The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river :
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

The song was introduced in 1850, and has not been altered.
9, 10. Cf. Haynes Bayly,

Oh, blow the horn! oh, blow the horn!
Hark! faeries are replying,

burden to his "Come over the lake, Love" (Poetical Works, i. 212).

IV

"THERE sinks the nebulous star we call the Sun,
If that hypothesis of theirs be sound"

Said Ida; "let us down and rest ;" and we
Down from the lean and wrinkled precipices,
By every coppice-feather'd chasm and cleft,
Dropt thro' the ambrosial gloom to where below
No bigger than a glow-worm shone the tent
Lamp-lit from the inner. Once she lean'd on me,
Descending; once or twice she lent her hand,
And blissful palpitations in the blood,
Stirring a sudden transport rose and fell.

But when we planted level feet, and dipt
Beneath the satin dome and enter'd in,
There leaning deep in broider'd down we sank
Our elbows on a tripod in the midst

A fragrant flame rose, and before us glow'd
Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold.

Then she, "Let some one sing to us: lightlier move
The minutes fledged with music : and a maid,
Of those beside her, smote her harp, and sang.

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair

IV

17. 1847-48. Fruit, viand, blossom, and amber wine and gold.

5

10

15

20

21 seqq. Of this beautiful blank-verse lyric Tennyson said (Life, i. 253): "The passion of the past, the abiding in the transient, was expressed in 'Tears, idle Tears,' which was written in the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey, full for me of its bygone memories." The germ of it may be found in a short poem contributed by Tennyson in 1831 to The Gem, which runs thus:

Oh sad No more! Oh sweet No more!
Oh strange No more!

By a mossed brookband on a stone
I smelt a wildweed-flower alone:

There was a ringing in my ears,

And both my eyes gushed out with tears.

Surely all pleasant things had gone before,

Lowburied fathomdeep beneath with thee, No More!

(The Gem for 1831, p. 87.)

With the sentiment of the poem may be compared Macpherson's Ossian,

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

"Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

25

30

"Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

35

"Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more."

40

She ended with such passion that the tear,
She sang of, shook and fell, an erring pearl
Lost in her bosom: but with some disdain
Answer'd the Princess "If indeed there haunt
About the moulder'd lodges of the Past
So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men,

45

Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool

And so pace by: but thine are fancies hatch'd

In silken-folded idleness; nor is it

Wiser to weep a true occasion lost,

50

But trim our sails, and let old bygones be,

While down the streams that float us each and all

Conleth and Cuthona, ad init.: "Did not Ossian hear a voice? Or is it the sound of days that are no more? Often does the memory of former times come like the evening sun upon my soul."

21. This lyric after 1875 generally in small type.

33, 34. Cf. Leigh Hunt, Hero and Leander, canto ii., ad fin. :—

And when the casement at the dawn of light

Began to show a square of ghastly white.

50. 1847-48. gone.

51-52. 1847-48.

and let the old proverb serve

While down the streams that buoy each separate craft.

To the issue, goes, like glittering bergs of ice,
Throne after throne, and molten on the waste
Becomes a cloud: for all things serve their time
Toward that great year of equal mights and rights,
Nor would I fight with iron laws, in the end
Found golden: let the past be past; let be
Their cancell❜d Babels: tho' the rough kex break
The starr'd mosaic, and the wild goat hang
Upon the shaft, and the wild figtree split
Their monstrous idols, care not while we hear
A trumpet in the distance pealing news
Of better, and Hope, a poising eagle, burns
Above the unrisen morrow:
then to me;

"Know you no song of your own land,” she said,
"Not such as moans about the retrospect,
But deals with the other distance and the hues
Of promise; not a death's-head at the wine.”

Then I remember'd one myself had made,
What time I watch'd the swallow winging south
From mine own land, part made long since, and part
Now while I sang, and maidenlike as far

As I could ape their treble, did I sing.

"O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,

59. The reference is to Genesis xi. 1-9.

"

55

60

65

70

75

59. Kex, or kecksie, is a dry stalk of hemlock or some similar plant. Cotgrave under "canon has " canon de sulo, a kex or elder stick." Cf. Henry V., v. ii. :—

And nothing teems

But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs. So in Ray's Proverbs, "As hollow as a gun, or as a kex." See Nares' note. We should naturally take the "starr'd mosaic" as meaning "flawed," as we speak of glass being "starred," and quoting from Tennyson himself (Prologue to Morte d'Arthur), "I bump'd the ice into three several stars. But he himself, on this interpretation being submitted to him, rejected it, and said that what he meant was "decorated with stars." 60. In or before 1871.

beard-blown goat

Hang on the shaft. 61. 1847-48. Upon the pillar. 1850-1-3. effect of the wild fig-tree, see Juvenal (x. 144-45),

"

Upon the shaft. For this speaking of sepulchres, ad quæ Discutienda valent sterilis mala robora ficus,

and Persius (i. 25); and for further illustrations, the commentators on these passages.

65. 1847. and then.

69. See Herodotus, ii. 78, for the custom referred to. 75 seqq. After 1875 this lyric generally in small type.

Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.

"O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.

"O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,
And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.

80

"O were I thou that she might take me in,

And lay me on her bosom, and her heart
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died.

85

"Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love, Delaying as the tender ash delays

To clothe herself, when all the woods are green?

"O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown :

90

Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,
But in the North long since my nest is made.

"O tell her, brief is life but love is long,
And brief the sun of summer in the North,
And brief the moon of beauty in the South.

95

"O Swallow, flying from the golden woods, Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine, And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee."

I ceased, and all the ladies, each at each,

Like the Ithacensian suitors in old time,
Stared with great eyes, and laugh'd with alien lips,
And knew not what they meant; for still my voice
Rang false but smiling "Not for thee," she said,
"O Bulbul, any rose of Gulistan

:

Shall burst her veil: marsh-divers, rather, maid,

100

105

IOI. The German and French phrases are familiar: "laugh'd with alien lips" is a translation of Homer's Odyssey, xx. 347, oi d' non vvadusios veñówr aλλorpiovov, "And now they began to laugh with alien jaws," i.e. with jaws which did not belong to them, i.e. with constrained or unnatural laughter. Horace borrowed the same phrase (Sat. 11. iii. 72), but gives it a different meaning.

104. Bulbul is the Persian for nightingale, and Gulistan for rose-garden. According to the Persian poets, the nightingale woos the rose, which unfolds if the charm of the song holds her.