THE LIGHT BREAKING.

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question. The five stanzas sound like one long, rippling swell of cathedral music.

The ship arrives; the grave is dug: and on the ashes of the dead will grow "the violet of his native land." Arthur Hallam lies in the chancel of Cleveland Church by the Severn.

There twice a day the Severn fills;

The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.

Meditating by the grave of his friend, Tennyson next bethinks him of the course of their friendship. "Through four sweet years" they had walked with each other "from flower to flower, from snow to snow;" in the autumn of the fifth year, the "Shadow feared of man" met them and broke the "fair companionship," bearing Arthur away whither Alfred could not follow, though he walked in haste, and mused that the Shadow was waiting for him "somewhere in the waste." Piece after piece now is filled with the melodious reflections of the poet on the past. Love had cleft his sorrows in twain, and given half of each to be borne by Arthur. He shrinks, as at a guilty suggestion, from the idea that his affection may die away into indifference. Nor will he be tempted by the anguish of bereavement to wish that he had never loved.

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.

This is a glimpse of light under the edge of the black cloud; and in the next piece we approach the first Christmas after Arthur's death. The bells of four hamlets answer each other through the mist on Christmas Eve, and the poet feels that they touch his sorrow with joy, "the merry, merry bells of Yule." But the season is not as former seasons have been.

At our old pastimes in the hall
We gambol'd, making vain pretence

Of gladness, with an awful sense

Of one mute Shadow watching all.

Following the celebration of the first Christmas after the death, we have three of the most solemn and hymn-like pieces in the poem, two suggested by the intercourse of Christ with the family of Bethany and the resurrection of Lazarus, and a third designed to rebuke the cynical scepticism which, it might naturally occur to Tennyson, would sneer at poetry so orthodox. O thou that after toil and storm

Mayst seem to have reached a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,

Nor cares to fix itself to form,

Leave thou thy sister when she prays,

Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.

Her faith thro' form is pure as thine,
Her hands are quicker unto good:
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!

See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within,
Thou fail not in a world of sin,
And ev'n for want of such a type.

This last is a weighty and suggestive thought. The embodiment of a law can never be absolutely perfect, and yet it is not the abstract principle, but the concrete rule, that is indispensable for the regulation of the common mind.

Hold thou the good: define it well:

For fear divine Philosophy

Should push beyond her mark, and be

Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

GOOD THE GOAL OF ILL.

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The spirit of the poem now continues deeply religious through piece after piece, and profound questions are started and partially or tentatively answered, but with studious disclaimer of intention to speak with dogmatic confidence or exhaustive finality.

And again:

Urania speaks with darkened brow:

Thou pratest here where thou art least;
This faith has many a purer priest,
And many an abler voice than thou.

If these brief lays, of sorrow born,

Were taken to be such as closed

Grave doubts and answers here proposed,
Then these were such as men might scorn.

Nor dare she trust a longer lay,

But rather loosens from the lip

Short swallow-flights of song, that dip

Their wings in tears, and skim away.

In stanzas of truc sublimity he invokes the spirit of his friend to stand by him in the hour of death.

Be near me when my light is low,

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

And tingle; and the heart is sick,

And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust,

And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Deep shadows still fall upon the page, but the light nevertheless increases. At length, in No. LIV., there is an exclamation of joy and hope.

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.

No. LXXII. commemorates the first return of the day when Arthur died. The poet has not yet so far triumphed over his sorrow as to discriminate the plaintive melancholy of the autumn wind from the wild howl of misery. It is a day of lashing rain, when the rose pulls sideways and the daisy closes its crimson fringes; but if it had been clear and calm, and if the sunlight had danced in "chequerwork of beam and shade along the hills," it would have been "as wan, as chill, as wild," to the poet as now.

Lift as thou mayst thy burthen'd brows

Thro' clouds that drench the morning star,

And whirl the ungarner'd sheaf afar,

And sow the sky with flying boughs,

And up thy vault with roaring sound
Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;
Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,

And hide thy shame beneath the ground.

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In the interval between the first anniversary of his loss and the second Christmas, he reflects much on the transitory nature of human affairs. The fame that he foresaw has been quenched, and that seems strange in a world in which there is SO much to do." But he believes that "somewhere, out of human view," work may be found for his friend which will be "wrought with tumult of acclaim;" and why repine that he is not on earth to work or to sing, when the lays in which his image is enshrined may be dumb "before the mouldering of a yew?" These mortal lullabies of pain

May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden's locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane

THE LIGHT INCREASING.

A man upon a stall may find,

And, passing, turn the page that tells

A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

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The second Christmas is not so sad as the first. Over all things broods "the quiet sense of something lost," yet no one shows a token of distress, and long use has dried the tears. There is cheerfulness, accordingly, in the strain in which he greets the new year, and acknowledges the impulse of its young life within him.

Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire,
The little speedwell's darling blue,
Deep tulips dash'd with fiery dew,
Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.

O thou, new-year, delaying long,
Delayest the sorrow in my blood,
That longs to burst a frozen bud,
And flood a fresher throat with song.

He recurs to the sentiment that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and in a piece containing about thirty stanzas dwells upon the fact that his grief has not weakened but strengthened him, upon his earnest consciousness that "the sense of human will" demands action from every man, and upon his deliberate resolution to cherish "the mighty hopes that make us men." It will, he feels, be no dishonor to his friend though his heart should glow with new love.

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.

Immediately after this long speaks with veritable rapture. in the four superb stanzas in

piece, he lifts up his voice and There is no mention of Arthur which he calls upon the genial