Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills?... O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil. He will not accept the suggestions which seem to empty human life of its deepest meanings. There must be some other solution. One more quotation of a different kind--the common sad thought, never so beautifully expressed, of the places we have loved when bereft of our daily loving care--then passing into other hands and forgetting us, and becoming at last to others what they have been to us. It is in these common universal _human_ themes that Tennyson with his exquisite musical touch, and sympathy, and unerring choice of significant detail, reaches the heart of every reader. Unwatch'd, the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down, Unloved, that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away: Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair, Ray round with flames her disk of seed, And many a rose-carnation feed With summer spice the humming air: Unloved, by many a sandy bar, The brook shall babble down the plain, At noon or when the lesser wain Is twisting round the polar star. (Omitting a stanza.) Till from the garden and the wild A fresh association blow, And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger's child. As year by year the labourer tills His wonted glebe, or lops the glades, And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills. I can quote no more. The poem seems gradually to rise from the depths of sorrow and doubt to a new hope and faith--in short, to a new life. The marks of what it has passed through are seen in the deeper thought, the larger nature, and insight, and scope. The _soul_ has grown and strengthened, we may almost say. In short, the poem is the inner history of a soul: our deepest feelings, our hopes, our fears, our longings, our weaknesses, our difficulties, all find penetrating, sympathetic, enlightening expression--terse, melodious, inspiring, deeply suggestive--in a word, we feel the magic of poetry. I have no time left to deal with the large work, which occupied many years, "The Idylls of the King." It is a series--in blank verse, always melodious and often exquisite, giving the main incidents of the old Arthurian legend, which as a boy he had read with delight in old Malory's prose epic. I must content myself with two brief references.