reminiscences which arise to heighten sorrow : the visit to Cambridge, and the sight of the familiar door in the long unlovely street, awaken memories, and with them the wounds of sorrow bleed afresh; but in the treatment of his subject, Tennyson goes beyond these individual recollections: he lets his imagination embrace universal life, and he incorporates into his verse experiences not necessarily his own. It is needful to give this caution, as curious critics have drawn false inferences from some lines, and read some fancied picture as though it delineated an actual occurrence of the poet's life. The practice of making deductions of this kind is not a just or fair one. Tennyson warmly repudiated such

deductions.

"I do not always write in my own name,' he said, speaking of one rather gross case of unwarrantable inference. We must beware, therefore, of leaping to conclusions or making convenient hypotheses to explain every fancy or concrete image we meet in the poem. The poet universalises himself as he writes, or perhaps we should say he draws the world with him into his experience. Nevertheless, strong personal sorrow is the occasion of the poem.

At first this grief is tinged with egotism. His

sorrow is almost fierce: it sweeps away for a moment some of the happy truths which he once held to be sweet and wise: grief may bring gain, but if gain is to be, the sorrowing hand cannot reach forward to grasp the profit. Nay, he is not sure that it is not better to refuse such gain. Certainly he will hug his sorrow, as one who believes that it would be disloyalty to his friend to let it go.

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned,
Let darkness keep her raven gloss;

Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,

Than that the victor Hours should scorn

The long result of love, and boast,
"Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn!"

(i)

Sorrow whispers to him that the promises of Nature are all false: the best and sweetest of these are mere echoes of his own heart's wishes

And all the phantom, Nature, stands—
With all the music in her tone,

A hollow echo of my own—

A hollow form with empty hands.

(iii)

His sorrow is so intense, words fail him. Let none measure his grief by his words. He uses words because they seem to soothe the stricken

heart.

The music and measure of verse have

power to ease the soul,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

So he will use words

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

(v)

It is vain to tell him that loss is common to the race. The universality of sorrow does not make it less. In the early dawn he creeps to the door of the house where his friend once lived. He feels like a guilty thing as, in his loneliness, he draws near to the house-the hateful sounds of the busy and remorseless world break upon his ear, and in the damp grey morning he steals away.

He is not here; but far away

The noise of life begins again,

And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

(vii)

Nature is calm with the calm of Autumn; but in his heart if there is calm at all it is the calm of despair. The Autumn has passed, and the first Christmas since his friend's death draws near. The church bells from the four churches

of the neighbouring hamlets break forth into Christmas peals. The sound of their voices rises and falls with the changes of the wind. He hears them as one who dreads to hear what only can bring agony with memory; he would almost rather have died than hear them again.

This year I slept and woke with pain,

I almost wished no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again.

(xxviii)

But Christmas Eve, while waking into painful life the memories of loss, exerts a soothing influence and brings a tenderer and therefore a more hopeful feeling. The Yuletide was as before marked by old pastimes; the gladness seemed an old pretence, for everyone felt as though a mute shadow sat near, watching all; but after a while a gentler feeling began to creep over the household circle. The dead are at rest. Following this gentler feeling, the old hope comes pleading for entrance into these saddened hearts.

So with lighter heart the Christmas morning

is welcomed.

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.

(xxx)

We thus reach one turning-point of the poem. The strong expressions of passionate and personal grief are now less frequent.

We enter
There is a

upon the second part of the poem. step forward in the purgation of grief, when the mind, released from the first paroxysms of sorrow, is free to enter upon the many dark problems which surround the thought of death. This part is interesting or not according to the mood in which we approach it. It contains some of the best-known passages in the poem. In it we have the appeal to the larger mind, which believes that it has escaped the need of formulating its faith, to respect the more childlike faith that delights in form (xxxiii); the passage which proclaims that a religion which is to be world-wide must be something other than a philosophy: truth to be made current coin must be embodied in person, life and action, and not in mere dogma.