But the gnawing of grief till it becomes a physical pain, the fever fits of sorrow, the aching _desiderium_, bring back in many guises the old questions. These require new attempts at answers, and are answered, “the sad mechanic exercise” of verse allaying the pain. This is the genesis of _In Memoriam_, not originally written for publication but produced at last as a monument to friendship, and as a book of consolation. No books of consolation can console except by sympathy; and in _In Memoriam_ sympathy and relief have been found, and will be found, by many. Another, we feel, has trodden our dark and stony path, has been shadowed by the shapes of dread which haunt our valley of tribulation: a mind almost infinitely greater than ours has been our fellow-sufferer. He has emerged from the darkness of the shadow of death into the light, whither, as it seems to us, we can scarcely hope to come. It is the sympathy and the example, I think, not the speculations, mystical or scientific, which make _In Memoriam_, in more than name, a book of consolation: even in hours of the sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the yellow sunshine and the woods of that autumn day when a man learned that his friend was dead. No, it was not the speculations and arguments that consoled or encouraged us. We did not listen to Tennyson as to Mr Frederic Harrison’s glorified Anglican clergyman. We could not murmur, like the Queen of the May— “That good man, the Laureate, has told us words of peace.” What we valued was the poet’s companionship. There was a young reader to whom _All along the Valley_ came as a new poem in a time of recent sorrow. “The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away,” said the singer of _In Memoriam_, and in that hour it seemed as if none could endure for two-and-thirty years the companionship of loss. But the years have gone by, and have left “Ever young the face that dwells With reason cloister’d in the brain.” {72} In this way to many _In Memoriam_ is almost a life-long companion: we walk with Great-heart for our guide through the valley Perilous. In this respect _In Memoriam_ is unique, for neither to its praise nor dispraise is it to be compared with the other famous elegies of the world. These are brief outbursts of grief—real, as in the hopeless words of Catullus over his brother’s tomb; or academic, like Milton’s _Lycidas_. We are not to suppose that Milton was heart-broken by the death of young Mr King, or that Shelley was greatly desolated by the death of Keats, with whom his personal relations had been slight, and of whose poetry he had spoken evil. He was nobly stirred as a poet by a poet’s death—like Mr Swinburne by the death of Charles Baudelaire; but neither Shelley nor Mr Swinburne was lamenting _dimidium animæ suæ_, or mourning for a friend “Dear as the mother to the son, More than my brothers are to me.”