XVIII

I

I HAVE led her home, my love, my only friend.
There is none like her, none.

And never yet so warmly ran my blood
And sweetly, on and on

Calming itself1 to the long-wish'd-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.

None like her, none.

2

Just now the dry-tongued laurels' pattering talk 2
Seem'd her light foot along the garden walk,
And shook my heart to think she comes once more;
But even then I heard her close the door,

The gates of Heaven are closed, and she is gone.

3

There is none like her, none.

Nor will be when our summers have deceased.

O, art thou sighing for Lebanon

In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East,

1 Calming itself.] For this beautiful idea of the steady flow of a great full body of water, cp. Crossing the Bar:

"Too full for sound or foam."

2 Pattering talk.] One of the most Tennysonian of all Tennyson's

Sighing for Lebanon,

Dark cedar, tho' thy limbs have here increased,
Upon a pastoral slope as fair,

And looking to the South, and fed
With honey'd rain and delicate air,
And haunted by the starry head

Of her whose gentle will has changed my fate,
And made my life a perfumed altar-flame;
And over whom thy darkness must have spread
With such delight as theirs of old, thy great
Forefathers of the thornless garden, there

Shadowing the snow-limb'd Eve from whom she

came.

4

Here will I lie, while these long branches sway,
And you fair stars that crown a happy day
Go in and out as if at merry play,

Who am no more so all forlorn,

As when it seem'd far better to be born
To labour and the mattock-harden'd hand,
Than nursed at ease and brought to understand
A sad astrology, the boundless plan

That makes you tyrants in your iron skies,
Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,1

Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand
His nothingness into man.

1 Sad astrology. passionless eyes, etc.] Cp. Matthew Arnold's Empedocles on Etna, near end :

"Emp. No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you,
No languor, no decay! languor and death,

They are with me, not you! ye are alive,
Ye and the pure dark ether where ye ride
Brilliant above me !"

5

1

But now shine on, and what care I,
Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl
The countercharm 1 of space and hollow sky,
And do accept my madness, and would die
To save from some slight shame one simple girl.

6

Would die; for sullen-seeming Death may give
More life to Love than is or ever was

In our low world, where yet 'tis sweet to live.
Let no one ask me how it came to pass;
It seems that I am happy, that to me
A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass,
A purer sapphire melts into the sea.

7

Not die; but live a life of truest breath,

And teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs.
O, why should Love, like men in drinking-songs,2
Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death?
Make answer, Maud my bliss,

Maud made my Maud by that long lover's kiss,
Life of my life, wilt thou not answer this?
"The dusky strand of Death inwoven here
With dear Love's tie, makes Love himself more
dear."

1 Countercharm.] The thought in these lines is a favourite one with the author, that were it not for our human souls and human affections, we might be tempted to doubt whether there were any Divine Love manifested in the universe.

2 Drinking songs.] Cp. the Greek epigram beginning

Πῖνε καὶ εὐφραίνου· τί γὰρ αὔριον, ἢ τί τὸ μέλλον ;

"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die" (Isa. xxii. 13).

8

Is that enchanted moan only the swell
Of the long waves that roll in yonder bay?
And hark the clock within, the silver knell
Of twelve sweet hours that past in bridal white,
And died to live, long as my pulses play;
But now by this my love has closed her sight
And given false death 1 her hand, and stol'n away
To dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell
Among the fragments of the golden day.
May nothing there her maiden grace affright!
Dear heart, I feel with thee the drowsy spell.
My bride to be, my evermore delight,

My own heart's heart and ownest own farewell;
It is but for a little space I go

And ye meanwhile far over moor and fell
Beat to the noiseless music of the night!
Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow
Of your soft splendours that you look so bright?
I have climbed nearer out of lonely Hell.
Beat, happy stars, timing with things below,
Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell,
Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe
That seems to draw-but it shall not be so :
Let all be well, be well.

1 False death.] Cp. Shakespeare (Sonnets):

"Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.'

Tennyson may have been reading Statius (Silvarum, v. 3. 260): "Sed te torpor iners, et mors imitata quietem, Explicuit, falsoque tulit sub Tartara somno,'

applied by his friend C. Merivale to the latter's own father.

XIX 1

I

HER brother is coming back to-night,
Breaking up my dream of delight.

2

My dream? do I dream of bliss?
I have walk'd awake with Truth.
O when did a morning shine
So rich in atonement as this
For my dark-dawning youth,

Darken'd watching a mother decline

And that dead man at her heart and mine
For who was left to watch her but I?

Yet so did I let my

freshness die.

3

:

I trust 2 that I did not talk

To gentle Maud in our walk

(For often in lonely wanderings

Ì have cursed him even to lifeless things)

1 These ten stanzas, up to xx., "Strange," etc., not in 1st edition. They are important as tending to make the story clearer, especially with regard to the relations between Maud's lover and her brother.

2 I trust.] Notice the indications of a confused memory here, preparing us for the mental breakdown later on.