5 Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought, A gulf that ever shuts and gapes, A hand that points, and palled shapes
In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;
And crowds that stream from yawning doors, io And shoals of puckered faces drive; Dark bulks that tumble half alive, And lazy lengths on boundless shores;
Till all at once beyond the will I hear a wizard music roll, 15 And through a lattice on the soul
Looks thy fair face and makes it still.
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Sleep, kinsman thou to death and trance And madness, thou has forged at last A night-long present of the past
In which we went through summer France.7
5
Hadst thou such credit with the soul? Then bring an opiate trebly strong, Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong,
That so my pleasure may be whole;
7. In the summer of 1830 Hallam and Tennyson went through southern France en route to Spain.
.
I N MEMORIAM , EPILOGU E / 116 3 While now we talk as once we talked 10 Of men and minds, the dust of change, The days that grow to something strange, In walking as of old we walked isBeside the river's wooded reach, The fortress, and the mountain ridge, The cataract flashing from the bridge, The breaker breaking on the beach.
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Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,8
And howlest, issuing out of night,
With blasts that blow the poplar white,
And lash with storm the streaming pane? 5 Day, when my crowned estate9 begun
To pine in that reverse of doom,1
Which sickened every living bloom,
And blurred the splendor of the sun;
Who usherest in the dolorous hour
io With thy quick tears that make the rose
Pull sideways, and the daisy close
Her crimson fringes to the shower; Who mightst have heaved a windless flame
Up the deep East, or, whispering, played
15 A checker-work of beam and shade
Along the hills, yet looked the same,
As wan, as chill, as wild as now;
Day, marked as with some hideous crime,
When the dark hand struck down through time,
20 And canceled nature's best: but thou, Lift as thou mayst thy burthened brows
Through clouds that drench the morning star,
And whirl the ungarnered sheaf afar,
And sow the sky with flying boughs, 25 And up thy vault with roaring sound
Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;
Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,
And hide thy shame beneath the ground.
$ * *
8. September 15, 1834, the first anniversary of 1. The reversal or disaster that doom brought Hallam's death. upon him when Hallam died. 9. State of happiness.
.
1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
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I leave thy praises unexpressed
In verse that brings myself relief,
