CHAPTER XII. THE SWAN-SONGS. "Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, Twilight and evening bell And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark." -Crossing the Bar. IT is recorded that when Tennyson heard Byron was dead he "thought the whole world was at an end." "I thought," he said, "everything was over and finished for everyone— that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out alone and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone." In October 1892 came the news that Tennyson was dead, and we too felt that there was a void, a gap, a "something lost" so great, so commanding, that for the moment everything seemed over and finished, nothing mattered, the impenetrable darkness of night enveloped us. "Tennyson is dead" were words that carved themselves upon many a heart. The sweetest singer, the purest poet, had passed into the silent land, and left us longing in vain for the touch of a vanished hand, craving in despair for a sound of the voice that is still. The The "spectre fear'd of man" came in no dread guise to the aged poet, whose greatest work was to prove the glory and the excellence of death. Fitting indeed was it for him who had sung the psalm of triumph In Memoriam that the grave should have no terrors. The silvery light of the moon fell upon the dying poet's face; now and then a smile flitted across his tranquil features; an open volume of Shakespeare lay in his hand; and as the gray October morning broke "God's finger touched him, and he slept." The flood had borne him onward, and, crossing the bar, he saw his Pilot face to face. For forty-two years he had worn the laurel, crown, receiving it "greener from the brows Of him who uttered nothing base." Scholar, philosopher, idealist as he was, he had still been the poet of the people, voicing their hopes and fears, espousing their cause, expressing their sorrows, proclaiming their joys, finding fitting words for all emotions. The foremost fact in Tennyson's long, life was his consistency. He pursued one ideal, and he might have said with the voyagers of whom he sang One fair Vision ever fled Down the waste waters day and night, And fixt upon the far sea-line; I follow till I make thee mine." The poet never doubted his mission and never swerved from his purpose. Known or unknown, rich or poor, courted or neglected, he was a poet always, feeling within himself something of a sacred designation and distinction. Carlyle discovered that he was "a true human soul to whom your soul can say Brother." When his triumph came the triumph over prejudice, indifference, and all those other obstacles which the world loves to place in the path of genius--it was unequivocal. His songs, with their delicious cadences, their dreamy sensuousness, and their suffusion of exquisite colour, were at once a revelation and an enchantment. The stanzas had a haunting melody; the very words seemed to sparkle to the eye; a sense of luxury and rest was borne on the languorous lines. There had been nothing like it since the music-laden verses of The Faery Queen gushed from the soul of Edmund Spenser, and the consummate art of the poet could not fail to obtain acknowledgment. Yet the lyrics were no more than the promise of spring: the glory of summer, the abundant autumn harvest, and even the splendour of a long and genial winter, were to follow. Upon which of Tennyson's works will his fame last? Perhaps on all, for he wrote little that was unworthy, though In Memoriam, Maud, and the Arthurian series will stand out as the most conspicuous pillars. These poems are as much for the future as the present, and the pinnacle of the poet's fame will gleam, high and shining, through the ages. The great magician is dead, and the temple of his body deserted. Life and Thought have gone away Side by side. Leaving door and windows wide Careless tenants they ! and we can only cry out with the poet Life and Thought Here no longer dwell; But in a city glorious A great and distant city-have bought Would they could have stayed with us! Three weeks after Tennyson's death his last collection of poems was published-The Death of Enone, Akbar's Dream, and other Poems. This posthumous volume excited the highest interest, and no doubt the pieces included in it will always claim a special attention. They were full of reminiscences, and awakened old memories; they touched anew the sweet familiar chords and gave out the gathered harmony of the minstrel's life. The delight felt when the music of the early lyrics, sixty years before, cast a spell upon the soul stole to us again, and we were amazed and charmed to find that the skill of the minstrel and the fresh ness of the voice of the singer remained unimpaired. We do not pretend that those hundred odd pages, containing but twenty-three poems, would have made any poet's fame, or that they can add to the Laureate's. The writer of them, whoever he might have been, would not have escaped recognition; but as the last gift of the octogenarian poet who had given us so much, the volume has a value, a pleasure, and a pathos all its own. And if this can be said for the world in general, how much more must these words apply to that lone companion of his life to whom the poems are dedicated! In 1864 Tennyson dedicated Enoch Arden to one who was "near, dear, and true," and could be made no truer "by Time itself"; and with Romney he might have said, "The world would lose, if such a wife as you Should vanish unrecorded." Eightand-twenty years later we find him saying that as he looked at the high blue of a June sky and the bright bracken and brown heather at his feet I thought to myself I would offer this book to you, To you that are seventy-seven, With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather. Could anything be more tender, more delicate, and more beautiful? When Tennyson was a young man, only recognised as a genius among a small circle, Carlyle introduced Sir John Simeon to him at Bath House with the uncouth observation-"There he sits upon a dung heap, surrounded by innumerable dead dogs." The "dead dogs were the translations and adaptations from the classics, chief among which was Enone, a long blank-verse poem published in the volume of 1832. The Quarterly Review, in its famous onslaught on Tennyson, specially attacked this poem, and with shafts of stinging ridicule assailed the form in which the subject was treated, the long descriptions of inanimate beauties, and the refrain, "sixteen times repeated ” Dear Mother Ida, hearken ere I die. Tennyson ten years later republished the piece with many amendments and some remarkable elaborations, and Enone took its place as an English classic. It is, in fact, an incomparably beautiful composition, as purely Greek in its grace and chasteness as the Greek-fashioned masterpieces of Keats. Enone, the rarely beautiful goddess, addresses a soliloquy to Mount Ida, in which she relates how she has been deserted by Paris for the rival whom he judged to exceed all others in beauty. Edgar Allen Poe, most exacting of critics, declared that "by the enjoyment or non-enjoyment of Enone he would test anyone's ideal sense." Just sixty years after the first lines on Enone saw the light, we had given to us a volume treating of Enone's death. "Oh, Mother Ida, hearken ere I die" was the haunting refrain of the first piece, and in the last we find the goddess sinking into the arms of death. She is alone in a cave, and the vines "which on the touch of heavenly feet had risen" had long ago withered. And while she gazed at the desolate scene and the changed landscape Her Past became her Present, and she saw Then, from out the long ravine below a wailing cry reaches her, a cry that Seem'd at first Thin as the batlike shrillings of the Dead Across the downward thunder of the brook and then Paris, the deceiver, once the pride of men, but now "no longer beauteous as a God," appeared before his deserted wife "like the wraith of his dead self." He had |