"Ever the weary wind went on,
And took the reed-tops as it went"
"I, that whole day,
Saw her no more, although I linger'd there
Till every daisy slept."
"Love with knit brows went by,
And with a flying finger swept my lips."
"Breathed like the covenant of a God, to hold
From thence through all the worlds."
"Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind,
And in her bosom bore the baby. Sleep."
"The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores."
"And in the fallow leisure of my life."
"Her voice fled always through 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."
"Now, now, his footsteps smite the threshold stairs
Of life."
"The drooping flower of knowledge changed to fruit
Of wisdom. Wait."
"Tall as a figure lengthen'd on the sand
When the tide ebbs in sunshine."
"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 gather'd color day by day."
"I could no more, but lay like one in trance,
That hears his burial talk'd of by his friends,
And can not speak, nor move, nor make one sign,
But lies and dreads his doom."
"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.
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'T is better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
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).
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,
Ah me! the sorrow deepens down,
Whose muffled motions blindly drown
The bases of my life in tears.
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.
I can not love thee as I ought,
For love reflects the thing beloved;
My words are only words, and moved
Upon the topmost froth of thought.
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 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.
Abiding with me till I sail
To seek thee on the mystic deeps,
And this electric force, that keeps
A thousand pulses dancing, fail.
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."
"Brawling, or like a clamor of the rooks
At distance, ere they settle for the night."
"In words whose echo lasts, they were so sweet."
"That I could rest, a rock in ebbs and flows."
"But as a man to whom a dreadful loss
Falls in a far land, and he knows it not."
"The long way smoke beneath him in his fear."
"Then, after all was done that hand could do,
She rested, and her desolation came
Upon her, and she wept beside the way."
"Seam'd with an ancient sword-cut on the cheek,
And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes
And loved him, with that love which was her doom."
"And in the meadows tremulous aspen-trees
And poplars made a noise of falling showers."
"No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great."
"Hurt in the side, whereat she caught her breath;
Through her own side she felt the sharp lance go."
"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."
"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."
"Far off a solitary trumpet blew.
Then, waiting by the doors, the war-horse neigh'd
As at a friend's voice, and he spake again."
"Through the thick night I hear the trumpet blow."
"And slipt aside, and like a wounded life
Crept down into the hollows of the wood."
"Then Philip, with his eyes
Full of that lifelong hunger, and his voice
Shaking a little like a drunkard's hand."
"Had he not
Spoken with That, which being everywhere
Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone,
Surely the man had died of solitude."
"Because things seen are mightier than things heard."
"For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck
See through 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."
"And he lay tranced; but when he rose and paced
Back toward his solitary home again,
All down the narrow street he went,
Beating it in upon his weary brain,
As though it were the burthen of a song,
'Not to tell her, never to let her know.'"
"Torn as a sail that leaves the rope is torn
In tempest."
"Nay, one there is, and at the eastern end,
Wealthy with wandering lines of mount and mere."
"Prick'd with incredible pinnacles into heaven."
"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."
"All the old echoes hidden in the wall."
"Their plumes driv'n 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."
"There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.
The swimming vapor 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 through 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."
"One seem'd all dark and red--a tract of sand,
And some one pacing there alone,
Who paced forever 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."
Each stanza is a picture, bound, not in book nor gold, but in a stanza.
"Like flame from ashes."
"Sighing weariedly, as one
Who sits and gazes on a faded fire,
When all the goodlier guests are past away."
"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."
"Belted his body with her white embrace."
"And out beyond into the dream to come."
"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."
Looking at these landscapes, can words add weight to the claim for
Alfred Tennyson as a painter?
And Tennyson is as pure as the air of mid-ocean. His moral qualities
are in no regard inferior to his artistic qualities, although from
centuries of poets we might have been schooled to anticipate that so
sensitive and poetic a nature had been sensual, concluding a lowered
standard of ethics, theoretical or practical, one or both, especially
considering his earliest literary admiration was that poetic Don Juan,
Lord Byron, whose poems were a transcript of his morals, where a
luxuriant imagination and a poetic diction were combined in a high
degree, and so the poet qualified to be a bane or blessing of a
commanding order, he choosing so to use his extraordinary gifts as to
pollute the living springs from which a generation of men and women
drank. What we do find is, a Tennyson as removed from a Byron in moral
mood and life as southern cross from northern lights. The morals of
both life and poems are as limpid as the waters of pellucid Tahoe; and
purest women may read from "Claribel" to "Crossing the Bar," and be
only purer from the reading. Henry Van Dyke has written on "The Bible
in Tennyson," an article, after his habit, discriminating and
appreciative, in the course of which he shows how some of the delicious
verse's of the laureate are literal extracts from the Book of God, so
native is poetry to that sublime volume; though I incline to believe
the larger loan of the Bible to Tennyson is the purity of thought
evidenced in the poet's writings, and more particularly in the poet's
life. Who has not been touched by the Bible who has lived in these
later centuries? Modern life may no more get away from the Bible than
our planet may flee from its own atmosphere. We can never estimate the
moral potency of such a poet, living and writing for sixty years,
though we may fairly account this longevity of pure living and pure
thinking and pure writing among the primary blessings of our century.
That two such pure men and poets as Tennyson and Browning were given a
single race in a single century is abundant cause for giving hearty
thanks to God. They have purified, not our day only, but remote days
coming, till days shall set to rise no more, and have given the lie to
the poor folly of supposing highest genius and purest morality to be
incompatibles; for in life and poem, and in the poem of life, they have
swept clouds from our sky, until all purity stands revealed, fair as
the morning star smiling at Eastern lattices. In Tennyson is no
slightest appeal to the sensual. He hates pruriency, making protest
against it with a voice like the clangor of angry bells. In "Locksley
Hall Sixty Years After," he speaks wisely and justly, in sarcasm that
bites as acids do:
"Rip your brother's 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 trough of Zolaism,
Forward, forward, aye and backward, downward, too,
in the abysm.
Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising
race of men."
And this is Tennyson the aged, whose moral eyes were as the physical
eyes of Moses on Pisgah, "undimmed." Bless him for his aged anger!
Happily, to-day, realism has lost its charm. We have had enough living
in sewers, when the suburbs were near with their breezy heights and
quiet homes. Stench needs no apostle. The age has outgrown these
hectic folk, who, in the name of nature, lead us back to Pompeii.
Gehenna needs not to be assisted. Jean Valjean, bent on an errand of
mercy, fled to the sewers of Paris, his appeal to these foul subways
being justified, since he sought them under stress for the preservation
of a life. Does this prove that men should take promenades in the
sewers as if they were boulevards? An author is not called on to tell
all he knows. Let writers of fiction assume that the public knows
there are foul things, and needs not to be reminded of them, and let
the romancist avoid them as he would a land of lepers.
Those who companied with Tennyson through his beautiful career were
helped into a growing love of purity. He had no panegyric for lust and
shame and sensuality, but made us feel they were shameful, so that we
blushed for those who had not the modesty to blush for themselves. We
are ashamed for Guinevere and Lancelot, and are proud of Enid and
Elaine and Sir Galahad and King Arthur; and in them, and in others,
have been helped to see the heroic beauty of simple virtue. This is an
incalculable gain for soul. When we have learned that profligates,
whatever their spasms of flashy achievements, are poor company, and
that the pure are evermore good company, and goodness is a quest
worthier than the quest for the golden grail, we have risen to nobility
of soul which can never become out of date.
Noah was not more clearly a preacher of righteousness in his day than
Tennyson in his, of whom say, as highest encomium we know to pronounce,
"He made goodness beautiful to our eyes and desirable to our hearts;
and, beyond this, made it easier for us to be good."
Over all this poet wrote, he might have looked straight in God's eye,
and prayed, as King Arthur:
"And that which I have done
May he within himself make pure!"