550

Landscape-lover, lord of language more than he that sang the "Works and Days,"

All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase ;

Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;

All the charm of all the Muses

often flowering in a lonely word;

Poet of the happy Tityrus piping underneath his beechen bowers; Poet of the poet-satyr whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers;

Chanter of the Pollio, glorying in the blissful years again to be, Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea;

Thou that seest Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind;

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the

doubtful doom of human kind;

Light among the vanish'd ages; star that gildest yet this phantom shore: Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no

more;

Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Cæsar's domeTho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound forever of Imperial Rome

Now the Rome of slaves hath perish'd, and the Rome of freemen holds her place,

I, from out the Northern Island sunder'd once from all the human race,

1" To Virgil was written at the request of the Mantuans for the nineteenth centenary of Virgil's Death." (Life of Tennyson, II, 320.)

MANY a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish'd face,

Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish'd race.

Raving politics, never at rest-as this poor earth's pale history runs,— What is it all but a trouble of ants in the

gleam of a million million of suns? Lies upon this side, lies upon that side. truthless violence mourn'd by the wise, Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of lies upon lies;

Stately purposes, valor in battle, glorious annals of army and fleet,

Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, trumpets of victory, groans of defeat;

Innocence seethed in her mother's milk, and Charity setting the martyr aflame; Thraldom who walks with the banner of Freedom, and recks not to ruin a realm in her name.

Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools;

Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow'd up by her vassal legion of fools;

Trade flying over a thousand seas with her spice and her vintage, her silk and her corn;

Desolate offing, sailorless harbors, famishing populace, wharves forlorn ;

Star of the morning, Hope in the sunrise; gloom of the evening, Life at a close;

Pleasure who flaunts on her wide downway with her flying robe and her poison'd rose;

Pain that has crawl'd from the corpse of Pleasure, a worm which writhes all day, and at night

Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back to the curse of the light;

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone;

Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty; Flattery gilding the rift in a throne;

Fame blowing out from her golden trumpet a jubilant challenge to Time and to Fate;

Slander, her shadow, sowing the nettle on all the laurell'd graves of the great;

Love for the maiden, crown'd with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been,

Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean;

National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire; Vows that will last to the last deathruckle, and vows that are snapted in a moment of fire;

Clouds and darkness
Closed upon Camelot ;
Arthur had vanish'd
I knew not whither,
The king who loved me,
And cannot die;

For out of the darkness
Silent and slowly

The Gleam, that had waned to a wintry glimmer

On icy fallow

And faded forest,
Drew to the valley
Named of the shadow,
And slowly brightening
Out of the glimmer,

And slowly moving again to a melody
Yearningly tender,

Fell on the shadow,
No longer a shadow,

But clothed with the Gleam.

And broader and brighter
The Gleam flying onward,
Wed to the melody,
Sang thro' the world;
And slower and fainter,
Old and weary,
But eager to follow,
I saw, whenever

In passing it glanced upon
Hamlet or city,

That under the Crosses
The dead man's garden,

The mortal hillock,

Would break into blossom;
And so to the land's

Last limit I came--
And can no longer,
But die rejoicing,
For thro' the Magic
Of Him the Mighty,

Who taught me in childhood,
There on the border

Of boundless Ocean,
And all but in Heaven
Hovers the Gleam.

Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight!
O young Mariner,
Down to the haven,
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam.

1889.

1" Crossing the Bar was written in my father's eighty-first year, on a day in October.... "I said, That is the crown of your life's work ;' he answered. It came in a moment.' He explained the 'Pilot' as That Divine and Unseen Who is always guiding us.'

"A few days before his death he said to me: Mind you put Crossing the Bar at the end of all editions of my poems. (Life of Tennyson, II.,

367.)