human
Can you write me a poem about elm, spring and sailor?
assistant
Sure, here's a poem about elm, spring and sailor:
  After sleeping at Horncastle, we drove six miles across a flat
"the well-beloved place
Where first we gazed upon the sky."
"Witch-elms that counterchange the floor
Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;"
Being astonished by the account of a hearse and mourning coaches
Since this autumn visit (1884), which led to my appealing to Lady
facilities for my having a number of copies of the engraving.
"'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up,
Whose golden rounds are our calamities,
Whereon our feet firm planting, nearer God
The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unseal'd."
mortality, and this harmonizes with his life of mourning.
"And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood,
And grow incorporate into thee."
"Sick for" means, desirous of.
Beneath a world-old yew tree, darkening half
The cloisters, on a gustful April morn
That puff'd the swaying branches into smoke.
O, brother, I have seen this yew-tree smoke,
Spring after spring, for half a hundred years."
"Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?"
"Break," he says, still addressing his heart, but in metaphor;
"Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost."
He sometimes hesitates, as at something half sinful, when giving
The "common" expressions of sympathy with our trouble are very
"Vacant chaff well-meant for grain."
"Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break."
The mother prays for her sailor-boy when
"His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave."
"O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend."
"He is not here; but far away."
"The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day."
"And learns her gone and far from home."
"My lost Arthur's loved remains."
"My Arthur, whom I shall not see,
Till all my widow'd race be run--"
until my life, bereaved of its first affection, be over.
"Thy dark freight, a vanish'd life."
The placid scene, which he had imagined as attending the vessel,
harmonizes with the home-bred fancy, that it is sweeter
"To rest beneath the clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains;"
that is, to be buried in the open churchyard;
"Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God."
"Should gulf him fathom deep in brine;
And hands so often clasp'd in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells."
"The dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep."
"O'er ocean-mirrors rounded large"
"Is this the end of all my care?
Is this the end? Is this the end?"
"return
To where the body sits, and learn,
That I have been an hour away."
"the comrade of my choice,
An awful thought, a life removed,
The human-hearted man I loved,
A Spirit, not a breathing voice."
"I should not feel it to be strange."
Both this and the previous Poem express the difficulty we feel in
"What ardently I wish'd, I long believed,
And disappointed still, was still deceived."
"But for fancies which aver
That all thy motions gently pass
Athwart a plane of molten glass,
I scarce could brook the strain and stir
That makes the barren branches loud."
"delirious man,
Whose fancy fuses old and new,
And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan."
"thro' circles of the bounding sky"--
"The dust of him I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run."
Laertes says of Ophelia,
"Lay her in the earth
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!"
"Come then, pure hands, and bear the head
That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep,
And come, whatever loves to weep,
And hear the ritual of the dead."
"thro' his lips impart
The life that almost dies in me;"
"My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then."
"It will be hard, they say, to find
Another service such as this."
"see the vacant chair, and think,
How good! how kind! and he is gone."
"But where the path we walk'd began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,"
"thinks, that somewhere in the waste
The Shadow sits and waits for me."
sometimes to where the cloaked Shadow is sitting--Death,
"Who keeps the keys of all the creeds"--
"Since our first sun arose and set."
"into the perfect star
We saw not, when we moved therein?"
On the contrary,
"I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
"But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll'd me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch'd with joy,
The merry, merry bells of Yule."
"as daily vexes household peace"--
"We'll keep our customs. What is law itself
But old establish'd custom? What religion
(I mean with one half of the men that use it)
Save the good use and wont that carries them
To worship how and where their fathers worshipp'd?
All things resolve to custom. We'll keep ours."
wraith--being present and watching them.
They sit in silence, then break into singing
"A merry song we sang with him
Last year."
"From orb to orb, from veil to veil,"
and so traverses the universe.
"Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,
Draw forth the cheerful day from night:
O Father, touch the east, and light
The light that shone when Hope was born."
"There lives no record of reply,"
"Behold a man raised up by Christ!
The rest remaineth unreveal'd;
He told it not; or something seal'd
The lips of that Evangelist."
It is only St. John who records the miracle.
Her whole spirit is then so "borne down by gladness," that
"She bows, she bathes the Saviour's feet
With costly spikenard and with tears."
This Poem is abstruse, and requires thought and care for the
interpretation of the Poet's meaning.
The pantheist must take care for himself, that, whilst satisfied
"In holding by the law within,"
--_ceu veritus turbare Vopisci
Pieriosque dies et habentes carmina somnos._
But still there would come
"The moanings of the homeless sea,"
"The sound of that forgetful shore,"
Although, even in manhood, the great truths of Religion only
"darkly join,
Deep-seated in our mystic frame"--
"And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef,"
"loiter'd in the Master's field,
And darken'd sanctities with song."
"Then are these songs I sing of thee
Not all ungrateful to thine ear."
"Fruitful cloud and living smoke;"
Also that at the proper season
"Thy gloom is kindled at the tips."
"is given
A life that bears immortal fruit
In such great offices as suit
The full-grown energies of heaven."
absence--whereas
"thou and I have shaken hands,
Till growing winters lay me low;
My paths are in the fields I know,
But thine in undiscover'd lands."
"leap the grades of life and light,
And flash at once, my friend, to thee."
"Through all the secular to be"--
"The howlings of forgotten fields"
"And what delights can equal those
That stir the spirit's inner deeps,
When one that loves but knows not, reaps
A truth from one that loves and knows?"
If, in the intermediate state, we find that
"Sleep and death be truly one"--
as St. Paul himself might lead us to believe--
"And every spirit's folded bloom"
"And love will last as pure and whole,
As when he loved me here in Time,
And at the spiritual prime
Rewaken with the dawning soul."
At the resurrection, the old affection will revive.
"before
God shut the doorways of his head;"
that is, before the skull of the infant closed. Yet sometimes
"A little flash, a mystic hint"
"On this, devolved with power to take away
Remembrance of offence; on that, to bring
Remembrance back of every good deed done.
From whence its name of Lethe on this part;
On the other, Eunoe."--Cary's Translation.
"A rosy warmth from marge to marge,"
its expansion interminable.
At any rate, to be conscious of "a separate whole"--a distinct
individuality--and yet merge at last
"in the general Soul,
Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet."
St. Paul is not more distinct and emphatic upon our individuality
Delighting in the thought of
"Enjoying each the other's good,"
"Farewell, we lose ourselves in light."
"Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away."
"Beneath all fancied hopes and fears,
Ay me, the sorrow deepens down,
Whose muffled motions blindly drown
The bases of my life in tears."
He invokes Hallam's spirit to be near him in his various moods of
"Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life,
The twilight of eternal day."
"There must be wisdom with great Death:
The dead shall look me thro' and thro'."
"They watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all."
"For love reflects the thing beloved;"
whereas his words are words only, the "froth of thought."
The Spirit of love reproves this self-accusation:
"Thou canst not move me from thy side,
Nor human frailty do me wrong."
"not the sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue"--
"When Time hath sunder'd shell from pearl"--
He has often known a father, now
"A sober man among his boys,"
"The grain by which a man may live?"
"Procuress to the lords of hell"--
by advocating sin as the path to sanctity.
This Poem expresses a hope in Universalism--
"that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill"--
He hopes that nothing has been made in vain--
"That not one life shall be destroy'd,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete."
But how reverently does he touch this mysterious subject!
"Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last--far off--at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry."
In Poem cxxiv., stanza 5, he says,
"Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near."
"Are God and Nature then at strife?"
"Upon the great world's altar-stairs,
That slope thro' darkness up to God;"--
but still he stretches forth "lame hands of faith"
"To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope"--
the hope of a final restitution of all things.
"Who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,"
also perish, and have his dust blown about the desert,
"Or seal'd within the iron hills?"
"O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil."
"Abide a little longer here,
And thou shalt take a nobler leave"--
be able to speak with more confidence of their meeting again.
affliction.
"How vain am I!
How should he love a thing so low?"
"How blanch'd with darkness must I grow!"
"the doubtful shore,
Where thy first form was made a man;"
that is, to this world, distinguishing it from that "second state
"I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can
The soul of Shakespeare love thee more."
The first love then either wholly dies out, or
"Is matter for a flying smile"--
a subject for ridicule.
He asks whether Hallam is looking back on this life,
"As some divinely gifted man,"
"by force his merit known,
And lives to clutch the golden keys,
To mould a mighty state's decrees,
And shape the whisper of the throne;"
as Lord Beaconsfield did.
Does not such a hero in his elevation,
"When all his active powers are still,"
sometimes feel tender memories of the scenes of his early life--
"The limit of his narrower fate"--
"Does my old friend remember me?"
"Sweet soul, do with me as thou wilt."
"Since we deserved the name of friends,
And thine effect so lives in me,
A part of mine may live in thee,
And move thee on to noble ends."
"His inner day can never die,
His night of loss is always there."
_Vale dulcissime,
vale dilectissime, desideratissime,
requiescas in pace.
Pater ac mater hic posthac requiescamus tecum,
usque ad tubam._"
"And in the dark church like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn."
The occurrences in this dream seem to have been suggested by the
indignities offered to our Lord before His crucifixion.
"I hear a wizard music roll,
And thro' a lattice on the soul
Looks thy fair face and makes it still."
"A night-long Present of the Past,"
associations.
"All along the valley, stream that flashest white,
Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,
All along the valley, where thy waters flow,
I walk'd with one I loved two-and-thirty years ago.
All along the valley, while I walk'd to-day,
The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away;
For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed,
Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,
And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,
The voice of the dead was a living voice to me."
"As wan, as chill, as wild as now."
"For nothing is that errs from law;"
all is overruled. We pass away, and what survives of human deeds?
"It rests with God."
"And self-infolds the large results
Of force that would have forged a name,"
had he been permitted to live.
contemplating the character of the departed, he sees
"Thy likeness to the wise below,
Thy kindred with the great of old."
I can perceive worth in thee equal to theirs!
Indeed, he does not care
"in these fading days
To raise a cry that lasts not long,
And round thee with the breeze of song,
To stir a little dust of praise."
"Is wrought with tumult of acclaim."
"What hope is here for modern rhyme?"
Looking at what has already happened,
"These mortal lullabies of pain,"
"A grief--then changed to something else,
Sung by a long forgotten mind."
Nevertheless, these considerations shall not deter the Poet--
"But what of that? My darken'd ways
Shall ring with music all the same;
To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise."
recreations,
"over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost."
"No--mixt with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry."
"More than my brothers are to me"--
"Let not this vex thee, noble heart!"
for thou art holding "the costliest love in fee," even a wife's
affection--we may again suppose.
"was rich where I was poor,
And he supplied my want the more
As his unlikeness fitted mine."
"as deep as life or thought,
But stay'd in peace with God and man;"
because Hallam would have found comfort in pious resignation.
"Unused example from the grave
Reach out dead hands to comfort me."
"More years had made me love thee more."
"But Death returns an answer sweet:
My sudden frost was sudden gain"--
The change in death instantly exalted its victim;
"And gave all ripeness to the grain,
It might have drawn from after-heat."
What he is angry with Death for is, their separation--
"He put our lives so far apart
We cannot hear each other speak."
"The northern shore" must simply mean our northern region.
"Can trouble live with April days,
Or sadness in the summer moons?"
He would have the New Year bring all its customary flowers--
"Deep tulips dash'd with fiery dew,
Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire"--
a sight of these would set free the sorrow in his blood,
"And flood a fresher throat with song."
Engaged in marriage to the Poet's sister, death intervened--
"that remorseless iron hour
Made cypress of her orange flower,
Despair of Hope, and earth of thee."
"He that died in Holy Land
Would reach us out the shining hand,
And take us as a single soul."
"The low beginnings of content."
It is _the friend to whom the epithalamium is addressed_--E. L.
Lushington--"true in word and tried in deed," who asks how he is
"God's finger touch'd him, and he slept."
He then recounts what he thinks may have occurred to Hallam, when
"to mourn for any over much:"
still, so deep is his attachment to Hallam, that he calls himself
"the divided half of such
A friendship as had master'd Time;"
He then seems to turn again to his living friend, and says,
"If not so fresh, with love as true,
I, clasping brother-hands, aver
I could not, if I would, transfer
The whole I felt for him to you."
But he is not wholly disconsolate--
"My heart, tho' widow'd, may not rest
Quite in the love of what is gone,
But seeks to beat in time with one
That warms another living breast."
"A hundred spirits whisper, 'Peace.'"
This Poem is remarkable as being one sustained sentence.
"The prophets blazon'd on the panes,"
"we saw
The God within him light his face,"
like the martyr Stephen's;
"And over those ethereal eyes
_Michael Angelo had a strong bar of bone over his eyes._
thinking and seeing in heaven."
"The glory of the sum of things,"
"The dust and din and steam of town;"
and now, in a golden afternoon, sees
"The landscape winking thro' the heat"
"A ballad to the brightening moon."
They are described as returning home,
"Before the crimson-circled star
Had fall'n into her father's grave,"
The evening sounds are very charming--
"The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honied hours,"
when the bees were gathering their last stores of the day. Tender
"the yet-loved sire would make
Confusion worse than death, and shake
The pillars of domestic peace."
Though all this may be true,
"I find not yet one lonely thought
That cries against my wish for thee."
"beauteous in thine after form,
And like a finer light in light."
"such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise."
"My Ghost may feel that thine is near."
"when the heart is full of din,
And doubt beside the portal waits,"
the departed spirits
"can but listen at the gates,
And hear the household jar within."
Here comes another family scene at Somersby.
"And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes
That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes
And woolly breasts and beaded eyes"--
"those fall'n leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead."
He reads them afresh, to renew a sense of their bygone intimacy:
"So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine."
"East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day."
The Poet says, "one indeed I knew"--who, it may be presumed, was
Hallam--and
"He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them."
"Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out,"
and found the serenity of faith.
"There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."
This Poem is highly mystical.
"My love has talk'd with rocks and trees."
His own affection for Hallam seems to personate the object of his
"great and wise,
She dwells on him with faithful eyes,
'I cannot understand: I love.'"
"No livelier than the wisp that gleams
On Lethe in the eyes of death;"
"Day, when I lost the flower of men."
"They know me not, but mourn with me."
This applies to all
"Betwixt the slumber of the poles,"--
from one end of the world to the other.
"This maple burn itself away."--P. ci., 1.
"But each has pleased a kindred eye,
And each reflects a kindlier day;
And, leaving these, to pass away,
I think once more he seems to die."
To take leave of them is to renew the more bitter separation.
"feed
With summer-spice the humming air,"
in which the bees are busy.
Uncared for, the brook will babble
"At noon, or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;"--
All this will go on, until garden and wild become familiar to the
"And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills."
"We leave the well-beloved place
Where first we gazed upon the sky."
"Contend for loving masterdom."
The former pleads
"here thy boyhood sung
Long since its matin song."
The rival affection urges
"Yea, but here
Thy feet have stray'd in after hours
With thy lost friend among the bowers,
And this hath made them trebly dear."
"They mix in one another's arms
To one pure image of regret."
This picture is very beautiful.
A dream is described,
"Which left my after-morn content;"
it imparted comfort.
"known to me,
The shape of him I loved."
"We steer'd her toward a crimson cloud
That land-like slept along the deep."
Christmastide again; and he hears the bells from
"A single church below the hill;"
"But all is new unhallow'd ground."
"For change of place, like growth of time,
Has broke the bond of dying use."
"save alone
What lightens in the lucid East
Of rising worlds by yonder wood."
"measured arcs, and lead
The closing cycle rich in good;"
bringing Christ's second advent.
"Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace,"
the millennium; and last of all,
"Ring in the Christ that is to be;"
God Himself again upon earth.
"It is the day when he was born,"
"A bitter day that early sank
Behind a purple frosty bank
Of vapour, leaving night forlorn."
"The drifts that pass
To darken on the rolling brine
That breaks the coast"
"Bring in great logs and let them lie."
"with festal cheer,
With books and music, surely we
Will drink to him whate'er he be,
And sing the songs he loved to hear."
"Mine own phantom chanting hymns;"
or, gazing below, he sees
"The reflex of a human face."
"'Tis held that sorrow makes us wise"
is repeated in P. cxiii., 1.
Hallam's character and accomplishments are recited. Richness of
"The blind hysterics of the Celt,"
"The men of rathe and riper years;"
both the young and older. He gave confidence to the timid, the
true-hearted held to him, and the deceitful were exposed,
"While I, thy dearest, sat apart"
"And, born of love, the vague desire
That spurs an imitative will,"
rose in me, and made me wish to do likewise.
"God and nature met in light,
And thus he bore without abuse
The grand old name of gentleman,
Defamed by every charlatan,
And soil'd with all ignoble use."
His friend was "some novel power," which
"Sprang up for ever at a touch,
And hope could never hope too much,
In watching thee from hour to hour."
Science, too often,
"leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.
Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain"--
and therefore needing caution and restraint.
If separated from love and faith, she bursts
"All barriers in her onward race
For power."
Science is "second, not the first,"
"For she is earthly of the mind,
But Wisdom heavenly of the soul."
He would have the world wise and modest,
"like thee,
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity."
"is of things we see;"
the latter by faith,
"Believing where we cannot prove;"
"And drown'd in yonder living blue
The lark becomes a sightless song."
"and my regret
Becomes an April violet,
And buds and blossoms like the rest."
He is cheered by the opening season.
Is it regret for buried time--grief for the friend whom he has
"Less yearning for the friendship fled,
Than some strong bond which is to be"--
reunion hereafter.
"Delight a hundredfold" will accrue from this postponement--the
Rather trust that
"the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends."
"I see
Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
A light blue lane of early dawn."
All is now welcome:
"I think of early days and thee,
And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,
And bright the friendship of thine eye;
And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
I take the pressure of thine hand."
He exults in the victory of a higher faith. We are not "magnetic
"not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death."
Let "the wiser man" of the future
"up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape,
But I was born to other things."
So the Poet sings,
"Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name
For what is one, the first, the last,
Thou, like my present and my past,
Thy place is changed; thou art the same."
"If thou wert with me, and the grave
Divide us not, be with me now."
"The stillness of the central sea."
The very hills and solid lands are no more than shadows, or
"Like clouds that shape themselves and go."
But our parting is not for ever,
"For tho' my lips may breathe adieu,
I cannot think the thing farewell."
I am sure that we shall meet again.
"Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess."
"A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd, I have felt."
"as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near."
"Because he felt so fixed in truth."
"Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well."
"The red fool-fury of the Seine"
"thou, dear spirit, happy star,
O'erlook'st the tumult from afar,
And smilest, knowing all is well."
"Is comrade to the lesser faith
That sees the course of human things."
"I see in part
That all, as in some piece of art,
Is toil co-operant to an end;"
that all things are working together for final good.
"Strange friend, past, present, and to be,
Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
Behold, I dream a dream of good,
And mingle all the world with thee."
Everything reminds him of Hallam; but
"Tho' mix'd with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more."
His last declaration of devoted attachment is,
"Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
I have thee still, and I rejoice;
I prosper, circled with thy voice;
I shall not lose thee tho' I die."
"When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,"
"Strong Son of God, immortal Love,"
"Immortal Love, author of this great frame;"
"Believing where we cannot prove."
"Thou art just."
This conviction is enough.
"Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood, thou"--
God incarnate, to whom we must become spiritually united,
"Our wills are ours, to make them thine,"
as expressed in Poem cxxxi., stanza 1.
"We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see."
"Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.
"Forgive my grief for one removed,
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.
I trust he lives in thee, and there
I find him worthier to be loved.
"Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
Confusions of a wasted youth;
Forgive them where they fail in truth,
And in thy wisdom make me wise."
"I count it crime
To mourn for any overmuch."
"To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise."
But this worth was only comparative,
"from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee;"
The strong domestic affections of the Poet are prominently shown
throughout _In Memoriam_, and his pleasure at this bridal is very
"O when her life was yet in bud,
He too foretold the perfect rose."
The worth of the Bridegroom is acknowledged in this address:
"And thou art worthy; full of power;
As gentle; liberal-minded, great,
Consistent; wearing all that weight
Of learning lightly like a flower."
 "The brook alone far off was heard." P. xcv. s. 2.
"What whisper'd from her lying lips?"
See also Psalm cxx. 2.
_Navis, quae tibi creditum
Debes Virgilium, finibus Atticis
Reddas incolumem, precor;
Et serves animae dimidium meae._
 This fruit of the vine, Matt. xxvi., 29.
 In the month of October, 1884, I walked in the thickly wooded
 The corpse was landed at Dover, and was brought by sixteen black
"The darken'd heart that beat no more."
"The moony vapour rolling round the King,
Who seem'd the phantom of a Giant in it."
 I remember holding a serious conversation with an enlightened
"Raze out the written troubles of the brain?"
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar," &c.
Tennyson also says in "The Two Voices:"
"Moreover, something is or seems
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams--
Of something felt, like something here,
Of something done, I know not where,
Such as no language may declare."
"But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still."
 The term "toll" is correct--
"When we lament a departed soul
We toll."
 _Dixitque novissima verba_, AE. iv., 650.
"_Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
Atque in perpetuum, frater, Ave, atque Vale._"
 See the Poet's own words on this point at the end of Poem XCVII.
 Clevedon Church, which is dedicated to St. Andrew, is quaint and
"I to the church the living call,
And to the grave do summon all."--1725.
 There are other tablets in this church, which contain touching
 The Severn is nine miles wide at Clevedon.
 In Tennyson's "Ode to Memory" the lines occur
"The seven elms, the poplars four.
That stand beside my father's door."
 In "The Two Voices," Tennyson says,
"I know that age to age succeeds,
Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,
A _dust_ of systems and of creeds."
And again, in "The Vision of Sin,"
"All the windy ways of men
Are but _dust_ that rises up,
And is lightly laid again."
Also in Poem LXXI., 3.
"the _dust_ of change."
 Shakespeare says,--"Till the diminution of space had pointed him
Chaucer says,
"And all the world as to mine eye
No more seemed than a prike."
 "The Poet Laureate has written his own song on the hearts of his
 This term is Shakespearean,
"What devil was't
That thus hath cozen'd you at hoodman-blind."
 A younger sister of Lady Tennyson.
"As old mythologies relate,
Some draught of Lethe might await
The slipping thro' from state to state."
 Miss Emily Tennyson eventually married a naval officer, Captain
 In this Poem occurs the line
"Arrive at last the blessed goal."
"But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried, Help me, Cassius, or I sink."
"I mean, my lords, those powers that the queen
Hath raised in Gallia have arrived our coast."
"Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy isle."
"all things rare
That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems."
Shakespeare, _Sonnet XXI._
 In the "Lotus Eaters," we read
"all hath suffered change;
For surely now our household hearths are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy."
"In the spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;
In the spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove."
Longfellow sings in "It is not always May:"
"The sun is bright--the air is clear,
The darting swallows soar and sing,
And from the stately elms I hear
The blue-bird prophesying spring."
"The fields made golden with the flower of March,
The throstle singing in the feather'd larch,
And down the river, like a flame of blue,
Keen as an arrow flies the water-king."
"The little halcyon's azure plume
Was never half so blue."--Shenstone.
"As the sun,
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow."
 The wish realized. See Poem xcv. s. 9.
"They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead:
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed;
I wept, as I remember'd how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.
"And now that thou are lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,
For death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take."
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops."
_Romeo and Juliet_, Act iii., s. 5.
 _Ignis fatuus_--"Will o' the Wisp."
 That is, the _ursa minor_, or little bear, which is a small
 This is a favourite figure. In Poem xlix., stanza 1, we read,
"Like light in many a shiver'd lance
That breaks about the dappled pools."
"This holly by the cottage-eave,
To-night, ungather'd, shall it stand."
Changed in later editions to
"To-night ungather'd let us leave
This laurel, let this holly stand."
Old sisters of a day gone by.
They too will die."--Poem xxix.
 "_Ligna super foco large reponens._" Thackeray sang,
"Care, like a dun,
Lurks at the gate,
Let the dog wait!
Happy we'll be.
Drink every one.
Pile up the coals,
Fill the red bowls,
Round the old tree."
 "All stone I felt within," Dante's Inferno, xxxiii. 47. Wright's
 Lucan has, "_ulularunt tristia Galli_."
 "Nearest" in later editions.
 In _Measure for Measure_, act iii., s. 1, we read
"To be imprison'd in the viewless winds."
"Sightless" and "viewless" are alike used for "invisible."
"O, therefore, from thy sightless range."
 "_Caelum mutant, qui trans mare currunt._" Hor. Ep. xi., 27.
 See Poem xcvi.
 What is the difference of meaning in the two words "adieu" and
"farewell"? Byron says in _Lara_,
"Farewell to life, but not adieu to thee."
"But as I rav'd, and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, _Child_,
And I reply'd, _My Lord_."
 Shakespeare says,
"Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead,
Excessive grief the enemy to the living."
_All's well that ends well_, act i., s. 1.