“It is the land that freemen till, That sober-suited Freedom chose, The land, where girt with friends or foes A man may speak the thing he will; “A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent....” The intense difference between the spirit here expressed and that of his more immediate and brilliant predecessors and countrymen, Byron and Shelley and Keats, may possibly account in some degree for the hold which Tennyson has taken on the English heart. He was a man, too, who felt the throbbings of the age and touched with skilful fingers the pulse of Time. Though anxious for the future, he was troubled with no “Dreams of Darkness,” or hollow-eyed despair, or morbid imaginings. He realizes change; he has hopes for a world over which he sees a God ruling. He sings boldly of “immortal souls,” and knows no “first dark day of nothingness.” He warns the intelligence of his countrymen to— “... pamper not a hasty time, Nor feed with crude imaginings The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings, That every sophister can lime. “Deliver not the tasks of might To weakness, neither hide the ray From those, not blind, who wait for day Tho’ sitting girt with doubtful light. “Make knowledge circle with the winds; But let her herald, Reverence, fly Before her to whatever sky Bear seed of men and growth of minds.” These lines are noble, true, and Christian; and again: “Meet is it changes should control Our being, lest we rust in ease. We all are changed by still degrees, _All but the basis of the soul_. “So let the change which comes be free To ingroove itself with that which flies, And work, a joint of state, that plies Its office, moved with sympathy. “A saying, hard to shape in act; _For all the past of Time reveals A bridal dawn of thunder-peals, Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact_. “Ev’n now we hear with inward strife _A motion toiling in the gloom— The Spirit of the years to come Yearning to mix himself with Life_. “A slow-develop’d strength awaits Completion in a painful school; Phantoms of other forms of rule, New Majesties of mighty States— “The warders of the growing hour, But vague in vapor, hard to mark; And round them sea and air are dark With great contrivances of Power.”