Stiller, with yet a bed for wandering men. There Enoch rested silent many days.

But Miriam Lane was good and garru-
lous,

Nor let him be, but often breaking in,
Told him, with other annals of the port,
Not knowing Enoch was so brown, so
bow'd,

So broken-all the story of his house: 700
His baby's death, her growing poverty,
How Philip put her little ones to school,
And kept them in it, his long wooing her,
Her slow consent and marriage, and the
birth

Of Philip's child; and o'er his countenance No shadow past, nor motion. Any one, Regarding, well had deem'd he felt the tale

Less than the teller; only when she closed, Enoch, poor man, was cast away and lost,'

He, shaking his gray head pathetically, 710 Repeated muttering, 'cast away and lost;' Again in deeper inward whispers, 'lost!'

But Enoch yearn'd to see her face again: If I might look on her sweet face again, And know that she is happy.' So the thought

Haunted and harass'd him, and drove him

forth,

At evening when the dull November day Was growing duller twilight, to the hill.

And tell my son that I died blessing him.
And say to Philip that I blest him too;
He never meant us anything but good.
But if my children care to see me dead,
Who hardly knew me living, let them
come,

I am their father; but she must not come,
For my dead face would vex her after-life.
And now there is but one of all my blood
Who will embrace me in the world-to-be.
This hair is his, she cut it off and gave it,
And I have borne it with me all these
years,
891

And thought to bear it with me to my grave;

But now my mind is changed, for I shall see him, My babe in bliss.

gone,

Wherefore when I am

Take, give her this, for it may comfort her;

It will moreover be a token to her
That I am he.'

He ceased; and Miriam Lane Made such a voluble answer promising all, That once again he roll'd his eyes upon her Repeating all he wish'd, and once again 900 She promised.

Then the third night after this, While Enoch slumber'd motionless and pale,

And Miriam watch'd and dozed at intervals,

There came so loud a calling of the sea
That all the houses in the haven rang.
He woke, he rose, he spread his arms
abroad,

Crying with a loud voice, 'A sail ! a sail !
I am saved;' and so fell back and spoke

no more.

So past the strong heroic soul away. And when they buried him the little port Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

AYLMER'S FIELD

1793

911

This poem, first published with 'Enoch Arden,' was less favorably received than the latter by the English critics, on account of what 'Blackwood' calls Tennyson's old infelicity in dealing with the higher orders.' That reviewer also finds fault with the construction of the story: The incidents are somewhat trite, and its characters more than somewhat improbable. Its heroine is a model of every Christian virtue; yet she deceives her father, and carries on a clandestine correspondence with her lover. Her pastor is an excellent clergyman; yet when two of his parishioners seek the sanctuary for the first time after their daughter's death, he seizes the opportunity to preach publicly against them an act surely unbefitting the pulpit of any period or of any country, but simply impossible in that of a decent rector in the decorous Church of England of the eighteenth century. . . . Averill's sermon doubtless contains what a man, situated as he was, could not help thinking: but no less certainly what a gentleman and a Christian would, when the mischief was done and the punishment had fallen, have scrupulously refrained from publicly expressing. Why pour the molten lead of those fierce denunciations into wounds yet deeper than his own? Why smite those afresh whom God had smitten so terribly already? The preacher, arising from his own desolate hearth, like a prophet of old, to denounce the crime which has laid it waste, is unquestionably a grandly tragic figure. But a deeper sense of the proprieties of character might have enabled its possessor to attain this fine effect without that perilous approach to the unreal and to the theatrical, by which, as it

The Quarterly Review' says of the poem: 'Full of wonderful beauty in places, and written throughout as Mr. Tennyson alone can write, we must, by the standard of his former work, pronounce it a comparative failure. The story does not bear the marks of such careful thought, in its design, nor in the grouping of its parts. After the simple and clear effect of Enoch Arden," ," "Aylmer's Field" gives an uncertain impression, and wants a like repose. Nor is there the same continuous unfolding of probabilities in the action, nor the same pure and noble feeling in the persons. . . . Sir Aylmer Aylmer is drawn with no kindly insight; he is a stupid ruffian, and being so is no type of an English gentleman. His wife is a mere shadow upon the page, and the author writes throughout more in the spirit of a radical painphleteer than of the poet laureate.'

666

66

Peter Bayne, on the other hand, remarks: Aylmer's Field" seems to me the companion picture to Locksley Hall." It is one of the most tragic of Tennyson's pieces - one of the saddest, sternest, and I might almost add mightiest, poems in the world. In "Locksley Hall" we see desecrated affection making two persons unhappy; in "Aylmer's Field" the blight is more deadly and more comprehensive. I know nothing of Tennyson's in which the moral earnestness is so prophet-like as in this great poem. With all the might of his genius in its maturity, he pours a molten torrent of indignation and of scorn upon that pride which is, perhaps, the central vice of England, that pride which displays itself in many ways-in pride of birth, in pride of gold, in pride of insular superiority, and which is always desolating and deadly. Pride, in this instance, trampling love under its feet, provides exquisite pain for all the chief personages in the poem, and obliterates two ancient families from the face of the earth.

...

In this poem Tennyson has reaped the highest honor man can attain, namely, that of adding to the Scripture of his country; nor should I think it a much less dark or pernicious error than the pride which caused all this woe, to hold that the Almighty could speak only through or to Jewish seers, and that there is no true inspiration in such writing as this.'

The fact (see page 227 above) that the story of the poem is true is a sufficient reply to the criticisms of Blackwood 'and the Quarterly' upon what seems improbable' in it.

The present Lord Tennyson says, in the 'Memoir (vol. ii. p. 9): The opening lines of "Aylmer's Field unfold the moral of that poem. The sequel describes the Nemesis which fell upon Sir Aylmer Aylmer in his pride of