-that feeling through recollection of Nature and his friend together which makes for every landscape its own ethereal atmosphere, half of soft air and half of soft emotion. Of this kind of natural description, so difficult, so rarely done well, so exquisite when it is at the same. time brief and full, the two poems c. and ci. are most lovely and delicate examples, and every one who cares for poetry should possess them in his soul. Many also are the scattered phrases about the natural world which might be collected for their subtle simplicity, beauty, and truth; but I close this praise of the poet with only one, in which man and Nature are inwoven, and the way he wrote his poem enshrined :

Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.

CHAPTER VIII

IN MEMORIAM (Continued)

ITS STRUCTURE

THE

Τ

HE question of this Chapter is-How was In Memoriam shaped? What is the conduct of the poem?

It was shaped into the continuous story of two years and a half; not a story of events but the story of the voyage of a soul. First, the hurricane of sorrow came; then the fierceness of the storm grew less, but left the sea tormented and the ship of the soul tossing from wave to wave, from question to question. At last there was calm, and the soul rested; and then a clear wind arose in sunny skies, and the ship flew forward, all the sails set to victory, into a harbour of peace. But better words than these to describe the history of In Memoriam are those of the Psalm, said of those who go down into the deep: "They go up to the heavens, and down again to the depth; their soul melteth away for very trouble. They reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end. So they cry unto the Lord

in their trouble, and He delivereth them out of their distress. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they are at rest so He bringeth them to the haven where they would be."

The time of this story is well marked, and it is the first thing its reader should understand. It outlines the map of the poem. It begins in September, 1833, when Tennyson hears of his friend's death at Vienna. It is autumn; the leaves are reddening to their fall, the chestnut is pattering to the ground, as the poet waits for the body of his friend. This autumn closes with a great storm:

To-night the winds begin to rise,

And roar from yonder dripping day,
The last red leaf is whirl'd away,

The rooks are blown about the skies.

Then the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth sections describe the first Christmas after the death of Arthur. In the thirty-eighth, the spring of 1834 has come, and in the forty-eighth the swallows are flying over the waters. The seventy-second records the anniversary of his friend's death, September, 1834. One year has passed by.

The Christmas of 1834 is recorded in the seventyeighth, and the spring of 1835 arrives in the eighty-third sections. Full summer is with us in the eighty-ninth and the ninety-fifth; and in the ninety-ninth the day of his friend's death dawns after storm in balm and peace. second year has gone by, September, 1835.

A

Another Christmas comes with the hundred and third section, and at the hundred and fourteenth these notes of time close with the April of 1836. The poem lasts, then, just two years and seven months. The epithalamium at the end, the celebration of his sister's marriageday, belongs to 1842; and the prologue to the poem was written last of all, and is dated 1849.

And now, to illustrate the progress of the soul from sorrow to peace, I will take the three main marks of time the anniversaries of the death of his friend, the Christmastides, the advents of spring, and dwell on the changes of mind displayed in the record of them. When Tennyson hears of Arthur's death (to take the deathdays first) grief is all; it drowns the world; Nature seems purposeless, "a hollow form with empty hands"; the sullen, changeless yew-tree symbolises the hardness of his heart. When the anniversary of the death comes the memory of it is still miserable. That hour

It was a

sicken'd every living bloom
And blurr'd the splendour of the sun.

Day mark'd as with some hideous crime,
When the dark hand struck down thro' time
And cancell'd nature's best-

a day "to hide its shame beneath the ground." Thus

even when a year has gone by the wrathfulness of sorrow is still deep. As yet there is no forgiveness of pain and no peace (lxxii.).

When the next anniversary dawns (xcix.) the tone is changed; the birds are singing, the meadows breathe softly of the past, the woodlands are holy to the dead; there has been storm, but the breath of the day is now balmy, and the swollen brook murmurs a song "that slights the coming care." But the greatest change is that he thinks less of his own pain and more of the pain of mankind. The dim, sweet dawn awakens to myriads

on the earth memories of death, and he feels that he is the comrade of all these mourners :

O wheresoever those may be,

Betwixt the slumber of the poles,

To-day they count as kindred souls;
They know me not, but mourn with me.

This is the progress at these spaces of time. But if we wish to test it in a better way, we should choose, not the anniversaries of death when the poet is sure to have his sorrow driven home to him, but other times when the mind is freed from so close a pressure of memory. I take now the three Christmas Days.

When the bells of the first Christmas Eve (xxviii.) ring out peace and goodwill, he remembers that he had almost wished to die in his grief before he heard them, but they control his spirit with a touch of joy; and though he scarce dare keep his Christmas Eve, so deep is regret, yet let me give, he cries, their due to ancient use and custom, though they too die. But this bitterness perishes next day. He keeps his Christmas and remembers his friend who was with him the year