him intimately, cannot fail to realize the strong attraction which many Catholic doctrines and practices had for Tennyson, and the reverence with which he regarded the Catholic Church as standing alone among jarring sects and creeds, majestic, venerable, and invulnerable. His mind was also an essentially and intensely religious one, and I know that one of my father’s attractions for him lay in the religious tone of his mind. On these points, however, I will say no more. In jotting down these few remembrances of a friendship which is amongst my most precious possessions, I settled with myself to refrain entirely from any presentation of what I believed to be Tennyson’s views on theology, metaphysics, or politics, no less than from any discussion of his poetic greatness. I want nothing but to sketch the man as he always seemed to me, one of the noblest, truest, and most lovable of God’s creatures, and one who, even without the genius that has crowned his brow with never-fading laurel, must, by weight of character and beauty of soul alone, stand a giant amid his fellow-men!

We spent the Christmas holidays of 1890-91 at Freshwater with our five children; not one of them will forget the delightful intercourse with Farringford during those weeks, and the Christmas Tree arranged by Mrs. Hallam Tennyson for her little Lionel in the large room known as the ball-room. Kind words and presents were showered on every one, and I think the beloved grandparents enjoyed it as much as their fourteen-months-old grandson, as they sat in the midst of their servants and cottagers (some of whom were amongst the oldest of their friends), and the guests, little and great, whom they had asked to share their Christmas festival. Our two eldest children have a more precious remembrance of that time and the following Easter, which we also spent at Freshwater, for Tennyson read aloud to them for the first and only time. To our girl he read “Old Roä” and the “Bugle Song,” and to our boy the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.” He read this in April 1891; it was the last time I heard him read, and I look upon it as a special act of kindness; he said he did not like to read to children — they did not understand, were bored — and he only yielded to my strong entreaties. If, however, he saw, as I think he did, the flushed cheeks and big tearful eyes of our fourteen-year-old schoolboy, he must have felt that he had a listener who did understand and appreciate!

Through the early part of the winter of 1890 Tennyson was remarkably well, walking in the morning with my husband and other friends, and taking long walks in the afternoon up and down the ball-room, when he liked to have one or two companions who would amuse him, and whom he would amuse with witty stories and bons mots. He had always a great pleasure in racy anecdotes, and the humorous side of life, and during the last years this increased, so that his friends treasured up every good story they heard to repeat to him at their next meeting.

Towards the end of the Christmas holidays Tennyson caught cold, and fears of a return of gout and bronchitis confined him to his room. My husband had already returned to London, and I was remaining only a few days longer and thinking sadly enough that I should not be able to see Tennyson again before I left, when on one of the last evenings I was spending at Farringford, he sent for me to his room and then, to my delighted surprise, proposed to read to me. I demurred, fearing it might be bad for him, but he insisted, and for half an hour read me one unpublished poem after another, his voice nearly as strong as I had ever known it, and it seemed to me even more pathetic and beautiful.

That Easter of 1891, among many pleasant recollections of Farringford and of the group of friends who paid their daily visit there, has one which I like to set against the stories of Tennyson’s unapproachableness and gruffness to those who went to see him, which are so often circulated, and which, in nine cases out of ten, meant that those who presented themselves to him had chosen an unfortunate time, or were in some respect deficient in tact or politeness. An American friend, professor of literature at Harvard, was staying with us. His admiration and veneration for the great master of verse were unbounded, and he would, I feel sure, have crossed the Atlantic merely to see and speak with him. The morning after his arrival, my husband took him to Farringford, where they found Tennyson somewhat annoyed by a communication from an unknown American admirer, enclosing a photograph of the Poet, upon which he requested him to sign his name; the coolness of the request being heightened by the fact that the sender had posted his letter unstamped. My husband said to his friend, “Now, M., here’s your opportunity; put down sixpence and pay the national debt, and Tennyson will sign you the receipt on this photograph.” He immediately took the joke, laughed, bade the professor take back his sixpence, and signed the photograph for him.

On one of the last days we were at Freshwater that Easter, Tennyson met our youngest child of five in the road, and addressed her, to her great amusement: “Madam! you’ve a damask rose on either cheek, and another on your forehead; rosy lips, golden hair, and a straw bonnet.”

I never again saw the household at Farringford after April 1891. Once more we were at Aldworth in October of that year, when Tennyson signed for us a photograph from Mr. Watts’s last picture. He was tired before we left and had gone to rest in his room, but I begged Hallam to let me go in to wish him good-bye. Had I known that it was good-bye, and that for the last time I looked on his face and kissed his dear hands, what could I have said? Never could I express the sorrowing love, the immense gratitude, which overflow my heart as I think of my father’s friend and mine!

The following letter was written by Tennyson to Catherine Lady Simeon after the death of his friend:

Aldworth, June 27th, 1870.

My dear Lady Simeon — Of course nothing could be more grateful to me than some memorial of my much-loved and ever-honoured friend, the only man on earth, I verily believe, to whom I could, and have more than once opened my whole heart; and he also has given me in many a conversation at Farringford in my little attic his utter confidence. I knew none like him for tenderness and generosity, not to mention his other noble qualities, and he was the very Prince of Courtesy; but I need not tell you this; anything, little book, or whatever you will choose, send me or bring when you come; and do pray come on the 4th July, and we will be all alone; and Louie can come, when she will, and you can spare her. — Believe me, always affectionately yours,

A. Tennyson.

SIR JOHN SIMEON

By Aubrey de Vere

The world external knew thee but in part:

It saw and honoured what was least in thee;

The loyal trust, the inborn courtesy;

The ways so winning, yet so pure from art;

The cordial reverence, keen to all desert,

All save thine own; the accost so frank and free;

The public zeal that toiled, but not for fee,

And shunned alike base praise, and hireling’s mart.

These things men saw; but deeper far than these

The under-current of thy soul worked on

Unvexed by surface-ripple, beam, or breeze,

And unbeheld its way to ocean won:

Life of thy life was still that Christian Faith

The sophist scorns. It failed thee not in death.

TENNYSON

By Arthur Sidgwick, Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

(Read in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, October 30, 1909.)

We are met here to-day to do honour to the memory and the life’s work of one of the greatest of Trinity’s sons, who has also won for himself — few lovers of poetry here or anywhere can feel a doubt — a high and secure place in the glorious roll of English Poets, that roll which records the poetic achievements of over 500 years.

In accepting (with whatever misgivings) the request of the College authorities to speak some preliminary words in appreciation of the Poet, I do not propose to deal in any detail with the history of his life and work, on which the biography has thrown such interesting and welcome light. The most that can here be attempted is to select a few aspects and illustrations of Tennyson’s life-long devotion to his art, such as may serve to bring out something of those gifts and qualities which, wherever English poetry is read, are felt to give to his work its special charm and value.

Though I must pass the early years almost in silence, I cannot refrain from quoting the delightful tale, first made known (I believe) by Miss Thackeray, how at the age of five the Poet was seen with outspread arms in a high wind, sailing gaily along and shouting his first line of poetry

I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind

— he did indeed all his life hear that voice and all other Nature-voices; and also the other tale of ten years later, how on the news of Byron’s death (in 1824) the boy went out, desolate, and carved the sad tidings on the sandstone, and (to use his own words) “thought everything over and finished for every one, and that nothing else mattered.”

Such despairing grief has seemed to some readers extravagant, to be excused on the plea of youth — he was only fifteen: but it must not be forgotten that Byron’s death was the final blow of a triple fatality such as finds no parallel in the history of literature. Three men of striking genius and rich poetic gifts — Byron, Shelley, and Keats — were all prematurely lost to the world within four years (1821-4). The fervid sorrow of the impulsive and gifted boy of fifteen, so far from being extravagant, must have been shared by countless readers of all ages who cared for poetry, not in England only.

It is true that as the years went on the youthful sympathy of Tennyson with what has been called the Revolutionary poetry was materially modified — perhaps especially in the case of Shelley. Yet there is a striking letter of the date 1834 — when Shelley had been dead twelve years, and Tennyson was twenty-five — which should not be forgotten. Henry Taylor had attacked the Byron-Shelley school of poetry; and Tennyson, while not disputing much of his general judgment, adds this penetrating comment: “It may be that he (Taylor) does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses, and so we are kept going.”

Matthew Arnold was a fine critic and a poet of high distinction, but I have always felt, if we compare his somewhat severe attitude towards the earlier school with that of Tennyson, that it was the latter who showed the truer insight, the wider sympathy, and the juster appreciation.

Of his Cambridge life, 1828-30, two main points stand out: the grievous want he felt of any real stimulus or inspiration in the instruction provided by the authorities; and, secondly, the remarkable group of distinguished men of his own age with whom his college life was passed. As to the first, the scathing lines written at the time, and published with his express consent in the biography, are more eloquent than any description could be. After naming all the glories of the Colleges — their portals, gardens, libraries, chapels, “doctors, proctors and deans”—”all these,” he cries, “shall not avail you when the Daybeam sports, new-risen over Albion ...” and the poem ends with the reason:

Because your manner sorts

Not with this age wherefrom ye stand apart,

Because the lips of little children preach

Against you, — you that do profess to teach

And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.

On the other hand, this lack (of official wisdom) was more than supplied by the friends with whom he lived — James Spedding, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), Trench, Alford, Brookfield, Blakesley, Thompson (afterwards Master), Merivale, Stephen Spring-Rice, J. Kemble, Heath, C. Buller, Monteith, Tennant, and above all Arthur Hallam. Thirty-five years later Lord Houghton justly said of this group of friends that “for the wealth of their promise they were a body of men such as this University has seldom contained.” To this should be added the special influence of the “Apostles,” to which Society most of these friends belonged, who had organized from the first regular weekly meetings for essays and discussions, where no topic was barred, and speech was absolutely free. The immense stimulus of such discussion to thought, to study, to readiness and power of argument, to widening the range of intellectual interests and literary judgment and appreciation, must be obvious to all. And we must not forget that the years covered by young Tennyson’s residence at Cambridge were precisely the period of the keenest intellectual stir and the stormiest political warfare that preceded the great Reform Bill.

To return to the poetry. Passing over the purely juvenile Poems by two Brothers printed in his eighteenth year, we have, in 1830, the first book of poems which have partially survived the mature and fastidious taste which suppressed so much of the early work. Even here, half the pieces have been withdrawn, and much of the rest re-written: what remains is rather slight — the Isabels and Claribels and Adelines and Lilians and Eleanores, poems which in some critics’ views border on the trivial. Really they should be regarded as experiments in lyric measures: and the careful student will note the signs of the poet’s fine ear and keen eye for nature: but the depths were not sounded.

Two years later came the second volume (1832). Again much has been withdrawn, much re-written: but when in this collection we find “Œnone,” “The Palace of Art,” “A Dream of Fair Women,” and “The Lotos-eaters,” we see that we have the real poet at last.

“The Palace of Art” is an attempt to trace the Nemesis of selfish culture, secluding itself from social human life and duty. After three years of these exclusive delights, the man’s outraged nature — or conscience if you will — reasserts itself in a kind of incipient madness: the soul of him sees visions. Then a weird passage:

But in dark corners of her palace stood

Uncertain shapes; and unawares

On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood,

And horrible nightmares,

And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame,

And, with dim fretted foreheads all,

On corpses three-months-old at noon she came,

That stood against the wall.

The horrors, like Gorgons and Furies of ancient poets, are perhaps a trifle too material; but in the description of the Nemesis there are touches of real power, which at least are impressive and arresting.

“Œnone” is perhaps the most absolutely beautiful of these early poems, and for the triumph of melodious sound, and finished picturesqueness of description, the opening lines are unsurpassed. We should also note that it took more than one edition to bring it to its present perfection of form. It is very well known, but no one will object to hear it again:

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier

Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.

The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,

Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,

And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand

The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down

Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars

The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine

In cataract after cataract to the sea.

Behind the valley topmost Gargarus

Stands up and takes the morning: but in front

The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal

Troas and Ilion’s column’d citadel,

The crown of Troas.

Before I pass on from “Œnone,” I may perhaps add a word or two on Tennyson’s classical poetry generally, and his debt to the great ancient masterpieces.

He was, perhaps, not exactly a scholar in what I may call the narrow professional sense; but in the broadest and deepest and truest sense he was a great scholar. Direct imitations of classical form, even when they show such power and poetry as Swinburne’s “Atalanta” and “Erechtheus,” have always something artificial about them. But in all Tennyson’s classic pieces—”Œnone,” “Ulysses,” “Demeter,” “Tithonus,” the legendary subjects — and in the two historic subjects, “Lucretius” and “Boädicea,” the classical tradition is there with full detail, but by the poet’s art it is transmuted. “Œnone” is epic in form, the rest are brief monodramas; the material is all ancient, and in many subtle ways the spirit; the handling is modern and original. In translations — too few — Tennyson can only be called consummate: his version of one passage of the Iliad (viii. 552) makes all other translations seem second-rate. Let me quote a few lines:

And these all night upon the bridge of war

Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed:

As when in heaven the stars about the moon

Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,

And every height comes out, and jutting peak

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens

Break open to their highest, and all the stars

Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:

So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds,

Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

The passage, let me add, is a crucial test of the power of a translator, for this reason: it is a plain, simple description of the Trojan camp-fires in the darkness, with a simile or comparison of the sight to a clearance of the sky at night and the sudden shining of the multitude of stars. With the infallible instinct of Greek Poetry there is a rapid lift in the style, a sudden glorious phrase ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ, to suggest adequately the magnificent sight of the sudden clearance. It is this effect that is difficult to give in the translation; and it is exactly this splendid climax that Tennyson’s incomparable rendering, “And the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest,” so perfectly conveys.

Again, in the metrical imitations — which are deliberately somewhat in the vein of sport and artifice — Tennyson alone, it seems to me, has exactly done what he intended, and shown what English effects can be produced by a master’s hand, even in these unfamiliar measures.

Of the serious classic pieces one of the most beautiful and moving is “Tithonus.” The tale is familiar: the beautiful youth Tithonus was beloved by the goddess of the Dawn, and her love bestowed immortality on him; but they both forgot to ask for immortal youth. So he grew old: and the pathos of the boon, granted by love at love’s request, thus turning out a curse, is the motive of the tale. He speaks:

Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:

How can my nature longer mix with thine?

Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold

Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet

Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam

Floats up from those dim fields about the homes

Of happy men that have the power to die,

And grassy barrows of the happier dead.

Release me, and restore me to the ground;

Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:

Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;

I earth in earth forget these empty courts,

And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

A great scholar has said that it is one of the most incomparable powers of poetry to make sad things beautiful, and so to go some way towards healing the sorrow in the reader’s heart. He was speaking of Greek Tragedy; but there is, I think, a deep truth in the saying, and it is not confined to that particular form of poetry. And I know no better instance of the truth than the singularly beautiful poem quoted above.

But the classic influences are, of course, not limited to the avowed borrowings from ancient legend. There are constantly lines in Tennyson where the student of ancient poetry recognizes a phrase — a turn — an echo — beautiful in themselves, and giving a special pleasure to the instructed reader; such a line as “When the first matin-song hath wakened loud,” which occurs in the “Address to Memory” — the striking early poem containing the description of his Somersby home — and is itself an exquisitely turned translation from Sophocles’ Electra. So again we have an echo from Homer through Virgil, in the half-playful line, “This way and that dividing the swift mind”; or, again, the vivid simile from Theocritus in the bold description:

And arms on which the standing muscles sloped,

As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,

Running too vehemently to break upon it.

— where the reader with an ear will note the bold metrical variation adding so much to the effect. So again the Poet himself has told us how the famous phrase for the kingfisher, “The sea-blue bird of March,” arose one day when he was haunted by the lovely stanza of Alcman (Greek lyric poet) about the “halcyon” whom he calls “the sea-blue bird of spring.” The fact is that Tennyson had an inborn instinct for the subtle power of language, and for musical sound — in a word, for that insight, finish, feeling for beauty in phrase and thought and thing, and that perfection of form, which, taken all together, we call poetry, and he is, like Virgil and Milton, a true son of the Greeks: and if his open imitations are few, the influence of the springs from which he drank is none the less powerful and pervading.

In 1842 came a carefully revised selection of the earlier books — he was always revising and improving — along with a large number of new poems.

I will pass over the English Idylls, which, in spite of beautiful touches, have never as a whole appealed to me. But, setting these aside, there are a few pieces which I cannot pass by without a word. They are “Love and Duty,” the political poems, and songs. “Morte d’Arthur” I leave over till we reach the Idylls.

“Love and Duty” is a passionate tragedy, the parting of two lovers at the call of duty. Perhaps the high-wrought pathos is a sign of youth; but youth may be a strength as well as a weakness; and the lines are surely of extraordinary beauty and force. I will quote the last passage, for a reason which will appear:

Should my Shadow cross thy thoughts

Too sadly for their peace, remand it thou

For calmer hours to Memory’s darkest hold,

If not to be forgotten — not at once —

Not all forgotten. Should it cross thy dreams,

O might it come like one that looks content,

With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth,

And point thee forward to a distant light,

Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart

And leave thee freër, till thou wake refresh’d

Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown

Full quire, and morning driv’n her plow of pearl

Far furrowing into light the mounded rack,

Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.

Certain critics have found fault with the splendid description of Dawn, as being untrue to nature; a lover in such a crisis, they think, would not be concerned with such images. I regard this suggestion as wholly at fault. The tragedy, the parting, has come to pass: the vision of dawn is a hope for her, now that the new life, apart from each other, has to begin for both of them. If the broken love was all, if they could not look beyond, the parting would have been different — like Lancelot and Guinevere—”Stammering and staring; a madness of farewells.” But here the note is higher. The passion barred from its issue rushes into new channels, and the exalted mood finds its only adequate vent in the rapturous vision of a future dawn, the symbol of his hopes for her, those hopes into which his sacrificed love is translated.

In the political poems we have a new departure. It is easy to idealize freedom, revolution, or war: and the ancients found it easy to compose lyrics on kings, athletes, warriors, or other powerful persons. From the days of Tyrtaeus and Pindar, to Byron, Shelley, and Swinburne, one or other of these themes has been the seed of song. But the praise of ordered liberty, of settled government, of political moderation, is far harder to idealize in poetry. It has been the peculiar aim of Tennyson to be the constitutional, and in this sense the national, poet: and it is his peculiar merit and good fortune to have succeeded in giving eloquent and forcible expression to the ideas suggested by these aims.

I will not quote the poems about “the Falsehood of extremes,” or “the land of just and old renown where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent,” because these poems, terse and forcible summaries as they are, have suffered, like other epigrammatic maxims in verse, from vulgarizing quotation. It is not the Poet’s fault in the least; in fact it is due to his very merits — to the memorable brevity, truth, and point of the phrasing. I will quote another — perhaps the most remarkable — of these political poems, “Love thou thy land.” It is close packed with thought, and must have been especially hard to write, since the Poet’s problem was to express in terse and picturesque and imaginative language what at bottom is philosophic and even prosaic detail. Nevertheless, where the material lends itself at all to imaginative handling we get effects that are impressive and even superb. Take a few lines — I cannot quote at length:

Oh yet, if Nature’s evil star

Drive men in manhood, as in youth,

To follow flying steps of Truth

Across the brazen bridge of war —

If New and Old, disastrous feud,

Must ever shock, like armed foes,

And this be true, till Time shall close,

That Principles are rain’d in blood;

Not yet the wise of heart would cease

To hold his hope thro’ shame and guilt,

But with his hand against the hilt,

Would pace the troubled land, like Peace;

Not less, tho’ dogs of Faction bay,

Would serve his kind in deed and word,

Certain, if knowledge bring the sword,

That knowledge takes the sword away.

The last couplet seems to me — where all is powerful and imaginative — to be a master-stroke of terse and pointed expression. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that it sums up human history in regard to one point — namely, the disturbing and even desolating effect of the new Political Idea, until its triumph comes, bringing a higher and more stable adjustment, and a peace more righteous and secure.

Far more widely known than these didactic poems, rich as they are in poetry and thought, are the patriotic odes — the three greatest being the poems on the Duke of Wellington, the “Revenge,” and Lucknow.

The ode on the Duke is a noble commemoration-poem, grave and stately and solemn — a worthy expression of “the mourning of a mighty nation” with a musical and dignified sorrow — a terse and vivid reference to the Duke’s exploits — a fine imaginative passage where he pictures the dead Nelson asking who the newcomer is, and the stately answer — a striking tribute to the simple and noble character of the dead hero — and then this:

A people’s voice! we are a people yet.

Tho’ all men else their nobler dreams forget,

Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers;

Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set

His Briton in blown seas and storming showers...

O Statesmen, guard us, guard the eye, the soul,

Of Europe, keep our noble England whole,

And save the one true seed of freedom sown

Betwixt a people and their ancient throne...

For, saving that, ye help to save mankind

Till public wrong be crumbled into dust,

And drill the raw world for the march of mind,

Till crowds at length be sane and crowns be just.

Again, for the judgment of the poem, the date is important. It was written only four years after the European earthquake of 1848, and only one year after the Coup d’État. The allusions are not mere commonplaces: they deal with live issues. It is not too much to say that in the great ode Tennyson had a subject after his own heart, and that he has done it magnificent justice.

Of the “Revenge” I will quote one passage, because it contains what always strikes me as the most wonderful effect of sound in poetry to be found anywhere. The whole poem, I may observe, is full of novel and effective handling of metre: but this is the most remarkable. It occurs in the description of the rising storm in which the gallant little ship went down:

And they mann’d the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,

And away she sail’d with her loss, and long’d for her own;

When a wind from the lands they had ruin’d awoke from sleep,

And the water began to heave, and the weather to moan,

And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,

And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,

Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,

And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter’d navy of Spain,

And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags

To be lost evermore in the main.

Lastly, in the 1842 volume, there was a little song without a title, which will certainly live as long as the English language.

In 1833, nine years before the volume appeared, had died abroad suddenly the rarely-gifted youth who was bound to Tennyson by the double tie of being his best-loved friend and the betrothed of his sister. The body had been brought home for burial by the sea at a little place called Clevedon.

This is the song:

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman’s boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.

There is something in the magical expression of deep love and sorrow in these lines — with the swift and vivid touches of scenery, sympathetic and suggestive — which we can only compare to the few greatest outbursts of passionate regret in poetry.

Five years later came “The Princess” (1847). The idea — a bold design — was to treat, by poetic and half-playful narrative, the comparative intellectual and moral natures of men and women, and the right method of education. The Poet’s views may perhaps to-day seem somewhat old-fashioned, the truths that he suggests or enunciates, in very finished and beautiful language, are controversial, and suffer from the inevitable failing of such writing, viz., that the issues of the strife have changed: experience has shown the forecasts, the fears, and the prophetic satire to be misplaced: and what seemed important truths have turned out to be prejudices or irrelevant platitudes.

The one thing that is consummate in “The Princess” is the handful of little songs that come as interludes between the acts. They are so well known that they need no quotation: their titles will suffice: “As through the land at eve we went,” “Sweet and low,” “The splendour falls,” “Tears, idle tears,” “Thy voice is heard thro’ rolling drums,” “Home they brought her warrior dead,” “Ask me no more.”

The extraordinary effect of these songs is not due only to their marvellous poetic force and finish and variety, but perhaps even more to the illuminating and pointed contrast between the true and deep and permanent realities of human experience — life, death, love, joy, and sorrow — each of which is touched in turn in these exquisite little pictures, and on the other hand the fantastic unreality (in the Poet’s view) of the Princess’s ideals and experiment.

If I must quote one passage, let it be abridged from the shepherd’s song which the Princess reads:

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:

·······

For Love is of the valley, come thou down

And find him; by the happy threshold, he,

Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,

Or red with spirted purple of the vats,

Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk

With Death and Morning on the silver horns...

But follow; let the torrent dance thee down

To find him in the valley; let the wild

Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave

The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill

Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,

That like a broken purpose waste in air:

So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales

Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth

Arise to thee; the children call, and I

Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,

Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmuring of innumerable bees.

This is the real idyll, with its central note of love, and wonderful beauty of sound, and vivid vision of every detail of Nature’s sights and life. It suggests a world where all is fresh and sweet, and beautiful and interesting, and simple and wholesome and harmonious.

The year 1850 was marked by three great events in the personal history of Tennyson: his marriage, the publication of his greatest work, “In Memoriam,” and his acceptance of the laureate crown of poetry in succession to Wordsworth, who died in the spring.

When I say that “In Memoriam” is Tennyson’s greatest work, I am of course aware that it is only a personal opinion on a disputable point. But I incline to think that most lovers of poetry would agree that “In Memoriam” is the one of all the Poet’s works the loss of which would be the greatest and most irreparable to poetry.

In the grave and solemn stanzas with which the poem opens, he calls the songs that follow wild and wandering cries, confusions of a wasted youth. But in truth they are the expression of the deepest and most heartfelt sorrow: the most musical and imaginative outpouring of every mood, and every trouble, of a noble love and regret: the cries of a soul stricken with doubt born of anguish, and darkened with shadows of disbelief and despair: the deeper brooding over the eternal problems of life, thought, knowledge, religion: the gradual groping toward a faith rather divined than proved, and slowly passing through storm into peace.

The poem took seventeen years to write, and when it appeared the Poet was at the summit of his great powers. His instinct chose a metre at once strong, simple, fresh, flexible, and grave, and noble — equally adapted to every mood, every form of thought or feeling — the passionate, the meditative, the solemn, the imaginative — for description, argument, aspiration, even for prayer. The tone varies: there are lighter and deeper touches: but it is hardly too much to say, there is not an insignificant stanza, nor a jarring note, from beginning to end.

In a poem where all is so familiar — which has meant and means so much to all who care for poetry — it is difficult to quote. I will take a few stanzas, so chosen, if possible, as to show somewhat of the variety, the range, the subtlety, the charm, and the power of this great work.

He goes to the house in London where the dead friend lived: the gloom without typifies and harmonizes with the darkness of his sorrowful thoughts.

Dark house, by which once more I stand

Here in the long unlovely street:

Doors, where my heart was wont to beat

So quickly, waiting for a hand, —

A hand that can be clasped no more —

Behold me — for I cannot sleep —

And like a guilty thing I creep

At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away

The noise of life begins again,

And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

One of the most important motives concerns the doubts raised by the new truths which science was beginning to teach, almost seeming to make in a sense a new heaven and a new earth. The old simple beliefs seemed to the Poet threatened — these misgivings are evil dreams: Nature seems to say:

... A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

Thou makest thine appeal to me;

I bring to life, I bring to death;

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more...

Then the Poet breaks out:

And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer —

Who trusted God was love indeed,

And love Creation’s final law —

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?...

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

He will not accept the suggestions which seem to empty human life of its deepest meanings. There must be some other solution.

One more quotation of a different kind — the common sad thought, never so beautifully expressed, of the places we have loved when bereft of our daily loving care — then passing into other hands and forgetting us, and becoming at last to others what they have been to us.

It is in these common universal human themes that Tennyson with his exquisite musical touch, and sympathy, and unerring choice of significant detail, reaches the heart of every reader.

Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway,

The tender blossom flutter down,

Unloved, that beech will gather brown,

This maple burn itself away:

Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair,

Ray round with flames her disk of seed,

And many a rose-carnation feed

With summer spice the humming air:

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain,

At noon or when the lesser wain

Is twisting round the polar star.

(Omitting a stanza.)

Till from the garden and the wild

A fresh association blow,

And year by year the landscape grow

Familiar to the stranger’s child.

As year by year the labourer tills

His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,

And year by year our memory fades

From all the circle of the hills.

I can quote no more.

The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith — in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has passed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and insight, and scope. The soul has grown and strengthened, we may almost say.

In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings, our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression — terse, melodious, inspiring, deeply suggestive — in a word, we feel the magic of poetry.

I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many years, “The Idylls of the King.” It is a series — in blank verse, always melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory’s prose epic.

I must content myself with two brief references.

The first idyll, “Gareth and Lynette,” is not in itself one of the most interesting — dealing chiefly as it does with the picture of the eager boy, anxious to be one of Arthur’s knights, who serves a year in menial place as a test of his obedience: but there is one passage which ought never to be omitted in speaking of Tennyson, viz. the answer of the seer when the boys ask him if the castle is enchanted.

The seer answers ironically, yet with a deep meaning, that it is enchanted:

For there is nothing in it as it seems

Saving the King; tho’ some there be that hold

The King a shadow, and the city real.

Then he tells them about the vows: which if they fear to take, he warns them

Pass not beneath this gateway, but abide

Without, among the cattle of the field,

For an ye hear a music, like enow

They are building still, seeing the city is built

To music, therefore never built at all,

And therefore built for ever.

Beneath the strangely beautiful surface meaning of these lines there lies the deep allegoric meaning that often what seems visionary is in truth a spiritual and eternal reality. It brings to mind the wonderful lines of Browning (in “Abt Vogler”):

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

The passion that left the earth to lose itself in the sky,

Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;

Enough that he heard it once, we shall hear it by and by.

The other point concerns the end of the poem. The last section is the Passing of Arthur; the old fragment “Morte d’Arthur” enlarged. One notable addition occurs at the very end.

In the earlier version of the fragment, after Arthur had passed away on the dark lake, with him the last hope also disappears.

We are only told:

Long stood Sir Bedivere,

Revolving many memories, till the hull

Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,

And on the mere the wailing died away.

In the fragment the end was tragic: the noble attempt failed; the hero and inspirer passed away, his aim defeated, his comrades slain or scattered, his life and efforts vain.

But in the final shape comes a new and very significant end:

Then from the dawn it seem’d there came, but faint,

As from beyond the limit of the world,

Like the last echo born of a great cry,

Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice,

Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb

Ev’n to the highest he could climb — and saw,

Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King

Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go

From less to less, and vanish into light.

And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.

We feel, as we are meant to feel, that though the death of a noble soul, after unequal war with ill, is deeply sad — fitly pictured with sorrowful sounds and darkness of night — yet the great spirit cannot wholly die: the night breaks into a new day; and the day will be brighter for those who are left, because of the efforts and memories of the leader who is no more.

Tennyson is without doubt, from first to last, one of the great poetic artists. He is not often an inspired singer like Shelley, but he has other gifts which Shelley lacked — a self-restraint, an artistic finish, a fine and mature taste, a deep reverence for the past, a pervading sympathy with the broad currents of the best thought and feeling of the time. Sometimes this is (as we have seen) a weakness, but it is also the source of his greatest strength. He has not, like Wordsworth, given us a new insight, what I may almost call a new religion: but he has a wider range than Wordsworth, and a surer poetic touch. Wordsworth may be the greater teacher; for many of us he has opened a new world: he has touched the deepest springs of our nature. But Tennyson has left us gifts hardly less rare and precious. He has refined, enriched, beautified, in some sense almost remade our poetic language; he has shown that the classic eighteenth-century finish is not incompatible with the nineteenth-century deeper and wider thought: and, in a word, he has inwoven the golden thread of poetry with the main texture of the life, knowledge, feeling, experience, and ideals of the years whereof we are all alike inheritors.

TENNYSON: HIS LIFE AND WORK by the Right Hon. Sir Alfred Lyall, G.C.B.

The biography of a great poet has seldom been so written as to enhance his reputation with the world at large. It is almost always the highest artist whose individuality, so to speak, is least discernible in his work, and who, like some divinity, is at his best when his mind and moods, his lofty purpose and his attitude toward the problems of life, are revealed only through the medium which he has chosen for revealing them to mankind. To lay bare the human side of a poet, to retail his domestic history, and to dwell upon his private relations with friends or family, will always interest the public enormously; but for himself it is often a perilous ordeal. The man of restless erratic genius, cut off in his prime like Byron or Shelley, leaves behind him a confession of faults and follies, while one who has lived long takes the risk of intellectual decline; or else, like Coleridge, Landor, and even Scott, he may in other ways suffer loss of dignity by the posthumous record of failings or mistakes. It is a rare coincidence that in this nineteenth century two poets of the first rank — Wordsworth and Tennyson — should each have passed the natural limit of fourscore years, steadily extending their reputation without material loss of their power, and completely fulfilling the ideal of a life devoted to their beautiful art, free alike from adventures and eccentricities, tranquil, blameless, and nobly dignified.

Such is the life which has been described to us in the Memoir of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by his son. In preparing it he had the singular advantage of very close and uninterrupted association for many years with his father, and of thorough acquaintance with his wishes and feelings in regard to the inevitable biography. In a brief preface, he touches, not without emotion, upon the aims and limitations of the task which it had become his duty to undertake.

“For my part,” he says, “I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography.... However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment; but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies.”

Lord Tennyson has given us a remarkable chronicle of his father’s life from youth to age, illustrated by correspondence that is always interesting and occasionally of supreme value, by anecdotes and reminiscences, by characteristic thoughts and pithy observations — the outcome of the Poet’s reflection, consummate literary judgment, and constant intercourse with the best contemporary intellects. He has, moreover, so arranged the narrative as to show the rapid expansion of Tennyson’s strong, inborn poetic instinct, with the impressions and influences which moulded its development, maturing and perfecting his marvellous powers of artistic execution.

Alfred Tennyson was born in the pastoral village of Somersby, amid the Lincolnshire wolds; and he spent many holidays on the coast at Mablethorpe, where he acquired that passion for the sea which has possessed so many poets. The atmosphere of a public school favours active emulation and discipline for the outer world; but to a boy of sensitive and imaginative temperament it is apt to be uncongenial, so we need not be sorry that Tennyson was spared the experience. At first, like most men of his temperament who go straight from private tuition to a University, he felt solitary and depressed—”the country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so matter-of-fact.” But there was about him a distinction in mind and body that soon marked him out among his fellows (“a kind of Hyperion,” writes FitzGerald), uniting strength with refinement, showing much insight into character, with the faculty of brief and pointed sallies: “We were looking one day at the portrait of an elderly politician in bland family aspect. A. T. (with his eyeglass): It looks rather like a retired panther. So true.”

He was an early member of the Society yclept the Apostles, which included many eager and brilliant spirits, whose debates were upon political reform, the bettering of the people’s condition, upon morals, religion, and those wider and more liberal views of social needs that were foremost at a period when the new forces were just mustering for attack upon the old entrenchment of Church and State. Edward FitzGerald’s notes and Tennyson’s own later recollections are drawn upon in this book for lively illustrations of the sayings and doings of this notable group of friends, and for glimpses of their manner of life at Cambridge. Here he lived in the choice society of that day, and formed, among other friendships, an affectionate attachment to Arthur Hallam, who afterwards became engaged to his sister, and in whose memory the famous poem was written. Hallam seems to have been one of those men whose extraordinary promise and early death invest their brief and brilliant career with a kind of romance, explaining and almost justifying the pagan notions of Fate and divine envy.

In June 1829 Tennyson scored his first triumph by the prize poem on Timbuctoo, which, as he said many years afterwards, won the medal to his utter astonishment, for it was an old poem on Armageddon, adapted to Central Africa “by a little alteration of the beginning and the end.” Arthur Hallam wrote of it on September 2, 1829: “The splendid imaginative power which pervades it will be seen through all hindrances. I consider Tennyson as promising fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century” — a remarkably far-reaching prophecy to have been built upon so slender a foundation. Out of his “horror of publicity,” as he said, he committed it to Merivale for declamation in the Senate House. In 1830 appeared Tennyson’s first volume of poems, upon which Arthur Hallam again wrote, in a review, that “the features of original genius are strongly and clearly marked”; while on the other hand, Coleridge passed upon it the well-known criticism that “he has begun to write verses without very well knowing what metre is”; and Christopher North handled it with a touch of good-natured ridicule. Then followed, in 1832, a fresh issue, including that magnificent allegory, the “Palace of Art”; with other poems whose very blemishes signified exuberant strength. James Montgomery’s observation of him at this stage is in the main true as a standing test of latent potency in beginners. “He has very wealthy and luxurious thought and great beauty of expression, and is a poet. But there is plenty of room for improvement, and I would have it so. Your trim, correct young writers rarely turn out well; a young poet should have a great deal which he can afford to throw away as he gets older.” The judgment was sound, for after a silent interval of ten years, during which the Poet was sedulously husbanding and cultivating his powers, the full-orbed splendour of his genius shone out in the two volumes of 1842.

“This decade,” writes his biographer, “wrought a marvellous abatement of my father’s real fault,” which was undoubtedly “the tendency, arising from the fulness of mind which had not yet learned to master its resources freely, to overcrowd his composition with imagery, to which may be added over-indulgence in the luxuries of the senses.” By this and by other extracts from contemporary criticism given in the Memoir its readers may survey and measure the Poet’s rapid development of mind and methods, the expansion of his range of thoughts, his increasing command over the musical instrument, and the admirable vigour and beauty which his composition was now disclosing. He had the singular advantage, rarely enjoyed so early in a poetic career, of being surrounded by enthusiastic friends who were also very competent art-critics, and whose unanimous verdict must have given him heart and confidence; so that the few spurts of cold water from professional reviewers troubled him very little. The darts thrown by such enemies might hardly reach or wound him — πρὶν γὰρ περιβῆσαν ἄριστοι — the two Hallams, James Spedding, Edward FitzGerald, the two Lushingtons, Blakesley, and Julius Hare rallied round him enthusiastically. Hartley Coleridge met Tennyson in 1835, and, “after the fourth bottom of gin,” deliberately thanked Heaven for having brought them acquainted. Wordsworth, who had at first been slow to appreciate, having afterwards listened to two poems recited by Aubrey de Vere, did “acknowledge that they were very noble in thought, with a diction singularly stately.” Even Carlyle, who had implored the Poet to stick to prose, was vanquished, and wrote (1842) a letter so vividly characteristic as to justify a long quotation:

Dear Tennyson — Wherever this find you, may it find you well, may it come as a friendly greeting to you. I have just been reading your Poems; I have read certain of them over again, and mean to read them over and over till they become my poems; this fact, with the inferences that lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it to myself, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew what my relation has been to the thing call’d English “Poetry” for many years back, you would think such a fact almost surprising! Truly it is long since in any English Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real man’s heart as I do in this same.

I know you cannot read German: the more interesting is it to trace in your “Summer Oak” a beautiful kindred to something that is best in Goethe; I mean his “Müllerin” (Miller’s daughter) chiefly, with whom the very Mill-dam gets in love; though she proves a flirt after all, and the thing ends in satirical lines! Very strangely, too, in the “Vision of Sin” I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not babble, this is speech; true deposition of a volunteer witness. And so I say let us all rejoice somewhat. And so let us all smite rhythmically, all in concert, “the sounding furrows,” and sail forward with new cheer “beyond the sunset” whither we are bound.

The Memoir contains some valuable reminiscences of this period, contributed after Tennyson’s death by his personal friends, which incidentally throw backward a light upon the literary society of that day. Mr. Aubrey de Vere describes a meeting between Tennyson and Wordsworth; and relates also, subsequently and separately, a conversation with Tennyson, who was enthusiastic over the songs of Burns: “You forget, for their sake, those stupid things, his serious pieces.” The same day Mr. de Vere met Wordsworth, who “praised Burns even more vehemently than Tennyson had done ...” but ended, “of course I refer to his serious efforts, those foolish little amatory songs of his one has to forget.”

But in addition to contemporary criticism, written or spoken, and to the reminiscences, the biography gives us also several unpublished poems and fragmentary verses belonging to this period, with the original readings of other pieces that were altered before publication. It is in these materials, beyond others, that we can observe the forming and maturing of his style, the fastidious taste which dictated his rejection of work that either did not satisfy the highest standard as a whole, or else marred a poem’s symmetrical proportion by superfluity, over-weight, or the undue predominance of some note in the general harmony. One may regret that some fine stanzas or exquisite lines should have been thus expunged, as, for example, those beginning:

Thou may’st remember what I said.

Yet we believe the impartial critic will confirm in every instance the decision. “Anacaona,” written at Cambridge, was never published, because “the natural history and the rhymes did not satisfy” Tennyson; it is full of tropical warmth and ardour, with a fine rhythmic beat, but it is certainly below high-water mark. And the same must be said of the “Song of the Three Sisters,” published and afterwards suppressed, though the blank verse of its prelude has undoubted quality. He acted, as we can see, inexorably upon his own rule that “the artist is known by his self-limitation”; feeling certain, as he once said, that “if I meant to make any mark in the world it must be by shortness, for the men before me had been so diffuse.” Only the concise and perfect work, he thought, would last; and “hundreds of lines were blown up the chimney with his pipe smoke, or were written down and thrown into the fire as not being perfect enough.” Yet all his austere resolution must have been needed for condemning some of the fine verses that were struck out of the “Palace of Art,” merely to give the poem even balance, and trim it like a boat. Very few poems could have spared or borne the excisions from the “Dream of Fair Women”; though here and there the didactic or scientific note is slightly prominent, as in the following stanza:

All nature widens upward. Evermore

The simpler essence lower lies,

More complex is more perfect, owning more

Discourse, more widely wise.

At any rate the preservation of these unpublished verses adds much to the value of the biography; and we may rank Tennyson among the very few poets whose reputation has rather gained than suffered by the posthumous appearance of pieces that the writer had deliberately withdrawn or withheld.

Of Tennyson’s own literary opinions one or two specimens, belonging to this time, may be given.

“Byron and Shelley, however mistaken they were, did yet give the world another heart and new pulses; and so we are kept going” — a just tribute to their fiery lyrical energy, which did much to clear insular prejudice from the souls of a masculine generation. “Lycidas” he held to be the test of any reader’s poetic instinct; and “Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us all, though his blank verse lacked originality of movement.” It is true that Keats, whose full metrical skill was never developed, may have imitated the Miltonic construction; yet after Milton he was the finest composer up to Tennyson’s day. And the first hundred lines of “Hyperion” have no slight affinity, in colouring and cadence, to the Tennysonian blank verse. For indeed it was Keats who, as Tennyson’s forerunner, passed on to him the gift of intense romantic susceptibility to the influences of Nature, the “dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching back into childhood.” But Tennyson’s art inclined more toward the picturesque, toward using words, as a painter uses his brush, for producing the impression of a scene’s true outline and colour; his work shows the realistic feeling of a later day, which delights in precision of details. In one of his letters he mentions that there was a time when he was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike him as a picture, just as an artist would take rough sketches. The subjoined fragment, written on revisiting Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, contains the quintessence of his descriptive style; the last three lines are sheer landscape painting.

Mablethorpe

Here often when a child I lay reclined,

I took delight in this fair land and free;

Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,

And here the Grecian ships all seemed to be.

And here again I come, and only find

The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,

Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary winds,

Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.

More frequently, however, he employed his wonderful image-making power to illustrate symbolically some mental state or emotion, availing himself of the mysterious relation between man and his environment, whereby the outer inanimate world is felt to be the resemblance and reflection of human moods. So in the “Palace of Art” the desolate soul is likened to

A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand,

Left on the shore; that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land

Their moon-led waters white.

And there are passages in the extracts given from his letters written to Miss Emily Sellwood, during the long engagement that preceded their marriage, which indicate the bent of his mind toward philosophic quietism, with frequent signs of that half-veiled fellow-feeling with natural things, that sense of life in all sound and motion, whereby poetry is drawn upward, by degrees and almost unconsciously, into the region of the “Higher Pantheism.” Nor has any English poet availed himself more skilfully of a language that is peculiarly rich in metaphors, consisting of words which still so far retain their original meaning as to suggest a picture while they convey a thought.

It is partly due to these qualities of mind and style that no chapter in this book, which mingles grave with gay very attractively, contains matter of higher biographical interest than that which is headed “In Memoriam.” For it is in this noble poem, on the whole Tennyson’s masterpiece, that he is stirred by his own passionate grief to dwell on the contrast between irremediable human suffering and the calm aspect of Nature, between the short and sorrowful days of man and the long procession of ages. From the doubts and perplexities, the tendency to lose heart, engendered by a sense of forces that are unceasing and relentless, he finds his ultimate escape in the spirit of trust in the Powers invisible, and in the persuasion that God and Nature cannot be at strife. In a letter contributed to this Memoir Professor Henry Sidgwick has described the impression produced on him and others of his time by this poem, showing how it struck in, so to speak, upon their religious debates at a moment of conflicting tendencies and great uncertainty of direction, giving intensity of expression to the dominant feeling, and wider range to the prevailing thought:

The most important influence of “In Memoriam” on my thought, apart from its poetic charm as an expression of personal emotion, opened in a region, if I may so say, deeper down than the difference between Theism and Christianity: it lay in the unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment, shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity. And this influence, I find, has increased rather than diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues between Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually more prominent. In the sixties I should say that these deeper issues were somewhat obscured by the discussions on Christian dogma and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. ... During these years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought in the trammels of a historical religion; and perhaps what we sympathized with most in “In Memoriam” at this time, apart from the personal feeling, was the defence of “honest doubt,” the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory poem, and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New Year.... Well, the years pass, the struggle with what Carlyle used to call “Hebrew old clothes” is over, Freedom is won, and what does Freedom bring us to? It brings us face to face with atheistic science; the faith in God and Immortality, which we had been struggling to clear from superstition, suddenly seems to be in the air; and in seeking for a firm basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the “fight with death” which “In Memoriam” so powerfully presents.

To many readers the whole letter will seem to render fitly their feeling of the pathetic intensity with which the everlasting problems of love and death, of human doubts and destinies, are set forth in “In Memoriam.” It will also remind them of the limitations, the inevitable inconclusiveness, of a poem which deals emotionally with questions that foil the deepest philosophers. The profound impression that was immediately produced by these exquisitely musical meditations may be ascribed, we think, to their sympathetic association with the peculiar spiritual needs and intellectual dilemmas of the time. It may be affirmed, as a general proposition, that up to about 1840, and for some years later, the majority among Englishmen of thought and culture were content to take morality as the chief test of religious truth, were disposed to hold that the essential principles of religion were best stated in the language of ethics. With this rational theology the pretensions of Science, which undertook to preserve and even to strengthen the moral basis, were not incompatible. But about this time came a spiritual awakening; and just then Tennyson came forward to insist, with poetic force and fervour, that the triumphant advance of Science was placing in jeopardy not merely the formal outworks but the central dogma of Christianity, which is the belief in a future life, in the soul’s conscious immortality. Is man subject to the general law of unending mutability? and is he after all but the highest and latest type, to be made and broken like a thousand others, mere clay under the moulding hands that are darkly visible in the processes of Nature? The Poet transfigured these obstinate questionings into the vision of an ever-breaking shore

That tumbled in a godless sea.

He turned our ears to hear the sound of streams that, swift or slow,

Draw down Æonian hills, and sow

The dust of continents to be —

and he was haunted by the misgiving that man also might be a mere atom in an ever-changing universe. Yet after long striving with doubts and fears, after having “fought with death,” he resolves that we cannot be “wholly brain, magnetic mockeries,” not only cunning casts in clays:

Let Science prove we are, and then

What matters Science unto men,

At least to me? I would not stay.

We think that such passages as these gave emphasis to the gathering alarm, and that many a startled inquirer, daunted by dim uncertainties, recoiled from the abyss that seemed to open at his feet, and made his peace, on such terms as consoled him, with Theology. Not that Tennyson himself retreated, or took refuge behind dogmatic entrenchments. On the contrary, he stood his ground and trod under foot the terrors of Acheron; relying on “the God who ever lives and loves.” But since not every one can be satisfied with subjective faith or lofty intuitions, we believe that the note of distress and warning sounded by “In Memoriam” startled more minds than were soothed by its comforting conclusions. If this be so, this utterance of the poet, standing prophet-like at the parting of the ways, moved men diversely. It strengthened the impulse to go onward trustfully; but it may also be counted among the indirect influences which combined to promote that notable reaction toward the sacramental and mysterious side of religion, toward positive faith as the safeguard of morals, which has been the outcome of the great Anglican revival set on foot by the Oxford Movement seventy years ago.

In June 1850, the month which saw “In Memoriam” published, Tennyson married Miss Sellwood. “The wedding was of the quietest, even the cake and the dresses arriving too late.” From this union came unbroken happiness during forty-two years; for his wife brought into the partnership a rich and rare treasure of aid, sympathy, and intellectual appreciation. Her son pays his tribute to her memory in an admirable passage, of which the greater part is here extracted:

And let me say here — although, as a son, I cannot allow myself full utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and “very woman of very woman,” “such a wife” and true helpmate she proved herself. It was she who became my father’s adviser in literary matters. “I am proud of her intellect,” he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her, and to no one else, he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her “tender spiritual nature” and instinctive nobility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor.... By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by “her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,” she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his depression and of his sorrow; and to her he wrote two of the most beautiful of his shorter lyrics—”Dear, near and true,” and the dedicatory lines which prefaced his last volume, “The Death of Œnone.”

In November 1850, after Wordsworth’s death, the Laureateship was offered to Tennyson. We have good authority for stating, though not from this Memoir, that Lord John Russell submitted to the Queen the four names of Professor Wilson, Henry Taylor, Sheridan Knowles, and, last on the list, Tennyson. The Prince Consort’s admiration of “In Memoriam” determined Her Majesty’s choice, which might seem easy enough to those who measure the four candidates by the standard of to-day. His accession to office brought down upon Tennyson, among other honoraria, “such shoals of poems that I am almost crazed with them; the two hundred million poets of Great Britain deluge me daily. Truly the Laureateship is no sinecure.” For the inevitable levee he accepted, not without disquietude over the nether garment, the loan of a Court suit from his ancient brother in song, Rogers, who had declined the laurels on the plea of age. Soon afterward he departed with his wife for Italy. Under the title of “The Daisy” he has commemorated this journey in stanzas of consummate metrical form, with their beautiful anapæstic ripple in each fourth line, to be studied by all who would understand the quantitative value (not merely accentual) and rhythmic effects of English syllables. On returning, they met the Brownings at Paris. Then, in 1852, he bought Farringford in the Isle of Wight, the Poet’s favourite habitation ever afterward, within sight of the sea and within sound of its rough weather, with its lawns, spreading trees, and meadows under the lee of the chalk downs, that have been frequently sketched into his verse, and will long be identified with his presence. There he worked at “Maud,” morning and evening, sitting in his hard, high-backed wooden chair in his little room at the top of the house, smoking the “sacred pipes” during certain half-hours of strict seclusion, when his best thoughts came to him.

From the final edition in 1851 of “In Memoriam” to “Maud” in 1853, which Lowell rather affectedly called the antiphonal voice of the earlier poem, the change of theme, tone, and manner was certainly great; and the public seems to have been taken by surprise. The transition was from lamentation to love-making; from stanzas swaying slow, like a dirge, within their uniform compass, to an abundant variety of metrical movement, quickened by frequent use of the anapæstic measure. The general reader was puzzled and inclined to ridicule what he failed at once to understand; the ordinary reviewer was either loftily contemptuous or indulged in puns and parodies; the higher criticism was divided; but Henry Taylor, Ruskin, Jowett, and the Brownings spoke without hesitation of the work’s great merits. Mr. Gladstone, whose judgment had been at first adverse, recanted, twenty years later, in a letter that was published in his Gleanings, and that now reappears in this Memoir:

“Whether it is to be desired,” he wrote, “that a poem should require from common men a good deal of effort in order to comprehend it; whether all that is put in the mouth of the Soliloquist in ‘Maud’ is within the lines of poetical verisimilitude; whether this poem has the full moral equilibrium which is so marked a characteristic of the sister-works, are questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have neither done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of detail, nor to its great lyrical and metrical power. And, what is worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation between particular passages in the poem and its general scope.”

Jowett wrote:

No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature. No modern poem contains more lines that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse of Shakespeare in which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height.

On the other hand, an anonymous letter, which Tennyson enjoyed repeating, ran thus:

Sir — I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest you. You beast! So you’ve taken to imitating Longfellow.

Yours in aversion,

“ — —”

“I shall never forget,” his son writes,

Tennyson’s last reading of “Maud,” on August 24, 1892. He was sitting in his high-backed chair, fronting a southern window which looks over the groves and yellow cornfields of Sussex toward the long line of South Downs that stretches from Arundel to Hastings (his high-domed Rembrandt-like head outlined against the sunset-clouds seen through the western window). His voice, low and calm in everyday life, capable of delicate and manifold inflection, but with “organ tones” of great power and range, thoroughly brought out the drama of the poem.

“The peculiarity of this poem,” Tennyson said, “is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters”; and the effect of his own recitation was to set this conception in clear relief by showing the connexion and significance of the linked monodies, combined with a vivid musical rendering of a pathetic love-story. The emotional intensity rises by degrees to the rapture of meeting with Maud in the garden, falls suddenly to the depth of blank despair, and revives in an atmosphere of energetic, warlike activity — the precursor of world-wide peace.

The poem, in fact, strikes all the highest lyrical chords, and we are disposed to think that all of them are by no means touched with equal skill. Possibly, the sustained and perfect execution of such a varied composition would be too arduous a task for any artist. It is difficult for the reader to adjust his mind to the changes of mood and motive which succeed each other rapidly, and often abruptly, within the compass of so short a piece; ranging from the almost melodramatic horror of the opening stanzas to the passionate and joyous melodies of the middle part; sinking into a wild wailing, and closing with the trumpet sounds of war. Yet every one will now acknowledge that some passages in “Maud” are immortal, and that the English language contains none more beautiful than the very best of them.

The letters in the Memoir are selected from upwards of forty thousand, and at this period we have many of singular interest. One from Mrs. Vyner, a stranger, touched the Poet deeply. Ruskin writes with reserve, as well he might, about the edition of the poems illustrated by Rossetti, Millais, and others:

I believe, in fact, that good pictures never can be; they are always another poem, subordinate, but wholly different from the poet’s conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same verses may affect various minds. But these woodcuts will be of much use in making people think and puzzle a little; art was getting quite a matter of form in book illustrations, and it does not so much matter whether any given vignette is right or not, as whether it contains thought or not, still more whether it contains any kind of plain facts. If people have no sympathy with St. Agnes, or if people, as soon as they get a distinct idea of a living girl who probably got scolded for dropping her candle-wax about the convent-stairs, and caught cold by looking too long out of the window in her bedgown, feel no true sympathy with her, they can have no sympathy in them.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning sends a warm-hearted letter; and Jowett, who enjoyed giving advice, evidently sat him down readily to reply when Mrs. Tennyson asked whether he could suggest any subjects for poetry:

I often fancy that the critical form of modern literature is like the rhetorical one which overlaid ancient literature, and will be regarded as that is, at its true worth in after times. One drop of natural feeling in poetry, or the true statement of a single new fact, is already felt to be of more value than all the critics put together.

Four “Idylls” came out in 1859, to be rapidly and largely taken up by the English public, with many congratulations from personal friends. Thackeray sends, after reading them, a letter full of his characteristic humour and cordiality:

“The landlord” — at Folkestone—”gave two bottles of his claret, and I think I drank the most, and here I have been lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful ‘Idylls’; my thoughts being turned to you; and what could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so happy?”

The Duke of Argyll wrote that Macaulay had been delighted with it, whereupon the Poet responds to his Grace somewhat caustically:

My dear Duke — Doubtless Macaulay’s good opinion is worth having, and I am grateful to you for letting me know it, but this time I intend to be thick-skinned; nay, I scarcely believe that I should ever feel very deeply the pen-punctures of those parasitic animalcules of the press, if they kept themselves to what I write, and did not glance spitefully and personally at myself. I hate spite.

Ruskin, on the other hand, is but half pleased; could not quite make up his mind about that “increased quietness of style”; feels “the art and finish in these poems a little more than I like”; wishes that the book’s nobleness and tenderness had been independent of a romantic condition of externals; and suggests that “so great power ought not to be spent on visions of things past, but on the living present.”

These latter sentences touch upon, or at least indicate, a line of criticism upon the general conception of the “Idylls,” as seen in their treatment of the Arthurian legend, with which, although it may appear inadequate, some of us are not indisposed to agree. Romanticism has been defined, half seriously, as the art of presenting to a people the literary works which can give the greatest imaginative pleasure in the actual state of their habits and beliefs. The “Idylls” adapted the mythical tales of the Round Table to the very highest standard of æsthetic taste, intellectual refinement, and moral delicacy prevailing in cultivated English society. And by that society they were very cordially appreciated. Undoubtedly the figure of Arthur — representing a stainless mirror of chivalry, a warrior king endowed with the qualities of patriotic self-devotion, clemency, generosity, and noble trustfulness, yet betrayed by his wife and his familiar friend, and dying in a lost fight against treacherous rebels — did present a lofty ideal that might well affect a gravely emotional people. Moreover, the poem is a splendidly illuminated Morality, unfolding scenes and figures that illustrate heroic virtues and human frailties, gallantry, chivalric enterprise, domestic perfidy, chaste virginal loves, and subtle amorous enchantments. It abounds also in descriptive passages which attest the close attention of the Poet’s eye and ear to natural sights and sounds, and his supreme art of fashioning his verse to their colours and echoes. In short, to quote from the biography,

he has made the old legends his own, restored the idealism, and infused into them a spirit of modern thought and of ethical significance; setting his characters in a rich and varied landscape; as indeed otherwise these archaic stories would not have appealed to the world at large.

This indeed he has done well. And yet it is not possible to put away altogether the modern prejudice against unreality, the sense of having here a vision not merely of things that are past, but of things that could never have been, of a world that is neither ancient nor modern, but a fairy land peopled with knights and dames whose habits and conversation are adjusted to the decorous taste of our nineteenth century. The time has long passed when men could look back on distant ages much as they looked forward to futurity, through a haze of unbounded credulity. Not every one has been able to overcome the effect of incongruity produced by a poem which invests the legendary personages of mediæval romance with morals and manners of a fastidious delicacy, and promotes them to be the embodiment of our own ethical ideals. If, indeed, we regard the “Idylls” as beautiful allegories, we may be content, as their author was, with the suggestion that King Arthur represents Conscience, and that the poem is “a picture of the different ways in which men looked on conscience, some reverencing it as a heaven-born king, others ascribing to it an earthly origin.” We may then be satisfied with learning, from the Poet himself, that “Camelot, for instance, a city of shadowy palaces, is everywhere symbolic of the gradual growth of human beliefs and institutions, and of the spiritual development of man.” In the light of these interpretations the poem is a beautifully woven tissue of poetic mysticism, clothing the old legend of chivalry with esoteric meaning. We can accept and admire it freely, remarking only that the deeper thoughts of the present generation do not run in an allegorical vein, and that such a vesture, though of the finest texture and embroidery, waxes old speedily. “The ‘Holy Grail,’” said Tennyson, “is one of the most imaginative of my poems. I have expressed there my strong feeling as to the reality of the Unseen”; and truly it is a marvellous excursion into the field of mystical romance. But Tennyson also said that “there is no single fact or incident in the ‘Idylls,’ however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained as without any mystery or allegory whatever”; and herein lies our difficulty. For, unless they can be read as wholly allegorical, there is an air of unreality about those enchanting pictures, as of scenes and persons that could never have existed anywhere. That Tennyson is a master of the art of veiling the lessons of real life under a fairy story, we know from the subtle symbolism with which he tells, in the “Lady of Shalott,” the tale of sudden absorbing love, hopeless and unregarded, sinking into despair — a true parable, understood of all men and women in all times. But those who have no great skill at deciphering the Hyponoia, the underlying significance, of the “Idylls” may be pardoned for confessing to an occasional feeling of something abstract, shadowy, and spectacular in the company of these knights and dames.

FitzGerald, after reading the “Holy Grail,” writes (1870) to Tennyson:

The whole myth of Arthur’s Round Table Dynasty in Britain presents itself before me with a sort of cloudy Stonehenge grandeur. I am not sure if the old knights’ adventures do not tell upon me better touched in some lyrical way (like your “Lady of Shalott”) than when elaborated into epic form. I never could care for Spenser, Tasso, or even Ariosto, whose epic has a ballad ring about it.... Anyhow, Alfred, while I feel how pure, noble, and holy your work is — and whole phrases, lines, and sentences of it will abide with me, and, I am sure, with men after me — I read on till the “Lincolnshire Farmer” drew tears from my eyes. I was got back to the substantial rough-spun Nature I knew; and the old brute, invested by you with the solemn humour of Humanity, like Shakespeare’s Shallow, became a more pathetic phenomenon than the knights who revisit the world in your other verse. There! I cannot help it, and have made a clean breast.

If the extreme realism of some modern writers has been rightly condemned as truth divorced from beauty, we may say that it has been by his skill in maintaining their indissoluble union that Tennyson’s best work shows its peculiar strength and has earned its enduring vitality. He excels in the verisimilitude of his portraiture, in the authentic delineation of character, preserving the type and developing the main lines of thought and action by imaginative insight, with high artistic fidelity in details. I venture to anticipate that his short monodramatic pieces in blank verse — his studies from the antique, like “Ulysses” and “Tithonus,” and his poems of English life, breathing the true idyllic spirit, like the “Gardener’s Daughter” and “Aylmer’s Field” — will sustain their popularity longer than the Arthurian Idylls. Nor can some of us honestly agree with the unqualified praise bestowed by high authority (as the Memoir testifies) on “Guinevere,” where the scene between the king and the queen at Almesbury, with all its elevation of tone and purity of sentiment, is not very far from a splendid anachronism. But the epilogue “To the Queen,” which closes the Arthurian epic, brings us back to modern thought and circumstance by its ringing protest against faint-heartedness in English politics.

The “Northern Farmer,” written in 1861, was at that time a novelty in form and subject. It gave a strong lead, at any rate, to that school of rough humorous versification, largely relying on quaint turns of ideas and phrases, on racy provincial dialect and local colouring generally, which has since had an immense success in the hands of minor artists. We may take it to have begun, for the last century, with the Biglow Papers. This form of metrical composition has latterly spread, as a species of modern ballad, to the Indian frontier and the Australian bush, but has little or no place in any language except the English. Such character sketches, taken direct from studies of rude life, have been always common in popular comic song, yet I believe that no first-class poet, after Burns and before Tennyson, had turned his hand to this kind of work; nor has anything been since produced upon the artistic level of the first “Northern Farmer.” “Roden Noel,” writes Tennyson, “calls the two ‘Northern Farmers’ photographs; but I call them imaginative” — as of course they are, being far above mere exact copies of some individual person.

There are some very readable impressions de voyage gathered out of journals of tours made about this time (1860) in France and England, and the letters maintain their high level of interest. Upon the death of Macaulay, Tennyson writes to the Duke of Argyll:

I hardly knew him: met him once, I remember, when Hallam and Guizot were in his company. Hallam was showing Guizot the Houses of Parliament, then building, and Macaulay went on like a cataract for an hour or so to those two great men, and, when they had gone, turned to me and said, “Good morning; I am happy to have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance,” and strode away. Had I been a piquable man I should have been piqued: but I don’t think I was, for the movement after all was amicable.

Then follows an account, by Mrs. Bradley, of a visit to Farringford, with “its careless ordered garden close to the ridge of a noble down”; and at the end of the Memoir is an appendix containing, among other things, Arthur Hallam’s striking critical appreciation of “Mariana in the South,” a poem which must be ranked as a masterpiece by all exiled Englishmen who have dreamt of their native breezes and verdure, under the blinding glare and intolerable heat of a tropical summer. Mr. Aubrey de Vere has contributed a reminiscence describing the effect produced upon himself and others by the poems of 1832-45, with a dissertation upon their style and philosophic significance. And in this manner the course and circumstances of the Poet’s life are set out, with much taste and regard for proportionate value of the materials for those singularly untroubled years through which he rose steadily from straitened means in youth to comparative affluence in middle age, and from distinction among a group of choice spirits to enduring fame as the greatest of poets born in the nineteenth century.

When, in 1864, Tennyson returned with “Enoch Arden” to the romance of real life among his own people, the poem was heartily welcomed, and sixty thousand copies were speedily sold. Spedding declared it to be the finest story he had ever heard, and added (in our opinion quite rightly) that it was “more especially adapted for Alfred than for any other poet.” Yet the plot, so to speak, of this pathetic narrative is as ancient as the Odyssey, for it rests upon a situation that must have been common in all times of long and distant voyaging, when men disappeared across the seas, were not heard of for years, and their wives were counted as widows. A well-known sailor’s ditty tells in rude popular rhymes the same story of the wandering mariner’s return home, to find himself forsaken and forgotten; and it frequently occurs in the folklore of the crusades. The first title in the proof-sheets of the “Enoch Arden” volume was “Idylls of the Hearth,” and here, says his biographer,

he writes with as intimate a knowledge, but with greater power (than in 1842), on subjects from English life, the sailor, the farmer, the parson, the city lawyer, the squire, the country maiden, and the old woman who dreams of her past life in a restful old age.

No great poet, in fact, has travelled for his subjects so little beyond his native land; and so his best descriptive work shows the painter’s eye on the object, with the impressions drawn fresh and at first hand from Nature, as in the poetry of primitive bards who saw things for themselves. His letters and notes teem with observations of wild flowers and wild creatures, of wide prospects over sea and land; and even when he followed Enoch Arden into the world that was to himself untravelled, he could surprise those who knew it by his rendering of tropical scenery.

A very good account, by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, of his tour through France and Switzerland with Tennyson in 1869, has preserved for us the flavour of his table and travelling talk upon literature, and occasionally upon religious problems. Into the philosophical or metaphysical abyss he did not let down his plummet very far; he recognized the limits of human knowledge, and for the dim regions beyond he accepted Faith as his guide and comforter. In regard to the poets—”As a boy,” he said, “I was a great admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do.” Probably this habit of premature and excessive indulgence in Byron has blunted many an eager admirer’s appetite, and has had something to do with the prevailing distaste for him, wherein we think that he has fallen into unmerited neglect. Of Shelley Tennyson said that there was “a great wind of words in a good deal of him, but that as a writer of blank verse he was perhaps the most skilful of the moderns. Nobody admires Shelley more than I once did, and I still admire him.” For Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” he had a profound admiration; yet even in that poem he thought “the old poet had shown a want of literary instinct,” and he touched upon some defects of composition; but he ended by saying emphatically that Wordsworth’s very best is the best in its way that has been sent out by moderns. He told an anecdote of Samuel Rogers. “One day we were walking arm and arm, and I spoke of what is called Immortality, and remarked how few writers could be sure of it. Upon this Rogers squeezed my arm and said, ‘I am sure of it.’”

His wife’s journal of this time is full of interest, recording various sayings and doings, conversations, correspondence, anecdotes, and glimpses of notable visits and visitors, Tourguéneff, Longfellow, Jenny Lind, Huxley, and Gladstone, to the last of whom Tennyson read aloud his “Holy Grail.” At the house of G. H. Lewes he read “Guinevere,” “which made George Eliot weep.” The diary is a faithful and valuable memorial of English country life at its best in the middle of the last century. Living quietly with his family, he was in constant intercourse with the most distinguished men of his day, and was himself honoured of them all.

In 1873 Tennyson had declined, for himself, Mr. Gladstone’s offer of a baronetcy. In 1874 this offer was repeated by Mr. Disraeli, who does not seem to have known that it had been once before made, in a high-flying sententious letter, evidently attuned to the deeper harmonies of the mysterious relation between genius and government.

A government should recognize intellect. It elevates and sustains the spirit. It elevates and sustains the spirit of a nation. But it is an office not easy to fulfil, for if it falls into favouritism and the patronage of mediocrity, instead of raising the national sentiment, it might degrade and debase it. Her Majesty, by the advice of her Ministers, has testified in the Arctic expedition, and will in other forms, her sympathy with science. But it is desirable that the claims of high letters should be equally acknowledged. That is not so easy a matter, because it is in the nature of things that the test of merit cannot be so precise in literature as in science. Nevertheless, etc. etc.

The honour, even thus offered, was again respectfully declined, with a suggestion that it might be renewed for his son after his own death; but this was pronounced impracticable.

The Metaphysical Society was founded by Tennyson and two others in 1869, and a list of the members is given in the Memoir, which touches on the style and topics of the debates, and on the umbrage taken by agnostic friends at the profound deference shown by Tennyson to Cardinal Manning. A letter from Dr. James Martineau describes the Poet’s general attitude toward the Society’s discussions; he sent his poem on the “Higher Pantheism” to be read at the first meeting; and he was “usually a silent listener, interposing some short question or pregnant hint.” The letter discourses, in expansive and perhaps faintly nebulous language, upon the influence of his poetry on the religious tendencies of the day.

That in a certain sense our great Laureate’s poetry has nevertheless had a dissolving influence upon the over-definite dogmatic creeds within hearing, or upon the modes of religious thought amid which it was born, can hardly be doubted. In laying bare, as it does, the history of his own spirit, its conflicts and aspirations, its alternate eclipse of doubt and glow of faith, it has reported more than a personal experience; he has told the story of an age which he has thus brought into Self-knowledge.... Among thousands of readers previously irresponsive to anything Divine he has created, or immeasurably intensified, the susceptibility of religious reverence.

After taking into due account the circumstances in which Dr. Martineau’s letter was written, to many readers this high-flying panegyric will seem to have in some degree overshot its mark.

It has been my duty, in reviewing this Memoir, to pass under some kind of critical survey the more important writings of Lord Tennyson, in particular relation to the narrative of his life, and to the formation of his views and opinions. I am, however, placed in some embarrassment by the fact that this work is for the most part done already in the volumes themselves. They contain ample quotations from letters and articles by very eminent hands, written with all the vigour of immediate impressions when the poems first appeared. And some of the reminiscences that have since been contributed to the biography by personal friends deal so thoroughly with its literary side as to fall little short of elaborate essays; so that on the whole not much is left to be said by the retrospective reviewer. We are met with this difficulty in taking up the chapters on the Historical Plays, which set before us, with an analysis of the plays by the biographer himself, a catena of judgments upon them, unanimously favourable, by the highest authorities. Robert Browning writes with generous enthusiasm of “Queen Mary.” Froude, the most dramatic of historians, expresses unbounded admiration: “You have reclaimed one more section of English history from the wilderness, and given it a form in which it will be fixed for ever. No one since Shakespeare has done that.” Gladstone, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Longfellow, G. H. Lewes and his wife, the statesmen, the poets, and the men of letters, each from his own standpoint attests the merits of one or another play, in letters of indisputable strength and sincerity. Nor can it be doubted that these pieces contain splendid passages, and fine engravings, so to speak, of historical personages, with a noble appreciation of the spacious Elizabethan period, and of the earlier romantic episodes. The dramatic art provides such a powerful instrument for striking deep into the national mind, and success in this form of high poetic execution is so lasting — while it is so rare — that almost every great English poet has written plays. On the other hand, few of them have ventured, like Tennyson, to face the capricious ordeal of the public theatre, where the vox populi is at least so far divine that it pronounces absolutely and often incomprehensibly.

“For Tennyson to begin publishing plays after he was sixty-five years of age was thought to be a hazardous experiment”; though I may remark that he started with the advantage of a first-class poetic reputation, which stimulated public curiosity. But he knew well the immense influence, for good or for ill, that the stage can bring to bear on the people; and for the stage all his plays were directly intended, not for literature, in the expectation that the necessary technical adaptations might be supplied by the actors or the professional playwright. Their historical truth, their vigorous conceptions of motive and circumstance, and their poetic force received ample acknowledgment. W. G. Ward, who was “grotesquely truthful,” though ultramontane, broke out into unqualified praise after listening to the reading of “Becket.” On the stage, where first impressions are all-important, the pieces had their share of success. Browning writes of the “tumult of acclaim” which greeted the appearance of “Queen Mary”; and of “Becket” Irving has told us that “it is one of the three most successful plays produced by him at the Lyceum.”

It is a question, often debated, whether in these latter days the theatre can be made a vehicle for the artistic representation of history. Literature, a jealous rival of all her sister arts, has so vastly extended her dominion over the people, she speaks so directly to the mind, without need of plastic or vocal interpretation, she is so independent of accessories and intermediaries, that her competitive influence weighs down all other departments of imaginative and pictorial idealization, religious or romantic. Against this stream of tendency even Tennyson’s genius could hardly make sufficient headway to conquer for his plays a lasting hold upon English audiences; and moreover his primal vigour had been spent upon other victories. Yet to have held the stage at all, for a brief space, is to have done more than has been achieved by any other poet of this (last) century. In 1880 his drama, “The Cup,” was produced with signal success at the Lyceum; and Tennyson summed up his theatrical experience by observing that “the success of a piece does not depend on its literary merit or even on its stage effect, but on its hitting somehow,” wherein Miss Ellen Terry agreed with him.

The annals of his daily life, throughout all this later part of it, consist of extracts from letters, journals, and memorials of intercourse, which abound with appropriate, amusing, and valuable matter, connected by the biographer’s personal recollections. We have thus a many-coloured mosaic, in which many figures and characters are reproduced by a kind of literary tessellation; while, as to the Poet himself, his habits, wise or whimsical, his thoughts from year to year on the subjects of the day, his manner of working, are all preserved. The correspondence of his friends maintains its high level of quality. Mr. W. H. Lecky gives us, in one of the best among all the reminiscences, a fine sample of his own faculty for delineation of character, bringing out the Poet’s simplicity of soul, his love of seclusion, the scope of his religious meditations, the keen sensibility (acquired by long culture) of his rhythmic ear, and also his susceptibility to the hum and pricking of critics.

Many persons spoke of your father as too much occupied with his poetry. It did, no doubt, fill a very large place in his thoughts, and it is also true that he was accustomed to express his opinions about it with a curiously childlike simplicity and frankness. But at bottom his nature seemed to be singularly modest. No poet ever corrected so many lines in deference to adverse criticism. His sensitiveness seemed to me curiously out of harmony with his large powerful frame, with his manly dark colouring, with his great massive hands and strong square-tipped fingers.

His son records how in lonely walks together Tennyson would chant a poem that he was composing, would search for strange birds or flowers, and would himself take flight on discovering that he was being stalked by a tourist. Among the letters is one from Victor Hugo, in the grand cosmopolitan style, beginning “Mon Éminent et Cher Confrère,” professing love for all mankind and admiration for noble verse everywhere; another from Cardinal Newman, smooth and adroit; there is also a note by Dr. Dabbs of his colloquy with Tennyson, showing how he began with the somewhat musty question about the incompatibility of Science with Religion, and found the Poet, as we infer, tolerably dexterous with the foils. Renan called, and put the essence of his philosophy into one phrase, “La vérité est une nuance”; there are jottings of talks with Carlyle, and a long extract from the journal of a yachting voyage with Mr. Gladstone, who said, “No man since Aeschylus could have written the Bride of Lammermoor.” It would be doing less than justice to the biography if I did not choose a few samples from an ample storehouse, and it would be unfair to make too many quotations, even from a book which surpasses all recent memoirs as a repertory of characteristic observations and short views of life and literature, interchanged by speech or writing, with many notable friends and visitors.

In 1883 the Queen, on the recommendation of Mr. Gladstone, offered Tennyson a peerage, which, after some rumination, he accepted, saying, “By Gladstone’s advice I have consented, but for my own part I shall regret my own simple name all my life.” We are to suppose that the Prime Minister’s only misgiving “lest my father might insist on wearing his wideawake in the House of Lords” had been duly overcome; and so next year the Poet, having taken his seat, voted, not without some questioning and doubts of the time’s ripeness, for extension of franchise. No more worthy representative of literature has ever added lustre to that august assembly than he who now took his seat on the cross benches, holding no form of party creed, but contemplating all. From a man of his traditions and tastes, his dislike of extravagance, his feeling for the stateliness of well-ordered movement, at his age, moderation in politics was to be expected; and indeed we observe that he commended to his friends Maine’s work on Popular Government, which carries political caution to the verge of timidity. But Tennyson, like Burke, had great confidence in the common sense and inbred good nature of the English people. “Stagnation,” he once said, “is more dangerous than revolution.” As he was throughout consistently the poet of the via media in politics, the dignified constitutional Laureate, so he was spared the changes that passed over the opinions of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, who were Radicals in youth, and declined into elderly Tories. Undoubtedly the temper of his time affected his politics as well as his poetry, for his manhood began in the calm period which followed the long stormy years when all Europe was one great war-field, and when the ardent spirits of Byron and Shelley had been fired by the fierce uprising of the nations.

In 1885, being then in his seventy-sixth year, Lord Tennyson published “Tiresias,” preluding with the verses to E. FitzGerald, so vigorous in tone and so finely wrought, with their rhymes ringing true to the expectant ear like the chime of a clear bell. Some years before, he had paid a passing visit at Woodbridge to “the lonely philosopher, a man of humorous melancholy mark, with his gray floating locks, sitting among his doves.... We fell at once into the old humour, as if we had been parted twenty days instead of so many years.” It is a rarity in modern life that two such men as Tennyson and FitzGerald, whose mutual friendship was never shaken, should have met but once in some twenty-five years, although divided by no more space than could be traversed by a three hours’ railway journey. “Tiresias” was soon followed by “Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After”; then, in 1889, came “Demeter” and other poems; until, in 1892, the volume containing the “Death of Œnone” and “Akbar’s Dream” closed the long series of poems which had held two generations under their charm. One line in the second “Locksley Hall” its author held to be the best of the kind he had ever written:

Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles;

though in my poor judgment the harmony seems marred by the frequent sibilants, which vex all English composers; and the suggestion that the sea would become stormless when the land should be at peace may be thought overbold.

It was but seasonable that his later poetry should have been tinged with autumnal colouring. The philosophic bent of his mind had necessarily grown with increasing years; its range had been widened by constant assimilation with the scientific ideas of the day, with social and political changes; but as far horizons breed sadness and wistful uncertainty, so his later verse leans more toward the moral lessons of experience, toward reflective and retrospective views of life and character. In poetry, as in prose, the sequel to a fine original piece has very rarely, if ever, been successful; though the second part, when it follows the first after a long interval, often exhibits the special value that comes from alteration of style and the natural changes of mood. Tennyson himself thought that “the two ‘Locksley Halls’ were likely to be in the future two of the most historically interesting of his poems, as descriptive of the tone of the age at two distant periods of his life.” In my opinion, the interest is less historical than biographical, in the sense that the second poem takes its deeper shade from the darkening that seems to have overspread his later meditations. For the interval of sixty years had, in fact, brought increased activity and enterprising eagerness to the English people; and the gray thoughts of the sequel, the heavier feeling of errors and perils encompassing the onward path toward the remote ideal, are the Poet’s own. He employed them, it is true, for the dramatic presentation of old age, and disclaimed any identity with the imaginary personage.

However this may be, the poems that appeared toward the close of his long literary career show a change of manner. We miss, to some degree, the delicate handling, the self-restraint, the serene air of his best compositions; there is a certain gloominess of atmosphere, breaking out occasionally into vehement expression, in the rolling dithyrambic stanzas of “Vastness,” “The Dawn,” or “The Dreamer.” In the “Death of Œnone,” the beautiful antique nymph of Tennyson’s youth, deserted and passionately lamenting on many-fountained Ida, has become soured and vindictive. She is now a jealous wife, to whose feet Paris, dying from the poisoned arrow, crawls “lame, crooked, reeling,” to be spurned as an adulterer, who may “go back to his adulteress and die.” Here the Poet abandons the style and feeling of Hellenic tradition; the echo of the old-world story has died away; it is rather the voice of some tragedy queen posing as the injured wife of modern society; and one remembers that the Homeric adulteress, Helen of Troy, went back to live happily and respected with her husband in Sparta. It was not to be expected that Tennyson’s later inspirations should reach the supreme level of the poems which he wrote in his prime, or that there should be no ebb from the high-water mark that he touched, in my opinion, fifty years earlier in 1842. Yet hardly any poet has so long retained consummate mastery of his instrument, or has published so little that might have been omitted with advantage or without detriment to his permanent reputation. And it will never be forgotten that he wrote “Crossing the Bar” in his eighty-first year.

It is clear from the Memoir, at any rate, that the burden of nigh fourscore years weakened none of his interest in literature and art, in political and philosophical speculation, or diminished his resources of humorous observation and anecdote. Among many recollections he told of Hallam (the historian) saying to him, “I have lived to read Carlyle’s French Revolution, but I cannot get on, the style is so abominable;” and of Carlyle groaning about Hallam’s Constitutional History: “Eh, it’s a miserable skeleton of a book” — bringing out into short and sharp contrast two opposite schools, the picturesque and the precise, of history-writing. Robert Browning’s death in December 1889 distressed him greatly; it was, moreover, a forewarning to the elder of two brothers, if not equals, in renown. In 1890 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was Tennyson’s junior by only twenty-three days, wrote to him:

I am proud of my birth-year, and humbled when I think of who were and who are my coevals. Darwin, the destroyer and creator; Lord Houghton, the pleasant and kind-hearted lover of men of letters; Gladstone, whom I leave it to you to characterise, but whose vast range of intellectual powers few will question; Mendelssohn, whose music still rings in our ears; and the Laureate, whose “jewels five words long” — many of them a good deal longer — sparkle in our memories.

He wrote kindly to William Watson and Rudyard Kipling, whose patriotic verse pleased him; and twelve months later Watson paid a grateful tribute to his memory in one of the best among many threnodies. He spoke of Carlyle’s having come to smoke a pipe with him one evening in London, “when the talk turned upon the immortality of the soul, upon which Carlyle said, ‘Eh, old Jewish rags, you must clear your mind of all that. Why should we expect a hereafter?’” and likened man’s sojourn on earth to a traveller’s rest at an inn, whereupon Tennyson turned the simile against him. His son describes how the old man’s “dignity and repose of manner, his low musical voice, and the power of his magnetic eye kept the attention riveted.” In August 1892 Lord Selborne and the Master of Balliol visited him; but

... he did not feel strong enough for religious discussions with Jowett, and begged Jowett not to consult with him or argue with him, as was his wont, on points of philosophy and religious doubt. The Master answered him with a remarkable utterance: “Your poetry has an element of philosophy more to be considered than any regular philosophy in England”;

which is certainly an ambiguous and possibly not an extravagant eulogy.

The final chapter of the Memoir gives, briefly, some sentences from his last talks, and describes a peaceful and noble ending. He found his Christianity undisturbed by jarring of sects and creeds; but he said, “I dread the losing hold of forms. I have expressed this in my ‘Akbar.’” The welfare of the British Empire, its expansion and its destiny, had been from the beginning and were to the end of his poetic career matters of intense pride and concern to him. When, in September 1892, he fell seriously ill, and Sir Andrew Clark arrived, the physician and the patient fell to discussing Gray’s “Elegy”; and a few days later, being much worse, he sent for his Shakespeare, tried to read but had to let his son read for him. Next day he said: “‘I want the blinds up, I want to see the sky and the light.’ He repeated ‘The sky and the light.’ It was a glorious morning, and the warm sunshine was flooding the weald of Sussex and the line of South Downs, which were seen from his window.” On the second day after this he passed away very quietly. The funeral service in Westminster Abbey, with its two anthems—”Crossing the Bar” and “The Silent Voices” — filling the long-drawn aisle and, rising to the fretted vault above the heads of a great congregation, will long be remembered by those who were present. “The tributes of sympathy,” his son writes, “which we received from many countries and from all classes and creeds, were not only remarkable for their universality, but for their depth of feeling.”

To those who had so long lived with him, the loss of one whom they had tended for many years with devoted affection and reverence was indeed irreparable. Yet they had the consolation of knowing that his life had been on the whole happy and fortunate, marked by singularly few griefs or troubles; that he had proved himself a master of the high calling which he set before himself, and departed, full of honours, at the coming of the time when no man can work.

A collection of letters that passed between the Queen and Tennyson, including two from Her Majesty to his son on receiving the news of Tennyson’s death, is added to the Memoir; and the volume closes with “Recollections of the Poet,” written at some length, by Lord Selborne, Jowett, John Tyndall, F. Myers, F. T. Palgrave, and the Duke of Argyll. These papers will be read, as they deserve to be, with attentive interest for their descriptions of the personal characteristics, recorded by those who knew him best, of a very remarkable man; they show also how his poems were conceived and elaborated, they trace his thoughts on high subjects, and they contain very ample dissertations on his poetry. They inevitably anticipate the work of the public reviewer, who cannot pretend to write with equal authority, while it is not his business to criticize the carefully composed opinions of others.

One can see, looking backward, that Tennyson’s genius flowered in due season; there had been a plentiful harvest of verse in the preceding generation, but it had been garnered, and the field was clear. The hour had come for a new writer to take up the succession to that brilliant and illustrious group who, in the first quarter of the last century, raised English poetry to a height far above the classic level of the age before them. Three leaders of that band — Byron, Keats, and Shelley — died young; the sum total of their years added together exceeds by no more than a decade the space of Tennyson’s single life. And if the creative period of a poet’s life may be reckoned as beginning at twenty-one (which is full early), it sums up to no more than thirty-one years for all the three poets whom we have named, and to sixty years for Tennyson alone. When his first volume appeared (1832), Byron, Shelley, and Keats were dead; Scott and Coleridge had long ceased to write poetry, and were dying; Wordsworth, who had done all his best work long before, alone survived, for Southey cannot be counted in the same rank. Moreover, England may be said to have been just then passing through one of those periods of artistic depression that precede a revival; the popular taste was artificial and decadent, it was running down to the pseudo-romantic and false Gothic, to the conventional Keepsake note in sentiment, to extravagant admiration of such poems as Moore’s Lalla Rookh. The purchase by the State of the Elgin Marbles, and the opening of the National Gallery, had prepared the way for better things in art; but I may affirm, speaking broadly, that it was a flat interval, when the new generation was just looking for some one to give form to an upward movement of ideas.

It was upon the rising wave after this calm that Tennyson was lifted forward by the quick recognition of his talent among his ardent and open-minded contemporaries; although his general popularity came gradually, since even in 1850, as may be seen from the list already given of his competitors for the Laureateship, his pre-eminence had not been indisputably established in high political society. Yet all genuine judges might perceive at once that here was the man to raise again from the lower plane the imaginative power of verse, who knew the magical charm that endows with beauty and dramatic force the incidents and impressions which the ordinary artist can only reproduce in a commonplace or unreal way, while the master-hand suddenly illumines the whole scene, foreground and background. He struck a note that touched the feelings and satisfied the spiritual needs of his contemporaries, and herein lay the promise of his poetry; for to the departing generation the coming man can say little or nothing. We have to bear in mind, also, that during Tennyson’s youth the whole complexion and “moving circumstance” of the age had undergone a great alteration. It was the uproar and martial clang, the drums and trampling of long and fierce wars, the mortal strife between revolutionary and reactionary forces, that kindled the fiery indignation of Shelley and Byron, inspiring such lines as

Still, Freedom, still thy banner, torn yet flying,

Streams like a meteor flag against the wind,

and affected Coleridge and even Southey “in their hot youth, when George the Third was king.” Tennyson’s opportunity came when these thunderous echoes had died away, when the Reform Bill had become law, when the era of general peace and comfortable prosperity that marks for England the middle of this century was just setting in. The change may be noticed in Tennyson’s treatment of landscape, of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky. With Byron and Coleridge the prevailing effects were grand, stormy, wildly magnificent; with Tennyson the impressions are mainly peaceful, melancholy, mysterious: he is looking on the happy autumn fields, or listening in fancy to the long wash of Australasian seas. There are of course exceptions on both sides; yet in Byron the best-known descriptive passages are all of the former, and in Tennyson of the latter, character. The difference in style corresponds, manifestly, not only with the contrast in the temper of their times, warlike for the earlier poets and peaceful for the later, but also with the disorder and unrest which vexed the private lives of Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge, as compared with the happy domestic fortunes of Tennyson.

It is almost superfluous to lay stress on the well-known metrical variety of Tennyson’s poems, or upon the musical range of his language. He followed the best models, and perhaps improved upon them, in using the primitive onomatopœia as the base for a higher order of composition, in which the words have a subtle connotation, blending sound and colour into harmonies that accord with the sense and spirit of a passage, convey the thought, and create the image. His skill in wielding the long flowing line was remarkable, nor had any poet before him employed it so frequently; its flexibility lent freedom and scope to his impersonations of character, and in other pieces he could give it the rolling melody of a chant or a chorus. On the instrumental power of blank verse we know that he set the highest value; he had his own secret methods of scansion, and his long practice enabled him to extend the capabilities of this peculiarly English metre. But for an excellent critical analysis of Tennyson’s blank verse, in comparison with the rhythm of other masters, I must refer my readers to Mr. J. B. Mayor’s Chapters on English Metre, with especial reference to the final chapter, where the styles of Tennyson and Browning, as representative of modern English verse, are scientifically examined.

I make no apology for having included some criticisms of Tennyson’s work in this review of his life, because not the least valuable feature of the Memoir is that it has been so arranged as to form a running commentary upon and interpretation of his poems, as reflecting his mind and his manner of life. Throughout the second half of the last century Tennyson has been foremost among English men of letters, and it is his proud distinction to have maintained the apostolic succession of our national poets in a manner not unworthy of those famous men who went immediately before him.

TENNYSON: THE POET AND THE MAN by Professor Henry Butcher

A hundred years have passed since Tennyson’s birth, seventeen years since his death. It is too soon to attempt to fix his permanent place among English poets, but it is not too soon to feel assured that much that he has written is of imperishable worth. Will you bear with me if I offer some brief remarks, not by way of critical estimate, but in loving appreciation of the poet and the man? And let me say at once how deeply all who care for Tennyson are indebted to the illuminating Memoir and Annotated Edition published by his son.

Tennyson’s poetic career is in some respects unique in English literature. He fell upon a time when fiction, science, and sociology were displacing poetry. He succeeded in conquering the poetic indifference of his age. For nearly sixty years he held a listening and eager audience, including not only fastidious hearers but also the larger public. Probably no English poet except Shakespeare has exercised such a commanding sway over both learned and unlearned. He unsealed the eyes of his contemporaries and revealed to them again the significance of beauty. To the English people, and indeed the English-speaking race, he was not merely the gracious and entrancing singer, but also the seer who divined their inmost thoughts and interpreted them in melodious forms of verse.

At the outset of his poetic life, Arthur Hallam notes the “strange earnestness of his worship of beauty.” Like Milton, he was studious of perfection. Like Milton, too, he had in a supreme degree the poet’s double endowment of an exquisite ear for the music of verse and an unerring eye for the images of nature. Like Milton, he acquired a mastery of phrase which has enriched the capacities of our English speech; and not Milton himself drew from the purely English elements in the language more finely modulated tones. No poet since Milton has been more deeply imbued with classical literature, and the perfection of form which he sought fell at once into a classic and mainly a Hellenic mould. We find in him reminiscences or close reproductions not only of Homer and Theocritus, of Virgil and Horace, of Lucretius and Catullus, of Ovid and Persius, but also of Sappho and Alcman, of Pindar and Aeschylus, of Moschus, Callimachus, and Quintus Smyrnaeus, more doubtfully of Simonides and Sophocles. We can follow the tracks of his reading also in Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, and Livy. His early volumes contain varied strains of classical and romantic legend. In some of the poems we are aware at once of the pervasive atmosphere and enchantment of romance, as in “The Lady of Shalott,” “Mariana,” “Sir Galahad,” and many more. Others — such as “Œnone,” “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus” — what are we to call them, classical or romantic? The thought and the form are chiefly classical, but the poems are shot through with romantic gleams and tinged with modern sentiment. Yet so skilful is the handling that there is no sense of incongruity between the things of the past and the feelings of a later day. The harmony of tone and colour is almost faultless, more so than in the treatment of the longer themes taken from Celtic sources. But while some poems are dominantly classical, others dominantly romantic, Tennyson’s genius as a whole is the spirit of romance expressing itself in forms of classical perfection. To the romanticist he may seem classical; to the classicist he is romantic: romantic in his choice of subjects, in his attitude towards Nature, in his profusion of detail, in an ornateness sometimes running to excess; in his moods, too, of reverie or languor and in the slumberous charm that broods over many of his landscapes. Yet he is free from the disordered individualism of the extreme romantic school. Disquietude and unrest are not wanting, but there is no unruly self-assertion; the cry of social revolt is faintly heard, and, when heard, its tones are among the least Tennysonian. Those who demand subtle or curious psychology find him disappointing; his characters are in the Greek manner broadly human, types rather than deviations from the type. That he was capable of expressing intense and poignant feeling is shown by such impassioned utterances as those of “Fatima” and “Maud”; but passion with him is usually restrained. There are critics for whom passion is genuine only if turbid, just as thought is profound only if obscure; and for them Tennyson’s reserve — again a Greek quality — seems an almost inhuman calm. His own most deeply felt experiences find their truest expression when passed through the medium of art; they come out tranquillized and transfigured. The sorrow and love of “In Memoriam” — which poem I take to be the supreme effort of his genius — are merged in large impersonal emotions. The poem, as he himself says, “is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine.” Tennyson’s intense humanity gives rise to a peculiar vein of pathos, and even of melancholy. Side by side there are his “mighty hopes” for the future and the power and “passion of the past”—”the voice of days of old and days to be”: on the one hand the forward straining intellect, on the other the backward glance, the lingering regret, and “some divine farewell.” Those haunting and recurrent words, “the days that are no more,” “for ever and for ever,” and the “vague world whisper” of the “far-far-away,” are charged with a sadness which recalls the pathetic but stoical refrain of “Nequiquam” in Lucretius.

Throughout Tennyson’s long career we can trace the essential oneness of his mind and art, beginning with his early experiments in language and metrical form. By degrees his range of subjects was enlarged; we are amazed at the ever-growing variety of theme and treatment and his manifold modes of utterance. In some, as in his lyrics and dramatic monologues, he displays a flawless excellence, in almost all consummate art. But diverse as are the chords he has struck, the voice, the touch, the melody are all his own. In his latest poems we may miss something of the early rapture of his lyric song, but he is still himself and unmistakable; and had he written nothing but the lines “To Virgil” and “Crossing the Bar” he would surely take rank among the highest. We think of him primarily as the artist, but the artist and the man in him were never far apart; and as years went on his human sympathies, always strong, were strengthened and broadened, and drew him closer to the common life of humble people. We overhear more of “the still sad music of humanity.” Towards the close of his life the moral and religious content of the poems becomes fuller with his deepening sense of the grandeur and the pathos of man’s existence. Some see in this a weakening of his art, the intrusion into poetry of an alien substance. Yet eliminate this element from art, and how much of the greatest poetry of the world is gone! Now and then, it must be confessed, the ethical aim in Tennyson seems to some of us unduly prominent, but very rarely does the artist lose himself in the teacher or the preacher. He has a message to deliver, but it is not a mere moral lesson: its true appeal is to the imagination; put it into prose and it is no longer his. It lives only in its proper form of imaginative beauty.

Aristotle noted two types of poet, the εὐφυής, the finely gifted artist, plastic to the Muse’s touch, who can assume many characters in turn; and the μανικός, the inspired poet, with a strain of frenzy, who is lifted out of himself in a divine transport. Were we asked to select three examples of the former type, one from Greece, one from Rome, and one from England, our choice from the ancient world would probably fall on Sophocles and Virgil, and might we not, as a fitting third, add Tennyson to the list? I do not attempt to determine their relative rank, but I do suggest that they all belong to the same family, and that already in this centenary year of our Poet we can recognize the poetic kinship. Each of the three had in him the inmost heart of poetry, beating with a full humanity and instinct with human tenderness; each remained true to his calling as an artist and pursued throughout life the vision of beauty; and each achieved, in his own individual way, a noble and harmonious beauty of thought and form, of soul and sense.

JAMES SPEDDING

JAMES SPEDDING by W. Aldis Wright

(Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.)

“Spedding was the Pope among us young men — the wisest man I know.” — Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son, p. 32.

James Spedding, of whom FitzGerald wrote, “He was the wisest man I have known,” was born June 20, 1808, at Mirehouse, Keswick, and was the third son of John Spedding. He was educated at the Grammar School, Bury St. Edmunds, where his father, leaving his Cumberland home, went to live for the purpose of putting his sons under the care of Dr. Malkin. Among his school-fellows were W. B. Donne, J. M. Kemble (the Anglo-Saxon scholar), the three brothers FitzGerald, and his own brother Edward, who with himself was at the head of the school when they left. From Bury he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he was contemporary with Frederick, Charles, and Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), and W. H. Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity), and was very early admitted into the fellowship of the Apostles. On Commemoration Day, 1830, he was called upon to deliver an oration in the College Chapel, the subject being “An Apology for the Moral and Literary Character of the Nineteenth Century,” which was afterwards printed. Another of his early productions was a speech against Political Unions, written for a debating society in the University of Cambridge, which, although anonymous, attracted the notice of the author of Philip van Artevelde, afterwards his colleague in the Colonial Office, who quoted some passages from it in the notes to his poem, with the remark: “It is a singular trait of the times that a speech containing so much of sagacity and mature reflection as is to be found in this exercitation, should have been delivered in an academical debating club, and should have passed away in a pamphlet, which, as far as I am aware, attracted no notice. Time and place consenting, a brilliant Parliamentary reputation might be built upon a tithe of the merit.” In 1831 he won the Members’ Prize with a Latin essay on “Utrum boni plus an mali hominibus et civitatibus attulerit dicendi copia,” and in 1832 he was again a candidate, and wrote to Thompson on the 4th of May about it:

Tennant and I both got in our Essays, both in a very imperfect state, and both the last minute but one.... I find that Alford also wrote. So the Apostles have three chances. What Alford’s may be I do not know. But Tennant’s and mine are neither of them worth much: Tennant’s from dryness, mine from impertinence: for of all the impertinent things I ever wrote (and this is a bold word) my “Dissertatio Latina” was the most impertinent. It was in the form of a letter from Son Marcus to Father Cicero; cutting up the Offices in the most reverential way possible. The merit of it is, that if no prize is given at all I may fairly put it down to the novelty of the experiment and the nature of the Judges, whom to my horror I found out the day after to be the Heads of Colleges! Marry, God forbid! I rather calculated on Graham’s being one of the chief voters, who is fond of fun in general, and of my Latin in particular. However, it is no matter. I spent an amusing fortnight and improved my composition: and my mind is easy anyhow, which you will not easily believe.

On June 21 he writes again:

You will be glad to know that scoffing and utilizing march (like humanity according to the St. Simonians), and that Cicero the son has justified his parentage by getting the first prize for Latin composition. You will be sorry to hear that not Alford nor Tennant, but Hildyard Pet. hath obtained the second. Whether their labour has been lost I know not, but mine has been fairly paid, being at the rate of a guinea a day, and therefore 365 guineas a year, a very tolerable income, and I shall increase my establishment accordingly.... I wish you would decide, with your character, to come to Cambridge in the vacation and not stay by that dismal sea. There will be George Farish, and Edm. Lushington, and God knows whether Tennant, and do but add yourself to myself, and ourselves to the aforesaid: and lo you a select company as ever smoked under the shadow of a horse chesnut. If you do not come, you will simply be behind the world of the wise (which you know is as much like a goad as like a nail fastened by the master of an assembly) in the understanding of things spoken. For we talk out of the “Palace of Art” and the “Legend of Fair Women.” The great Alfred is here, i.e. in Southampton Row, smoking all the day, and we went from this house [14 Queen Square, Westminster] on a pilgrimage to see him; to wit, Two Heaths, my brother and myself, and, meeting Allen on the way, we took him along with us, and when we arrived at the place appointed we found A. T. and A. H. H. and J. M. K. So we made a goodly company, and did as we do at Cambridge, and, but that you were not among us, we should have been happy.

Again, on the 18th of July:

A new volume by A. T. is in preparation and will, I suppose, be out in Autumn. In the meantime I have no copy of the “Palace of Art,” but shall be happy to repeat it to you when you come, — no copy of the “Legend of Fair Women,” but can repeat about a dozen stanzas which are of the finest, — no copy of the conclusion of “Œnone” but one in pencil which no one but myself can read. The two concluding stanzas of “The Miller’s Daughter,” I can give you in this letter.... A broad smiling letter from John Heath commissions me this morning to engage Mrs. Perry’s lodgings for Dunbar, whereat I rejoice: also informs me that he himself keeps a Parroquet, and that Douglas has become a great Berkeleian, and would leave his body, like Jeremy Bentham’s, to be dissected, if he thought he had one.

His brother Edward, who had been for some time in delicate health, died on the 24th of August 1832, and a few days later Spedding writes to Thompson:

If you have seen Tennant you will be prepared to hear that my brother Edward died early on Friday morning, after above a month of severe suffering, leaving a ghastly vacancy in my prospects, not to be filled up. However, what is past — the profit and the pleasure which I have gathered out of long and pleasant years of brotherly society — this at least is safe, and is so much to be thankful for. Why should I be the sorrier because I have so long been graced with a source of comfort and of pride, which, if I had never known, I should now be as cheerful as when I last wrote to you? You knew him but little, but you knew him enough to form some notion of how much I have to regret — or, in other words, how much I have had to bless God for. He made a good and a Christian end, and it is ascertained by a post-mortem inspection that he could not possibly have had health for any length of time together. His disease was the formation of internal abscesses, in consequence of a failure of some of the membranes, and quite beyond the reach of surgery, so that, had one been at liberty to decide by a wish whether he should live or die, it would have been an act of unpardonable selfishness to wish him a moment more of captivity. This too is something to take off the bitterness of regret, which, however, in any way has no business to be bitter. But whether it is that I value high human friendship more highly than I ought to do, or whatever be the cause, a strange fatality seems to hang over the objects of my more especial esteem, and I would have you, Thompson, beware in time. But I shall lose my character with you if I do not take care. I hope you will communicate the news to Tennant and Farish, and to all our common friends, for explanations face to face are formidable things.

It was the death of this brother that gave occasion to the verses “To J. S.” which Tennyson published in the volume then in course of preparation.

In October 1832, after unsuccessfully sitting for a Fellowship, he decided upon another trial. Writing from Mirehouse to Thompson, he says:

I find it impossible to read here, the valleys look so independent of circumstances. There stand the mountains, there lie the valleys, and there is that brook which thou hast made to take its pastime therein, a jolly old beck that has lately taken to worshipping its maker; for it overflowed and went into the church, turning us Christians out, or rather preventing us from going in — a better thing, inasmuch as prevention is better than cure.

He was again unsuccessful, and Whiston was elected before him.

In the spring of this year (1833) he had written to Thompson: “Hallam announces himself this morning as not otherwise than unwell.” He had long been delicate, and his early and sudden death at Vienna on the 15th of September came as a shock but not a surprise to his friends. There was a suggestion that his memory should be perpetuated by an inscription in the College Chapel, but it came to nothing. Spedding wrote to Thompson on November 18:

Phillips has been consulting me and others as to the propriety and possibility of getting a tablet to Arthur Hallam’s memory erected in Trinity Chapel. Everybody approves cordially to whom he has communicated the proposal, and he now wishes it to be known among Hallam’s friends that such a plan is in contemplation, but privately and quietly. He will then get Christopher Wordsworth to get the Master’s permission, and then it will be time to think about the rest. It is just possible that there may be some College etiquette or other in the way, and it would be a pity in that case that the intention should have been talked about publicly. Will you communicate this to friends in Cambridge who may communicate with friends out of Cambridge, and so there will be little difficulty in letting every one know who is interested in the matter? Kemble can tell Trench, etc.; Merivale, Alford, etc. Who will write to Monteith, or send me his address? I will write to Donne myself. I think you must know every friend of Hallam’s whom I know. I have communicated with no one yet, except those in town. You will be able to do what is fitting better than I can tell you.

The scheme came to nothing, for what reason we do not know; possibly “college etiquette,” as Spedding anticipated, might stand in the way, for Hallam was neither Fellow nor Scholar of the College.

In the spring of 1834 Spedding was still at Mirehouse, and gives Thompson an account of a day and night he spent with Hartley Coleridge:

The said Hartley is indeed a spirit of no common rate — his mind is brimful of rare and precious fancies, which leap out of him as fresh as a fountain in the sunshine. His biographical engagement with Bingley is for the present suspended, by his own fault, as he says. I suppose he could not stand it any longer. But the three first numbers are completed, and bound up in a goodly fat volume of 720 closely printed pages. It contains twelve or fifteen lives, and more good things of all sorts and sizes than any other book of 720 pages. It is published by Bingley in Leeds and Whitaker in London, called Biographia Borealis, costs sixteen shillings, and the notes alone are worth the money. Wherefore, I pray you not only to get it yourself, but likewise to make everybody else get it. No apostolic bookcase should be without it. It should become a household book; therefore, let no one think of borrowing it, but whosoever is wise and good let him buy or steal it. If any man should ask what are the politics of the work (a question which no Apostle, who is indeed an Apostle, ever thought of asking but in the way of mere curiosity), then say thou, the same politics which were held in common by Plato, Demosthenes, Shakespeare, Bacon, Burke, and God Almighty, and let him make what he can of the information.

Wordsworth’s eyes are better, but not well, nor ever likely to be. Reading inflames them and so does composing. I believe it was a series of Highland Sonnets that brought on the last attack, so much worse than any he had had before. He read me several that I had not seen nor heard before, many of them admirably good; also a long, romantic wizard and fairy poem, in the time of Merlin and King Arthur, very pretty, but not of the first order. But I should not have expected anything so good from him, which was so much out of his beat. He has not advanced much in his knowledge of Alfred; but he is very modest in his refusal to praise attributing his want of admiration to a deficiency in himself, whether from the stiffness of old age, which cannot accommodate itself to a new style of beauty, or that the compass of his sympathies has been narrowed by flowing too long and strongly in one direction. (N.B. He is not answerable for the English that I am writing.) But he doubts not that Alfred’s style has its own beauty, though he wants the faculty to enter fully into it, alleging as a parallel case the choruses in “Samson Agonistes” the measure of which he has never been able to enjoy, which comes to perhaps as high a compliment as a negative compliment can be. He spoke so wisely and graciously that I had half a mind to try him with a poem or two, but that would have been more perhaps than he meant. And indeed it is always so pleasant to hear a distinguished man unaffectedly disclaiming the office of censor, that I never think it fair to take him at his word. I have given a copy of Alfred’s second volume to Hartley Coleridge, who, I trust, will make more of it. He had only seen it for a few minutes, and was greatly behind the age, though he admitted that A. T. was undoubtedly a man of genius; and was going to say something about the Quarterly in a Review of The Doctor, which he was, or is, writing for Blackwood. I also sent him yesterday a copy of Charles Tennyson, accompanied with one of my most gentlemanly letters.

Spedding was now nearly six-and-twenty, and had no settled plan of life before him. “For myself,” he says, “I am unsettled in all my prospects and plans. I am, in fact, doing nothing, but I flatter myself I am pausing on the brink to take a good look at the different ways of life which are open to me before I take the fatal plunge.”

At the end of 1834 he invited Thompson, who was then at York, to visit him at Mirehouse.

Excuses shall not be admitted, at least not such as yours. Is there not a stage-coach which fears God, and do you for that reason refuse to employ it? You ought rather to encourage it. What is a little bile or rheumatism, compared with the advancement of Truth, and the conservation of the Faith that is on the earth? Moreover, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a coach leaves Kendal at 8 o’clock in the morning, and arrives in Keswick about one, having traversed in the short space of five hours many miles of the finest scenery in the country, containing both other things and five lakes, and the dwelling-places of Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge, and Hamilton (more commonly known as Cyril Thornton). As for your time lost last term, that I know, from my experience of your character, to be a fiction of modesty: and as for your hopes of making up for it at home, that I know, from my experience of my own character, to be humbug. Besides, you write as one balancing his own desires according to a principle of enlightened self-interest. You forget that it is not for your own pleasure, but for my profit, that I ask you to come. Am I not sliding daily from bad to worse? Am I not losing the race I do not run? Am I not learning to look on all knowledge as vanity, all labour as sorrow? for not the knowledge for which men labour is profitable, but the labour only, and yet who can labour for that which profiteth not? Have I not already parted with the hope, and am I not now parting with the wish, to advance? Am I performing any duty? Am I making any money? Am I not falling away from the Apostolic mind, notwithstanding? Am I not taking pleasure in the shooting of snipes? Am I not in danger of having a bad German pronunciation for evermore? Roll these things in your mind, and then roll yourself into the coach. I will meet you at Ambleside, if you like.

I had read the review of Wordsworth several times over: and thought the criticism (except. excipiend.) good, and the moral philosophy superb. The passage about the moon looking round her, etc., I of course felt to be a blunder, though I was less surprised than sorry to see it. It seems to me to chime in too well with what I marked as the defect of his preface to P. v. A., so that I fear it is not a negligent criticism, as one might have hoped: but an opinion well weighed and carefully adopted. I wonder what he would say to Ebenezer Elliott, with his flowers and mountains, for a taste?

Welcome then again

Love-listening Primrose! tho’ not parted long

We meet like lovers after years of pain.

Oh thou bringst blissful childhood back to me,

Thou still art loveliest in the lowest place,

Still as of old Day glows with love for thee,

And reads our heavenly Father in thy face.

Surely thy thoughts are humble and devout,

Flower of the pensive gold! for why should heaven

Deny to thee his noblest boon of thought,

If to Earth’s demigods ‘tis vainly given?

Answer me, Sunless Sister, Thou hast speech

Though silent Fragrance is thy eloquence,

Beauty thy language, and thy smile might teach

Ungrateful man to pardon providence.

He would call it a very bold figure of speech: figure of speech, quotha! However, Philip is a noble fellow, and the apology for this piece of criticism is so wise and so good that one can hardly regret that an apology was needed. I have sent for the citation of Will. Shakespeare, though rather with the desire than the expectation of great delight. I read a few extracts in the Atlas, with which I was not at all struck, or, if at all, not favourably; but that does not go for much, as I did not know who it was by, or anything about it, and the extracts were most probably ill-chosen. But to tell you the truth I never took much to Landor. To be sure I never read much of him, but I have often had the book in my hand. Perhaps I might have liked him better if the speakers had been named Philander and Strephon, and Philalethes and the like, instead of Bacon, and Hooker, and Raleigh, and so following. I shall have every chance this time: for besides the prejudice derived from your praise, I am by no means easy in feeling no great respect for a writer of whom P. v. A. speaks so very highly. There is something in Philip’s intellect which commands more than my usual reverence. More genial minds I have met with, but for strength, and integrity, and discretion of understanding, I do not know his equal. He puts me in mind of F. Malkin. We must have him change his mind, though, about the moon and the streams. I read the review of Coleridge in the Quarterly the other day. The parts which are not Coleridge’s own might have been better, but they are well enough.

The spring of 1835 was memorable at Mirehouse for a visit of Tennyson and FitzGerald. That this made a vivid impression on FitzGerald is evident from a letter which he wrote after Spedding’s death to his niece, when there was some idea of gathering together his miscellaneous essays:

“I rejoice,” he says, “to hear of a Collection, or Reprint, of his stray works.... I used to say he wrote ‘Virgilian Prose.’ One only of his I did not care for; but that, I doubt not, was because of the subject, not of the treatment: his own printed Report of a Speech he made in what was called the ‘Quinquaginta Club’ Debating Society (not the Union) at Cambridge about the year 1831. This speech his Father got him to recall and recompose in Print; wishing always that his Son should turn his faculties to such public Topics rather than to the Poets, of whom he had seen enough in Cumberland not to have much regard for: Shelley for one, at one time stalking about the mountains with Pistols, and other such Vagaries. I do not think he was much an admirer of Wordsworth (I don’t know about Southey), and I well remember that when I was at Merehouse (as Miss Bristowe would have us call it), with A. Tennyson in 1835, Mr. Spedding grudged his Son’s giving up much time and thought to consultations about Morte d’Arthur’s, Lords of Burleigh, etc., which were then in MS. He more than once questioned me, who was sometimes present at the meetings, ‘Well, Mr. F., and what is it? Mr. Tennyson reads, and Jem criticizes: — is that it?’ etc. This, while I might be playing Chess with dear Mrs. Spedding, in May, while the Daffodils were dancing outside the Hall door.”

“At the end of May,” he writes to Mrs. Kemble, “we went to lodge for a week at Windermere — where Wordsworth’s new volume of Yarrow Revisited reached us. W. was then at his home, but Tennyson would not go to visit him: and of course I did not: nor even saw him.”

In the summer of 1835 Thompson spent the Long Vacation at the Lakes, and Spedding was engaged in securing lodgings for him and his pupils, while Tennyson was still at Mirehouse.

“I am going,” he writes, “with Alfred, I believe, to Buttermere, and so have not time to tell you how much I am rejoiced that your destiny should have dragged you hither — nor to discuss the London Review — nor to tell you about Fitz and Alfred Tennyson, and Hartley Coleridge, and W. W., etc., only that Alfred is very gruff and unmanageable, and the weather very cold. He desires to be remembered. Fitz is gone.”

A few days later he says:

Alfred left us about a week since, homeward bound, but meaning to touch at Brookfield’s on his way. The weather has been much finer since he went; certainly, while he was here, our northern sun did not display himself to advantage. Nevertheless, I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would have supposed who did not know his almost personal dislike of the Present, whatever it may be. Hartley Coleridge is mightily taken with him; and, after the fourth bottom of gin, deliberately thanked Heaven (under me, I believe, or me under Heaven, I forget which) for having brought them acquainted. Said Hartley was busy with an article on “Macbeth,” to appear (the vegetable spirits permitting) in the next Blackwood. He confessed to a creed touching Destiny which was new to me: denying Free Will (if I understood him right) in toto; but at the same time maintaining that man is solely and entirely answerable for whatever evil he does: not merely that he is to suffer for it, which I could understand, but that he is answerable for it which I do not. Now this, I think, is not fair. I could not get Alfred to Rydal Mount, he would and would not — sulky one, although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him; and would have been more so had the state of his household permitted, which I am sorry to say is full of sickness.... By a letter from D. D. H[eath] received to-day I infer that Subscription no Bondage is out; which I shall accordingly send for. I am sorry it is not to be understood in the sense of “Killing no Murder,” which seems to me, till I be further enlightened, the only sort of construction which will make sense of it. D. D. H. looketh on this pamphlet as the final cause of the system of subscription at Oxford, and, now that the effect hath been accomplished doth heartily wish that custom may be discontinued. Euge, D. D. H.! For myself, since Alfred went, my time has been chiefly employed (that is, all my time which was not occupied in exercising the puppies) upon three several books: to wit, Ralph Esher, a sort of novel by Leigh Hunt, containing a most graceful and lively portraiture of Charles II.’s times, a good deal of rot about Truth and Love, and a good deal of metaphysics, hard to understand in parts, but in parts (to me, at least) very deep and touching. Item, Isaac Comnenus, a Play (Murray, 1827): by Henry Taylor, as Southey who lent me the book informs me; a work much in the tone and [style of] P. v. A., and though far behind in design and execution by [no means] an unworthy precursor. It has some passages as fine as anything in Philip. Item, thirdly and lastly, Basil Montagu’s Life of Bacon, a work of much labour both on the writer’s part and the reader’s, but well meant, and if not itself a good one containing all the materials necessary for a good one, which is saying a great deal. I have not read all the notes. In fact I believe they are all contained in the text. I should think that on a moderate computation, half the two volumes is a reprint of the other half, for if there are a few pages which are printed twice over, there are many half and quarter pages which are repeated four or five times. I should half like to review it.

If he had acted on his own suggestion we might not have had Macaulay’s Essay, and certainly should not have had the Evenings with a Reviewer. This is the first intimation of his interest in what was to be the work of his life. It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Taylor, the author of Philip van Artevelde, which influenced his occupation for the next six years.

“At this time,” says Sir Henry in his Autobiography, “I obtained another relief, and in obtaining it obtained a friend for life. James Spedding was the younger son of a Cumberland squire who had been a friend of my father’s in former, though I think they had not met in latter days. In the notes to Van Artevelde I had quoted a passage from an admirable speech of his spoken in a debating club at Cambridge when he was an undergraduate. This led to my making his acquaintance; and when some very laborious business of detail had to be executed, I obtained authority to offer him the employment with the remuneration of £150 a year. He was in a difficulty at the time as to the choice of a profession, and feeling that life without business and occupation of some kind was dangerous, was glad to accept this employment as one which might answer the purpose well enough, if he proved suited to it, and if not might be relinquished without difficulty and exchanged for some other. I wrote to Mr. Southey, 24th January 1836:

“‘Spedding has been and will be invaluable, and they owe me much for him. He is regarded on all hands, not only as a man of first-rate capacity, but as having quite a genius for business. I, for my part, have never seen anything like him in business on this side Stephen.... When I contemplate the easy labours of Stephen and one or two others I am disposed to think that there are giants in these days.’

“For six years Spedding worked away with universal approbation, and all this time he would have been willing to accept a post of précis writer with £300 a year, or any other such recognised position, and attach himself permanently to the office. But none such was placed at his disposal ... and he took the opportunity of the Whig government going out in 1841 to give up his employment. He then applied himself to edit the works and vindicate the fame of Lord Bacon. In 1847, on Sir James Stephen’s retirement, the office of Under Secretary of State with £2000 a year was offered to him by Lord Grey, before it was offered to me, and he could not be induced to accept it. He could not be brought to believe, what no one else doubted, that he was equal to the duties.

“Be this as it may, the fact that the man being well known and close at hand for six years, who could have been had for £300 a year in 1841, should have been let slip, though he was thought worth £2000 a year in 1847, if not a rare, is a clear example of the little heed given by the Government of this country to the choice and use of instruments.”

The exact date of Spedding’s beginning work at the Colonial Office is not known, but it must have been between the middle of June 1835 and the end of August, for by that time he found that Downing Street was “no place for the indulgence of the individual genius.” In a letter to Thompson he writes:

I did take the liberty of insinuating a scoff at a Spanish Governor in one of my Despatches, but H. T. said it was clever and would not do. Said H. T. rises day by day in my esteem. He is not the least stiff or awful, but very gentle and majestic. He has a great deal of P. v. A. in him. But we do not talk much except on matters of business, which, however, rises in his hands to the dignity of statesmanship. I have not yet ascertained the contingencies on which my stay here depends, but I should think it probable that I may in the end have the offer of a permanent appointment in the office. If I have, I mean to take it, purely from a sense of duty; that I may have a nominal employment to satisfy impertinent enquiries withal, and perhaps also (as I dream in my more romantic moments) that I may have a real employment to discipline my own soul withal. The prospect of its leading to wealth or dignity is so small under present circumstances as not to be worth taking into account, yet not exactly so neither, for any prospect of any thing to come, however faint and distant, dignifies an employment with a relationship to the future and the indefinite.

I meant to have gone to Kitlands to-day, but the coach was full. Recollect that you are not a man of many cares new taken up, and therefore may find time to shower your wiser meditations upon a sheet of paper, which addressed to me under cover to “R. W. Hay, Esq., Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, Downing Street,” will not be lost upon one who sometimes did but observe and wonder, but has now to enquire and dispatch.

Thompson had been with a reading party at Keswick during the summer, but had proved a bad correspondent.

“I have heard,” Spedding writes in November, “occasionally from Mirehouse dim intimations of your supposed existence; and latterly I have seen Martineau, to whom I have carefully pointed out the weak points in your character, which he had not observed. I have reason to believe that I am rising rapidly in public estimation, and I have only to pray that I may not become too sufficient for my place. My sense of Duty has already been appealed to in the most flattering manner, to draw me to the undertaking of nobler business, which, being capable of, I have no right (it is said) to decline. My capacity, it would seem, is beyond doubt; and, as it has been evinced without any effort or observation of mine, perhaps the best way after all will be to let it have its own way and trouble my soul no more about it. Turn it adrift in the world, leave it to find its own market and provide its own goods, and if my soul (which would be a stranger in such pilgrimage) should return in after years to enquire after it, who knows how great she may find it grown? P. v. A. is away for his holidays. If you can suggest a good subject for a dramatic romance out of English or Scotch history between the Conquest and the time of Elizabeth, you shall thereby do him a good turn, and perhaps get praised in a note. Helps has just been here asking for information about Cambridge in general, more particularly about you and Blakesley. I could only tell him what I knew of you, which you must confess is not much to your credit. Sterling has established himself and his family in Bayswater, and gives tea parties to the wiser minds. I am going thither to-night. Garden (I understand from himself, writing from Carstairs) is to curatise in Cornwall. D. D. H. thinks there is humour in an equity draft.... My own career is as far from being marked out as ever. There is no present prospect of a vacancy here, and I cannot get any body to advise me to accept it if there were.”

In the following year Thompson was appointed to the Head Mastership of the recently founded Leicester and Leicestershire Collegiate School, and at the opening ceremony on August 9, 1836, he delivered an address, of which Spedding says:

I have read your speech, not with the distant and respectful admiration, the wonder broken off, which I am apt to call faith, but with the deliberate admiration of a man who understands and strongly assents. I see your audience had sense enough to utter loud cheers, but I want to know whether they had sense enough to see that such a speech ought not to be let pass away in a newspaper, but to be provided with some permanent, portable, and self-subsisting existence. If the proceedings of the day are to be published in a pamphlet, I should like to invest money in a few copies. If not, I shall think about printing your part of them in a legible shape on my own account.... G. Farish is going to Madeira, with Sterling, I believe. James F. speaks hopefully of the latter, but is more alarmed about his brother.

In a letter to Allen we get a glimpse of Tennyson:

Alfred Tennyson has reappeared, and is going to-day or to-morrow to Florence, or to Killarney, or to Madeira, or to some place where some ship is going — he does not know where. He has been on a visit to a madhouse for the last fortnight (not as a patient), and has been delighted with the mad people, whom he reports the most agreeable and the most reasonable persons he has met with. The keeper is Dr. Allen (any relation of yours?), with whom he had been greatly taken!

Again writing to Thompson in October 1840 he says:

I have been studying Alfred Tennyson’s MSS., and I send you a copy of a poem which I think he once repeated to you and me, and which we neither of us much entered into. Reading it again the other day, I was surprised with the power and beauty of it, and I now think it wants nothing but a better name, or, I should rather say, a historical foundation. I would have it put into the mouth of some noted man (among the many such that must have been) involved in a marriage which he does not like, in violation of a pre-existing attachment. The imagining of such situations for the mere purpose of entering into the feelings which belong to them has something unwholesome in it, to my fancy; but the situation being given (whether in fact or fiction), there is no harm in turning it into poetry.

In 1840 Lord Lyndhurst was a candidate for the office of High Steward of the University of Cambridge in opposition to Lord Lyttelton. Spedding voted for the latter.

“I went down to Cambridge,” he writes to Thompson, “to support Lord Lyttelton in his late distinguished defeat, of which you have, of course, heard all particulars with apostolic embellishments and illustrations both from other apostolic souls and from Merivale. I have been happy in being able in these trying circumstances to preserve my natural tranquillity. My view of the nature of the contest is this: The University would select Lord Lyndhurst as the sort of man whom a University should delight to honour. A dissentient minority say not content. The majority reply to the dissentients, ‘Why divide? You see you cannot win.’ The minority rejoins, ‘Never mind; divide we will, win or not win. If Lord Lyndhurst is to be selected for such an honour as this, it shall be deliberately and not by accident. The objections shall be formally brought forward and formally overruled.’ The bringing of the question to the poll I consider as an appeal to the constituency to consider what they were about; and, in spite of the result, I am glad it has been brought to this issue. For the credit of the University it was fit it should be known that there were 500 dissentients, and for the instruction of mankind it was fit it should be known that there was a majority of two masters of arts to one who thought Lord Lyndhurst the proper man to receive the honours and dignities of the University. Had I been an enemy I should have voted in the majority; but being a dutiful, though not perhaps a very respectful son, I was glad of an opportunity of making the 586 into 587.”

The friends of Lord Lyndhurst made every effort to secure his election, and we learn from his Life by Sir Theodore Martin that he was only induced to be a candidate on condition that his return would be certain. The majority was 480.

Thompson, who had returned to Cambridge, was at this time in feeble health, and, as it was not known where a letter would find him, FitzGerald wrote under cover to Spedding, who was still at the Colonial Office. The letter does not appear to have been preserved, but it suggested to Spedding some criticism of the theatres and actors of the time which is not without interest at the present day.

“Fitz,” he writes on November 25, 1840, “has forwarded this to me that I may direct it properly, and as it is not sealed I have made free with the contents. The meaning of the writing on the wall had hitherto escaped me, I confess, but the effect of my head in the Pit has often occurred to me as something unseemly, like Scriptures out of Church; inasmuch as when I am by myself I always choose a place where I can wear my hat. I have sometimes thought of getting a wig to wear in such places of vain resort. But to say the truth, a bad play will often afford more rational entertainment for two or three hours than an average dinner party, provided a man goes to it with an understanding that such a thing can be neither better nor worse than a shadow, and with an imagination to amend it. It is strange enough, for your best modern plays and your modern acting of the best plays (except in a very few instances) are so wretched that one should think they could only bore and disgust one — meagre, vapid, false and vulgar in the highest degree. One only wonders that so many human heads and hearts can consent to sit it out, and be amused and refreshed by it. I believe it is this very problem which gives the theory an interest to me, for certainly the spectators are to me an integral part of the spectacle (do I use ‘integral’ right? I could never properly understand the calculus), and the most entertaining part of the action is the action of the play upon the audience. You not only see the mirror held up to Nature, but you see Nature looking at her image in it, which presents her in still another aspect. Of the nature of the multitude, their ways of thinking and feeling certainly, and partly too of their ways of acting, much may be learned in the pit of a theatre. From the effect of Bulwer’s plays upon the play-going public one might have inferred the effect of his novels upon the reading public, almost as surely as you might have inferred the effect of his plays from observing the style of acting which is most popular. But besides my pleasure in contemplating the nature of the fool multitude, I am curious about the laws of art, and I observe, in that as in other things, that specimens of the want of the thing are as instructive as the specimen of the thing itself. I never understood Shakespeare’s idea of Julius Caesar till I once saw George Bennett enact him; and I think I gained more light as to the meaning of many parts of Falstaff in the Merry Wives from the grossest and, I think, worst piece of acting I ever saw (by Bartley) than I have gained as to Benedick from C. Kemble, or Hamlet from Macready. Altogether, I find that the clumsy, tawdry, motley pageant, with its little good and much bad, its touches of nature here and there, and its scene after scene of vulgarity, insipidity, cant, and monstrous unnaturalness, has the effect of provoking my understanding and imagination into agreeable exercise.”

The time had come when, after six years of service, Spedding resolved to shake himself free from the uncongenial business of the Colonial Office, and devote himself to what was to be the work of his life. On the 19th of August 1841 he writes from Wycliffe Rectory to Thompson who was then in Germany:

You told me to write on speculation and not put off too long, but I suppose I am not the less qualified to perform the former part of your injunction for having neglected to perform the latter. But I suppose the worst consequence will be that my letter will not reach you, by which you will save something in postage and lose nothing in any other way. The fact is that your letter reached me during the last hours of my official life, when between the duty of clearing my table, and preparing for another and a better life (packing up, to wit), I had no time to write anything that was to go as far as Dresden. From the business of Downing St. I relapsed suddenly to the not less absorbing recreations of the 12th August and the moors; and since we left the grouse in quiet I have been on constant duty in looking at rocks and rivers and whatever there is to be looked at in a country not barren of natural attractions and the scene of one of Walter Scott’s poems. To-day I have been I do not know how many miles to see a handsome modern house and fine estate on the banks of the Tees, and to enjoy the most formidable of all mortal entertainments, a lunch of about 16 persons at a house you were never in before; all low voices and only one of the family known to you by name. However the beef was good, and silence is richer than speech. I am now returned, my skin is full of tea and bread and butter, and the room is full of young women talking about ghosts and singing Irish melodies. I have borrowed this sheet of thin paper that you may have the less to pay, and I have set off in this minute hand that I may have the more room to utter whatsoever shall be given to me to utter in this house: what that may be I shall not stay to conjecture, but proceed at once to the proof.

I need not describe to you the appearance of London or the manners of the inhabitants in the galleries and institutions with which it abounds, as you have had opportunities of learning better by the use of your own eyes and ears as much about these as you wish to know. Something I might say about the manners and morals of Downing Street which would be new to you, that section of London society having been rarely penetrated by travellers, and if penetrated still more rarely escaped from without the loss of that peculiar faculty by virtue of which man tells truth. But this also I shall at present spare you. Downing Street already lies behind me, and I think it is St. Paul who tells us that we should fix our eyes on what is before, and what, I wonder, is before me? I see a fair array of years abounding in capabilities and in leisure to cultivate them, and if I could follow that precept of St. Paul’s faithfully, and abstain from looking backwards at an equally fair array of opportunities unimproved and leisure run to waste, I should think the prospect a splendid one.... For these six years past I have been working for other men’s purposes, and cultivating my life for their use. Now I set up for myself; and the question is this, of all things which most need to be done what am I best able to do?... But I had forgotten that all this will be a mystery to you who do not know what I have done to myself since I saw you. You must know this that as soon as it was clear which way the elections were going, I wrote to Stephen to say that I meant to leave the C.O., not because the change of parties need make any difference to me, but because my position had already yielded all the good I could expect from it, and a change of administration formed a natural period which it would not be desirable to let pass, the gain of the salary being, in fact, to a person who could live without it, no adequate compensation for the loss of time to a person who could use it in other ways, etc. etc. Stephen thought me quite right, and recommends me to persevere in my present intention of making literature my business: so far at least as to make a fair experiment of it: not doubting that, for a man who has enough to live upon, and who has resolution enough to employ five or six hours every day in reading or writing with some definite practical object, there is no kind of life so eligible: and there is plenty of work to do. So on the 10th of August 1841 (which day I will trouble you, in the memoir of my life which you will prefix to your edition of the fragments of my great work which you will find among my papers at my untimely death, to make for ever memorable) I took my leave of the Colonial Office and recovered possession of my time and my hours at the moderate cost of £150 per annum, and here I am with the responsibility: a German, I suppose, would spell it with a capital R. And now what have you to say? One thing I really think is promising. I set out with a definite project, not too big or too remote: and if I had not involved myself in a desire to make something of these Baconian letters, which I could not so well do without more leisure and liberty to hunt down my game, I should not have trusted myself to my own guidance with quite so free a conscience. I have already made an entrance into the Lambeth Library and satisfied myself that former editors are not to be trusted; and that a great deal may probably be done by a man who unites two important requisites which have not yet met in any of them, industry and brains. Would you believe, for instance, that there is more than one letter from Francis Bacon to his Mother, and vice versa, which have never been included in any collection of his letters? And that there are many letters between Antony Bacon and his mother relating to the prospects and goings on of the two brothers between the ages of twenty and thirty-five which no biographer of Francis appears to have studied, probably none has ever seen? Mr. Maitland showed me a MS. commonplace book containing a good many anecdotes about Bacon and the people of that time (most of them published I believe in the Apophthegms, etc.) interspersed with memoranda of all kinds, of which he says he can find no account. I suspect it to be Dr. Rawley’s private memorandum book; a point which may easily be verified: and if so it will no doubt contain many things which being laid alongside of many other things will throw light upon various obscurities. That such a MS. should be known to exist in the Lambeth Library, and that, after some half-dozen editors have been over the ground in pursuit of Baconiana, it should remain there without anything being known about it, is it not a proof that in fact the ground has yet to be explored? And if so who can say but that among the volumes upon volumes of letters relating to these times which are still preserved in print or in MS., matter may not be found out of which to construct an edition of Bacon’s letters that will read as easily and as clearly as a novel. I am sure if it were done properly, it would be one of the most valuable historical and probably the most valuable biographical works that has been produced about these times. For there is hardly any contemporary political question of interest which is not indirectly or directly touched upon at one time or another, and which would not therefore require elucidation.

The subject is pursued in the next letter written from Mirehouse ten days later to Thompson, who was still abroad.

I am quite sure that much remains to be done with regard to those Baconian letters which I told you of, and I am sure too that without leisure and liberty I at least could not fairly set about it. I have been among the MSS. in the Lambeth Library and found that, though there are probably not many letters of Bacon’s which have not been published, there is a wilderness of papers closely connected with them which has never been properly explored. It is a field in which nobody has been at work that had both industry and brains. For the present, therefore, I look forward to this as my main business, in which if I prosper, I shall know what to do when (Peel having lost that no confidence in his opponents in which consists all the confidence he has to rest upon himself) Lord John shall come in again and fortune shall be again in a condition to be wooed; if I prosper not, I shall still know what to do; though it will be different. But I am filling a second letter with myself.

I am afraid you are not likely to see any people of the right sort, such as you describe, at Munich; though I duly advertised them of your street and lodging. Pollock has been circuiting as simple barrister, and will shortly have to circuit again as Barrister revising. In the between he comes here, and indeed I expect him this evening.... Douglas Heath had meant to join John, who has been tumbling up and down the Alps under the guidance of some Geologist; an unsafe guide, I should fancy, for what death so sweet to a Geologist as to knock out his brains against a stone; or to be embedded in some liquid, liquefying, or indurescent substance (such as snow or mud or lava) in which a million of years hence some other Geologist may find him embedded and so satisfy himself that a man was once there? He seems to have had some fine rides on the backs of avalanches down fissures. But Douglas was kept in London by business partly, and partly by the illness of his mother and the uncertain health of his father, and does not expect to get out of England this year. I hope he will contrive to get hither in about a month. I am afraid there is no chance of your finding a chink of time between your return to England and your October term business in which you might pay us another visit. Your first object ought to be to put yourself into the most convenient place for being thoroughly cured, which implies the neighbourhood of a thoroughly good Doctor: a luxury which we cannot offer you here. But I hope that, now the year is mine all round to dispose of as I think best, we shall be able some day to make our several times suit and our several lines meet at Mirehouse, and run on together for a while. You are very much approved of by everybody here.

Early in the year 1842, Spedding accompanied the first Lord Ashburton to the United States as Secretary to a commission, the object of which was to determine a boundary question which was successfully settled by the treaty of Washington. He writes to Thompson from Gosport on February 9, 1842:

Having heard that you think I might have written to you upon the occasion by my breaking out in this new light, and partly concurring in that sentiment, and finding myself as much at leisure for the rest of the evening as if the destinies of no country, much less the destinies of two, depended upon me, I sit down to shake mental hands with you, and to wish you prosperity during my eclipse and setting behind the Atlantic.

I will not trouble you with explanations concerning my inducement for taking so considerable a step as this. You will easily understand that I had to listen to more inward voices than one, and to wait the result of much confused inward debate before I decided to take it. Fortunately there was no question as to the comparative worth of the said two voices, nor any doubt as to the side on which they respectively appeared. It was the Fiend, i.e. the baser nature, the human instinct, that said, “Budge not.” The better voice said, “Go, why not?” The decision was soon taken, and being taken, the thing itself seemed much easier than it looked at first. It is now above three weeks since I have looked at it only as a thing that is to be, and I almost feel as if it would be strange if it were otherwise. What the effect of it may be on my character and fortunes I do not trouble myself to prophesy. It will at least make me think many things easy which seemed unapproachably difficult a month ago. It will teach me to keep accounts. And it will give me some insight into the nature of a state-conscience, a state-reason, a state-understanding, and a state-character. Many things besides. It may very likely ruin my reputation, but I am not sure that that would be an evil. I should be much happier, I think, without any reputation, not to add that if it were gone, I should be thrown upon my resources, which might after all turn out to be a better thing. But let these things pass. One thing is quite clear, that I could not spend the next six months in any way by which I should gain so much either in knowledge or in power. My immortal work must, of course, be suspended, but what is six months in an immortality? By the way, touching my Falstaff Platonizing, I agree with you, as reported by Merivale, that the insertion of such a joke would be unbecoming in a Museum Academicum, the more’s the pity, for with the joke itself I was a good deal pleased. But then, on the other hand, you will not let me prefix a serious introduction, explaining the thing which it is meant to illustrate. I can only suggest that you should yourself write an introduction refuting the said theory, if you really believe that the thing is worth putting in at all. But let this also pass, for I see the bottom of my paper (by the way I suppose I must not say such a thing in the U.S.), and the chambermaid would fain be dismissed to her bed. At present you may truly say that I am going ahead, for I alone of the suite have arrived, and my master, by being unpunctual, has lost a day of fair wind.

At this time FitzGerald wrote to Laurence, the artist:

You have, of course, read the account of Spedding’s forehead landing in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it for Beachy Head. There is a Shakespeare cliff, and a Spedding cliff. Good old fellow! I hope he’ll come back safe and sound, forehead and all. Not swords, nor cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied, that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s forehead; we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things; you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of Geneva. We have great laughing over this.

Tennyson’s 1842 volume came out while Spedding was at Washington, and FitzGerald, writing to Pollock, regretted that it contained some pieces which he thought better omitted.

I agree with you quite about the skipping-rope, etc. But the bald men of the Embassy would tell you otherwise. I should not wonder if the whole theory of the Embassy, perhaps the discovery of America itself, was involved in that very Poem. Lord Bacon’s honesty may, I am sure, be found there.

“The Yankees,” Donne writes to Bernard Barton, “seem to think baldness a rarity appertaining to the old country, for their papers could not sufficiently express their wonder, when Ld. Ashburton went over about the Boundary question, at the lack of hair among his attachés. Spedding’s crown imperial of a cranium struck them like a view of Teneriffe or Atlas.”

“Nothing has been heard of Spedding,” says FitzGerald, “but we all conclude, from the nature of the case, that he has not been scalped.”

The mission ended happily in the treaty of Washington, and Spedding returned to his friends, in spite of the forebodings of FitzGerald, who says:

A man on the coach the other day told me that all was being settled very easily in America, but stage-coach politicians are not always to be trusted.

By the end of the year (1842), Spedding was again at Mirehouse.

“I am at present,” he writes to Thompson, “absorbed in teaching the young idea of a water spaniel how to shoot. He promises to be an accomplished dog. He can already catch a wounded hare and bring it, rescue a snipe out of a rapid stream, hunt (though in vain) for a water-hen among the roots of an alder-bush, and wait with intense breathless anxiety to hear the sound of a duck’s wing in the gloaming. In time I hope to teach him to do as I bid him. We are all well here. How is all at Cambridge? What shall you do at Christmas? If I am still here, can you come so far north? You shall see the dog.”

But although these country delights had their attractions for him, he had for some years established himself in London, where his rooms at 60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields were the meeting-place of Tennyson, Thackeray, FitzGerald, and any of his friends who happened to be in London at the time.

“Spedding is just now furnishing chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” FitzGerald writes in 1836, “so that we may look on him as a fixture in London. He and I went to dine with Tennant at Blackheath last Thursday: there we met Edgeworth, who has got a large house at Eltham, and is lying in wait for pupils. I am afraid he will not find many. We passed a very delightful evening.”

His return from America after four months at Washington, led to his being selected by the editor of the Edinburgh Review to write an article on Dickens’s American Notes, which gave the novelist strange and unreasonable offence. Spedding had originally written, “He is understood to have gone out as a kind of missionary in the cause of international copyright,” and this had been changed by the editor to “He went out, if we are rightly informed, as a kind of missionary,” etc. To this Dickens writes in a towering passion, “I deny it wholly. He is wrongly informed, and reports without enquiry, a piece of information which I could only characterise by using one of the shortest and strongest words in the language.” And yet his letters show that, whether the subject of international copyright were the real object of his visit or not, his speeches on it are referred to with a kind of satisfaction as if they were of the utmost importance. Apparently he was dissatisfied with the impartial way in which Spedding distributed his praise and blame, praising only where praise was due and blaming where it was not, and not attributing too much value to the hasty results of a four months’ experience of the country.

But for several years Spedding had been a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the articles which he selected for republication are full of that calm wisdom which distinguished all that he wrote. In 1836 he reviewed his friend Henry Taylor’s Statesman; in 1838 he wrote on “Negro Apprenticeship”; in 1839 on the “Suspension of the Jamaica Constitution”; in 1840 on the “Wakefield Theory of Colonization”; in 1841 on the “Civilization of Africa and the Niger Expedition,” in which his friend John Allen lost a brother; and in 1842 on “South Australia in 1841,” a sequel to the article on the “Wakefield Theory of Colonization.” And now for the next thirty years of his life he devoted himself to the task of what FitzGerald called washing his blackamoor, “a Tragedy pathetic as Antigone or Iphigenia.” His own special work was the arrangement of Bacon’s letters and minor writings, which had hitherto been very carelessly edited, and for this purpose he spent his days among the originals in the Lambeth Library and the British Museum. “Spedding devotes his days to Lord Bacon in the British Museum,” writes FitzGerald in 1844; and again in 1846, “I saw very little of Spedding in London, for he was out all day at State paper offices and Museums.”

But he was not so absorbed in his special pursuits as not to take interest in public affairs, and the Maynooth Grant in 1845 and the opposition which it excited caused him to take part in an address to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in its favour.

“You will see in the Morning Herald of to-day,” he writes to Thompson, “that the great event has already taken place, and though the world continues to move as it did, there does appear to be a change of weather.

“We had only 300 names. But that was quite enough, considering all things, especially the respectability of the people, and the imperfection of the agitation, to make the address well worth presenting. Having gone so far, to hold back altogether would have been to confess that the attempt was a mere failure, which nobody can say it was. To hold it back past the time specified in the circulars and originally designed, for the chance of obtaining more signatures, would have been useless: people would have only said that though we boasted of the shortness of the time in which the signatures were collected, yet in fact we waited as long as there was any chance of gathering any more. And in point of fact they had begun to come in very slowly by Monday morning. At best, it could not have been improved into an effectual canvass, and as it is, it shows very well. Let any one put the two lists side by side, and then say, if the weight of opinion in Cambridge inclines one way, which way is it? I was doubtful of the expediency of stirring it at first, but I am now very glad that it has been done. I wish the Herald had printed the names. But it was an unlucky day, there being a great debate in both Houses.

“Hare declined presenting; upon which H. Lushington, Venables, Micklethwaite, and myself (who had, in fact, been the chief actors), distributed ourselves into two cabs: and drove slap up to the Chancellor of Exchequer’s. Harry Lushington was the chief speaker, and did it very well and gracefully. Goulburn was, of course, gracious, but I should hardly have inferred that he was glad. However, he said he was; glad that this had been done, and glad that no more had been done; and (upon the whole) easy about the matter. The fever (he said) appeared to be gradually subsiding, and indeed the opposition was less formidable than might be supposed. ‘From what the gentleman said who presented the address on the other side, he gathered that it was for the most part a conscientious opposition, not arising from any political animosity.’ Certainly Punch cannot be said to beat Nature.”

Nothing, however, diverted him from his great object. FitzGerald writes to Frederick Tennyson:

Spedding, you know, does not change: he is now the same that he was fourteen years old when I first knew him at school, more than twenty years ago; wise, calm, bald, combining the best qualities of Youth and Age.

But his calmness was not proof against the enthusiasm created by the advent of Jenny Lind in 1847. Again FitzGerald writes:

All the world has been, as I suppose you have read, crazy about Jenny Lind.... Spedding’s cool blood was moved to hire stalls several times at an advanced rate.... I have never yet heard the famous Jenny Lind, whom all the world raves about. Spedding is especially mad about her, I understand: and, after that, is it not best for weaker vessels to keep out of her way? Night after night is that bald head seen in one particular position in the Opera house, in a stall; the miserable man has forgot Bacon and philosophy, and goes after strange women.

His health, however, had been giving some cause for anxiety at this time to his old friend, who writes to Carlyle:

Thank you for your account of Spedding: I had written however to himself, and from himself ascertained that he was out of the worst. But Spedding’s life is a very ticklish one.

Hitherto Spedding had been working in his own way at Bacon’s life and letters without any idea of contributing to a complete edition of his works, but rather with the object of defending him against what he believed to be the injustice done him by Macaulay in his famous Essay. But in 1847 Mr. Leslie Ellis had been preparing an edition of Bacon’s philosophical works which was offered for publication to Messrs. Longman, and Spedding acted as intermediary.

“Better, I think,” he writes to Thompson, “to be with the publishers than against them so long as one keeps the reins. Therefore I have written to Longman, reporting Ellis’s proposition, and recommending them to treat immediately with him upon those terms; for that if they get the philosophical works alone so edited, their edition will command the market, even if they do nothing but reprint the rest as they are. Whereas, if any other publisher should engage Ellis’s services for that portion, their trade edition would be worthless for ever. All which I believe to be true, and I hope will be conclusive. When that point is fixed there will be time enough to consider what else may be done. If they refuse the opportunity, I think I shall decline further connexion with the enterprise. My own project, as I never counted upon anything but expense from it, will not be much affected either way.”

The result, as is well known, was a complete edition of Bacon’s works, in which Mr. Leslie Ellis undertook the philosophical, Mr. Douglas Heath the legal and professional, and Spedding the literary and miscellaneous, to which he afterwards added the life and letters. In the meantime he wrote, but never published, for his own satisfaction and that he might gather the opinions of his friends, Evenings with a Reviewer, the reviewer being Macaulay and the review his Essay on Bacon. In sending a copy to Dr. Whewell he says:

It may seem absurd in a man to print a book, and yet to wish not only to keep it private, but also to prevent it from circulating privately. But after considering the matter carefully, with reference to what I may call the interest of the subject — I mean to the chance of making a successful and durable impression upon the popular opinion — I am satisfied that it would not be judicious to present the question to the public first in this form. It would probably provoke controversy. The result of the controversy would depend upon reviewers. Reviewers, until they have heard the evidence as well as the argument, are not in a condition to judge; yet unless the evidence be made easily accessible and bound up with the argument, they cannot be expected either to seek it out or to suspend their opinions, but will simply proceed to judgment without hearing it. In such a case, considering the strength of popular prepossessions and the tendency of the first blow at them to raise a dust of popular objections, the verdict would in the first instance go against me; and though I might appeal with a better chance to the second thoughts and the next generation, yet the appeal would be conducted at great disadvantage, because I should then stand in the position of an advocate with a personal interest in the cause. As it is, I hope in my division of Bacon’s works to set forth all the evidence clearly and impartially, so that everybody who has the book will have the means of judging for himself, and if I can get that credit for justice and impartiality which I mean to deserve, I do not much doubt the issue. But the first reception of the work, upon which in these times so much depends, will itself depend very much upon my coming before the public with a clear and unsuspected character: and this, if I should previously acquire the reputation (justly or not) of an advocate engaged to make good his own cause, I could not expect.

FitzGerald, writing to Donne at the end of 1848, says of Evenings with a Reviewer:

I saw many of my friends in London, Carlyle and Tennyson among them; but most and best of all, Spedding. I have stolen his noble book away from him; noble, in spite (I believe, but am not sure) of some adikology in the second volume: some special pleadings for his idol: amica Veritas, sed magis, etc.

And Donne in reply:

I, too, have Spedding’s “glorious book,” which I prefer to any modern reading. Reading one of his “Evenings” is next to spending an evening with the author.

Thompson, whose health had completely broken down in 1849, was undergoing the water-cure at Great Malvern, and early in 1850 Spedding writes to him:

They tell me that a letter will find you at Great Malvern. Indeed, I had reason to think so before, for I had heard of you twice since you went thither; once from Spring Rice and once from Blakesley.... I have been stationary here since August, seeing nobody and hearing nothing, so you must not expect any news.... You want to know, perhaps, what I am about myself. I am at this moment sitting in an easy-chair with the ink on a table beside me, and the papers on a blotting-board on my knee. On the little table beside me is first a leaden jar, bought long since to keep tobacco in, now holding snipe-shot. Next to it a pocket Virgil lying on its belly. On my left a ledge made for a lamp, on which are three different translations of Bacon’s Sapientia Veterum, and some loose pieces of paper destined in due time to be enriched with a fourth translation, of which I need say no more. Next to my little table stands a large round table, now quite uninhabitable by reason of the litter of books that has taken possession of it, as, for instance, another Virgil with English translation and notes, open, upon its back; a Dryden’s translation shut, and standing upright on its edge. A letter-clip holding a packet in brown-paper cover, inscribed “De sapientia veterum: translation.” A volume of Bacon standing shut on its edge. A Cruden’s Concordance; and near it, lying on its side and shut, Alford’s Greek Testament (an excellent book of immense industry, and very neat execution; good in all ways so far as I have looked, and so far as I can judge of what I see in such a matter; it seems as if one might find in it everything one can want to know about the four gospels, that an editor can tell one). Another volume of Bacon open, on its back; beneath it a folio Aristotle (!) also open, and beneath that again a huge old folio Demosthenes and Æschines (but this was brought down from the garret two days ago, and has not yet been put away). Many other things of the same kind; which, however, I cannot describe particularly without getting up, which I do not feel disposed to do. But I must not forget a striped box which belongs to my portmanteau, but serves here as a receptacle for loose papers, and stands on the table. Another table in the corner sustaining two vols. of Facciolati evidently out for use, reposing on a huge Hogarth which lies there because no bookcase is big enough to hold it, and itself reposes upon all the Naval Victories, flanked by a ball of string, an unopened packet of Bernard Barton’s remains, a Speed’s History of England, a ream of scribbling paper, and an Ainsworth. Under my chair lies my own dog Tip, who once went with you and me to the top of Ullock. Opposite stands a long narrow box containing bows, and hung about with quivers, belts, and other archery equipments. The chimney-piece is littered with disabled arrows. It is now half-past 3 P.M., I have a slight headache, due (I really believe) to a sour orange. The lake was yesterday frozen over with ice as smooth and transparent as glass. I had no skates, and to-day it is going either to thaw or to snow. I intended to buy a pair of skates last midsummer, but forgot. I have a great mind to go and buy a pair now. I leave you to gather the condition of my mind from the condition of my room. I am in truth doing very little. These family establishments are not favourable for work. I do not know how it is; the day seems as long, and one seems to have it all to oneself, but there are no hours in it. What becomes of half of them I cannot guess. Time leaks in a gentleman’s house.

My father has had a bad cold this winter, which hung about him longer than usual, and made him both look and feel ill. But he has thrown it quite off and seems now to be as well [as] usual, which is very well. His sight grows worse as of course it must do; but as fast as it leaves him he learns to make less do, so that he does not appear to be much distressed by the gradual privation. His old bitch is dead, and his old mare retires upon a pension, a paddock, a horse-pond, and a house, all to herself, with a daily feed of corn. He is now very well mounted on a fast walking pony, borrowed from a neighbour, and has a boy to walk with him and two puppies. He looks after his farming affairs as usual, and does not at all believe that land can be ruined by plenty. In truth we hear little in these latitudes of the agricultural distress of which we see so much in the newspapers.

I have not heard from Ellis since he left England, and I do not know exactly where he is. He talked of staying some time at Avignon. But I am so doubtful whether a letter would find him there that I do not care to write upon the chance. Our publishers seem to be quite easy in mind, and made no enquiries as to the rate of progress. If Ellis can be ready within two years, I shall have to stir myself in order to be ready with my contribution. But I expect a good year’s respite. I have finished the Henry VII., however, which is my principal labour; and I like very well what I have done.

But all his plans were disarranged by Mr. Ellis’s illness. In the latter part of 1849, while travelling on the Riviera, Ellis had a severe attack of rheumatic fever, from which he never recovered, and which entirely disabled him for the work he had undertaken and in which he had made some progress. Spedding, therefore, had to take his place and edit as best he could Bacon’s Philosophical Works. He has explained very fully in the Preface to them the method he adopted, and the careful manner in which he kept Mr. Ellis’s work distinct. “Early in 1853,” he says, “I took the work in hand.” In the meanwhile he was to be found at his rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there FitzGerald visited him in April 1850.

“Spedding is my sheet-anchor,” he says, “the truly wise and fine fellow: I am going to his rooms this very evening, and there I believe Thackeray, Venables, etc. are to be. I hope not a large assembly, for I get shyer and shyer even of those I know.”

“I was in London only for ten days this spring,” FitzGerald writes to Frederick Tennyson, “and those ten days not in the thick of the season.... The most pleasurable remembrance I had of my stay in town was the last day I spent there; having a long ramble in the streets with Spedding, looking at books and pictures; then a walk with him and Carlyle across the Park to Chelsea, where we dropped that Latter-Day Prophet at his house; then, getting upon a steamer, smoked down to Westminster; dined at a chop-house by the Bridge, and then went to Astley’s; old Spedding being quite as wise about the horsemanship as about Bacon and Shakespeare. We parted at midnight in Covent Garden, and this whole pleasant day has left a taste on my palate like one of Plato’s lighter, easier, and more picturesque dialogues.”

In August he went into Suffolk to stay with FitzGerald and the Cowells at their home in Bramford, near Ipswich. FitzGerald again writes to Frederick Tennyson:

I have not seen any one you know since I last wrote; nor heard from any one: except dear old Spedding, who really came down and spent two days with us, me and that Scholar and his Wife in their Village, in their delightful little house, in their pleasant fields by the River side. Old Spedding was delicious there; always leaving a mark, I say, in all places one has been at with him, a sort of Platonic perfume. For has he not all the beauty of the Platonic Socrates, with some personal beauty to boot? He explained to us one day about the laws of reflection in water; and I said then one never could look at the willow whose branches furnished the text without thinking of him. How beastly this reads! As if he gave us a lecture! But you know the man, how quietly it all came out; only because I petulantly denied his plain assertion. For I really often cross him only to draw him out; and vain as I may be, he is one of those that I am well content to make shine at my own expense.

In August 1851 he writes again to Frederick Tennyson:

Almost the only man I hear from is dear old Spedding, who has lost his Father, and is now, I suppose, a rich man. This makes no apparent change in his way of life; he has only hired an additional Attic in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so as to be able to bed a friend upon occasion. I may have to fill it ere long.

And a few months later:

Spedding is immutably wise, good, and delightful; not as immutably well in Body, I think, though he does not complain.

The great work went slowly on, but nothing as yet was published. Spedding had just taken over Ellis’s portion and was devoting himself to this. We get a glimpse of him again in FitzGerald’s letters:

I saw old Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he dearly loved, and whose death-bed at Hastings he had just been waiting upon.

It was 1857 before the first three volumes appeared, followed by three others in 1858, and by the final volume in 1859. Ellis did not live to see the completion of the work, for he died in May of that year.

FitzGerald, writing in 1857 to Cowell, who was now in Calcutta, from Portland Terrace, where he lived during his early married life, says:

Spedding has been once here in near three months. His Bacon keeps coming out: his part, the Letters, etc., of Bacon, is not come yet; so it remains to be seen what he will do then, but I can’t help thinking he has let the Pot boil too long.

It was 1861, however, before the first volume of the Life and Letters appeared, and Spedding found that he had already been forestalled by Hepworth Dixon in The Story of Lord Bacon’s Life. In a note to the earliest letter printed, probably the earliest specimen remaining of Bacon’s handwriting, he says, with quiet contempt:

The copies of some of these letters lately published by Mr. Hepworth Dixon ... differ, I observe, very much from mine; most of them in the words and sense, more or less, and some in the name of the person writing, or the person written to, or both. But as mine are more intelligible, and were made with care and at leisure, and when my eyes were better than they are now, I do not suspect any material error in them, and have not thought it worth while to apply for leave to compare them again with the originals.

“I am very glad,” FitzGerald writes to Thompson, “to hear old Spedding is really getting his share of Bacon into Print: I doubt if it will be half as good as the “Evenings,” where Spedding was in the Passion which is wanted to fill his Sail for any longer Voyage.”

Some three years later, he says:

Spedding’s Bacon seems to hang fire; they say he is disheartened at the little Interest, and less Conviction, that his two first volumes carried; Thompson told me they had convinced him the other way; and that Ellis had long given up Bacon’s Defence before he died.

And so it continued to the end. When the sixth volume appeared in 1872 FitzGerald wrote:

And here is Spedding’s vol. vi. which leaves me much where it found me about Bacon: but though I scarce care for him, I can read old Spedding’s pleading for him for ever; that is old Spedding’s simple statement of the case, as he sees it. The Ralegh business is quite delightful, better than Old Kensington.

Carlyle alone of all the critics was unstinted, though rather patronizing, in his praise. Writing to FitzGerald, he says:

Like yourself I have gone through Spedding, seven long long volumes, not skipping except when I had got the sense with me, and generally reading all of Bacon’s own that was there: I confess to you I found it a most creditable and even surprising Book, offering the most perfect and complete image both of Bacon and of Spedding, and distinguished as the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy-work I have ever met with in this generation. Bacon is washed down to the natural skin; and truly he is not, nor ever was, unlovely to me; a man of no culpability to speak of; of an opulent and even magnificent intellect, but all in the magnificent prose vein. Nothing or almost nothing of the “melodies eternal” to be traced in him. There is a grim strength in Spedding, quietly, very quietly invincible, which I did not quite know of till this Book; and in all ways I could congratulate this indefatigably patient, placidly invincible and victorious Spedding.

But for the last eight years he had given up his rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and gone to live with his nieces at 80 Westbourne Terrace, where he remained till his death. Thompson, in succession to Dr. Whewell, had been appointed Master of Trinity, and in writing to congratulate him Spedding says:

I was not unprepared for your news, having just returned from Kitlands, where the Pollocks were, and the rumour was under discussion and generally thought to be well-founded, and the thing if true very much rejoiced over. I have great pleasure in adding my own congratulations, as well to yourself as to Trinity. It was all that was wanted to make one of the last acts of Lord Russell a complete success. I should be very glad to think that I had as much to do with it as you suppose: but I was only one of many, and not by any means the most influential, and as the thing is done, no matter how it was brought about.

I am myself preparing for a shift of position, though the adventure is of a milder kind. My nephew (J. J. S.) is going to be married within a month or so: and it has been settled that he is to live at Greta Bank, and that the rest of the party now living there are to take a house in London: where I am invited to join them, with due securities for liberties and privileges. Though the exertion incident to dislodgment from quarters overgrown with so many superfetations of confusion and disorder, is formidable to contemplate, the proposed arrangement is so obviously convenient and desirable, that I am going to encounter it. And though the place is not yet settled, it seems probable that before the end of the year I shall be transferred or transferring myself and my goods to the western part of London, and preparing to remodel my manners and customs (in some respects) according to the usages of civilized society. Though I shall live among women, they will be women of my own house, and therefore not worshippers, which is a great advantage, and though there may be some danger for an obedient uncle in being where he can always be caught, I hope to be able to preserve as much independence as is good for a man.

I have four proof sheets to settle, and have just been interrupted by an engraver with a proof [of] the D. of Buccleugh’s miniature of Bacon, which will be the best portrait that has yet been done of him in black and white.

This was the miniature which was reproduced at the beginning of the third volume of the Life and Letters, and which Spedding regarded as the original of Van Somer’s portrait.

The following letter to Tennyson, written in 1870, is necessary to the full understanding of Tennyson’s reply (see Memoir by his Son):

My dear Alfred — I do not know where you are, and I want to know for three reasons: 1st, that I may thank you for your book; 2nd, that I may send you mine; 3rd, that I may let you know, if you do not know it already, that there has been a box here these many weeks, which is meant for you and comes from FitzGerald.

A copy of your new volume came early from the publisher, yet not so early but that it found me already half way through. I was happy to observe that neither years nor domestic happiness have had any demoralizing effect upon you as yet. Your touch is as delicate and vigorous and your invention as rich as ever: and I am still in hope that your greatest poem of all has not yet been written. Some years ago, when you were in want of a subject, I recommended Job. The argument of Job, to be treated as you treat the legends of Arthur, as freely and with as much light of modern thought as you find fit. As we know it now, it is only half intelligible, and must be full of blunders and passages misunderstood. Probably also the peculiar character of the oriental style would at any rate stand in the way and prevent it from producing its proper effect upon the modern and western mind. Yet we can see through all the confusion what a great argument it is, and I think it was never more wanted than now. If you would take it in hand, and tell it in verse in your own way, without any scruples about improving on Scripture, I believe it would be the greatest poem in the language. The controversy is as much alive to-day in London as it could ever have been in the place where and the time when it was composed, of which, as the author, I am altogether ignorant. And the voice out of the whirlwind may speak without fear of anachronisms.

My own book, though there is only one volume this time, is much bigger than yours. It is wrapped up ready to go by the book-post, and only wants to know to which of your many mansions it is to be directed.

Fitz’s box, which is about as large as a tailor’s box for a single suit, contains a drawing of Thackeray’s, an illustration of the “Lord of Burghley,” a pretty sketch of the landskip-painter and the village maiden. He sent it here under the vain delusion that whenever you happened to come to London I should be sure to know. And I presume he sent word to you of what he had done, for he did not ask me to communicate the fact. I was only to write to him in case the box did not arrive, and as the box did arrive I did not write. If you will let me know what you wish to be done with it, I will do with it accordingly.

There is a line in your last volume which I can’t read: the last line but one of the “flower in the crannied wall.”

In the course of the same year he edited the Conference of Pleasure, written by Bacon for some masque or festive occasion, and printed from a MS. belonging to the Duke of Northumberland which had been slightly injured by fire. FitzGerald, in a letter to me, says of it:

Spedding’s Introduction to his grilled Bacon, I call it really a beautiful little Idyll, the mechanical Job done so perfectly and so elegantly.

But while he was engaged in the great labour of his life he found time to write beautiful pieces of criticism on Shakespeare to which FitzGerald would willingly have had him devote his whole attention. “I never heard him read a page,” he writes to Sir Frederick Pollock, “but he threw some new light upon it.” In the Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1850 he contributed a paper on “Who wrote Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.?” which he discussed with characteristic thoroughness. His conclusion was that it was the work of two authors, one of whom was Fletcher, and this was confirmed by the investigations of another enquirer, who independently arrived at substantially the same result. The division of the Acts in Much Ado, Twelfth Night, Richard II., and King Lear formed the subject of other discussions, and these he considered his most valuable contribution to the restoration of Shakespeare. A criticism of Miss Kate Terry’s acting in Viola gave him the opportunity of pointing out the corruptions by which the fine comedy, Twelfth Night, has been degraded into farce.

“Spedding says,” FitzGerald writes in 1875 to Fanny Kemble, “that Irving’s Hamlet is simply — hideous — a strong expression for Spedding to use. But — (lest I should think his condemnation was only the Old Man’s fault of depreciating all that is new) he extols Miss Ellen Terry’s Portia as simply a perfect Performance: remembering (he says) all the while how fine was Fanny Kemble’s.”

Again to the same correspondent early in 1880 he says:

By far the chief incident in my life for the last month has been the reading of dear old Spedding’s Paper on the Merchant of Venice, there, at any rate, is one Question settled, and in such a beautiful way as only he commands. I could not help writing a few lines to tell him what I thought, but even very sincere praise is not the way to conciliate him. About Christmas I wrote him, relying on it that I should be most likely to secure an answer if I expressed dissent from some other work of his, and my expectation was justified by one of the fullest answers he had written to me for many a day and year.

The paper referred to was “The Story of the Merchant of Venice” in the Cornhill Magazine for March 1880. In sending a copy to Frederick Tennyson he says:

I now post you a paper by old Spedding — a very beautiful one, I think; settling one point, however unimportant, and in a graceful, as well as logical, way such as he is Master of.

A case has been got up — whether by Irving, the Stage Representative of Shylock, or by his Admirers — to prove the Jew to be a very amiable and ill-used man: insomuch that one is to come away from the theatre loving him and hating all the rest. He dresses himself up to look like the Saviour, Mrs. Kemble says. So old Jem disposes of that, besides unravelling Shakespeare’s mechanism of the Novel he draws from, in a manner (as Jem says) more distinct to us than in his treatment of any other of his Plays “not professedly historical.” And this latter point is, of course, far more interesting than the question of Irving and Co., — which is a simple attempt, both of Actor and Writer, to strike out an original idea in the teeth of common-sense and Tradition.

And now came the end, unexpected and the result of an accident, which he maintained was entirely his own fault. In writing to tell me of the fatal result, one of his dearest friends said:

I grieve to tell you that all is over with our dear old friend.... He intended to cross before two carriages — crossed before one — found there was not time to pass before the other, and instead of pausing stepped back under the hansom which he had not seen, and which had not time to alter its course. He spent more strength in exculpating the poor driver than on any personal matter during his illness as soon as he regained memory of the circumstances.

“Mowbray Donne,” says FitzGerald, when all was over, “wrote me that Laurence had been there four or five days ago, when Spedding said, that had the Cab done but a little more, it would have been a good Quietus. Socrates to the last.”

And in another letter:

Tennyson called at the Hospital, but was not allowed to see him, though Hallam did, I think. Some one calling afterwards, Spedding took the doctor’s arm, and asked, “Was it Mr. Tennyson?” Doctors and nurses all devoted to the patient man.

To Fanny Kemble he writes:

It was very, very good and kind of you to write to me about Spedding. Yes: Aldis Wright had apprised me of the matter just after it happened — he happening to be in London at the time; and but two days after the accident heard that Spedding was quite calm, and even cheerful; only anxious that Wright himself should not be kept waiting for some communication which S. had promised him! Whether to live, or to die, he will be Socrates still.

Directly that I heard from Wright I wrote to Mowbray Donne to send me just a Post Card — daily, if he or his wife could, with but one or two words on it—”Better,” “Less well,” or whatever it might be. This morning I hear that all is going on even better than could be expected, according to Miss Spedding. But I suppose the Crisis, which you tell me of, is not yet come; and I have always a terror of that French Adage—”Monsieur se porte mal — Monsieur se porte mieux — Monsieur est—” Ah, you know, or you guess, the rest.

My dear old Spedding, though I have not seen him these twenty years and more — and probably should never see him again — but he lives — his old Self — in my heart of hearts; and all I hear of him does but embellish the recollection of him — if it could be embellished — for he is but the same that he was from a Boy — all that is best in Heart and Head — a man that would be incredible had one not known him.

Again he writes of him to Professor Norton:

He was the wisest man I have known; a great sense of Humour, a Socrates in Life and in Death, which he faced with all Serenity so long as Consciousness lasted. I suppose something of him will reach America, I mean, of his Death; run over by a Cab and dying in St. George’s Hospital to which he was taken, and from which he could not be removed home alive.

“I did not know,” he says in another letter, “that I should feel Spedding’s Loss as I do, after an interval of more than twenty years [since] meeting him. But I knew that I could always get the Word I wanted of him by Letter, and also that from time to time I should meet with some of his wise and delightful Papers in some Quarter or other. He talked of Shakespeare, I am told, when his Mind wandered. I wake almost every morning feeling as if I had lost something, as one does in a Dream; and truly enough, I have lost him. ‘Matthew is in his Grave, etc.’”

In apologizing to Fanny Kemble for not writing to her as usual, he says:

I have let the Full Moon pass because you had written to me so lately, and so kindly, about our lost Spedding, that I could not call on you too soon again. Of him I will say nothing except that his Death has made me recall very many passages in his Life in which I was partly concerned. In particular, staying at his Cumberland Home along with Tennyson in the May of 1835.... His Father and Mother were both alive — he a wise man, who mounted his Cob after Breakfast, and was at his Farm till Dinner at two — then away again till Tea: after which he sat reading by a shaded lamp: saying very little, but always courteous and quite content with any company his Son might bring to the house, so long as they let him go his way: which indeed he would have gone whether they let him or no. But he had seen enough of Poets not to like them or their Trade: Shelley for a time living among the Lakes: Coleridge at Southey’s (whom perhaps he had a respect for — Southey, I mean); and Wordsworth, whom I do not think he valued. He was rather jealous of “Jem,” who might have done available service in the world, he thought, giving himself up to such Dreamers; and sitting up with Tennyson conning over the “Morte d’Arthur,” “Lord of Burleigh,” and other things which helped to make up the two Volumes of 1842. So I always associate that Arthur Idyll with Basanthwaite Lake, under Skiddaw. Mrs. Spedding was a sensible, motherly Lady, with whom I used to play Chess of a Night. And there was an old Friend of hers, Miss Bristowe, who always reminded me of Miss La Creevy, if you know of such a Person in Nickleby.

We will conclude with what his old friend, Sir Henry Taylor, wrote of him after his death:

As he will not read what I write I may allow myself to say something more. He was always master of himself and of his emotions; but underlying a somewhat melancholy composure and aspect there were depths of tenderness known only to those who knew his whole nature and his inward life, and it is well for those by whom he is mourned if they can find what he has described in a letter to be his great consolation in all his experiences of the death of those he loved (experiences which had begun early and had not been few), “that the past is sacred and sanctified; nothing can happen hereafter to disturb or obliterate it; nor need the recollection have any bitterness if a man does not, out of a false and morbid sentiment, make it so for himself.”

And he adds:

To me there are no companions more welcome, cordial, consolatory or cheerful than my dead friends.

ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM

Arthur Hallam reading “Walter Scott” aloud on board the “Leeds,” bound from Bordeaux to Dublin, Sept. 9, 1830.

After Tennyson’s and Hallam’s memorable journey to the Pyrenees in aid of the revolutionary movement

against King Ferdinand of Spain, vividly described by Carlyle in his Life of John Sterling.

Alfred Tennyson (in profile), John Harden and Mrs. Harden (on the left), and the Miss Hardens.

ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM by Dr. John Brown

[The following article, containing the Memoir of Arthur Hallam by his father, Henry Hallam, is reprinted from Horae Subsecivae. — Ed.]

Praesens imperfectum, — perfectum, plusquam perfectum Futurum. — Grotius.

The idea of thy life shall sweetly creep

Into my study of imagination;

And every lovely organ of thy life

Shall come apparelled in more precious habit —

More moving delicate, and full of life,

Into the eye and prospect of my soul,

Than when thou livedst indeed.

Much Ado about Nothing.

In the chancel of Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, rest the mortal remains of Arthur Henry Hallam, eldest son of our great philosophic historian and critic, — and the friend to whom “In Memoriam” is sacred. This place was selected by his father, not only from the connection of kindred, being the burial-place of his maternal grandfather, Sir Abraham Elton, but likewise “on account of its still and sequestered situation, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel.” That lone hill, with its humble old church, its outlook over the waste of waters, where “the stately ships go on,” was, we doubt not, in Tennyson’s mind when the poem, “Break, break, break,” which contains the burden of that volume in which are enshrined so much of the deepest affection, poetry, philosophy, and godliness, rose into his “study of imagination”—”into the eye and prospect of his soul.”

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman’s boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.

Out of these few simple words, deep and melancholy, and sounding as the sea, as out of a well of the living waters of love, flows forth all “In Memoriam,” as a stream flows out of its spring-all is here. “I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me,”—”the touch of the vanished hand — the sound of the voice that is still,” — the body and soul of his friend. Rising as it were out of the midst of the gloom of the valley of the shadow of death:

The mountain infant to the sun comes forth

Like human life from darkness;

and how its waters flow on! carrying life, beauty, magnificence, — shadows and happy lights, depths of blackness, depths clear as the very body of heaven. How it deepens as it goes, involving larger interests, wider views, “thoughts that wander through eternity,” greater affections, but still retaining its pure living waters, its unforgotten burden of love and sorrow. How it visits every region! “The long unlovely street,” pleasant villages and farms, “the placid ocean-plains,” waste howling wildernesses, grim woods, nemorumque noctem, informed with spiritual fears, where may be seen, if shapes they may be called:

Fear and trembling Hope,

Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton,

And Time the Shadow;

now within hearing of the Minster clock, now of the College bells, and the vague hum of the mighty city. And overhead through all its course the heaven with its clouds, its sun, moon, and stars; but always, and in all places, declaring its source; and even when laying its burden of manifold and faithful affection at the feet of the Almighty Father, still remembering whence it came:

That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

It is to that chancel, and to the day, 3rd January 1834, that he refers in Poem XVIII. of “In Memoriam”:

‘Tis well; ‘tis something; we may stand

Where he in English earth is laid,

And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

‘Tis little; but it looks in truth

As if the quiet bones were blest

Among familiar names to rest

And in the places of his youth.

And again in XIX.:

The Danube to the Severn gave

The darken’d heart that beat no more;

They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave.

There twice a day the Severn fills;

The salt sea-water passes by,

And hushes half the babbling Wye,

And makes a silence in the hills.

Here, too, it is, LXVII.:

When on my bed the moonlight falls,

I know that in thy place of rest

By that broad water of the west,

There comes a glory on the walls:

Thy marble bright in dark appears,

As slowly steals a silver flame

Along the letters of thy name,

And o’er the number of thy years.

This young man, whose memory his friend has consecrated in the hearts of all who can be touched by such love and beauty, was in nowise unworthy of all this. It is not for us to say, for it was not given to us the sad privilege to know, all that a father’s heart buried with his son in that grave, all “the hopes of unaccomplished years”; nor can we feel in its fulness all that is meant by

such

A friendship as had master’d Time;

Which masters Time indeed, and is

Eternal, separate from fears:

The all-assuming months and years

Can take no part away from this.

But this we may say, we know nothing of in all literature to compare with the volume from which these lines are taken, since David lamented with this lamentation: “The beauty of Israel is slain. Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither rain upon you. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me, thy love for me was wonderful.” We cannot, as some have done, compare it with Shakespeare’s sonnets, or with “Lycidas.” In spite of the amazing genius and tenderness, the never-wearying, all-involving reiteration of passionate attachment, the idolatry of admiring love, the rapturous devotedness, displayed in these sonnets, we cannot but agree with Mr. Hallam in thinking “that there is a tendency now, especially among young men of poetical tempers, to exaggerate the beauties of these remarkable productions”; and though we would hardly say with him, “that it is impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never written them,” giving us, as they do, and as perhaps nothing else could do, such proof of a power of loving, of an amount of attendrissement, which is not less wonderful than the bodying forth of that myriad-mind which gave us Hamlet, and Lear, Cordelia, and Puck, and all the rest, and indeed explaining to us how he could give us all these; — while we hardly go so far, we agree with his other wise words:—”There is a weakness and folly in all misplaced and excessive affection”; which in Shakespeare’s case is the more distressing, when we consider that “Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets,” was, in all likelihood, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a man of noble and gallant character, but always of licentious life.

As for “Lycidas,” we must confess that the poetry — and we all know how consummate it is — and not the affection, seems uppermost in Milton’s mind, as it is in ours. The other element, though quick and true, has no glory through reason of the excellency of that which invests it. But there is no such drawback in “In Memoriam.” The purity, the temperate but fervent goodness, the firmness and depth of nature, the impassioned logic, the large, sensitive, and liberal heart, the reverence and godly fear, of

That friend of mine who lives in God,

which from these Remains we know to have dwelt in that young soul, give to “In Memoriam” the character of exactest portraiture. There is no excessive or misplaced affection here; it is all founded in fact: while everywhere and throughout it all, affection — a love that is wonderful — meets us first and leaves us last, giving form and substance and grace, and the breath of life and love, to everything that the poet’s thick-coming fancies so exquisitely frame. We can recall few poems approaching to it in this quality of sustained affection. The only English poems we can think of as of the same order, are Cowper’s lines on seeing his mother’s portrait:

O that these lips had language!

Burns’ “To Mary in Heaven”; and two pieces of Vaughan — one beginning

O thou who know’st for whom I mourn;

and the other:

They are all gone into the world of light.

But our object now is, not so much to illustrate Mr. Tennyson’s verses, as to introduce to our readers, what we ourselves have got so much delight, and, we trust, profit from — The Remains in Verse and Prose, of Arthur Henry Hallam, 1834; privately printed. We had for many years been searching for this volume, but in vain; a sentence quoted by Henry Taylor struck us, and our desire was quickened by reading “In Memoriam.” We do not remember when we have been more impressed than by these Remains of this young man, especially when taken along with his friend’s Memorial; and instead of trying to tell our readers what this impression is, we have preferred giving them as copious extracts as our space allows, that they may judge and enjoy for themselves. The italics are our own. We can promise them few finer, deeper, and better pleasures than reading, and detaining their minds over these two books together, filling their hearts with the fulness of their truth and tenderness. They will see how accurate as well as how affectionate and “of imagination all compact” Tennyson is, and how worthy of all that he has said of him, that friend was. The likeness is drawn ad vivum:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

He summons up remembrance of things past.

“The idea of his Life” has been sown a natural body, and has been raised a spiritual body, but the identity is unhurt; the countenance shines and the raiment is white and glistering, but it is the same face and form.

The Memoir is by Mr. Hallam. We give it entire, not knowing anywhere a nobler or more touching record of a father’s love and sorrow.

Arthur Henry Hallam was born in Bedford Place, London, on the 1st of February 1811. Very few years had elapsed before his parents observed strong indications of his future character, in a peculiar clearness of perception, a facility of acquiring knowledge, and, above all, in an undeviating sweetness of disposition, and adherence to his sense of what was right and becoming. As he advanced to another stage of childhood, it was rendered still more manifest that he would be distinguished from ordinary persons, by an increasing thoughtfulness, and a fondness for a class of books, which in general are so little intelligible to boys of his age, that they excite in them no kind of interest.

In the summer of 1818 he spent some months with his parents in Germany and Switzerland, and became familiar with the French language, which he had already learned to read with facility. He had gone through the elements of Latin before this time; but that language having been laid aside during his tour, it was found upon his return that, a variety of new scenes having effaced it from his memory, it was necessary to begin again with the first rudiments. He was nearly eight years old at this time; and in little more than twelve months he could read Latin with tolerable facility. In this period his mind was developing itself more rapidly than before; he now felt a keen relish for dramatic poetry, and wrote several tragedies, if we may so call them, either in prose or verse, with a more precocious display of talents than the Editor remembers to have met with in any other individual. The natural pride, however, of his parents, did not blind them to the uncertainty that belongs to all premature efforts of the mind; and they so carefully avoided everything like a boastful display of blossoms which, in many cases, have withered away in barren luxuriance, that the circumstances of these compositions was hardly ever mentioned out of their own family.

In the spring of 1820, Arthur was placed under the Rev. W. Carmalt, at Putney, where he remained nearly two years. After leaving this school, he went abroad again for some months; and, in October 1822, became the pupil of the Rev. E. C. Hawtrey, an Assistant Master of Eton College. At Eton he continued till the summer of 1827. He was now become a good though not perhaps a first-rate scholar in the Latin and Greek languages. The loss of time, relatively to this object, in travelling, but far more his increasing avidity for a different kind of knowledge, and the strong bent of his mind to subjects which exercise other faculties than such as the acquirement of languages calls into play, will sufficiently account for what might seem a comparative deficiency in classical learning. It can only, however, be reckoned one, comparatively to his other attainments, and to his remarkable facility in mastering the modern languages. The Editor has thought it not improper to print in the following pages an Eton exercise, which, as written before the age of fourteen, though not free from metrical and other errors, appears, perhaps to a partial judgment, far above the level of such compositions. It is remarkable that he should have selected the story of Ugolino, from a poet with whom, and with whose language, he was then but very slightly acquainted, but who was afterwards to become, more perhaps than any other, the master-mover of his spirit. It may be added, that great judgment and taste are perceptible in this translation, which is by no means a literal one; and in which the phraseology of Sophocles is not ill substituted, in some passages, for that of Dante.

The Latin poetry of an Etonian is generally reckoned at that School the chief test of his literary talent. That of Arthur was good without being excellent; he never wanted depth of thought, or truth of feeling; but it is only in a few rare instances, if altogether in any, that an original mind has been known to utter itself freely and vigorously, without sacrifice of purity, in a language the capacities of which are so imperfectly understood; and in his productions there was not the thorough conformity to an ancient model which is required for perfect elegance in Latin verse. He took no great pleasure in this sort of composition; and perhaps never returned to it of his own accord.

In the latter part of his residence at Eton, he was led away more and more by the predominant bias of his mind, from the exclusive study of ancient literature. The poets of England, especially the older dramatists, came with greater attraction over his spirit. He loved Fletcher, and some of Fletcher’s contemporaries, for their energy of language and intenseness of feeling; but it was in Shakespeare alone that he found the fulness of soul which seemed to slake the thirst of his own rapidly expanding genius for an inexhaustible fountain of thought and emotion. He knew Shakespeare thoroughly; and indeed his acquaintance with the earlier poetry of this country was very extensive. Among the modern poets, Byron was at this time, far above the rest, and almost exclusively, his favourite; a preference which, in later years, he transferred altogether to Wordsworth and Shelley.

He became, when about fifteen years old, a member of the debating society established among the elder boys, in which he took great interest; and this served to confirm the bias of his intellect towards the moral and political philosophy of modern times. It was probably, however, of important utility in giving him that command of his own language which he possessed, as the following Essays will show, in a very superior degree, and in exercising those powers of argumentative discussion, which now displayed themselves as eminently characteristic of his mind. It was a necessary consequence that he declined still more from the usual paths of study, and abated perhaps somewhat of his regard for the writers of antiquity. It must not be understood, nevertheless, as most of those who read these pages will be aware, that he ever lost his sensibility to those ever-living effusions of genius which the ancient languages preserve. He loved Aeschylus and Sophocles (to Euripides he hardly did justice), Lucretius and Virgil; if he did not seem so much drawn towards Homer as might at first be expected, this may probably be accounted for by his increasing taste for philosophical poetry.

In the early part of 1827, Arthur took a part in the Eton Miscellany, a periodical publication, in which some of his friends in the debating society were concerned. He wrote in this, besides a few papers in prose, a little poem on a story connected with the Lake of Killarney. It has not been thought by the Editor advisable, upon the whole, to reprint these lines; though, in his opinion, they bear very striking marks of superior powers. This was almost the first poetry that Arthur had written, except the childish tragedies above mentioned. No one was ever less inclined to the trick of versifying. Poetry with him was not an amusement, but the natural and almost necessary language of genuine emotion; and it was not till the discipline of serious reflection, and the approach of manhood, gave a reality and intenseness to such emotions, that he learned the capacities of his own genius. That he was a poet by nature, these Remains will sufficiently prove; but certainly he was far removed from being a versifier by nature; nor was he probably able to perform, what he scarce ever attempted, to write easily and elegantly on an ordinary subject. The lines on the story of Pygmalion are so far an exception, that they arose out of a momentary amusement of society; but he could not avoid, even in these, his own grave tone of poetry.

Upon leaving Eton in the summer of 1827, he accompanied his parents to the Continent, and passed eight months in Italy. This introduction to new scenes of nature and art, and to new sources of intellectual delight, at the very period of transition from boyhood to youth, sealed no doubt the peculiar character of his mind, and taught him, too soon for his peace, to sound those depths of thought and feeling from which, after this time, all that he wrote was derived. He had, when he passed the Alps, only a moderate acquaintance with the Italian language; but during his residence in the country he came to speak it with perfect fluency, and with a pure Sienese pronunciation. In its study he was much assisted by his friend and instructor, the Abbate Pifferi, who encouraged him to his first attempts at versification. The few sonnets, which are now printed, were, it is to be remembered, written by a foreigner, hardly seventeen years old, and after a very short stay in Italy. The Editor might not, probably, have suffered them to appear even in this private manner, upon his own judgment. But he knew that the greatest living writer of Italy, to whom they were shown some time since at Milan, by the author’s excellent friend, Mr. Richard Milnes, has expressed himself in terms of high approbation.

The growing intimacy of Arthur with Italian poetry led him naturally to that of Dante. No poet was so congenial to the character of his own reflective mind; in none other could he so abundantly find that disdain of flowery redundance, that perpetual preference of the sensible to the ideal, that aspiration for somewhat better and less fleeting than earthly things, to which his inmost soul responded. Like all genuine worshippers of the great Florentine poet, he rated the Inferno below the two latter portions of the Divina Commedia; there was nothing even to revolt his taste, but rather much to attract it, in the scholastic theology and mystic visions of the Paradiso. Petrarch he greatly admired, though with less idolatry than Dante; and the sonnets here printed will show to all competent judges how fully he had imbibed the spirit, without servile centonism, of the best writers in that style of composition who flourished in the sixteenth century.

But poetry was not an absorbing passion at this time in his mind. His eyes were fixed on the best pictures with silent intense delight. He had a deep and just perception of what was beautiful in this art, at least in its higher schools; for he did not pay much regard, or perhaps quite do justice, to the masters of the seventeenth century. To technical criticism he made no sort of pretension; painting was to him but the visible language of emotion; and where it did not aim at exciting it, or employed inadequate means, his admiration would be withheld. Hence he highly prized the ancient paintings, both Italian and German, of the age which preceded the full development of art. But he was almost as enthusiastic an admirer of the Venetian, as of the Tuscan and Roman schools; considering these masters as reaching the same end by the different agencies of form and colour. This predilection for the sensitive beauties of painting is somewhat analogous to his fondness for harmony of verse, on which he laid more stress than poets so thoughtful are apt to do. In one of the last days of his life, he lingered long among the fine Venetian pictures of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna.

He returned to England in June 1828; and, in the following October, went down to reside at Cambridge; having been entered on the boards of Trinity College before his departure to the Continent. He was the pupil of the Rev. William Whewell. In some respects, as soon became manifest, he was not formed to obtain great academical reputation. An acquaintance with the learned languages, considerable at the school where he was educated, but not improved, to say the least, by the intermission of a year, during which his mind had been so occupied by other pursuits, that he had thought little of antiquity even in Rome itself, though abundantly sufficient for the gratification of taste and the acquisition of knowledge, was sure to prove inadequate to the searching scrutiny of modern examinations. He soon, therefore, saw reason to renounce all competition of this kind; nor did he ever so much as attempt any Greek or Latin composition during his stay at Cambridge. In truth he was very indifferent to success of this kind; and conscious as he must have been of a high reputation among his contemporaries, he could not think that he stood in need of any University distinctions. The Editor became by degrees almost equally indifferent to what he perceived to be so uncongenial to Arthur’s mind. It was, however, to be regretted that he never paid the least attention to mathematical studies. That he should not prosecute them with the diligence usual at Cambridge, was of course to be expected; yet his clearness and acumen would certainly have enabled him to master the principles of geometrical reasoning; nor, in fact, did he so much find a difficulty in apprehending demonstrations, as a want of interest, and a consequent inability to retain them in his memory. A little more practice in the strict logic of geometry, a little more familiarity with the physical laws of the universe, and the phenomena to which they relate, would possibly have repressed the tendency to vague and mystical speculations which he was too fond of indulging. In the philosophy of the human mind, he was in no danger of the materializing theories of some ancient and modern schools; but in shunning this extreme, he might sometimes forget that, in the honest pursuit of truth, we can shut our eyes to no real phenomena, and that the physiology of man must always enter into any valid scheme of his psychology.

The comparative inferiority which he might show in the usual trials of knowledge, sprung in a great measure from the want of a prompt and accurate memory. It was the faculty wherein he shone the least, according to ordinary observation; though his very extensive reach of literature, and his rapidity in acquiring languages, sufficed to prove that it was capable of being largely exercised. He could remember anything, as a friend observed to the Editor, that was associated with an idea. But he seemed, at least after he reached manhood, to want almost wholly the power, so common with inferior understandings, of retaining, with regularity and exactness, a number of unimportant uninteresting particulars. It would have been nearly impossible to make him recollect for three days the date of the battle of Marathon, or the names in order of the Athenian months. Nor could he repeat poetry, much as he loved it, with the correctness often found in young men. It is not improbable, that a more steady discipline in early life would have strengthened this faculty, or that he might have supplied its deficiency by some technical devices; but where the higher powers of intellect were so extraordinarily manifested, it would have been preposterous to complain of what may perhaps have been a necessary consequence of their amplitude, or at least a natural result of their exercise.

But another reason may be given for his deficiency in those unremitting labours which the course of academical education, in the present times, is supposed to exact from those who aspire to its distinctions. In the first year of his residence at Cambridge, symptoms of disordered health, especially in the circulatory system, began to show themselves; and it is by no means improbable, that these were indications of a tendency to derangement of the vital functions, which became ultimately fatal. A too rapid determination of blood towards the brain, with its concomitant uneasy sensations, rendered him frequently incapable of mental fatigue. He had indeed once before, at Florence, been affected by symptoms not unlike these. His intensity of reflection and feeling also brought on occasionally a considerable depression of spirits, which had been painfully observed at times by those who watched him most, from the time of his leaving Eton, and even before. It was not till after several months that he regained a less morbid condition of mind and body. This same irregularity of circulation returned in the next spring, but was of less duration. During the third year of his Cambridge life, he appeared in much better health.

In this year (1831) he obtained the first college prize for an English declamation. The subject chosen by him was the conduct of the Independent party during the civil war. This exercise was greatly admired at the time, but was never printed. In consequence of this success, it became incumbent on him, according to the custom of the college, to deliver an oration in the chapel immediately before the Christmas vacation of the same year. On this occasion he selected a subject very congenial to his own turn of thought and favourite study, the influence of Italian upon English literature. He had previously gained another prize for an English essay on the philosophical writings of Cicero. This essay is perhaps too excursive from the prescribed subject; but his mind was so deeply imbued with the higher philosophy, especially that of Plato, with which he was very conversant, that he could not be expected to dwell much on the praises of Cicero in that respect.

Though the bent of Arthur’s mind by no means inclined him to strict research into facts, he was full as much conversant with the great features of ancient and modern history, as from the course of his other studies and the habits of his life it was possible to expect. He reckoned them, as great minds always do, the groundworks of moral and political philosophy, and took no pains to acquire any knowledge of this sort from which a principle could not be derived or illustrated. To some parts of English history, and to that of the French Revolution, he had paid considerable attention. He had not read nearly so much of the Greek and Latin historians as of the philosophers and poets. In the history of literary, and especially of philosophical and religious opinions, he was deeply versed, as much so as it is possible to apply that term at his age. The following pages exhibit proofs of an acquaintance, not crude or superficial, with that important branch of literature.

His political judgments were invariably prompted by his strong sense of right and justice. These, in so young a person, were naturally rather fluctuating, and subject to the correction of advancing knowledge and experience. Ardent in the cause of those he deemed to be oppressed, of which, in one instance, he was led to give a proof with more of energy and enthusiasm than discretion, he was deeply attached to the ancient institutions of his country.

He spoke French readily, though with less elegance than Italian, till from disuse he lost much of his fluency in the latter. In his last fatal tour in Germany, he was rapidly acquiring a readiness in the language of that country. The whole range of French literature was almost as familiar to him as that of England.

The society in which Arthur lived most intimately, at Eton and at the University, was formed of young men, eminent for natural ability, and for delight in what he sought above all things, the knowledge of truth, and the perception of beauty. They who loved and admired him living, and who now revere his sacred memory, as of one to whom, in the fondness of regret, they admit of no rival, know best what he was in the daily commerce of life; and his eulogy should, on every account, better come from hearts which, if partial, have been rendered so by the experience of friendship, not by the affection of nature.

Arthur left Cambridge on taking his degree in January 1832. He resided from that time with the Editor in London, having been entered on the boards of the Inner Temple. It was greatly the desire of the Editor that he should engage himself in the study of the law; not merely with professional views, but as a useful discipline for a mind too much occupied with habits of thought, which, ennobling and important as they were, could not but separate him from the everyday business of life, and might, by their excess, in his susceptible temperament, be productive of considerable mischief. He had, during the previous long vacation, read with the Editor the Institutes of Justinian, and the two works of Heineccius which illustrate them; and he now went through Blackstone’s Commentaries, with as much of other law-books as, in the Editor’s judgment, was required for a similar purpose. It was satisfactory at that time to perceive that, far from showing any of that distaste to legal studies which might have been anticipated from some parts of his intellectual character, he entered upon them not only with great acuteness, but considerable interest. In the month of October 1832, he began to see the practical application of legal knowledge in the office of an eminent conveyancer, Mr. Walters of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with whom he continued till his departure from England in the following summer.

It was not, however, to be expected, or even desired by any one who knew how to value him, that he should at once abandon those habits of study which had fertilized and invigorated his mind. But he now, from some change or other in his course of thinking, ceased in a great measure to write poetry, and expressed to more than one friend an intention to give it up. The instances after his leaving Cambridge were few. The dramatic scene between Raffaelle and Fiammetta was written in 1832; and about the same time he had a design to translate the Vita Nuova of his favourite Dante; a work which he justly prized, as the development of that immense genius, in a kind of autobiography, which best prepares us for a real insight into the Divine Comedy. He rendered accordingly into verse most of the sonnets which the Vita Nuova contains; but the Editor does not believe that he made any progress in the prose translation. These sonnets appearing rather too literal, and consequently harsh, it has not been thought worth while to print.

In the summer of 1832, the appearance of Professor Rosetti’s Disquisizioni sullo spirito Antipapale, in which the writings of Arthur’s beloved masters, Dante and Petrarch, as well as most of the mediæval literature of Italy, were treated as a series of enigmas, to be understood only by a key that discloses a latent Carbonarism, a secret conspiracy against the religion of their age, excited him to publish his own Remarks in reply. It seemed to him the worst of poetical heresies to desert the Absolute, the Universal, the Eternal, the Beautiful and True, which the Platonic spirit of his literary creed taught him to seek in all the higher works of genius, in quest of some temporary historical allusion, which could be of no interest with posterity. Nothing, however, could be more alien from his courteous disposition than to abuse the licence of controversy, or to treat with intentional disrespect a very ingenious person, who had been led on too far in pursuing a course of interpretation, which, within certain much narrower limits, it is impossible for any one conversant with history not to admit.

A very few other anonymous writings occupied his leisure about this time. Among these were slight memoirs of Petrarch, Voltaire, and Burke, for the Gallery of Portraits, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. His time was, however, principally devoted, when not engaged at his office, to metaphysical researches, and to the history of philosophical opinions.

From the latter part of his residence at Cambridge, a gradual but very perceptible improvement in the cheerfulness of his spirits gladdened his family and his friends; intervals there doubtless were when the continual seriousness of his habits of thought, or the force of circumstances, threw something more of gravity into his demeanour; but in general he was animated and even gay, renewing or preserving his intercourse with some of those he had most valued at Eton and Cambridge. The symptoms of deranged circulation which had manifested themselves before, ceased to appear, or at least so as to excite his own attention; and though it struck those who were most anxious in watching him, that his power of enduring fatigue was not quite so great as from his frame of body and apparent robustness might have been anticipated, nothing gave the least indication of danger either to their eyes, or to those of the medical practitioners who were in the habit of observing him. An attack of intermittent fever, during the prevalent influenza of the spring of 1833, may perhaps have disposed his constitution to the last fatal blow.

To any one who has watched the history of the disease by which “so quick this bright thing came to confusion,” and who knows how near its subject must often, perhaps all his life, have been to that eternity which occupied so much of his thoughts and desires, and the secrets of which were so soon to open on his young eyes, there is something very touching in this account. Such a state of health would enhance, and tend to produce, by the sensations proper to such a condition, that habitual seriousness of thought, that sober judgment, and that tendency to look at the true life of things — that deep but gentle and calm sadness, and that occasional sinking of the heart, which make his noble and strong inner nature, his resolved mind, so much more impressive and endearing.

This feeling of personal insecurity — of life being ready to slip away — the sensation that this world and its on-goings, its mighty interests, and delicate joys, is ready to be shut up in a moment — this instinctive apprehension of the peril of vehement bodily enjoyment — all this would tend to make him “walk softly,” and to keep him from much of the evil that is in the world, and would help him to live soberly, righteously, and godly, even in the bright and rich years of his youth. His power of giving himself up to the search after absolute truth, and the contemplation of Supreme goodness, must have been increased by this same organization. But all this delicate feeling, this fineness of sense, did rather quicken the energy and fervour of the indwelling soul — the τὶ θερμὸν πρᾶγμα that burned within. In the quaint words of Vaughan, it was “manhood with a female eye.” These two conditions must, as we have said, have made him dear indeed. And by a beautiful law of life, having that organ out of which are the issues of life, under a sort of perpetual nearness to suffering, and so liable to pain, he would be more easily moved for others — more alive to their pain — more filled with fellow-feeling.

The Editor cannot dwell on anything later. Arthur accompanied him to Germany in the beginning of August. In returning to Vienna from Pesth, a wet day probably gave rise to an intermittent fever, with very slight symptoms, and apparently subsiding, when a sudden rush of blood to the head put an instantaneous end to his life on the 15th of September 1833. The mysteriousness of such a dreadful termination to a disorder generally of so little importance, and in this instance of the slightest kind, has been diminished by an examination which showed a weakness of the cerebral vessels, and a want of sufficient energy in the heart. Those whose eyes must long be dim with tears, and whose hopes on this side the tomb are broken down for ever, may cling, as well as they can, to the poor consolation of believing that a few more years would, in the usual chances of humanity, have severed the frail union of his graceful and manly form with the pure spirit that it enshrined.

The remains of Arthur were brought to England, and interred on the 3rd of January 1834, in the chancel of Clevedon Church, in Somersetshire, belonging to his maternal grandfather, Sir Abraham Elton, a place selected by the Editor, not only from the connection of kindred, but on account of its still and sequestered situation, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel.

More ought perhaps to be said — but it is very difficult to proceed. From the earliest years of this extraordinary young man, his premature abilities were not more conspicuous than an almost faultless disposition, sustained by a more calm self-command than has often been witnessed in that season of life. The sweetness of temper which distinguished his childhood, became with the advance of manhood a habitual benevolence, and ultimately ripened into that exalted principle of love towards God and man, which animated and almost absorbed his soul during the latter period of his life, and to which most of the following compositions bear such emphatic testimony. He seemed to tread the earth as a spirit from some better world; and in bowing to the mysterious will which has in mercy removed him, perfected by so short a trial, and passing over the bridge which separates the seen from the unseen life, in a moment, and, as we may believe, without a moment’s pang, we must feel not only the bereavement of those to whom he was dear, but the loss which mankind have sustained by the withdrawing of such a light.

A considerable portion of the poetry contained in this volume was printed in the year 1830, and was intended by the author to be published together with the poems of his intimate friend, Mr. Alfred Tennyson. They were, however, withheld from publication at the request of the Editor. The poem of Timbuctoo was written for the University prize in 1829, which it did not obtain. Notwithstanding its too great obscurity, the subject itself being hardly indicated, and the extremely hyperbolical importance which the author’s brilliant fancy has attached to a nest of barbarians, no one can avoid admiring the grandeur of his conceptions, and the deep philosophy upon which he has built the scheme of his poem. This is, however, by no means the most pleasing of his compositions. It is in the profound reflection, the melancholy tenderness, and the religious sanctity of other effusions that a lasting charm will be found. A commonplace subject, such as those announced for academical prizes generally are, was incapable of exciting a mind which, beyond almost every other, went straight to the farthest depths that the human intellect can fathom, or from which human feelings can be drawn. Many short poems, of equal beauty with those here printed, have been deemed unfit even for the limited circulation they might obtain, on account of their unveiling more of emotion than, consistently with what is due to him and to others, could be exposed to view.

The two succeeding essays have never been printed; but were read, it is believed, in a literary society at Trinity College, or in one to which he afterwards belonged in London. That entitled Theodicaea Novissima is printed at the desire of some of his intimate friends. A few expressions in it want his usual precision; and there are ideas which he might have seen cause, in the lapse of time, to modify, independently of what his very acute mind would probably have perceived, that his hypothesis, like that of Leibnitz, on the origin of evil, resolves itself at last into an unproved assumption of its necessity. It has, however, some advantages, which need not be mentioned, over that of Leibnitz; and it is here printed, not as a solution of the greatest mystery of the universe, but as most characteristic of the author’s mind, original and sublime, uniting, what is very rare except in early youth, a fearless and unblenching spirit of inquiry into the highest objects of speculation, with the most humble and reverential piety. It is probable that in many of his views on such topics he was influenced by the writings of Jonathan Edwards, with whose opinions on metaphysical and moral subjects he seems generally to have concurred.

The extract from a review of Tennyson’s poems in a publication now extinct, the Englishman’s Magazine, is also printed at the suggestion of a friend. The pieces that follow are reprints, and have been already mentioned in this Memoir.

We have given this Memoir almost entire, for the sake both of its subject and its manner — for what in it is the father’s as well as for what is the son’s. There is something very touching in the paternal composure, the judiciousness, the truthfulness, where truth is so difficult to reach through tears, the calm estimate and the subdued tenderness, the ever-rising but ever-restrained emotion; the father’s heart-throbs throughout.

We wish we could have given in full the letters from Arthur’s friends which his father has incorporated in the Memoir. They all bring out, in different but harmonious ways, his extraordinary moral and intellectual worth, his rare beauty of character, and their deep affection.

The following extract from one seems to us very interesting:

Outwardly I do not think there was anything remarkable in his habits, except an irregularity with regard to times and places of study, which may seem surprising in one whose progress in so many directions was so eminently great and rapid. He was commonly to be found in some friend’s room, reading or canvassing. I daresay he lost something by this irregularity, but less than perhaps one would at first imagine. I never saw him idle. He might seem to be lounging, or only amusing himself, but his mind was always active, and active for good. In fact, his energy and quickness of apprehension did not stand in need of outward aid.

There is much in this worthy of more extended notice. Such minds as his probably grow best in this way, are best left to themselves, to glide on at their own sweet wills; the stream was too deep and clear, and perhaps too entirely bent on its own errand, to be dealt with or regulated by any art or device. The same friend sums up his character thus:

I have met with no man his superior in metaphysical subtlety; no man his equal as a philosophical critic on works of taste; no man whose views on all subjects connected with the duties and dignities of humanity were more large and generous, and enlightened.

And all this said of a youth of twenty — heu nimium brevis aevi decus et desiderium!

We have given little of his verse; and what we do give is taken at random. We agree entirely in his father’s estimate of his poetical gift and art, but his mind was too serious, too thoughtful, too intensely dedicated to truth and the God of truth, to linger long in the pursuit of beauty; he was on his way to God, and could rest in nothing short of Him, otherwise he might have been a poet of genuine excellence.

Dark, dark, yea, “irrecoverably dark,”

Is the soul’s eye; yet how it strives and battles

Through th’ impenetrable gloom to fix

That master light, the secret truth of things,

Which is the body of the infinite God!

·······

Sure, we are leaves of one harmonious bower,

Fed by a sap that never will be scant,

All-permeating, all-producing mind;

And in our several parcellings of doom

We but fulfil the beauty of the whole.

Oh, madness! if a leaf should dare complain

Of its dark verdure, and aspire to be

The gayer, brighter thing that wantons near.

·······

Oh, blessing and delight of my young heart,

Maiden, who wast so lovely, and so pure,

I know not in what region now thou art,

Or whom thy gentle eyes in joy assure.

Not the old hills on which we gazed together,

Not the old faces which we both did love,

Not the old books, whence knowledge we did gather,

Not these, but others now thy fancies move.

I would I knew thy present hopes and fears,

All thy companions with their pleasant talk,

And the clear aspect which thy dwelling wears:

So, though in body absent, I might walk

With thee in thought and feeling, till thy mood

Did sanctify mine own to peerless good.

·······

Alfred, I would that you beheld me now,

Sitting beneath a mossy ivied wall

On a quaint bench, which to that structure old

Winds an accordant curve. Above my head

Dilates immeasurable a wild of leaves,

Seeming received into the blue expanse

That vaults this summer noon.

·······

Still here — thou hast not faded from my sight,

Nor all the music round thee from mine ear:

Still grace flows from thee to the brightening year,

And all the birds laugh out in wealthier light.

Still am I free to close my happy eyes,

And paint upon the gloom thy mimic form,

That soft white neck, that cheek in beauty warm,

And brow half hidden where yon ringlet lies:

With, oh! the blissful knowledge all the while

That I can lift at will each curvèd lid,

And my fair dream most highly realize.

The time will come, ‘tis ushered by my sighs,

When I may shape the dark, but vainly bid

True light restore that form, those looks, that smile.

·······

The garden trees are busy with the shower

That fell ere sunset: now methinks they talk,

Lowly and sweetly as befits the hour,

One to another down the grassy walk.

Hark the laburnum from his opening flower,

This cheery creeper greets in whisper light,

While the grim fir, rejoicing in the night,

Hoarse mutters to the murmuring sycamore.

What shall I deem their converse? would they hail

The wild grey light that fronts yon massive cloud,

Or the half bow, rising like pillar’d fire?

Or are they fighting faintly for desire

That with May dawn their leaves may be o’erflowed,

And dews about their feet may never fail?

In the Essay, entitled Theodicaea Novissima, from which the following passages are taken, to the great injury in its general effect, he sets himself to the task of doing his utmost to clear up the mystery of the existence of such things as sin and suffering, in the universe of a being like God. He does it fearlessly, but like a child. It is in the spirit of his friend’s words:

An infant crying in the night,

An infant crying for the light,

And with no language but a cry.

Then was I as a child that cries,

But, crying, knows his father near.

It is not a mere exercitation of the intellect, it is an endeavour to get nearer God — to assert His eternal Providence, and vindicate His ways to men. We know no performance more wonderful for such a boy. Pascal might have written it. As was to be expected, the tremendous subject remains where he found it — his glowing love and genius cast a gleam here and there across its gloom; but it is brief as the lightning in the collied night — the jaws of darkness do devour it up — this secret belongs to God. Across its deep and dazzling darkness, and from out its abyss of thick cloud, “all dark, dark, irrecoverably dark,” no steady ray has ever, or will ever, come — over its face its own darkness must brood, till He to whom alone the darkness and the light are both alike, to whom the night shineth as the day, says, “Let there be light!” There is, we all know, a certain awful attraction, a nameless charm for all thoughtful spirits, in this mystery, “the greatest in the universe,” as Mr. Hallam truly says; and it is well for us at times, so that we have pure eyes and a clean heart, to turn aside and look into its gloom; but it is not good to busy ourselves in clever speculations about it, or briskly to criticize the speculations of others — it is a wise and pious saying of Augustine, Verius cogitatur Deus quam dicitur; et verius est quam cogitatur.

I wish to be understood as considering Christianity in the present Essay rather in its relation to the intellect, as constituting the higher philosophy, than in its far more important bearing upon the hearts and destinies of us all. I shall propose the question in this form, “Is there ground for believing that the existence of moral evil is absolutely necessary to the fulfilment of God’s essential love for Christ?” (i.e. of the Father for Christ, or of ὁ πατήρ for ὁ λόγος).

“Can man by searching find out God?” I believe not. I believe that the unassisted efforts of man’s reason have not established the existence and attributes of Deity on so sure a basis as the Deist imagines. However sublime may be the notion of a supreme original mind, and however naturally human feelings adhered to it, the reasons by which it was justified were not, in my opinion, sufficient to clear it from considerable doubt and confusion.... I hesitate not to say that I derive from Revelation a conviction of Theism, which, without that assistance, would have been but a dark and ambiguous hope. I see that the Bible fits into every fold of the human heart. I am a man and I believe it to be God’s book because it is man’s book. It is true that the Bible affords me no additional means of demonstrating the falsity of Atheism; if mind had nothing to do with the formation of the Universe, doubtless whatever had was competent also to make the Bible; but I have gained this advantage, that my feelings and thoughts can no longer refuse their assent to what is evidently framed to engage that assent; and what is it to me that I cannot disprove the bare logical possibility of my whole nature being fallacious? To seek for a certainty above certainty, an evidence beyond necessary belief, is the very lunacy of scepticism: we must trust our own faculties, or we can put no trust in anything, save that moment we call the present, which escapes us while we articulate its name. I am determined therefore to receive the Bible as Divinely authorized, and the scheme of human and Divine things which it contains, as essentially true.

In the Supreme Nature those two capacities of Perfect Love and Perfect Joy are indivisible. Holiness and Happiness, says an old divine, are two several notions of one thing. Equally inseparable are the notions of Opposition to Love and Opposition to Bliss. Unless, therefore, the heart of a created being is at one with the heart of God, it cannot but be miserable. Moreover, there is no possibility of continuing for ever partly with God and partly against Him: we must either be capable by our nature of entire accordance with His will, or we must be incapable of anything but misery, further than He may for a while “not impute our trespasses to us,” that is, He may interpose some temporary barrier between sin and its attendant pain. For in the Eternal Idea of God a created spirit is perhaps not seen, as a series of successive states, of which some that are evil might be compensated by others that are good, but as one indivisible object of these almost divisible modes, and that either in accordance with His own nature, or in opposition to it....

Before the Gospel was preached to man, how could a human soul have this love, and this consequent life? I see no way; but now that Christ has excited our love for Him by showing unutterable love for us; now that we know Him as an Elder Brother, a being of like thoughts, feelings, sensations, sufferings, with ourselves, it has become possible to love as God loves, that is, to love Christ, and thus to become united in heart to God. Besides, Christ is the express image of God’s person: in loving Him we are sure we are in a state of readiness to love the Father, whom we see, He tells us, when we see Him. Nor is this all: the tendency of love is towards a union so intimate as virtually to amount to identification; when then by affection towards Christ we have become blended with His being, the beams of eternal love, falling, as ever, on the one beloved object, will include us in Him, and their returning flashes of love out of His personality will carry along with them some from our own, since ours has become confused with His, and so shall we be one with Christ, and through Christ with God. Thus, then, we see the great effect of the Incarnation, as far as our nature is concerned, was to render human love for the Most High a possible thing. The law had said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength”; and could men have lived by law, “which is the strength of sin,” verily righteousness and life would have been by that law. But it was not possible, and all were concluded under sin, that in Christ might be the deliverance of all. I believe that Redemption (i.e., what Christ has done and suffered for mankind) is universal, in so far as it left no obstacle between man and God, but man’s own will; that indeed is in the power of God’s election, with whom alone rest the abysmal secrets of personality; but as far as Christ is concerned, His death was for all, since His intentions and affections were equally directed to all, and “none who come to Him will He in any wise cast out.”

I deprecate any hasty rejection of these thoughts as novelties. Christianity is indeed, as St. Augustine says, “pulchritudo tam antiqua”; but he adds, “tam nova,” for it is capable of presenting to every mind a new face of truth. The great doctrine which in my judgment these observations tend to strengthen and illumine, the doctrine of personal love for a personal God, is assuredly no novelty, but has in all times been the vital principle of the Church. Many are the forms of anti-christian heresy, which for a season have depressed and obscured that principle of life, but its nature is conflictive and resurgent; and neither the Papal Hierarchy with its pomp of systematized errors, nor the worst apostasy of latitudinarian Protestantism, have ever so far prevailed, but that many from age to age have proclaimed and vindicated the eternal gospel of love, believing, as I also firmly believe, that any opinion which tends to keep out of sight the living and loving God, whether it substitute for Him an idol, an occult agency, or a formal creed, can be nothing better than a vain and portentous shadow projected from the selfish darkness of unregenerate man.

The following is from the Review of Tennyson’s Poems; we do not know that during the lapse of years anything better has been said:

Undoubtedly the true poet addresses himself, in all his conceptions, to the common nature of us all. Art is a lofty tree, and may shoot up far beyond our grasp, but its roots are in daily life and experience. Every bosom contains the elements of those complex emotions which the artist feels, and every head can, to a certain extent, go over in itself the process of their combination, so as to understand his expressions and sympathize with his state. But this requires exertion; more or less, indeed, according to the difference of occasion, but always some degree of exertion. For since the emotions of the poet during composition follow a regular law of association, it follows that to accompany their progress up to the harmonious prospect of the whole, and to perceive the proper dependence of every step on that which preceded, it is absolutely necessary to start from the same point, i.e., clearly to apprehend that leading sentiment of the poet’s mind, by their conformity to which the host of suggestions are arranged. Now this requisite exertion is not willingly made by the large majority of readers. It is so easy to judge capriciously, and according to indolent impulse!

Those different powers of poetic disposition, the energies of Sensitive, of Reflective, or Passionate emotion, which in former times were intermingled, and derived from mutual support an extensive empire over the feelings of men, were now restrained within separate spheres of agency. The whole system no longer worked harmoniously, and by intrinsic harmony acquired external freedom; but there arose a violent and unusual action in the several component functions, each for itself, all striving to reproduce the regular power which the whole had once enjoyed. Hence the melancholy which so evidently characterizes the spirit of modern poetry; hence that return of the mind upon itself, and the habit of seeking relief in idiosyncrasies rather than community of interest. In the old times the poetic impulse went along with the general impulse of the nation.

One of the faithful Islâm, a poet in the truest and highest sense, we are anxious to present to our readers.... He sees all the forms of Nature with the eruditus oculus, and his ear has a fairy fineness. There is a strange earnestness in his worship of beauty, which throws a charm over his impassioned song more easily felt than described, and not to be escaped by those who have once felt it. We think that he has more definiteness and roundness of general conception than the late Mr. Keats, and is much more free from blemishes of diction and hasty capriccios of fancy.... The author imitates nobody; we recognize the spirit of his age, but not the individual form of this or that writer. His thoughts bear no more resemblance to Byron or Scott, Shelley or Coleridge, than to Homer or Calderon, Ferdusi or Calidasa. We have remarked five distinctive excellences of his own manner. First, his luxuriance of imagination, and at the same time his control over it. Secondly, his power of embodying himself in ideal characters, or rather modes of character, with such extreme accuracy of adjustment, that the circumstances of the narration seem to have a natural correspondence with the predominant feeling, and, as it were, to be evolved from it by assimilative force. Thirdly, his vivid, picturesque delineation of objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fused, to borrow a metaphor from science, in a medium of strong emotion. Fourthly, the variety of his lyrical measures, and exquisite modulation of harmonious words and cadences to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed. Fifthly, the elevated habits of thought, implied in these compositions, and imparting a mellow soberness of tone, more impressive, to our minds, than if the author had drawn up a set of opinions in verse, and sought to instruct the understanding, rather than to communicate the love of beauty to the heart.

What follows is justly thought and well said:

And is it not a noble thing that the English tongue is, as it were, the common focus and point of union to which opposite beauties converge? Is it a trifle that we temper energy with softness, strength with flexibility, capaciousness of sound with pliancy of idiom? Some, I know, insensible to these virtues, and ambitious of I know not what unattainable decomposition, prefer to utter funereal praises over the grave of departed Anglo-Saxon, or, starting with convulsive shudder, are ready to leap from surrounding Latinisms into the kindred, sympathetic arms of modern German. For myself, I neither share their regret, nor their terror. Willing at all times to pay filial homage to the shades of Hengist and Horsa, and to admit they have laid the base of our compound language; or, if you will, have prepared the soil from which the chief nutriment of the goodly tree, our British oak, must be derived, I am yet proud to confess that I look with sentiments more exulting and more reverential to the bonds by which the law of the universe has fastened me to my distant brethren of the same Caucasian race; to the privileges which I, an inhabitant of the gloomy North, share in common with climates imparadized in perpetual summer, to the universality and efficacy resulting from blended intelligence, which, while it endears in our eyes the land of our fathers as a seat of peculiar blessing, tends to elevate and expand our thoughts into communion with humanity at large; and, in the “sublimer spirit” of the Poet, to make us feel

That God is everywhere — the God who framed

Mankind to be one mighty family,

Himself our Father, and the world our home.

What nice shading of thought do his remarks on Petrarch discover!

But it is not so much to his direct adoptions that I refer, as to the general modulation of thought, that clear softness of his images, that energetic self-possession of his conceptions, and that melodious repose in which are held together all the emotions he delineates.

Every one who knows anything of himself, and of his fellow-men, will acknowledge the wisdom of what follows. It displays an intimate knowledge both of the constitution and history of man, and there is much in it suited to our present need:

I do not hesitate to express my conviction, that the spirit of the critical philosophy, as seen by its fruits in all the ramifications of art, literature, and morality, is as much more dangerous than the spirit of mechanical philosophy, as it is fairer in appearance, and more capable of alliance with our natural feelings of enthusiasm and delight. Its dangerous tendency is this, that it perverts those very minds, whose office it was to resist the perverse impulses of society, and to proclaim truth under the dominion of falsehood. However precipitate may be at any time the current of public opinion, bearing along the mass of men to the grosser agitations of life, and to such schemes of belief as make these the prominent objects, there will always be in reserve a force of antagonistic opinion, strengthened by opposition, and attesting the sanctity of those higher principles which are despised or forgotten by the majority. These men are secured by natural temperament and peculiar circumstances from participating in the common delusion: but if some other and deeper fallacy be invented; if some more subtle beast of the field should speak to them in wicked flattery; if a digest of intellectual aphorisms can be substituted in their minds for a code of living truths, and the lovely semblances of beauty, truth, affection, can be made first to obscure the presence, and then to conceal the loss, of that religious humility, without which, as their central life, all these are but dreadful shadows; if so fatal a stratagem can be successfully practised; I see not what hope remains for a people against whom the gates of hell have so prevailed.

But the number of pure artists is small: few souls are so finely tempered as to preserve the delicacy of meditative feeling, untainted by the allurements of accidental suggestion. The voice of the critical conscience is still and small, like that of the moral: it cannot entirely be stifled where it has been heard, but it may be disobeyed. Temptations are never wanting: some immediate and temporary effect can be produced at less expense of inward exertion than the high and more ideal effect which art demands: it is much easier to pander to the ordinary and often recurring wish for excitement, than to promote the rare and difficult intuition of beauty. To raise the many to his own real point of view, the artist must employ his energies, and create energy in others: to descend to their position is less noble, but practicable with ease. If I may be allowed the metaphor, one partakes of the nature of redemptive power; the other of that self-abased and degenerate will, which “flung from his splendours” the fairest star in heaven.

Revelation is a voluntary approximation of the Infinite Being to the ways and thoughts of finite humanity. But until this step has been taken by Almighty Grace, how should man have a warrant for loving with all his heart and mind and strength?... Without the gospel, nature exhibits a want of harmony between our intrinsic constitution and the system in which it is placed. But Christianity has made up the difference. It is possible and natural to love the Father, who has made us His children by the spirit of adoption: it is possible and natural to love the Elder Brother, who was, in all things, like as we are, except sin, and can succour those in temptation, having been himself tempted. Thus the Christian faith is the necessary complement of a sound ethical system.

There is something to us very striking in the words “Revelation is a voluntary approximation of the Infinite Being.” This states the case with an accuracy and a distinctness not at all common among either the opponents or the apologists of revealed religion in the ordinary sense of the expression. In one sense God is for ever revealing Himself. His heavens are for ever telling His glory, and the firmament showing His handiwork; day unto day is uttering speech, and night unto night is showing knowledge concerning Him. But in the word of the truth of the gospel, God draws near to His creatures; He bows His heavens, and comes down:

That glorious form, that light unsufferable,

And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,

he lays aside. The Word dwelt with men. “Come then, let us reason together”;—”Waiting to be gracious”;—”Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man open to Me, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with Me.” It is the father seeing his son while yet a great way off, and having compassion, and running to him and falling on his neck and kissing him; for “it was meet for us to rejoice, for this my son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found.” Let no man confound the voice of God in His Works with the voice of God in His Word; they are utterances of the same infinite heart and will; they are in absolute harmony; together they make up “that undisturbèd song of pure concent”; one “perfect diapason”; but they are distinct; they are meant to be so. A poor traveller, “weary and waysore,” is stumbling in unknown places through the darkness of a night of fear, with no light near him, the everlasting stars twinkling far off in their depths, and yet unrisen sun, or the waning moon, sending up their pale beams into the upper heavens, but all this is distant and bewildering for his feet, doubtless better much than outer darkness, beautiful and full of God, if he could have the heart to look up, and the eyes to make use of its vague light; but he is miserable, and afraid, his next step is what he is thinking of; a lamp secured against all winds of doctrine is put into his hands, it may in some respects widen the circle of darkness, but it will cheer his feet, it will tell them what to do next. What a silly fool he would be to throw away that lantern, or draw down the shutters, and make it dark to him, while it sits “i’ the centre and enjoys bright day,” and all upon the philosophical ground that its light was of the same kind as the stars’, and that it was beneath the dignity of human nature to do anything but struggle on and be lost in the attempt to get through the wilderness and the night by the guidance of those “natural” lights, which, though they are from heaven, have so often led the wanderer astray. The dignity of human nature indeed! Let him keep his lantern till the glad sun is up, with healing under his wings. Let him take good heed to the “sure” λόγον while in this αὐχμηρῷ τοπῷ — this dark, damp, unwholesome place, “till the day dawn and φωσφόρος — the day-star — arise.” Nature and the Bible, the Works and the Word of God, are two distinct things. In the mind of their Supreme Author they dwell in perfect peace, in that unspeakable unity which is of His essence; and to us His children, every day their harmony, their mutual relations, are discovering themselves; but let us beware of saying all nature is a revelation as the Bible is, and all the Bible is natural as nature is: there is a perilous juggle here.

The following passage develops Arthur Hallam’s views on religious feeling; this was the master idea of his mind, and it would not be easy to overrate its importance.

“My son, give me thine heart”;—”Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”;—”The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”

He expresses the same general idea in these words, remarkable in themselves, still more so as being the thought of one so young.

The work of intellect is posterior to the work of feeling. The latter lies at the foundation of the man; it is his proper self — the peculiar thing that characterizes him as an individual. No two men are alike in feeling; but conceptions of the understanding, when distinct are precisely similar in all — the ascertained relations of truths are the common property of the race.

Tennyson, we have no doubt, had this thought of his friend in his mind, in the following lines; it is an answer to the question, Can man by searching find out God? —

I found Him not in world or sun,

Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye;

Nor thro’ the questions men may try,

The petty cobwebs we have spun:

If e’er when faith had fallen asleep,

I heard a voice “believe no more,”

And heard an ever-breaking shore

That tumbled in the godless deep;

A warmth within the breast would melt

The freezing reason’s colder part,

And like a man in wrath, the heart

Stood up and answered, “I have felt.”

No, like a child in doubt and fear:

But that blind clamour made me wise;

Then was I as a child that cries,

But, crying, knows his father near;

And what I seem beheld again

What is, and no man understands:

And out of darkness came the hands

That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.

This is a subject of the deepest personal as well as speculative interest. In the works of Augustine, of Baxter, Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, and of Alexander Knox, our readers will find how large a place the religious affections held in their view of Divine truth as well as of human duty. The last-mentioned writer expresses himself thus:

Our sentimental faculties are far stronger than our cogitative; and the best impressions on the latter will be but the moonshine of the mind, if they are alone. Feeling will be best excited by sympathy; rather, it cannot be excited in any other way. Heart must act upon heart — the idea of a living person being essential to all intercourse of heart. You cannot by any possibility cordialize with a mere ens rationis. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” otherwise we could not have “beheld His glory,” much less “received of His fulness.”

Our young author thus goes on:

This opens upon us an ampler view in which the subject deserves to be considered, and a relation still more direct and close between the Christian religion and the passion of love. What is the distinguishing character of Hebrew literature, which separates it by so broad a line of demarcation from that of every ancient people? Undoubtedly the sentiment of erotic devotion which pervades it. Their poets never represent the Deity as an impassive principle, a mere organizing intellect, removed at infinite distance from human hopes and fears. He is for them a being of like passions with themselves, requiring heart for heart, and capable of inspiring affection, because capable of feeling and returning it. Awful indeed are the thunders of His utterance and the clouds that surround His dwelling-place; very terrible is the vengeance He executes on the nations that forget Him: but to His chosen people, and especially to the men “after His own heart,” whom He anoints from the midst of them, His “still, small voice” speaks in sympathy and loving-kindness. Every Hebrew, while his breast glowed with patriotic enthusiasm at those promises, which he shared as one of the favoured race, had a yet deeper source of emotion, from which gushed perpetually the aspirations of prayer and thanksgiving. He might consider himself alone in the presence of his God; the single being to whom a great revelation had been made, and over whose head an “exceeding weight of glory” was suspended. For him the rocks of Horeb had trembled, and the waters of the Red Sea were parted in their course. The word given on Sinai with such solemn pomp of ministration was given to his own individual soul, and brought him into immediate communion with his Creator. That awful Being could never be put away from him. He was about his path, and about his bed, and knew all his thoughts long before. Yet this tremendous, enclosing presence was a presence of love. It was a manifold, everlasting manifestation of one deep feeling — a desire for human affection. Such a belief, while it enlisted even pride and self-interest on the side of piety, had a direct tendency to excite the best passions of our nature. Love is not long asked in vain from generous dispositions. A Being, never absent, but standing beside the life of each man with ever-watchful tenderness, and recognized, though invisible, in every blessing that befel them from youth to age, became naturally the object of their warmest affections. Their belief in Him could not exist without producing, as a necessary effect, that profound impression of passionate individual attachment which in the Hebrew authors always mingles with and vivifies their faith in the Invisible. All the books of the Old Testament are breathed upon by this breath of life. Especially is it to be found in that beautiful collection, entitled the Psalms of David, which remains, after some thousand years, perhaps the most perfect form in which the religious sentiment of man has been embodied.

But what is true of Judaism is yet more true of Christianity: “matre pulchrâ filia pulchrior.” In addition to all the characters of Hebrew Monotheism, there exists in the doctrine of the Cross a peculiar and inexhaustible treasure for the affectionate feelings. The idea of the Θεανθρωπος, the God whose goings forth have been from everlasting, yet visible to men for their redemption as an earthly, temporal creature, living, acting, and suffering among themselves, then (which is yet more important) transferring to the unseen place of His spiritual agency the same humanity He wore on earth, so that the lapse of generations can in no way affect the conception of His identity; this is the most powerful thought that ever addressed itself to a human imagination. It is the που στῶ, which alone was wanted to move the world. Here was solved at once the great problem which so long had distressed the teachers of mankind, how to make virtue the object of passion, and to secure at once the warmest enthusiasm in the heart with the clearest perception of right and wrong in the understanding. The character of the blessed Founder of our faith became an abstract of morality to determine the judgment, while at the same time it remained personal, and liable to love. The written word and established church prevented a degeneration into ungoverned mysticism, but the predominant principle of vital religion always remained that of self-sacrifice to the Saviour. Not only the higher divisions of moral duties, but the simple, primary impulses of benevolence, were subordinated to this new absorbing passion. The world was loved “in Christ alone.” The brethren were members of His mystical body. All the other bonds that had fastened down the spirit of the universe to our narrow round of earth were as nothing in comparison to this golden chain of suffering and self-sacrifice, which at once riveted the heart of man to one who, like himself, was acquainted with grief. Pain is the deepest thing we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other.

There is a sad pleasure — non ingrata amaritudo — and a sort of meditative tenderness in contemplating the little life of this “dear youth,” and in letting the mind rest upon these his earnest thoughts; to watch his keen and fearless, but childlike spirit, moving itself aright — going straight onward along “the lines of limitless desires” — throwing himself into the very deepest of the ways of God, and striking out as a strong swimmer striketh out his hands to swim; to see him “mewing his mighty youth, and kindling his undazzled eye at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance”:

Light intellectual, and full of love,

Love of true beauty, therefore full of joy,

Joy, every other sweetness far above.

It is good for every one to look upon such a sight, and as we look, to love. We should all be the better for it; and should desire to be thankful for, and to use aright a gift so good and perfect, coming down as it does from above, from the Father of lights, in whom alone there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

Thus it is, that to each one of us the death of Arthur Hallam — his thoughts and affections — his views of God, of our relations to Him, of duty, of the meaning and worth of this world and the next — where he now is — have an individual significance. He is bound up in our bundle of life; we must be the better or the worse of having known what manner of man he was; and in a sense less peculiar, but not less true, each of us may say:

—— The tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.

—— O for the touch of a vanished hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

God gives us love! Something to love

He lends us; but when love is grown

To ripeness, that on which it throve

Falls off, and love is left alone:

This is the curse of time. Alas!

In grief we are not all unlearned;

Once, through our own doors Death did pass;

One went who never hath returned.

This star

Rose with us, through a little arc

Of heaven, nor having wandered far,

Shot on the sudden into dark.

Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace;

Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,

While the stars burn, the moons increase,

And the great ages onward roll.

Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet,

Nothing comes to thee new or strange,

Sleep, full of rest from head to feet;

Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.

Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella. — Go in peace, soul beautiful and blessed.

“O man greatly beloved, go thou thy way till the end, for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.” — Daniel.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A: THE COMMENTS OF TENNYSON ON ONE OF HIS LATER ETHICAL POEMS

By Wilfrid Ward

He had often said he would go through the “De Profundis” with me line by line, and he did so late in January or early in February 1889, when I was staying at Farringford. He was still very ill, having had rheumatic fever in the previous year; and neither he nor his friends expected that he would recover after his many relapses. He could scarcely move his limbs, and his fingers were tied with bandages. We moved him from bed to sofa, but he could not sit up. His mind, however, was quite clear. He read through the “De Profundis,” and gave the substance of the explanation I have written down. He began languidly, but soon got deeply interested. When he reached the prayer at the end, he said: “A B” (naming a well-known Positivist thinker) “exclaimed, when I read it to him, ‘Do leave that prayer out; I like all the rest of it.’”

I proceed to set down the account of the poem written (in substance) immediately after his explanation of it. The mystery of life as a whole which so constantly exercised him is here most fully dealt with. He supposes a child just born, and considers the problems of human existence as presented by the thought of the child’s birth, and the child’s future life with all its possibilities. The poem takes the form of two greetings to the new-born child. In the first greeting life is viewed as we see it in the world, and as we know it by physical science, as a phenomenon; as the materialist might view it; not indeed coarsely, but as an outcome of all the physical forces of the universe, which have ever contained in themselves the potentiality of all that was to come—”all that was to be in all that was.” These vast and wondrous forces have now issued in this newly given life — this child born into the world. There is the sense of mystery in our greeting to it; but it is of the mysteries of the physical Universe and nothing beyond; the sense of awe fitting to finite man at the thought of infinite Time, of the countless years before human life was at all, during which the fixed laws of Nature were ruling and framing the earth as we know it, of the countless years earlier still, during which, on the nebular hypothesis, Nature’s laws were working before our planet was separated off from the mass of the sun’s light, and before the similar differentiation took place in the rest of the “vast waste dawn of multitudinous eddying light.” Again, there is awe in contemplating the vastness of space; in the thoughts which in ascending scale rise from the new-born infant to the great globe of which he is so small a part, from that to the whole solar system, from that again to the myriad similar systems “glimmering up the heights beyond” us which we partly see in the Milky Way; from that to those others which human sight can never descry. Forces in Time and Space as nearly infinite as our imagination can conceive, have been leading up to this one birth, with the short life of a single man before it. May that life be happy and noble! Viewing it still as the course determined by Nature’s laws — a course unknown to us and yet unalterably fixed — we sigh forth the hope that our child may pass unscathed through youth, may have a full and prosperous time on earth, blessed by man for good done to man, and may pass peacefully at last to rest. Such is the first greeting — full of the poetry of life, of its wondrous causes, of the overwhelming greatness of the Universe of which this new-given baby is the child, cared for, preserved hitherto unscathed amid these awful powers, all in all to its parents, inspiring the hope which new-given joy makes sanguine, that fortune may be kind to it, that happiness may be as great, sorrow and pain as little, as the chances of the world allow.

After his explanation, he read the first greeting to the child:

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

Where all that was to be, in all that was,

Whirl’d for a million æons through the vast

Waste dawn of multitudinous eddying light —

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

Thro’ all this changing world of changeless law,

And every phase of ever-heightening life,

And nine long months of antenatal gloom,

With this last moon, this crescent — her dark orb

Touch’d with earth’s light — thou comest, darling boy;

Our own; a babe in lineament and limb

Perfect, and prophet of the perfect man;

Whose face and form are hers and mine in one,

Indissolubly married like our love;

Live and be happy in thyself, and serve

This mortal race thy kin so well, that men

May bless thee as we bless thee, O young life,

Breaking with laughter from the dark; and may

The fated channel where thy motion lives

Be prosperously shaped, and sway thy course

Along the years of haste and random youth

Unshatter’d; then full-current thro’ full man;

And last, in kindly curves, with gentlest fall,

By quiet fields, a slowly-dying power

To that last deep where we and thou art still.

And then comes the second greeting. A deeper chord is struck. The listener, who has, perhaps, felt as if the first greeting contained all — all the mystery of birth, of life, of death — hears a sound unknown, unimagined before. A new range of ideas is opened to us. The starry firmament disappears for the moment. The “deep” of infinite time and space is forgotten. A fresh sense is awakened, a deeper depth disclosed. We leave this wondrous world of appearances. We gaze into that other deep — the world of spirit, the world of realities; we see the new-born babe coming to us from that true world, with all the “abysmal depths of personality,” no longer a mere link in the chain of causes, with a fated course through the events of life, but a moral being, with the awful power of making or marring its own destiny and that of others. The proportions are abruptly reversed. The child is no longer the minute outcome of natural forces so much greater than itself. It is the “spirit,” the moral being, a reality which impinges on the world of appearances. Never can I forget the change of voice, the change of manner, as Lord Tennyson passed from the first greeting, with its purely human thoughts, to the second, so full of awe at the conception of the world behind the veil and the moral nature of man; an awe which seemed to culminate when he paused before the word “Spirit” in the seventh line and then gave it in deeper and more piercing tones: “Out of the deep — Spirit, — out of the deep.” This second greeting is in two parts:

I

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

From that great deep, before our world begins,

Whereon the Spirit of God moves as He will —

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

From that true world within the world we see,

Whereof our world is but the bounding shore —

Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,

With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun,

Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.

II

For in the world, which is not ours, they said,

“Let us make man,” and that which should be man,

From that one light no man can look upon,

Drew to this shore, lit by the suns and moons

And all the shadows. O dear Spirit, half-lost

In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign

That thou art thou — who wailest being born

And banish’d into mystery, and the pain

Of this divisible-indivisible world

Among the numerable-innumerable

Sun, sun, and sun, thro’ finite-infinite space,

In finite-infinite Time — our mortal veil

And shatter’d phantom of that infinite One,

Who made thee unconceivably Thyself

Out of His whole World-self, and all in all —

Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape

And ivyberry, choose; and still depart

From death to death thro’ life and life, and find

Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought

Not matter, not the finite-infinite,

But this main-miracle, that thou art thou,

With power on thine own act and on the world.

Note that the second greeting considers the reality of the child’s life and its meaning, the first only its appearance. The great deep of the spiritual world is “that true world within the world we see, Whereof our world is but the bounding shore.” And this indication that the second greeting gives the deeper and truer view, is preserved in some of the side touches of description. In the first greeting, for example, the moon is spoken of as “touch’d with earth’s light”; in the second the truer and less obvious fact is suggested. It “sends the hidden sun down yon dark sea.” The material view again looks at bright and hopeful appearances in life, and it notes the new-born babe “breaking with laughter from the dark.” The spiritual view foresees the woes which, if Byron is right in calling melancholy the “telescope of truth,” are truer than the joys. It notes no longer the child’s laughter, but rather its tears, “Thou wailest being born and banished into mystery.” Life, in the spiritual view, is in part a veiling and obscuring of the true self as it is, in a world of appearances. The soul is “half lost” in the body which is part of the phenomenal world, “in thine own shadow and in this fleshly sign that thou art thou.” The suns and moons, too, are but shadows, as the body of the child itself is but a shadow — shadows of the spirit-world and of God Himself. The physical life is before the child; but not as a fatally determined course. Choice of the good is to lead the spirit ever nearer God. The wonders of the material Universe are still recognized: “Sun, sun, and sun, thro’ finite-infinite space, in finite-infinite Time”; but they vanish into insignificance when compared to the two great facts of the spirit-world which consciousness tells us unmistakably — the facts of personality and of a responsible will. The great mystery is “Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite,” but “this main-miracle, that thou art thou, with power on thine own act and on the world.”

“Out of the deep” — in this conception of the true “deep” of the world behind the veil we have the thought which recurs so often, as in the “Passing of Arthur” and in “Crossing the Bar” — of birth and death as the coming from and returning to the spirit-world and God Himself. Birth is the coming to land from that deep; “of which our world is but the bounding shore;” death the re-embarking on the same infinite sea, for the home of truth and light.

He seemed so much better when he had finished his explanation that I asked him to read the poem through again. This he did, more beautifully than I ever heard him read. I felt as though his long illness and his expectation of death gave more intensity and force to his rendering of this wonderful poem on the mystery of life. He began quietly, and read the concluding lines of the first “greeting,” the brief description of a peaceful old age and death, from the human standpoint, with a very tender pathos:

And last, in kindly curves, with gentlest fall

By quiet fields, a slowly-dying power,

To that last deep where we and thou are still.

Then he gathered force, and his voice deepened as the greeting to the immortal soul of the man was read. He raised his eyes from the book at the seventh line and looked for a moment at his hearer with an indescribable expression of awe before he uttered the word “spirit”; “Out of the deep — Spirit, — out of the deep.” When he had finished the second greeting he was trembling much. Then he read the prayer — a prayer he had told me of self-prostration before the Infinite. I think he intended it as a contrast to the analytical and reflective character of the rest. It is an outpouring of the simplest and most intense self-abandonment to the Creator, an acknowledgment, when all has been thought and said with such insight and beauty, that our best thoughts and words are as nothing in the Great Presence — in a sense parallel to the breaking off in the “Ode to the Duke of Wellington”:

Speak no more of his renown,

Lay your earthly fancies down.

He began to chaunt in a loud clear voice:

Hallowed be Thy Name — Halleluiah.

His voice was growing tremulous as he reached the second part:

We feel we are nothing — for all is Thou and in Thee;

We feel we are something — that also has come from Thee.

And he broke down as he finished the prayer:

We know we are nothing — but Thou wilt help us to be.

Hallowed be Thy Name — Halleluiah!

APPENDIX B

It will be seen below that the lines to which reference is made —

That man’s the true cosmopolite

Who loves his native country best,

have been altered to suit my mother’s setting, arranged by Sir Charles Stanford, to

He best will serve the race of men

Who loves his native country best.

HANDS ALL ROUND

A NATIONAL SONG

The Melody by EMILY, LADY TENNYSON and arranged by C. VILLIERS STANFORD

To all the loyal hearts who long

To keep our English Empire whole!

To all our noble sons, the strong

New England of the Southern Pole!

To England under Indian skies,

To those dark millions of her realm!

To Canada whom we love and prize,

Whatever statesman hold the helm.

Hands all round! God the traitor’s hope confound!

To the great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,

And the great name of England round and round.

To all our statesmen so they be

True leaders of the land’s desire!

To both our Houses, may they see

Beyond the borough and the shire!

We sail’d wherever ship could sail,

We founded many a mighty state;

Pray God our greatness may not fail

Thro’ craven fears of being great.

Hands all round! God the traitor’s hope confound!

To the great cause of Freedom drink, my friends,

And the great name of England round and round.

APPENDIX C

MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS FROM UNKNOWN FRIENDS

[During the last twenty-five years of his life my father was probably, throughout the whole English-speaking race, the Englishman who was most widely known. Hence the letters addressed to him by strangers competed in number with those which, it is well known, add a needless weariness to the heavy task of governing a civilized state. This became a correspondence mainly of request or of reverence, although the voice of disappointment or of envy of what is ranked above oneself which lurks in common human nature may have occasionally been audible. My father’s experience here was that of Dr. Johnson and, doubtless, of many more men of commanding eminence; that of writers submitting their work for candid criticism, charging him with conceit if he suggested publication as unadvisable; if it were advised, and the book failed, with deception. Probably many of those who wrote thus soon repented of their eloquence; at any rate nothing of this nature will be here preserved. But of the ordinary type of strangers’ letters some specimens may be of interest. And although these few have been chosen mainly from the letters addressed to my father during his last fifteen years yet they will give a general impression of the vast quantity received.

I place first letters upon poetry submitted (or proposed for submission) to my father’s judgment.]

(1884)

I hope you will forgive the liberty I am taking in writing to you. I have heard a great deal about you, and I read a part of one of your poems, “The May Queen.” I have not had an opportunity to read the whole of it, but I like what I have seen very much.... I have tried to write some poems myself. I have enclosed one for you to see, which came into my mind while I was digging a ditch in my garden. I am only nine years old, and if I keep on trying some day I shall write a grand poem.

(1882)

Honoured Sir — It has been said: where a great apology is most needed, it is best to begin with the business at once.

I never had the pleasure of seeing you, but it is enough for me to have had the pleasure of reading your heart in your works, “though they be but a part of your inward soul.” I am a lad scarcely seventeen summers old. In some of my leisure hours, particularly morning and evening ones, I penned a few thousand lines of small poems in fair metre, — so my simple-minded friend or two pronounce them in their partiality.... [He deprecates the suspicion that he is applying for money.] Will you allow me to forward to you through the post a few of my poems? And when your benevolent soul has given up time to read some of my verses (“the primrose fancies of a boy”), and should my productions be considered by you deserving of your good word, half the difficulty of finding a willing publisher will, I know, be removed.

There is something truly felt and pathetic in the two following letters. The first is from a young poetess.

I hardly know how I have summoned up sufficient courage to address you, although I have long wished to do so! Studying that most touching of poems “Enoch Arden,” I felt somehow convinced that the heart that had inspired so much which is beautiful and touching, would also prompt a kind answer to me. Ever since I was a child (not so very long ago), writing was my only consolation and solace in moments of great grief or joy; writing — I shall not say poetry but rhyme.

(1881)

Dear Mr. Tennyson — I have heard and believed that great men are always the best hearted, and therefore hope you will kindly look at the enclosed and tell me if there is any hope that I may ever write anything worthy the name of poetry, and if those lines are anything but doggerel, I hope you will not think me as presumptuous as I do; something tells me you will be kind.

Now follow good average specimens.

(1890)

Dear and much-admired Lord Tennyson — The writer of this, an humble admirer of your Poetry, — an uneducated girl from the bogs of Ireland, has the audacity to send you her first effort in verse: whether it is poetry or not I leave you to decide, as I am entirely incapable of judging myself, as I am wholly ignorant of the art of versification, and indeed would never dream of attempting to write verse, only I was very anxious to succeed in prose writing....

(1882)

Will you kindly pardon my venturing to ask you to read some of my verses, and to tell me whether you consider me capable of ever writing poetry fit to be read? I have never had any desire to become a poet, but lately ideas have come into my head, once I seemed to see a line or two before my eyes, and in order to free myself from these fancies I wrote.

(1884)

Dear Sir — I remember your figure and attire at Shiplake Vicarage in Mrs. Franklyn Rawnsley’s house, 1852, thirty-two years ago. Does your memory travel back to a fine December morning when, the house full of guests for the christening of the latest blossom of the Rawnsley house, there drove up through the flooded meadows surrounding the low old vicarage, a cab with a young foreigner, a child of sixteen summers, all tremulous how she should be received, not speaking a word of English but her native German tongue, besides French, introduced by Miss Amélie Bodte, the authoress in Dresden, to teach music to Mrs. Rawnsley’s children? What a woeful feeling for the well-known counsellor’s daughter to be treated in a cool way as the engaged teacher of little children. However, there was an oasis in the desert. On the following morning Mrs. Rawnsley proposed to the assembled guests to take a walk in a neighbouring Squire’s park while she looked after some home duties, and a tall young gentleman with an enormous Tyrolese hat offered to walk with a solitary stranger. He spoke a little German and tried to divert the gloom of the young girl by crossing the lawn and breaking a belated rose she admired coming from snow-bound Saxony. They stopped at a turtle-dove house where he made the prettiest little German pun she never forgot hereafter, “Ich bin eine kleine Taube” (I am a little dove (deaf)?). And it began to rain, and he — it was you — took off the Spanish cloak gathered with narrow stitches on the throat, a black velvet collar falling over it, and wrapped it round the girl’s shoulders. The ladies of the company frowned, returning home, all told as with one voice to Mrs. Rawnsley what had happened during the walk, and she laughed and said to me in French, “My dear, you had all the honours as a German because you did not try for them, this is the Poet Laureate, and it displeases him that the ladies torment him for attentions.” And now do you remember, of course you know this girl was I. And the next day you read the “Ode to the Queen,” of which I did not understand a word, and you went away to the sea to meet your wife and baby son, and I never saw you again. Now after thirty-two years undergoing purification in the crucible of humble life, I come to ask you to accept kindly the dedication of one of my compositions — a song. Your name is as illustrious here as in England, and my poor song will find more eager listeners with your name attached as a patron than otherwise.... “A turtle dove” could but bring an olive branch to a lone woman and gladden the heart of your Lordship’s most respectful admirer,

Maria * * *

(1890)

Now a Transatlantic poetess:

(After excuse asked for “presumption” she says:)

I have to thank you for some of the best thoughts and the purest pleasure I have ever derived from anything.

I am an American girl nineteen years of age, and was named from the hero of “Aylmer’s Field.”

I enclose some verses I have written. I would like exceedingly to hear your opinion of them and to know if they contain anything of promise.

Leoline * * *

(1877)

From America also we have one who modestly describes himself as “a mere Collegian, a youth to fortune and to fame unknown....”

I have during the past summer been engaged, to my great entertainment and instruction, in the perusal of your poetical works, reading many for the first time though of course familiar with a large number; having finished them, I could not refrain from expressing my admiration of your great genius in a few lines which I send herewith.

O Tennyson, how great a soul is thine!

Thy range of thought how varied

and how vast...

(1862)

Will you accept the enclosed lines as a slight testimonial of the high admiration entertained for your exquisite genius, by a rhyming daughter of Columbia; whose poetic wings just fledging from a first unpublished vol. (commended by Wm. Cullen Bryant and Geo. Bancroft, Esqrs.) permit only a feeble fluttering around the base of that “Parnassus,” whose summit you have so brilliantly, and justly attained. * * *

(187-)

Then an “Agent for Stars” offers my father £20,000 if said Agent is permitted to arrange a tour for him in the United States.

(1884)

The following is another — we will not say, a less acceptable offering:

I send you by my good friend —— a dozen small parcels of smoking tobacco....

We think it the best smoking tobacco in the world and I trust that you may find reason to agree with us. If it shall give you one moment’s pleasure in return for the countless hours of delight that you have given me, I shall count myself a happy mortal.

(1890)

A gift certainly not less acceptable comes from a little girl:

My Lord — Please let these flowers be in your room, and do wear the little bunch. — I remain, your true admirer, * * *

Now follows the Grande Armée of natural, amiable, but remorseless autograph hunters. A miscellaneous group comes first.

(1890)

Honoured Lord — May I (an Australian maiden born 1870) hope to be pardoned for taking the liberty of writing to you — so distinguished a gentleman — to express my great admiration for your poems? It is my admiration that has emboldened me to venture so far ... etc. etc.

Let me conclude with one request: namely to ask you to do me the very great honour to acknowledge this letter; so that I may be able to boast of, and dearly treasure, even a line from the Great Poet.

(1890)

An obvious fisher for good things follows:

Sir — I hope that you will kindly excuse the liberty I take in requesting you to be so good as to inform me how the word “humble” should be pronounced: i.e. whether or not it is proper to aspirate the “h”?

A reply at your kind convenience will inexpressibly oblige....

(1890)

Another ingenuously finds it needful to ask whether the word be pronounced Idylls or Edylls.

(1891)

Dear Sir — A simple child (who writes from Holland), would feel extremely happy, would be in the seventh heaven, when she would be favoured with a mere line of the greatest poet of renown, Alfred Tennyson. Allow her, to offer you before, her sincere thanks for your autograph, with which she would feel the happiest child in the world.

With kind regards, most honourable lord, yours respectfully.

(1882)

A (German) collector of autographs, who has an autograph of Mr. Kinkel and Victor Hugo, the greatest living poets of Germany and France, only misses in his collection the autograph of the greatest living English poet. Therefore he requests you to give him an autograph of yours. May it only be your signature, it will find in my album a place of honour.

(1882)

To the prince of poets.

Monsieur — Forgive me, I beseech you, the liberty I take in daring to write to you; but I wish to beg the greatest of favours.

This favour, Monsieur, it is your signature.

I am only a young Belgian girl, and I have no reason to proffer why you should thus distinguish me; but I feel you must love all girls, or you could not have written “Isabel” or “Lilian”; and you must be kind and good, or you would not have given them to the world.

So, Monsieur, I humbly beg you send me the name we all venerate, traced by the hand that has guided the world with so much beauty, and make one more heart supremely happy. — One who loves you,

* * *

Three petitions, which touched my father, may here have place.

The first (1884) consists of some twenty letters, in very creditable English and excellent hand-writing, each saying some handsome thing about the “May Queen,” which they had learned, and now criticized with amusing naïveté, and asking for a line from Tennyson — signed with the children’s names, and dated from a German High School for girls: “who,” says their Mistress, “in the joy of their hearts tried to express their feeling of admiration in their imperfect knowledge of the English language.”

In the next a young girl from India, training in England with comrades apparently for Zenana work, thanks “Our dear aziz Sahib” for a copy of the Poems, and then proceeds, in neat round hand:

Oh how we wish we could see you even for one minute The Great and good Poet Laureate, whom everybody loves so much and we love you too dear sweet Sahib, we are going to learn that pretty Poetry “The May Queen” and several others out of that lovely Book. Will you please, dear Sahib, write out “The May Queen” and “The Dedication of the Idyols of the King,” with your own hand, we will keep it till the last day of our lives.

They then explain why the “Dedication” is asked for; “because we know how dearly Prince Albert loved you, and, also our beloved Queen Empress, and how you love them”: also how they long to go back “to our dear India,” and sing hymns, and nurse and dose “our own countrywomen in the Zenanas.”

Now good-bye our aziz (beloved) Sahib I am sending you some wild daisies and moss as you are so fond of flowers and everything beautiful in God’s world. May God give you a sweet smile every day, prays your little loving, Indian Friend,,

* * *

This last explains itself:

Dear Mr. Tennyson — I am one of a large struggling family of girls and boys who have never yet been able to afford to give 9s. for that much-coveted green volume Tennyson’s “Poems,” so at last, the boys having failed to obtain it as a prize, and the girls as a birthday present, I, the boldest of the party, venture to ask if you would kindly bestow a copy on a nest full of young admirers.,

* * *

He wrote his little Indian maid a pretty letter, and sent his poems to the “best girl.” And in many an instance, (requests for aid included) the correspondence bears witness to my father’s open-hearted kindliness and liberality. His beggars, at any rate, were often choosers.

The wish for an autograph, we may again reasonably suppose, was not absent from the minds of the following (and other analogous) writers. The first dates from Scotland:

(1878)

I take the great liberty in writing to you, in order to settle a dispute that has arisen amongst several parties, regarding the song written by Sir Walter Scott, Jock O’ Hazeldean. The words are as follows,

And ye shall be his bride Lady;

So comely to be seen.

Does comely apply to the bride, or the bridegroom? As your opinion will be considered satisfactory to all, your reply will be considered a lasting favour.,

* * *

(1883)

I am an enthusiastic reader and admirer of your works, and have read those which I like especially, over and over again, in particular “Maud,” which I consider to be surpassingly fresh and beautiful — there is a sort of fascination about the poem to me ... but I really cannot understand the meaning of the end of it.

I should very much like to know whether it is intended to mean that Maud’s brother, “that curl’d Assyrian bull,” is slain by her lover: whether Maud is supposed to die of a broken heart, or does her lover come back, long after, presumably from the Russian war and marry her?

The remaining examples, in which respect is curiously blended with familiarity, are dated from the United States.

A lively boy of thirteen (1884) who loves “Nature and Poetry” shall here have precedence:

In the first place I wish to ask your pardon for bothering you with this letter, but I want to make a collection, or I mean get the autographs of 5 or 6 distinguished poets; and so I thought I would write and get yours if possible and then the minor ones may follow.

I have read most of your poems, and like them very much indeed, etc. etc.

(A biographical sketch follows, including a visit to England.) When we drove back from Stoke Pogis to Windsor we saw the deer in the Queen’s hunting grounds, and the tall, mighty oaks on each side of the road seemed to say, “This is an Earthly Paradise.”...

If you would write a verse or two from some one of your poems and write your name under it, I should be very much obliged to you indeed.

(1885)

Forgive the intrusion of a stranger (says a lady). Long have I desired to have some one of the noble thoughts, I have so learned to love, in your own handwriting. I have felt a delicacy in asking this, but the wish is so earnest with me that I will venture this first and last request.... I crave some tangible proof that my “hero-worship” has some sympathetic, human foundation. Could I choose a couplet?... They spring to my memory in legions. The wild melody of “Blow, bugle, blow,” etc. etc. ... They have helped to make my life beautiful, earnest and true, and I am grateful for it all. If I might be once more your debtor it would be a real joy to me, but if it feels like a burden, do not give it another thought.

(1891)

... In behalf of Charity Circle, a non-sectarian organization of the order of King’s Daughters, we are making a collection of autographs of prominent men and women to be used in a souvenir banner: which when finished will be sold and the proceeds devoted to charity work. We feel as if the banner will not be complete without Lord Tennyson’s autograph.

(1891)

Beloved Sir — I feel awkward and abashed, as I thus come before you, who are so great, so honored, so crowned with earthly fame and glory; and, so worthy to be thus crowned, and known to fame: but, I know, that in the midst of all these honors, which might spoil one, of the common sort of souls; you are a poet, born, not made; and therefore, you have the essential gift of the poet [sympathy] and can feel for the imprisoned soul, beating against the stifling walls of silence: and longing, fainting, to come forth into the glad sunshine, the sweet, fresh air of utterance, so strangely withheld from it.... From [youth] till now, Beloved Sir, you have been my friend, my soother; the dear angel, whose kindly office it has been, ever and anon, to speak for me ... and thus to give me the sweet sense of having been led forth from prison for a while into the blessed light and freedom of utterance.

I will never forget the relief afforded by those lines:

My very heart faints and my soul grieves

Etc. etc.

(1891)

A lady writes to the honored Poet-Laureate of England, and the beloved world-renowned verse-maker.

Knowing the value of even one verse and your autograph I write to you and make my request, which if granted will be beyond my anticipations. I want a dedicatory poem so much, but if I get only a line from you I should be happy. I always loved your poetry. Now please, do send me the coveted verse. I, a beggar-maid at the throne of poetry, kneel and beg of the monarch a crumb. Have you any grandchildren? I wish I could get one of their photos for my book. Hoping you will act like the good king in the fairy kingdom and grant the request — I remain etc. etc.

(1885)

Dear Lady Tennyson — It is one of the glorious privileges of our government that the “first ladies of the land” may be courteously addressed without the formalities of an introduction, and why not the same rule in your country? Therefore, without the semblance of an apology, I request you will do me the honor to grant a small favor. I am engaged in collecting souvenirs from celebrated writers, and you being the wife of England’s Poet Laureate, I would prize beyond measure a contribution from you: a scrap of silk or velvet from one of your dresses, and also a scrap of one of your husband’s neckties.... There is no one who loves his works as myself ... he reaches further down into the human heart and touches its tender cords (sic) as no man has since the days of Shakespeare.... My husband, who has won an enviable reputation as a writer hopes soon to produce his work on The Lives of English and American Poets. Hoping you will not refuse me, etc. etc.

A few miscellaneous oddities follow.

(1883)

Dear Sir — May I ask you as a favour where I could find a “wold,” to illustrate the following verse:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

And on these dews that drench the furze,

And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold:

(“In Memoriam,” XI.)

which is the subject given this year for a painting (for the Gold Medal), to the Students of the Royal Academy of Arts?

(1840)

A young girl, writing from America, asks a natural question.

We have your book of poems, and I have read “Enoch Arden.” So I thought I would write and see if it is true. Was there a girl whose name was Anna Lee, and two boys named Enoch Arden and Philip Ray?

I felt very sorry for Philip at first and afterward for Enoch, when he came home and found his wife had married Philip and he saw her children grown up, but could not go to see them....

I have a pet rooster, and it is very cunning. I hold it and pet it and I love it lots.

Well, I must close, hoping to hear from you soon, for I want to know if the story of Enoch is true.

(1891)

U.S.A. again supplies the following naïveté:

Dear Sir — I intrude a line on your notice, to ask a little favor.

I am in my fourteenth year; am considered fairly advanced for my age, by older heads. I wish your opinion of the best line of books for me to read at leisure hours, aside from novels or fiction. I attend the high school, and on Saturdays, clerk in the store, of which my father is senior partner.

P.S. — You will find five cents for return postage.

2nd P.S. — My mother says you are not living, but I say to her, I believe she is mistaken; in other words, I am glad one time to differ with her.

(1888)

My dear Lord Tennyson — I once met you....

You will think it strange indeed, my Lord, when I assure you that I am often supposed to be your noble self, once in Scarborough, often in Town at the great exhibitions and elsewhere. I wear a large Tyrolese felt hat.

There is to be a grand summer party here, my Lord, gentlemen to appear in character, I having been requested to appear as “Lord Tennyson.”

Could your Lordship kindly lend me any outer clothing, by Thursday morning at latest? a cloak, etc.? Then I should feel so thankful and fulfil the character better.

America characteristically supplies the following:

Permit me to call your special attention to a pamphlet I mail you herewith, of an address to the New Shakespere Society, containing the announcement of a momentous discovery which I have made in the “Shakespeare” plays.

My unveiling therein of the allegory of Cymbeline is but a sample of what I have similarly discerned in the other dramas, and in which I find the same conclusions consistently to be reached.

The fair writer’s answers to objections and discourse on her discovery unhappily throw no light upon the subject. She proceeds:

I would add that it is singular to myself there should be so strong a prejudice against the acceptance of Bacon’s authorship of these dramas, investing them, as it does, with such additional interest both of a historical and an autobiographical kind, in the light of his concealment of it.

The value of truth, and the interests of literature, constitute my apology for this intrusion upon your valuable time.

[The acceptance of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s dramas and the attack on Shakespeare’s character made my father register his opinion thus:

Not only with no sense of shame

On common sense you tread,

Not only ride your hobby lame,

But make him kick the dead. Ed.]

(1882)

Right Honorable Sir — The editor of a Bohemian literary journal takes the liberty of applying, in a very delicate matter, to you the most renowned poet of the first literature in the world. Yet this liberty I draw from having a great belief in the generous character of the English nation.

What I do venture to impress on your mind is this, that a poem of yours written on, and dedicated to the poor descendants of Bohemia’s happier ancestors, would as a mighty missionary go the round all over their fair country evoking everywhere loud echoes out of the graves of their heroes!

(1892)

The following is a letter from an hysterical Irishman:

Eminent Sir — I send you the inside poem to show you what the American people think of your lives of tyranny, and may the day come when your infernal land may be torn to a million pieces. Curse you for your highway robbery of Ireland, and then holding her down in such misery, and also for your cowardly war with Napoleon. You could fight him alone, could you? I wish that every Englishman was in the hottest place of hell — their bones made into gridirons to roast their hearts on. * * *

(1888-1892)

A French chemist, hearing that “Monsieur” suffers from gout, has a certain secret cure. If he could, he would come over to England, “et ... je vous guérirais complètement.”

He is assured that this remedy will rapidly make him rich. But it should be known beyond France.

On m’a dit que je pouvais trouver quelques-uns à l’étranger qui sauraient l’apprécier et le faire valoir que cela vaut une petite fortune pour moi; ne serai-je que pour l’humanité, je me tacherai de la vendre.

Je vous le répète, Monsieur, c’est bien regrettable que je ne sois pas plus près de chez vous, car je vous soulagerois et, Monsieur, on peut se renseigner sur moi; je ne suis pas riche mais honnête et d’une bonne famille, et en faisant mon chimisterie je m’occupe un peu d’antiquités.

Two of the latest letters amused my father much, one from Canada from a little boy who said that his mother liked cheeses, and he would like Tennyson to send him money to buy a good cheese: the other from an English artist who said that his speciality was drawing cows, but that he must have a cow of his own to live with and make proper studies of, would therefore Tennyson give him a cow?

APPENDIX D

TENNYSON’S ARTHURIAN POEM By Sir James Knowles, K.C.V.O.

[This letter was written after a talk with my father, and no doubt Sir James Knowles has caught much of the meaning of “The Idylls of the King.” About this poem my father said to me, “My meaning was spiritual. I only took the legendary stories of the Round Table as illustrations. Arthur was allegorical to me. I intended him to represent the Ideal in the Soul of Man coming in contact with the warring elements of the flesh.” — Ed.]

The fine and wholesome moral breeze which always seems to blow about the higher realms of Art comes to us fresh as ever from this great poem, and more acceptably than ever just now. A constant worship of Purity, and a constant reprobation of Impurity as the rock on which the noble projects of the “blameless king” are wrecked, appear throughout upon the surface of the story.

But besides this, there doubtless does run through it all a sort of under-tone of symbolism, which, while it never interferes with the clear melody of the poem, or perverts it into that most tedious of riddles, a formal allegory, gives a profound harmony to its music and a prophetic strain to its intention most worthy of a great spiritual Bard.

King Arthur, as he has always been treated by Tennyson, stands obviously for no mere individual prince or hero, but for the “King within us” — our highest nature, by whatsoever name it may be called — conscience; spirit; the moral soul; the religious sense; the noble resolve. His story and adventures become the story of the battle and pre-eminence of the soul and of the perpetual warfare between the spirit and the flesh.

For so exalting him there is abundant warrant in the language of many old compilers, by whom “all human perfection was collected in Arthur”; as where, for instance, one says,—”The old world knows not his peer, nor will the future show us his equal, — he alone towers over all other kings, better than the past ones, and greater than those that are to be”; or another, “In short, God has not made, since Adam was, the man more perfect than Arthur.”

How and why Arthur ever grew to so ideal a height we need not now inquire, it is sufficient here to note the fact, and that Tennyson is archæologically justified thereby in making him the type of the soul on earth, from its mysterious coming to its mysterious and deathless going.

In the “Idylls of the King,” the soul comes first before us as a conqueror in a waste and desert land groaning under mere brute power. Its history before then is dark with doubt and mystery, and the questions about its origin and authority form the main subject of the introductory poem.

Many, themselves the basest, hold it to be base-born, and rage against its rule:

And since his ways are sweet,

And theirs are bestial, hold him less than man;

And there be those who deem him more than man,

And dream he dropt from heaven.

Of those who recognize its claim, some, as the hoary chamberlain, accept it on the word of wizards who have written all about it in a sacred book which, doubtless, some day will become intelligible. Others, as Ulfius, and Brastias, standing for commonplace men with commonplace views, are satisfied to think the soul comes as the body does, or not to think at all about it. Others, again, as Bedivere, with warmer hearts, feel there is mystery, where to the careless all is plain, yet seek among the dark ways of excessive natural passion for the key, and drift towards the scandalous accordingly. Then comes the simple touching tenderness of the woman’s discovery of conscience and its influence given by Queen Bellicent in the story of her childhood; and this, again, is supplemented and contrasted by the doctrine of the wise men and philosophers put into Merlin’s mouth. His “riddling triplets” anger the woman, but are a wonderful summary of the way, part-earnest, part-ironical, and all-pathetic, in which great wit confronts the problem of the soul.

The inscrutableness of its origin being thus signified, we see next the recognition of its supremacy, and its first act of kinghood, — the inspiration of the best and bravest near it with a common enthusiasm for Right. The founding of the Order of the Round Table coincides with the solemn crowning of the soul. Conscience, acknowledged and throned as king, binds at once all the best of human powers together into one brotherhood, and that brotherhood to itself by vows so strait and high,

That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some

Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,

Some flush’d, and others dazed, as one who wakes

Half-blinded at the coming of a light.

At that supreme coronation-moment, the Spirit is surrounded and cheered on by all the powers and influences which can ever help it — earthly servants and allies and heavenly powers and tokens — the knights, to signify the strength of the body; Merlin, to signify the strength of intellect; the Lady of the Lake, who stands for the Church, and gives the soul its sharpest and most splendid earthly weapon; and, above all, three fair and mystic Queens, “tall, with bright sweet faces,” robed in the living colours sacred to love and faith and hope, which flow upon them from the image of our Lord above. These, surely, stand for those immortal virtues which only will abide “when all that seems shall suffer shock,” and leaning upon which alone, the soul, when all else falls from it, shall go towards the golden gates of the new and brighter morning.

As the first and introductory idyll thus seems to indicate the coming and the recognition of the soul, so the ensuing idylls of the “Round Table” show how its influence fares — waxes or wanes — in the great battle of life. Through all of these we see the body and its passions gain continually greater sway, till in the end the Spirit’s earthly work is thwarted and defeated by the flesh. Its immortality alone remains to it, and, with this, a deathless hope.

From the story of “Geraint and Enid,” where the first gust of poisoning passion bows for a time with base suspicion, yet passes, and leaves pure a great and simple heart, we are led through “Merlin and Vivien,” where, early in the storm, we see great wit and genius succumb, — and through “Lancelot and Elaine,” where the piteous early death of innocence and hope results from it, — to “The Holy Grail,” where we find religion itself under the stress of it, and despite the earnest efforts of the soul, blown into mere fantastic shapes of superstition. It would be difficult to find a nobler and manlier apology for pure and sane and practical religion, fit for mighty men, than the verdict of the King at the end of this wonderful poem.

In “Pelleas and Ettarre” the storm of corruption culminates, whirling the sweet waters of young love and faith (the very life-spring of the world) out from their proper channels, sweeping them into mist, and casting them in hail upon the land. A scarcely-concealed harlot here rides splendid to the Court, and is crowned Queen of Beauty in the lists; the lust of the flesh is all but paramount. Then comes in “Guinevere” the final lightning stroke, and all the fabric of the earthly life falls smitten into dust, leaving to the soul a broken heart for company, and a conviction that if in this world only it had hope, it were of all things most miserable.

Thus ends the “Round Table,” and the story of the life-long labour of the soul....

There remains but the passing of the soul “from the great deep to the great deep,” and this is the subject of the closing idyll. Here the “last dim, weird battle,” fought out in densest mist, stands for a picture of all human death, and paints its awfulness and confusion. The soul alone, enduring beyond the end wherein all else is swallowed up, sees the mist clear at last, and finds those three crowned virtues, “abiding” true and fast, and waiting to convey it to its rest. Character, upheld and formed by these, is the immortal outcome of mortal life. They wail with it awhile in sympathy for the failure of its earthly plans; but at the very last of all are heard to change their sorrow into songs of joy, and departing, “vanish into light.”

Such or such like seems to be the high significance and under-meaning of this noble poem, — a meaning worthy of the exquisite expression which conveys it and of the wealth of beauty and imagery which enfolds it.

But nothing is more remarkable than the way in which so much symbolic truth is given without the slightest forcing of the current of the narrative itself. Indeed, so subtle are the touches, and so consummately refined the art employed, that quite possibly many readers may hold there is no parable at all intended. It is most interesting, for instance, to note the thread of realism which is preserved throughout, and which, whether intentionally or not, serves the double purpose of entirely screening any such symbolic under-meaning from all who do not care to seek it, and also of accounting naturally for all the supernatural adventures and beliefs recorded in the story itself.

Thus, in “The Holy Grail,” the various apparitions of the mystic vessel are explicable by passing meteors or sudden lightning flashes seen in a season of great tempests and thunderstorms — first acting on the hysterical exaltation of an enthusiastic nun, and then, by contagion from her faith, upon the imaginations of a few kindred natures.

Again, in the “Coming of Arthur,” the marvellous story of his birth, as told by Bleys, might simply have been founded on a shipwreck when the sea was phosphorescent, and when all hands suddenly perished, save one infant who was washed ashore.

Or, again, in the same poem, the three mystic Queens at the Coronation — who become, in one sense, so all-important in their meaning — derive their import in the eyes of Bellicent simply from the accident of coloured beams of light falling upon them from a stained-glass window.

May I, in conclusion say how happily characteristic of their English author, and their English theme, seems to me the manner in which these “Idylls of the King” have become a complete poem? It brings to mind the method of our old cathedral-builders. Round some early shrine, too precious to be moved, were gathered bit by bit a nave and aisles, then rich side chapels, then the great image-crowded portals, then a more noble chancel, then, perhaps, the towers, all in fulfilment of some general plan made long ago, but each produced and added as occasion urged or natural opportunity arose. As such buildings always seem rather to have grown than been constructed, and have the wealth of interest, and beauty, and variety which makes Canterbury Cathedral, for instance, far more poetical than St. Paul’s — so with these “Idylls.” Bit by bit the poem and its sacred purport have grown continually more and more connected and impressive. Had Tennyson sat down in early youth to write the symbolic epic of King Arthur which he then projected, his “Morte d’Arthur” is enough to show how fine a work might have resulted. But, for once, at any rate, the interposing critics did art good service, for they deferred till the experience of life had given him, as it were, many lives, a poem which could not have been produced without wide acquaintanceship with the world and human nature. We should never otherwise have had the parable “full of voices” which we now fortunately possess.

THE END

ALFRED TENNYSON by Andrew Lang

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I — BOYHOOD — CAMBRIDGE — EARLY POEMS.

CHAPTER II. — POEMS OF 1831-1833.

CHAPTER III. — 1837-1842.

CHAPTER IV. — 1842-848 — THE PRINCESS.

CHAPTER V. — IN MEMORIAM.

CHAPTER VI. — AFTER IN MEMORIAM.

CHAPTER VII. — THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

CHAPTER VIII. — ENOCH ARDEN. THE DRAMAS.

CHAPTER IX. — LAST YEARS.

CHAPTER X. — 1890.

CHAPTER XI. — LAST CHAPTER.

INTRODUCTION

In writing this brief sketch of the Life of Tennyson, and this attempt to appreciate his work, I have rested almost entirely on the Biography by Lord Tennyson (with his kind permission) and on the text of the Poems. As to the Life, doubtless current anecdotes, not given in the Biography, are known to me, and to most people. But as they must also be familiar to the author of the Biography, I have not thought it desirable to include what he rejected. The works of the “localisers” I have not read: Tennyson disliked these researches, as a rule, and they appear to be unessential, and often hazardous. The professed commentators I have not consulted. It appeared better to give one’s own impressions of the Poems, unaffected by the impressions of others, except in one or two cases where matters of fact rather than of taste seemed to be in question. Thus on two or three points I have ventured to differ from a distinguished living critic, and have given the reasons for my dissent. Professor Bradley’s Commentary on In Memoriam  came out after this sketch was in print. Many of the comments cited by Mr Bradley from his predecessors appear to justify my neglect of these curious inquirers. The “difficulties” which they raise are not likely, as a rule, to present themselves to persons who read poetry “for human pleasure.”

I have not often dwelt on parallels to be found in the works of earlier poets. In many cases Tennyson deliberately reproduced passages from Greek, Latin, and old Italian writers, just as Virgil did in the case of Homer, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and others. There are, doubtless, instances in which a phrase is unconsciously reproduced by automatic memory, from an English poet. But I am less inclined than Mr Bradley to think that unconscious reminiscence is more common in Tennyson than in the poets generally. I have not closely examined Keats and Shelley, for example, to see how far they were influenced by unconscious memory. But Scott, confessedly, was apt to reproduce the phrases of others, and once unwittingly borrowed from a poem by the valet of one of his friends! I believe that many of the alleged borrowings in Tennyson are either no true parallels at all or are the unavoidable coincidences of expression which must inevitably occur. The poet himself stated, in a lively phrase, his opinion of the hunters after parallels, and I confess that I am much of his mind. They often remind me of Mr Punch’s parody on an unfriendly review of Alexander Smith -

“Most WOMEN have NO CHARACTER at all.” — POPE.

“No CHARACTER that servant WOMAN asked.” — SMITH.

I have to thank Mr Edmund Gosse and Mr Vernon Rendall for their kindness in reading my proof-sheets. They have saved me from some errors, but I may have occasionally retained matter which, for one reason or another, did not recommend itself to them. In no case are they responsible for the opinions expressed, or for the critical estimates. They are those of a Tennysonian, and, no doubt, would be other than they are if the writer were younger than he is. It does not follow that they would necessarily be more correct, though probably they would be more in vogue. The point of view must shift with each generation of readers, as ideas or beliefs go in or out of fashion, are accepted, rejected, or rehabilitated. To one age Tennyson may seem weakly superstitious; to another needlessly sceptical. After all, what he must live by is, not his opinions, but his poetry. The poetry of Milton survives his ideas; whatever may be the fate of the ideas of Tennyson his poetry must endure.

CHAPTER I — BOYHOOD — CAMBRIDGE — EARLY POEMS.

The life and work of Tennyson present something like the normal type of what, in circumstances as fortunate as mortals may expect, the life and work of a modern poet ought to be. A modern poet, one says, because even poetry is now affected by the division of labour. We do not look to the poet for a large share in the practical activities of existence: we do not expect him, like AEschylus and Sophocles, Theognis and Alcaeus, to take a conspicuous part in politics and war; or even, as in the Age of Anne, to shine among wits and in society. Life has become, perhaps, too specialised for such multifarious activities. Indeed, even in ancient days, as a Celtic proverb and as the picture of life in the Homeric epics prove, the poet was already a man apart — not foremost among statesmen and rather backward among warriors. If we agree with a not unpopular opinion, the poet ought to be a kind of “Titanic” force, wrecking himself on his own passions and on the nature of things, as did Byron, Burns, Marlowe, and Musset. But Tennyson’s career followed lines really more normal, the lines of the life of Wordsworth, wisdom and self-control directing the course of a long, sane, sound, and fortunate existence. The great physical strength which is commonly the basis of great mental vigour was not ruined in Tennyson by poverty and passion, as in the case of Burns, nor in forced literary labour, as in those of Scott and Dickens. For long he was poor, like Wordsworth and Southey, but never destitute. He made his early effort: he had his time of great sorrow, and trial, and apparent failure. With practical wisdom he conquered circumstances; he became eminent; he outlived reaction against his genius; he died in the fulness of a happy age and of renown. This full-orbed life, with not a few years of sorrow and stress, is what Nature seems to intend for the career of a divine minstrel. If Tennyson missed the “one crowded hour of glorious life,” he had not to be content in “an age without a name.”

It was not Tennyson’s lot to illustrate any modern theory of the origin of genius. Born in 1809 of a Lincolnshire family, long connected with the soil but inconspicuous in history, Tennyson had nothing Celtic in his blood, as far as pedigrees prove. This is unfortunate for one school of theorists. His mother (genius is presumed to be derived from mothers) had a genius merely for moral excellence and for religion. She is described in the poem of Isabel, and was “a remarkable and saintly woman.” In the male line, the family was not (as the families of genius ought to be) brief of life and unhealthy. “The Tennysons never die,” said the sister who was betrothed to Arthur Hallam. The father, a clergyman, was, says his grandson, “a man of great ability,” and his “excellent library” was an element in the education of his family. “My father was a poet,” Tennyson said, “and could write regular verse very skilfully.” In physical type the sons were tall, strong, and unusually dark: Tennyson, when abroad, was not taken for an Englishman; at home, strangers thought him “foreign.” Most of the children had the temperament, and several of the sons had some of the accomplishments, of genius: whence derived by way of heredity is a question beyond conjecture, for the father’s accomplishment was not unusual. As Walton says of the poet and the angler, they “were born to be so”: we know no more.

The region in which the paternal hamlet of Somersby lies, “a land of quiet villages, large fields, grey hillsides, and noble tall-towered churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold,” does not appear to have been rich in romantic legend and tradition. The folk-lore of Lincolnshire, of which examples have been published, does seem to have a peculiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humorous than the poetical aspect of the country-people that Tennyson appears to have known. In brief, we have nothing to inform us as to how genius came into that generation of Tennysons which was born between 1807 and 1819. A source and a cause there must have been, but these things are hidden, except from popular science.

Precocity is not a sign of genius, but genius is perhaps always accompanied by precocity. This is especially notable in the cases of painting, music, and mathematics; but in the matter of literature genius may chiefly show itself in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott, who when a boy knew much, but did little that would attract notice. As a child and a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition and performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood varied somewhat in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of eight he covered a slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie Thomson, the only poet with whom he was then acquainted. In another passage he says, “The first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was eight I remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was this -

‘With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood’ -

great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine!”

It WAS fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. Scott, Campbell, and Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this nonsense verse. “Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, ‘I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind,’ and the words ‘far, far away’ had always a strange charm for me.” A late lyric has this overword, FAR, FAR AWAY!

A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets was more or less precocious. Tennyson also knew Pope, and wrote hundreds of lines in Pope’s measure. At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott’s manner, of some six thousand lines. He “never felt himself more truly inspired,” for the sense of “inspiration” (as the late Mr Myers has argued in an essay on the “Mechanism of Genius”) has little to do with the actual value of the product. At fourteen Tennyson wrote a drama in blank verse. A chorus from this play (as one guesses), a piece from “an unpublished drama written very early,” is published in the volume of 1830:-

“The varied earth, the moving heaven,

The rapid waste of roving sea,

The fountain-pregnant mountains riven

To shapes of wildest anarchy,

By secret fire and midnight storms

That wander round their windy cones.”

These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical transcript, “the varied earth,” daedala tellus. There is the geological interest in the forces that shape the hills. There is the use of the favourite word “windy,” and later in the piece -

“The troublous autumn’s SALLOW gloom.”

The young poet from boyhood was original in his manner.

Byron made him blase at fourteen. Then Byron died, and Tennyson scratched on a rock “Byron is dead,” on “a day when the whole world seemed darkened for me.” Later he considered Byron’s poetry “too much akin to rhetoric.” “Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is endlessly clever, and is now unduly depreciated.” He “did give the world another heart and new pulses, and so we are kept going.” But “he was dominated by Byron till he was seventeen, when he put him away altogether.”

In his boyhood, despite the sufferings which he endured for a while at school at Louth; despite bullying from big boys and masters, Tennyson would “shout his verses to the skies.” “Well, Arthur, I mean to be famous,” he used to say to one of his brothers. He observed nature very closely by the brook and the thundering sea- shores: he was never a sportsman, and his angling was in the manner of the lover of The Miller’s Daughter. He was seventeen (1826) when Poems by Two Brothers (himself and his brother Frederick) was published with the date 1827. These poems contain, as far as I have been able to discover, nothing really Tennysonian. What he had done in his own manner was omitted, “being thought too much out of the common for the public taste.” The young poet had already saving common-sense, and understood the public. Fragments of the true gold are found in the volume of 1830, others are preserved in the Biography. The ballad suggested by The Bride of Lammermoor was not unworthy of Beddoes, and that novel, one cannot but think, suggested the opening situation in Maud, where the hero is a modern Master of Ravenswood in his relation to the rich interloping family and the beautiful daughter. To this point we shall return. It does not appear that Tennyson was conscious in Maud of the suggestion from Scott, and the coincidence may be merely accidental.

The Lover’s Tale, published in 1879, was mainly a work of the poet’s nineteenth year. A few copies had been printed for friends. One of these, with errors of the press, and without the intended alterations, was pirated by an unhappy man in 1875. In old age Tennyson brought out the work of his boyhood. “It was written before I had ever seen Shelley, though it is called Shelleyan,” he said; and indeed he believed that his work had never been imitative, after his earliest efforts in the manner of Thomson and of Scott. The only things in The Lover’s Tale which would suggest that the poet here followed Shelley are the Italian scene of the story, the character of the versification, and the extraordinary luxuriance and exuberance of the imagery.  As early as 1868 Tennyson heard that written copies of The Lover’s Tale were in circulation. He then remarked, as to the exuberance of the piece: “Allowance must be made for abundance of youth. It is rich and full, but there are mistakes in it. . . . The poem is the breath of young love.”

How truly Tennysonian the manner is may be understood even from the opening lines, full of the original cadences which were to become so familiar:-

“Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff,

Filling with purple gloom the vacancies

Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas

Hung in mid-heaven, and half way down rare sails,

White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky.”

The narrative in parts one and two (which alone were written in youth) is so choked with images and descriptions as to be almost obscure. It is the story, practically, of a love like that of Paul and Virginia, but the love is not returned by the girl, who prefers the friend of the narrator. Like the hero of Maud, the speaker has a period of madness and illusion; while the third part, “The Golden Supper” — suggested by a story of Boccaccio, and written in maturity — is put in the mouth of another narrator, and is in a different style. The discarded lover, visiting the vault which contains the body of his lady, finds her alive, and restores her to her husband. The whole finished legend is necessarily not among the author’s masterpieces. But perhaps not even Keats in his earliest work displayed more of promise, and gave more assurance of genius. Here and there come turns and phrases, “all the charm of all the Muses,” which remind a reader of things later well known in pieces more mature. Such lines are -

”Strange to me and sweet,

Sweet through strange years,”

and -

“Like to a low-hung and a fiery sky

Hung round with RAGGED RIMS and burning folds.”

And -

“Like sounds without the twilight realm of dreams,

Which wander round the bases of the hills.”

We also note close observation of nature in the curious phrase -

“Cries of the partridge like a rusty key

Turned in a lock.”

Of this kind was Tennyson’s adolescent vein, when he left

”The poplars four

That stood beside his father’s door,”

the Somersby brook, and the mills and granges, the seas of the Lincolnshire coast, and the hills and dales among the wolds, for Cambridge. He was well read in old and contemporary English literature, and in the classics. Already he was acquainted with the singular trance-like condition to which his poems occasionally allude, a subject for comment later. He matriculated at Trinity, with his brother Charles, on February 20, 1828, and had an interview of a not quite friendly sort with a proctor before he wore the gown.

That Tennyson should go to Cambridge, not to Oxford, was part of the nature of things, by which Cambridge educates the majority of English poets, whereas Oxford has only “turned out” a few — like Shelley. At that time, as in Macaulay’s day, the path of university honours at Cambridge lay through Mathematics, and, except for his prize poem in 1829, Tennyson took no honours at all. His classical reading was pursued as literature, not as a course of grammar and philology. No English poet, at least since Milton, had been better read in the classics; but Tennyson’s studies did not aim at the gaining of academic distinction. His aspect was such that Thompson, later Master of Trinity, on first seeing him come into hall, said, “That man must be a poet.” Like Byron, Shelley, and probably Coleridge, Tennyson looked the poet that he was: “Six feet high, broad-chested, strong-limbed, his face Shakespearian and with deep eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with dark wavy hair, his head finely poised.”

Not much is recorded of Tennyson as an undergraduate. In our days efforts would have been made to enlist so promising a recruit in one of the college boats; but rowing was in its infancy. It is a peculiarity of the universities that little flocks of men of unusual ability come up at intervals together, breaking the monotony of idlers, prize scholars, and honours men. Such a group appeared at Balliol in Matthew Arnold’s time, and rather later, at various colleges, in the dawn of Pre-Raphaelitism. The Tennysons — Alfred, Frederick, and Charles — were members of such a set. There was Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, from Eton; there was Spedding, the editor and biographer of Bacon; Milnes (Lord Houghton), Blakesley (Dean of Lincoln), Thompson, Merivale, Trench (a poet, and later, Archbishop of Dublin), Brookfield, Buller, and, after Tennyson the greatest, Thackeray, a contemporary if not an “Apostle.” Charles Buller’s, like Hallam’s, was to be an “unfulfilled renown.” Of Hallam, whose name is for ever linked with his own, Tennyson said that he would have been a great man, but not a great poet; “he was as near perfection as mortal man could be.” His scanty remains are chiefly notable for his divination of Tennyson as a great poet; for the rest, we can only trust the author of In Memoriam and the verdict of tradition.

The studies of the poet at this time included original composition in Greek and Latin verse, history, and a theme that he alone has made poetical, natural science. All poetry has its roots in the age before natural science was more than a series of nature-myths. The poets have usually, like Keats, regretted the days when

“There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,”

when the hills and streams were not yet “dispeopled of their dreams.” Tennyson, on the other hand, was already finding material for poetry in the world as seen through microscope and telescope, and as developed through “aeonian” processes of evolution. In a notebook, mixed with Greek, is a poem on the Moon — not the moon of Selene, “the orbed Maiden,” but of astronomical science. In Memoriam recalls the conversations on labour and politics, discussions of the age of the Reform Bill, of rick-burning (expected to “make taters cheaper”), and of Catholic emancipation; also the emancipation of such negroes as had not yet tasted the blessings of freedom. In politics Tennyson was what he remained, a patriot, a friend of freedom, a foe of disorder. His politics, he said, were those “of Shakespeare, Bacon, and every sane man.” He was one of the Society of Apostles, and characteristically contributed an essay on Ghosts. Only the preface survives: it is not written in a scientific style; but bids us “not assume that any vision IS baseless.” Perhaps the author went on to discuss “veridical hallucinations,” but his ideas about these things must be considered later.

It was by his father’s wish that Tennyson competed for the English prize poem. The theme, Timbuctoo, was not inspiring. Thackeray wrote a good parody of the ordinary prize poem in Pope’s metre:-

“I see her sons the hill of glory mount,

And sell their sugars on their own account;

Prone to her feet the prostrate nations come,

Sue for her rice and barter for her rum.”

Tennyson’s work was not much more serious: he merely patched up an old piece, in blank verse, on the battle of Armageddon. The poem is not destitute of Tennysonian cadence, and ends, not inappropriately, with “All was night.” Indeed, all WAS night.

An ingenious myth accounts for Tennyson’s success: At Oxford, says Charles Wordsworth, the author was more likely to have been rusticated than rewarded. But already (1829) Arthur Hallam told Mr Gladstone that Tennyson “promised fair to be the greatest poet of our generation, perhaps of our century.”

In 1830 Tennyson published the first volume of which he was sole author. Browning’s Pauline was of the year 1833. It was the very dead hours of the Muses. The great Mr Murray had ceased, as one despairing of song, to publish poetry. Bulwer Lytton, in the preface to Paul Clifford (1830), announced that poetry, with every other form of literature except the Novel, was unremunerative and unread. Coleridge and Scott were silent: indeed Sir Walter was near his death; Wordsworth had shot his bolt, though an arrow or two were left in the quiver. Keats, Shelley, and Byron were dead; Milman’s brief vogue was departing. It seemed as if novels alone could appeal to readers, so great a change in taste had been wrought by the sixteen years of Waverley romances. The slim volume of Tennyson was naturally neglected, though Leigh Hunt reviewed it in the Tatler. Hallam’s comments in the Englishman’s Magazine, though enthusiastic (as was right and natural), were judicious. “The author imitates no one.” Coleridge did not read all the book, but noted “things of a good deal of beauty. The misfortune is that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is.” As Tennyson said in 1890, “So I, an old man, who get a poem or poems every day, might cast a casual glance at a book, and seeing something which I could not scan or understand, might possibly decide against the book without further consideration.” As a rule, the said books are worthless. The number of versifiers makes it hard, indeed, for the poet to win recognition. One little new book of rhyme is so like another, and almost all are of so little interest!

The rare book that differs from the rest has a bizarrerie with its originality, and in the poems of 1830 there was, assuredly, more than enough of the bizarre. There were no hyphens in the double epithets, and words like “tendriltwine” seemed provokingly affected. A kind of lusciousness, like that of Keats when under the influence of Leigh Hunt, may here and there be observed. Such faults as these catch the indifferent eye when a new book is first opened, and the volume of 1830 was probably condemned by almost every reader of the previous generation who deigned to afford it a glance. Out of fifty-six pieces only twenty-three were reprinted in the two volumes of 1842, which won for Tennyson the general recognition of the world of letters. Five or six of the pieces then left out were added as Juvenilia in the collected works of 1871, 1872. The whole mass deserves the attention of students of the poet’s development.

This early volume may be said to contain, in the germ, all the great original qualities of Tennyson, except the humour of his rural studies and the elaboration of his Idylls. For example, in Mariana we first note what may be called his perfection and accomplishment. The very few alterations made later are verbal. The moated grange of Mariana in Measure for Measure, and her mood of desertion and despair, are elaborated by a precision of truth and with a perfection of harmony worthy of Shakespeare himself, and minutely studied from the natural scenes in which the poet was born. If these verses alone survived out of the wreck of Victorian literature, they would demonstrate the greatness of the author as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. Isabel (a study of the poet’s mother) is almost as remarkable in its stately dignity; while Recollections of the Arabian Nights attest the power of refined luxury in romantic description, and herald the unmatched beauty of The Lotos-Eaters. The Poet, again, is a picture of that which Tennyson himself was to fulfil; and Oriana is a revival of romance, and of the ballad, not limited to the ballad form as in its prototype, Helen of Kirkconnell. Curious and exquisite experiment in metre is indicated in the Leonine Elegiacs, in Claribel, and several other poems. Qualities which were not for long to find public expression, speculative powers brooding, in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble questions, were attested by The Mystic, and Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself, an unlucky title of a remarkable performance. “In this, the most agitated of all his poems, we find the soul urging onward

‘Thro’ utter dark a full-sail’d skiff,

Unpiloted i’ the echoing dance

Of reboant whirlwinds;’

and to the question, ‘Why not believe, then?’ we have as answer a simile of the sea, which cannot slumber like a mountain tarn, or

‘Draw down into his vexed pools

All that blue heaven which hues and paves’

the tranquil inland mere.”

The poet longs for the faith of his infant days and of his mother -

“Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew

The beauty and repose of faith,

And the clear spirit shining thro’.”

That faith is already shaken, and the long struggle for belief has already begun.

Tennyson, according to Matthew Arnold, was not un esprit puissant. Other and younger critics, who have attained to a cock-certain mood of negation, are apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not finally agree with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a weakling or a hypocrite because, after trying all things, he is not an atheist or a materialist, then the reproach of insincerity or of feebleness of mind must rest upon Tennyson. But it is manifest that, almost in boyhood, he had already faced the ideas which, to one of his character, almost meant despair: he had not kept his eyes closed. To his extremely self-satisfied accusers we might answer, in lines from this earliest volume (The Mystic):-

“Ye scorn him with an undiscerning scorn;

Ye cannot read the marvel in his eye,

The still serene abstraction.”

He would behold

“One shadow in the midst of a great light,

One reflex from eternity on time,

One mighty countenance of perfect calm,

Awful with most invariable eyes.”

His mystic of these boyish years -

”Often lying broad awake, and yet

Remaining from the body, and apart

In intellect and power and will, hath heard

Time flowing in the middle of the night,

And all things creeping to a day of doom.”

In this poem, never republished by the author, is an attempt to express an experience which in later years he more than once endeavoured to set forth in articulate speech, an experience which was destined to colour his finial speculations on ultimate problems of God and of the soul. We shall later have to discuss the opinion of an eminent critic, Mr Frederic Harrison, that Tennyson’s ideas, theological, evolutionary, and generally speculative, “followed, rather than created, the current ideas of his time.” “The train of thought” (in In Memoriam), writes Mr Harrison, “is essentially that with which ordinary English readers had been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr Martineau, Ecce Homo, Hypatia.” Of these influences only Maurice, and Maurice only orally, could have reached the author of The Mystic and the Supposed Confessions. Ecce Homo, Hypatia, Mr Jowett, were all in the bosom of the future when In Memoriam was written. Now, The Mystic and the Supposed Confessions are prior to In Memoriam, earlier than 1830. Yet they already contain the chief speculative tendencies of In Memoriam; the growing doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then familiar to Tennyson, though not to “ordinary English readers”), the longing for a return to childlike faith, and the mystical experiences which helped Tennyson to recover a faith that abode with him. In these things he was original. Even as an undergraduate he was not following “a train of thought made familiar” by authors who had not yet written a line, and by books which had not yet been published.

So much, then, of the poet that was to be and of the philosopher existed in the little volume of the undergraduate. In The Mystic we notice a phrase, two words long, which was later to be made familiar, “Daughters of time, divinely tall,” reproduced in the picture of Helen:-

“A daughter of the Gods, divinely tall,

And most divinely fair.”

The reflective pieces are certainly of more interest now (though they seem to have satisfied the poet less) than the gallery of airy fairy Lilians, Adelines, Rosalinds, and Eleanores:-

“Daughters of dreams and of stories,”

like

“Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,

Felise, and Yolande, and Juliette.”

Cambridge, which he was soon to leave, did not satisfy the poet. Oxford did not satisfy Gibbon, or later, Shelley; and young men of genius are not, in fact, usually content with universities which, perhaps, are doing their best, but are neither governed nor populated by minds of the highest and most original class.

”You that do profess to teach

And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.”

The universities, in fact, teach a good deal of that which can be learned, but the best things cannot be taught. The universities give men leisure, books, and companionship, to learn for themselves. All tutors cannot be, and at that time few dreamed of being, men like Jowett and T. H. Green, Gamaliels at whose feet undergraduates sat with enthusiasm, “did EAGERLY frequent,” like Omar Khayyam. In later years Tennyson found closer relations between dons and undergraduates, and recorded his affection for his university. She had supplied him with such companionship as is rare, and permitted him to “catch the blossom of the flying terms,” even if tutors and lecturers were creatures of routine, terriblement enfonces dans la matiere, like the sire of Madelon and Cathos, that honourable citizen.

Tennyson just missed, by going down, a visit of Wordsworth to Cambridge. The old enthusiast of revolution was justifying passive obedience: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the Pyrenees. The purpose was political — to aid some Spanish rebels. The fruit is seen in OEnone and Mariana in the South.

In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father. “He slept in the dead man’s bed, earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came.” “You see,” he said, “ghosts do not generally come to imaginative people;” a remark very true, though ghosts are attributed to “imagination.” Whatever causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of phantasia which is consciously exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far too many ghosts to believe in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe and Shelley, who met themselves, what poet ever did “see a ghost”? One who saw Tennyson as he wandered alone at this period called him “a mysterious being, seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of intercourse with the spirit world not granted to others.” But it was the world of the poet, not of the “medium.”

The Tennysons stayed on at the parsonage for six years. But, anticipating their removal, Arthur Hallam in 1831 dealt in prophecy about the identification in the district of places in his friend’s poems—”critic after critic will trace the wanderings of the brook,” as, — in fact, critic after critic has done. Tennyson disliked — these “localisers.” The poet’s walks were shared by Arthur Hallam, then affianced to his sister Emily.

CHAPTER II. — POEMS OF 1831-1833.

By 1832 most of the poems of Tennyson’s second volume were circulating in MS. among his friends, and no poet ever had friends more encouraging. Perhaps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness among their acquaintance for effusions in manuscript, or in proof- sheets. The charmed volume appeared at the end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam denounced as “infamous” Lockhart’s review in the Quarterly. Infamous or not, it is extremely diverting. How Lockhart could miss the great and abundant poetry remains a marvel. Ten years later the Scorpion repented, and invited Sterling to review any book he pleased, for the purpose of enabling him to praise the two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. Lockhart hated all affectation and “preciosity,” of which the new book was not destitute. He had been among Wordsworth’s most ardent admirers when Wordsworth had few, but the memories of the war with the “Cockney School” clung to him, the war with Leigh Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Probably he thought that the poet was a member of a London clique. There is really no excuse for Lockhart, except that he DID repent, that much of his banter was amusing, and that, above all, his censures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, many passages of a fine absurdity criticised by the infamous reviewer. One could name great prose-writers, historians, who never altered the wondrous errors to which their attention was called by critics. Prose-writers have been more sensitively attached to their glaring blunders in verifiable facts than was this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in taste.

The Lady of Shalott, even in its early form, was more than enough to give assurance of a poet. In effect it is even more poetical, in a mysterious way, if infinitely less human, than the later treatment of the same or a similar legend in Elaine. It has the charm of Coleridge, and an allegory of the fatal escape from the world of dreams and shadows into that of realities may have been really present to the mind of the young poet, aware that he was “living in phantasy.” The alterations are usually for the better. The daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the poet seems to assert in the first form -

“The yellow-leaved water-lily,

The green sheathed daffodilly,

Tremble in the water chilly,

Round about Shalott.”

Nobody can prefer to keep

“Though the squally east wind keenly

Blew, with folded arms serenely

By the water stood the queenly

Lady of Shalott.”

However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader is too seriously sympathetic with her inevitable discomfort -

“All raimented in snowy white

That loosely flew,”

as she was. The original conclusion was distressing; we were dropped from the airs of mysterious romance:-

“They crossed themselves, their stars they blest,

Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest;

There lay a parchment on her breast,

That puzzled more than all the rest

The well-fed wits at Camelot.”

Hitherto we have been “puzzled,” but as with the sublime incoherences of a dream. Now we meet well-fed wits, who say, “Bless my stars!” as perhaps we should also have done in the circumstances — a dead lady arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in a boat, for “her blood was frozen slowly,” as was natural, granting the weather and the lady’s airy costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the young poet’s vision broke up in this humorous manner. And, after all, it is less surprising that the Scorpion, finding such matter in a new little book by a new young man, was more sensitive to the absurdity than to the romance. But no lover of poetry should have been blind to the almost flawless excellence of Mariana in the South, inspired by the landscape of the Provencal tour with Arthur Hallam. In consequence of Lockhart’s censures, or in deference to the maturer taste of the poet, The Miller’s Daughter was greatly altered before 1842. It is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson’s domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome delivered his famous lecture. The seventh stanza perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to bring in “minnows” where “fish” had been the reading, and where “trout” would best recall an English chalk stream. To the angler the rising trout, which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as the “reflex of a beauteous form.” “Every woman seems an angel at the water-side,” said “that good old angler, now with God,” Thomas Todd Stoddart, and so “the long and listless boy” found it to be. It is no wonder that the mother was “SLOWLY brought to yield consent to my desire.” The domestic affections, in fact, do not adapt themselves so well to poetry as the passion, unique in Tennyson, of Fatima. The critics who hunt for parallels or plagiarisms will note -

“O Love, O fire! once he drew

With one long kiss my whole soul thro’

My lips,”

and will observe Mr Browning’s

”Once he kissed

My soul out in a fiery mist.”

As to OEnone, the scenery of that earliest of the classical idylls is borrowed from the Pyrenees and the tour with Hallam. “It is possible that the poem may have been suggested by Beattie’s Judgment of Paris,” says Mr Collins; it is also possible that the tale which

”Quintus Calaber

Somewhat lazily handled of old”

may have reached Tennyson’s mind from an older writer than Beattie. He is at least as likely to have been familiar with Greek myth as with the lamented “Minstrel.” The form of 1833, greatly altered in 1842, contained such unlucky phrases as “cedar shadowy,” and “snowycoloured,” “marblecold,” “violet-eyed” — easy spoils of criticism. The alterations which converted a beautiful but faulty into a beautiful and flawless poem perhaps obscure the significance of OEnone’s “I will not die alone,” which in the earlier volume directly refers to the foreseen end of all as narrated in Tennyson’s late piece, The Death of OEnone. The whole poem brings to mind the glowing hues of Titian and the famous Homeric lines on the divine wedlock of Zeus and Hera.

The allegory or moral of The Palace of Art does not need explanation.

Not many of the poems owe more to revision. The early stanza about

Isaiah, with fierce Ezekiel, and “Eastern Confutzee,” did undeniably

remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of The Groves of Blarney.

“With statues gracing that noble place in,

All haythen goddesses most rare,

Petrarch, Plato, and Nebuchadnezzar,

All standing naked in the open air.”

In the early version the Soul, being too much “up to date,”

“Lit white streams of dazzling gas,”

like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.

“Thus her intense, untold delight,

In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound,

Was flattered day and night.”

Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter’s experiments in gas, the “smell” gave him no “deep, untold delight,” and his “infamous review” was biassed by these circumstances.

The volume of 1833 was in nothing more remarkable than in its proof of the many-sidedness of the author. He offered mediaeval romance, and classical perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and domestic idyll, of which The May Queen is probably the most popular example. The “mysterious being,” conversant with “the spiritual world,” might have been expected to disdain topics well within the range of Eliza Cook. He did not despise but elevated them, and thereby did more to introduce himself to the wide English public than he could have done by a century of Fatimas or Lotos-Eaters. On the other hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will scarcely be satisfied with pathos which in process of time has come to seem “obvious.” The pathos of early death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in Homer, where Achilles is to be the victim, or in the laments of the Anthology, where we only know that the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May Queen is of her nature rather commonplace.

“That good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,”

strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian parody of Wordsworth -

“A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman.”

The Lotos-Eaters, of course, is at the opposite pole of the poet’s genius. A few plain verses of the Odyssey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de repere of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision of some verses, rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece, — one of the eternal possessions of song.

On the other hand, the opening of The Dream of Fair Women was marred in 1833 by the grotesque introductory verses about “a man that sails in a balloon.” Young as Tennyson was, these freakish passages are a psychological marvel in the work of one who did not lack the saving sense of humour. The poet, wafted on the wing and “pinion that the Theban eagle bear,” cannot conceivably be likened to an aeronaut waving flags out of a balloon — except in a spirit of self-mockery which was not Tennyson’s. His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic and superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more remarkable than in this magnificent vision. It is probably by mere accidental coincidence of thought that, in the verses To J. S. (James Spedding), Tennyson reproduces the noble speech on the warrior’s death which Sir Walter Scott places in the lips of the great Dundee: “It is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun, THAT is all that is worth caring for,” the light which lingers eternally on the hills of Atholl. Tennyson’s lines are a close parallel:-

“His memory long will live alone

In all our hearts, as mournful light

That broods above the fallen sun,

And dwells in heaven half the night.”

Though Tennyson disliked the exhibition of “the chips of the workshop,” we have commented on them, on the early readings of the early volumes. They may be regarded more properly as the sketches of a master than as “chips,” and do more than merely engage the idle curiosity of the fanatics of first editions. They prove that the poet was studious of perfection, and wisely studious, for his alterations, unlike those of some authors, were almost invariably for the better, the saner, the more mature in taste. The early readings are also worth notice, because they partially explain, by their occasionally fantastic and humourless character, the lack of early and general recognition of the poet’s genius. The native prejudice of mankind is not in favour of a new poet. Of new poets there are always so many, most of them bad, that nature has protected mankind by an armour of suspiciousness. The world, and Lockhart, easily found good reasons for distrusting this new claimant of the ivy and the bays: moreover, since about 1814 there had been a reaction against new poetry. The market was glutted. Scott had set everybody on reading, and too many on writing, novels. The great reaction of the century against all forms of literature except prose fiction had begun. Near the very date of Tennyson’s first volume Bulwer Lytton, as we saw, had frankly explained that he wrote novels because nobody would look at anything else. Tennyson had to overcome this universal, or all but universal, indifference to new poetry, and, after being silent for ten years, overcome it he did — a remarkable victory of art and of patient courage. Times were even worse for poets than to-day. Three hundred copies of the new volume were sold! But Tennyson’s friends were not puffers in league with pushing publishers.

Meanwhile the poet in 1833 went on quietly and undefeated with his work. He composed The Gardener’s Daughter, and was at work on the Morte d’Arthur, suppressed till the ninth year, on the Horatian plan. Many poems were produced (and even written out, which a number of his pieces never were), and were left in manuscript till they appeared in the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of the author that the marvel is how he came to write them — in what uninspired hours. Unlike Wordsworth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His studies were in Greek, German, Italian, history (a little), and chemistry, botany, and electricity—”cross-grained Muses,” these last.

It was on September 15, 1833, that Arthur Hallam died. Unheralded by sign or symptom of disease as it was, the news fell like a thunderbolt from a serene sky. Tennyson’s and Hallam’s love had been “passing the love of women.” A blow like this drives a man on the rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. “Is this the end?” Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to forego hope and attend evening lectures, the young critics of our generation find Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears concerning the ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life — his friendship.

“That faith I fain would keep,

That hope I’ll not forego:

Eternal be the sleep -

Unless to waken so,”

wrote Lockhart, and the verses echoed ceaselessly in the widowed heart of Carlyle. These men, it is part of the duty of critics later born to remember, were not children or cowards, though they dreamed, and hoped, and feared. We ought to make allowance for failings incident to an age not yet fully enlightened by popular science, and still undivorced from spiritual ideas that are as old as the human race, and perhaps not likely to perish while that race exists. Now and then even scientific men have been mistaken, especially when they have declined to examine evidence, as in this problem of the transcendental nature of the human spirit they usually do. At all events Tennyson was unconvinced that death is the end, and shortly after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he began to write fragments in verse preluding to the poem of In Memoriam. He also began, in a mood of great misery, The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834, when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautiful Sir Galahad, “intended for something of a male counterpart to St Agnes.” The Morte d’Arthur Tennyson then thought “the best thing I have managed lately.” Very early in 1835 many stanzas of In Memoriam had taken form. “I do not wish to be dragged forward in any shape before the reading public at present,” wrote the poet, when he heard that Mill desired to write on him. His OEnone he had brought to its new perfection, and did not desire comments on work now several years old. He also wrote his Ulysses and his Tithonus.

If ever the term “morbid” could have been applied to Tennyson, it would have been in the years immediately following the death of Arthur Hallam. But the application would have been unjust. True, the poet was living out of the world; he was unhappy, and he was, as people say, “doing nothing.” He was so poor that he sold his Chancellor’s prize gold medal, and he did not

”Scan his whole horizon

In quest of what he could clap eyes on,”

in the way of money-making, which another poet describes as the normal attitude of all men as well as of pirates. A careless observer would have thought that the poet was dawdling. But he dwelt in no Castle of Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his verses: like Sir Walter in Liddesdale, “he was making himsel’ a’ the time.” He did not neglect the movements of the great world in that dawn of discontent with the philosophy of commercialism. But it was not his vocation to plunge into the fray, and on to platforms.

It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in England, for a man deliberately to choose poetry as the duty of his life, and to remain loyal, as a consequence, to the bride of St Francis — Poverty. This loyalty Tennyson maintained, even under the temptation to make money in recognised ways presented by his new-born love for his future wife, Miss Emily Sellwood. They had first met in 1830, when she, a girl of seventeen, seemed to him like “a Dryad or an Oread wandering here.” But admiration became the affection of a lifetime when Tennyson met Miss Sellwood as bridesmaid to her sister, the bride of his brother Charles, in 1836. The poet could not afford to marry, and, like the hero of Locksley Hall, he may have asked himself, “What is that which I should do?” By 1840 he had done nothing tangible and lucrative, and correspondence between the lovers was forbidden. That neither dreamed of Tennyson’s deserting poetry for a more normal profession proved of great benefit to the world. The course is one which could only be justified by the absolute certainty of possessing genius.

CHAPTER III. — 1837-1842.

In 1837 the Tennysons left the old rectory; till 1840 they lived at

High Beech in Epping Forest, and after a brief stay at Tunbridge

Wells went to Boxley, near Maidstone.

It appears that at last the poet had “beat his music out,” though his friends “still tried to cheer him.” But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac. “If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness,” he said at this time; “for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except King Arthur, had been done.” The age had not la tete epique: Poe had announced the paradox that there is no such thing as a long poem, and even in dealing with Arthur, Tennyson followed the example of Theocritus in writing, not an epic, but epic idylls. Long poems suit an age of listeners, for which they were originally composed, or of leisure and few books. At present epics are read for duty’s sake, not for the only valid reason, “for human pleasure,” in FitzGerald’s phrase.

Between 1838 and 1840 Tennyson made some brief tours in England with FitzGerald, and, coming from Coventry, wrote Godiva. His engagement with Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned sine die, as they were forbidden to correspond.

By 1841 Tennyson was living at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast; working at his volumes of 1842, much urged by FitzGerald and American admirers, who had heard of the poet through Emerson. Moxon was to be the publisher, himself something of a poet; but early in 1842 he had not yet received the MS. Perhaps Emerson heard of Tennyson through Carlyle, who, says Sterling, “said more in your praise than in any one’s except Cromwell, and an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or forty people with a bowie-knife.” Carlyle at this time was much attached to Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review, and it may have been Carlyle who converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim. Carlyle had very little more appreciation of Keats than had Byron, or (in early days) Lockhart, and it was probably as much the man of heroic physical mould, “a life-guardsman spoilt by making poetry,” and the unaffected companion over a pipe, as the poet, that attracted him in Tennyson. As we saw, when the two triumphant volumes of 1842 did appear, Lockhart asked Sterling to review whatever book he pleased (meaning the Poems) in the Quarterly. The praise of Sterling may seem lukewarm to us, especially when compared with that of Spedding in the Edinburgh. But Sterling, and Lockhart too, were obliged to “gang warily.” Lockhart had, to his constant annoyance, “a partner, Mr Croker,” and I have heard from the late Dean Boyle that Mr Croker was much annoyed by even the mild applause yielded in the Quarterly to the author of the Morte d’Arthur.

While preparing the volumes of 1842 at Boxley, Tennyson’s life was divided between London and the society of his brother-in-law, Mr Edmund Lushington, the great Greek scholar and Professor of Greek at Glasgow University. There was in Mr Lushington’s personal aspect, and noble simplicity of manner and character, something that strongly resembled Tennyson himself. Among their common friends were Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes), Mr Lear of the Book of Nonsense (“with such a pencil, such a pen”), Mr Venables (who at school modified the profile of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Tennyson met his friends at The Cock, which he rendered classic; among them were Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and Dickens. The times were stirring: social agitation, and “Carol philosophy” in Dickens, with growls from Carlyle, marked the period. There was also a kind of optimism in the air, a prophetic optimism, not yet fulfilled.

“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.”

The hands of Presidents have not always been unstained; nor are statements of a mythical nature confined to the lips of the clergy. The poet was anxious that freedom should “broaden down,” but “slowly,” not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in a hurry will never care for the political poems, and it is certain that Tennyson did not feel sympathetically inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his darling desire was “to cut the throats of all the cures,” like some Covenanters of old. “Mais vous connaissez mon coeur”—”and a pretty black one it is,” thought young Tennyson. So cautious in youth, during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Tennyson could not become a convinced revolutionary later. We must accept him with his limitations: nor must we confuse him with the hero of his Locksley Hall, one of the most popular, and most parodied, of the poems of 1842: full of beautiful images and “confusions of a wasted youth,” a youth dramatically conceived, and in no way autobiographical.

In so marvellous a treasure of precious things as the volumes of 1842, perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the Morte d’Arthur. It had been written seven years earlier, and pronounced by the poet “not bad.” Tennyson was never, perhaps, a very deep Arthurian student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his companion.  He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German “literature of the subject.” Malory’s compilation (1485) from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories. “A faint Homeric echo” it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might have been chanted by

“The lonely maiden of the Lake”

when

“Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps,

Upon the hidden bases of the hills.”

Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the

Odyssey -

“Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow.”

“Softly through the flutes of the Grecians” came first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson’s own Lucretius, then in Mr Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon:-

“Lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of west

Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea

Rolls without wind for ever, and the snow

There shows not her white wings and windy feet,

Nor thunder nor swift rain saith anything,

Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive.”

So fortunate in their transmission through poets have been the lines of “the Ionian father of the rest,” the greatest of them all.

In the variety of excellences which marks Tennyson, the new English idylls of 1842 hold their prominent place. Nothing can be more exquisite and more English than the picture of “the garden that I love.” Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to the seventh of his, where it is most closely followed, and possesses such a picture of a girl as the Sicilian never tried to paint.

Dora is another idyll, resembling the work of a Wordsworth in a clime softer than that of the Fells. The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward Bull are not among the more enduring of even the playful poems. The St Simeon Stylites appears “made to the hand” of the author of Men and Women rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to “society verse” lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love and Duty. Shall

”Sin itself be found

The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?”

That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular modern moral. But Honour is the better part, and here was a poet who had the courage to say so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an age when highly respectable matrons assure us that “passion,” like charity, covers a multitude of sins. Love and Duty, we must admit, is “early Victorian.”

The Ulysses is almost a rival to the Morte d’Arthur. It is of an early date, after Arthur Hallam’s death, and Thackeray speaks of the poet chanting his

“Great Achilles whom we knew,”

as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. But it is later than these. Tennyson said, “Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.” Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more noble, and the personal emotion more dignified for the classic veil. When the plaintive Pessimist (“‘proud of the title,’ as the Living Skeleton said when they showed him”) tells us that “not to have been born is best,” we may answer with Ulysses -

”Life piled on life

Were all too little.”

The Ulysses of Tennyson, of course, is Dante’s Ulysses, not Homer’s Odysseus, who brought home to Ithaca not one of his mariners. His last known adventure, the journey to the land of men who knew not the savour of salt, Odysseus was to make on foot and alone; so spake the ghost of Tiresias within the poplar pale of Persephone.

The Two Voices expresses the contest of doubts and griefs with the spirit of endurance and joy which speaks alone in Ulysses. The man who is unhappy, but does not want to put an end to himself, has certainly the better of the argument with the despairing Voice. The arguments of “that barren Voice” are, indeed, remarkably deficient in cogency and logic, if we can bring ourselves to strip the discussion of its poetry. The original title, Thoughts of a Suicide, was inappropriate. The suicidal suggestions are promptly faced and confuted, and the mood of the author is throughout that of one who thinks life worth living:-

“Whatever crazy sorrow saith,

No life that breathes with human breath

Has ever truly long’d for death.

‘Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,

Oh life, not death, for which we pant;

More life, and fuller, that I want.”

This appears to be a satisfactory reply to the persons who eke out a livelihood by publishing pessimistic books, and hooting, as the great Alexandre Dumas says, at the great drama of Life.

With The Day-Dream (of The Sleeping Beauty) Tennyson again displays his matchless range of powers. Verse of Society rises into a charmed and musical fantasy, passing from the Berlin-wool work of the period

(“Take the broidery frame, and add

A crimson to the quaint Macaw”)

into the enchanted land of the fable: princes immortal, princesses eternally young and fair. The St Agnes and Sir Galahad, companion pieces, contain the romance, as St Simeon Stylites shows the repulsive side of asceticism; for the saint and the knight are young, beautiful, and eager as St Theresa in her childhood. It has been said, I do not know on what authority, that the poet had no recollection of composing Sir Galahad, any more than Scott remembered composing The Bride of Lammermoor, or Thackeray parts of Pendennis. The haunting of Tennyson’s mind by the Arthurian legends prompted also the lovely fragment on the Queen’s last Maying, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, a thing of perfect charm and music. The ballads of Lady Clare and The Lord of Burleigh are not examples of the poet in his strength; for his power and fantasy we must turn to The Vision of Sin, where the early passages have the languid voluptuous music of The Lotos-Eaters, with the ethical element superadded, while the portion beginning -

“Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin

is in parts reminiscent of Burns’s Jolly Beggars. In Break, Break, Break, we hear a note prelusive to In Memoriam, much of which was already composed.

The Poems of 1842 are always vocal in the memories of all readers of English verse. None are more familiar, at least to men of the generations which immediately followed Tennyson’s. FitzGerald was apt to think that the poet never again attained the same level, and I venture to suppose that he never rose above it. For FitzGerald’s opinion, right or wrong, it is easy to account. He had seen all the pieces in manuscript; they were his cherished possession before the world knew them. C’est mon homme, he might have said of Tennyson, as Boileau said of Moliere. Before the public awoke FitzGerald had “discovered Tennyson,” and that at the age most open to poetry and most enthusiastic in friendship. Again, the Poems of 1842 were SHORT, while The Princess, Maud, and The Idylls of the King were relatively long, and, with In Memoriam, possessed unity of subject. They lacked the rich, the unexampled variety of topic, treatment, and theme which marks the Poems of 1842. These were all reasons why FitzGerald should think that the two slim green volumes held the poet’s work at its highest level. Perhaps he was not wrong, after all.

CHAPTER IV. — 1842-848 — THE PRINCESS.

The Poems, and such criticisms as those of Spedding and Sterling, gave Tennyson his place. All the world of letters heard of him. Dean Bradley tells us how he took Oxford by storm in the days of the undergraduateship of Clough and Matthew Arnold. Probably both of these young writers did not share the undergraduate enthusiasm. Mr Arnold, we know, did not reckon Tennyson un esprit puissant. Like Wordsworth (who thought Tennyson “decidedly the first of our living poets, . . . he has expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings”), Arnold was no fervent admirer of his contemporaries. Besides, if Tennyson’s work is “a criticism of Life,” the moral criticism, so far, was hidden in flowers, like the sword of Aristogiton at the feast. But, on the whole, Tennyson had won the young men who cared for poetry, though Sir Robert Peel had never heard of him: and to win the young, as Theocritus desired to do, is more than half the battle. On September 8, 1842, the poet was able to tell Mr Lushington that “500 of my books are sold; according to Moxon’s brother, I have made a sensation.” The sales were not like those of Childe Harold or Marmion; but for some twenty years new poetry had not sold at all. Novels had come in about 1814, and few wanted or bought recent verse. But Carlyle was converted. He spoke no more of a spoiled guardsman. “If you knew what my relation has been to the thing called ‘English Poetry’ for many years back, you would think such a fact” (his pleasure in the book) “surprising.” Carlyle had been living (as Mrs Carlyle too well knew) in Oliver Cromwell, a hero who probably took no delight in Lycidas or Comus, in Lovelace or Carew. “I would give all my poetry to have made one song like that,” said Tennyson of Lovelace’s Althea. But Noll would have disregarded them all alike, and Carlyle was full of the spirit of the Protector. To conquer him was indeed a victory for Tennyson; while Dickens, not a reading man, expressed his “earnest and sincere homage.”

But Tennyson was not successful in the modern way. Nobody “interviewed” him. His photograph, of course, with disquisitions on his pipes and slippers, did not adorn the literary press. His literary income was not magnified by penny-a-liners. He did not become a lion; he never would roar and shake his mane in drawing- rooms. Lockhart held that Society was the most agreeable form of the stage: the dresses and actresses incomparably the prettiest. But Tennyson liked Society no better than did General Gordon. He had friends enough, and no desire for new acquaintances. Indeed, his fortune was shattered at this time by a strange investment in wood- carving by machinery. Ruskin had only just begun to write, and wood- carving by machinery was still deemed an enterprise at once philanthropic and aesthetic. “My father’s worldly goods were all gone,” says Lord Tennyson. The poet’s health suffered extremely: he tried a fashionable “cure” at Cheltenham, where he saw miracles of healing, but underwent none. In September 1845 Peel was moved by Lord Houghton to recommend the poet for a pension (200 pounds annually). “I have done nothing slavish to get it: I never even solicited for it either by myself or others.” Like Dr Johnson, he honourably accepted what was offered in honour. For some reason many persons who write in the press are always maddened when such good fortune, however small, however well merited, falls to a brother in letters. They, of course, were “causelessly bitter.” “Let them rave!”

If few of the rewards of literary success arrived, the penalties at once began, and only ceased with the poet’s existence. “If you only knew what a nuisance these volumes of verse are! Rascals send me theirs per post from America, and I have more than once been knocked up out of bed to pay three or four shillings for books of which I can’t get through one page, for of all books the most insipid reading is second-rate verse.”

Would that versifiers took the warning! Tennyson had not sent his little firstlings to Coleridge and Wordsworth: they are only the hopeless rhymers who bombard men of letters with their lyrics and tragedies.

Mr Browning was a sufferer. To one young twitterer he replied in the usual way. The bard wrote acknowledging the letter, but asking for a definite criticism. “I do not think myself a Shakespeare or a Milton, but I KNOW I am better than Mr Coventry Patmore or Mr Austin Dobson.” Mr Browning tried to procrastinate: he was already deeply engaged with earlier arrivals of volumes of song. The poet was hurt, not angry; he had expected other things from Mr Browning: HE ought to know his duty to youth. At the intercession of a relation Mr Browning now did his best, and the minstrel, satisfied at last, repeated his conviction of his superiority to the authors of The Angel in the House and Beau Brocade. Probably no man, not even Mr Gladstone, ever suffered so much from minstrels as Tennyson. He did not suffer them gladly.

In 1846 the Poems reached their fourth edition. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (bitten by what fly who knows?) attacked Tennyson in The New Timon, a forgotten satire. We do not understand the ways of that generation. The cheap and spiteful genre of satire, its forged morality, its sham indignation, its appeal to the ape-like passions, has gone out. Lytton had suffered many things (not in verse) from Jeames Yellowplush: I do not know that he hit back at Thackeray, but he “passed it on” to Thackeray’s old college companion. Tennyson, for once, replied (in Punch: the verses were sent thither by John Forster); the answer was one of magnificent contempt. But he soon decided that

“The noblest answer unto such

Is perfect stillness when they brawl.”

Long afterwards the poet dedicated a work to the son of Lord Lytton. He replied to no more satirists.  Our difficulty, of course, is to conceive such an attack coming from a man of Lytton’s position and genius. He was no hungry hack, and could, and did, do infinitely better things than “stand in a false following” of Pope. Probably Lytton had a false idea that Tennyson was a rich man, a branch of his family being affluent, and so resented the little pension. The poet was so far from rich in 1846, and even after the publication of The Princess, that his marriage had still to be deferred for four years.

On reading The Princess afresh one is impressed, despite old familiarity, with the extraordinary influence of its beauty. Here are, indeed, the best words best placed, and that curious felicity of style which makes every line a marvel, and an eternal possession. It is as if Tennyson had taken the advice which Keats gave to Shelley, “Load every rift with ore.” To choose but one or two examples, how the purest and freshest impression of nature is re-created in mind and memory by the picture of Melissa with

”All her thoughts as fair within her eyes,

As bottom agates seen to wave and float

In crystal currents of clear morning seas.”

The lyric, “Tears, idle tears,” is far beyond praise: once read it seems like a thing that has always existed in the world of poetic archetypes, and has now been not so much composed as discovered and revealed. The many pictures and similitudes in The Princess have a magical gorgeousness:-

”From the illumined hall

Long lanes of splendour slanted o’er a press

Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes,

And rainbow robes, and gems and gem-like eyes,

And gold and golden heads; they to and fro

Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale.”

The “small sweet Idyll” from

“A volume of the poets of her land”

pure Theocritus. It has been admirably rendered into Greek by Mr Gilbert Murray. The exquisite beauties of style are not less exquisitely blended in the confusions of a dream, for a dream is the thing most akin to The Princess. Time does not exist in the realm of Gama, or in the ideal university of Ida. We have a bookless North, severed but by a frontier pillar from a golden and learned South. The arts, from architecture to miniature-painting, are in their highest perfection, while knights still tourney in armour, and the quarrel of two nations is decided as in the gentle and joyous passage of arms at Ashby de la Zouche. Such confusions are purposefully dream-like: the vision being a composite thing, as dreams are, haunted by the modern scene of the holiday in the park, the “gallant glorious chronicle,” the Abbey, and that “old crusading knight austere,” Sir Ralph. The seven narrators of the scheme are like the “split personalities” of dreams, and the whole scheme is of great technical skill. The earlier editions lacked the beautiful songs of the ladies, and that additional trait of dream, the strange trance- like seizures of the Prince: “fallings from us, vanishings,” in Wordsworthian phrase; instances of “dissociation,” in modern psychological terminology. Tennyson himself, like Shelley and Wordsworth, had experience of this kind of dreaming awake which he attributes to his Prince, to strengthen the shadowy yet brilliant character of his romance. It is a thing of normal and natural points de repere; of daylight suggestion, touched as with the magnifying and intensifying elements of haschish-begotten phantasmagoria. In the same way opium raised into the region of brilliant vision that passage of Purchas which Coleridge was reading before he dreamed Kubla Khan. But in Tennyson the effects were deliberately sought and secured.

One might conjecture, though Lord Tennyson says nothing on the subject, that among the suggestions for The Princess was the opening of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here the King of Navarre devises the College of Recluses, which is broken up by the arrival of the Princess of France, Rosaline, and the other ladies:-

King. Our Court shall be a little Academe,

Still and contemplative in living art.

You three, Biron, Domain, and Longaville,

Have sworn for three years’ term to live with me,

My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes.

* * *

Biron. That is, to live and study here three years.

But there are other strict observances;

As, not to see a woman in that term.

* * *

[Reads] ‘That no woman shalt come within a mile of my Court:’ Hath

this been proclaimed?

Long. Four days ago.

Biron. Let’s see the penalty. [Reads] ‘On pain of losing her

tongue.’

The Princess then arrives with her ladies, as the Prince does with Cyril and Florian, as Charles did, with Buckingham, in Spain. The conclusion of Shakespeare is Tennyson’s conclusion -

“We cannot cross the cause why we are born.”

The later poet reverses the attitude of the sexes in Love’s Labour’s Lost: it is the women who make and break the vow; and the women in The Princess insist on the “grand, epic, homicidal” scenes, while the men are debarred, more or less, from a sportive treatment of the subject. The tavern catch of Cyril; the laughable pursuit of the Prince by the feminine Proctors; the draggled appearance of the adventurers in female garb, are concessions to the humour of the situation. Shakespeare would certainly have given us the song of Cyril at the picnic, and comic enough the effect would have been on the stage. It may be a gross employment, but The Princess, with the pretty chorus of girl undergraduates,

“In colours gayer than the morning mist,”

went reasonably well in opera. Merely considered as a romantic fiction, The Princess presents higher proofs of original narrative genius than any other such attempt by its author.

The poem is far from being deficient in that human interest which Shelley said that it was as vain to ask from HIM, as to seek to buy a leg of mutton at a gin-shop. The characters, the protagonists, with Cyril, Melissa, Lady Blanche, the child Aglaia, King Gama, the other king, Arac, and the hero’s mother — beautifully studied from the mother of the poet — are all sufficiently human. But they seem to waver in the magic air, “as all the golden autumn woodland reels athwart the fires of autumn leaves. For these reasons, and because of the designed fantasy of the whole composition, The Princess is essentially a poem for the true lovers of poetry, of Spenser and of Coleridge. The serious motive, the question of Woman, her wrongs, her rights, her education, her capabilities, was not “in the air” in 1847. To be sure it had often been “in the air.” The Alexandrian Platonists, the Renaissance, even the age of Anne, had their emancipated and learned ladies. Early Greece had Sappho, Corinna, and Erinna, the first the chief of lyric poets, even in her fragments, the two others applauded by all Hellas. The French Revolution had begotten Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her Vindication of the Rights of Women, and in France George Sand was prominent and emancipated enough while the poet wrote. But, the question of love apart, George Sand was “very, very woman,” shining as a domestic character and fond of needlework. England was not excited about the question which has since produced so many disputants, inevitably shrill, and has not been greatly meddled with by women of genius, George Eliot or Mrs Oliphant. The poem, in the public indifference as to feminine education, came rather prematurely. We have now ladies’ colleges, not in haunts remote from man, but by the sedged banks of Cam and Cherwell. There have been no revolutionary results: no boys have spied these chaste nests, with echoing romantic consequences. The beauty and splendour of the Princess’s university have not arisen in light and colour, and it is only at St Andrews that girls wear the academic and becoming costume of the scarlet gown. The real is far below the ideal, but the real in 1847 seemed eminently remote, or even impossible.

The learned Princess herself was not on our level as to knowledge and the past of womankind. She knew not of their masterly position in the law of ancient Egypt. Gynaeocracy and matriarchy, the woman the head of the savage or prehistoric group, were things hidden from her. She “glanced at the Lycian custom,” but not at the Pictish, a custom which would have suited George Sand to a marvel. She maligned the Hottentots.

“The highest is the measure of the man,

And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay.”

The Hottentots had long ago anticipated the Princess and her shrill modern sisterhood. If we take the Greeks, or even ourselves, we may say, with Dampier (1689), “The Hodmadods, though a nasty people, yet are gentlemen to these” as regards the position of women. Let us hear Mr Hartland: “In every Hottentot’s house the wife is supreme. Her husband, poor fellow, though he may wield wide power and influence out of doors, at home dare not even take a mouthful of sour-milk out of the household vat without her permission . . . The highest oath a man can take is to swear by his eldest sister, and if he abuses this name he forfeits to her his finest goods and sheep.”

However, in 1847 England had not yet thought of imitating the Hodmadods. Consequently, and by reason of the purely literary and elaborately fantastical character of The Princess, it was not of a nature to increase the poet’s fame and success. “My book is out, and I hate it, and so no doubt will you,” Tennyson wrote to FitzGerald, who hated it and said so. “Like Carlyle, I gave up all hopes of him after The Princess,” indeed it was not apt to conciliate Carlyle. “None of the songs had the old champagne flavour,” said Fitz; and Lord Tennyson adds, “Nothing either by Thackeray or by my father met FitzGerald’s approbation unless he had first seen it in manuscript.” This prejudice was very human. Lord Tennyson remarks, as to the poet’s meaning in this work, born too early, that “the sooner woman finds out, before the great educational movement begins, that ‘woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse,’ the better it will be for the progress of the world.”

But probably the “educational movement” will not make much difference to womankind on the whole. The old Platonic remark that woman “does the same things as man, but not so well,” will eternally hold good, at least in the arts, and in letters, except in rare cases of genius. A new Jeanne d’Arc, the most signal example of absolute genius in history, will not come again; and the ages have waited vainly for a new Sappho or a new Jane Austen. Literature, poetry, painting, have always been fields open to woman. But two names exhaust the roll of women of the highest rank in letters — Sappho and Jane Austen. And “when did woman ever yet invent?” In “arts of government” Elizabeth had courage, and just saving sense enough to yield to Cecil at the eleventh hour, and escape the fate of “her sister and her foe,” the beautiful unhappy queen who told her ladies that she dared to look on whatever men dared to do, and herself would do it if her strength so served her.”  “The foundress of the Babylonian walls” is a myth; “the Rhodope that built the Pyramid” is not a creditable myth; for exceptions to Knox’s “Monstrous Regiment of Women” we must fall back on “The Palmyrene that fought Aurelian,” and the revered name of the greatest of English queens, Victoria. Thus history does not encourage the hope that a man-like education will raise many women to the level of the highest of their sex in the past, or even that the enormous majority of women will take advantage of the opportunity of a man-like education. A glance at the numerous periodicals designed for the reading of women depresses optimism, and the Princess’s prophecy of

“Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss

Of science, and the secrets of the mind,”

is not near fulfilment. Fortunately the sex does not “love the Metaphysics,” and perhaps has not yet produced even a manual of Logic. It must suffice man and woman to

”Walk this world

Yoked in all exercise of noble end,”

of a more practical character, while woman is at liberty

”To live and learn and be

All that not harms distinctive womanhood.”

This was the conclusion of the poet who had the most chivalrous reverence for womanhood. This is the eirenicon of that old strife between the women and the men — that war in which both armies are captured. It may not be acceptable to excited lady combatants, who think man their foe, when the real enemy is (what Porson damned) the Nature of Things.

A new poem like The Princess would soon reach the public of our day, so greatly increased are the uses of advertisement. But The Princess moved slowly from edition to revised and improved edition, bringing neither money nor much increase of fame. The poet was living with his family at Cheltenham, where among his new acquaintances were Sydney Dobell, the poet of a few exquisite pieces, and F. W. Robertson, later so popular as a preacher at Brighton. Meeting him for the first time, and knowing Robertson’s “wish to pluck the heart from my mystery, from pure nervousness I would only talk of beer.” This kind of shyness beset Tennyson. A lady tells me that as a girl (and a very beautiful girl) she and her sister, and a third, nec diversa, met the poet, and expected high discourse. But his speech was all of that wingless insect which “gets there, all the same,” according to an American lyrist; the insect which fills Mrs Carlyle’s letters with bulletins of her success or failure in domestic campaigns.

Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair of Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too modest to be introduced to the great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so nobly. Oddly enough Douglas Jerrold enthusiastically assured Tennyson, at a dinner of a Society of Authors, that “you are the one who will live.” To that end, humanly speaking, he placed himself under the celebrated Dr Gully and his “water-cure,” a foible of that period. In 1848 he made a tour to King Arthur’s Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland, where the Pass of Brander disappointed him: perhaps he saw it on a fine day, and, like Glencoe, it needs tempest and mist lit up by the white fires of many waterfalls. By bonny Doon he “fell into a passion of tears,” for he had all of Keats’s sentiment for Burns: “There never was immortal poet if he be not one.” Of all English poets, the warmest in the praise of Burns have been the two most unlike himself — Tennyson and Keats. It was the songs that Tennyson preferred; Wordsworth liked the Cottar’s Saturday Night.

CHAPTER V. — IN MEMORIAM.

In May 1850 a few, copies of In Memoriam were printed for friends, and presently the poem was published without author’s name. The pieces had been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is to be observed that the “section about evolution” was written some years before 1844, when the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in Vestiges of Creation, were given to the world, and caused a good deal of talk. Ten years, again, after In Memoriam, came Darwin’s Origin of Species. These dates are worth observing. The theory of evolution, of course in a rude mythical shape, is at least as old as the theory of creation, and is found among the speculations of the most backward savages. The Arunta of Central Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly differentiated developments. “The rudimentary forms, Inapertwa, were in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs of sight, hearing, or smell.” They existed in a kind of lumps, and were set free from the cauls which enveloped them by two beings called Ungambikula, “a word which means ‘out of nothing,’ or ‘self- existing.’ Men descend from lower animals thus evolved.”

This example of the doctrine of evolution in an early shape is only mentioned to prove that the idea has been familiar to the human mind from the lowest known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been the theory of creation by a kind of supreme being. The notion of creation, however, up to 1860, held the foremost place in modern European belief. But Lamarck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others had submitted hypotheses of evolution. Now it was part of the originality of Tennyson, as a philosophic poet, that he had brooded from boyhood on these early theories of evolution, in an age when they were practically unknown to the literary, and were not patronised by the scientific, world. In November 1844 he wrote to Mr Moxon, “I want you to get me a book which I see advertised in the Examiner: it seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have written more than one poem.” This book was Vestiges of Creation. These poems are the stanzas in In Memoriam about “the greater ape,” and about Nature as careless of the type: “all shall go.” The poetic and philosophic originality of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as to the effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious beliefs long before the world was moved in all its deeps by Darwin’s Origin of Species. Thus the geological record is inconsistent, we learned, with the record of the first chapters of Genesis. If man is a differentiated monkey, and if a monkey has no soul, or future life (which is taken for granted), where are man’s title-deeds to these possessions? With other difficulties of an obvious kind, these presented themselves to the poet with renewed force when his only chance of happiness depended on being able to believe in a future life, and reunion with the beloved dead. Unbelief had always existed. We hear of atheists in the Rig Veda. In the early eighteenth century, in the age of Swift -

“Men proved, as sure as God’s in Gloucester,

That Moses was a great impostor.”

distrust of Moses increased with the increase of hypotheses of evolution. But what English poet, before Tennyson, ever attempted “to lay the spectres of the mind”; ever faced world-old problems in their most recent aspects? I am not acquainted with any poet who attempted this task, and, whatever we may think of Tennyson’s success, I do not see how we can deny his originality.

Mr Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither “the theology nor the philosophy of In Memoriam are new, original, with an independent force and depth of their own.” “They are exquisitely graceful re- statements of the theology of the Broad Churchman of the school of F. D. Maurice and Jowett — a combination of Maurice’s somewhat illogical piety with Jowett’s philosophy of mystification.” The piety of Maurice may be as illogical as that of Positivism is logical, and the philosophy of the Master of Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison pleases to call it. But as Jowett’s earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does not see how it could influence Tennyson before 1844. And what had the Duke of Argyll written on these themes some years before 1844? The late Duke, to whom Mr Harrison refers in this connection, was born in 1823. His philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tennyson’s In Memoriam, must have been set forth by him at the tender age of seventeen, or thereabouts. Mr Harrison’s sentence is, “But does In Memoriam teach anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about that time” (the time of writing was mainly 1833-1840) “common form with F. D. Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter?”

The dates answer Mr Harrison. Jowett did not publish anything till at least fifteen years after Tennyson wrote his poems on evolution and belief. Dr Boyd Carpenter’s works previous to 1840 are unknown to bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a young parson at Cheltenham. Ruskin had not published the first volume of Modern Painters. His Oxford prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The Duke of Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest, except the contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in the time of In Memoriam, Tennyson was “in touch with the ideas of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall”?  When Tennyson wrote the parts of In Memoriam which deal with science, nobody beyond their families and friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. They had not developed, much less had they published, their “general ideas.” Even in his journal of the Cruise of the Beagle Darwin’s ideas were religious, and he naively admired the works of God. It is strange that Mr Harrison has based his criticism, and his theory of Tennyson’s want of originality, on what seems to be a historical error. He cites parts of In Memoriam, and remarks, “No one can deny that all this is exquisitely beautiful; that these eternal problems have never been clad in such inimitable grace . . . But the train of thought is essentially that with which ordinary English readers have been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Ecce Homo, Hypatia, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr Drummond, and many valiant companies of Septem [why Septem?] contra Diabolum.” One must keep repeating the historical verity that the ideas of In Memoriam could not have been “made familiar by” authors who had not yet published anything, or by books yet undreamed of and unborn, such as Ecce Homo and Jowett’s work on some of St Paul’s Epistles. If these books contain the ideas of In Memoriam, it is by dint of repetition and borrowing from In Memoriam, or by coincidence. The originality was Tennyson’s, for we cannot dispute the evidence of dates.

When one speaks of “originality” one does not mean that Tennyson discovered the existence of the ultimate problems. But at Cambridge (1828-1830) he had voted “No” in answer to the question discussed by “the Apostles,” “Is an intelligible [intelligent?] First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the universe?”  He had also propounded the theory that “the development of the human body might possibly be traced from the radiated vermicular molluscous and vertebrate organisms,” thirty years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. To be concerned so early with such hypotheses, and to face, in poetry, the religious or irreligious inferences which may be drawn from them, decidedly constitutes part of the poetic originality of Tennyson. His attitude, as a poet, towards religious doubt is only so far not original, as it is part of the general reaction from the freethinking of the eighteenth century. Men had then been freethinkers avec delices. It was a joyous thing to be an atheist, or something very like one; at all events, it was glorious to be “emancipated.” Many still find it glorious, as we read in the tone of Mr Huxley, when he triumphs and tramples over pious dukes and bishops. Shelley said that a certain schoolgirl “would make a dear little atheist.” But by 1828-1830 men were less joyous in their escape from all that had hitherto consoled and fortified humanity. Long before he dreamed of In Memoriam, in the Poems chiefly Lyrical of 1830 Tennyson had written -

“‘Yet,’ said I, in my morn of youth,

The unsunn’d freshness of my strength,

When I went forth in quest of truth,

‘It is man’s privilege to doubt.’ . . .

Ay me! I fear

All may not doubt, but everywhere

Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God,

Whom call I Idol? Let Thy dove

Shadow me over, and my sins

Be unremember’d, and Thy love

Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet

Somewhat before the heavy clod

Weighs on me, and the busy fret

Of that sharp-headed worm begins

In the gross blackness underneath.

Oh weary life! oh weary death!

Oh spirit and heart made desolate!

Oh damned vacillating state!”

Now the philosophy of In Memoriam may be, indeed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from sensitive minds, as a “damned vacillating state.” The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular science as to be sure that he knows everything: knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with no room for God or a soul. He is far from that happy cock-certainty, and consequently is exposed to the contempt of the cock-certain. The poem, says Mr Harrison, “has made Tennyson the idol of the Anglican clergyman — the world in which he was born and the world in which his life was ideally passed- -the idol of all cultured youth and of all aesthetic women. It is an honourable post to fill” — that of idol. “The argument of In Memoriam apparently is . . . that we should faintly trust the larger hope.” That, I think, is not the argument, not the conclusion of the poem, but is a casual expression of one mood among many moods.

The argument and conclusion of In Memoriam are the argument and conclusion of the life of Tennyson, and of the love of Tennyson, that immortal passion which was a part of himself, and which, if aught of us endure, is living yet, and must live eternally. From the record of his Life by his son we know that his trust in “the larger hope” was not “faint,” but strengthened with the years. There are said to have been less hopeful intervals.

His faith is, of course, no argument for others, — at least it ought not to be. We are all the creatures of our bias, our environment, our experience, our emotions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike the experience of most men. It yielded him subjective grounds for belief. He “opened a path unto many,” like Yama, the Vedic being who discovered the way to death. But Tennyson’s path led not to death, but to life spiritual, and to hope, and he did “give a new impulse to the thought of his age,” as other great poets have done. Of course it may be an impulse to wrong thought. As the philosophical Australian black said, “We shall know when we are dead.”

Mr Harrison argues as if, unlike Tennyson, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Burns produced “original ideas fresh from their own spirit, and not derived from contemporary thinkers.” I do not know what original ideas these great poets discovered and promulgated; their ideas seem to have been “in the air.” These poets “made them current coin.” Shelley thought that he owed many of his ideas to Godwin, a contemporary thinker. Wordsworth has a debt to Plato, a thinker not contemporary. Burns’s democratic independence was “in the air,” and had been, in Scotland, since Elder remarked on it in a letter to Ingles in 1515. It is not the ideas, it is the expression of the ideas, that marks the poet. Tennyson’s ideas are relatively novel, though as old as Plotinus, for they are applied to a novel, or at least an unfamiliar, mental situation. Doubt was abroad, as it always is; but, for perhaps the first time since Porphyry wrote his letter to Abammon, the doubters desired to believe, and said, “Lord, help Thou my unbelief.” To robust, not sensitive minds, very much in unity with themselves, the attitude seems contemptible, or at best decently futile. Yet I cannot think it below the dignity of mankind, conscious that it is not omniscient. The poet does fail in logic (In Memoriam, cxx.) when he says -

“Let him, the wiser man who springs

Hereafter, up from childhood shape

His action like the greater ape,

But I was BORN to other things.”

I am not well acquainted with the habits of the greater ape, but it would probably be unwise, and perhaps indecent, to imitate him, even if “we also are his offspring.” We might as well revert to polyandry and paint, because our Celtic or Pictish ancestors, if we had any, practised the one and wore the other. However, petulances like the verse on the greater ape are rare in In Memoriam. To declare that “I would not stay” in life if science proves us to be “cunning casts in clay,” is beneath the courage of the Stoical philosophy.

Theologically, the poem represents the struggle with doubts and hopes and fears, which had been with Tennyson from his boyhood, as is proved by the volume of 1830. But the doubts had exerted, probably, but little influence on his happiness till the sudden stroke of loss made life for a time seem almost unbearable unless the doubts were solved. They WERE solved, or stoically set aside, in the Ulysses, written in the freshness of grief, with the conclusion that we must be

”Strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

But the gnawing of grief till it becomes a physical pain, the fever fits of sorrow, the aching desiderium, bring back in many guises the old questions. These require new attempts at answers, and are answered, “the sad mechanic exercise” of verse allaying the pain. This is the genesis of In Memoriam, not originally written for publication but produced at last as a monument to friendship, and as a book of consolation.

No books of consolation can console except by sympathy; and in In Memoriam sympathy and relief have been found, and will be found, by many. Another, we feel, has trodden our dark and stony path, has been shadowed by the shapes of dread which haunt our valley of tribulation: a mind almost infinitely greater than ours has been our fellow-sufferer. He has emerged from the darkness of the shadow of death into the light, whither, as it seems to us, we can scarcely hope to come. It is the sympathy and the example, I think, not the speculations, mystical or scientific, which make In Memoriam, in more than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the yellow sunshine and the woods of that autumn day when a man learned that his friend was dead. No, it was not the speculations and arguments that consoled or encouraged us. We did not listen to Tennyson as to Mr Frederic Harrison’s glorified Anglican clergyman. We could not murmur, like the Queen of the May -

“That good man, the Laureate, has told tis words of peace.”

What we valued was the poet’s companionship. There was a young reader to whom All along the Valley came as a new poem in a time of recent sorrow.

“The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away,”

said the singer of In Memoriam, and in that hour it seemed as if none could endure for two-and-thirty years the companionship of loss. But the years have gone by, and have left

”Ever young the face that dwells

With reason cloister’d in the brain.”

In this way to many In Memoriam is almost a life-long companion: we walk with Great-heart for our guide through the valley Perilous.

In this respect In Memoriam is unique, for neither to its praise nor dispraise is it to be compared with the other famous elegies of the world. These are brief outbursts of grief — real, as in the hopeless words of Catullus over his brother’s tomb; or academic, like Milton’s Lycidas. We are not to suppose that Milton was heart-broken by the death of young Mr King, or that Shelley was greatly desolated by the death of Keats, with whom his personal relations had been slight, and of whose poetry he had spoken evil. He was nobly stirred as a poet by a poet’s death — like Mr Swinburne by the death of Charles Baudelaire; but neither Shelley nor Mr Swinburne was lamenting dimidium animae suae, or mourning for a friend

”Dear as the mother to the son,

More than my brothers are to me.”

The passion of In Memoriam is personal, is acute, is life-long, and thus it differs from the other elegies. Moreover, it celebrates a noble object, and thus is unlike the ambiguous affection, real or dramatic, which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem stands alone, cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking into actual prophecy, like Shelley’s Adonais; not capable, by reason even of its meditative metre, of the organ music of Lycidas. Yet it is not to be reckoned inferior to these because its aim and plan are other than theirs.

It is far from my purpose to “class” Tennyson, or to dispute about his relative greatness when compared with Wordsworth or Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, or Burns. He rated one song of Lovelace above all his lyrics, and, in fact, could no more have written the Cavalier’s To Althea from Prison than Lovelace could have written the Morte d’Arthur. “It is not reasonable, it is not fair,” says Mr Harrison, after comparing In Memoriam with Lycidas, “to compare Tennyson with Milton,” and it is not reasonable to compare Tennyson with any poet whatever. Criticism is not the construction of a class list. But we may reasonably say that In Memoriam is a noble poem, an original poem, a poem which stands alone in literature. The wonderful beauty, ever fresh, howsoever often read, of many stanzas, is not denied by any critic. The marvel is that the same serene certainty of art broods over even the stanzas which must have been conceived while the sorrow was fresh. The second piece,

“Old yew, which graspest at the stones,”

must have been composed soon after the stroke fell. Yet it is as perfect as the proem of 1849. As a rule, the poetical expression of strong emotion appears usually to clothe the memory of passion when it has been softened by time. But here already “the rhythm, phrasing, and articulation are entirely faultless, exquisitely clear, melodious, and rare.”  It were superfluous labour to point at special beauties, at the exquisite rendering of nature; and copious commentaries exist to explain the course of the argument, if a series of moods is to be called an argument. One may note such a point as that (xiv.) where the poet says that, were he to meet his friend in life,

“I should not feel it to be strange.”

It may have happened to many to mistake, for a section of a second, the face of a stranger for the face seen only in dreams, and to find that the recognition brings no surprise.

Pieces of a character apart from the rest, and placed in a designed sequence, are xcii., xciii., xcv. In the first the poet says -

“If any vision should reveal

Thy likeness, I might count it vain

As but the canker of the brain;

Yea, tho’ it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast

Together in the days behind,

I might but say, I hear a wind

Of memory murmuring the past.

Yea, tho’ it spake and bared to view

A fact within the coming year;

And tho’ the months, revolving near,

Should prove the phantom-warning true,

They might not seem thy prophecies,

But spiritual presentiments,

And such refraction of events

As often rises ere they rise.”

The author thus shows himself difficile as to recognising the personal identity of a phantasm; nor is it easy to see what mode of proving his identity would be left to a spirit. The poet, therefore, appeals to some perhaps less satisfactory experience:-

“Descend, and touch, and enter; hear

The wish too strong for words to name;

That in this blindness of the frame

My Ghost may feel that thine is near.”

The third poem is the crown of In Memoriam, expressing almost such things as are not given to man to utter:-

And all at once it seem’d at last

The living soul was flash’d on mine,

And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d

About empyreal heights of thought,

And came on that which is, and caught

The deep pulsations of the world,

AEonian music measuring out

The steps of Time — the shocks of Chance -

The blows of Death. At length my trance

Was cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt.

Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame

In matter-moulded forms of speech,

Or ev’n for intellect to reach

Thro’ memory that which I became.”

Experiences like this, subjective, and not matter for argument, were familiar to Tennyson. Jowett said, “He was one of those who, though not an upholder of miracles, thought that the wonders of Heaven and Earth were never far absent from us.” In The Mystic, Tennyson, when almost a boy, had shown familiarity with strange psychological and psychical conditions. Poems of much later life also deal with these, and, more or less consciously, his philosophy was tinged, and his confidence that we are more than “cunning casts in clay” was increased, by phenomena of experience, which can only be evidence for the mystic himself, if even for him. But this dim aspect of his philosophy, of course, is “to the Greeks foolishness.”

His was a philosophy of his own; not a philosophy for disciples, and “those that eddy round and round.” It was the sum of his reflection on the mass of his impressions. I have shown, by the aid of dates, that it was not borrowed from Huxley, Mr Stopford Brooke, or the late Duke of Argyll. But, no doubt, many of the ideas were “in the air,” and must have presented themselves to minds at once of religious tendency, and attracted by the evolutionary theories which had always existed as floating speculations, till they were made current coin by the genius and patient study of Darwin. That Tennyson’s opinions between 1830 and 1840 were influenced by those of F. D. Maurice is reckoned probable by Canon Ainger, author of the notice of the poet in The Dictionary of National Biography. In the Life of Maurice, Tennyson does not appear till 1850, and the two men were not at Cambridge together. But Maurice’s ideas, as they then existed, may have reached Tennyson orally through Hallam and other members of the Trinity set, who knew personally the author of Letters to a Quaker. However, this is no question of scientific priority: to myself it seems that Tennyson “beat his music out” for himself, as perhaps most people do. Like his own Sir Percivale, “I know not all he meant.”

Among the opinions as to In Memoriam current at the time of its publication Lord Tennyson notices those of Maurice and Robertson. They “thought that the poet had made a definite step towards the unification of the highest religion and philosophy with the progressive science of the day.” Neither science nor religion stands still; neither stands now where it then did. Conceivably they are travelling on paths which will ultimately coincide; but this opinion, of course, must seem foolishness to most professors of science. Bishop Westcott was at Cambridge when the book appeared: he is one of Mr Harrison’s possible sources of Tennyson’s ideas. He recognised the poet’s “splendid faith (in the face of every difficulty) in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble destiny of the individual man.” Ten years later Professor Henry Sidgwick, a mind sufficiently sceptical, found in some lines of In Memoriam “the indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith which humanity cannot give up because it is necessary for life; and which I know that I, at least so far as the man in me is deeper than the methodical thinker, cannot give up.” But we know that many persons not only do not find an irreducible minimum of faith “necessary for life,” but are highly indignant and contemptuous if any one else ventures to suggest the logical possibility of any faith at all.

The mass of mankind will probably never be convinced unbelievers — nay, probably the backward or forward swing of the pendulum will touch more convinced belief. But there always have been, since the Rishis of India sang, superior persons who believe in nothing not material — whatever the material may be. Tennyson was, it is said, “impatient” of these esprits forts, and they are impatient of him. It is an error to be impatient: we know not whither the logos may lead us, or later generations; and we ought not to be irritated with others because it leads them into what we think the wrong path. It is unfortunate that a work of art, like In Memoriam, should arouse theological or anti-theological passions. The poet only shows us the paths by which his mind travelled: they may not be the right paths, nor is it easy to trace them on a philosophical chart. He escaped from Doubting Castle. Others may “take that for a hermitage,” and be happy enough in the residence. We are all determined by our bias: Tennyson’s is unconcealed. His poem is not a tract: it does not aim at the conversion of people with the contrary bias, it is irksome, in writing about a poet, to be obliged to discuss a philosophy which, certainly, is not stated in the manner of Spinoza, but is merely the equilibrium of contending forces in a single mind.

The most famous review of In Memoriam is that which declared that “these touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.” This is only equalled, if equalled, by a recent critique which treated a fresh edition of Jane Eyre as a new novel, “not without power, in parts, and showing some knowledge of Yorkshire local colour.”

CHAPTER VI. — AFTER IN MEMORIAM.

On June 13 Tennyson married, at Shiplake, the object of his old, long-tried, and constant affection. The marriage was still “imprudent,” — eight years of then uncontested supremacy in English poetry had not brought a golden harvest. Mr Moxon appears to have supplied 300 pounds “in advance of royalties.” The sum, so contemptible in the eyes of first-rate modern novelists, was a competence to Tennyson, added to his little pension and the epaves of his patrimony. “The peace of God came into my life when I married her,” he said in later days. The poet made a charming copy of verses to his friend, the Rev. Mr Rawnsley, who tied the knot, as he and his bride drove to the beautiful village of Pangbourne. Thence they went to the stately Clevedon Court, the seat of Sir Abraham Elton, hard by the church where Arthur Hallam sleeps. The place is very ancient and beautiful, and was a favourite haunt of Thackeray. They passed on to Lynton, and to Glastonbury, where a collateral ancestor of Mrs Tennyson’s is buried beside King Arthur’s grave, in that green valley of Avilion, among the apple-blossoms. They settled for a while at Tent Lodge on Coniston Water, in a land of hospitable Marshalls.

After their return to London, on the night of November 18, Tennyson dreamed that Prince Albert came and kissed him, and that he himself said, “Very kind, but very German,” which was very like him. Next day he received from Windsor the offer of the Laureateship. He doubted, and hesitated, but accepted. Since Wordsworth’s death there had, as usual, been a good deal of banter about the probable new Laureate: examples of competitive odes exist in Bon Gaultier. That by Tennyson is Anacreontic, but he was not really set on kissing the Maids of Honour, as he is made to sing. Rogers had declined, on the plea of extreme old age; but it was worthy of the great and good Queen not to overlook the Nestor of English poets. For the rest, the Queen looked for “a name bearing such distinction in the literary world as to do credit to the appointment.” In the previous century the great poets had rarely been Laureates. But since Sir Walter Scott declined the bays in favour of Southey, for whom, again, the tale of bricks in the way of Odes was lightened, and when Wordsworth succeeded Southey, the office became honourable. Tennyson gave it an increase of renown, while, though in itself of merely nominal value, it served his poems, to speak profanely, as an advertisement. New editions of his books were at once in demand; while few readers had ever heard of Mr Browning, already his friend, and already author of Men and Women.

The Laureateship brought the poet acquainted with the Queen, who was to be his debtor in later days for encouragement and consolation. To his Laureateship we owe, among other good things, the stately and moving Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, a splendid heroic piece, unappreciated at the moment. But Tennyson was, of course, no Birthday poet. Since the exile of the House of Stuart our kings in England have not maintained the old familiarity with many classes of their subjects. Literature has not been fashionable at Court, and Tennyson could in no age have been a courtier. We hear the complaint, every now and then, that official honours are not conferred (except the Laureateship) on men of letters. But most of them probably think it rather distinguished not to be decorated, or to carry titles borne by many deserving persons unvisited by the Muses. Even the appointment to the bays usually provokes a great deal of jealous and spiteful feeling, which would only be multiplied if official honours were distributed among men of the pen. Perhaps Tennyson’s laurels were not for nothing in the chorus of dispraise which greeted the Ode on the Duke of Wellington, and Maud.

The year 1851 was chiefly notable for a tour to Italy, made immortal in the beautiful poem of The Daisy, in a measure of the poet’s own invention. The next year, following on the Coup d’etat and the rise of the new French empire, produced patriotic appeals to Britons to “guard their own,” which to a great extent former alien owners had been unsuccessful in guarding from Britons. The Tennysons had lost their first child at his birth: perhaps he is remembered in The Grandmother, “the babe had fought for his life.” In August 1852 the present Lord Tennyson was born, and Mr Maurice was asked to be godfather. The Wellington Ode was of November, and was met by “the almost universal depreciation of the press,” — why, except because, as I have just suggested, Tennyson was Laureate, it is impossible to imagine. The verses were worthy of the occasion: more they could not be.

In the autumn of 1853 the poet visited Ardtornish on the Sound of Mull, a beautiful place endeared to him who now writes by the earliest associations. It chanced to him to pass his holidays there just when Tennyson and Mr Palgrave had left—”Mr Tinsmith and Mr Pancake,” as Robert the boatman, a very black Celt, called them. Being then nine years of age, I heard of a poet’s visit, and asked, “A real poet, like Sir Walter Scott?” with whom I then supposed that “the Muse had gone away.” “Oh, not like Sir Walter Scott, of course,” my mother told me, with loyalty unashamed. One can think of the poet as Mrs Sellar, his hostess, describes him, beneath the limes of the avenue at Acharn, planted, Mrs Sellar says, by a cousin of Flora Macdonald. I have been told that the lady who planted the lilies, if not the limes, was the famed Jacobite, Miss Jennie Cameron, mentioned in Tom Jones. An English engraving of 1746 shows the Prince between these two beauties, Flora and Jennie.

“No one,” says Mrs Sellar, “could have been more easy, simple, and delightful,” and indeed it is no marvel that in her society and that of her husband, the Greek professor, and her cousin, Miss Cross, and in such scenes, “he blossomed out in the most genial manner, making us all feel as if he were an old friend.”

In November Tennyson took a house at Farringford, “as it was beautiful and far from the haunts of men.” There he settled to a country existence in the society of his wife, his two children (the second, Lionel, being in 1854 the baby), and there he composed Maud, while the sound of the guns, in practice for the war of the Crimea, boomed from the coast. In May Tennyson saw the artists, of schools oddly various, who illustrated his poems. Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt gave the tone to the art, but Mr Horsley, Creswick, and Mulgrave were also engaged. While Maud was being composed Tennyson wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade; a famous poem, not in a manner in which he was born to excel — at least in my poor opinion. “Some one HAD blundered,” and that line was the first fashioned and the keynote of the poem; but, after all, “blundered” is not an exquisite rhyme to “hundred.” The poem, in any case, was most welcome to our army in the Crimea, and is a spirited piece for recitation.

In January 1855 Maud was finished; in April the poet copied it out for the press, and refreshed himself by reading a very different poem, The Lady of the Lake. The author, Sir Walter, had suffered, like the hero of Maud, by an unhappy love affair, which just faintly colours The Lady of the Lake by a single allusion, in the description of Fitz-James’s dreams:-

“Then, — from my couch may heavenly might

Chase that worst phantom of the night! -

Again returned the scenes of youth,

Of confident undoubting truth;

Again his soul he interchanged

With friends whose hearts were long estranged.

They come, in dim procession led,

The cold, the faithless, and the dead;

As warm each hand, each brow as gay,

As if they parted yesterday.

And doubt distracts him at the view -

Oh, were his senses false or true?

Dreamed he of death, or broken vow,

Or is it all a vision now?”

We learn from Lady Louisa Stuart, to whom Scott read these lines, that they referred to his lost love. I cite the passage because the extreme reticence of Scott, in his undying sorrow, is in contrast with what Tennyson, after reading The Lady of the Lake, was putting into the mouth of his complaining lover in Maud.

We have no reason to suppose that Tennyson himself had ever to bewail a faithless love. To be sure, the hero of Locksley Hall is in this attitude, but then Locksley Hall is not autobiographical. Less dramatic and impersonal in appearance are the stanzas -

“Come not, when I am dead,

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave;”

and

“Child, if it were thine error or thy crime

I care no longer, being all unblest.”

No biographer tells us whether this was a personal complaint or a mere set of verses on an imaginary occasion. In In Memoriam Tennyson speaks out concerning the loss of a friend. In Maud, as in Locksley Hall, he makes his hero reveal the agony caused by the loss of a mistress. There is no reason to suppose that the poet had ever any such mischance, but many readers have taken Locksley Hall and Maud for autobiographical revelations, like In Memoriam. They are, on the other hand, imaginative and dramatic. They illustrate the pangs of disappointed love of woman, pangs more complex and more rankling than those inflicted by death. In each case, however, the poet, who has sung so nobly the happiness of fortunate wedded loves, has chosen a hero with whom we do not readily sympathise — a Hamlet in miniature,

“With a heart of furious fancies,”

as in the old mad song. This choice, thanks to the popular misconception, did him some harm. As a “monodramatic Idyll,” a romance in many rich lyric measures, Maud was at first excessively unpopular. “Tennyson’s Maud is Tennyson’s Maudlin,” said a satirist, and “morbid,” “mad,” “rampant,” and “rabid bloodthirstiness of soul,” were among the amenities of criticism. Tennyson hated war, but his hero, at least, hopes that national union in a national struggle will awake a nobler than the commercial spirit. Into the rights and wrongs of our quarrel with Russia we are not to go. Tennyson, rightly or wrongly, took the part of his country, and must “thole the feud” of those high-souled citizens who think their country always in the wrong — as perhaps it very frequently is. We are not to expect a tranquil absence of bias in the midst of military excitement, when very laudable sentiments are apt to misguide men in both directions. In any case, political partisanship added to the enemies of the poem, which was applauded by Henry Taylor, Ruskin, George Brimley, and Jowett, while Mrs Browning sent consoling words from Italy. The poem remained a favourite with the author, who chose passages from it often, when persuaded to read aloud by friends; and modern criticism has not failed to applaud the splendour of the verse and the subtlety of the mad scenes, the passion of the love lyrics.

These merits have ceased to be disputed, but, though a loyal Tennysonian, I have never quite been able to reconcile myself to Maud as a whole. The hero is an unwholesome young man, and not of an original kind. He is un beau tenebreux of 1830. I suppose it has been observed that he is merely The Master of Ravenswood in modern costume, and without Lady Ashton. Her part is taken by Maud’s brother. The situations of the hero and of the Master (whose acquaintance Thackeray never renewed after he lost his hat in the Kelpie Flow) are nearly identical. The families and fathers of both have been ruined by “the gray old wolf,” and by Sir William Ashton, representing the house of Stair. Both heroes live dawdling on, hard by their lost ancestral homes. Both fall in love with the daughters of the enemies of their houses. The loves of both are baffled, and end in tragedy. Both are concerned in a duel, though the Master, on his way to the ground, “stables his steed in the Kelpie Flow,” and the wooer in Maud shoots Lucy Ashton’s brother, — I mean the brother of Maud, — though duelling in England was out of date. Then comes an interval of madness, and he recovers amid the patriotic emotions of the ill-fated Crimean expedition. Both lovers are gloomy, though the Master has better cause, for the Tennysonian hero is more comfortably provided for than Edgar with his “man and maid,” his Caleb and Mysie. Finally, both The Bride of Lammermoor, which affected Tennyson so potently in boyhood

(“A merry merry bridal,

A merry merry day”),

and Maud, excel in passages rather than as wholes.

The hero of Maud, with his clandestine wooing of a girl of sixteen, has this apology, that the match had been, as it were, predestined, and desired by the mother of the lady. Still, the brother did not ill to be angry; and the peevishness of the hero against the brother and the parvenu lord and rival strikes a jarring note. In England, at least, the general sentiment is opposed to this moody, introspective kind of young man, of whom Tennyson is not to be supposed to approve. We do not feel certain that his man and maid were “ever ready to slander and steal.” That seems to be part of his jaundiced way of looking at everything and everybody. He has even a bad word for the “man-god” of modern days, -

“The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain,

An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor.”

Rien n’est sacre for this cynic, who thinks himself a Stoic. Thus Maud was made to be unpopular with the author’s countrymen, who conceived a prejudice against Maud’s lover, described by Tennyson as “a morbid poetic soul, . . . an egotist with the makings of a cynic.” That he is “raised to sanity” (still in Tennyson’s words) “by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature,” the world failed to perceive, especially as the sanity was only a brief lucid interval, tempered by hanging about the garden to meet a girl of sixteen, unknown to her relations. Tennyson added that “different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters,” to which critics replied that they wanted different characters, if only by way of relief, and did not care for any of the phases of passion. The learned Monsieur Janet has maintained that love is a disease like another, and that nobody falls in love when in perfect health of mind and body. This theory seems open to exception, but the hero of Maud is unhealthy enough. At best and last, he only helps to give a martial force a “send-off”:-

“I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath

With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry.”

He did not go out as a volunteer, and probably the Crimean winters brought him back to his original estate of cynical gloom — and very naturally.

The reconciliation with Life is not like the reconciliation of In Memoriam. The poem took its rise in old lines, and most beautiful lines, which Tennyson had contributed in 1837 to a miscellany:-

“O that ‘twere possible,

After long grief and pain,

To find the arms of my true love

Round me once again.”

Thence the poet, working back to find the origin of the situation, encountered the ideas and the persons of Maud.

I have tried to state the sources, in the general mind, of the general dislike of Maud. The public, “driving at practice,” disapproved of the “criticism of life” in the poem; confused the suffering narrator with the author, and neglected the poetry. “No modern poem,” said Jowett, “contains more lines that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any verse out of Shakespeare in which the ecstacy of love soars to such a height.” With these comments we may agree, yet may fail to follow Jowett when he says, “No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power of the same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature.” Shakespeare could not in a narrative poem have preferred the varying passions of one character to the characters of many persons.

Tennyson was “nettled at first,” his son says, “by these captious remarks of the ‘indolent reviewers,’ but afterwards he would take no notice of them except to speak of them in a half-pitiful, half- humorous, half-mournful manner.” The besetting sin and error of the critics was, of course, to confound Tennyson’s hero with himself, as if we confused Dickens with Pip.

Like Aurora Leigh, Lucile, and other works, Maud is under the disadvantage of being, practically, a novel of modern life in verse. Criticised as a tale of modern life (and it was criticised in that character), it could not be very highly esteemed. But the essence of Maud, of course, lies in the poetical vehicle. Nobody can cavil at the impressiveness of the opening stanzas -

“I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood”;

with the keynotes of colour and of desolation struck; the lips of the hollow “dabbled with blood-red heath,” the “red-ribb’d ledges,” and “the flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands”; and the contrast in the picture of the child Maud -

“Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall.”

The poem abounds in lines which live in the memory, as in the vernal description -

“A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime”;

and the voice heard in the garden singing

“A passionate ballad gallant and gay,”

as Lovelace’s Althea, and the lines on the far-off waving of a white hand, “betwixt the cloud and the moon.” The lyric of

“Birds in the high Hall-garden

When twilight was falling,

Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,

They were crying and calling,”

was a favourite of the poet.

“What birds were these?” he is said to have asked a lady suddenly, when reading to a silent company.

“Nightingales,” suggested a listener, who did not probably remember any other fowl that is vocal in the dusk.

“No, they were rooks,” answered the poet.

“Come into the Garden, Maud,” is as fine a love-song as Tennyson ever wrote, with a triumphant ring, and a soaring exultant note. Then the poem drops from its height, like a lark shot high in heaven; tragedy comes, and remorse, and the beautiful interlude of the

“lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl.”

Then follows the exquisite

“O that ‘twere possible,”

and the dull consciousness of the poem of madness, with its dumb gnawing confusion of pain and wandering memory; the hero being finally left, in the author’s words, “sane but shattered.”

Tennyson’s letters of the time show that the critics succeeded in wounding him: it was not a difficult thing to do. Maud was threatened with a broadside from “that pompholygous, broad-blown Apollodorus, the gifted X.” People who have read Aytoun’s diverting Firmilian, where Apollodorus plays his part, and who remember “gifted Gilfillan” in Waverley, know who the gifted X. was. But X. was no great authority south of Tay.

Despite the almost unanimous condemnation by public critics, the success of Maud enabled Tennyson to buy Farringford, so he must have been better appreciated and understood by the world than by the reviewers.

In February 1850 Tennyson returned to his old Arthurian themes, “the only big thing not done,” for Milton had merely glanced at Arthur, Dryden did not

“Raise the Table Round again,”

and Blackmore has never been reckoned adequate. Vivien was first composed as Merlin and Nimue, and then Geraint and Enid was adapted from the Mabinogion, the Welsh collection of Marchen and legends, things of widely different ages, now rather Celtic, or Brythonic, now amplifications made under the influence of mediaeval French romance. Enid was finished in Wales in August, and Tennyson learned Welsh enough to be able to read the Mabinogion, which is much more of Welsh than many Arthurian critics possess. The two first Idylls were privately printed in the summer of 1857, being very rare and much desired of collectors in this embryonic shape. In July Guinevere was begun, in the middle, with Arthur’s valedictory address to his erring consort. In autumn Tennyson visited the late Duke of Argyll at Inveraray: he was much attached to the Duke — unlike Professor Huxley. Their love of nature, the Duke being as keen-eyed as the poet was short-sighted, was one tie of union. The Indian Mutiny, or at least the death of Havelock, was the occasion of lines which the author was too wise to include in any of his volumes: the poem on Lucknow was of later composition.

Guinevere was completed in March 1858; and Tennyson met Mr Swinburne, then very young. “What I particularly admired in him was that he did not press upon me any verses of his own.” Tennyson would have found more to admire if he had pressed for a sight of the verses. Neither he nor Mr Matthew Arnold was very encouraging to young poets: they had no sons in Apollo, like Ben Jonson. But both were kept in a perpetual state of apprehension by the army of versifiers who send volumes by post, to whom that can only be said what Tennyson did say to one of them, “As an amusement to yourself and your friends, the writing it” (verse) “is all very well.” It is the friends who do not find it amusing, while the stranger becomes the foe. The psychology of these pests of the Muses is bewildering. They do not seem to read poetry, only to write it and launch it at unoffending strangers. If they bought each other’s books, all of them could afford to publish.

The Master of Balliol, the most adviceful man, if one may use the term, of his age, appears to have advised Tennyson to publish the Idylls at once. There had been years of silence since Maud, and the Master suspected that “mosquitoes” (reviewers) were the cause. “There is a note needed to show the good side of human nature and to condone its frailties which Thackeray will never strike.” To others it seems that Thackeray was eternally striking this note: at that time in General Lambert, his wife, and daughters, not to speak of other characters in The Virginians. Who does not condone the frailties of Captain Costigan, and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong? In any case, Tennyson took his own time, he was (1858) only beginning Elaine. There is no doubt that Tennyson was easily pricked by unsympathetic criticism, even from the most insignificant source, and, as he confessed, he received little pleasure from praise. All authors, without exception, are sensitive. A sturdier author wrote that he would sometimes have been glad to meet his assailant “where the muir-cock was bailie.” We know how testily Wordsworth replied in defence to the gentlest comments by Lamb.

The Master of Balliol kept insisting, “As to the critics, their power is not really great. . . . One drop of natural feeling in poetry or the true statement of a single new fact is already felt to be of more value than all the critics put together.” Yet even critics may be in the right, and of all great poets, Tennyson listened most obediently to their censures, as we have seen in the case of his early poems. His prolonged silences after the attacks of 1833 and 1855 were occupied in work and reflection: Achilles was not merely sulking in his tent, as some of his friends seem to have supposed. An epic in a series of epic idylls cannot be dashed off like a romantic novel in rhyme; and Tennyson’s method was always one of waiting for maturity of conception and execution.

Mrs Tennyson, doubtless by her lord’s desire, asked the Master (then tutor of Balliol) to suggest themes. Old age was suggested, and is treated in The Grandmother. Other topics were not handled. “I hold most strongly,” said the Master, “that it is the duty of every one who has the good fortune to know a man of genius to do any trifling service they can to lighten his work.” To do every service in his power to every man was the Master’s life-long practice. He was not much at home, his letters show, with Burns, to whom he seems to have attributed John Anderson, my jo, John, while he tells an anecdote of Burns composing Tam o’ Shanter with emotional tears, which, if true at all, is true of the making of To Mary in Heaven. If Burns wept over Tam o’ Shanter, the tears must have been tears of laughter.

The first four Idylls of the King were prepared for publication in the spring of 1859; while Tennyson was at work also on Pelleas and Ettarre, and the Tristram cycle. In autumn he went on a tour to Lisbon with Mr F. T. Palgrave and Mr Craufurd Grove. Returning, he fell eagerly to reading an early copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the crown of his own early speculations on the theory of evolution. “Your theory does not make against Christianity?” he asked Darwin later (1868), who replied, “No, certainly not.” But Darwin has stated the waverings of his own mind in contact with a topic too high for a priori reasoning, and only to be approached, if at all, on the strength of the scientific method applied to facts which science, so far, neglects, or denies, or “explains away,” rather than explains.

The Idylls, unlike Maud, were well received by the press, better by the public, and best of all by friends like Thackeray, the Duke of Argyll, the Master of Balliol, and Clough, while Ruskin showed some reserve. The letter from Thackeray I cannot deny myself the pleasure of citing from the Biography: it was written “in an ardour of claret and gratitude,” but posted some six weeks later:-

FOLKESTONE, September. 36 ONSLOW SQUARE, October.

My Dear Old Alfred, — I owe you a letter of happiness and thanks. Sir, about three weeks ago, when I was ill in bed, I read the Idylls of the King, and I thought, “Oh, I must write to him now, for this pleasure, this delight, this splendour of happiness which I have been enjoying.” But I should have blotted the sheets, ‘tis ill writing on one’s back. The letter full of gratitude never went as far as the post-office, and how comes it now?

D’abord, a bottle of claret. (The landlord of the hotel asked me down to the cellar and treated me.) Then afterwards sitting here, an old magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, 1850, and I come on a poem out of The Princess which says, “I hear the horns of Elfland blowing, blowing,” — no, it’s “the horns of Elfland faintly blowing” (I have been into my bedroom to fetch my pen and it has made that blot), and, reading the lines, which only one man in the world could write, I thought about the other horns of Elfland blowing in full strength, and Arthur in gold armour, and Guinevere in gold hair, and all those knights and heroes and beauties and purple landscapes and misty gray lakes in which you have made me live. They seem like facts to me, since about three weeks ago (three weeks or a month was it?) when I read the book. It is on the table yonder, and I don’t like, somehow, to disturb it, but the delight and gratitude! You have made me as happy as I was as a child with the Arabian Nights, — every step I have walked in Elfland has been a sort of Paradise to me. (The landlord gave TWO bottles of his claret and I think I drank the most) and here I have been lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful Idylls, my thoughts being turned to you: what could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so happy? Do you understand that what I mean is all true, and that I should break out were you sitting opposite with a pipe in your mouth? Gold and purple and diamonds, I say, gentlemen, and glory and love and honour, and if you haven’t given me all these why should I be in such an ardour of gratitude? But I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has ever come to me since I was a young man; to write and think about it makes me almost young, and this I suppose is what I’m doing, like an after-dinner speech.

P.S. — I thought the “Grandmother” quite as fine. How can you at 50 be doing things as well as at 35?

October 16th. — (I should think six weeks after the writing of the above.)

The rhapsody of gratitude was never sent, and for a peculiar reason: just about the time of writing I came to an arrangement with Smith & Elder to edit their new magazine, and to have a contribution from T. was the publishers’ and editor’s highest ambition. But to ask a man for a favour, and to praise and bow down before him in the same page, seemed to be so like hypocrisy, that I held my hand, and left this note in my desk, where it has been lying during a little French- Italian-Swiss tour which my girls and their papa have been making.

Meanwhile S. E. & Co. have been making their own proposals to you, and you have replied not favourably, I am sorry to hear; but now there is no reason why you should not have my homages, and I am just as thankful for the Idylls, and love and admire them just as much, as I did two months ago when I began to write in that ardour of claret and gratitude. If you can’t write for us you can’t. If you can by chance some day, and help an old friend, how pleased and happy I shall be! This however must be left to fate and your convenience: I don’t intend to give up hope, but accept the good fortune if it comes. I see one, two, three quarterlies advertised to-day, as all bringing laurels to laureatus. He will not refuse the private tribute of an old friend, will he? You don’t know how pleased the girls were at Kensington t’other day to hear you quote their father’s little verses, and he too I daresay was not disgusted. He sends you and yours his very best regards in this most heartfelt and artless

(note of admiration)! Always yours, my dear Alfred, W. M. THACKERAY.

Naturally this letter gave Tennyson more pleasure than all the converted critics with their favourable reviews. The Duke of Argyll announced the conversion of Macaulay. The Master found Elaine “the fairest, sweetest, purest love poem in the English language.” As to the whole, “The allegory in the distance GREATLY STRENGTHENS, ALSO ELEVATES, THE MEANING OF THE POEM.”

Ruskin, like some other critics, felt “the art and finish in these poems a little more than I like to feel it.” Yet Guinevere and Elaine had been rapidly written and little corrected. I confess to the opinion that what a man does most easily is, as a rule, what he does best. We know that the “art and finish” of Shakespeare were spontaneous, and so were those of Tennyson. Perfection in art is sometimes more sudden than we think, but then “the long preparation for it, — that unseen germination, THAT is what we ignore and forget.” But he wisely kept his pieces by him for a long time, restudying them with a fresh eye. The “unreality” of the subject also failed to please Ruskin, as it is a stumbling-block to others. He wanted poems on “the living present,” a theme not selected by Homer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Virgil, or the Greek dramatists, except (among surviving plays) in the Persae of AEschylus. The poet who can transfigure the hot present is fortunate, but most, and the greatest, have visited the cool quiet purlieus of the past.

CHAPTER VII. — THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

The Idylls may probably be best considered in their final shape: they are not an epic, but a series of heroic idyllia of the same genre as the heroic idyllia of Theocritus. He wrote long after the natural age of national epic, the age of Homer. He saw the later literary epic rise in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, a poem with many beauties, if rather an archaistic and elaborate revival as a whole. The time for long narrative poems, Theocritus appears to have thought, was past, and he only ventured on the heroic idyllia of Heracles, and certain adventures of the Argonauts. Tennyson, too, from the first believed that his pieces ought to be short. Therefore, though he had a conception of his work as a whole, a conception long mused on, and sketched in various lights, he produced no epic, only a series of epic idyllia. He had a spiritual conception, “an allegory in the distance,” an allegory not to be insisted upon, though its presence was to be felt. No longer, as in youth, did Tennyson intend Merlin to symbolise “the sceptical understanding” (as if one were to “break into blank the gospel of” Herr Kant), or poor Guinevere to stand for the Blessed Reformation, or the Table Round for Liberal Institutions. Mercifully Tennyson never actually allegorised Arthur in that fashion. Later he thought of a musical masque of Arthur, and sketched a scenario. Finally Tennyson dropped both the allegory of Liberal principles and the musical masque in favour of the series of heroic idylls. There was only a “parabolic drift” in the intention. “There is no single fact or incident in the Idylls, however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained without any mystery or allegory whatever. The Idylls ought to be read (and the right readers never dream of doing anything else) as romantic poems, just like Browning’s Childe Roland, in which the wrong readers (the members of the Browning Society) sought for mystic mountains and marvels. Yet Tennyson had his own interpretation, “a dream of man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin.” That was his “interpretation,” or “allegory in the distance.”

People may be heard objecting to the suggestion of any spiritual interpretation of the Arthur legends, and even to the existence of elementary morality among the Arthurian knights and ladies. There seems to be a notion that “bold bawdry and open manslaughter,” as Roger Ascham said, are the staple of Tennyson’s sources, whether in the mediaeval French, the Welsh, or in Malory’s compilation, chiefly from French sources. Tennyson is accused of “Bowdlerising” these, and of introducing gentleness, courtesy, and conscience into a literature where such qualities were unknown. I must confess myself ignorant of any early and popular, or “primitive” literature, in which human virtues, and the human conscience, do not play their part. Those who object to Tennyson’s handling of the great Arthurian cycle, on the ground that he is too refined and too moral, must either never have read or must long have forgotten even Malory’s romance. Thus we read, in a recent novel, that Lancelot was an homme aux bonnes fortunes, whereas Lancelot was the most loyal of lovers.

Among other critics, Mr Harrison has objected that the Arthurian world of Tennyson “is not quite an ideal world. Therein lies the difficulty. The scene, though not of course historic, has certain historic suggestions and characters.” It is not apparent who the historic characters are, for the real Arthur is but a historic phantasm. “But then, in the midst of so much realism, the knights, from Arthur downwards, talk and act in ways with which we are familiar in modern ethical and psychological novels, but which are as impossible in real mediaeval knights as a Bengal tiger or a Polar bear would be in a drawing-room.” I confess to little acquaintance with modern ethical novels; but real mediaeval knights, and still more the knights of mediaeval romance, were capable of very ethical actions. To halt an army for the protection and comfort of a laundress was a highly ethical action. Perhaps Sir Redvers Buller would do it: Bruce did. Mr Harrison accuses the ladies of the Idylls of soul-bewildering casuistry, like that of women in Middlemarch or Helbeck of Bannisdale. Now I am not reminded by Guinevere, and Elaine, and Enid, of ladies in these ethical novels. But the women of the mediaeval Cours d’Amour (the originals from whom the old romancers drew) were nothing if not casuists. “Spiritual delicacy” (as they understood it) was their delight.

Mr Harrison even argues that Malory’s men lived hot-blooded lives in fierce times, “before an idea had arisen in the world of ‘reverencing conscience,’ ‘leading sweet lives,’” and so on. But he admits that they had “fantastic ideals of ‘honour’ and ‘love.’” As to “fantastic,” that is a matter of opinion, but to have ideals and to live in accordance with them is to “reverence conscience”, which the heroes of the romances are said by Mr Harrison never to have had an idea of doing. They are denied even “amiable words and courtliness.” Need one say that courtliness is the dominant note of mediaeval knights, in history as in romance? With discourtesy Froissart would “head the count of crimes.” After a battle, he says, Scots knights and English would thank each other for a good fight, “not like the Germans.” “And now, I dare say,” said Malory’s Sir Ector, “thou, Sir Lancelot, wast the curtiest knight that ever bare shield, . . . and thou wast the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies.” Observe Sir Lancelot in the difficult pass where the Lily Maid offers her love: “Jesu defend me, for then I rewarded your father and your brother full evil for their great goodness. . . . But because, fair damsel, that ye love me as ye say ye do, I will, for your good will and kindness, show you some goodness, . . . and always while I live to be your true knight.” Here are “amiable words and courtesy.” I cannot agree with Mr Harrison that Malory’s book is merely “a fierce lusty epic.” That was not the opinion of its printer and publisher, Caxton. He produced it as an example of “the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in these days, . . . noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, love, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil.”

In reaction against the bold-faced heroines and sensual amours of some of the old French romances, an ideal of exaggerated asceticism, of stainless chastity, notoriously pervades the portion of Malory’s work which deals with the Holy Grail. Lancelot is distraught when he finds that, by dint of enchantment, he has been made false to Guinevere (Book XI. chap. viii.) After his dreaming vision of the Holy Grail, with the reproachful Voice, Sir Lancelot said, “My sin and my wickedness have brought me great dishonour, . . . and now I see and understand that my old sin hindereth and shameth me.” He was human, the Lancelot of Malory, and “fell to his old love again,” with a heavy heart, and with long penance at the end. How such good knights can be deemed conscienceless and void of courtesy one knows not, except by a survival of the Puritanism of Ascham. But Tennyson found in the book what is in the book — honour, conscience, courtesy, and the hero -

“Whose honour rooted in dishonour stood,

And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”

Malory’s book, which was Tennyson’s chief source, ends by being the tragedy of the conscience of Lancelot. Arthur is dead, or “In Avalon he groweth old.” The Queen and Lancelot might sing, as Lennox reports that Queen Mary did after Darnley’s murder -

“Weel is me

For I am free.”

“Why took they not their pastime?” Because conscience forbade, and Guinevere sends her lover far from her, and both die in religion. Thus Malory’s “fierce lusty epic” is neither so lusty nor so fierce but that it gives Tennyson his keynote: the sin that breaks the fair companionship, and is bitterly repented.

“The knights are almost too polite to kill each other,” the critic urges. In Malory they are sometimes quite too polite to kill each other. Sir Darras has a blood-feud against Sir Tristram, and Sir Tristram is in his dungeon. Sir Darras said, “Wit ye well that Sir Darras shall never destroy such a noble knight as thou art in prison, howbeit that thou hast slain three of my sons, whereby I was greatly aggrieved. But now shalt thou go and thy fellows. . . . All that ye did,” said Sir Darras, “was by force of knighthood, and that was the cause I would not put you to death” (Book IX. chap. xl.)

Tennyson is accused of “emasculating the fierce lusty epic into a moral lesson, as if it were to be performed in a drawing-room by an academy of young ladies” — presided over, I daresay, by “Anglican clergymen.” I know not how any one who has read the Morte d’Arthur can blame Tennyson in the matter. Let Malory and his sources be blamed, if to be moral is to be culpable. A few passages apart, there is no coarseness in Malory; that there are conscience, courtesy, “sweet lives,” “keeping down the base in man,” “amiable words,” and all that Tennyson gives, and, in Mr Harrison’s theory, gives without authority in the romance, my quotations from Malory demonstrate. They are chosen at a casual opening of his book. That there “had not arisen in the world” “the idea of reverencing conscience” before the close of the fifteenth century A.D. is an extraordinary statement for a critic of history to offer.

Mr Harrison makes his protest because “in the conspiracy of silence into which Tennyson’s just fame has hypnotised the critics, it is bare honesty to admit defects.” I think I am not hypnotised, and I do not regard the Idylls as the crown of Tennyson’s work. But it is not his “defect” to have introduced generosity, gentleness, conscience, and chastity where no such things occur in his sources. Take Sir Darras: his position is that of Priam when he meets Achilles, who slew his sons, except that Priam comes as a suppliant; Sir Darras has Tristram in his hands, and may slay him. He is “too polite,” as Mr Harrison says: he is too good a Christian, or too good a gentleman. One would not have given a tripod for the life of Achilles had he fallen into the hands of Priam. But between 1200 B.C. (or so) and the date of Malory, new ideas about “living sweet lives” had arisen. Where and when do they not arise? A British patrol fired on certain Swazis in time of truce. Their lieutenant, who had been absent when this occurred, rode alone to the stronghold of the Swazi king, Sekukoeni, and gave himself up, expecting death by torture. “Go, sir,” said the king; “we too are gentlemen.” The idea of a “sweet life” of honour had dawned even on Sekukoeni: it lights up Malory’s romance, and is reflected in Tennyson’s Idylls, doubtless with some modernism of expression.

That the Idylls represent no real world is certain. That Tennyson modernises and moralises too much, I willingly admit; what I deny is that he introduces gentleness, courtesy, and conscience where his sources have none. Indeed this is not a matter of critical opinion, but of verifiable fact. Any one can read Malory and judge for himself. But the world in which the Idylls move could not be real. For more than a thousand years different races, different ages, had taken hold of the ancient Celtic legends and spiritualised them after their own manner, and moulded them to their own ideals. There may have been a historical Arthur, Comes Britanniae, after the Roman withdrawal. Ye Amherawdyr Arthur, “the Emperor Arthur,” may have lived and fought, and led the Brythons to battle. But there may also have been a Brythonic deity, or culture hero, of the same, or of a similar name, and myths about him may have been assigned to a real Arthur. Again, the Arthur of the old Welsh legends was by no means the blameless king — even in comparatively late French romances he is not blameless. But the process of idealising him went on: still incomplete in Malory’s compilation, where he is often rather otiose and far from royal. Tennyson, for his purpose, completed the idealisation.

As to Guinevere, she was not idealised in the old Welsh rhyme -

“Guinevere, Giant Ogurvan’s daughter,

Naughty young, more naughty later.”

Of Lancelot, and her passion for him, the old Welsh has nothing to say. Probably Chretien de Troyes, by a happy blunder or misconception, gave Lancelot his love and his pre-eminent part. Lancelot was confused with Peredur, and Guinevere with the lady of whom Peredur was in quest. The Elaine who becomes by Lancelot the mother of Galahad “was Lancelot’s rightful consort, as one recognises in her name that of Elen, the Empress, whom the story of Peredur” (Lancelot, by the confusion) “gives that hero to wife.” The second Elaine, the maid of Astolat, is another refraction from the original Elen. As to the Grail, it may be a Christianised rendering of one or another of the magical and mystic caldrons of Welsh or Irish legend. There is even an apparent Celtic source of the mysterious fisher king of the Grail romance.

A sketch of the evolution of the Arthurian legends might run thus:-

Sixth to eighth century, growth of myth about an Arthur, real, or supposed to be real.

Tenth century, the Duchies of Normandy and Brittany are in close relations; by the eleventh century Normans know Celtic Arthurian stories.

After, 1066, Normans in contact with the Celtic peoples of this island are in touch with the Arthur tales.

1130-1145, works on Arthurian matter by Geoffrey of Monmouth.

1155, Wace’s French translation of Geoffrey.

1150-1182, Chretien de Troyes writes poems on Arthurian topics.

French prose romances on Arthur, from, say, 1180 to 1250. Those romances reach Wales, and modify, in translations, the original Welsh legends, or, in part, supplant them.

Amplifications and recastings are numerous. In 1485 Caxton publishes

Malory’s selections from French and English sources, the whole being

Tennyson’s main source, Le Mort d’Arthur.

Thus the Arthur stories, originally Celtic, originally a mass of semi-pagan legend, myth, and marchen, have been retold and rehandled by Norman, Englishman, and Frenchman, taking on new hues, expressing new ideals — religious, chivalrous, and moral. Any poet may work his will on them, and Tennyson’s will was to retain the chivalrous courtesy, generosity, love, and asceticism, while dimly or brightly veiling or illuminating them with his own ideals. After so many processes, from folk-tale to modern idyll, the Arthurian world could not be real, and real it is not. Camelot lies “out of space, out of time,” though the colouring is mainly that of the later chivalry, and “the gleam” on the hues is partly derived from Celtic fancy of various dates, and is partly Tennysonian.

As the Idylls were finally arranged, the first, The Coming of Arthur, is a remarkable proof of Tennyson’s ingenuity in construction. Tales about the birth of Arthur varied. In Malory, Uther Pendragon, the Bretwalda (in later phrase) of Britain, besieges the Duke of Tintagil, who has a fair wife, Ygerne, in another castle. Merlin magically puts on Uther the shape of Ygerne’s husband, and as her husband she receives him. On that night Arthur is begotten by Uther, and the Duke of Tintagil, his mother’s husband, is slain in a sortie. Uther weds Ygerne; both recognise Arthur as their child. However, by the Celtic custom of fosterage the infant is intrusted to Sir Ector as his dalt, or foster-child, and Uther falls in battle. Arthur is later approven king by the adventure of drawing from the stone the magic sword that no other king could move. This adventure answers to Sigmund’s drawing the sword from the Branstock, in the Volsunga Saga, “Now men stand up, and none would fain be the last to lay hand to the sword,” apparently stricken into the pillar by Woden. “But none who came thereto might avail to pull it out, for in nowise would it come away howsoever they tugged at it, but now up comes Sigmund, King Volsung’s son, and sets hand to the sword, and pulls it from the stock, even as if it lay loose before him.” The incident in the Arthurian as in the Volsunga legend is on a par with the Golden Bough, in the sixth book of the AEneid. Only the predestined champion, such as AEneas, can pluck, or break, or cut the bough -

”Ipse volens facilisque sequetur

Si te fata vocant.”

All this ancient popular element in the Arthur story is disregarded by Tennyson. He does not make Uther approach Ygerne in the semblance of her lord, as Zeus approached Alcmena in the semblance of her husband, Amphitryon. He neglects the other ancient test of the proving of Arthur by his success in drawing the sword. The poet’s object is to enfold the origin and birth of Arthur in a spiritual mystery. This is deftly accomplished by aid of the various versions of the tale that reach King Leodogran when Arthur seeks the hand of his daughter Guinevere, for Arthur’s title to the crown is still disputed, so Leodogran makes inquiries. The answers first leave it dubious whether Arthur is son of Gorlois, husband of Ygerne, or of Uther, who slew Gorlois and married her:-

“Enforced she was to wed him in her tears.”

The Celtic custom of fosterage is overlooked, and Merlin gives the child to Anton, not as the customary dalt, but to preserve the babe from danger. Queen Bellicent then tells Leodogran, from the evidence of Bleys, Merlin’s master in necromancy, the story of Arthur’s miraculous advent.

“And down the wave and in the flame was borne

A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,

Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried ‘The King!

Here is an heir for Uther!’”

But Merlin, when asked by Bellicent to corroborate the statement of

Bleys, merely

“Answer’d in riddling triplets of old time.”

Finally, Leodogran’s faith is confirmed by a vision. Thus doubtfully, amidst rumour and portent, cloud and spiritual light, comes Arthur: “from the great deep” he comes, and in as strange fashion, at the end, “to the great deep he goes” — a king to be accepted in faith or rejected by doubt. Arthur and his ideal are objects of belief. All goes well while the knights hold that

“The King will follow Christ, and we the King,

In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing.”

In history we find the same situation in the France of 1429 -

“The King will follow Jeanne, and we the King.”

While this faith held, all went well; when the king ceased to follow, the spell was broken, — the Maid was martyred. In this sense the poet conceives the coming of Arthur, a sign to be spoken against, a test of high purposes, a belief redeeming and ennobling till faith fails, and the little rift within the lute, the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, makes discord of the music. As matter of legend, it is to be understood that Guinevere did not recognise Arthur when first he rode below her window -

“Since he neither wore on helm or shield

The golden symbol of his kinglihood.”

But Lancelot was sent to bring the bride -

”And return’d

Among the flowers, in May, with Guinevere.”

Then their long love may have begun, as in the story of Tristram sent to bring Yseult to be the bride of King Mark. In Malory, however, Lancelot does not come on the scene till after Arthur’s wedding and return from his conquering expedition to Rome. Then Lancelot wins renown, “wherefore Queen Guinevere had him in favour above all other knights; and in certain he loved the Queen again above all other ladies damosels of his life.” Lancelot, as we have seen, is practically a French creation, adopted to illustrate the chivalrous theory of love, with its bitter fruit. Though not of the original Celtic stock of legend, Sir Lancelot makes the romance what it is, and draws down the tragedy that originally turned on the sin of Arthur himself, the sin that gave birth to the traitor Modred. But the mediaeval romancers disguised that form of the story, and the process of idealising Arthur reached such heights in the middle ages that Tennyson thought himself at liberty to paint the Flos Regum, “the blameless King.” He followed the Brut ab Arthur. “In short, God has not made since Adam was, the man more perfect than Arthur.” This is remote from the Arthur of the oldest Celtic legends, but justifies the poet in adapting Arthur to the ideal hero of the Idylls:-

“Ideal manhood closed in real man,

Rather than that grey king, whose name, a ghost,

Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak,

And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him

Of Geoffrey’s book, or him of Malleor’s, one

Touched by the adulterous finger of a time

That hovered between war and wantonness,

And crownings and dethronements.”

The poetical beauties of The Coming of Arthur excel those of Gareth and Lynette. The sons of Lot and Bellicent seem to have been originally regarded as the incestuous offspring of Arthur and his sister, the wife of King Lot. Next it was represented that Arthur was ignorant of the relationship. Mr Rhys supposes that the mythical scandal (still present in Malory as a sin of ignorance) arose from blending the Celtic Arthur (as Culture Hero) with an older divine personage, such as Zeus, who marries his sister Hera. Marriages of brother and sister are familiar in the Egyptian royal house, and that of the Incas. But the poet has a perfect right to disregard a scandalous myth which, obviously crystallised later about the figure of the mythical Celtic Arthur, was an incongruous accretion to his legend. Gareth, therefore, is merely Arthur’s nephew, not son, in the poem, as are Gawain and the traitor Modred. The story seems to be rather mediaeval French than Celtic — a mingling of the spirit of fabliau and popular fairy tale. The poet has added to its lightness, almost frivolity, the description of the unreal city of Camelot, built to music, as when

“Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers.”

He has also brought in the allegory of Death, which, when faced, proves to be “a blooming boy” behind the mask. The courtesy and prowess of Lancelot lead up to the later development of his character.

In The Marriage of Geraint, a rumour has already risen about Lancelot and the Queen, darkening the Court, and presaging

“The world’s loud whisper breaking into storm.”

For this reason Geraint removes Enid from Camelot to his own land — the poet thus early leading up to the sin and the doom of Lancelot. But this motive does not occur in the Welsh story of Enid and Geraint, which Tennyson has otherwise followed with unwonted closeness. The tale occurs in French romances in various forms, but it appears to have returned, by way of France and coloured with French influences, to Wales, where it is one of the later Mabinogion. The characters are Celtic, and Nud, father of Edyrn, Geraint’s defeated antagonist, appears to be recognised by Mr Rhys as “the Celtic Zeus.” The manners and the tournaments are French. In the Welsh tale Geraint and Enid are bedded in Arthur’s own chamber, which seems to be a symbolic commutation of the jus primae noctis a custom of which the very existence is disputed. This unseemly antiquarian detail, of course, is omitted in the Idyll.

An abstract of the Welsh tale will show how closely Tennyson here follows his original. News is brought into Arthur’s Court of the appearance of a white stag. The king arranges a hunt, and Guinevere asks leave to go and watch the sport. Next morning she cannot be wakened, though the tale does not aver, like the Idyll, that she was

“Lost in sweet dreams, and dreaming of her love

For Lancelot.”

Guinevere wakes late, and rides through a ford of Usk to the hunt. Geraint follows, “a golden-hilted sword was at his side, and a robe and a surcoat of satin were upon him, and two shoes of leather upon his feet, and around him was a scarf of blue purple, at each corner of which was a golden apple”:-

“But Guinevere lay late into the morn,

Lost in sweet dreams, and dreaming of her love

For Lancelot, and forgetful of the hunt;

But rose at last, a single maiden with her,

Took horse, and forded Usk, and gain’d the wood;

There, on a little knoll beside it, stay’d

Waiting to hear the hounds; but heard instead

A sudden sound of hoofs, for Prince Geraint,

Late also, wearing neither hunting-dress

Nor weapon, save a golden-hilted brand,

Came quickly flashing thro’ the shallow ford

Behind them, and so gallop’d up the knoll.

A purple scarf, at either end whereof

There swung an apple of the purest gold,

Sway’d round about him, as he gallop’d up

To join them, glancing like a dragon-fly

In summer suit and silks of holiday.”

The encounter with the dwarf, the lady, and the knight follows. The prose of the Mabinogi may be compared with the verse of Tennyson:-

“Geraint,” said Gwenhwyvar, “knowest thou the name of that tall knight yonder?” “I know him not,” said he, “and the strange armour that he wears prevents my either seeing his face or his features.” “Go, maiden,” said Gwenhwyvar, “and ask the dwarf who that knight is.” Then the maiden went up to the dwarf; and the dwarf waited for the maiden, when he saw her coming towards him. And the maiden inquired of the dwarf who the knight was. “I will not tell thee,” he answered. “Since thou art so churlish as not to tell me,” said she, “I will ask him himself.” “Thou shalt not ask him, by my faith,” said he. “Wherefore?” said she. “Because thou art not of honour sufficient to befit thee to speak to my Lord.” Then the maiden turned her horse’s head towards the knight, upon which the dwarf struck her with the whip that was in his hand across the face and the eyes, until the blood flowed forth. And the maiden, through the hurt she received from the blow, returned to Gwenhwyvar, complaining of the pain. “Very rudely has the dwarf treated thee,” said Geraint. “I will go myself to know who the knight is.” “Go,” said Gwenhwyvar. And Geraint went up to the dwarf. “Who is yonder knight?” said Geraint. “I will not tell thee,” said the dwarf. “Then will I ask him himself,” said he. “That wilt thou not, by my faith,” said the dwarf; “thou art not honourable enough to speak with my Lord.” Said Geraint, “I have spoken with men of equal rank with him.” And he turned his horse’s head towards the knight; but the dwarf overtook him, and struck him as he had done the maiden, so that the blood coloured the scarf that Geraint wore. Then Geraint put his hand upon the hilt of his sword, but he took counsel with himself, and considered that it would be no vengeance for him to slay the dwarf, and to be attacked unarmed by the armed knight, so he returned to where Gwenhwyvar was.

”And while they listen’d for the distant hunt,

And chiefly for the baying of Cavall,

King Arthur’s hound of deepest mouth, there rode

Full slowly by a knight, lady, and dwarf;

Whereof the dwarf lagg’d latest, and the knight

Had vizor up, and show’d a youthful face,

Imperious, and of haughtiest lineaments.

And Guinevere, not mindful of his face

In the King’s hall, desired his name, and sent

Her maiden to demand it of the dwarf;

Who being vicious, old and irritable,

And doubling all his master’s vice of pride,

Made answer sharply that she should not know.

‘Then will I ask it of himself,’ she said.

‘Nay, by my faith, thou shalt not,’ cried the dwarf;

‘Thou art not worthy ev’n to speak of him’;

And when she put her horse toward the knight,

Struck at her with his whip, and she return’d

Indignant to the Queen; whereat Geraint

Exclaiming, ‘Surely I will learn the name,’

Made sharply to the dwarf, and ask’d it of him,

Who answer’d as before; and when the Prince

Had put his horse in motion toward the knight,

Struck at him with his whip, and cut his cheek.

The Prince’s blood spirted upon the scarf,

Dyeing it; and his quick, instinctive hand

Caught at the hilt, as to abolish him:

But he, from his exceeding manfulness

And pure nobility of temperament,

Wroth to be wroth at such a worm, refrain’d

From ev’n a word.”

The self-restraint of Geraint, who does not slay the dwarf,

”From his exceeding manfulness

And pure nobility of temperament,”

may appear “too polite,” and too much in accord with the still undiscovered idea of “leading sweet lives.” However, the uninvented idea does occur in the Welsh original: “Then Geraint put his hand upon the hilt of his sword, but he took counsel with himself, and considered that it would be no vengeance for him to slay the dwarf,” while he also reflects that he would be “attacked unarmed by the armed knight.” Perhaps Tennyson may be blamed for omitting this obvious motive for self-restraint. Geraint therefore follows the knight in hope of finding arms, and arrives at the town all busy with preparations for the tournament of the sparrow-hawk. This was a challenge sparrow-hawk: the knight had won it twice, and if he won it thrice it would be his to keep. The rest, in the tale, is exactly followed in the Idyll. Geraint is entertained by the ruined Yniol. The youth bears the “costrel” full of “good purchased mead” (the ruined Earl not brewing for himself), and Enid carries the manchet bread in her veil, “old, and beginning to be worn out.” All Tennyson’s own is the beautiful passage -

”And while he waited in the castle court,

The voice of Enid, Yniol’s daughter, rang

Clear thro’ the open casement of the hall,

Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird,

Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,

Moves him to think what kind of bird it is

That sings so delicately clear, and make

Conjecture of the plumage and the form;

So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint;

And made him like a man abroad at morn

When first the liquid note beloved of men

Comes flying over many a windy wave

To Britain, and in April suddenly

Breaks from a coppice gemm’d with green and red,

And he suspends his converse with a friend,

Or it may be the labour of his hands,

To think or say, ‘There is the nightingale’;

So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said,

‘Here, by God’s grace, is the one voice for me.’”

Yniol frankly admits in the tale that he was in the wrong in the quarrel with his nephew. The poet, however, gives him the right, as is natural. The combat is exactly followed in the Idyll, as is Geraint’s insistence in carrying his bride to Court in her faded silks. Geraint, however, leaves Court with Enid, not because of the scandal about Lancelot, but to do his duty in his own country. He becomes indolent and uxorious, and Enid deplores his weakness, and awakes his suspicions, thus:-

And one morning in the summer time they were upon their couch, and Geraint lay upon the edge of it. And Enid was without sleep in the apartment which had windows of glass. And the sun shone upon the couch. And the clothes had slipped from off his arms and his breast, and he was asleep. Then she gazed upon the marvellous beauty of his appearance, and she said, “Alas, and am I the cause that these arms and this breast have lost their glory and the warlike fame which they once so richly enjoyed!” And as she said this, the tears dropped from her eyes, and they fell upon his breast. And the tears she shed, and the words she had spoken, awoke him; and another thing contributed to awaken him, and that was the idea that it was not in thinking of him that she spoke thus, but that it was because she loved some other man more than him, and that she wished for other society, and thereupon Geraint was troubled in his mind, and he called his squire; and when he came to him, “Go quickly,” said he, “and prepare my horse and my arms, and make them ready. And do thou arise,” said he to Enid, “and apparel thyself; and cause thy horse to be accoutred, and clothe thee in the worst riding-dress that thou hast in thy possession. And evil betide me,” said he, “if thou returnest here until thou knowest whether I have lost my strength so completely as thou didst say. And if it be so, it will then be easy for thee to seek the society thou didst wish for of him of whom thou wast thinking.” So she arose, and clothed herself in her meanest garments. “I know nothing, Lord,” said she, “of thy meaning.” “Neither wilt thou know at this time,” said he.

”At last, it chanced that on a summer morn

(They sleeping each by either) the new sun

Beat thro’ the blindless casement of the room,

And heated the strong warrior in his dreams;

Who, moving, cast the coverlet aside,

And bared the knotted column of his throat,

The massive square of his heroic breast,

And arms on which the standing muscle sloped,

As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,

Running too vehemently to break upon it.

And Enid woke and sat beside the couch,

Admiring him, and thought within herself,

Was ever man so grandly made as he?

Then, like a shadow, past the people’s talk

And accusation of uxoriousness

Across her mind, and bowing over him,

Low to her own heart piteously she said:

’O noble breast and all-puissant arms,

Am I the cause, I the poor cause that men

Reproach you, saying all your force is gone?

I AM the cause, because I dare not speak

And tell him what I think and what they say.

And yet I hate that he should linger here;

I cannot love my lord and not his name.

Far liefer had I gird his harness on him,

And ride with him to battle and stand by,

And watch his mightful hand striking great blows

At caitiffs and at wrongers of the world.

Far better were I laid in the dark earth,

Not hearing any more his noble voice,

Not to be folded more in these dear arms,

And darken’d from the high light in his eyes,

Than that my lord thro’ me should suffer shame.

Am I so bold, and could I so stand by,

And see my dear lord wounded in the strife,

Or maybe pierced to death before mine eyes,

And yet not dare to tell him what I think,

And how men slur him, saying all his force

Is melted into mere effeminacy?

O me, I fear that I am no true wife.’

Half inwardly, half audibly she spoke,

And the strong passion in her made her weep

True tears upon his broad and naked breast,

And these awoke him, and by great mischance

He heard but fragments of her later words,

And that she fear’d she was not a true wife.

And then he thought, ‘In spite of all my care,

For all my pains, poor man, for all my pains,

She is not faithful to me, and I see her

Weeping for some gay knight in Arthur’s hall.’

Then tho’ he loved and reverenced her too much

To dream she could be guilty of foul act,

Right thro’ his manful breast darted the pang

That makes a man, in the sweet face of her

Whom he loves most, lonely and miserable.

At this he hurl’d his huge limbs out of bed,

And shook his drowsy squire awake and cried,

‘My charger and her palfrey’; then to her,

‘I will ride forth into the wilderness;

For tho’ it seems my spurs are yet to win,

I have not fall’n so low as some would wish.

And thou, put on thy worst and meanest dress

And ride with me.’ And Enid ask’d, amazed,

‘If Enid errs, let Enid learn her fault.’

But he, ‘I charge thee, ask not, but obey.’

Then she bethought her of a faded silk,

A faded mantle and a faded veil,

And moving toward a cedarn cabinet,

Wherein she kept them folded reverently

With sprigs of summer laid between the folds,

She took them, and array’d herself therein,

Remembering when first he came on her

Drest in that dress, and how he loved her in it,

And all her foolish fears about the dress,

And all his journey to her, as himself

Had told her, and their coming to the court.”

Tennyson’s

“Arms on which the standing muscle sloped,

As slopes a wild brook o’er a little stone,

Running too vehemently to break upon it,”

is suggested perhaps by Theocritus—”The muscles on his brawny arms stood out like rounded rocks that the winter torrent has rolled and worn smooth, in the great swirling stream” (Idyll xxii.)

The second part of the poem follows the original less closely. Thus Limours, in the tale, is not an old suitor of Enid; Edyrn does not appear to the rescue; certain cruel games, veiled in a magic mist, occur in the tale, and are omitted by the poet; “Gwyffert petit, so called by the Franks, whom the Cymry call the Little King,” in the tale, is not a character in the Idyll, and, generally, the gross Celtic exaggerations of Geraint’s feats are toned down by Tennyson. In other respects, as when Geraint eats the mowers’ dinner, the tale supplies the materials. But it does not dwell tenderly on the reconciliation. The tale is more or less in the vein of “patient Grizel,” and he who told it is more concerned with the fighting than with amoris redintegratio, and the sufferings of Enid. The Idyll is enriched with many beautiful pictures from nature, such as this:-

“But at the flash and motion of the man

They vanish’d panic-stricken, like a shoal

Of darting fish, that on a summer morn

Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot

Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand,

But if a man who stands upon the brink

But lift a shining hand against the sun,

There is not left the twinkle of a fin

Betwixt the cressy islets white in flower;

So, scared but at the motion of the man,

Fled all the boon companions of the Earl,

And left him lying in the public way.”

In Balin and Balan Tennyson displays great constructive power, and remarkable skill in moulding the most recalcitrant materials. Balin or Balyn, according to Mr Rhys, is the Belinus of Geoffrey of Monmouth, “whose name represents the Celtic divinity described in Latin as Apollo Belenus or Belinus.”  In Geoffrey, Belinus, euphemerised, or reduced from god to hero, has a brother, Brennius, the Celtic Bran, King of Britain from Caithness to the Humber. Belinus drives Bran into exile. “Thus it is seen that Belinus or Balyn was, mythologically speaking, the natural enemy” (as Apollo Belinus, the radiant god) “of the dark divinity Bran or Balan.”

If this view be correct, the two brothers answer to the good and bad principles of myths like that of the Huron Iouskeha the Sun, and Anatensic the Moon, or rather Taouiscara and Iouskeha, the hostile brothers, Black and White.  These mythical brethren are, in Malory, two knights of Northumberland, Balin the wild and Balan. Their adventures are mixed up with a hostile Lady of the Lake, whom Balin slays in Arthur’s presence, with a sword which none but Balin can draw from sheath; and with an evil black-faced knight Garlon, invisible at will, whom Balin slays in the castle of the knight’s brother, King Pellam. Pursued from room to room by Pellam, Balin finds himself in a chamber full of relics of Joseph of Arimathea. There he seizes a spear, the very spear with which the Roman soldier pierced the side of the Crucified, and wounds Pellam. The castle falls in ruins “through that dolorous stroke.” Pellam becomes the maimed king, who can only be healed by the Holy Grail. Apparently Celtic myths of obscure antiquity have been adapted in France, and interwoven with fables about Joseph of Arimathea and Christian mysteries. It is not possible here to go into the complicated learning of the subject. In Malory, Balin, after dealing the dolorous stroke, borrows a strange shield from a knight, and, thus accoutred, meets his brother Balan, who does not recognise him. They fight, both die and are buried in one tomb, and Galahad later achieves the adventure of winning Balin’s sword. “Thus endeth the tale of Balyn and of Balan, two brethren born in Northumberland, good knights,” says Malory, simply, and unconscious of the strange mythological medley under the coat armour of romance.

The materials, then, seemed confused and obdurate, but Tennyson works them into the course of the fatal love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and into the spiritual texture of the Idylls. Balin has been expelled from Court for the wildness that gives him his name, Balin le Sauvage. He had buffeted a squire in hall. He and Balan await all challengers beside a well. Arthur encounters and dismounts them. Balin devotes himself to self-conquest. Then comes tidings that Pellam, of old leagued with Lot against Arthur, has taken to religion, collects relics, claims descent from Joseph of Arimathea, and owns the sacred spear that pierced the side of Christ. But Garlon is with him, the knight invisible, who appears to come from an Irish source, or at least has a parallel in Irish legend. This Garlon has an unknightly way of killing men by viewless blows from the rear. Balan goes to encounter Garlon. Balin remains, learning courtesy, modelling himself on Lancelot, and gaining leave to bear Guinevere’s Crown Matrimonial for his cognisance, — which, of course, Balan does not know, -

“As golden earnest of a better life.”

But Balin sees reason to think that Lancelot and Guinevere love even too well.

”Then chanced, one morning, that Sir Balin sat

Close-bower’d in that garden nigh the hall.

A walk of roses ran from door to door;

A walk of lilies crost it to the bower:

And down that range of roses the great Queen

Came with slow steps, the morning on her face;

And all in shadow from the counter door

Sir Lancelot as to meet her, then at once,

As if he saw not, glanced aside, and paced

The long white walk of lilies toward the bower.

Follow’d the Queen; Sir Balin heard her ‘Prince,

Art thou so little loyal to thy Queen,

As pass without good morrow to thy Queen?’

To whom Sir Lancelot with his eyes on earth,

‘Fain would I still be loyal to the Queen.’

‘Yea so,’ she said, ‘but so to pass me by -

So loyal scarce is loyal to thyself,

Whom all men rate the king of courtesy.

Let be: ye stand, fair lord, as in a dream.’

Then Lancelot with his hand among the flowers,

‘Yea — for a dream. Last night methought I saw

That maiden Saint who stands with lily in hand

In yonder shrine. All round her prest the dark,

And all the light upon her silver face

Flow’d from the spiritual lily that she held.

Lo! these her emblems drew mine eyes — away:

For see, how perfect-pure! As light a flush

As hardly tints the blossom of the quince

Would mar their charm of stainless maidenhood.’

’Sweeter to me,’ she said, ‘this garden rose

Deep-hued and many-folded sweeter still

The wild-wood hyacinth and the bloom of May.

Prince, we have ridd’n before among the flowers

In those fair days — not all as cool as these,

Tho’ season-earlier. Art thou sad? or sick?

Our noble King will send thee his own leech -

Sick? or for any matter anger’d at me?’

Then Lancelot lifted his large eyes; they dwelt

Deep-tranced on hers, and could not fall: her hue

Changed at his gaze: so turning side by side

They past, and Balin started from his bower.

’Queen? subject? but I see not what I see.

Damsel and lover? hear not what I hear.

My father hath begotten me in his wrath.

I suffer from the things before me, know,

Learn nothing; am not worthy to be knight;

A churl, a clown!’ and in him gloom on gloom

Deepen’d: he sharply caught his lance and shield,

Nor stay’d to crave permission of the King,

But, mad for strange adventure, dash’d away.”

Balin is “disillusioned,” his faith in the Ideal is shaken if not shattered. He rides at adventure. Arriving at the half-ruined castle of Pellam, that dubious devotee, he hears Garlon insult Guinevere, but restrains himself. Next day, again insulted for bearing “the crown scandalous” on his shield, he strikes Garlon down, is pursued, seizes the sacred spear, and escapes. Vivien meets him in the woods, drops scandal in his ears, and so maddens him that he defaces his shield with the crown of Guinevere. Her song, and her words,

”This fire of Heaven,

This old sun-worship, boy, will rise again,

And beat the cross to earth, and break the King

And all his Table,”

might be forced into an allegory of the revived pride of life, at the Renaissance and after. The maddened yells of Balin strike the ear of Balan, who thinks he has met the foul knight Garlon, that

“Tramples on the goodly shield to show

His loathing of our Order and the Queen.”

They fight, fatally wound, and finally recognise each other: Balan trying to restore Balin’s faith in Guinevere, who is merely slandered by Garlon and Vivien. Balin acknowledges that his wildness has been their common bane, and they die, “either locked in either’s arms.”

There is nothing in Malory, nor in any other source, so far as I am aware, which suggested to Tennyson the clou of the situation — the use of Guinevere’s crown as a cognisance by Balin. This device enables the poet to weave the rather confused and unintelligible adventures of Balin and Balan into the scheme, and to make it a stage in the progress of his fable. That Balin was reckless and wild Malory bears witness, but his endeavours to conquer himself and reach the ideal set by Lancelot are Tennyson’s addition, with all the tragedy of Balin’s disenchantment and despair. The strange fantastic house of Pellam, full of the most sacred things,

“In which he scarce could spy the Christ for Saints,”

yet sheltering the human fiend Garlon, is supplied by Malory, whose predecessors probably blended more than one myth of the old Cymry into the romance, washed over with Christian colouring. As Malory tells this part of the tale it is perhaps more strange and effective than in the Idyll. The introduction of Vivien into this adventure is wholly due to Tennyson: her appearance here leads up to her triumph in the poem which follows, Merlin and Vivien.

The nature and origin of Merlin are something of a mystery. Hints and rumours of Merlin, as of Arthur, stream from hill and grave as far north as Tweedside. If he was a historical person, myths of magic might crystallise round him, as round Virgil in Italy. The process would be the easier in a country where the practices of Druidry still lingered, and revived after the retreat of the Romans. The mediaeval romancers invented a legend that Merlin was a virgin- born child of Satan. In Tennyson he may be guessed to represent the fabled esoteric lore of old religions, with their vague pantheisms, and such magic as the tapas of Brahmanic legends. He is wise with a riddling evasive wisdom: the builder of Camelot, the prophet, a shadow of Druidry clinging to the Christian king. His wisdom cannot avail him: if he beholds “his own mischance with a glassy countenance,” he cannot avoid his shapen fate. He becomes assotted of Vivien, and goes open-eyed to his doom.

The enchantress, Vivien, is one of that dubious company of Ladies of the Lake, now friendly, now treacherous. Probably these ladies are the fairies of popular Celtic tradition, taken up into the more elaborate poetry of Cymric literature and mediaeval romance. Mr Rhys traces Vivien, or Nimue, or Nyneue, back, through a series of palaeographic changes and errors, to Rhiannon, wife of Pwyll, a kind of lady of the lake he thinks, but the identification is not very satisfactory. Vivien is certainly “one of the damsels of the lake” in Malory, and the damsels of the lake seem to be lake fairies, with all their beguilements and strange unstable loves. “And always Merlin lay about the lady to have her maidenhood, and she was ever passing weary of him, and fain would have been delivered of him, for she was afraid of him because he was a devil’s son. . . . So by her subtle working she made Merlin to go under that stone to let her wit of the marvels there, but she wrought so there for him that he came never out for all the craft he could do. And so she departed and left Merlin.” The sympathy of Malory is not with the enchanter. In the Idylls, as finally published, Vivien is born on a battlefield of death, with a nature perverted, and an instinctive hatred of the good. Wherefore she leaves the Court of King Mark to make mischief in Camelot. She is, in fact, the ideal minx, a character not elsewhere treated by Tennyson:-

”She hated all the knights, and heard in thought

Their lavish comment when her name was named.

For once, when Arthur walking all alone,

Vext at a rumour issued from herself

Of some corruption crept among his knights,

Had met her, Vivien, being greeted fair,

Would fain have wrought upon his cloudy mood

With reverent eyes mock-loyal, shaken voice,

And flutter’d adoration, and at last

With dark sweet hints of some who prized him more

Than who should prize him most; at which the King

Had gazed upon her blankly and gone by:

But one had watch’d, and had not held his peace:

It made the laughter of an afternoon

That Vivien should attempt the blameless King.

And after that, she set herself to gain

Him, the most famous man of all those times,

Merlin, who knew the range of all their arts,

Had built the King his havens, ships, and halls,

Was also Bard, and knew the starry heavens;

The people call’d him Wizard; whom at first

She play’d about with slight and sprightly talk,

And vivid smiles, and faintly-venom’d points

Of slander, glancing here and grazing there;

And yielding to his kindlier moods, the Seer

Would watch her at her petulance, and play,

Ev’n when they seem’d unloveable, and laugh

As those that watch a kitten; thus he grew

Tolerant of what he half disdain’d, and she,

Perceiving that she was but half disdain’d,

Began to break her sports with graver fits,

Turn red or pale, would often when they met

Sigh fully, or all-silent gaze upon him

With such a fixt devotion, that the old man,

Tho’ doubtful, felt the flattery, and at times

Would flatter his own wish in age for love,

And half believe her true: for thus at times

He waver’d; but that other clung to him,

Fixt in her will, and so the seasons went.”

Vivien is modern enough — if any type of character is modern: at all events there is no such Blanche Amory of a girl in the old legends and romances. In these Merlin fatigues the lady by his love; she learns his arts, and gets rid of him as she can. His forebodings in the Idyll contain a magnificent image:-

”There lay she all her length and kiss’d his feet,

As if in deepest reverence and in love.

A twist of gold was round her hair; a robe

Of samite without price, that more exprest

Than hid her, clung about her lissome limbs,

In colour like the satin-shining palm

On sallows in the windy gleams of March:

And while she kiss’d them, crying, ‘Trample me,

Dear feet, that I have follow’d thro’ the world,

And I will pay you worship; tread me down

And I will kiss you for it’; he was mute:

So dark a forethought roll’d about his brain,

As on a dull day in an Ocean cave

The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall

In silence.”

We think of the blinded Cyclops groping round his cave, like “the blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall.”

The richness, the many shining contrasts and immortal lines in Vivien, seem almost too noble for a subject not easily redeemed, and the picture of the ideal Court lying in full corruption. Next to Elaine, Jowett wrote that he “admired Vivien the most (the naughty one), which seems to me a work of wonderful power and skill. It is most elegant and fanciful. I am not surprised at your Delilah beguiling the wise man; she is quite equal to it.” The dramatic versatility of Tennyson’s genius, his power of creating the most various characters, is nowhere better displayed than in the contrast between the Vivien and the Elaine. Vivien is a type, her adventure is of a nature, which he has not elsewhere handled. Thackeray, who admired the Idylls so enthusiastically, might have recognised in Vivien a character not unlike some of his own, as dark as Becky Sharp, more terrible in her selfishness than that Beatrix Esmond who is still a paragon, and, in her creator’s despite, a queen of hearts. In Elaine, on the other hand, Tennyson has drawn a girl so innocently passionate, and told a tale of love that never found his earthly close, so delicately beautiful, that we may perhaps place this Idyll the highest of his poems on love, and reckon it the gem of the Idylls, the central diamond in the diamond crown. Reading Elaine once more, after an interval of years, one is captivated by its grace, its pathos, its nobility. The poet had touched on some unidentified form of the story, long before, in The Lady of Shalott. That poem had the mystery of romance, but, in human interest, could not compete with Elaine, if indeed any poem of Tennyson’s can be ranked with this matchless Idyll.

The mere invention, and, as we may say, charpentage, are of the first order. The materials in Malory, though beautiful, are simple, and left a field for the poet’s invention.

Arthur, with the Scots and Northern knights, means to encounter all comers at a Whitsuntide tourney. Guinevere is ill, and cannot go to the jousts, while Lancelot makes excuse that he is not healed of a wound. “Wherefore the King was heavy and passing wroth, and so he departed towards Winchester.” The Queen then blamed Lancelot: people will say they deceive Arthur. “Madame,” said Sir Lancelot, “I allow your wit; it is of late come that ye were wise.” In the Idyll Guinevere speaks as if their early loves had been as conspicuous as, according to George Buchanan, were those of Queen Mary and Bothwell. Lancelot will go to the tourney, and, despite Guinevere’s warning, will take part against Arthur and his own fierce Northern kinsmen. He rides to Astolat—”that is, Gylford” — where Arthur sees him. He borrows the blank shield of “Sir Torre,” and the company of his brother Sir Lavaine. Elaine “cast such a love unto Sir Lancelot that she would never withdraw her love, wherefore she died.” At her prayer, and for better disguise (as he had never worn a lady’s favour), Lancelot carried her scarlet pearl-embroidered sleeve in his helmet, and left his shield in Elaine’s keeping. The tourney passes as in the poem, Gawain recognising Lancelot, but puzzled by the favour he wears. The wounded Lancelot “thought to do what he might while he might endure.” When he is offered the prize he is so sore hurt that he “takes no force of no honour.” He rides into a wood, where Lavaine draws forth the spear. Lavaine brings Lancelot to the hermit, once a knight. “I have seen the day,” says the hermit, “I would have loved him the worse, because he was against my lord, King Arthur, for some time. I was one of the fellowship of the Round Table, but I thank God now I am otherwise disposed.” Gawain, seeking the wounded knight, comes to Astolat, where Elaine declares “he is the man in the world that I first loved, and truly he is the last that ever I shall love.” Gawain, on seeing the shield, tells Elaine that the wounded knight is Lancelot, and she goes to seek him and Lavaine. Gawain does not pay court to Elaine, nor does Arthur rebuke him, as in the poem. When Guinevere heard that Lancelot bore another lady’s favour, “she was nigh out of her mind for wrath,” and expressed her anger to Sir Bors, for Gawain had spoken of the maid of Astolat. Bors tells this to Lancelot, who is tended by Elaine. “‘But I well see,’ said Sir Bors, ‘by her diligence about you that she loveth you entirely.’ ‘That me repenteth,’ said Sir Lancelot. Said Sir Bors, ‘Sir, she is not the first that hath lost her pain upon you, and that is the more pity.’” When Lancelot recovers, and returns to Astolat, she declares her love with the frankness of ladies in mediaeval romance. “Have mercy upon me and suffer me not to die for thy love.” Lancelot replies with the courtesy and the offers of service which became him. “Of all this,” said the maiden, “I will none; for but if ye will wed me, or be my paramour at the least, wit you well, Sir Lancelot, my good days are done.”

This was a difficult pass for the poet, living in other days of other manners. His art appears in the turn which he gives to Elaine’s declaration:-

”But when Sir Lancelot’s deadly hurt was whole,

To Astolat returning rode the three.

There morn by morn, arraying her sweet self

In that wherein she deem’d she look’d her best,

She came before Sir Lancelot, for she thought

‘If I be loved, these are my festal robes,

If not, the victim’s flowers before he fall.’

And Lancelot ever prest upon the maid

That she should ask some goodly gift of him

For her own self or hers; ‘and do not shun

To speak the wish most near to your true heart;

Such service have ye done me, that I make

My will of yours, and Prince and Lord am I

In mine own land, and what I will I can.’

Then like a ghost she lifted up her face,

But like a ghost without the power to speak.

And Lancelot saw that she withheld her wish,

And bode among them yet a little space

Till he should learn it; and one morn it chanced

He found her in among the garden yews,

And said, ‘Delay no longer, speak your wish,

Seeing I go to-day’: then out she brake:

‘Going? and we shall never see you more.

And I must die for want of one bold word.’

‘Speak: that I live to hear,’ he said, ‘is yours.’

Then suddenly and passionately she spoke:

‘I have gone mad. I love you: let me die.’

‘Ah, sister,’ answer’d Lancelot, ‘what is this?’

And innocently extending her white arms,

‘Your love,’ she said, ‘your love — to be your wife.’

And Lancelot answer’d, ‘Had I chosen to wed,

I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine:

But now there never will be wife of mine.’

‘No, no’ she cried, ‘I care not to be wife,

But to be with you still, to see your face,

To serve you, and to follow you thro’ the world.’

And Lancelot answer’d, ‘Nay, the world, the world,

All ear and eye, with such a stupid heart

To interpret ear and eye, and such a tongue

To blare its own interpretation — nay,

Full ill then should I quit your brother’s love,

And your good father’s kindness.’ And she said,

‘Not to be with you, not to see your face -

Alas for me then, my good days are done.’”

So she dies, and is borne down Thames to London, the fairest corpse, “and she lay as though she had smiled.” Her letter is read. “Ye might have showed her,” said the Queen, “some courtesy and gentleness that might have preserved her life;” and so the two are reconciled.

Such, in brief, is the tender old tale of true love, with the shining courtesy of Lavaine and the father of the maid, who speak no word of anger against Lancelot. “For since first I saw my lord, Sir Lancelot,” says Lavaine, “I could never depart from him, nor nought I will, if I may follow him: she doth as I do.” To the simple and moving story Tennyson adds, by way of ornament, the diamonds, the prize of the tourney, and the manner of their finding:-

”For Arthur, long before they crown’d him King,

Roving the trackless realms of Lyonnesse,

Had found a glen, gray boulder and black tarn.

A horror lived about the tarn, and clave

Like its own mists to all the mountain side:

For here two brothers, one a king, had met

And fought together; but their names were lost;

And each had slain his brother at a blow;

And down they fell and made the glen abhorr’d:

And there they lay till all their bones were bleach’d,

And lichen’d into colour with the crags:

And he, that once was king, had on a crown

Of diamonds, one in front, and four aside.

And Arthur came, and labouring up the pass,

All in a misty moonshine, unawares

Had trodden that crown’d skeleton, and the skull

Brake from the nape, and from the skull the crown

Roll’d into light, and turning on its rims

Fled like a glittering rivulet to the tarn:

And down the shingly scaur he plunged, and caught,

And set it on his head, and in his heart

Heard murmurs, ‘Lo, thou likewise shalt be King.’”

The diamonds reappear in the scene of Guinevere’s jealousy:-

”All in an oriel on the summer side,

Vine-clad, of Arthur’s palace toward the stream,

They met, and Lancelot kneeling utter’d, ‘Queen,

Lady, my liege, in whom I have my joy,

Take, what I had not won except for you,

These jewels, and make me happy, making them

An armlet for the roundest arm on earth,

Or necklace for a neck to which the swan’s

Is tawnier than her cygnet’s: these are words:

Your beauty is your beauty, and I sin

In speaking, yet O grant my worship of it

Words, as we grant grief tears. Such sin in words,

Perchance, we both can pardon: but, my Queen,

I hear of rumours flying thro’ your court.

Our bond, as not the bond of man and wife,

Should have in it an absoluter trust

To make up that defect: let rumours be:

When did not rumours fly? these, as I trust

That you trust me in your own nobleness,

I may not well believe that you believe.’

While thus he spoke, half turn’d away, the Queen

Brake from the vast oriel-embowering vine

Leaf after leaf, and tore, and cast them off,

Till all the place whereon she stood was green;

Then, when he ceased, in one cold passive hand

Received at once and laid aside the gems

There on a table near her, and replied:

’It may be, I am quicker of belief

Than you believe me, Lancelot of the Lake.

Our bond is not the bond of man and wife.

This good is in it, whatsoe’er of ill,

It can be broken easier. I for you

This many a year have done despite and wrong

To one whom ever in my heart of hearts

I did acknowledge nobler. What are these?

Diamonds for me! they had been thrice their worth

Being your gift, had you not lost your own.

To loyal hearts the value of all gifts

Must vary as the giver’s. Not for me!

For her! for your new fancy. Only this

Grant me, I pray you: have your joys apart.

I doubt not that however changed, you keep

So much of what is graceful: and myself

Would shun to break those bounds of courtesy

In which as Arthur’s Queen I move and rule:

So cannot speak my mind. An end to this!

A strange one! yet I take it with Amen.

So pray you, add my diamonds to her pearls;

Deck her with these; tell her, she shines me down:

An armlet for an arm to which the Queen’s

Is haggard, or a necklace for a neck

O as much fairer — as a faith once fair

Was richer than these diamonds — hers not mine -

Nay, by the mother of our Lord himself,

Or hers or mine, mine now to work my will -

She shall not have them.’

Saying which she seized,

And, thro’ the casement standing wide for heat,

Flung them, and down they flash’d, and smote the stream.

Then from the smitten surface flash’d, as it were,

Diamonds to meet them, and they past away.

Then while Sir Lancelot leant, in half disdain

At love, life, all things, on the window ledge,

Close underneath his eyes, and right across

Where these had fallen, slowly past the barge

Whereon the lily maid of Astolat

Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night.”

This affair of the diamonds is the chief addition to the old tale, in which we already see the curse of lawless love, fallen upon the jealous Queen and the long-enduring Lancelot. “This is not the first time,” said Sir Lancelot, “that ye have been displeased with me causeless, but, madame, ever I must suffer you, but what sorrow I endure I take no force” (that is, “I disregard”).

The romance, and the poet, in his own despite, cannot but make Lancelot the man we love, not Arthur or another. Human nature perversely sides with Guinevere against the Blameless King:-

”She broke into a little scornful laugh:

‘Arthur, my lord, Arthur, the faultless King,

That passionate perfection, my good lord -

But who can gaze upon the Sun in heaven?

He never spake word of reproach to me,

He never had a glimpse of mine untruth,

He cares not for me: only here to-day

There gleam’d a vague suspicion in his eyes:

Some meddling rogue has tamper’d with him — else

Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round,

And swearing men to vows impossible,

To make them like himself: but, friend, to me

He is all fault who hath no fault at all:

For who loves me must have a touch of earth;

The low sun makes the colour: I am yours,

Not Arthur’s, as ye know, save by the bond.”

It is not the beautiful Queen who wins us, our hearts are with “the innocence of love” in Elaine. But Lancelot has the charm that captivated Lavaine; and Tennyson’s Arthur remains

“The moral child without the craft to rule,

Else had he not lost me.”

Indeed the romance of Malory makes Arthur deserve “the pretty popular name such manhood earns” by his conduct as regards Guinevere when she is accused by her enemies in the later chapters. Yet Malory does not finally condone the sin which baffles Lancelot’s quest of the Holy Grail.

Tennyson at first was in doubt as to writing on the Grail, for certain respects of reverence. When he did approach the theme it was in a method of extreme condensation. The romances on the Grail outrun the length even of mediaeval poetry and prose. They are exceedingly confused, as was natural, if that hypothesis which regards the story as a Christianised form of obscure Celtic myth be correct. Sir Percivale’s sister, in the Idyll, has the first vision of the Grail:-

“Sweet brother, I have seen the Holy Grail:

For, waked at dead of night, I heard a sound

As of a silver horn from o’er the hills

Blown, and I thought, ‘It is not Arthur’s use

To hunt by moonlight’; and the slender sound

As from a distance beyond distance grew

Coming upon me — O never harp nor horn,

Nor aught we blow with breath, or touch with hand,

Was like that music as it came; and then

Stream’d thro’ my cell a cold and silver beam,

And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail,

Rose-red with beatings in it, as if alive,

Till all the white walls of my cell were dyed

With rosy colours leaping on the wall;

And then the music faded, and the Grail

Past, and the beam decay’d, and from the walls

The rosy quiverings died into the night.

So now the Holy Thing is here again

Among us, brother, fast thou too and pray,

And tell thy brother knights to fast and pray,

That so perchance the vision may be seen

By thee and those, and all the world be heal’d.”

Galahad, son of Lancelot and the first Elaine (who became Lancelot’s mistress by art magic), then vows himself to the Quest, and, after the vision in hall at Camelot, the knights, except Arthur, follow his example, to Arthur’s grief. “Ye follow wandering fires!” Probably, or perhaps, the poet indicates dislike of hasty spiritual enthusiasms, of “seeking for a sign,” and of the mysticism which betokens want of faith. The Middle Ages, more than many readers know, were ages of doubt. Men desired the witness of the senses to the truth of what the Church taught, they wished to see that naked child of the romance “smite himself into” the wafer of the Sacrament. The author of the Imitatio Christi discourages such vain and too curious inquiries as helped to rend the Church, and divided Christendom into hostile camps. The Quest of the actual Grail was a knightly form of theological research into the unsearchable; undertaken, often in a secular spirit of adventure, by sinful men. The poet’s heart is rather with human things:-

”’O brother,’ ask’d Ambrosius,—’for in sooth

These ancient books — and they would win thee — teem,

Only I find not there this Holy Grail,

With miracles and marvels like to these,

Not all unlike; which oftentime I read,

Who read but on my breviary with ease,

Till my head swims; and then go forth and pass

Down to the little thorpe that lies so close,

And almost plaster’d like a martin’s nest

To these old walls — and mingle with our folk;

And knowing every honest face of theirs

As well as ever shepherd knew his sheep,

And every homely secret in their hearts,

Delight myself with gossip and old wives,

And ills and aches, and teethings, lyings-in,

And mirthful sayings, children of the place,

That have no meaning half a league away:

Or lulling random squabbles when they rise,

Chafferings and chatterings at the market-cross,

Rejoice, small man, in this small world of mine,

Yea, even in their hens and in their eggs.”’

This appears to be Tennyson’s original reading of the Quest of the

Grail. His own mysticism, which did not strive, or cry, or seek

after marvels, though marvels might come unsought, is expressed in

Arthur’s words:-

”’“And spake I not too truly, O my knights?

Was I too dark a prophet when I said

To those who went upon the Holy Quest,

That most of them would follow wandering fires,

Lost in the quagmire? — lost to me and gone,

And left me gazing at a barren board,

And a lean Order — scarce return’d a tithe -

And out of those to whom the vision came

My greatest hardly will believe he saw;

Another hath beheld it afar off,

And leaving human wrongs to right themselves,

Cares but to pass into the silent life.

And one hath had the vision face to face,

And now his chair desires him here in vain,

However they may crown him otherwhere.

’”And some among you held, that if the King

Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow:

Not easily, seeing that the King must guard

That which he rules, and is but as the hind

To whom a space of land is given to plow

Who may not wander from the allotted field

Before his work be done; but, being done,

Let visions of the night or of the day

Come, as they will; and many a time they come,

Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,

This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,

This air that smites his forehead is not air

But vision — yea, his very hand and foot -

In moments when he feels he cannot die,

And knows himself no vision to himself,

Nor the high God a vision, nor that One

Who rose again: ye have seen what ye have seen.”

‘So spake the King: I knew not all he meant.’”

The closing lines declare, as far as the poet could declare them, these subjective experiences of his which, in a manner rarely parallelled, coloured and formed his thought on the highest things. He introduces them even into this poem on a topic which, because of its sacred associations, he for long did not venture to touch.

In Pelleas and Ettarre — which deals with the sorrows of one of the young knights who fill up the gaps left at the Round Table by the mischances of the Quest — it would be difficult to trace a Celtic original. For Malory, not Celtic legend, supplied Tennyson with the germinal idea of a poem which, in the romance, has no bearing on the final catastrophe. Pelleas, a King of the Isles, loves the beautiful Ettarre, “a great lady,” and for her wins at a tourney the prize of the golden circlet. But she hates and despises him, and Sir Gawain is a spectator when, as in the poem, the felon knights of Ettarre bind and insult their conqueror, Pelleas. Gawain promises to win the love of Ettarre for Pelleas, and, as in the poem, borrows his arms and horse, and pretends to have slain him. But in place of turning Ettarre’s heart towards Pelleas, Gawain becomes her lover, and Pelleas, detecting them asleep, lays his naked sword on their necks. He then rides home to die; but Nimue (Vivien), the Lady of the Lake, restores him to health and sanity. His fever gone, he scorns Ettarre, who, by Nimue’s enchantment, now loves him as much as she had hated him. Pelleas weds Nimue, and Ettarre dies of a broken heart. Tennyson, of course, could not make Nimue (his Vivien) do anything benevolent. He therefore closes his poem by a repetition of the effect in the case of Balin. Pelleas is driven desperate by the treachery of Gawain, the reported infidelity of Guinevere, and the general corruption of the ideal. A shadow falls on Lancelot and Guinevere, and Modred sees that his hour is drawing nigh. In spite of beautiful passages this is not one of the finest of the Idylls, save for the study of the fierce, hateful, and beautiful grande dame, Ettarre. The narrative does little to advance the general plot. In the original of Malory it has no connection with the Lancelot cycle, except as far as it reveals the treachery of Gawain, the gay and fair-spoken “light of love,” brother of the traitor Modred. A simpler treatment of the theme may be read in Mr Swinburne’s beautiful poem, The Tale of Balen.

It is in The Last Tournament that Modred finds the beginning of his opportunity. The brief life of the Ideal has burned itself out, as the year, in its vernal beauty when Arthur came, is burning out in autumn. The poem is purposely autumnal, with the autumn, not of mellow fruitfulness, but of the “flying gold of the ruined woodlands” and the dank odours of decay. In that miserable season is held the Tourney of the Dead Innocence, with the blood-red prize of rubies. With a wise touch Tennyson has represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a carnival of the “smart” and the third-rate. Courtesy is dead, even Tristram is brutal, and in Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as love of her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the world has never been corrupt with a good grace. It is a passage of arms neither gentle nor joyous that Lancelot presides over:-

”The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream

To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll

Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began:

And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf

And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume

Went down it. Sighing weariedly, as one

Who sits and gazes on a faded fire,

When all the goodlier guests are past away,

Sat their great umpire, looking o’er the lists.

He saw the laws that ruled the tournament

Broken, but spake not; once, a knight cast down

Before his throne of arbitration cursed

The dead babe and the follies of the King;

And once the laces of a helmet crack’d,

And show’d him, like a vermin in its hole,

Modred, a narrow face: anon he heard

The voice that billow’d round the barriers roar

An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight,

But newly-enter’d, taller than the rest,

And armour’d all in forest green, whereon

There tript a hundred tiny silver deer,

And wearing but a holly-spray for crest,

With ever-scattering berries, and on shield

A spear, a harp, a bugle — Tristram — late

From overseas in Brittany return’d,

And marriage with a princess of that realm,

Isolt the White — Sir Tristram of the Woods -

Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain

His own against him, and now yearn’d to shake

The burthen off his heart in one full shock

With Tristram ev’n to death: his strong hands gript

And dinted the gilt dragons right and left,

Until he groan’d for wrath — so many of those,

That ware their ladies’ colours on the casque,

Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds,

And there with gibes and flickering mockeries

Stood, while he mutter’d, ‘Craven crests! O shame!

What faith have these in whom they sware to love?

The glory of our Round Table is no more.’

So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems,

Not speaking other word than ‘Hast thou won?

Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand

Wherewith thou takest this, is red!’ to whom

Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot’s languorous mood,

Made answer, ‘Ay, but wherefore toss me this

Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound?

Let be thy fair Queen’s fantasy. Strength of heart

And might of limb, but mainly use and skill,

Are winners in this pastime of our King.

My hand — belike the lance hath dript upon it -

No blood of mine, I trow; but O chief knight,

Right arm of Arthur in the battlefield,

Great brother, thou nor I have made the world;

Be happy in thy fair Queen as I in mine.’

And Tristram round the gallery made his horse

Caracole; then bow’d his homage, bluntly saying,

‘Fair damsels, each to him who worships each

Sole Queen of Beauty and of love, behold

This day my Queen of Beauty is not here.’

And most of these were mute, some anger’d, one

Murmuring, ‘All courtesy is dead,’ and one,

‘The glory of our Round Table is no more.’

Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung,

And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day

Went glooming down in wet and weariness:

But under her black brows a swarthy one

Laugh’d shrilly, crying, ‘Praise the patient saints,

Our one white day of Innocence hath past,

Tho’ somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it.

The snowdrop only, flowering thro’ the year,

Would make the world as blank as Winter-tide.

Come — let us gladden their sad eyes, our Queen’s

And Lancelot’s, at this night’s solemnity

With all the kindlier colours of the field.’”

Arthur’s last victory over a robber knight is ingloriously squalid:-

”He ended: Arthur knew the voice; the face

Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name

Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind.

And Arthur deign’d not use of word or sword,

But let the drunkard, as he stretch’d from horse

To strike him, overbalancing his bulk,

Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp

Fall, as the crest of some slow-arching wave,

Heard in dead night along that table-shore,

Drops flat, and after the great waters break

Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,

Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,

From less and less to nothing; thus he fell

Head-heavy; then the knights, who watch’d him, roar’d

And shouted and leapt down upon the fall’n;

There trampled out his face from being known,

And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves:

Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang

Thro’ open doors, and swording right and left

Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurl’d

The tables over and the wines, and slew

Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells,

And all the pavement stream’d with massacre:

Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower,

Which half that autumn night, like the live North,

Red-pulsing up thro’ Alioth and Alcor,

Made all above it, and a hundred meres

About it, as the water Moab saw

Come round by the East, and out beyond them flush’d

The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea.”

Guinevere is one of the greatest of the Idylls. Malory makes Lancelot more sympathetic; his fight, unarmed, in Guinevere’s chamber, against the felon knights, is one of his most spirited scenes. Tennyson omits this, and omits all the unpardonable behaviour of Arthur as narrated in Malory. Critics have usually condemned the last parting of Guinevere and Arthur, because the King doth preach too much to an unhappy woman who has no reply. The position of Arthur is not easily redeemable: it is difficult to conceive that a noble nature could be, or should be, blind so long. He does rehabilitate his Queen in her own self-respect, perhaps, by assuring her that he loves her still:-

“Let no man dream but that I love thee still.”

Had he said that one line and no more, we might have loved him better. In the Idylls we have not Malory’s last meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, one of the scenes in which the wandering composite romance ends as nobly as the Iliad.

The Passing of Arthur, except for a new introductory passage of great beauty and appropriateness, is the Morte d’Arthur, first published in 1842:-

“So all day long the noise of battle roll’d

Among the mountains by the winter sea.”

The year has run its course, spring, summer, gloomy autumn, and dies in the mist of Arthur’s last wintry battle in the west -

“And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.”

The splendid and sombre procession has passed, leaving us to muse as to how far the poet has fulfilled his own ideal. There could be no new epic: he gave a chain of heroic Idylls. An epic there could not be, for the Iliad and Odyssey have each a unity of theme, a narrative compressed into a few days in the former, in the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of Arthur’s reign could not so be condensed; and Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in the crown that shines with unnumbered gems, each with its own glory.

CHAPTER VIII. — ENOCH ARDEN. THE DRAMAS.

The success of the first volume of the Idylls recompensed the poet for the slings and arrows that gave Maud a hostile welcome. His next publication was the beautiful Tithonus, a fit pendant to the Ulysses, and composed about the same date (1833-35). “A quarter of a century ago,” Tennyson dates it, writing in 1860 to the Duke of Argyll. He had found it when “ferreting among my old books,” he said, in search of something for Thackeray, who was establishing the Cornhill Magazine. What must the wealth of the poet have been, who, possessing Tithonus in his portfolio, did not take the trouble to insert it in the volumes of 1842! Nobody knows how many poems of Tennyson’s never even saw pen and ink, being composed unwritten, and forgotten. At this time we find him recommending Mr Browning’s Men and Women to the Duke, who, like many Tennysonians, does not seem to have been a ready convert to his great contemporary. The Duke and Duchess urged the Laureate to attempt the topic of the Holy Grail, but he was not in the mood. Indeed the vision of the Grail in the early Sir Galahad is doubtless happier than the allegorical handling of a theme so obscure, remote, and difficult, in the Idylls. He wrote his Boadicea, a piece magnificent in itself, but of difficult popular access, owing to the metrical experiment.

In the autumn of 1860 he revisited Cornwall with F. T. Palgrave, Mr Val Prinsep, and Mr Holman Hunt. They walked in the rain, saw Tintagel and the Scilly Isles, and were feted by an enthusiastic captain of a little river steamer, who was more interested in “Mr Tinman and Mr Pancake” than the Celtic boatman of Ardtornish. The winter was passed at Farringford, and the Northern Farmer was written there, a Lincolnshire reminiscence, in the February of 1861. In autumn the Pyrenees were visited by Tennyson in company with Arthur Clough and Mr Dakyns of Clifton College. At Cauteretz in August, and among memories of the old tour with Arthur Hallam, was written All along the Valley. The ways, however, in Auvergne were “foul,” and the diet “unhappy.” The dedication of the Idylls was written on the death of the Prince Consort in December, and in January 1862 the Ode for the opening of an exhibition. The poet was busy with his “Fisherman,” Enoch Arden. The volume was published in 1864, and Lord Tennyson says it has been, next to In Memoriam, the most popular of his father’s works. One would have expected the one volume containing the poems up to 1842 to hold that place. The new book, however, mainly dealt with English, contemporary, and domestic themes—”the poetry of the affections.” An old woman, a district visitor reported, regarded Enoch Arden as “more beautiful” than the other tracts which were read to her. It is indeed a tender and touching tale, based on a folk-story which Tennyson found current in Brittany as well as in England. Nor is the unseen and unknown landscape of the tropic isle less happily created by the poet’s imagination than the familiar English cliffs and hazel copses:-

”The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns

And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,

The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,

The lightning flash of insect and of bird,

The lustre of the long convolvuluses

That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran

Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows

And glories of the broad belt of the world,

All these he saw; but what he fain had seen

He could not see, the kindly human face,

Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard

The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,

The league-long roller thundering on the reef,

The moving whisper of huge trees that branch’d

And blossom’d in the zenith, or the sweep

Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,

As down the shore he ranged, or all day long

Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,

A shipwreck’d sailor, waiting for a sail:

No sail from day to day, but every day

The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts

Among the palms and ferns and precipices;

The blaze upon the waters to the east;

The blaze upon his island overhead;

The blaze upon the waters to the west;

Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,

The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again

The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail.”

Aylmer’s Field somewhat recalls the burden of Maud, the curse of purse-proud wealth, but is too gloomy to be a fair specimen of Tennyson’s art. In Sea Dreams (first published in 1860) the awful vision of crumbling faiths is somewhat out of harmony with its environment:-

”But round the North, a light,

A belt, it seem’d, of luminous vapour, lay,

And ever in it a low musical note

Swell’d up and died; and, as it swell’d, a ridge

Of breaker issued from the belt, and still

Grew with the growing note, and when the note

Had reach’d a thunderous fulness, on those cliffs

Broke, mixt with awful light (the same as that

Living within the belt) whereby she saw

That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more,

But huge cathedral fronts of every age,

Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see,

One after one: and then the great ridge drew,

Lessening to the lessening music, back,

And past into the belt and swell’d again

Slowly to music: ever when it broke

The statues, king or saint or founder fell;

Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left

Came men and women in dark clusters round,

Some crying, ‘Set them up! they shall not fall!’

And others, ‘Let them lie, for they have fall’n.’

And still they strove and wrangled: and she grieved

In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find

Their wildest wailings never out of tune

With that sweet note; and ever as their shrieks

Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave

Returning, while none mark’d it, on the crowd

Broke, mixt with awful light, and show’d their eyes

Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away

The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone,

To the waste deeps together.

’Then I fixt

My wistful eyes on two fair images,

Both crown’d with stars and high among the stars, -

The Virgin Mother standing with her child

High up on one of those dark minster-fronts -

Till she began to totter, and the child

Clung to the mother, and sent out a cry

Which mixt with little Margaret’s, and I woke,

And my dream awed me: — well — but what are dreams?”

The passage is rather fitted for a despairing mood of Arthur, in the

Idylls, than for the wife of the city clerk ruined by a pious rogue.

The Lucretius, later published, is beyond praise as a masterly study of the great Roman sceptic, whose heart is at eternal odds with his Epicurean creed. Nascent madness, or fever of the brain drugged by the blundering love philtre, is not more cunningly treated in the mad scenes of Maud. No prose commentary on the De Rerum Natura, however long and learned, conveys so clearly as this concise study in verse the sense of magnificent mingled ruin in the mind and poem of the Roman.

The “Experiments in Quantity” were, perhaps, suggested by Mr Matthew Arnold’s Lectures on the Translating of Homer. Mr Arnold believed in a translation into English hexameters. His negative criticism of other translators and translations was amusing and instructive: he had an easy game to play with the Yankee-doodle metre of F. W. Newman, the ponderous blank verse of Cowper, the tripping and clipping couplets of Pope, the Elizabethan fantasies of Chapman. But Mr Arnold’s hexameters were neither musical nor rapid: they only exhibited a new form of failure. As the Prince of Abyssinia said to his tutor, “Enough; you have convinced me that no man can be a poet,” so Mr Arnold went some way to prove that no man can translate Homer.

Tennyson had the lowest opinion of hexameters as an English metre for serious purposes.

“These lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer!”

Lord Tennyson says, “German hexameters he disliked even more than English.” Indeed there is not much room for preference. Tennyson’s Alcaics (Milton) were intended to follow the Greek rather than the Horatian model, and resulted, at all events, in a poem worthy of the “mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies.” The specimen of the Iliad in blank verse, beautiful as it is, does not, somehow, reproduce the music of Homer. It is entirely Tennysonian, as in

“Roll’d the rich vapour far into the heaven.”

The reader, in that one line, recognises the voice and trick of the

English poet, and is far away from the Chian:-

“As when in heaven the stars about the moon

Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,

And every height comes out, and jutting peak

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens

Break open to their highest, and all the stars

Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:

So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds,

Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.”

This is excellent, is poetry, escapes the conceits of Pope (who never “wrote with his eye on the object”), but is pure Tennyson. We have not yet, probably we never shall have, an adequate rendering of the Iliad into verse, and prose translations do not pretend to be adequate. When parents and dominies have abolished the study of Greek, something, it seems, will have been lost to the world, — something which even Tennyson could not restore in English. He thought blank verse the proper equivalent; but it is no equivalent. One even prefers his own prose:-

Nor did Paris linger in his lofty halls, but when he had girt on his gorgeous armour, all of varied bronze, then he rushed thro’ the city, glorying in his airy feet. And as when a stall-kept horse, that is barley-fed at the manger, breaketh his tether, and dasheth thro’ the plain, spurning it, being wont to bathe himself in the fair-running river, rioting, and reareth his head, and his mane flieth back on either shoulder, and he glorieth in his beauty, and his knees bear him at the gallop to the haunts and meadows of the mares; so ran the son of Priam, Paris, from the height of Pergamus, all in arms, glittering like the sun, laughing for light-heartedness, and his swift feet bare him.

In February 1865 Tennyson lost the mother whose portrait he drew in

Isabel,—”a thing enskied and sainted.”

In the autumn of 1865 the Tennysons went on a Continental tour, and visited Waterloo, Weimar, and Dresden; in September they entertained Emma I., Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The months passed quietly at home or in town. The poet had written his Lucretius, and, to please Sir George Grove, wrote The Song of the Wrens, for music. Tennyson had not that positive aversion to music which marked Dr Johnson, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and some other poets. Nay, he liked Beethoven, which places him higher in the musical scale than Scott, who did not rise above a Border lilt or a Jacobite ditty. The Wren songs, entitled The Window, were privately printed by Sir Ivor Guest in 1867, were set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and published by Strahan in December 1870. “A puppet,” Tennyson called the song-book, “whose only merit is, perhaps, that it can dance to Mr Sullivan’s instrument. I am sorry that my puppet should have to dance at all in the dark shadow of these days” (the siege of Paris), “but the music is now completed, and I am bound by my promise.” The verses are described as “partly in the old style,” but the true old style of the Elizabethan and cavalier days is lost.

In the summer of 1867 the Tennysons moved to a farmhouse near Haslemere, at that time not a centre of literary Londoners. “Sandy soil and heather-scented air” allured them, and the result was the purchase of land, and the building of Aldworth, Mr Knowles being the architect. In autumn Tennyson visited Lyme Regis, and, like all other travellers thither, made a pilgrimage to the Cobb, sacred to Louisa Musgrove. The poet now began the study of Hebrew, having a mind to translate the Book of Job, a vision unfulfilled. In 1868 he thought of publishing his boyish piece, The Lover’s Tale, but delayed. An anonymously edited piracy of this and other poems was perpetrated in 1875, limited, at least nominally, to fifty copies.

In July Longfellow visited Tennyson. “The Longfellows and he talked much of spiritualism, for he was greatly interested in that subject, but he suspended his judgment, and thought that, if in such manifestations there is anything, ‘Pucks, not the spirits of dead men, reveal themselves.’” This was Southey’s suggestion, as regards the celebrated disturbances in the house of the Wesleys. “Wit might have much to say, wisdom, little,” said Sam Wesley. Probably the talk about David Dunglas Home, the “medium” then in vogue, led to the discussion of “spiritualism.” We do not hear that Tennyson ever had the curiosity to see Home, whom Mr Browning so firmly detested.

In September The Holy Grail was begun: it was finished “in about a week. It came like a breath of inspiration.” The subject had for many years been turned about in the poet’s mind, which, of course, was busy in these years of apparent inactivity. At this time (August 1868) Tennyson left his old publishers, the Moxons, for Mr Strahan, who endured till 1872. Then he was succeeded by Messrs H. S. King & Co., who gave place (1879) to Messrs Kegan Paul & Co., while in 1884 Messrs Macmillan became, and continue to be, the publishers. A few pieces, except Lucretius (Macmillan’s Magazine, May 1868) unimportant, appeared in serials.

Very early in 1869 The Coming of Arthur was composed, while Tennyson was reading Browning’s The Ring and the Book. He and his great contemporary were on terms of affectionate friendship, though Tennyson, perhaps, appreciated less of Browning than Browning of Tennyson. Meanwhile “Old Fitz” kept up a fire of unsympathetic growls at Browning and all his works. “I have been trying in vain to read it” (The Ring and the Book), “and yet the Athenaeum tells me it is wonderfully fine.” FitzGerald’s ply had been taken long ago; he wanted verbal music in poetry (no exorbitant desire), while, in Browning, carmina desunt. Perhaps, too, a personal feeling, as if Browning was Tennyson’s rival, affected the judgment of the author of Omar Khayyam. We may almost call him “the author.”

The Holy Grail, with the smaller poems, such as Lucretius, was published at the end of 1869. FitzGerald appears to have preferred The Northern Farmer, “the substantial rough-spun nature I knew,” to all the visionary knights in the airy Quest. To compare “—” (obviously Browning) with Tennyson, was “to compare an old Jew’s curiosity shop with the Phidian Marbles.” Tennyson’s poems “being clear to the bottom as well as beautiful, do not seem to cockney eyes so deep as muddy waters.”

In November 1870 The Last Tournament was begun; it was finished in May 1871. Conceivably the vulgar scandals of the last days of the French Imperial regime may have influenced Tennyson’s picture of the corruption of Arthur’s Court; but the Empire did not begin, like the Round Table, with aspirations after the Ideal. In the autumn of the year Tennyson entertained, and was entertained by, Mr Huxley. In their ideas about ultimate things two men could not vary more widely, but each delighted in the other’s society. In the spring of 1872 Tennyson visited Paris and the ruins of the Louvre. He read Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset, whose comedies he admired. The little that we hear of his opinion of the other great poet runs to this effect, “Victor Hugo is an unequal genius, sometimes sublime; he reminds one that there is but one step between the sublime and the ridiculous,” but the example by which Tennyson illustrated this was derived from one of the poet’s novels. In these we meet not only the sublime and the ridiculous, but passages which leave us in some perplexity as to their true category. One would have expected Hugo’s lyrics to be Tennyson’s favourites, but only Gastibelza is mentioned in that character. At this time Tennyson was vexed by

“Art with poisonous honey stolen from France,”

a phrase which cannot apply to Hugo. Meanwhile Gareth was being written, and the knight’s song for The Coming of Arthur. Gareth and Lynette, with minor pieces, appeared in 1872. Balin and Balan was composed later, to lead up to Vivien, to which, perhaps, Balin and Balan was introduction sufficient had it been the earlier written. But the Idylls have already been discussed as arranged in sequence. The completion of the Idylls, with the patriotic epilogue, was followed by the offer of a baronetcy. Tennyson preferred that he and his wife “should remain plain Mr and Mrs,” though “I hope that I have too much of the old-world loyalty not to wear my lady’s favours against all comers, should you think that it would be more agreeable to her Majesty that I should do so.”

The Idylls ended, Tennyson in 1874 began to contemplate a drama, choosing the topic, perhaps neither popular nor in an Aristotelian sense tragic, of Mary Tudor. This play was published, and put on the stage by Sir Henry Irving in 1875. Harold followed in 1876, The Cup in 1881 (at the Lyceum), The Promise of May (at the Globe) in 1882, Becket in 1884, with The Foresters in 1892. It seems best to consider all the dramatic period of Tennyson’s work, a period reached so strangely late in his career, in the sequence of the Plays. The task is one from which I shrink, as conscious of entire ignorance of the stage and of lack of enthusiasm for the drama. Great dramatic authors have, almost invariably, had long practical knowledge of the scenes and of what is behind them. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Moliere and his contemporaries, had lived their lives on the boards and in the foyer, actors themselves, or in daily touch with actors and actresses. In the present day successful playwrights appear to live much in the world of the players. They have practical knowledge of the conventions and conditions which the stage imposes. Neither Browning nor Mr Swinburne (to take great names) has had, it seems, much of this practical and daily experience; their dramas have been acted but rarely, if at all, and many examples prove that neither poetical genius nor the genius for prose fiction can enable men to produce plays which hold their own on the boards. This may be the fault of public taste, or partly of public taste, partly of defect in practical knowledge on the side of the authors. Of the stage, by way of practice, Tennyson had known next to nothing, yet his dramas were written to be acted, and acted some of them were. “For himself, he was aware,” says his biographer, “that he wanted intimate knowledge of the mechanical details necessary for the modern stage, although in early and middle life he had been a constant playgoer, and would keenly follow the action of a play, criticising the characterisation, incidents, scenic effects, situations, language, and dramatic points.” He was quite prepared to be “edited” for acting purposes by the players. Miss Mary Anderson says that “he was ready to sacrifice even his MOST beautiful lines for the sake of a real dramatic effect.”

This proved unusual common-sense in a poet. Modern times and manners are notoriously unfavourable to the serious drama. In the age of the Greek tragedians, as in the days of “Eliza and our James,” reading was not very common, and life was much more passed in public than among ourselves, when people go to the play for light recreation, or to be shocked. So various was the genius of Tennyson, that had he devoted himself early to the stage, and had he been backed by a manager with the enterprise and intelligence of Sir Henry Irving, it is impossible to say how much he might have done to restore the serious drama. But we cannot regret that he was occupied in his prime with other things, nor can we expect to find his noblest and most enduring work in the dramatic experiments of his latest years. It is notable that, in his opinion, “the conditions of the dramatic art are much more complex than they were.” For example, we have “the star system,” which tends to allot what is, or was, technically styled “the fat,” to one or two popular players. Now, a poet like Tennyson will inevitably distribute large quantities of what is most excellent to many characters, and the consequent difficulties may be appreciated by students of our fallen nature. The poet added that to be a first-rate historical playwright means much more work than formerly, seeing that “exact history” has taken the part of the “chance chronicle.”

This is a misfortune. The dramas of the Attic stage, with one or two exceptions, are based on myth and legend, not on history, and even in the Persae, grounded on contemporary events, AEschylus introduced the ghost of Darius, not vouched for by “exact history.” Let us conceive Shakespeare writing Macbeth in an age of “exact history.” Hardly any of the play would be left. Fleance and Banquo must go. Duncan becomes a young man, and far from “gracious.” Macbeth appears as the defender of the legitimist prince, Lulach, against Duncan, a usurper. Lady Macbeth is a pattern to her sex, and her lord is a clement and sagacious ruler. The witches are ruled out of the piece. Difficulties arise about the English aid to Malcolm. History, in fact, declines to be dramatic. Liberties must be taken. In his plays of the Mary Stuart cycle, Mr Swinburne telescopes the affair of Darnley into that of Chastelard, which was much earlier. He makes Mary Beaton (in love with Chastelard) a kind of avenging fate, who will never leave the Queen till her head falls at Fotheringay; though, in fact, after a flirtation with Randolph, Mary Beaton married Ogilvy of Boyne (really in love with Lady Bothwell), and not one of the four Maries was at Fotheringay. An artist ought to be allowed to follow legend, of its essence dramatic, or to manipulate history as he pleases. Our modern scrupulosity is pedantic. But Tennyson read a long list of books for his Queen Mary, though it does not appear that he made original researches in MSS. These labours occupied 1874 and 1875. Yet it would be foolish to criticise his Queen Mary as if we were criticising “exact history.” “The play’s the thing.”

The poet thought that “Bloody Mary” “had been harshly judged by the verdict of popular tradition.” So have most characters to whom popular dislike affixes the popular epithet—”Bloody Claverse,” “Bloody Mackenzie,” “Bloody Balfour.” Mary had the courage of the Tudors. She “edified all around her by her cheerfulness, her piety, and her resignation to the will of Providence,” in her last days (Lingard). Camden calls her “a queen never praised enough for the purity of her morals, her charity to the poor” (she practised as a district visitor), “and her liberality to the nobles and the clergy.” She was “pious, merciful, pure, and ever to be praised, if we overlook her erroneous opinions in religion,” says Godwin. She had been grievously wronged from her youth upwards. In Elizabeth she had a sister and a rival, a constant intriguer against her, and a kinswoman far from amiable. Despite “the kindness and attention of Philip” (Lingard), affairs of State demanded his absence from England. The disappointment as to her expected child was cruel. She knew that she had become unpopular, and she could not look for the success of her Church, to which she was sincerely attached. M. Auguste Filon thought that Queen Mary might secure dramatic rank for Tennyson, “if a great actress arose who conceived a passion for the part of Mary.” But that was not to be expected. Mary was middle- aged, plain, and in aspect now terrible, now rueful. No great actress will throw herself with passion into such an ungrateful part. “Throughout all history,” Tennyson said, “there was nothing more mournful than the final tragedy of this woman.” MOURNFUL it is, but not tragic. There is nothing grand at the close, as when Mary Stuart conquers death and evil fame, redeeming herself by her courage and her calm, and extending over unborn generations that witchery which her enemies dreaded more than an army with banners.

Moreover, popular tradition can never forgive the fires of Smithfield. It was Mary Tudor’s misfortune that she had the power to execute, on a great scale, that faculty of persecution to the death for which her Presbyterian and other Protestant opponents pined in vain. Mr Froude says of her, “For the first and last time the true Ultramontane spirit was dominant in England, the genuine conviction that, as the orthodox prophets and sovereigns of Israel slew the worshippers of Baal, so were Catholic rulers called upon, as their first duty, to extirpate heretics as the enemies of God and man.” That was precisely the spirit of Knox and other Presbyterian denouncers of death against “Idolaters” (Catholics). But the Scottish preachers were always thwarted: Mary and her advisers had their way, as, earlier, Latimer had preached against sufferers at the stake. To the stake, which he feared so greatly, Cranmer had sent persons not of his own fleeting shade of theological opinion. These men had burned Anabaptists, but all that is lightly forgotten by Protestant opinion. Under Mary (whoever may have been primarily responsible) Cranmer and Latimer were treated as they had treated others. Moreover, some two hundred poor men and women had dared the fiery death. The persecution was on a scale never forgiven or forgotten, since Mary began cerdonibus esse timenda. Mary was not essentially inclement. Despite Renard, the agent of the Emperor, she spared that lord of fluff and feather, Courtenay, and she spared Elizabeth. Lady Jane she could not save, the girl who was a queen by grace of God and of her own royal nature. But Mary will never be pardoned by England. “Few men or women have lived less capable of doing knowingly a wrong thing,” says Mr Froude, a great admirer of Tennyson’s play. Yet, taking Mr Froude’s own view, Mary’s abject and superannuated passion for Philip; her ecstasies during her supposed pregnancy; “the forlorn hours when she would sit on the ground with her knees drawn to her face,” with all her “symptoms of hysterical derangement, leave little room, as we think of her, for other feelings than pity.” Unfortunately, feelings of pity for a person so distraught, so sourly treated by fortune, do not suffice for tragedy. When we contemplate Antigone or OEdipus, it is not with a sentiment of pity struggling against abhorrence.

For these reasons the play does not seem to have a good dramatic subject. The unity is given by Mary herself and her fortunes, and these are scarcely dramatic. History prevents the introduction of Philip till the second scene of the third act. His entrance is manque; he merely accompanies Cardinal Pole, who takes command of the scene, and Philip does not get in a word till after a long conversation between the Queen and the Cardinal. Previously Philip had only crossed the stage in a procession, yet when he does appear he is bereft of prominence. The interest as regards him is indicated, in Act I. scene v., by Mary’s kissing his miniature. Her blighted love for him is one main motive of the tragedy, but his own part appears too subordinate in the play as published. The interest is scattered among the vast crowd of characters; and Mr R. H. Hutton remarked at the time that he “remains something of a cold, cruel, and sensual shadow.” We are more interested in Wyatt, Cranmer, Gardiner, and others; or at least their parts are more interesting. Yet in no case does the interest of any character, except of Mary and Elizabeth, remain continuous throughout the play. Tennyson himself thought that “the real difficulty of the drama is to give sufficient relief to its intense sadness. . . . Nothing less than the holy calm of the meek and penitent Cranmer can be adequate artistic relief.” But not much relief can be drawn from a man about to be burned alive, and history does not tempt us to keen sympathy with the recanting archbishop, at least if we agree with Macaulay rather than with Froude.

I venture to think that historical tradition, as usual, offered a better motive than exact history. Following tradition, we see in Mary a cloud of hateful gloom, from which England escapes into the glorious dawn of “the Gospel light,” and of Elizabeth, who might be made a triumphantly sympathetic character. That is the natural and popular course which the drama might take. But Tennyson’s history is almost critical and scientific. Points of difficult and debated evidence (as to Elizabeth’s part in Wyatt’s rebellion) are discussed. There is no contest of day and darkness, of Truth and Error. The characters are in that perplexed condition about creeds which was their actual state after the political and social and religious chaos produced by Henry VIII. Gardiner is a Catholic, but not an Ultramontane; Lord William Howard is a Catholic, but not a fanatic; we find a truculent Anabaptist, or Socialist, and a citizen whose pride is his moderation. The native uncritical tendency of the drama is to throw up hats and halloo for Elizabeth and an open Bible. In place of this, Cecil delivers a well-considered analysis of the character of Elizabeth

”Eliz. God guide me lest I lose the way.

[Exit Elizabeth.

Cecil. Many points weather’d, many perilous ones,

At last a harbour opens; but therein

Sunk rocks — they need fine steering — much it is

To be nor mad, nor bigot — have a mind -

Nor let Priests’ talk, or dream of worlds to be,

Miscolour things about her — sudden touches

For him, or him — sunk rocks; no passionate faith -

But — if let be — balance and compromise;

Brave, wary, sane to the heart of her — a Tudor

School’d by the shadow of death — a Boleyn, too,

Glancing across the Tudor — not so well.”

This is excellent as historical criticism, in the favourable sense; but the drama, by its nature, demands something not critical but triumphant and one-sided. The character of Elizabeth is one of the best in the play, as her soliloquy (Act III. scene v.) is one of the finest of the speeches. We see her courage, her coquetry, her dissimulation, her arrogance. But while this is the true Elizabeth, it is not the idealised Elizabeth whom English loyalty created, lived for, and died for. Mr Froude wrote, “You have given us the greatest of all your works,” an opinion which the world can never accept. “You have reclaimed one more section of English History from the wilderness, and given it a form in which it will be fixed for ever. No one since Shakespeare has done that.” But Mr Froude had done it, and Tennyson’s reading of “the section” is mainly that of Mr Froude. Mr Gladstone found that Cranmer and Gardiner “are still in a considerable degree mysteries to me.” A mystery Cranmer must remain. Perhaps the “crowds” and “Voices” are not the least excellent of the characters, Tennyson’s humour finding an opportunity in them, and in Joan and Tib. His idyllic charm speaks in the words of Lady Clarence to the fevered Queen; and there is dramatic genius in her reply:-

”Mary. What is the strange thing happiness? Sit down here:

Tell me thine happiest hour.

Lady Clarence. I will, if that

May make your Grace forget yourself a little.

There runs a shallow brook across our field

For twenty miles, where the black crow flies five,

And doth so bound and babble all the way

As if itself were happy. It was May-time,

And I was walking with the man I loved.

I loved him, but I thought I was not loved.

And both were silent, letting the wild brook

Speak for us — till he stoop’d and gather’d one

From out a bed of thick forget-me-nots,

Look’d hard and sweet at me, and gave it me.

I took it, tho’ I did not know I took it,

And put it in my bosom, and all at once

I felt his arms about me, and his lips -

Mary. O God! I have been too slack, too slack;

There are Hot Gospellers even among our guards -

Nobles we dared not touch. We have but burnt

The heretic priest, workmen, and women and children.

Wet, famine, ague, fever, storm, wreck, wrath, -

We have so play’d the coward; but by God’s grace,

We’ll follow Philip’s leading, and set up

The Holy Office here — garner the wheat,

And burn the tares with unquenchable fire!”

The conclusion, in the acting edition, printed in the Biography, appears to be an improvement on that in the text as originally published. Unhappy as the drama essentially is, the welcome which Mr Browning gave both to the published work and to the acted play—”a complete success”: “conception, execution, the whole and the parts, I see nowhere the shadow of a fault” — offers “relief” in actual human nature. “He is the greatest-brained poet in England,” Tennyson said, on a later occasion. “Violets fade, he has given me a crown of gold.”

Before writing Harold (1876) the poet “studied many recent plays,” and re-read AEschylus and Sophocles. For history he went to the Bayeux tapestry, the Roman de Rou, Lord Lytton, and Freeman. Students of a recent controversy will observe that, following Freeman, he retains the famous palisade, so grievously battered by the axe-strokes of Mr Horace Round. Harold is a piece more compressed, and much more in accordance with the traditions of the drama, than Queen Mary. The topic is tragic indeed: the sorrow being that of a great man, a great king, the bulwark of a people that fell with his fall. Moreover, as the topic is treated, the play is rich in the irony usually associated with the name of Sophocles. Victory comes before a fall. Harold, like Antigone, is torn between two duties — his oath and the claims of his country. His ruin comes from what Aristotle would call his [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], his fault in swearing the oath to William. The hero himself; recking little, after a superstitious moment, of the concealed relics over which he swore, deems his offence to lie in swearing a vow which he never meant to keep. The persuasions which urge him to this course are admirably presented: England, Edith, his brother’s freedom, were at stake. Casuistry, or even law, would have absolved him easily; an oath taken under duresse is of no avail. But Harold’s “honour rooted in dishonour stood,” and he cannot so readily absolve himself. Bruce and the bishops who stood by Bruce had no such scruples: they perjured themselves often, on the most sacred relics, especially the bishops. But Harold rises above the mediaeval and magical conception of the oath, and goes to his doom conscious of a stain on his honour, of which only a deeper stain, that of falseness to his country, could make him clean. This is a truly tragic stroke of destiny. The hero’s character is admirably noble, patient, and simple. The Confessor also is as true in art as to history, and his vision of the fall and rise of England is a noble passage. In Aldwyth we have something of Vivien, with a grain of conscience, and the part of Edith Swan’s-neck has a restrained and classic pathos in contrast with the melancholy of Wulfnoth. The piece, as the poet said, is a “tragedy of doom,” of deepening and darkening omens, as in the Odyssey and Njal’s Saga. The battle scene, with the choruses of the monks, makes a noble close.

FitzGerald remained loyal, but it was to “a fairy Prince who came from other skies than these rainy ones,” and “the wretched critics,” as G. H. Lewes called them, seem to have been unfriendly. In fact (besides the innate wretchedness of all critics), they grudged the time and labour given to the drama, in an undramatic age. Harold had not what FitzGerald called “the old champagne flavour” of the vintage of 1842.

Becket was begun in 1876, printed in 1879, and published in 1884. Before that date, in 1880, Tennyson produced one of the volumes of poetry which was more welcome than a play to most of his admirers. The intervening years passed in the Isle of Wight, at Aldworth, in town, and in summer tours, were of no marked biographical interest. The poet was close on three score and ten — he reached that limit in 1879. The days darkened around him, as darken they must: in the spring of 1879 he lost his favourite brother, himself a poet of original genius, Charles Tennyson Turner. In May of the same year he published The Lover’s Tale, which has been treated here among his earliest works. His hours, and (to some extent) his meals, were regulated by Sir Andrew Clark. He planted trees, walked, read, loitered in his garden, and kept up his old friendships, while he made that of the great Gordon. Compliments passed between him and Victor Hugo, who had entertained Lionel Tennyson in Paris, and wrote: “Je lis avec emotion vos vers superbes; c’est un reflet de gloire que vous m’envoyez.” Mr Matthew Arnold’s compliment was very like Mr Arnold’s humour: “Your father has been our most popular poet for over forty years, and I am of opinion that he fully deserves his reputation”: such was “Mat’s sublime waggery.” Tennyson heaped coals of fire on the other poet, bidding him, as he liked to be bidden, to write more poetry, not “prose things.” Tennyson lived much in the society of Browning and George Eliot, and made the acquaintance of Renan. In December 1879 Mr and Mrs Kendal produced The Falcon, which ran for sixty-seven nights; it is “an exquisite little poem in action,” as Fanny Kemble said. During a Continental tour Tennyson visited Catullus’s Sirmio: “here he made his Frater Ave atque Vale,” and the poet composed his beautiful salutation to the

“Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago.”

In 1880 Ballads and other Poems proved that, like Titian, the great poet was not to be defeated by the years. The First Quarrel was in his most popular English style. Rizpah deserved and received the splendid panegyric of Mr Swinburne. The Revenge is probably the finest of the patriotic pieces, and keeps green the memory of an exploit the most marvellous in the annals of English seamen. The Village Wife is a pendant worthy of The Northern Farmer. The poem In the Children’s Hospital caused some irritation at the moment, but there was only one opinion as to the Defence of Lucknow and the beautiful re-telling of the Celtic Voyage of Maeldune. The fragment of Homeric translation was equally fortunate in choice of subject and in rendering.

In the end of 1880 the poet finished The Cup, which had been worked on occasionally since he completed The Falcon in 1880. The piece was read by the author to Sir Henry Irving and his company, and it was found that the manuscript copy needed few alterations to fit it for the stage. The scenery and the acting of the protagonists are not easily to be forgotten. The play ran for a hundred and thirty nights. Sir Henry Irving had thought that Becket (then unpublished) would prove too expensive, and could only be a succes d’estime. Tennyson had found out that “the worst of writing for the stage is, you must keep some actor always in your mind.” To this necessity authors like Moliere and Shakespeare were, of course, resigned and familiar; they knew exactly how to deal with all their means. But this part of the business of play-writing must always be a cross to the poet who is not at one with the world of the stage.

In The Cup Miss Ellen Terry made the strongest impression, her part being noble and sympathetic, while Sir Henry Irving had the ungrateful part of the villain. To be sure, he was a villain of much complexity; and Tennyson thought that his subtle blend of Roman refinement and intellectuality, and barbarian, self-satisfied sensuality, was not “hit off.” Synorix is, in fact, half-Greek, half-Celt, with a Roman education, and the “blend” is rather too remote for successful representation. The traditional villain, from Iago downwards, is not apt to utter such poetry as this:-

“O Thou, that dost inspire the germ with life,

The child, a thread within the house of birth,

And give him limbs, then air, and send him forth

The glory of his father — Thou whose breath

Is balmy wind to robe our bills with grass,

And kindle all our vales with myrtle-blossom,

And roll the golden oceans of our grain,

And sway the long grape-bunches of our vines,

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 person, and represents no kind of political, social, or economical thinker. A man would give all other bliss and all his worldly wealth for this, to waste his whole strength in one kick upon this perfect prig. He employs the arguments of evolution and so forth to justify the seduction of a little girl of fifteen, and later, by way of making amends, proposes to commit incest by marrying her sister. There have been evolutionists, to be sure, who believed in promiscuity, like Mr Edgar, as preferable to monogamy. But this only proves that an evolutionist may fail to understand evolution. There be also such folk as Stevenson calls “squirradicals” — squires who say that “the land is the people’s.” Probably no advocate of promiscuity, and no squirradical, was present at the performances of The Promise of May. But people of advanced minds had got it into their heads that their doctrines were to be attacked, so they went and made a hubbub in the sacred cause of freedom of thought and speech. The truth is, that controversial topics, political topics, ought not to be brought into plays, much less into sermons. Tennyson meant Edgar for “nothing thorough, nothing sincere.” He is that venomous thing, the prig-scoundrel: he does not suit the stage, and his place, if anywhere, is in the novel. Advocates of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister might have applauded Edgar for wishing to marry the sister of a mistress assumed to be deceased, but no other party in the State wanted anything except the punching of Edgar’s head by Farmer Dobson.

In 1883 died Edward FitzGerald, the most kind, loyal, and, as he said, crotchety of old and dear Cambridge friends. He did not live to see the delightful poem which Tennyson had written for him. In almost his latest letter he had remarked, superfluously, that when he called the task of translating The Agamemnon “work for a poet,” he “was not thinking of Mr Browning.”

In the autumn of 1883 Tennyson was taken, with Mr Gladstone, by Sir Donald Currie, for a cruise round the west coast of Scotland, to the Orkneys, and to Copenhagen. The people of Kirkwall conferred on the poet and the statesman the freedom of the burgh, and Mr Gladstone, in an interesting speech, compared the relative chances of posthumous fame of the poet and the politician. Pericles is not less remembered than Sophocles, though Shakespeare is more in men’s minds than Cecil. Much depends, as far as the statesmen are considered, on contemporary historians. It is Thucydides who immortalises Pericles. But it is improbable that the things which Mr Gladstone did, and attempted, will be forgotten more rapidly than the conduct and characters of, say, Burleigh or Lethington.

In 1884, after this voyage, with its royal functions and celebrations at Copenhagen, a peerage was offered to the poet. He “did not want to alter his plain Mr,” and he must have known that, whether he accepted or refused, the chorus of blame would be louder than that of applause. Scott had desired “such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath”; the title went well with the old name, and pleased his love of old times. Tennyson had been blamed “by literary men” for thrice evading a baronetcy, and he did not think that a peerage would make smooth the lives of his descendants. But he concluded, “Why should I be selfish and not suffer an honour (as Gladstone says) to be done to literature in my name?” Politically, he thought that the Upper House, while it lasts, partly supplied the place of the American “referendum.” He voted in July 1884 for the extension of the franchise, and in November stated his views to Mr Gladstone in verse. In prose he wrote to Mr Gladstone, “I have a strong conviction that the more simple the dealings of men with men, as well as of man with man, are — the better,” a sentiment which, perhaps, did not always prevail with his friend. The poet’s reflections on the horror of Gordon’s death are not recorded. He introduced the idea of the Gordon Home for Boys, and later supported it by a letter, “Have we forgotten Gordon?” to the Daily Telegraph. They who cannot forget Gordon must always be grateful to Tennyson for providing this opportunity of honouring the greatest of an illustrious clan, and of helping, in their degree, a scheme which was dear to the heroic leader.

The poet, very naturally, was most averse to personal appearance in public matters. Mankind is so fashioned that the advice of a poet is always regarded as unpractical, and is even apt to injure the cause which he advocates. Happily there cannot be two opinions about the right way of honouring Gordon. Tennyson’s poem, The Fleet, was also in harmony with the general sentiment.

In the last month of 1884 Becket was published. The theme of Fair Rosamund had appealed to the poet in youth, and he had written part of a lyric which he judiciously left unpublished. It is given in his Biography. In 1877 he had visited Canterbury, and had traced the steps of Becket to his place of slaughter in the Cathedral. The poem was printed in 1879, but not published till seven years later. In 1879 Sir Henry Irving had thought the play too costly to be produced with more than a succes d’estime; but in 1891 he put it on the stage, where it proved the most successful of modern poetic dramas. As published it is, obviously, far too long for public performance. It is not easy to understand why dramatic poets always make their works so much too long. The drama seems, by its very nature, to have a limit almost as distinct as the limit of the sonnet. It is easy to calculate how long a play for the stage ought to be, and we might think that a poet would find the natural limit serviceable to his art, for it inculcates selection, conciseness, and concentration. But despite these advantages of the natural form of the drama, modern poets, at least, constantly overflow their banks. The author ruit profusus, and the manager has to reduce the piece to feasible proportions, such as it ought to have assumed from the first.

Becket has been highly praised by Sir Henry Irving himself, for its “moments of passion and pathos, . . . which, when they exist, atone to an audience for the endurance of long acts.” But why should the audience have such long acts to endure? The reader, one fears, is apt to use his privilege of skipping. The long speeches of Walter Map and the immense period of Margery tempt the student to exercise his agility. A “chronicle play” has the privilege of wandering, but Becket wanders too far and too long. The political details of the quarrel between Church and State, with its domestic and international complexities, are apt to fatigue the attention. Inevitable and insoluble as the situation was, neither protagonist is entirely sympathetic, whether in the play or in history. The struggle in Becket between his love of the king and his duty to the Church (or what he takes to be his duty) is nobly presented, and is truly dramatic, while there is grotesque and terrible relief in the banquet of the Beggars. In the scene of the assassination the poet “never stoops his wing,” and there are passages of tender pathos between Henry and Rosamund, while Becket’s keen memories of his early days, just before his death, are moving.

”Becket. I once was out with Henry in the days

When Henry loved me, and we came upon

A wild-fowl sitting on her nest, so still

I reach’d my hand and touch’d; she did not stir;

The snow had frozen round her, and she sat

Stone-dead upon a heap of ice-cold eggs.

Look! how this love, this mother, runs thro’ all

The world God made — even the beast — the bird!

John of Salisbury. Ay, still a lover of the beast and bird?

But these arm’d men — will you not hide yourself?

Perchance the fierce De Brocs from Saltwood Castle,

To assail our Holy Mother lest she brood

Too long o’er this hard egg, the world, and send

Her whole heart’s heat into it, till it break

Into young angels. Pray you, hide yourself.

Becket. There was a little fair-hair’d Norman maid

Lived in my mother’s house: if Rosamund is

The world’s rose, as her name imports her — she

Was the world’s lily.

John of Salisbury. Ay, and what of her?

Becket. She died of leprosy.”

But the part of Rosamund, her innocent ignorance especially, is not very readily intelligible, not quite persuasive, and there is almost a touch of the burlesque in her unexpected appearance as a monk. To weave that old and famous story of love into the terribly complex political intrigue was a task almost too great. The character of Eleanor is perhaps more successfully drawn in the Prologue than in the scene where she offers the choice of the dagger or the bowl, and is interrupted, in a startlingly unexpected manner, by the Archbishop himself. The opportunities for scenic effects are magnificent throughout, and must have contributed greatly to the success on the stage. Still one cannot but regard the published Becket as rather the marble from which the statue may be hewn than as the statue itself. There are fine scenes, powerful and masterly drawing of character in Henry, Eleanor, and Becket, but there is a want of concentration, due, perhaps, to the long period of time covered by the action. So, at least, it seems to a reader who has admitted his sense of incompetency in the dramatic region. The acuteness of the poet’s power of historical intuition was attested by Mr J. R. Green and Mr Bryce. “One cannot imagine,” said Mr Bryce, “a more vivid, a more perfectly faithful picture than it gives both of Henry and Thomas.” Tennyson’s portraits of these two “go beyond and perfect history.” The poet’s sympathy ought, perhaps, to have been, if not with the false and ruffianly Henry, at least with Henry’s side of the question. For Tennyson had made Harold leave

”To England

My legacy of war against the Pope

From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age,

Till the sea wash her level with her shores,

Or till the Pope be Christ’s.”

CHAPTER IX. — LAST YEARS.

The end of 1884 saw the publication of Tiresias and other Poems, dedicated to “My good friend, Robert Browning,” and opening with the beautiful verses to one who never was Mr Browning’s friend, Edward FitzGerald. The volume is rich in the best examples of Tennyson’s later work. Tiresias, the monologue of the aged seer, blinded by excess of light when he beheld Athene unveiled, and under the curse of Cassandra, is worthy of the author who, in youth, wrote OEnone and Ulysses. Possibly the verses reflect Tennyson’s own sense of public indifference to the voice of the poet and the seer. But they are of much earlier date than the year of publication:-

”For when the crowd would roar

For blood, for war, whose issue was their doom,

To cast wise words among the multitude

Was flinging fruit to lions; nor, in hours

Of civil outbreak, when I knew the twain

Would each waste each, and bring on both the yoke

Of stronger states, was mine the voice to curb

The madness of our cities and their kings.

Who ever turn’d upon his heel to hear

My warning that the tyranny of one

Was prelude to the tyranny of all?

My counsel that the tyranny of all

Led backward to the tyranny of one?

This power hath work’d no good to aught that lives.”

The conclusion was a favourite with the author, and his blank verse never reached a higher strain:-

”But for me,

I would that I were gather’d to my rest,

And mingled with the famous kings of old,

On whom about their ocean-islets flash

The faces of the Gods — the wise man’s word,

Here trampled by the populace underfoot,

There crown’d with worship — and these eyes will find

The men I knew, and watch the chariot whirl

About the goal again, and hunters race

The shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings,

In height and prowess more than human, strive

Again for glory, while the golden lyre

Is ever sounding in heroic ears

Heroic hymns, and every way the vales

Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-fume

Of those who mix all odour to the Gods

On one far height in one far-shining fire.”

Then follows the pathetic piece on FitzGerald’s death, and the prayer, not unfulfilled -

”That, when I from hence

Shall fade with him into the unknown,

My close of earth’s experience

May prove as peaceful as his own.”

The Ancient Sage, with its lyric interludes, is one of Tennyson’s meditations on the mystery of the world and of existence. Like the poet himself, the Sage finds a gleam of light and hope in his own subjective experiences of some unspeakable condition, already recorded in In Memoriam. The topic was one on which he seems to have spoken to his friends with freedom:-

“And more, my son! for more than once when I

Sat all alone, revolving in myself

The word that is the symbol of myself,

The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

And past into the Nameless, as a cloud

Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs

Were strange not mine — and yet no shade of doubt,

But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self

The gain of such large life as match’d with ours

Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words,

Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.”

The poet’s habit of

”Revolving in myself

The word that is the symbol of myself” -

that is, of dwelling on the sound of his own name, was familiar to the Arabs. M. Lefebure has drawn my attention to a passage in the works of a mediaeval Arab philosopher, Ibn Khaldoun:  “To arrive at the highest degree of inspiration of which he is capable, the diviner should have recourse to the use of certain phrases marked by a peculiar cadence and parallelism. Thus he emancipates his mind from the influence of the senses, and is enabled to attain an imperfect contact with the spiritual world.” Ibn Khaldoun regards the “contact” as extremely “imperfect.” He describes similar efforts made by concentrating the gaze on a mirror, a bowl of water, or the like. Tennyson was doubtless unaware that he had stumbled accidentally on a method of “ancient sages.” Psychologists will explain his experience by the word “dissociation.” It is not everybody, however, who can thus dissociate himself. The temperament of genius has often been subject to such influence, as M. Lefebure has shown in the modern instances of George Sand and Alfred de Musset: we might add Shelley, Goethe, and even Scott.

The poet’s versatility was displayed in the appearance with these records of “weird seizures”, of the Irish dialect piece To-morrow, the popular Spinster’s Sweet-Arts, and the Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero has relapsed on the gloom of the hero of Maud. He represents himself, of course, not Tennyson, or only one of the moods of Tennyson, which were sometimes black enough. A very different mood chants the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and speaks of

“Green Sussex fading into blue

With one gray glimpse of sea.”

The lines To Virgil were written at the request of the Mantuans, by the most Virgilian of all the successors of the

“Wielder of the stateliest measure

ever moulded by the lips of man.”

Never was Tennyson more Virgilian than in this unmatched panegyric, the sum and flower of criticism of that

“Golden branch amid the shadows,

kings and realms that pass to rise no more.”

Hardly less admirable is the tribute to Catullus, and the old poet is young again in the bird-song of Early Spring. The lines on Poets and their Bibliographies, with The Dead Prophet, express Tennyson’s lifelong abhorrence of the critics and biographers, whose joy is in the futile and the unimportant, in personal gossip and the sweepings of the studio, the salvage of the wastepaper basket. The Prefatory Poem to my Brother’s Sonnets is not only touching in itself, but proves that the poet can “turn to favour and to prettiness” such an affliction as the ruinous summer of 1879.

The year 1880 brought deeper distress in the death of the poet’s son Lionel, whose illness, begun in India, ended fatally in the Red Sea. The interest of the following years was mainly domestic. The poet’s health, hitherto robust, was somewhat impaired in 1888, but his vivid interest in affairs and in letters was unabated. He consoled himself with Virgil, Keats, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Euripides, and Mr Leaf’s speculations on the composite nature of the Iliad, in which Coleridge, perhaps alone among poets, believed. “You know,” said Tennyson to Mr Leaf; “I never liked that theory of yours about the many poets.” It would be at least as easy to prove that there were many authors of Ivanhoe, or perhaps it would be a good deal more easy. However, he admitted that three lines which occur both in the Eighth and the Sixteenth Books of the Iliad are more appropriate in the later book. Similar examples might be found in his own poems. He still wrote, in the intervals of a malady which brought him “as near death as a man could be without dying.” He was an example of the great physical strength which, on the whole, seems usually to accompany great mental power. The strength may be dissipated by passion, or by undue labour, as in cases easily recalled to memory, but neither cause had impaired the vigour of Tennyson. Like Goethe, he lived out all his life; and his eightieth birthday was cheered both by public and private expressions of reverence and affection.

Of Tennyson’s last three years on earth we may think, in his own words, that his

”Life’s latest eve endured

Nor settled into hueless grey.”

Nature was as dear to him and as inspiring as of old; men and affairs 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 fall below the poetical; or, at least, do not drop into “the utterly unpoetical”:-

“The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man,

But cannot wholly free itself from Man,

Are calling to each other thro’ a dawn

Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil

Is rending, and the Voices of the day

Are heard across the Voices of the dark.

No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man,

But thro’ the Will of One who knows and rules -

And utter knowledge is but utter love -

AEonian Evolution, swift or slow,

Thro’ all the Spheres — an ever opening height,

An ever lessening earth.”

The Ring is, in fact, a ghost story based on a legend told by Mr Lowell about a house near where he had once lived; one of those houses vexed by

“A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls,

A noise of falling weights that never fell,

Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand,

Door-handles turn’d when none was at the door,

And bolted doors that open’d of themselves.”

These phenomena were doubtless caused by rats and water-pipes, but they do not destroy the pity and the passion of the tale. The lines to Mary Boyle are all of the normal world, and worthy of a poet’s youth and of the spring. Merlin and the Gleam is the spiritual allegory of the poet’s own career:-

“Arthur had vanish’d

I knew not whither,

The king who loved me,

And cannot die.”

So at last

”All but in Heaven

Hovers The Gleam,”

whither the wayfarer was soon to follow. There is a marvellous hope and pathos in the melancholy of these all but the latest songs, reminiscent of youth and love, and even of the dim haunting memories and dreams of infancy. No other English poet has thus rounded all his life with music. Tennyson was in his eighty-first year, when there “came in a moment” the crown of his work, the immortal lyric, Crossing the Bar. It is hardly less majestic and musical in the perfect Greek rendering by his brother-in-law, Mr Lushington. For once at least a poem has been “poured from the golden to the silver cup” without the spilling of a drop. The new book’s appearance was coincident with the death of Mr Browning, “so loving and appreciative,” as Lady Tennyson wrote; a friend, not a rival, however the partisans of either poet might strive to stir emulation between two men of such lofty and such various genius.

CHAPTER X. — 1890.

In the year 1889 the poet’s health had permitted him to take long walks on the sea-shore and along the cliffs, one of which, by reason of its whiteness, he had named “Taliessin,” “the splendid brow.” His mind ran on a poem founded on an Egyptian legend (of which the source is not mentioned), telling how “despair and death came upon him who was mad enough to try to probe the secret of the universe.” He also thought of a drama on Tristram, who, in the Idylls, is treated with brevity, and not with the sympathy of the old writer who cries, “God bless Tristram the knight: he fought for England!” But early in 1890 Tennyson suffered from a severe attack of influenza. In May Mr Watts painted his portrait, and

“Divinely through all hindrance found the man.”

Tennyson was a great admirer of Miss Austen’s novels: “The realism and life-likeness of Miss Austen’s Dramatis Personae come nearest to those of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is a sun to which Jane Austen, though a bright and true little world, is but an asteroid.” He was therefore pleased to find apple-blossoms co-existing with ripe strawberries on June 28, as Miss Austen has been blamed, by minute philosophers, for introducing this combination in the garden party in Emma. The poet, like most of the good and great, read novels eagerly, and excited himself over the confirmation of an adult male in a story by Miss Yonge. Of Scott, “the most chivalrous literary figure of the century, and the author with the widest range since Shakespeare,” he preferred Old Mortality, and it is a good choice. He hated “morbid and introspective tales, with their oceans of sham philosophy.” At this time, with catholic taste, he read Mr Stevenson and Mr Meredith, Miss Braddon and Mr Henry James, Ouida and Mr Thomas Hardy; Mr Hall Caine and Mr Anstey; Mrs Oliphant and Miss Edna Lyall. Not everybody can peruse all of these very diverse authors with pleasure. He began his poem on the Roman gladiatorial combats; indeed his years, fourscore and one, left his intellectual eagerness as unimpaired as that of Goethe. “A crooked share,” he said to the Princess Louise, “may make a straight furrow.” “One afternoon he had a long waltz with M- in the ballroom.” Speaking of

“All the charm of all the Muses

Often flowering in a lonely word”

in Virgil, he adduced, rather strangely, the cunctantem ramum, said of the Golden Bough, in the Sixth AEneid. The choice is odd, because the Sibyl has just told AEneas that, if he be destined to pluck the branch of gold, ipse volens facilisque sequetur, “it will come off of its own accord,” like the sacred ti branches of the Fijians, which bend down to be plucked for the Fire rite. Yet, when the predestined AEneas tries to pluck the bough of gold, it yields reluctantly (cunctantem), contrary to what the Sibyl has foretold. Mr Conington, therefore, thought the phrase a slip on the part of Virgil. “People accused Virgil of plagiarising,” he said, “but if a man made it his own there was no harm in that (look at the great poets, Shakespeare included).” Tennyson, like Virgil, made much that was ancient his own; his verses are often, and purposefully, a mosaic of classical reminiscences. But he was vexed by the hunters after remote and unconscious resemblances, and far-fetched analogies between his lines and those of others. He complained that, if he said that the sun went down, a parallel was at once cited from Homer, or anybody else, and he used a very powerful phrase to condemn critics who detected such repetitions. “The moanings of the homeless sea,”—”moanings” from Horace, “homeless” from Shelley. “As if no one else had ever heard the sea moan except Horace!” Tennyson’s mixture of memory and forgetfulness was not so strange as that of Scott, and when he adapted from the Greek, Latin, or Italian, it was of set purpose, just as it was with Virgil. The beautiful lines comparing a girl’s eyes to bottom agates that seem to

”Wave and float

In crystal currents of clear running seas,”

he invented while bathing in Wales. It was his habit, to note down in verse such similes from nature, and to use them when he found occasion. But the higher criticism, analysing the simile, detected elements from Shakespeare and from Beaumont and Fletcher.

In June 1891 the poet went on a tour in Devonshire, and began his Akbar, and probably wrote June Bracken and Heather; or perhaps it was composed when “we often sat on the top of Blackdown to watch the sunset.” He wrote to Mr Kipling -

“The oldest to the youngest singer

That England bore”

(to alter Mr Swinburne’s lines to Landor), praising his Flag of England. Mr Kipling replied as “the private to the general.”

Early in 1892 The Foresters was successfully produced at New York by Miss Ada Rehan, the music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the scenery from woodland designs by Whymper. Robin Hood (as we learn from Mark Twain) is a favourite hero with the youth of America. Mr Tom Sawyer himself took, in Mark Twain’s tale, the part of the bold outlaw.

The Death of OEnone was published in 1892, with the dedication to the

Master of Balliol -

”Read a Grecian tale retold

Which, cast in later Grecian mould,

Quintus Calaber

Somewhat lazily handled of old.”

Quintus Calaber, more usually called Quintus Smyrnaeus, is a writer of perhaps the fourth century of our era. About him nothing, or next to nothing, is known. He told, in so late an age, the conclusion of the Tale of Troy, and (in the writer’s opinion) has been unduly neglected and disdained. His manner, I venture to think, is more Homeric than that of the more famous and doubtless greater Alexandrian poet of the Argonautic cycle, Apollonius Rhodius, his senior by five centuries. His materials were probably the ancient and lost poems of the Epic Cycle, and the story of the death of OEnone may be from the Little Iliad of Lesches. Possibly parts of his work may be textually derived from the Cyclics, but the topic is very obscure. In Quintus, Paris, after encountering evil omens on his way, makes a long speech, imploring the pardon of the deserted OEnone. She replies, not with the Tennysonian brevity; she sends him back to the helpless arms of her rival, Helen. Paris dies on the hills; never did Helen see him returning. The wood-nymphs bewail Paris, and a herdsman brings the bitter news to Helen, who chants her lament. But remorse falls on OEnone. She does not go

”Slowly down

By the long torrent’s ever-deepened roar,”

but rushes “swift as the wind to seek and spring upon the pyre of her lord.” Fate and Aphrodite drive her headlong, and in heaven Selene, remembering Endymion, bewails the lot of her sister in sorrow. OEnone reaches the funeral flame, and without a word or a cry leaps into her husband’s arms, the wild Nymphs wondering. The lovers are mingled in one heap of ashes, and these are bestowed in one vessel of gold and buried in a howe. This is the story which the poet rehandled in his old age, completing the work of his happy youth when he walked with Hallam in the Pyrenean hills, that were to him as Ida. The romance of OEnone and her death condone, as even Homer was apt to condone, the sins of beautiful Paris, whom the nymphs lament, despite the evil that he has wrought. The silence of the veiled OEnone, as she springs into her lover’s last embrace, is perhaps more affecting and more natural than Tennyson’s

”She lifted up a voice

Of shrill command, ‘Who burns upon the pyre?’”

The St Telemachus has the old splendour and vigour of verse, and, though written so late in life, is worthy of the poet’s prime:-

”Eve after eve that haggard anchorite

Would haunt the desolated fane, and there

Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low

‘Vicisti Galilaee’; louder again,

Spurning a shatter’d fragment of the God,

‘Vicisti Galilaee!’ but — when now

Bathed in that lurid crimson — ask’d ‘Is earth

On fire to the West? or is the Demon-god

Wroth at his fall?’ and heard an answer ‘Wake

Thou deedless dreamer, lazying out a life

Of self-suppression, not of selfless love.’

And once a flight of shadowy fighters crost

The disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wings

Came sweeping by him, and pointed to the West,

And at his ear he heard a whisper ‘Rome,’

And in his heart he cried ‘The call of God!’

And call’d arose, and, slowly plunging down

Thro’ that disastrous glory, set his face

By waste and field and town of alien tongue,

Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphere

Of westward-wheeling stars; and every dawn

Struck from him his own shadow on to Rome.

Foot-sore, way-worn, at length he touch’d his goal,

The Christian city.”

Akbar’s Dream may be taken, more or less, to represent the poet’s own theology of a race seeking after God, if perchance they may find Him, and the closing Hymn was a favourite with Tennyson. He said, “It is a magnificent metre”:-

HYMN.

I.

Once again thou flamest heavenward, once again we see thee rise.

Every morning is thy birthday gladdening human hearts and eyes.

Every morning here we greet it, bowing lowly down before thee,

Thee the Godlike, thee the changeless in thine ever-changing skies.

II.

Shadow-maker, shadow-slayer, arrowing light from clime to clime,

Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their woodland rhyme.

Warble bird, and open flower, and, men, below the dome of azure

Kneel adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures Time!”

In this final volume the poet cast his handful of incense on the altar of Scott, versifying the tale of Il Bizarro, which the dying Sir Walter records in his Journal in Italy. The Churchwarden and the Curate is not inferior to the earlier peasant poems in its expression of shrewdness, humour, and superstition. A verse of Poets and Critics may be taken as the poet’s last word on the old futile quarrel:-

“This thing, that thing is the rage,

Helter-skelter runs the age;

Minds on this round earth of ours

Vary like the leaves and flowers,

Fashion’d after certain laws;

Sing thou low or loud or sweet,

All at all points thou canst not meet,

Some will pass and some will pause.

What is true at last will tell:

Few at first will place thee well;

Some too low would have thee shine,

Some too high — no fault of thine -

Hold thine own, and work thy will!

Year will graze the heel of year,

But seldom comes the poet here,

And the Critic’s rarer still.”

Still the lines hold good -

“Some too low would have thee shine,

Some too high — no fault of thine.”

The end was now at hand. A sense of weakness was felt by the poet on September 3, 1892: on the 28th his family sent for Sir Andrew Clark; but the patient gradually faded out of life, and expired on Thursday, October 6, at 1.35 A.M. To the very last he had Shakespeare by him, and his windows were open to the sun; on the last night they were flooded by the moonlight. The description of the final scenes must be read in the Biography by the poet’s son. “His patience and quiet strength had power upon those who were nearest and dearest to him; we felt thankful for the love and the utter peace of it all.” “The life after death,” Tennyson had said just before his fatal illness, “is the cardinal point of Christianity. I believe that God reveals Himself in every individual soul; and my idea of Heaven is the perpetual ministry of one soul to another.” He had lived the life of heaven upon earth, being in all his work a minister of things honourable, lovely, consoling, and ennobling to the souls of others, with a ministry which cannot die. His body sleeps next to that of his friend and fellow-poet, Robert Browning, in front of Chaucer’s monument in the Abbey.

CHAPTER XI. — LAST CHAPTER.

“O, that Press will get hold of me now,” Tennyson said when he knew that his last hour was at hand. He had a horror of personal tattle, as even his early poems declare -

“For now the Poet cannot die,

Nor leave his music as of old,

But round him ere he scarce be cold

Begins the scandal and the cry.”

But no “carrion-vulture” has waited

“To tear his heart before the crowd.”

About Tennyson, doubtless, there is much anecdotage: most of the anecdotes turn on his shyness, his really exaggerated hatred of personal notoriety, and the odd and brusque things which he would say when alarmed by effusive strangers. It has not seemed worth while to repeat more than one or two of these legends, nor have I sought outside the Biography by his son for more than the biographer chose to tell. The readers who are least interested in poetry are most interested in tattle about the poet. It is the privilege of genius to retain the freshness and simplicity, with some of the foibles, of the child. When Tennyson read his poems aloud he was apt to be moved by them, and to express frankly his approbation where he thought it deserved. Only very rudimentary psychologists recognised conceit in this freedom; and only the same set of persons mistook shyness for arrogance. Effusiveness of praise or curiosity in a stranger is apt to produce bluntness of reply in a Briton. “Don’t talk d-d nonsense, sir,” said the Duke of Wellington to the gushing person who piloted him, in his old age, across Piccadilly. Of Tennyson Mr Palgrave says, “I have known him silenced, almost frozen, before the eager unintentional eyes of a girl of fifteen. And under the stress of this nervous impulse compelled to contradict his inner self (especially when under the terror of leonisation . . . ), he was doubtless at times betrayed into an abrupt phrase, a cold unsympathetic exterior; a moment’s ‘defect of the rose.’” Had he not been sensitive in all things, he would have been less of a poet. The chief criticism directed against his mode of life is that he WAS sensitive and reserved, but he could and did make himself pleasant in the society of les pauvres d’esprit. Curiosity alarmed him, and drove him into his shell: strangers who met him in that mood carried away false impressions, which developed into myths. As the Master of Balliol has recorded, despite his shyness “he was extremely hospitable, often inviting not only his friends, but the friends of his friends, and giving them a hearty welcome. For underneath a sensitive exterior he was thoroughly genial if he was understood.” In these points he was unlike his great contemporary, Browning; for instance, Tennyson never (I think) was the Master’s guest at Balliol, mingling, like Browning, with the undergraduates, to whom the Master’s hospitality was freely extended. Yet, where he was familiar, Tennyson was a gay companion, not shunning jest or even paradox. “As Dr Johnson says, every man may be judged of by his laughter”: but no Boswell has chronicled the laughters of Tennyson. “He never, or hardly ever, made puns or witticisms” (though one pun, at least, endures in tradition), “but always lived in an attitude of humour.” Mr Jowett writes (and no description of the poet is better than his) -

If I were to describe his outward appearance, I should say that he was certainly unlike any one else whom I ever saw. A glance at some of Watts’ portraits of him will give, better than any description which can be expressed in words, a conception of his noble mien and look. He was a magnificent man, who stood before you in his native refinement and strength. The unconventionality of his manners was in keeping with the originality of his figure. He would sometimes say nothing, or a word or two only, to the stranger who approached him, out of shyness. He would sometimes come into the drawing-room reading a book. At other times, especially to ladies, he was singularly gracious and benevolent. He would talk about the accidents of his own life with an extraordinary freedom, as at the moment they appeared to present themselves to his mind, the days of his boyhood that were passed at Somersby, and the old school of manners which he came across in his own neighbourhood: the days of the “apostles” at Cambridge: the years which he spent in London; the evenings enjoyed at the Cock Tavern, and elsewhere, when he saw another side of life, not without a kindly and humorous sense of the ridiculous in his fellow-creatures. His repertory of stories was perfectly inexhaustible; they were often about slight matters that would scarcely bear repetition, but were told with such lifelike reality, that they convulsed his hearers with laughter. Like most story-tellers, he often repeated his favourites; but, like children, his audience liked hearing them again and again, and he enjoyed telling them. It might be said of him that he told more stories than any one, but was by no means the regular story-teller. In the commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius.

To this description may be added another by Mr F. T. Palgrave:-

Every one will have seen men, distinguished in some line of work, whose conversation (to take the old figure) either “smelt too strongly of the lamp,” or lay quite apart from their art or craft. What, through all these years, struck me about Tennyson, was that whilst he never deviated into poetical language as such, whether in rhetoric or highly coloured phrase, yet throughout the substance of his talk the same mode of thought, the same imaginative grasp of nature, the same fineness and gentleness in his view of character, the same forbearance and toleration, the aurea mediocritas despised by fools and fanatics, which are stamped on his poetry, were constantly perceptible: whilst in the easy and as it were unsought choiceness, the conscientious and truth-loving precision of his words, the same personal identity revealed itself. What a strange charm lay here, how deeply illuminating the whole character, as in prolonged intercourse it gradually revealed itself! Artist and man, Tennyson was invariably true to himself, or rather, in Wordsworth’s phrase, he “moved altogether”; his nature and his poetry being harmonious aspects of the same soul; as botanists tell us that flower and fruit are but transformations of root and stem and leafage. We read how, in mediaeval days, conduits were made to flow with claret. But this was on great occasions only. Tennyson’s fountain always ran wine.

Once more: In Mme. Recamier’s salon, I have read, at the time when conversation was yet a fine art in Paris, guests famous for esprit would sit in the twilight round the stove, whilst each in turn let fly some sparkling anecdote or bon-mot, which rose and shone and died out into silence, till the next of the elect pyrotechnists was ready. Good things of this kind, as I have said, were plentiful in Tennyson’s repertory. But what, to pass from the materials to the method of his conversation, eminently marked it was the continuity of the electric current. He spoke, and was silent, and spoke again: but the circuit was unbroken; there was no effort in taking up the thread, no sense of disjunction. Often I thought, had he never written a line of the poems so dear to us, his conversation alone would have made him the most interesting companion known to me. From this great and gracious student of humanity, what less, indeed, could be expected? And if, as a converser, I were to compare him with Socrates, as figured for us in the dialogues of his great disciple, I think that I should have the assent of that eminently valued friend of Tennyson’s, whose long labour of love has conferred English citizenship upon Plato.

We have called him shy and sensitive in daily intercourse with strangers, and as to criticism, he freely confessed that a midge of dispraise could sting, while applause gave him little pleasure. Yet no poet altered his verses so much in obedience to censure unjustly or irritatingly stated, yet in essence just. He readily rejected some of his “Juvenilia” on Mr Palgrave’s suggestion. The same friend tells how well he took a rather fierce attack on an unpublished piece, when Mr Palgrave “owned that he could not find one good line in it.” Very few poets, or even versifiers (fiercer they than poets are), would have continued to show their virgin numbers to a friend so candid, as Tennyson did. Perhaps most of the genus irritabile will grant that spoken criticism, if unfavourable, somehow annoys and stirs opposition in an author; probably because it confirms his own suspicions about his work. Such criticism is almost invariably just. But Campbell, when Rogers offered a correction, “bounced out of the room, with a ‘Hang it! I should like to see the man who would dare to correct me.’”

Mr Jowett justly recognised in the life of Tennyson two circumstances which made him other than, but for these, he would have been. He had intended to do with the Arthurian subject what he never did, “in some way or other to have represented in it the great religions of the world. . . . It is a proof of Tennyson’s genius that he should have thus early grasped the great historical aspect of religion.” His intention was foiled, his early dream was broken, by the death of Arthur Hallam, and by the coldness and contempt with which, at the same period, his early poems were received.

Mr Jowett (who had a firm belief in the “great work”) regretted the change of plan as to the Arthurian topic, regretted it the more from his own interest in the History of Religion. But we need not share the regrets. The early plan for the Arthur (which Mr Jowett never saw) has been published, and certainly the scheme could not have been executed on these lines.  Moreover, as the Master observed, the work would have been premature in Tennyson’s youth, and, indeed, it would still be premature. The comparative science of religious evolution is even now very tentative, and does not yield materials of sufficient stability for an epic, even if such an epic could be forced into the mould of the Arthur legends, a feat perhaps impossible, and certainly undesirable. A truly fantastic allegory must have been the result, and it is fortunate that the poet abandoned the idea in favour of more human themes. Moreover, he recognised very early that his was not a Muse de longue haleine; that he must be “short.” We may therefore feel certain that his early sorrow and discouragement were salutary to him as a poet, and as a man. He became more sympathetic, more tender, and was obliged to put forth that stoical self-control, and strenuous courage and endurance, through which alone his poetic career was rendered possible. “He had the susceptibility of a child or a woman,” says his friend; “he had also” (it was a strange combination) “the strength of a giant or of a god.” Without these qualities he must have broken down between 1833 and 1842 into a hypochondriac, or a morose, if majestic, failure. Poor, obscure, and unhappy, he overcame the world, and passed from darkness into light. The “poetic temperament” in another not gifted with his endurance and persistent strength would have achieved ruin.

Most of us remember Taine’s parallel between Tennyson and Alfred de Musset. The French critic has no high approval of Tennyson’s “respectability” and long peaceful life, as compared with the wrecked life and genius of Musset, l’enfant perdu of love, wine, and song. This is a theory like another, and is perhaps attractive to the young. The poet must have strong passions, or how can he sing of them: he must be tossed and whirled in the stress of things, like Shelley’s autumn leaves; -

“Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”

Looking at Burns, Byron, Musset, or even at Shelley’s earlier years, youth sees in them the true poets, “sacred things,” but also “light,” as Plato says, inspired to break their wings against the nature of existence, and the flammantia maenia mundi. But this is almost a boyish idea, this idea that the true poet is the slave of the passions, and that the poet who dominates them has none, and is but a staid domestic animal, an ass browsing the common, as somebody has written about Wordsworth. Certainly Tennyson’s was no “passionless perfection.” He, like others, was tempted to beat with ineffectual wings against the inscrutable nature of life. He, too, had his dark hour, and was as subject to temptation as they who yielded to the stress and died, or became unhappy waifs, “young men with a splendid past.” He must have known, no less than Musset, the attractions of many a paradis artificiel, with its bright visions, its houris, its offers of oblivion of pain. “He had the look of one who had suffered greatly,” Mr Palgrave writes in his record of their first meeting in 1842. But he, like Goethe, Scott, and Victor Hugo, had strength as well as passion and emotion; he came unscorched through the fire that has burned away the wings of so many other great poets. This was no less fortunate for the world than for himself. Of his prolonged dark hour we know little in detail, but we have seen that from the first he resisted the Tempter; Ulysses is his Retro Sathanas!

About “the mechanism of genius” in Tennyson Mr Palgrave has told us a little; more appears incidentally in his biography. “It was his way that when we had entered on some scene of special beauty or grandeur, after enjoying it together, he should always withdraw wholly from sight, and study the view, as it were, in a little artificial solitude.”

Tennyson’s poems, Mr Palgrave says, often arose in a kind of point de repere (like those forms and landscapes which seem to spring from a floating point of light, beheld with closed eyes just before we sleep). “More than once he said that his poems sprang often from a ‘nucleus,’ some one word, maybe, or brief melodious phrase, which had floated through the brain, as it were, unbidden. And perhaps at once while walking they were presently wrought into a little song. But if he did not write it down at once the lyric fled from him irrecoverably.” He believed himself thus to have lost poems as good as his best. It seems probable that this is a common genesis of verses, good or bad, among all who write. Like Dickens, and like most men of genius probably, he saw all the scenes of his poems “in his mind’s eye.” Many authors do this, without the power of making their readers share the vision; but probably few can impart the vision who do not themselves “visualise” with distinctness. We have seen, in the cases of The Holy Grail and other pieces, that Tennyson, after long meditating a subject, often wrote very rapidly, and with little need of correction. He was born with “style”; it was a gift of his genius rather than the result of conscious elaboration. Yet he did use “the file,” of which much is now written, especially for the purpose of polishing away the sibilants, so common in our language. In the nine years of silence which followed the little book of 1833 his poems matured, and henceforth it is probable that he altered his verses little, if we except the modifications in The Princess. Many slight verbal touches were made, or old readings were restored, but important changes, in the way of omission or addition, became rare.

Of nature Tennyson was scrupulously observant till his very latest days, eagerly noting, not only “effects,” as a painter does, but their causes, botanical or geological. Had man been scientific from the beginning he would probably have evolved no poetry at all; material things would not have been endowed by him with life and passion; he would have told himself no stories of the origins of stars and flowers, clouds and fire, winds and rainbows. Modern poets have resented, like Keats and Wordsworth, the destruction of the old prehistoric dreams by the geologist and by other scientific characters. But it was part of Tennyson’s poetic originality to see the beautiful things of nature at once with the vision of early poetic men, and of moderns accustomed to the microscope, telescope, spectrum analysis, and so forth. Thus Tennyson received a double delight from the sensible universe, and it is a double delight that he communicates to his readers. His intellect was thus always active, even in apparent repose. His eyes rested not from observing, or his mind from recording and comparing, the beautiful familiar phenomena of earth and sky. In the matter of the study of books we have seen how deeply versed he was in certain of the Greek, Roman, and Italian classics. Mr Jowett writes: “He was what might be called a good scholar in the university or public-school sense of the term, . . . yet I seem to remember that he had his favourite classics, such as Homer, and Pindar, and Theocritus. . . . He was also a lover of Greek fragments. But I am not sure whether, in later life, he ever sat down to read consecutively the greatest works of AEschylus and Sophocles, although he used occasionally to dip into them.” The Greek dramatists, in fact, seem to have affected Tennyson’s work but slightly, while he constantly reminds us of Virgil, Homer, Theocritus, and even Persius and Horace. Mediaeval French, whether in poetry or prose, and the poetry of the “Pleiad” seems to have occupied little of his attention. Into the oriental literatures he dipped — pretty deeply for his Akbar; and even his Locksley Hall owed something to Sir William Jones’s version of “the old Arabian Moallakat.” The debt appears to be infinitesimal. He seems to have been less closely familiar with Elizabethan poetry than might have been expected: a number of his obiter dicta on all kinds of literary points are recorded in the Life by Mr Palgrave. “Sir Walter Scott’s short tale, My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror (how little known!), he once spoke of as the finest of all ghost or magical stories.” Lord Tennyson adds, “The Tapestried Chamber also he greatly admired.” Both are lost from modern view among the short pieces of the last volumes of the Waverley novels. Of the poet’s interest in and attitude towards the more obscure pyschological and psychical problems — to popular science foolishness — enough has been said, but the remarks of Professor Tyndall have not been cited:-

My special purpose in introducing this poem, however, was to call your attention to a passage further on which greatly interested me. The poem is, throughout, a discussion between a believer in immortality and one who is unable to believe. The method pursued is this. The Sage reads a portion of the scroll, which he has taken from the hands of his follower, and then brings his own arguments to bear upon that portion, with a view to neutralising the scepticism of the younger man. Let me here remark that I read the whole series of poems published under the title “Tiresias,” full of admiration for their freshness and vigour. Seven years after I had first read them your father died, and you, his son, asked me to contribute a chapter to the book which you contemplate publishing. I knew that I had some small store of references to my interview with your father carefully written in ancient journals. On the receipt of your request, I looked up the account of my first visit to Farringford, and there, to my profound astonishment, I found described that experience of your father’s which, in the mouth of the Ancient Sage, was made the ground of an important argument against materialism and in favour of personal immortality eight-and-twenty years afterwards. In no other poem during all these years is, to my knowledge, this experience once alluded to. I had completely forgotten it, but here it was recorded in black and white. If you turn to your father’s account of the wonderful state of consciousness superinduced by thinking of his own name, and compare it with the argument of the Ancient Sage, you will see that they refer to one and the same phenomenon.

And more, my son! for more than once when I

Sat all alone, revolving in myself

The word that is the symbol of myself,

The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

And past into the Nameless, as a cloud

Melts into heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs

Were strange, not mine — and yet no shade of doubt,

But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self

The gain of such large life as match’d with ours

Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words,

Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.

Any words about Tennyson as a politician are apt to excite the sleepless prejudice which haunts the political field. He probably, if forced to “put a name to it,” would have called himself a Liberal. But he was not a social agitator. He never set a rick on fire. “He held aloof, in a somewhat detached position, from the great social seethings of his age” (Mr Frederic Harrison). But in youth he helped to extinguish some flaming ricks. He spoke of the “many-headed beast” (the reading public) in terms borrowed from Plato. He had no higher esteem for mobs than Shakespeare or John Knox professed, while his theory of tyrants (in the case of Napoleon III. about 1852) was that of Liberals like Mr Swinburne and Victor Hugo. Though to modern enlightenment Tennyson may seem as great a Tory as Dr Johnson, yet he had spoken his word in 1852 for the freedom of France, and for securing England against the supposed designs of a usurper (now fallen). He really believed, obsolete as the faith may be, in guarding our own, both on land and sea. Perhaps no Continental or American critic has ever yet dispraised a poetical fellow-countryman merely for urging the duties of national union and national defence. A critic, however, writes thus of Tennyson: “When our poet descends into the arena of party polemics, in such things as Riflemen, Form! Hands all Round, . . . The Fleet, and other topical pieces dear to the Jingo soul, it is not poetry but journalism.” I doubt whether the desirableness of the existence of a volunteer force and of a fleet really is within the arena of PARTY polemics. If any party thinks that we ought to have no volunteers, and that it is our duty to starve the fleet, what is that party’s name? Who cries, “Down with the Fleet! Down with National Defence! Hooray for the Disintegration of the Empire!”?

Tennyson was not a party man, but he certainly would have opposed any such party. If to defend our homes and this England be “Jingoism,” Tennyson, like Shakespeare, was a Jingo. But, alas! I do not know the name of the party which opposes Tennyson, and which wishes the invader to trample down England — any invader will do for so philanthropic a purpose. Except when resisting this unnamed party, the poet seldom or never entered “the arena of party polemics.” Tennyson could not have exclaimed, like Squire Western, “Hurrah for old England! Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen have landed in Kent!” He undeniably did write verses (whether poetry or journalism) tending to make readers take an unfavourable view of honest invaders. If to do that is to be a “Jingo,” and if such conduct hurts the feelings of any great English party, then Tennyson was a Jingo and a partisan, and was, so far, a rhymester, like Mr Kipling. Indeed we know that Tennyson applauded Mr Kipling’s The English Flag. So the worst is out, as we in England count the worst. In America and on the continent of Europe, however, a poet may be proud of his country’s flag without incurring rebuke from his countrymen. Tennyson did not reckon himself a party man; he believed more in political evolution than in political revolution, with cataclysms. He was neither an Anarchist nor a Home Ruler, nor a politician so generous as to wish England to be laid defenceless at the feet of her foes.

If these sentiments deserve censure, in Tennyson, at least, they claim our tolerance. He was not born in a generation late enough to be truly Liberal. Old prejudices about “this England,” old words from Henry V. and King John, haunted his memory and darkened his vision of the true proportions of things. We draw in prejudice with our mother’s milk. The mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a Comtist; his father had not been a staunch true-blue anti- Englander. Thus he inherited a certain bias in favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he could never emancipate himself. But tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. Had Tennyson’s birth been later, we might find in him a more complete realisation of our poetic ideal — might have detected less to blame or to forgive.

With that apology we must leave the fame of Tennyson as a politician to the clement consideration of an enlightened posterity. I do not defend his narrow insularities, his Jingoism, or the appreciable percentage of faith which blushing analysis may detect in his honest doubt: these things I may regret or condemn, but we ought not to let them obscure our view of the Poet. He was led away by bad examples. Of all Jingoes Shakespeare is the most unashamed, and next to him are Drayton, Scott, and Wordsworth, with his

“Oh, for one hour of that Dundee!”

In the years which followed the untoward affair of Waterloo young Tennyson fell much under the influence of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and the other offenders, and these are extenuating circumstances. By a curious practical paradox, where the realms of poetry and politics meet, the Tory critics seem milder of mood and more Liberal than the Liberal critics. Thus Mr William Morris was certainly a very advanced political theorist; and in theology Mr Swinburne has written things not easily reconcilable with orthodoxy. Yet we find Divine- Right Tories, who in literature are fervent admirers of these two poets, and leave their heterodoxies out of account. But many Liberal critics appear unable quite to forgive Tennyson because he did not wish to starve the fleet, and because he held certain very ancient, if obsolete, beliefs. Perhaps a general amnesty ought to be passed, as far as poets are concerned, and their politics and creeds should be left to silence, where “beyond these voices there is peace.”

One remark, I hope, can excite no prejudice. The greatest of the Gordons was a soldier, and lived in religion. But the point at which Tennyson’s memory is blended with that of Gordon is the point of sympathy with the neglected poor. It is to his wise advice, and to affection for Gordon, that we owe the Gordon training school for poor boys, — a good school, and good boys come out of that academy.

The question as to Tennyson’s precise rank in the glorious roll of the Poets of England can never be determined by us, if in any case or at any time such determinations can be made. We do not, or should not, ask whether Virgil or Lucretius, whether AEschylus or Sophocles, is the greater poet. The consent of mankind seems to place Homer and Shakespeare and Dante high above all. For the rest no prize-list can be settled. If influence among aliens is the test, Byron probably takes, among our poets, the next rank after Shakespeare. But probably there is no possible test. In certain respects Shelley, in many respects Milton, in some Coleridge, in some Burns, in the opinion of a number of persons Browning, are greater poets than Tennyson. But for exquisite variety and varied exquisiteness Tennyson is not readily to be surpassed. At one moment he pleases the uncritical mass of readers, in another mood he wins the verdict of the raffine. It is a success which scarce any English poet but Shakespeare has excelled. His faults have rarely, if ever, been those of flat-footed, “thick-ankled” dulness; of rhetoric, of common- place; rather have his defects been the excess of his qualities. A kind of John Bullishness may also be noted, especially in derogatory references to France, which, true or untrue, are out of taste and keeping. But these errors could be removed by the excision of half- a-dozen lines. His later work (as the Voyage of Maeldune) shows a just appreciation of ancient Celtic literature. A great critic, F. T. Palgrave, has expressed perhaps the soundest appreciation of Tennyson:-

It is for “the days that remain” to bear witness to his real place in the great hierarchy, amongst whom Dante boldly yet justly ranked himself. But if we look at Tennyson’s work in a twofold aspect, — HERE, on the exquisite art in which, throughout, his verse is clothed, the lucid beauty of the form, the melody almost audible as music, the mysterious skill by which the words used constantly strike as the INEVITABLE words (and hence, unforgettable), the subtle allusive touches, by which a secondary image is suggested to enrich the leading thought, as the harmonic “partials” give richness to the note struck upon the string; THERE, when we think of the vast fertility in subject and treatment, united with happy selection of motive, the wide range of character, the dramatic force of impersonation, the pathos in every variety, the mastery over the comic and the tragic alike, above all, perhaps, those phrases of luminous insight which spring direct from imaginative observation of Humanity, true for all time, coming from the heart to the heart, — his work will probably be found to lie somewhere between that of Virgil and Shakespeare: having its portion, if I may venture on the phrase, in the inspiration of both.

A professed enthusiast for Tennyson can add nothing to, and take nothing from, these words of one who, though his friend, was too truly a critic to entertain the admiration that goes beyond idolatry.

TENNYSON’S LIFE AND POETRY by Eugene Parsons

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

TENNYSON’S LIFE AND POETRY.

MISTAKES CONCERNING TENNYSON.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

There is already an extensive Tennyson literature. Of books relating to the scenes connected with his life and works, are Walters’ In Tennyson Land; Brooks’ Out of Doors with Tennyson; also Church’s Laureate’s Country, and Napier’s Homes and Haunts of Lord Tennyson. There is a mass of material, both critical and biographical, in Shepherd’s Tennysoniana; Wace’s Life and Works of Tennyson; Tainsh’s Study of the Works of Tennyson; Jennings’ Sketch of Lord Tennyson; and Van Dyke’s Poetry of Tennyson. Besides these may be mentioned Brightwell’s Tennyson Concordance; Irving’s Tennyson; Lester’s Lord Tennyson and the Bible; also Collins’ Illustrations of Tennyson.

Valuable help for understanding and appreciating In Memoriam is afforded by the volumes on that poem written by Robertson, Gatty, Genung, Chapman and Davidson. Much interesting information is given in Dawson’s Study of “The Princess”; Mann’s Tennyson’s “Maud” Vindicated; Elsdale’s Studies in the Idyls; and Nutt’s Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail. A collection of Tennyson’s songs, set to music by various composers, has been issued by Stanley Lucas and by Harper & Bros.

Several volumes of selections from Tennyson’s writings have appeared as follows: Ausgewählte Gedichte, with notes (in German) by Fischer, Salzwedel, 1878; Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson, with notes (in Italian) by T. C. Cann, Florence, 1887; Lyrical Poems of Lord Tennyson, annotated by F. T. Palgrave; Select Poems of Tennyson, and Young People’s Tennyson, both edited by W. J. Rolfe; Tennyson Selections, with notes by F. J. Rowe and W. T. Webb; and Tennyson for the Young, edited by Alfred Ainger.

Among school editions of Tennyson’s poems, are The Princess, with notes by Rolfe, also by Wallace; Enoch Arden, with notes by Rolfe, by Webb, and by Blaisdel; Enoch Arden, with notes (in German) by Hamann, Leipzig, 1890; Enoch Arden, with notes (in French) by Courtois, Paris, 1891; Enoch Arden, with notes (in French) by Beljame, Paris, 1891; Les Idylles du roi, Enoch Arden, with notes (in French) by Baret, Paris, 1886; Enoch Arden, les Idylles du roi, with notes (in French) by Sevrette, Paris, 1887; Aylmer’s Field, annotated by Webb; The Two Voices and A Dream of Fair Women, by Corson; The Coming of Arthur and The Passing of Arthur, by Rowe; In Memoriam and other poems, by Kellogg.

Innumerable papers on Tennyson and his poetry have been published in newspapers and periodicals. A large number of these reviews and some descriptive articles are contained in the following volumes: Horne’s Spirit of the Age; Howitt’s Homes and Haunts of British Poets; Hamilton’s Poets-Laureate of England; Robertson’s Lectures; Kingsley’s Miscellanies; Bagehot’s Literary Studies; Japp’s Three Great Teachers; Buchanan’s Master Spirits; Austin’s Poets of the Period; Forman’s Our Living Poets; Friswell’s Modern Men of Letters; Haweis’ Poets in the Pulpit; McCrie’s Religion of Our Literature; Devey’s Comparative Estimate of English Poets; Gladstone’s Gleanings of Past Years; Archer’s English Dramatists of To-Day; Stedman’s Victorian Poets; Cooke’s Poets and Problems; Fraser’s Chaucer to Longfellow; Dawson’s Makers of Modern English; Egan’s Lectures on English Literature; and Ritchie’s Light-Bearers.

For favorable or unfavorable estimates of Tennyson, the reader is referred to the lectures of Dowden and Ingram in the Dublin Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art, and to the collected essays of Brimley, Bayne, Hadley, Masson, Stirling, Roscoe, Hayward, Hutton, Swinburne, Galton, Noel, Heywood, Bayard Taylor and others.

Some side-lights are thrown on the Laureate in Ruskin’s Modern Painters; Hamerton’s Thoughts on Art; Masson’s Recent British Philosophy; and Arnold’s Lectures on Translating Homer. Stray glimpses of the man in his personal relations are found in the Carlyle and Emerson Correspondence; Fanny Kemble’s Records of a Girlhood; Caroline Fox’s Memories of Old Friends; Reid’s Life of Lord Houghton; and in the Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald.

But with all that has been written concerning Tennyson, no monograph, so far as I am aware, has hitherto appeared which is at once comprehensive and accurate. Mrs. Ritchie’s beautiful portraiture of the Laureate, with its touch of hero-worship, lacks a great deal of being a survey of his literary career. No biography of Alfred Tennyson has been published which is worthy the name. For many years students and lovers of the poet encountered difficulty in obtaining full and exact information on the chief events of his life. I undertook to supply this want in the essay entitled “Tennyson’s Life and Poetry.”

In the preparation of this paper, I had occasion to consult various periodicals and works of reference. With scarcely an exception, I found the articles on Tennyson in cyclopedias and biographical dictionaries faulty in many particulars. Even the sketches in recent compilations and journals are full of misleading and conflicting statements. I became impressed with the thought that these errors ought to be exposed and corrected. The result was the critique—”Mistakes concerning Tennyson.” I gathered my materials from a variety of sources, and always aimed to disengage the truth. I depended largely on Rev. Alfred Gatty, Mrs. Ritchie, Mr. Gosse, Prof. Palgrave, Prof. Church, Mr. C. J. Caswell, and Dr. Van Dyke as the most trustworthy authorities.

My thanks are due Dr. W. F. Poole, of the Newberry Library, for placing at my disposal an immense collection of bibliographies, catalogues and bulletins of foreign books. I desire also to express my obligations to Dr. Henry van Dyke, of New York City, for aiding me in my researches.

Eugene Parsons.

3612 Stanton Ave., Chicago,

April, 1892.

TENNYSON’S LIFE AND POETRY.

I.

Alfred Tennyson was born August 6, 1809, in Somersby, a wooded hamlet of Lincolnshire, England. “The native village of Tennyson,” says Howitt, who visited it many years ago, “is not situated in the fens, but in a pretty pastoral district of softly sloping hills and large ash trees. It is not based on bogs, but on a clean sandstone. There is a little glen in the neighborhood, called by the old monkish name of Holywell.” There he was brought up amid the lovely idyllic scenes which he has made famous in the “Ode to Memory” and other poems. The picturesque “Glen,” with its tangled underwood and purling brook, was a favorite haunt of the poet in childhood. On one of the stones in this ravine he inscribed the words — Byron is Dead — ere he was fifteen.

Alfred was the fourth son of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., rector of Somersby and other neighboring parishes. His father, the oldest son of George Tennyson, Esq., of Bayons and Usselby Hall, was a man of uncommon talents and attainments, who had tried his hand, with fair success, at architecture, painting, music and poetry. His mother was a sweet, gentle soul, and exceptionally sensitive. The poet-laureate seems to have inherited from her his refined, shrinking nature.

Dr. Tennyson married Miss Elizabeth Fytche, August 6, 1805. Their first child, George, died in infancy. According to the parish registers, the Tennyson family consisted of eleven children, viz.: Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Mary, Emily, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, Matilda, Cecilia and Horatio. They formed a joyous, lively household — amusements being agreeably mingled with their daily tasks. They were all handsome and gifted, with marked mental traits and imaginative temperaments. They were especially fond of reading and story-telling. At least four of the boys were addicted to verse-writing — a habit they kept up through life, though Alfred alone devoted himself to a poetical career as something more than a pastime. Frederick Tennyson’s occasional pieces are characterized by luxuriant fancy and chaste diction; the sonnets of Charles won high praise from Coleridge, but the fame of both has been overshadowed by that of their distinguished brother.

The scholarly clergyman, who was an M. A. of Cambridge, carefully attended to the education and training of his children. He turned his gifts and accomplishments to good account in stimulating their mental growth. Alfred was sent to the Louth Grammar School four years (1816-20). During this time he presumably learned something, although no flattering reports of his progress have come down to us. Then private teachers were employed by Dr. Tennyson to instruct his boys, but he took upon himself for the most part the burden of fitting them for college. Only a moderate amount of study was imposed by the rector. A great deal of the time Alfred was out of doors, rambling through the pastures and woods about Somersby and Bag Enderby. He was solitary, not caring to mingle with other boys in their sports. As a child, he exhibited the same peculiarities which characterized the man. He was shy and reserved, moody and absent-minded. Alfred and Charles were devotedly attached to each other, and frequently were together in their walks. The lads were both large and strong for their age. Charles was a popular boy in Somersby on account of his frank, genial disposition — which cannot be said of the reticent Alfred.

One incident connected with the poet’s education at home is worth repeating. His father required him to memorize the odes of Horace and to recite them morning by morning until the four books were gone through. The Laureate in later years testified to the value of this practice in cultivating a delicate sense for metrical music. He called Horace his master. Certainly no other bard has ever excelled Tennyson in the art of expressing himself in melodious verse.

From his twelfth to his sixteenth year, Alfred was apparently idle much of the time, yet he was unconsciously preparing for his life-work. He was gathering material and storing up impressions which were afterwards utilized. It was with him a formative period. The hours he spent strolling in lanes and woods were not wasted. The quiet, meditative boy lived in a realm of the imagination, and his thoughts and fancies took shape in crude poems.

This period of day-dreaming was followed by one of marked intellectual activity. The thin volume — Poems by Two Brothers, printed in 1826, contained the pieces written by Alfred when he was only sixteen or seventeen. It shows that these were busy years. The Tennyson youths not only scribbled a great deal of verse — they ranged far and wide in the fields of ancient and modern literature. Their father had a good library, and they appreciated its treasures. In the footnotes of their first book were many curious bits of information, and quotations from the classics.

The Tennyson children were fortunate in having cultured parents. They were favored in another respect. Dr. Tennyson was comfortably well off for a clergyman. His means — which he shrewdly husbanded — enabled the family to spend the summers at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast. Thus Alfred’s passion for the sea was early developed. For some time it was the rector’s custom to occupy a dwelling in Louth during the school year. In this way the seclusion and monotony of Somersby life were broken. The young Tennysons saw considerable of the world. They were often welcomed in the home of their grandmother, Mrs. Fytche, in Westgate Place, and occasionally visited the stately mansion at Bayons. Especially Charles and Alfred were at times the guests of their great-uncle Samuel Turner, vicar of Grasby and curate of Caistor, who afterwards left his property and parish livings to his favorite, Charles Tennyson Turner. Such were the experiences of the Laureate’s youth and childhood, which inevitably influenced his whole life and entered into his poetry. He illustrates the truth that a poet is largely what his environment makes him.

Byron exercised a magical spell over him in his teens, and this influence is apparent in his boyish rhymes which are tinged with Byronic melancholy. Afterwards Keats gained the ascendency. As a colorist, Tennyson owes much to this gorgeous word-painter, whom he has equaled, if not surpassed, in his own field.

Alfred, in his boyhood, gave unmistakable indications of genius. During his university course at Cambridge, he was generally looked upon as a superior mortal, of whom great things were expected by his teachers and fellow-collegians. Dr. Whewell, his tutor, treated him with unusual respect.

While at Trinity college (1828-31) he formed friendships which lasted till death ended them one by one. It was indeed a company of choice spirits with whom Tennyson had the good fortune to be associated. Among them were Thackeray, Helps, Garden, Sterling, Thompson, Kinglake, Maurice, Kemble, Milnes, Trench, Alford, Brookfield, Merivale, Spedding and others. Besides these, he numbered among the friends of his early manhood Fitzgerald, Hare, Hunt, Carlyle, Gladstone, Rogers, Landor, Forster, the Lushingtons and other famous scholars and men of letters.

In the companionship of such men, he found the stimulus necessary for the development of his poetical faculty. They all regarded him with feelings of warmest admiration. The young poet had at least a few appreciative readers during the ten or twelve years of obscurity when the public cared little for his writings. He was encouraged by their words of commendation to pursue the bard’s divine calling, to which he was led by an overmastering instinct. He could afford to wait and smile at his slashing reviewers. Meanwhile he profited by the suggestions of his critics. In this respect he presents a striking contrast to Browning. He mercilessly subjected his productions to the most painstaking revision. He attempted various styles, and experimented with all sorts of metres. Thus he served his laborious apprenticeship and acquired a mastery of his art. His eminent success has confirmed the expectations of his youthful admirers.

During his stay at Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam, a son of the historian. Hallam, who was a young man of extraordinary promise, became the dearest of his friends — more to him than brother. Their intimate fellowship was strengthened by Arthur’s love for the poet’s sister. It was his strongest earthly attachment. In 1830, the two friends traveled through France together, and stopped a while in the Pyrenees. On revisiting these mountains long afterward, the Laureate, overcome by reminiscences of other days, wrote the affecting lines entitled “In the Valley of Cauteretz”:

All along the valley, stream that flashest white,

Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,

All along the valley, where thy waters flow,

I walk’d with one I loved two and thirty years ago.

For all along the valley, while I walk’d to-day,

The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away;

For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed,

Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,

And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,

The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

In 1833, the sudden death of Hallam, then Emily’s betrothed, produced on Alfred’s mind a deep and ineffaceable impression. While brooding over his sorrow, the idea came to him of expressing his emotions in verse which might be a fitting tribute to the dead. At different times and amid widely varying circumstances, were composed the elegiac strains and poetic musings that make up “In Memoriam,” a poem representing many moods and experiences. It is a work occupying a place apart in literature. Its merits and defects are peculiar. There is no other elegy like it, and it may be doubted whether a second In Memoriam will ever be written. Tennyson erected an appropriate and imperishable monument to the memory of his lost friend. In conferring immortality upon his beloved Arthur, he gained it for himself. His best claim on the future is to be known and remembered as the author of “In Memoriam,” his masterpiece.

Equally enduring is the melodious wail—”Break, break, break,” one of the sweetest dirges in all literature. Hallam was buried (Jan. 3, 1834) at Clevedon by the Severn, near its entrance to the Bristol Channel, within sound of the melancholy waves. Singularly this exquisite song, which breathes of the sea, was not composed here, but “in a Lincolnshire lane at five o’clock in the morning,” as the Laureate himself has declared. It was written within a year after Hallam’s death, Sept. 15, 1833.

Not much has been learned of Tennyson’s early manhood. No very definite picture can be formed of his life after he left college. He seldom wrote letters. Even his most intimate friends could not succeed in carrying on a correspondence with him. What happened to him is not, however, all a blank. A few scraps relating to his history are found in the letters of Carlyle, Fitzgerald, Milnes and others. A number of autobiographical fragments are sprinkled through the poems which he wrote between 1830 and 1850, but they refer more to his spiritual development than to the outward events which constitute memoirs.

Mrs. Tennyson and her family continued to live at the Rectory after her husband died, March 16, 1831. In the autumn of 1835, she removed to High Beach, Epping Forest, (“In Memoriam,” CII., CIV., CV.), and about 1840 to Well Walk, Hampstead. Here she made her home the rest of her life with her sister, Mary Ann Fytche — nearly all of her sons and daughters having married and scattered. She died February 21, 1865, at the age of eighty-four.

Alfred’s university career was cut short by his father’s death. For some years he remained at home — a diligent student of books and a close observer of nature. He roamed back and forth between Somersby and London, alternately in solitude and with his friends. Fitzgerald tells of his visiting with Tennyson at the Cumberland home of James Spedding in 1835.

Here Alfred would spend hour after hour reading aloud “Morte d’Arthur” and other unpublished poems, which his scholarly friend criticized. In 1838, he was a welcome member of the Anonymous Club in London, and for several years he had rooms in this city at various intervals. It was his custom to make long incursions through the country on foot, studying the landscapes of England and Wales and pondering many a lay unsung. Thus he became familiar with the natural features of the places illustrated in his poems with such pictorial fidelity and vividness, though not with photographic accuracy.

Through this long period he was unknown to the great world. He lived modestly, though not in actual want. His books brought him no substantial returns till long after 1842. There was but little left of his patrimony, if any, when he was granted a pension of £200 in 1845. This timely aid was obtained for him by Sir Robert Peel, chiefly through the influence of Carlyle and Milnes.

Henceforth fortune graciously smiled upon him and made amends for past neglect. His reputation was becoming well established, and new editions of his poems were being called for. The Queen chanced to pick up one of his earlier volumes, and was charmed with the simple story of “The Miller’s Daughter.” She procured a copy of the book for the Princess Alice; this incident, it is related, brought him into favor with the aristocracy and gave a tremendous impetus to his popularity. After the death of Wordsworth in 1850, Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate. Since then he has been highly esteemed by the royal family, and has produced in their honor some spirited odes and stately dedications.

The poet married (June 13, 1850) Miss Emily Sellwood, of Horncastle, whom he had known from childhood. Her mother was a sister of Sir John Franklin, and her youngest sister was the wife of Charles Tennyson Turner. Two or three years they lived at Twickenham, where Hallam Tennyson was born in 1852. Together they visited Italy in 1851, and vivid memories of their travels are recalled in “The Daisy,” addressed to his wife. This interesting poem, written at Edinburgh, was suggested by the finding of a daisy in a book — the flower having been plucked on the Splugen and placed by Mrs. Tennyson between the leaves of a little volume as a memento of their Italian journey. The poet’s fancy was stirred and revived the delicious hours —

In lands of palm and southern pine;

In lands of palm, of orange blossom,

Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.

Those who are familiar with Tennyson’s poems know how exalted is his ideal of woman as wife and mother. Lady Tennyson seems to have met the poet’s exacting requirements almost perfectly. What sort of helpmeet she has been he lovingly portrayed in the “Dedication,” — a tender tribute that was fully deserved. “His most lady-like, gentle wife,” Fitzgerald called her. Of superior education and talent, she was a worthy companion for an author. A number of her husband’s songs she has set to music. She has never sought public recognition. Content with the round of duties in a domestic sphere, she has lived for husband and children. Their married life has been exceptionally harmonious.

In 1852, the Laureate’s largely increasing income enabled him to purchase an estate of more than four hundred acres near Freshwater, Isle of Wight. In the lines, “To the Rev. F. D. Maurice,” dated January, 1854, the poet depicts his pleasant life in this delightful retreat:

Where, far from noise and smoke of town,

I watch the twilight falling brown

All round a careless-order’d garden

Close to the ridge of a noble down.

You’ll have no scandal while you dine,

But honest talk and wholesome wine,

And only hear the magpie gossip

Garrulous under a roof of pine:

For groves of pine on either hand,

To break the blast of winter, stand;

And further on, the hoary Channel

Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.

In 1855, Tennyson received the honorary degree of D. C. L. from Oxford. His prosperity continued — there being considerable profits from judicious investments and immense sales of his books. In 1867, he bought an estate near Haslemere, Surrey, “for the purpose of enjoying inland air and scenery.” Here he built a fine Gothic mansion, which is an ideal residence for a poet. Aldworth House is situated far up on Blackdown Heath, and overlooks a lovely valley. It is near the northern border of Sussex. “The prospect from the terrace of the house,” says Church, “is one of the finest in the south of England.” The poet thus pictures the place which has been his summer home for more than twenty years:

Our birches yellowing and from each

The light leaf falling fast,

While squirrels from our fiery beech

Were bearing off the mast,

You came, and look’d, and loved the view

Long-known and loved by me,

Green Sussex fading into blue

With one gray glimpse of sea.

In 1883, the Laureate had amassed property estimated to be worth £200,000. He was offered and accepted a peerage during the latter part of this year, and became Baron of Aldworth and Farringford, January 24, 1884. He took his seat in the House of Lords March 11. In 1865, he declined a baronetcy offered by the Queen as a reward for his loyal devotion to the Crown. Whatever distinction may attach to the honorable name of Lord Tennyson, the majority of his numerous readers prefer to call him plain Alfred Tennyson.

It may not be widely known that Baron Tennyson has a splendid lineage, of which he has modestly kept silent, unlike Byron. According to a writer in the St. James’ Gazette, who traced his ancestry back to Norman times, Tennyson is descended from an illustrious house of “princes, soldiers, and statesmen, famous in British or European history.” Some of his remote relatives were crowned heads — one being the celebrated Malcolm III. of Scotland. In Tennyson’s descent “two lines are blended,” says Church, “the middle class line of the Tennysons, and the noble and even royal line of the D’Eyncourts.”

Alfred’s uncle, the Right Hon. Charles Tennyson-D’Eyncourt of Bayons Manor in Lincolnshire, was a man of marked ability and culture, who held various public offices, and represented several boroughs in parliament from 1818 to 1852. Since his death, in 1861, the family estate has successively passed to his three sons — George Hildyard, Admiral Edwin Clayton, C. B. (1871), and Louis Charles (1890), the present inheritor of the D’Eyncourt seat and dignity.

The poet’s last years have been clouded by the bereavement of many old friends and relatives. Septimus, Charles, Mary, Emily, and Edward are dead. He suffered a severe blow in the death of his second son Lionel, while on the homeward voyage from India. He mourns his loss in the touching stanzas—”To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.”

Lord Tennyson was the recipient of many congratulations on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, August 6, 1889. The same year was marked by the publication of a new volume of poems, which attest that his intellectual vigor is unimpaired by age or bodily weakness. A dainty little poem of his—”To Sleep” — was published in the New Review for March, 1891, and it is not improbable that others will see the light in the near future.

Tennyson’s health, though quite robust for an octogenarian, has been broken of late. In the spring of 1890, he was troubled with a grievous illness, the result of exposure to cold — he having persisted in taking his “daily two hours’ walk along the cliff” in all kinds of weather. It was expected that the poet would spend the following winter in the South to avoid the rigorous climate of the Isle of Wight, but he recovered sufficient strength to remain at Farringford House amid the scenes he loves so well.

Tennyson has always shunned publicity, living in a world apart — removed from the gaze of the profane crowd. He rarely goes into society, preferring rural retirement to social converse. As poet and man, he has gained by this voluntary seclusion. His delight is to mingle with the world of nature. The woods and skies, the streams and billows have been his comrades. How much they have contributed to his poetic greatness cannot be estimated. He is, however, a recluse with his eyes open. He has watched the progress of mankind and observed the trend of the times. Realizing the needs of the age, he grandly rose to the occasion — either to lift up his voice in protest against its faults, or to sing its achievements.

For many years no strangers have been admitted to Farringford Park. Visitors, while welcome at Aldworth in the afternoon, have not been allowed to interrupt the accustomed occupations of the master of the house, who is very methodical in his habits. It has long been his custom to rise early and spend the morning hours in his study — writing and dreaming in an atmosphere laden with smoke and the odor of tobacco. He now uses the pen but little, owing to failing eyesight. The Honorable Hallam Tennyson is his secretary and constant companion.

Personally, his lordship is a man who would attract attention anywhere, with his stalwart form slightly stooping, his noble face, his long flowing hair and bushy beard. He dresses carelessly, and when out of doors wears a shocking bad hat; with his cloak and walking-stick, he makes a picturesque figure. He is a confirmed pedestrian. “Every morning,” says a newspaper correspondent, “in hail, rain or snow, the poet dons his frouzy cap and his frouzier slouch hat, and promenades for an hour or so, none daring to disturb him.”

Tennyson is taciturn and brusque before strangers, whose presence annoys him, but he is delightfully easy and spontaneous with friends. Edward Fitzgerald, in his letters to Frederick Tennyson and others, alludes again and again, in terms of enthusiastic appreciation, to Alfred’s wise and pointed conversation. One of his original “sayings, which strike the nail on the head,” was about Dante. It is well worth quoting in Fitzgerald’s concise language, taken from a letter written in 1876:

“What Mr. Lowell says of him recalled to me what Tennyson said to me some thirty-five or forty years ago. We were stopping before a shop in Regent street where were two figures of Dante and Gœthe. I (I suppose) said, ‘What is there in old Dante’s face that is missing in Gœthe’s?’ And Tennyson (whose profile then had certainly a remarkable likeness to Dante’s) said: ‘The divine.’”

From first to last Alfred Tennyson has recognized that the mission of the poet is that of an æsthetic teacher. Much has he done to educate English-speaking people in the appreciation of beauty. But he is emphatically more than this. A man of stainless reputation, his deeds and words have almost invariably been on the side of righteousness. His career has been free from the excesses which disgraced the lives of Marlowe and Shelley, of Byron and Poe. He is rather to be ranged with the Spensers and Miltons, the Wordsworths and Brownings, as a defender of truth and religion. In the main he has steadfastly kept in mind the austere ideal —

Of those who, far aloof

From envy, hate and pity, and spite and scorn,

Live the great life which all our greatest fain

Would follow, center’d in eternal calm.

II.

The current of Tennyson’s genius is like a rivulet placidly flowing through meadows and groves, occasionally rippling and swirling over stones, then pursuing its even course — gradually widening and deepening; not like a mighty river proudly sweeping in a resistless flood through a wilderness, or tumbling down rocky chasms. All that he has given the world during sixty years of literary activity is contained in less than a dozen volumes of verse. Only a rapid survey of his poetical career is attempted here.

Passing by without comment Poems by two Brothers (1826), “The Lover’s Tale” (composed about 1828), and “Timbuctoo” (1829), we come to Tennyson’s first bid for fame in Poems, chiefly Lyrical (1830). This slender volume included (along with much rubbish) a few pieces which are perennial favorites with lovers of Tennyson, viz.: “Mariana,” “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” “The Dying Swan,” “A Dirge,” “Love and Death,” and “Circumstance.” Among the poems suppressed in later editions is one in an unusual vein—”Nero to Leander” — which Emerson inserted in his Parnassus.

His second book of Poems (1833) was a more ambitious venture. Its contents, though marred by faults of crude taste, possessed in a marked degree, the characteristic qualities of the Laureate’s poetry. Nearly all of the lyrics in it have been found worthy of a permanent place in the collected editions of his poems, but most of them underwent countless changes before they were republished in 1842 — being corrected and polished till they were well-nigh perfect from a critical standpoint.

The two volumes of Poems (1842) revealed Tennyson at his best — a mature singer whose dignified, harmonious verse compares favorably with the most splendid contributions to British poetry. “The Princess” (1847), “In Memoriam” (1850), and “Maud” (1855) made his position secure as the greatest of living poets.

Not satisfied to rest content as a lyrist, Tennyson essayed extended narrative in Idyls of the King (1859) and “Enoch Arden” (1864). Gaining courage from the enthusiastic reception of the four Arthurian idyls, he undertook to carry out a long cherished design — which Milton and Dryden had conceived — of writing a national epic on King Arthur. He had already made several attempts at versifying incidents from the Mabinogion and Malory’s old romance Morte d’ Arthur, but they were isolated fragments. From time to time he added others, making the series of tales called the Round Table a complete cycle as follows:

The Coming of Arthur, 1869; Gareth and Lynette, 1872; Geraint and Enid, 1859; Balin and Balan, 1885; Merlin and Vivien, 1859; Lancelot and Elaine, 1859; The Holy Grail, 1869; Pelleas and Ettarre, 1869; The Last Tournament, 1871; Guinevere, 1859; The Passing of Arthur, 1842, 1869.

Then boldly entering the dangerous field of historical drama, Tennyson became a rival of Shakspeare himself in “Queen Mary” (1875), “Harold” (1876), and “Becket” (1884). Besides these, he brought forth three shorter plays or dramatic sketches—”The Cup” (1884), “The Falcon” (1884), “The Promise of May” (1886), and a lengthy idyllic drama called “The Foresters” (1892).

As if to prove that his fertility was not exhausted in the province of the lyric, he made fresh incursions into fields of song long familiar to him. These winnowings of the last two decades are gathered into the following volumes:

Ballads, and Other Poems (1880); Tiresias, and Other Poems (1885); Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, etc. (1886); Demeter, and Other Poems (1889).

Enough books have been named to give at least half a dozen minstrels a firm footing on Parnassus. The number of Tennyson’s meritorious performances is simply astonishing. But few poets have wrought with such unwearying patience. Not many can present as imposing a catalogue of works that are confessedly of such a high order of excellence. Browning has written more, but Browning has not taken the trouble to perfect himself in form — in short, he is not a finished artist. In literary workmanship, Tennyson stands supreme. It is universally admitted that none of his contemporaries ranks so high as man of letters. He is the brightest ornament of the Victorian reign.

Without doubt the Laureate deserves his hard-won glory. In his hale old age, he has disarmed the critics of years ago who sneered at his empty lays and feminine ways. The question — Cui bono? could be asked as to many of Tennyson’s earlier efforts, such as “Oriana,” “The Lady of Shalott,” “Audley Court,” “Edwin Morris,” “Amphion,” “Lady Clare,” “The Lord of Burleigh,” “The Beggar Maid” and others. These lyrics and idyls are made up of ornate commonplaces which show the artistic instinct rather than the poetic. They abound with the ephemeral conceits of drawing-room poetry. They contain nothing that resembles vivacity or sublimity. They have not the interest which is general and universal as distinguished from the private or the unusual. They are not representative of human nature, but of individual peculiarities. They are ideal pictures, not transcripts from experience.

With a few exceptions, the minor poems published in 1855 and 1864 are of similar character; and it may be said that “The Princess,” “Maud,” “Enoch Arden,” and most of the Arthurian stories are in much the same vein. None of these works, when viewed as an organic whole, can be called great. In all of them, manliness is at a discount, and there is withal a dearth of ideas. Sentiment and ornament are overdone, and there is not enough of life. They can be described as a chaos of pretty fancies and idle reveries. Such are not the strains that shape a nation’s destiny and are treasured in its heart. In the centuries agone, such a songster would have been a first-class troubadour, much sought and praised in princely circles.

But former estimates of Tennyson must be revised. The slurs at the euphonious jingler and effeminate Alfred are in place no more. He has abandoned the domain of the legendary and the fantastic. Romance has given way to history, and dreams to reality. Sensuous effects are now subordinate. His verse no longer cloys with sweetness. It is simple, natural, impassioned.

“Queen Mary” and “Becket” certainly rank foremost among the few powerful plays that have appeared since Shelley wrote “The Cenci.” There are some Bulwer-Lyttonish passages in “Becket,” but they are more than redeemed by the imperial magnificence of other passages in the same tragedy. The ballads and other lyrics published within the last dozen years display a rugged virility that was quite foreign to the labored “Idyls of the King.” “Rizpah” and “The Revenge” have the ring of genuine metal. There is no hollow sound in the manly tributes to E. Fitzgerald and to his ancient Mantuan master. The introspective poet of “The Two Voices” has grown to fuller intellectual stature in “The Ancient Sage.” The music and majesty of “Tiresias” and “Demeter” are unsurpassed in “Ulysses” and “Tithonus.” “Romney’s Remorse” excels “Sea Dreams” in portraying the better instincts of humanity on the domestic side, and its tender lullaby—”Beat upon mine, little heart!” — almost equals the incomparable “Sweet and low.” While “Vastness” and “Crossing the Bar” repeat the lyrical triumphs of his palmiest days.

Time has dealt gently with the venerable harper, whose hands sweep the strings with surer touch and greater compass than before. Age has brought more forceful speech and clearer vision. Some of his senile efforts betray less of conscious effort, as though long practice in using metrical language as a vehicle of thought and imagery had made it a pure mirror of the poet’s mind. His worn-out mannerisms appear occasionally, also his subtleties of expression and feeling. There is the same imaginative sorcery as of old, and the same consummate style, but the studied elegance and artful devices of earlier productions are less noticeable. There is less of minute finish in form and more of epic grandeur in tone and spirit. A healthier inspiration has visited him in the evening of life. His genius has gradually ripened. The full cup of advanced years was needed to bring out what was best in him, to effect his complete development.

Since the hysterical explosion of “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” the Laureate seems to have attained the calmness of soul which belongs to the true poetical spirit. He is no longer the fretful author of “The New Timon,” “The Spiteful Letter,” and “Literary Squabbles,” who lacked the restraint of entire self-possession. A more serious tone pervades the personal poems—”To Ulysses,” “To Mary Boyle” and others in his 1889 volume. A wiser man wrote the stately measures of “Happy” and “By an Evolutionist,” one who looked down upon past follies from spiritual heights never before reached. There is a touch of Miltonic loftiness in his “Parnassus,” and the philosophic resignation of Gœthe in “The Progress of Spring.” His is the tranquil, fruitful old age that crowns a well ordered career.

MISTAKES CONCERNING TENNYSON.

A STUDY IN CONTEMPORANEOUS BIOGRAPHY.

“Alfred Tennyson was born August 5, 1809, at Somersby, a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, of which, and of a neighboring parish, his father, Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, was rector. The poet’s mother was Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, vicar of Louth. Alfred was the third of seven sons — Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Edward, Horatio, Arthur, and Septimus. A daughter, Cecilia, became the wife of Edmund Law Lushington, long professor of Greek in Glasgow University. Whether there were other daughters, the biographies of the poet do not mention.”

This is the opening paragraph of the Introduction to a school edition of “The Two Voices” and “A Dream of Fair Women,” by Dr. Hiram Corson. Here are several inaccuracies as to the Tennyson family and the poet’s birthday, and the same mistakes and others are found in nearly all the sketches of the Laureate in periodicals and works of reference.

It is generally supposed that cyclopedia articles are prepared by specialists who know what they are writing about. This is the popular conception, but this is evidently not the case in regard to Tennyson, who has fared sadly at the hands of his biographers. The brief accounts of his life given in Appleton’s, the Americanized Britannica, and other cyclopedias fairly bristle with blunders and objectionable features. As they stand, most of these articles are utterly untrustworthy. Their assertions are often misleading, or so vague as to be practically valueless. As a result, most people are more or less at sea in regard to Tennyson chronology.

Dr. Tennyson and Family.

A multitude of errors have been perpetrated about Dr. Tennyson and family. We are told that Bayons Manor was his native place, and that he was “rector of Somersby and vicar of Bennington and Grimsby.” One writer uncritically imagines him a doctor of divinity. According to some questionable authorities, he died “about 1830;” “in 1830;” “about 1831;” “on the 18th of March, 1831;” and in 1832. Mrs. Tennyson is said to have died “in her eighty-first year;” also “in her eighty-fourth year.”

The number of sons and daughters in the Tennyson household is rarely given correctly. Alfred is called, in a hit-or-miss fashion, one of three, four, six, seven and eight brothers. His sisters are variously reckoned as one, three, four and five.

The Rev. George Clayton Tennyson was born at Market Rasen, December 10, 1778. He graduated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1801; he received the degree of M. A. in 1805, and of LL.D. in 1813. He married (August 6, 1805) Miss Elizabeth Fytche of Louth. He moved to Somersby in 1808, where he was rector till his death. If the inscription on his tomb is to be trusted, Dr. Tennyson was rector of two neighboring parishes — Benniworth and Bag Enderby — and was vicar of Great Grimsby; and died March 16, 1831. The poet’s mother died February 21, 1865, in her eighty-fifth year.

Alfred Tennyson was the fourth of eight sons — George (who died in infancy), Frederick, Charles, Alfred, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, and Horatio. The sisters were Mary, Emily, Matilda, and Cecilia. Excepting George and Frederick, all of the children were born at Somersby.

Alfred’s Birthday.

The discussion as to the poet’s birthday is now practically at rest — his lordship himself having authoritatively settled the matter. Would that he would enlighten us on some other perplexing points in his history! Mrs. Tennyson kept August 6 as Alfred’s birthday. Tourists who have hastily examined the parish registers of Somersby have mistaken the figure 6 for a 5, owing to the fading of the ink “at the back, or left, of the loop.” But careless hackwriters, depending upon the compilations published decades ago, continue to assert that the Laureate was born August 5; April 9, or April 6.

Year of Tennyson’s Birth.

In Welsh’s English Literature is a “biography” of Tennyson which says, amid various other slips, that he was born in 1810. Allibone’s Dictionary of Authors (p. 2371) is a year out of the way. When this ponderous work was first published, not much was definitely known of the poet, but Alden’s Cyclopedia of Literature (1890), and other unreliable authorities put 1810 or 1811 as the year of his birth.

In the parish registers of Somersby, Dr. Tennyson’s handwriting records Alfred’s birth and baptism among the entries of 1809. Here is an instance where one can put to flight a host — for the names of those who assign 1810 as the year of the poet’s birth are legion.

Tennyson’s Schooldays.

There is a want of precision in many of the statements that have been made by Tennyson’s biographers concerning his school days. In the Encyclopedia Americana (1889), vol. iv., p. 660, Dr. C. E. Washburn says Alfred “attended for a time Cadney’s village school, and for a brief period the grammar-school at Louth,” — which is partly true, but curiously misrepresents the matter. He was a pupil in Louth Grammar School four years (1816-20) — not a very “brief period.” Howitt and others make the length of time “two or three years,” and some have the mistaken impression that he passed some time in Cadney’s school before he went to Louth. Cadney came to Somersby about 1820, and, in the autumn of the next year, he instructed the Tennyson boys in arithmetic at the rectory. Cook erroneously supposes that Charles and Alfred were at Louth in 1827.

There has been considerable guessing as to the time when Tennyson went to Cambridge. He is said to have entered Trinity College in 1826; in 1827; about 1827; in 1829; and “early in 1829.” There is no occasion for such indefiniteness. To be exact, Alfred became a student of Trinity in October, 1828. He left college without graduating, at the time of his father’s death. His brothers, Frederick and Charles, finished the course in 1832.

COINCIDENCES.

The cyclopedias also present numerous examples of coincidences as well as variations — some of the incorrect details being repeated almost verbatim, as though successive compilers had copied over and over the mistakes of their superficial predecessors. This ought not to go on forever.

The sketches of Tennyson in Lippincott’s Biographical Dictionary (1885) and in the Americanized Britannica (1890) may be taken as samples. In the following sentence from Lippincott’s the writer manages to make five or six misstatements:

“In 1851 he succeeded Wordsworth as poet-laureate, and about the same time he married, and retired to Faringford, in the Isle of Wight, where he resided until 1869, when he removed to Petersfield, Hampshire.”

In the biographical supplement of the Americanized Britannica, this becomes two or three sentences, viz.:

“He was made poet-laureate in 1851. It was about this time, too, that Tennyson married, returning to Faringford, in the Isle of Wight, where he lived until 1869.... It was in this year the poet moved from the Isle of Wight and took up his residence in Petersfield, Hampshire.”

There are similar passages in Appleton’s and Johnson’s cyclopedias. It is perfectly plain that there was not much independent investigation in these unscholarly performances.

MISTAKES.

Mistake No. 1: Tennyson received the Laureateship in 1850, the year of Wordsworth’s death. Mistake No. 2: he was married June 13, 1850. Mistake No. 3: Farringford is misspelled. Mistake No. 4: Tennyson lived at Twickenham three years after his marriage. Mistake No. 5: in 1853, he first took possession of Farringford, which is still his winter residence. Mistake No. 6: in 1867, the poet built a house near Haslemere in Surrey — not at Petersfield, Hampshire — where he spends the summer months. According to Prof. Church, the Laureate bought the Aldworth estate in 1872. The latter date is manifestly wrong.

The story of Tennyson’s Petersfield establishment may be classed as a myth, though supported by several monuments of research called cyclopedias.

Nothing is said of a Hampshire home in Jennings’ Life of Tennyson, in Church’s Laureate’s Country, or in Van Dyke’s admirable book on the Poetry of Tennyson; no reference to it is found in the essays on Tennyson by Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Nor is Lord Tennyson’s name found in the list of land owners of Hampshire, in Walford’s County Families of the United Kingdom. One is puzzled to understand how such a report started.

TENNYSON’S ELEVATION TO THE PEERAGE.

It is rather surprising to read in the People’s Cyclopedia, Johnson’s, Lippincott’s and elsewhere, that Tennyson was raised to the peerage in 1883 as “Baron d’Eyncourt,” etc. This he cannot properly be called, though a descendant from the ancient house of D’Eyncourt — which long ago ceased to be a barony. The pedigree of Alfred’s grandfather, who belonged to the Lincolnshire gentry, is traced through ten generations to Edmund, Duke of Somerset, and two centuries further back to Edward III.’s fourth son, John of Gaunt. Dr. Tennyson died in the lifetime of his father, and the D’Eyncourt seat and dignity passed to his younger brother Charles. The poet’s cousin Louis Charles is the present possessor of the family estate at Bayons. England’s noble Laureate (according to Burke’s Peerage, ed. of 1888, p. 1361) was created a peer of the realm Jan. 24, 1884, with the new title — Baron of Aldworth, Surrey, and of Farringford, Isle of Wight. He took his seat in the House of Lords, Mar. 11, 1884.

LAPSES IN ENGLISH GEOGRAPHY.

A common mistake is that of locating Aldworth in Sussex. Mr. Frederick Dolman, in the Ladies’ Home Journal (August, 1891), carelessly speaks of “the poet’s residences in the fair Isle and sunny Sussex.” According to Murray’s Handbook for Surrey (ed. of 1888, p. 182), and other excellent authorities, Aldworth is in the county of Surrey — not far from the northern borders of Sussex. In Walford’s County Families of the United Kingdom, p. 1203, Lord Tennyson’s name occurs among the land owners of Surrey — not with those of Sussex.

Somersby and Somerby have been mixed by many people who are not familiar with English geography. The latter village is in the western part of Lincolnshire, near Grantham — a considerable distance from Alfred Tennyson’s birthplace. Duyckinck, in his Eminent Men and Women, recklessly says he was born at “Somerby, a small parish in Leicestershire.”

If Europeans are guilty of crass ignorance of the United States, Americans too are open to criticism for their hazy notions of foreign places. An inexcusable blunder is that in Phillips’ Popular Manual of English Literature, vol. II., p. 497, where Blackdown is loosely referred to as “a hill in the vicinity of Petersfield, Hampshire.” Another writer is remiss in accepting statements implicitly and without question. A footnote in Kellogg’s school edition of “In Memoriam,” p. 23, says “Hallam was buried in Cleveland Church on the Severn, which empties into British Channel.” If he had looked up the town for himself on the map of England, he would have discovered that Clevedon, the birthplace of Hallam, is situated on the bank of the Severn near its entrance to the Bristol Channel.

VARIOUS ERRORS.

It is not my purpose to enumerate all the errors that I have come across in my reading relating to Tennyson and his works. For the sake of brevity, I merely correct a few of them without giving full particulars in every case. Tennyson first visited the Pyrenees in 1830 — not in 1831; the second visit was in 1862. He received the degree of D. C. L. in 1855 — not in 1859. His son Hallam was born at Twickenham, Aug. 11, 1852; Lionel, at Freshwater, Mar. 16, 1854.

Tennyson did not write “Break, break, break” at Clevedon or Freshwater. The intercalary lyrics of “The Princess” were first published in the third edition — not in the second. The plot of “The Cup” is taken from Plutarch’s treatise De Mulierum Virtutibus; this work has been confused by Archer and Jennings with Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus.

Many unpardonable mistakes have been made in dating Tennyson’s published writings, also in wording and punctuating their titles. It has been said that “The Princess” first appeared in print in 1846 and 1849; “In Memoriam,” in 1849 and 1851; “Idyls of the King,” in 1855, 1858, and 1861; “Enoch Arden,” in 1865; “The Holy Grail, and Other Poems,” in 1867 and 1870; “Harold,” in 1877; “Becket,” in 1879 and 1885; “Tiresias, and Other Poems,” in 1886; and “Demeter, and Other Poems,” in 1890. In Hart’s Manual of English Literature, one of Tennyson’s poems is named “The Vision of Art,” and a recent German cyclopedia makes him the author of “Tristam and Iseult.” A newspaper account of the sale of Tennysoniana in London contains the queer bit of misinformation that Poems by Two Brothers “was published by Louth in 1826.” These slips could have been easily avoided. The mystery hanging about the Laureate’s life does not involve his works.

It is believed that the following list, which has been carefully verified, is correct both as to the titles and the dates of first publication of all of Tennyson’s books, viz:

Westminster Abbey, London — Tennyson’s final resting place

Tennyson’s grave in Poets Corner, covered with flowers shortly after the burial

Tennyson’s grave

Table of Contents

The Poetry Collections

POEMS, BY TWO BROTHERS

TIMBUCTOO : A POEM

POEMS, CHIEFLY LYRICAL

POEMS, 1832

THE LOVER’S TALE. A FRAGMENT.

POEMS, 1842

MISCELLANEOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS, 1831-1868

THE PRINCESS: A MEDLEY

IN MEMORIAM A. H. H.

MAUD, AND OTHER POEMS

IDYLLS OF THE KING

ENOCH ARDEN AND OTHER POEMS

BALLADS AND OTHER POEMS

TIRESIAS AND OTHER POEMS

LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER, ETC.

DEMETER AND OTHER POEMS

THE DEATH OF ŒNONE, AND OTHER POEMS

The Poems

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Plays

QUEEN MARY: A DRAMA

HAROLD: A DRAMA

BECKET

THE CUP: A TRAGEDY

THE FALCON

THE PROMISE OF MAY

THE FORESTERS: ROBIN HOOD AND MAID MARIAN

The Biographies

TENNYSON AND HIS FRIENDS by Hallam, Lord Tennyson

ALFRED TENNYSON by Andrew Lang

TENNYSON’S LIFE AND POETRY by Eugene Parsons