Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Thro’ all the circle of the golden year?” Thus far he flow’d, and ended; whereupon “Ah, folly!” in mimic cadence answer’d James— “Ah, folly! for it lies so far away. Not in our time, nor in our children’s time, ’Tis like the second world to us that live; ’Twere all as one to fix our hopes on Heaven As on this vision of the golden year.” With that he struck his staff against the rocks And broke it,—James,—you know him,—old, but full Of force and choler, and firm upon his feet, And like an oaken stock in winter woods, O’erflourished with the hoary clematis: Then added, all in heat: “What stuff is this! Old writers push’d the happy season back,— The more fools they,—we forward: dreamers both: You most, that in an age, when every hour Must sweat her sixty minutes to the death, Live on, God love us, as if the seedsman, rapt Upon the teeming harvest, should not dip[4] His hand into the bag: but well I know That unto him who works, and feels he works, This same grand year is ever at the doors.” He spoke; and, high above, I heard them blast The steep slate-quarry, and the great echo flap And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff. [1] 1846 to 1850. And joined him in Llanberis; and that same song He told me, etc. [2] Proverbs xxx. 15: “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give”. [3] 1890. Altered to “Yet oceans daily gaining on the land”. [4] _Selections_, 1865. Plunge. Ulysses First published in 1842, no alterations were made in it subsequently. This noble poem, which is said to have induced Sir Robert Peel to give Tennyson his pension, was written soon after Arthur Hallam’s death, presumably therefore in 1833. “It gave my feeling,” Tennyson said to his son, “about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in _In Memoriam_.” It is not the _Ulysses_ of Homer, nor was it suggested by the _Odyssey_. The germ, the spirit and the sentiment of the poem are from the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s _Inferno_, where Ulysses in the Limbo of the Deceivers speaks from the flame which swathes him. I give a literal version of the passage:—