And in her bosom bore the baby, Sleep. But this whole hour your eyes have been intent On that veil’d picture—veil’d, for what it holds May not be dwelt on by the common day. This prelude has prepared thee. Raise thy soul; Make thine heart ready with thine eyes: the time Is come to raise the veil. Behold her there, As I beheld her ere she knew my heart, My first, last love; the idol of my youth, The darling of my manhood, and, alas! Now the most blessed memory of mine age. [1] _Cf. Romeo and Juliet_, ii., vi.:— O so light a foot Will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint. [2] _Cf._ Keats, _Ode to Nightingale_:— The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. [3] _Cf_. Theocritus, _Id_., vii., 143:—παντ’ ὦσδεν θέρεος μάλα πἰονος. [4] Provincial name for the goldfinch. See Tennyson’s letter to the Duke of Argyll, _Life_, ii., 221. [5] This passage is imitated from Theocritus, vii., 143 _seqq_. [6] This passage originally ran:— Her beauty grew till drawn in narrowing arcs The southing autumn touch’d with sallower gleams The granges on the fallows. At that time, Tir’d of the noisy town I wander’d there. The bell toll’d four, and by the time I reach’d The wicket-gate I found her by herself. But Fitzgerald pointing out that the autumn landscape was taken from the background of Titian (Lord Ellesmere’s _Ages of Man_) Tennyson struck out the passage. If this was the reason he must have been in an unusually scrupulous mood. See his _Life_, i., 232. [7] So Massinger, _City Madam_, iii., 3:— I am sublim’d. Gross earth Supports me not. _I walk on air_. [8] _Cf._ Dante, _Inferno_, v., 81-83:— Quali columbe dal desio chiamatè, Con l’ ali aperte e ferme, al dolce nido Volan. [9] 1842-1850. Lisping. [10] In privately printed volume 1842. His. Dora First published in 1842. This poem had been written as early as 1835, when it was read to Fitzgerald and Spedding (_Life_, i., 182). No alterations were made in the text after 1853. The story in this poem was taken even to the minutest details from a prose story of Miss Mitford’s, namely, _The Tale of Dora Creswell_ (_Our Village_, vol. in., 242-53), the only alterations being in the names, Farmer Cresswell, Dora Creswell, Walter Cresswell, and Mary Hay becoming respectively Allan, Dora, William, and Mary Morrison. How carefully the poet has preserved the picturesque touches of the original may be seen by comparing the following two passages:— And Dora took the child, and went her way Across the wheat, and sat upon a mound That was unsown, where many poppies grew. .... She rose and took The child once more, and sat upon the mound; And made a little wreath of all the flowers That grew about, and tied it round his hat.