What hast thou done for me, grim Old Age, save breaking my bones on the rack?

Would I had past in the morning that looks so bright from afar!

OLD AGE.

Done for thee ?-starved the wild beast that was linkt to thee eighty years back.

Less weight now for the ladder-of-heaven that hangs on a star.

Man is intended to be master in the realm assigned to him. The true man in man must truly rule. The counsel to him is

Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy Province of the brute.

The struggle grows less as age advances; the calm of self-conquest comes.

I have climb'd to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the past,

Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire,

But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at last As he stands on the heights of his life with the glimpse of a height that is higher.

These quotations express the feelings of his age. We can feel in many a phrase that the weariness of the body pressed upon the poet. The physical frame became a burden too burdensome to endure. It was "the poor rib-grated dungeon of the holy human ghost": it was

destined to "vanish and give place to the beauty that endures." But the constant spiritual object before Man was the victory over self; the choice between the higher yielding to the lower, and the nobler triumphing over the lower was before Man. The man of self-pleasing and the man of self-surrender are both to be seen in our survey of the world, and we can read whence the inspiration of the latter was derived.

He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind;

He that has nail'd all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind.

"Vastness."

Tennyson's ideal in this matter remained the same throughout life. These utterances of his closing years are little more than echoes of the thoughts experienced more sweetly and more tenderly in the days of his strength. The ideal of life is the same; the man is to surrender his will to the higher will and nobler wisdom. The inspiration of this spirit is the same. Love, as expressed in the highest divinely human love which the world has known, love is his inspiration, for love alone can effect this true self-surrender; love alone can efface all forms of egotism, and cause selfishness to pass away in the music

of a devoted and self-sacrificing life. This he gives voice to early and late; and the late utterances of it, vigorous and earnest as they are, never surpassed those earlier expressions so familiar to us all:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love

Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

Thou seemest human and divine,

The highest, holiest manhood Thou;
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.

"In Memoriam," Prologue.

CHAPTER X

TENNYSON-IN MEMORIAM

ONE day when walking with the author up and down the Ball Room (as it was called) at Farringford, Tennyson was led to speak about "In Memoriam," and the strange and misunderstanding criticism which had assailed it. He referred to the criticism in the Record, in which the Reviewer said that Mr. Tennyson had barely escaped Atheism, and had plunged into the abyss of Pantheism, and then went on to speak of the general drift of "In Memoriam." It is, he said, a kind of small "Divina Commedia" ending in a marriage.

The comparison thus given us by the poet himself may serve as a guide to us in reading the poem. It resembles the "Divine Comedy" in that it takes us into the darkest regions, carries us through realms and times of self-conquest, and out again into a place of joy and gladness. We hear the sad dirge of the region of deepest

sorrow: sorrow seems to petrify: the Old Yew becomes a symbol of a changelessness which knows no spring.

The seasons bring the flower again,

And bring the firstling to the flock;

O not for thee the glow, the bloom,
Who changest not in any gale,
Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom.

(ii)

The sullen tree exerts a fascination; the poet seems to pass into a lower and passionless life like that of the tree.

I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.

(ii)

After the stony grief comes a calmer time. The effect of the quietude, or self-mastery of soul in grief, is indicated after a year is gone:

So many worlds, so much to do,

So little done, such things to be,
How know I what had need of thee,

For thou wert strong as thou wert true?

(lxxiii)

Death has quenched the light which might have made his friend famous, but he will not curse Nature, no, nor death; law rules everywhere.