It may be stated, on the highest authority, that the special passage
alluded to in the opening stanza, cannot be identified, but _it is
Goethe's creed_.
St. Augustine wrote, that we can rise higher on the ladder of life, by
trampling down our vices. His words, in a Sermon on the Ascension, are,
_De vitiis nostris scalam nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus_.
Longfellow published a Poem, not earlier than 1842, which he called "The
Ladder of St. Augustine;" and more recently, Lowell, another American
Poet, and Minister Plenipotentiary in London, adopted a similar idea when
he said,
"'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up,
Whose golden rounds are our calamities,
Whereon our feet firm planting, nearer God
The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unseal'd."
The "dead selves" of Tennyson are neither our vices nor our calamities;
but, rather, our general experiences, which all perish as they happen; and
of these, in his own case, the special loss he had sustained in the death
of Hallam (his "more than brother"--his _dimidium sui_, "bosom-friend and
half of life") ought to rouse him to soar into "higher things;" rather
than leave him to be pointed at, as "the man that loved and lost" (see
Poems xxvii., 4, and lxxxv., 1); and all that he had before been, as now
"over-worn," and prostrated by this one bereavement.
But it was difficult to anticipate in the future a gain to match the loss
he had sustained; and to appropriate interest, _i.e._, reap the fruit of
tears that he was now shedding. Love, however, shall uphold his grief
with sustaining power; for it is better to be grief-mad, and "dance with
death"--(singing and dancing being a custom at ancient funerals)--than
become a spectacle of scorn for "the victor Hours" to deride, after they
have effaced his love-born sorrow.