'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.'--
and its tenour is obvious, from the rapture of the reader--
'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.'--
the rhyme to 'Why' being of course 'Ay.'
After this the progress of things need no telling.
'Sun comes, moon comes,
Time slips away;
Sun sets, moon sets,
Love, fix a day.
* * * *
"To-morrow, love, to-morrow,
And that's an age away."
Blaze upon her window, sun,
And honour all the day.'
The last song of the series is too fine and too even a union of fancy,
feeling, and art not to be quoted entire--
'Light, so low upon earth,
You send a flash to the sun.
Here is the golden close of love,
All my wooing is done.
O 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:
O 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.'
Surely these songs, even in the fragmentary state in which we have been
forced to give them, will be recognized as the work of a great master,
by everyone who has the feeling and the fancy requisite for any
appreciation of poetry, and are surely as worthy of Mr. Tennyson's
genius as Shakspeare's songs are of his, or the lyrics in 'Wilhelm
Meister' of Goethe's. They are full of the old exquisite art that has
endeared the songs of the 'Princess' to so many thousand hearts. We find
here, as in those and other old favourites, those lovely and
indescribable touches which seem to paint in sound or air the very
things they name--the
'Winds and lights and shadows that cannot be still;'
the
'Wet west wind, how you blow, how you blow;'--