“Dear, but let us type them now
In our own lives, and this proud watchword rest
Of equal; seeing either sex alone
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies
Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils
Defect in each, and always thought in thought,
Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,
The single pure and perfect animal,
The two-cell❜d heart beating, with one full stroke,
Life."
And again sighing she spoke: "A dream
That once was mine! what woman taught you this?”
"Alone" I said "from earlier than I know,
Immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world,
I loved the woman: he, that doth not, lives
A drowning life, besotted in sweet self,
Or pines in sad experience worse than death,
Or keeps his wing'd affections clipt with crime:
Yet was there one thro' whom I loved her, one
Not learned, save in gracious household ways,
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
No Angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise,
Interpreter between the Gods and men,
Who look'd all native to her place, and yet
On tiptoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved,
And girdled her with music. Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
Said Ida, tremulously, "so all unlike
286. See Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes' discourse, 189-90.
289. Commas added in 1850.
299. With this picture of the "ideal" woman, which it is interesting to know was in some respects a sketch of Tennyson's own mother, cf. Wordsworth's poem, "She was a phantom of delight," and the picture of "the maid" in the Prelude, xii. 151 seqq.; and cf., too, Tennyson's own fuller sketch, in the character of Edith, in Aylmer's Field.
313. 1847-48. Said Ida, "so unlike, so all unlike→
It seems you love to cheat yourself with words:
This mother is your model.
Of your strange doubts: they well might be: I seem
A mockery to my own self. Never, Prince;
You cannot love me."
"Nay but thee" I said "From yearlong poring on thy pictured eyes, Ere seen I loved, and loved thee seen, and saw Thee woman thro' the crust of iron moods That mask'd thee from men's reverence up, and forced
Sweet love on pranks of saucy boyhood: now,
Giv'n back to life, to life indeed, thro' thee,
Indeed I love: the new day comes, the light
Dearer for night, as dearer thou for faults
Lived over: lift thine eyes; my doubts are dead,
My haunting sense of hollow shows: the change,
This truthful change in thee has kill'd it. Dear,
Look and let thy nature strike on mine,
Like yonder morning on the blind half-world;
Approach and fear not; breathe upon my brows;
In that fine air I tremble, all the past
Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this
Is morn to more, and all the rich to-come
Reels, as the golden Autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning weeds. Forgive me,
I waste my heart in signs: let be. My bride,
My wife, my life. O we will walk this world,
Yoked in all exercise of noble end,
And so thro' those dark gates across the wild
That no man knows. Indeed I love thee: come,
Yield thyself up: my hopes and thine are one:
Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself;
Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.”
315. 1847-48-50. This mother is your model. Never, Prince.
316, 317. Added in 1851.
Between 319 and 320. 1847-48. Or some mysterious or magnetic touch.
324. Comma after this line added in 1853.
327. 1847-48-50. doubt me no more.
328, 329. Added in 1851.
330. The first comma added in 1851, and the second in 1853.
335. 1847-48-50. I scarce believe, and all the rich to come (without hyphen). 337. 1847-48. flowers. 1850. leaves.
344. Semicolon was inserted in 1851.
So closed our tale, of which I give you all
The random scheme as wildly as it rose:
The words are mostly mine; for when we ceased
There came a minute's pause, and Walter said,
"I wish she had not yielded!" then to me,
"What, if you drest it up poetically!"
So pray'd the men, the women: I gave assent:
Yet how to bind the scatter'd scheme of seven
Together in one sheaf? What style could suit?
The men required that I should give throughout
The sort of mock-heroic gigantesque,
With which we banter'd little Lilia first:
The women-and perhaps they felt their power,
In the first two editions the opening lines ran thus :-
Here closed our compound story which at first
Had only meant to banter little maids
With mock-heroics and with parody:
But slipt in some strange way, crost with burlesque,
From mock to earnest, even into tones
Of tragic, and with less and less of jest
To such a serious end that Lilia fixt
A showery glance upon her Aunt and said,
"You-tell us what we are;" who there began
A treatise, growing with it, and might have flow'd
In axiom worthier to be grav'n on rock,
Than all that lasts of old-world hieroglyph,
Or lichen-fretted Rune and arrowhead;
But that there rose a shout: the gates were closed
At sundown, and the crowd were swarming now,
To take their leave, about the garden rails.
And I and some went out, and mingled with them.
And there we saw Sir Walter, etc.
In 1850 the former opening was excised, and the opening as it now stands substituted.
For something in the ballads which they sang,
Or in their silent influence as they sat,
Had ever seem'd to wrestle with burlesque,
And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close-
They hated banter, wish'd for something real,
A gallant fight, a noble princess-why
Not make her true-heroic-true-sublime?
Or all, they said, as earnest as the close?
Which yet with such a framework scarce could be.
Then rose a little feud betwixt the two,
Betwixt the mockers and the realists:
And I, betwixt them both, to please them both,
And yet to give the story as it rose,
I moved as in a strange diagonal,
And maybe neither pleased myself nor them.
But Lilia pleased me, for she took no part
In our dispute: the sequel of the tale
Had touch'd her; and she sat, she pluck'd the grass,
She flung it from her, thinking: last, she fixt
A showery glance upon her aunt, and said,
"You tell us what we are who might have told,
For she was cramm'd with theories out of books,
But that there rose a shout: the gates were closed
At sunset, and the crowd were swarming now,
To take their leave, about the garden rails.
So I and some went out to these: we climb'd
The slope to Vivian-place, and turning saw
The happy valleys, half in light, and half
Far-shadowing from the west, a land of peace;
Gray halls alone among their massive groves;
Trim hamlets; here and there a rustic tower
Half-lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat;
The shimmering glimpses of a stream; the seas;
A red sail, or a white; and far beyond,
Imagined more than seen, the skirts of France.
"Look there, a garden!" said my college friend, The Tory member's elder son, "and there!
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God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain, whole within herself,
A nation yet, the rulers and the ruled-
Some sense of duty, something of a faith,
Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,
Some patient force to change them when we will,
Some civic manhood firm against the crowd-
But yonder, whiff! there comes a sudden heat,
The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,
The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,
The little boys begin to shoot and stab,
A kingdom topples over with a shriek
Like an old woman, and down rolls the world
In mock heroics stranger than our own;
Revolts, republics, revolutions, most
No graver than a schoolboys' barring out;
Too comic for the solemn things they are,
Too solemn for the comic touches in them,
Like our wild Princess with as wise a dream
As some of theirs-God bless the narrow seas!
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad."
"Have patience," I replied, "ourselves are full
Of social wrong; and maybe wildest dreams
Are but the needful preludes of the truth:
For me, the genial day, the happy crowd,
The sport half-science, fill me with a faith.
This fine old world of ours is but a child
Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time
To learn its limbs: there is a hand that guides."
In such discourse we gain'd the garden rails,
51. Cf. Ode on the Death of Wellington :—
A people's voice! we are a people yet.
Tho' all men else their nobler dreams forget,
Confused by brainless mobs and lawless Powers;
Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set
His Briton in blown seas and storming showers.
58 seqq. A reference to the Revolution in Paris, February 1848, which dethroned Louis Philippe and set up a Republic; a description as truthful as it is sarcastic.
70. Cf. Merchant of Venice, 11. viii.:—
The narrow seas that part
72. In and after 1875 "Have patience" began a new paragraph.
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