The spring, the restored Persephone, comes more vigorous and joyous to the shores of the Ægean than to ours. All Tennyson’s own is Demeter’s awe of those “imperial disimpassioned eyes” of her daughter, come from the bed and the throne of Hades, the Lord of many guests. The hymn, happy in its ending, has no thought of the grey heads of the Fates, and their answer to the goddess concerning “fate beyond the Fates,” and the breaking of the bonds of Hades. The ballad of _Owd Roä_ is one of the most spirited of the essays in dialect to which Tennyson had of late years inclined. _Vastness_ merely expresses, in terms of poetry, Tennyson’s conviction that, without immortality, life is a series of worthless contrasts. An opposite opinion may be entertained, but a man has a right to express his own, which, coming from so great a mind, is not undeserving of attention; or, at least, is hardly deserving of reproof. The poet’s idea is also stated thus in _The Ring_, in terms which perhaps do not fall below the poetical; or, at least, do not drop into “the utterly unpoetical”:— “The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man, But cannot wholly free itself from Man, Are calling to each other thro’ a dawn Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil Is rending, and the Voices of the day Are heard across the Voices of the dark. No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man, But thro’ the Will of One who knows and rules— And utter knowledge is but utter love— Æonian Evolution, swift or slow, Thro’ all the Spheres—an ever opening height, An ever lessening earth.” _The Ring_ is, in fact, a ghost story based on a legend told by Mr Lowell about a house near where he had once lived; one of those houses vexed by “A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls, A noise of falling weights that never fell, Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand, Door-handles turn’d when none was at the door, And bolted doors that open’d of themselves.” These phenomena were doubtless caused by rats and water-pipes, but they do not destroy the pity and the passion of the tale. The lines to Mary Boyle are all of the normal world, and worthy of a poet’s youth and of the spring. _Merlin and the Gleam_ is the spiritual allegory of the poet’s own career:— “Arthur had vanish’d I knew not whither, The king who loved me, And cannot die.” So at last “All but in Heaven Hovers The Gleam,”