Thy marble bright in dark appears, As slowly steals a silver flame Along the letters of thy name And o’er the numbers of thy years. It is the ghastly morbidness of this that at first arrests the reader’s attention, and a closer examination does not by any means impress him; for surely to describe a moonbeam as a “flame,” moonlight in fact, in appearance, and in the long history of poetic thought being notoriously cold and the very negation of heat, is a lapse from the rightness of things more characteristic of a poetaster seeking at any cost a rhyme to “name” than the mark of a great poet. It has long been the fashion among those who shout with the biggest crowd to point scornfully at the critic who, discussing “In Memoriam” soon after it was published, wrote: “These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.” This has been termed “inept.” Now, if we turn to the dictionaries, we shall find the commonly received definition of that word to be “unfitting.” But was it, indeed, unfitting? The opinion of that critic did not actually fit the facts; but the morbid tone of the poem, and the singularly feminine ring of such phrases as “The man I held as half-divine,” “my Arthur,” and the like, seem to many a reader to be a perfect justification of the aptness of the critic’s views; and remind us that none other than Bulwer Lytton once referred to Tennyson as “school-miss Alfred.” My Arthur, whom I shall not see Till all my widowed race be run; Dear as the mother to the son, More than my brothers are to me. There is the critic’s ample defence. To a healthily constituted mind, that verse is more than ordinarily revolting.