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There was nothing said as soon as they were alone, but, as if with one accord, both glanced at each of the many letters brought by the last post, and, if it were one of condolence, laid it aside unread. The butler had placed on a small table two evening papers, which had notices of the memorial service for Sir David Bright, and one had some lines "In Memoriam" from a poet of considerable repute.
To assault it with the claims of the hour is to defeat its purpose and rob the future. It must have quiet, leisure, repose. Let it dream for a while in the silence of sweet gardens, within the walls of universities, in the fruitful peace of undisturbed days; for out of such dreams have come "As You Like It," "The Tempest," "In Memoriam," and "The Vision of Sir Launfal."
Genuine grief will no more come at command than genuine joy, and so Mark found, not without some self-reproach; he even began to read 'In Memoriam' again with the idea of making that the keynote for his emotions, but the passionate yearning of that lament was pitched too high for him, and he never finished it.
O wife! the moon and stars slide down the west To make in fresher skies their happy quest. So, Love, once more we'll wed among the blest! We were standing in the old English church at Clevedon on a summer afternoon. And here, said my companion, pausing in the chancel, sleeps Arthur Hallam, the friend of Alfred Tennyson, and the subject of "In Memoriam."
But so far as "In Memoriam" attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience of human anguish and intellect. I say intellect advisedly. Not for him such blunders of thought as Coleridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well."
The impression of works like Tennyson's In Memoriam or Idylls of the King, common text-books in colleges, the steady pressure of Acts of the British Government in India, like that raising the marriage age of girls; the example of men in authority like Lord Curzon, during whose vice-regal tour in South India there were no nautch entertainments; the necessity of understanding expressions like "general election" and "public spirit," and of comprehending in some measure the working of local self-government all such constant pressure must effect a change in the mental standpoint.
She has taken me from all my friends and she will take him away! No one is left me but papa; and though she can't hurt his love, she has got his confidence away, and made him join against me! But that one thing I'll never, never do!" She started up, and opened a locked purple photograph-album, with 'In Memoriam' inscribed on it her hands trembling so that she could hardly turn the key.
Archdeacon Hare having given a somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that, written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though faltering, as prose after verse, with Adonais, In Memoriam, and Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis.
Tennyson's immature work, like that of the minor poets, is sometimes in a doubtful or despairing strain; but his In Memoriam is like the rainbow after storm; and Browning seems better to express the spirit of his age in the strong, manly faith of "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and in the courageous optimism of all his poetry. Stedman's Victorian Anthology is, on the whole, a most inspiring book of poetry.
"Dear as the mother to the son More than my brothers are to me." In Memoriam is a group of poems rather than one long poem "Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away." It is written in a meter which Tennyson believed he had invented, but which Ben Jonson and others had used before him. Two hundred years before Jonson had written a little elegy beginning
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