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 fiying 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 snapt in a moment of fire;

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;

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth;

All new-old revolutions of Empirechange of the tide-what is all of it worth?

What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer, All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair?

What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last? Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a meaningless Past?

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of bees in their hive?—

Peace, let it be for I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive. 1885.

MERLIN AND THE GLEAM1

O YOUNG Mariner,

You from the haven
Under the sea-cliff,
You that are watching
The gray Magician
With eyes of wonder,
I am Merlin,

And I am dying,

I am Merlin

Who follow the Gleam.

Mighty the Wizard
Who found me at sunrise
Sleeping and woke me
And learn'd me Magic!
Great the Master,
And sweet the Magic,
When over the valley,
In early summers,
Over the mountain,
On human faces,

1 See the Life of Tennyson, II, 366.

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.

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I liave crossed the bar. 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 ail editions of my poems." (Life of Tennyson, I., 367.)

I

I THOUGHT once how Theocritus. had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wishedfor years,

Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young: And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,

The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,

Those of my own life, who by turns had flung

A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,

So weeping, how a mystic Shape did