Part 18 (1/2)
Akbar's Dream may be taken, y of a race seeking after God, if perchance theyHynificent ain thou flaain we see thee rise
Everyhureet it, bowing lowly down before thee, Thee the Godlike, thee the changeless in thine ever-changing skies
II
Shadow-ht from clime to clime, Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their woodland rhyme
Warble bird, and open flower, and,Him the Timeless in the flame that measures Time!”
In this final volume the poet cast his handful of incense on the altar of Scott, versifying the tale of Il Bizarro, which the dying Sir Walter records in his Journal in Italy The Churchwarden and the Curate is not inferior to the earlier peasant poems in its expression of shrewdness, humour, and superstition A verse of Poets and Critics may be taken as the poet's last word on the old futile quarrel:-
”This thing, that thing is the rage, Helter-skelter runs the age; Minds on this round earth of ours Vary like the leaves and flowers, Fashi+on'd after certain laws; Sing thou low or loud or sweet, All at all points thou canst not meet, Some will pass and some will pause
What is true at last will tell: Few at first will place thee well; Soh--no fault of thine - Hold thine own, and work thy will!
Year will graze the heel of year, But seldom comes the poet here, And the Critic's rarer still”
Still the lines hold good -
”Soh--no fault of thine”
The end was now at hand A sense of weakness was felt by the poet on September 3, 1892: on the 28th his faradually faded out of life, and expired on Thursday, October 6, at 135 AM To the very last he had Shakespeare by hiht they were flooded by the ht The description of the final scenes raphy by the poet's son ”His patience and quiet strength had power upon those ere nearest and dearest to him; we felt thankful for the love and the utter peace of it all” ”The life after death,” Tennyson had said just before his fatal illness, ”is the cardinal point of Christianity I believe that God reveals Himself in every individual soul; and my idea of Heaven is the perpetual ministry of one soul to another” He had lived the life of heaven upon earth, being in all his work a , and ennobling to the souls of others, with a ministry which cannot die His body sleeps next to that of his friend and fellow-poet, Robert Browning, in front of Chaucer's monument in the Abbey
CHAPTER XI--LAST CHAPTER
”O, that Press will get hold of me now,” Tennyson said when he knew that his last hour was at hand He had a horror of personal tattle, as even his early poems declare -
”For now the Poet cannot die, Nor leave his ins the scandal and the cry”
But no ”carrion-vulture” has waited
”To tear his heart before the crowd”
About Tennyson, doubtless, there is e: erated hatred of personal notoriety, and the odd and brusque things which he would say when alarers It has not seeends, nor have I sought outside the Biography by his son for rapher chose to tell The readers who are least interested in poetry are e of genius to retain the freshness and simplicity, with some of the foibles, of the child When Tennyson read his poems aloud he was apt to be moved by theht it deserved Only very rudinised conceit in this freedoance Effusiveness of praise or curiosity in a stranger is apt to produce bluntness of reply in a Briton ”Don't talk d-d nonsense, sir,” said the Duke of Wellington to the gushi+ng person who piloted hirave says, ”I have known hier unintentional eyes of a girl of fifteen And under the stress of this nervous impulse compelled to contradict his inner self (especially when under the terror of leonisation), he was doubtless at times betrayed into an abrupt phrase, a cold unsympathetic exterior; a moment's 'defect of the rose'” Had he not been sensitive in all things, he would have been less of a poet The chief criticisainst his mode of life is that he WAS sensitive and reserved, but he could and did make himself pleasant in the society of les pauvres d'esprit Curiosity alarers who met him in that mood carried away false impressions, which developed into myths As the Master of Balliol has recorded, despite his shyness ”he was extre not only his friends, but the friends of his friends, and giving them a hearty welcoenial if he was understood”
In these points he was unlike his great conte; for instance, Tennyson never (I think) was the Master's guest at Balliol, raduates, to whom the Master's hospitality was freely extended Yet, where he was fa jest or even paradox ”As Dr Johnson says, every hter”: but no Boswell has chronicled the laughters of Tennyson