Not a bell was rung, not a prayer was read;

It is that which makes us loud in the world of the

dead;

There is none that does his work, not one;

A touch of their office might have sufficed,
But the churchmen fain would kill their church,
As the churches have kill'd their Christ.

3

See, there is one of us sobbing,
No limit to his distress;

And another, a lord of all things, praying
To his own great self, as I guess;
And another, a statesman there, betraying
His party-secret, fool, to the press;
And yonder a vile physician, blabbing
The case of his patient-all for what?
To tickle the maggot born in an empty head,
And wheedle a world that loves him not,
For it is but a world of the dead.

Nothing but idiot gabble!

4

For the prophecy1 given of old
And then not understood,

Has come to pass as foretold;

Not let any man think for the public good,
But babble, merely for babble.

1 The prophecy.] Possibly the reference may be to 2 Tim. iii. 2, or to Plato's Republic, viii. 7, which describes the lack of public spirit in an oligarchical state." A friend suggests Luke xii. 2, 3.

For I never whisper'd a private affair
Within the hearing of cat or mouse,
No, not to myself in the closet alone,

But I heard it shouted at once from the top of the

house;

Everything came to be known:

Who told him we were there?

5

Not that gray old wolf, for he came not back From the wilderness, full of wolves, where he used to lie ;

He has gather'd the bones for his o'ergrown whelp to crack;

Crack them now for yourself, and howl, and die.

6

Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,

And curse me the British vermin, the rat;

I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship, But I know that he lies and listens mute

In an ancient mansion's crannies and holes :

Arsenic, arsenic, sure,1 would do it,

Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls! It is all used up for that.

7

Tell him now she is standing here at my head; Not beautiful now, not even kind;

1 Sure.] 1st edition read "sir."

He

may

take her now; for she never speaks her

mind,

But is ever the one thing silent here.

She is not of us, as I divine;

She comes from another stiller world of the dead, Stiller, not fairer than mine.

8

But I know where a garden grows,
Fairer than aught in the world beside,
All made up of the lily and rose

That blow by night, when the season is good,
To the sound of dancing music and flutes:
It is only flowers, they had no fruits,

And I almost fear they are not roses, but blood;
For the keeper was one, so full of pride,
He linkt a dead man there to a spectral bride;
For he, if he had not been a Sultan of brutes,
Would he have that hole in his side?

9

But what will the old man say?

He laid a cruel snare in a pit

To catch a friend of mine one stormy day;
Yet now I could even weep to think of it;
For what will the old man say

When he comes to the second corpse in the pit?

IO

Friend, to be struck by the public foe,
Then to strike him and lay him low,

That were a public merit, far,

Whatever the Quaker holds, from sin;
But the red life spilt for a private blow-
I swear to you, lawful and lawless war
Are scarcely even akin.

II

O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?
Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,
Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?

Maybe still I am but half-dead;

Then I cannot be wholly dumb;

I will cry to the steps above my head,

And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come To bury me, bury me

Deeper, ever so little deeper.1

1 These stanzas display that morbid feeling closely related to insanity, which jumbles up the sensations of the living with the circumstances peculiar to death. Of this kind of morbidity many instances may be found in Heine's poems. It is characteristic of Tennyson's remarkably healthy mind that he does not long remain in this mood, but passes from it to a bitter invective against the shows and pretences of modern life-an invective, which, exaggerated and one-sided as it is, is not without a residuum of truth. For a somewhat similar frame of mind, cp. King Lear, iv. 6: "What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes, with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy. dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?"

XXVIII

I

My life has crept so long on a broken wing

Thro' cells of madness,1 haunts of horror and fear, That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing:

My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year
When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs,
And the shining daffodil dies, and the Charioteer
And starry Gemini hang like glorious crowns
Over Orion's grave 2 low down in the west,
That like a silent lightning under the stars

She seem'd to divide in a dream from a band of the blest,

And spoke of a hope for the world in the coming

wars

"And in that hope, dear soul, let trouble have rest, Knowing I tarry for thee," and pointed to Mars As he glow'd like a ruddy shield on the Lion's breast.4

1 Cells of madness.] Apparently in some refuge or asylum, whence he is now liberated.

2 Shining daffodil... Orion's grave.] With an evident reference to the last line of iii., and intended to recall that time last year.

3 She seemed, etc.] The part played by Maud in the poet's vision is something like that of Beatrice in the Divina Commedia.

4 Mars... Lion's breast.] The planet Mars seen in or near the constellation Leo. Here taken as an omen of war. From this point the poet turns to the actual world; seeing in the approach of war a sign of better things to come and of nobler aims for mankind than the worship of wealth.