When one would aim an arrow fair, But send it slackly from the string; And one would pierce an outer ring,
And one an inner, here and there;
And last the master bowman, he, Would cleave the mark. A willing ear We lent him. Who but hung to hear
The rapt oration flowing free
From point to point, with power and grace And music in the bounds of law, To those conclusions when we saw The God within him light his face,
And seem to lift the form, and glow In azure orbits heavenly-wise; And over those ethereal eyes
The bar of Michael Angelo?1
9. The Apostles, an undergraduate club to which (1475?1564), had a prominent ridge of bone above Tennyson and Hallam had belonged. his eyes. I. Hallam, like the Italian artist Michelangelo
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IN MEMORIAM, 118 / 1169
115
Wild bird,2 whose warble, liquid sweet, Rings Eden through the budded quicks,3 O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet,
5 Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ Thy spirits in the darkening leaf, And in the midmost heart of grief
Thy passion clasps a secret joy;
And I?my harp would prelude woe? io I cannot all command the strings; The glory of the sum of things Will flash along the chords and go.
89 Witch elms that counterchange the floor Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;4 And thou, with all thy breadth and height Of foliage, towering sycamore; 5 How often, hither wandering down, My Arthur found your shadows fair, And shook to all the liberal air The dust and din and steam of town! ioHe brought an eye for all he saw; He mixed in all our simple sports; They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts And dusty purlieus0 of the law.5 regions 15O joy to him in this retreat, Immantled in ambrosial dark, To drink the cooler air, and mark The landscape winking through the heat! 20O sound to rout the brood of cares, The sweep of scythe in morning dew, The gust that round the garden flew, And tumbled half the mellowing pears! O bliss, when all in circle drawn About him, heart and ear were fed
2. Probably a nightingale. Somersby, the Tennysons' country home. 3. Hawthorn hedges. 5. Haliam became a law student in London after 4. Shadows of the elm tree checker the lawn at leaving Cambridge.
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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
To hear him, as he lay and read The Tuscan poets6 on the lawn!
25 Or in the all-golden afternoon A guest, or happy sister, sung, Or here she brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon.
Nor less it pleased in livelier moods, 30 Beyond the bounding hill to stray, And break the livelong summer day With banquet in the distant woods;
Whereat we glanced from theme to theme, Discussed the books to love or hate, 35 Or touched the changes of the state, Or threaded some Socratic dream;7
But if I praised the busy town, He loved to rail against it still, For 'ground in yonder social mill
40 We rub each other's angles down,
'And merge,' he said, 'in form and gloss The picturesque of man and man.' We talked: the stream beneath us ran,
The wine-flask lying couched in moss,
45 Or cooled within the glooming wave; And last, returning from afar, Before the crimson-circled star8
Had fallen into her father's9 grave,
And brushing ankle-deep in flowers, so We heard behind the woodbine veil The milk that bubbled in0 the pail, into And buzzings of the honeyed hours.
91
When rosy plumelets tuft the larch, And rarely0 pipes the mounted thrush, exquisitely Or underneath the barren bush
Flits by the sea-blue bird0 of March; kingfisher
6. A group of 13th-and 14th-century poets in cen-8. Venus, which will sink into the west as the Sun tral Italy (Tuscany); the best-known of them are has done. Dante and Petrarch. 9. According to the nebular hypothesis, planets 7. I.e., worked our way through some discourse of condensed out of the sun's atmosphere; in this Socrates (as recorded by Plato). sense the Sun is the 'father' of planets.
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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 117 1
