“For when the crowd would roar For blood, for war, whose issue was their doom, To cast wise words among the multitude Was flinging fruit to lions; nor, in hours Of civil outbreak, when I knew the twain Would each waste each, and bring on both the yoke Of stronger states, was mine the voice to curb The madness of our cities and their kings. Who ever turn’d upon his heel to hear My warning that the tyranny of one Was prelude to the tyranny of all? My counsel that the tyranny of all Led backward to the tyranny of one? This power hath work’d no good to aught that lives.” The conclusion was a favourite with the author, and his blank verse never reached a higher strain:— “But for me, I would that I were gather’d to my rest, And mingled with the famous kings of old, On whom about their ocean-islets flash The faces of the Gods—the wise man’s word, Here trampled by the populace underfoot, There crown’d with worship—and these eyes will find The men I knew, and watch the chariot whirl About the goal again, and hunters race The shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings, In height and prowess more than human, strive Again for glory, while the golden lyre Is ever sounding in heroic ears Heroic hymns, and every way the vales Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-fume Of those who mix all odour to the Gods On one far height in one far-shining fire.” Then follows the pathetic piece on FitzGerald’s death, and the prayer, not unfulfilled— “That, when I from hence Shall fade with him into the unknown, My close of earth’s experience May prove as peaceful as his own.” _The Ancient Sage_, with its lyric interludes, is one of Tennyson’s meditations on the mystery of the world and of existence. Like the poet himself, the Sage finds a gleam of light and hope in his own subjective experiences of some unspeakable condition, already recorded in _In Memoriam_. The topic was one on which he seems to have spoken to his friends with freedom:— “And more, my son! for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, And past into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs Were strange not mine—and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self The gain of such large life as match’d with ours Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.” The poet’s habit of “Revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself”—