That strikes by night a craggy shelf,

And staggers blindly ere she sink?

And stunn'd me from my power to think

And all my knowledge of myself;

And made me that delirious man
Whose fancy fuses old and new,
And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan?

XVII

Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze
Compell'd thy canvas, and my prayer
Was as the whisper of an air

To breathe thee over lonely seas.

For I in spirit saw thee move

Thro' circles of the bounding sky,
Week after week: the days go by:

Come quick, thou bringest all I love.

Henceforth, wherever thou may'st roam,
My blessing, like a line of light,
Is on the waters day and night,
And like a beacon guards thee home.

So may whatever tempest mars

Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark;
And balmy drops in summer dark

Slide from the bosom of the stars.

XVII

In this exquisite poem we have again the inspiration of Theocritus, Horace, and Petrarch.

6. From horizon to horizon.

15, 16. Cf. Talking Oak,

All starry culmination drop
Balm-dews,

and Herrick, Hesperides, A Nuptial Song on Sir Clipseby Crew,

Midwife-moone begs a boon you must grant; that's entrance; with Which extract all we can call pith

Which

And quintessence

Of planetary bodies.

So kind an office hath been done,
Such precious relics brought by thee;
The dust of him I shall not see

Till all my widow'd race be run.

XVIII

'Tis well; 'tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

'Tis little; but it looks in truth

As if the quiet bones were blest
Among familiar names to rest

And in the places of his youth.

Come then, pure hands, and bear the head
That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep,
And come, whatever loves to weep,

And hear the ritual of the dead.

20

5

10

A graceful and pathetic application of Hallam's own blessing on his friend. See his review of Tennyson's Early Poems: "When this poet dies, will not the Graces and the Loves mourn over him?" Then follows the quotation from Persius. See Englishman's Magazine, August 1831.

11. An imitation of a familiar use of quidquid in Latin. Cf. Horace, Epod. v. 1: "At O Deorum quidquid in cœlo regit."

That dies not, but endures with pain,

And slowly forms the firmer mind,
Treasuring the look it cannot find,
The words that are not heard again.

XIX

The Danube to the Severn gave

The darken'd heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave.

There twice a day the Severn fills ;
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,

And makes a silence in the hills.

20

5

The Wye is hush'd nor moved along,

And hush'd my deepest grief of all,
When fill'd with tears that cannot fall,

10

I brim with sorrow drowning song.

The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.

15

XX

The lesser griefs that may be said,

That breathe a thousand tender vows,

Are but as servants in a house
Where lies the master newly dead;

XIX

5 seq. I gladly avail myself of Mr. Bradley's note: "The tidal water, in flowing up the Bristol Channel, which, as it begins to narrow, is called the Severn, passes Clevedon, and further up enters the Wye.

As the tide passes up the Wye, its silent flood deepens and hushes the river; but as it ebbs again, the river grows shallower, becomes vocal, and babbles." The connection of the ebbing and flowing tide with the moods of grief is a conceit worthy of the Metaphysical School, and surely very unworthy of a poem which professes to speak the language of the heart.

Who speak their feeling as it is,

And weep the fullness from the mind: "It will be hard they say "to find Another service such as this."

5

So much the vital spirits sink

To see the vacant chair, and think,
"How good! how kind! and he is gone."

XXI

I sing to him that rests below,

And, since the grasses round me wave,
I take the grasses of the grave,

And make them pipes whereon to blow.

20

The traveller hears me now and then,

5

And sometimes harshly will he speak;

"This fellow would make weakness weak,

And melt the waxen hearts of men."

Another answers, "Let him be,

He loves to make parade of pain,
That with his piping he may gain
The praise that comes to constancy.”

XXI

3. 4. A conceit very unworthy of Tennyson, involving also an absurdity.

10

A third is wroth: "Is this an hour

For private sorrow's barren song,
When more and more the people throng

The chairs and thrones of civil power?

15

For now her little ones have ranged;

And one is sad; her note is changed,
Because her brood is stol'n away.

XXII

The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow:

XXI

15, 16. Presumably a reference to the events in and about 1848.

18-20. The best commentary on this obscure phrase is a passage from Tennyson's Life, ii. 336: "The spectroscope was destined to make much greater revelations even than it had already made, 'in charming

Her secret from the latest moon.'

23, 24. Cf. stanza viii. in the poem, After reading a Life and Letters, and Goethe, Der Sänger,

Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt

25, 27. Editions 1850-51.

Der in den Zweigen wohnet.
And unto one.

XXII

From this section to xxv. we have a series of retrospects, contrasting the past with the present. With the whole of this section may be compared Petrarch's 47th Sonnet, In Morte di Madonna Laura.