Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (439)

(3) Of the Life of the Spirit:

The Vision of Sin (445) ·

The Ancient Sage (446)

"Flower in the crannied wall" (449)

The Higher Pantheism (449)

Will (450)

Wages (451)

The Deserted House (451)

"Break, break, break" (451)

In the Valley of Cauteretz (452)

Selections from In Memoriam (452)
PROLOGUE

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INTRODUCTION

I

TENNYSON'S PLACE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

46 The voice of him the master and the sire

Of one whole age and legion of the lyre,
Who sang his morning-song when Coleridge still
Uttered dark oracles from Highgate Hill,

And with new launchèd argosies of rhyme

Gilds and makes brave this sombreing tide of time.

To him nor tender nor heroic muse

Did her divine confederacy refuse:

To all its moods the lyre of life he strung,

And notes of death fell deathless from his tongue,

Himself the Merlin of his magic strain,

He bade old glories break in bloom again;

And so, exempted from oblivious gloom,

Through him these days shall fadeless break in bloom."

WILLIAM WATSON, 1892.

TENNYSON Seems to us, at the beginning of the Twentieth
Century, the most representative poet of the English race
in the Nineteenth Century. Indeed it is doubtful whether
any other writer during the last hundred years has reflected
so clearly and so broadly, in verse or prose, the features of
that composite age. The history of its aspirations and con-
flicts, its dreams and disappointments, its æsthetic revivals and
scientific discoveries, its questioning spirit in religion and its

XV