and they shall run,
170 Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun; Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,
Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books? Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. 175 I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains! Mated with a squalid savage?what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time? I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
180 Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!1 Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves4 of change. Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.5 185 Mother-Age?for mine I knew not?help me as when life begun;
Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the sun.
3. At Joshua's command the sun and moon stood impression that train wheels ran in grooved rails. still while the Israelites completed the slaughter of 5. China, regarded in the 19th century as a static, their enemies in the valley of Ajalon (Joshua unprogressive country. Cf. Mill, On Liberty 10.12-13). (1859), p. 1051. 4. Railroad tracks. Tennyson at one time had the
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TEARS , IDLE TEAR S / 1 13 5 O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set. Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet. Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall! Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall. Comes a vapor from the margin,0 blackening over heath andholt,? Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt. riverbank wood Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow; For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go. 1837-38 1842
FROM THE PRINCESS1
Tears, Idle Tears2
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
5 And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
io So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
15 So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
1. The Princess (1847), a long narrative poem, worth's 'Tintern Abbey' (1798) and with memories contains interludes in which occasional songs are of Arthur Hallam, who was buried across the Brissung. Several of these songs, two of which are tol Channel in this area. 'It is what I have always printed here, have been set to music by various felt even from a boy, and what as a boy I called the 19th- and 20th-century composers. passion of the past.' And it is so always with me 2. Tennyson commented: 'This song came to me now; it is the distance that charms me in the land- on the yellowing autumn-tide at Tintern Abbey, scape, the picture and the past, and not the full for me of its bygone memories.' This locale immediate today in which I move.' would be for him associated both with Words
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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
20 O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
1847
