O, therefore from thy sightless range
With God in unconjectured bliss,
O, from the distance of the abyss
Of tenfold-complicated change,

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
The wish too strong for words to name;
That in this blindness of the frame
My Ghost may feel that thine is near.

XCIX.

Unwatch'd the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down, Unloved that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away;

Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,
Ray round with flames her disk of seed,
And many a rose-carnation feed
With summer spice the humming air;

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain, At noon or when the lesser wain

Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,

And flood the haunts of hern and crake; Or into silver arrows break

The sailing moon in creek and cove;

Till from the garden and the wild

A fresh association blow,

And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger's child;

As year by year the labourer tills

His wonted glebe, or lops the glades; And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills.

CIV.

Ring out wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

CXVI.

Contemplate all this work of time,
The giant labouring in his youth;
Nor dream of human love and truth,
As dying Nature's earth and lime;

But trust that those we call the dead,
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends. They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread

In tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming-random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last arose the man;

Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime, The herald of a higher race,

And of himself in higher place,

If so he type this work of time

Within himself, from more to more;

Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,

Like glories, move his course, and show That life is not an idle ore,

But iron dug from central gloom,

And heated hot with burning fears, And dipp'd in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom

To shape and use. Arise and fly

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die.

CXXVII.

Dear friend, far off, my lost desire,
So far, so near in woe and weal;
O, loved the most when I must feel
There is a lower and a higher;

Known, and unknown, human, divine!
Sweet human hand and lips and eye,
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die,
Mine, mine, forever, ever mine!

Strange friend, past, present, and to be,
Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
Behold I dream a dream of good,
And mingle all the world with thee.

CXXIX.

O living will that shalt endure

When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,

Flow through our deeds and make them pure,

That we may lift from out the dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquer'd years
To one that with us works, and trust

With faith that comes of self-control,

The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,
And all we flow from, soul in soul.

From the proem, or from the exquisite epithalamium at the end of the volume, we shall not quote; they are too long to be inserted at length, and too perfect wholes for us to mar them by any curtailment.

It has been often asked why Mr. Tennyson's great and varied powers had never been concentrated on one immortal work. The epic, the lyric, the idyllic faculties, perhaps the dramatic also, . seemed to be all there, and yet all sundered, scattered about in small fragmentary poems. In Memoriam, as we think, explains the paradox. Mr. Tennyson could not write an epos or a drama while he was living one. It was true, as people said, that his secluded habits had shut him out from that knowledge of human character necessary for the popular dramatist; but he had been talking all the while with angels. Within the unseen world which underlies and explains this mere time-shadow, which men call Reality and Fact, he had been going down into the depths, and ascending into the heights, led, like Dante of old, by the guiding of a mighty spirit. And in this volume, the record of seventeen years, we have the result of those spiritual experiences in a form calculated, as we believe, to be a priceless benefit to many an earnest seeker in this generation, and perhaps to stir up some who are priding themselves on a cold dilettantism and barren epicurism, into something like a living faith and hope. Blessed and delightful it is to find, that even in these new ages the creeds which so many fancy to be at their last gasp, are still the final and highest succour, not merely of the peasant and the outcast,

but of the subtle artist and the daring speculator! Blessed it is to find the most cunning poet of our day able to combine the complicated rhythm and melody of modern times with the old truths which gave heart to martyrs at the stake, to see in the science and the history of the nineteenth century new and living fulfilments of the words which we learnt at our mothers' knee! Blessed, thrice blessed, to find that hero-worship is not yet passed away; that the heart of man still beats young and fresh; that the old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakspeare and his nameless friend, of "love passing the love of woman," ennobled by its own humility, deeper than death, and mightier than the grave, can still blossom out if it be but in one heart here and there to show men still how sooner or later "he that loveth knoweth God, for God is Love!"

ref. Jamecon.

THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY

ART.

[Fraser's Magazine.]

MUCH attention has been excited this year (1849) by the alleged fulfilment of a prophecy that the Papal power was to receive its death-blow-in temporal matters, at least-during the past year 1848. For ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. Fleming, the obsolete author, who has so suddenly revived in the public esteem, than we have in other interpreters of prophecy. Their shallow and bigoted views of past history are enough to damp our faith in their discernment of the future. It does seem that people ought to understand what has been, before they predict what will be. History is "the track of God's footsteps through time; it is in his dealings with our forefathers that we may expect to find the laws by which he will deal with us. Not that Mr. Fleming's conjecture must be false; among a thousand guesses there ought surely to be one right one. And it is almost impossible for earnest men to bend their whole minds, however clumsily, to one branch of study without arriving at some truth or other. The interpreters of prophecy, therefore, like all other interpreters, have our best wishes, though not our sanguine hopes. But, in the mean time, there are surely signs of the approaching ruin of Popery, more certain than any speculations on the mystic numbers of the Revelation. We should point to recent books, -not to books which merely expose Rome,-that has been done long ago, usque ad nauseam,—but to books which do her justice, -to Mr. Maitland's Dark Ages; Lord Lindsay's Christian Art ; Mr. Macaulay's new History of England; and last, but not least, to the very charming book of Mrs. Jameson, whose title heads this review. In them and in a host of similar works in Germany, which Dr. Wiseman's party hail as signs of coming triumph, we

Sacred and Legendary Art. By MRS. JAMESON.