11 5 Now fades the last long streak of snow, Now burgeons every maze of quick0About the flowering squares,0 andBy ashen roots the violets blow. hawthorn hedge thick fields 5 Now rings the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drowned in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song. ioNow dance the lights on lawn and lea, The flocks are whiter down the vale, And milkier every milky sail On winding stream or distant sea; 15Where now the seamew? pipes, or divesIn yonder greening gleam, and fly The happy birds, that change their sky To build and brood, that live their lives a seabird 20From land to land; and in my breast Spring wakens too, and my regret Becomes an April violet, And buds and blossoms like the rest.
118
Contemplate all this work of Time,
The giant laboring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth, As dying Nature's earth and lime;2
5 But trust that those we call the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They0 say, Scientists The solid earth whereon we tread
In tracts of fluent heat began, io And grew to seeming-random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last arose the man;
Who throve and branched from clime to clime, The herald of a higher race,
2. Two of the perishable organic ingredients of the human body.
.
1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
15 And of himself in higher place
If so he type3 this work of time Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crowned with attributes of woe
Like glories, move his course, and show
20 That life is not as idle ore, But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipped in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the shocks of doom 25 To shape and use. Arise and fly
The reeling Faun,4 the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
119
Doors,5 where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, not as one that weeps
I come once more; the city sleeps;
I smell the meadow in the street; 5 I hear a chirp of birds; I see
Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
A light blue lane of early dawn,
And think of early days and thee,
And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,0 gentleio And bright the friendship of thine eye;
And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
I take the pressure of thine hand.
120 I trust I have not wasted breath:
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries;6 not in vain,
Like Paul7 with beasts, I fought with Death;
5 Not only cunning0 casts in clay: skillful Let Science prove we are, and then
3. Emulate, prefigure as a type. pole Street. Cf. section 7. 4. In Roman mythology a half-human, half-beast 6. Mechanisms operated by responses to electrical deity of the woods and mountains. forces. 5. The doors of Hallam's house on London's Wim-7. 1 Corinthians 15.32.
.
IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1183
What matters Science unto men, At least to me? I would not stay.
Let him, the wiser man who springs 10
