Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I.
‘Spring-flowers’! While you still delay to take
Your leave of town,
Our elm-tree’s ruddy-hearted blossom-flake
Is fluttering down.

II.
Be truer to your promise. There! I heard
Our cuckoo call.
Be needle to the magnet of your word,
Nor wait, till all

III.
Our vernal bloom from every vale and plain
And garden pass,
And all the gold from each laburnum chain
Drop to the grass.

IV.
Is memory with your Marian gone to rest,
Dead with the dead?
For ere she left us,

You make our faults too gross, and thence maintain
Our darker future. May your fears be vain!
At times the small black fly upon the pane
May seem the black ox of the distant plain.
-To One Who Ran Down The English by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

O you that were eyes and light
to the King till he past away
From the darkness of life—
He saw not his daughter—he blest her:
the blind King sees you to-day,
He blesses the wife.
-To Princess Frederica On Her Marriage by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Fair things are slow to fade away,
Bear witness you, that yesterday1
From out the Ghost of Pindar inyou
Roll’d an Olympian; and they say2
–
That here the torpid mummy wheat
Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet
As that which gilds the glebe of England,
Sunn’d with a summer of milder heat.
–
So may this legend for awhile,
If greeted by your classic smile,
Tho’ dead in its Trinacrian Enna,
Blossom again on a colder isle.

O Patriot Statesman, be thou wise to know
The limits of resistance, and the bounds
Determining concession; still be bold
Not only to slight praise but suffer scorn;
And be thy heart a fortress to maintain
The day against the moment, and the year
Against the day; thy voice, a music heard
Thro’ all the yells and counter-yells of feud
And faction, and thy will, a power to make
This ever-changing world of circumstance,
In changing, chime with never-changing

I.
At times our Britain cannot rest,
At times her steps are swift and rash;
She moving, at her girdle clash
The golden keys of East and West.

II.
Not swift or rash, when late she lent
The sceptres of her West, her East,
To one, that ruling has increased
Her greatness and her self-content.

III.
Your rule has made the people love
Their ruler. Your viceregal days
Have added fulness to the phrase
Of ‘Gauntlet in the velvet glove.’

IV.
But

I.
Dear Master in our classic town,
You, loved by all the younger gown
There at Balliol,
Lay your Plato for one minute down,

II.
And read a Grecian tale re-told,
Which, cast in later Grecian mould,
Quintus Calaber
Somewhat lazily handled of old;

III.
And on this white midwinter day—
For have the far-off hymns of May,
All her melodies,
All her harmonies echo’d away?—

IV.
To-day, before you turn again
To thoughts that lift the soul of men,
Hear my cataract’s
Downward thunder in hollow and

O loyal to the royal in thyself,
And loyal to thy land, as this to thee-
Bear witness, that rememberable day,
When, pale as yet, and fever-worn, the Prince
Who scarce had plucked his flickering life again
From halfway down the shadow of the grave,
Past with thee through thy people and their love,
And London rolled one tide of joy through all
Her trebled millions, and loud leagues of man
And welcome! witness, too, the silent cry,
The

January, 1854

Come, when no graver cares employ,
Godfather, come and see your boy:
Your presence will be sun in winter,
Making the little one leap for joy.

For, being of that honest few,
Who give the Fiend himself his due,
Should eighty-thousand college-councils
Thunder ‘Anathema,’ friend, at you;

Should all our churchmen foam in spite
At you, so careful of the right,
Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome
(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight;

Where, far from

I.
Ulysses, much-experienced man,
Whose eyes have known this globe of ours,
Her tribes of men, and trees, and flowers,
From Corrientes to Japan,

II.
To you that bask below the Line,
I soaking here in winter wet–
The century’s three strong eights have met
To drag me down to seventy-nine

III.
In summer if I reach my day–
To you, yet young, who breathe the balm
Of summer-winters by the palm
And orange grove of Paraguay,

IV.
I tolerant of the colder

Victor in Drama, Victor in Romance,
Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears,
French of the French, and Lord of human tears;
Child-lover; Bard whose fame-lit laurels glance
Darkening the wreaths of all that would advance,
Beyond our strait, their claim to be thy peers;
Weird Titan by thy winter weight of years
As yet unbroken, Stormy voice of France!
Who dost not love our England–so they say;
I know not–England, France, all man to be
Will make one

I.

Roman Virgil, thou that singest
Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fire,
Ilion falling, Rome arising,
wars, and filial faith, and Dido’s pyre;

II.

Landscape-lover, lord of language
more than he that sang the ‘Works and Days,’
All the chosen coin of fancy
flashing out from many a golden phrase;

III.

Thou that singest wheat and woodland,
tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;
All the charm of all the Muses
often flowering in a lonely word;

IV.

Poet of the happy Tityrus
piping underneath

Farewell, Macready, since to-night we part;
Full-handed thunders often have confessed
Thy power, well-used to move the public breast.
We thank thee with our voice, and from the heart.
Farewell, Macready, since this night we part,
Go, take thine honors home; rank with the best,
Garrick and statelier Kemble, and the rest
Who made a nation purer through their art.
Thine is it that our drama did not die,
Nor flicker down to brainless pantomine,
And those gilt gauds

I.
HER, that yer Honour was spakin’ to? Whin, yer Honour? last year—
Standin’ here be the bridge, when last yer Honour was here?
An’ yer Honour ye gev her the top of the mornin’, ‘Tomorra’ says she.
What did they call her, yer Honour? They call’d her Molly Magee.
An’ yer Honour’s the thrue ould blood that always manes to be kind,
But there’s rason in all things, yer Honour, for Molly was out

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy

I.
Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs
after many a vanish’d face,
Many a planet by many a sun may roll
with the dust of a vanish’d race.

II.
Raving politics, never at rest–as this poor
earth’s pale history runs,–
What is it all but a trouble of ants in the
gleam of a million million of suns?

III.
Lies upon this side, lies upon that side,
truthless violence mourn’d by the Wise,
Thousands of voices drowning his

Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea–
Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong–
Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she;
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.
–
The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure

John- I’m glad I walk’d.
How fresh the meadows look
Above the river, and, but a month ago,
The whole hill-side was redder than a fox.
Is yon plantation where this byway joins
The turnpike?
James- Yes.
John- And when does this come by?

Why do they prate of the blessings of peace? we have made them a curse,
Pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own;
And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse
Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own heath-stone?

But these are the days of advance, the works of the men of mind,
When who but a fool would have

I.

O well for him whose will is strong!
He suffers, but he will not suffer long;
He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong:
For him nor moves the loud world’s random mock,
Nor all Calamity’s hugest waves confound,
Who seems a promontory of rock,
That, compass’d round with turbulent sound,
In middle ocean meets the surging shock,
Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crown’d.

II.

But ill for him who, bettering not with time,
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,
And ever weaker grows thro’ acted

O plump head-waiter at The Cock,
To which I most resort,
How goes the time? ’Tis five o’clock.
Go fetch a pint of port:
But let it not be such as that
You set before chance-comers,
But such whose father-grape grew fat
On Lusitanian summers.

No vain libation to the Muse,
But may she still be kind,
And whisper lovely words, and use
Her influence on the mind,
To make me write my random rhymes,
Ere they be half-forgotten;
Nor add and alter,

You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.-
It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent:

Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to