“Neither fondness for my son nor reverence for my aged sire nor the due love which ought to have gladdened Penelope could conquer in me the ardour which I had to become experienced in the world and in human vice and worth. I put out into the deep open sea with but one ship and with that small company which had not deserted me.... I and my companions were old and tardy when we came to that narrow pass where Hercules assigned his landmarks. ‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached the West deny not to this the brief vigil of your senses that remain, experience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun. Consider your origin, ye were not formed to live like Brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.... Night already saw the other pole with all its stars and ours so low that it rose not from the ocean floor’” (_Inferno_, xxvi., 94-126). But if the germ is here the expansion is Tennyson’s; he has added elaboration and symmetry, fine touches, magical images and magical diction. There is nothing in Dante which answers to— Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. or It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Of these lines well does Carlyle say what so many will feel: “These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would till whole Lacrymatorics as I read”. It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades[1] Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments,[2] Myself not least, but honour’d of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end,[3] To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This is my son, mine own Telemachus,[4] To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil