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.

5

10

15

20

CXXVII

7, 8. Probably refers to the Revolution of 1848. Cf. Epilogue to The Princess. The last couplet, and indeed the whole poem, has particular point. Hallam, in his Oration on the Influence of Italian Works of Imagination, had concluded a vivid picture of the terrible character of the Revolution of 1830 with an expression of hope that all might yet be well (Remains, p. 144). The allusion, therefore, has peculiar propriety.

9. First edition. woe to him.

15. Cf. Horace, Odes, I. xxxiv. 9, "bruta tellus." Milton had already transferred it into English (Comus, 797): "And the brute earth would lend her

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 cö-operant to an end.

5

10

15

20

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;

CXXVIII

5, 6. Cf. Locksley Hall Sixty Years after :

The course of Time will swerve,

Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward streaming curve.

8. First edition. ministers.

14. Cf. Crashaw (To Mistress M. R.), “gilded dunghills, glorious lies." The word has no doubt here the sense so common in Elizabethan English and in Milton-braggart or boastful, Lat. gloriosus.

19. First edition. baseness.

3. First three editions. O!

CXXIX

Known and unknown; human, divine;
Sweet human hand and lips and eye;

5

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.

1-7. Cf. Shelley's Adonais, xlii.:—

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music.

He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own.

10

5

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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.

CXXXI

"

5

10

1. Tennyson himself explained this as intended to mean 'free-will, the higher and enduring part of man" (Life, 1. 319), and this "will" being heaven-descended" (cf. the poem Will), can and should bring itself into harmony with the Supreme and Eternal Will; see Prologue, 15, 16. It is therefore a prayer that the heaven-descended will in man may bring itself into harmony with the Will of God, sanctify our lives, and confirm our faith in those truths which never can be proved till death shall remove the barrier between us and "all we loved and all we flow from." With the first stanza may be compared First Epistle of St. John ii. 17: "And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.' In 1 Corinthians x. 4, the spiritual rock is Christ: "They [our fathers] drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them [or, as it is alternatively rendered, "went with them"]: and that Rock was Christ.' Tennyson must plainly have had this text in his mind, and it is therefore difficult not to suppose that the spiritual rock" is Christ. Is it possible that the "spiritual rock" may still mean Christ, and that it is a prayer that the "living will" may continue to express itself in the God-Man, fill as it were a fountain from which it flows to us? This would link the end of the poem with the Prologue.

5. First edition. out the dust.

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

5

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,

10

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.

15

20

For the connection of this poem with In Memoriam, see Introduction. It was written to celebrate the marriage of Edmund Law Lushington and Cecilia Tennyson, the poet's sister, 10th October 1842. The scene is Park House, near Boxley, Maidstone.

22-24. It would seem from these lines that the conception of In Memoriam as a whole could not have been formed at the time this poem was written.