Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892 -- Friends and associates
and how its waters flow on! carrying life, beauty, magnificence,--shadows
and happy lights, depths of blackness, depths clear as the very body of
heaven. How it deepens as it goes, involving larger interests, wider
views, "thoughts that wander through eternity," greater affections, but
still retaining its pure living waters, its unforgotten burden of love and
sorrow. How it visits every region! "The long unlovely street," pleasant
villages and farms, "the placid ocean-plains," waste howling wildernesses,
grim woods, _nemorumque noctem_, informed with spiritual fears, where may
be seen, if shapes they may be called:
Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton,
And Time the Shadow;
now within hearing of the Minster clock, now of the College bells, and the
vague hum of the mighty city. And overhead through all its course the
heaven with its clouds, its sun, moon, and stars; but always, and in all
places, declaring its source; and even when laying its burden of manifold
and faithful affection at the feet of the Almighty Father, still
remembering whence it came:
That friend of mine who lives in God,
That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
It is to that chancel, and to the day, 3rd January 1834, that he refers in
Poem XVIII. of "In Memoriam":
'Tis well; 'tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
'Tis little; but it looks in truth
As if the quiet bones were blest
Among familiar names to rest
And in the places of his youth.
And again in XIX.:
The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken'd heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
Here, too, it is, LXVII.:
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.
This young man, whose memory his friend has consecrated in the hearts of
all who can be touched by such love and beauty, was in nowise unworthy of
all this. It is not for us to say, for it was not given to us the sad
privilege to know, all that a father's heart buried with his son in that
grave, all "the hopes of unaccomplished years"; nor can we feel in its
fulness all that is meant by
such
A friendship as had master'd Time;
Which masters Time indeed, and is
Eternal, separate from fears:
The all-assuming months and years
Can take no part away from this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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