Puslapio vaizdai
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chain yields, breaks; the huge drawbridge slams down, thundering (avec fracas). Glorious; and yet, alas! it is still but the outworks. The eight grim towers with their Invalides' musketry, their paving-stones and cannon-mouths still soar aloft intact: ditch yawning impassable, stone-faced; the inner drawbridge with its back towards us: the Bastille is still to take!

WORK.

BLESSED is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows; draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labor is life; from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence, breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge "self-knowledge," and much else, so soon as work fitly begins. Knowledge! the knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working; the rest is yet all an hypothesis of knowledge: a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds in endless logic vortices, till we try it and fix it. "Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone." . .

Older than all preached gospels was this unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, for-ever-enduring gospel: Work, and therein have well-being. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven, lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a spirit of active method, a force for work;—and burns like a painfully smouldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent facts around thee! What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated,

arable; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him; make order of him, the subject not of chaos, but of intelligence, divinity and thee! The thistle that grows in thy path, dig it out that a blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk, may grow there instead. The waste cotton-shrub, gather its waste white down, spin it, weave it; that, in place of idle litter, there may be folded webs, and the naked skin of man be covered.

But, above all, where thou findest ignorance, stupidity, brute-mindedness-attack it I say; smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and it lives; but smite, smite in the name of God! The highest God, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee: still audibly, if thou have ears to hear. He, even He, with his unspoken voice, is fuller than any Sinai thunders, or syllabled speech of whirlwinds; for the SILENCE of deep eternities, of worlds from beyond the morning-stars, does it not speak to thee? The unborn ages; the old Graves, with their long mouldering dust, the very tears that wetted it, now all dry-do not these speak to thee what ear hath not heard? The deep death-kingdoms, the stars in their never-resting courses, all space and all time, proclaim it to thee in continual silent admonition. Thou, too, if ever man should, shalt work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.

All true work is sacred; in all true work, were it but true hand-labor, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all sciences, all spoken epics, all acted heroism, martyrdom— up to that "agony of bloody sweat," which all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not "worship," then I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky.

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ALFRED TENNYSON, born in that famous birth-year of great men, 1809, lived to a great age, companioned by noble thoughts and by his eminent contemporaries, supported by the strong unfaltering fire of his own genius, honored by his queen, held by millions of readers as the foremost poet of his time, and exceptionally happy in the domestic sphere of wife and children. Poor in his youth, he died a rich man, from the honorable exercise of his extraordinary gifts. A fuller, more influential and successful life has seldom been lived by any man; his rich nature was characterized by that trenchant masculinity which admits the refinement of the Eternal Feminine; his sterling sense was softened and led by the spirit, and he was initiate in the incommunicable mysteries of the soul. His career and character, not less than his poetry, must remain a profitable study for many generations. The poetry. of no other Englishman since Shakespeare has become so familiar in men's mouths as his, and its effect has been succulent both to literature and to life. He is beyond dispute the English poet of his century and one of the few writers great enough to make a century memorable. Always (to use his own words) "he gave the people of his best:" and though, in the much that he has written, there is not a little which mature criticism rates far below his best, and more that could be spared as being reproductions in fresh forms of thoughts treated by him before; yet there stands to his credit a body of poetry which only the finest and noblest genius could have created, and without which the literature of his time would

lack some of its most exquisite graces and most felicitous and penetrating interpretations.

Tennyson's outward life was uneventful. He entered Cambridge in 1828, with Hallam (son of the historian), Trench and Houghton; was compelled by his slender income to defer his marriage until 1850, when he was forty-one; was raised to the laureate-ship of England in the same year, and accepted a peerage in 1884. He was no traveler, rarely leaving England, and never realizing the hope of his youth, "To see, before I die, the palms and temples of the south." He died in 1892, well past the age of fourscore, but with the fineness of his genius unabated. His history is that of his mind and heart, which is shadowed forth in his writings, yet ever veiled beneath the reticences of pure art. He was great enough to eschew the individual and singular in the published expression of his thought, and to offer only those ideas and feelings which are catholic in the race. All who have loved and lost have experienced the emotions of "In Memoriam ;" no one who has meditated deeply on the problems of the age can fail to find his best conclusions in "Locksley Hall;" scepticism may find its utterance and its answer in "The Two Voices;" the refusal of the soul to stay in mortal limitations resounds in "Ulysses;" the passion, purity and exaltation of love are portrayed in "Enone," "Maud," "Love and Duty," "Tears, Idle Tears," "The Gardener's Daughter," and many other lovely poems; the mockery of beauty without God is shown in "The Palace of Art;" the grandeur of patriotism, civil and military, is expressed in the "Ode on the Death of Wellington" and in "England;" and so we might continue. In a word, the life of his age flowed through Tennyson, and found in him its broadest utterance. Philosophy, science, history and art were elemental spirits employed by this Prospero to give body, color and pertinence to his harmonious creations; his brain was balanced by his heart, and the first was as lofty as the last was deep.

The beginnings of the poet's career were not ambitious. Before he was twenty, he and his brother published a small volume of "Poems by Two Brothers," which showed faculty, but no definite aim. His "Poems Chiefly Lyrical," appear

ing when he was twenty-one, were studies in form, sentiment and beauty, but only his more sagacious critics were able to foretell from it his future eminence. In 1842 another volume was brought out; and in this we find the first specimen of a work destined to be the most voluminous and one of the most important of his life-the fragment called "Morte d'Arthur." The plan of the "Epic of Arthur" had then been for some time in his mind; but he had not satisfied himself with his treatment of it. The fragment, however, was so generally praised that he was encouraged to take up the subject with renewed vigor; and, at intervals during the fifty years that followed, he gradually elaborated the whole stately series of poems bearing upon the story of Uther's mystic Son. The work as a whole is sufficient basis for a great reputation; but the merit of the various parts is not equal; there is poetry in all of them, but some of the earlier ones-"Enid," "Guenevere," "Elaine," and the "Morte d'Arthur" itself, seem to touch a higher level than the rest. The material was derived chiefly from the prose narrative of Malory; as an individual effort to put in homogeneous metrical form the legends of the beginnings of a nation, perhaps nothing since Homer's Iliad and Odyssey has been done to compare with it. But it is somewhat too long for the taste of the present day, and the general sameness of treatment and tone militate against its cumulative effect.

The most important fact of Tennyson's young manhood, in its influence upon his mind, was the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. The sad event took place in 1833, when Tennyson was twenty-four years old; "In Memoriam," the poem which commemorates it, was not published till 1850. During these seventeen years he had been enabled to pass through the acuter stages of grief into a calmer and deeper state, in which became visible to him the mercy of the God who giveth and who taketh away. The poem, therefore, shows the balance and symmetry of high art; it shows pain compensated by spiritual growth and the consolations of religion and philosophy. It has probably been more widely read than any other of Tennyson's productions; and the wonderful perfection of its form, and the truth and insight

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