“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.
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.”