SONNET XCVIII

From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,

Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing, That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odor and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where
they grew:

Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did
play.

SONNET CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never

shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and

weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

3

TENNYSON'S ULYSSES

Tis safe to venture the prediction

IT

that, however Tennyson's work may be reduced in bulk by Time, that dispassionate and inexorable editor, the lines entitled " Ulysses" will survive all changes of taste and hold their place in English verse of the highest class. The poem has not only rare beauty and distinction but is the expression of the poet's genius on the highest level of achievment. It was composed in his earliest prime, and the morning air is upon it; a certain freshness, vigor, and spirited movement modulated and tempered by the classical sense of disciplined and ordered power.

There never was a time in Tennyson's life when he was not a poet; from the earliest hour of childhood in the rectory at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where a group of children of noble beauty made life a game of the imagination, to the hour when he fell asleep, the burden of years on his body but not on his spirit, "Cymbeline" lying by his hand. At fourteen the whole world seemed to be darkened for him by the death of Byron. Three years later, in company with. his brother Charles, he published a slender volume entitled "Poems by Two Brothers," the opening lines of which read:

"'Tis sweet to lead from stage to stage, Like infancy to a maturer age;"

a curious prediction of that power of growth which was the law of life to

Tennyson and which he registered with striking clearness in his work. In 1829 his poem "Timbuctoo" won the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge, and a year later another slender volume of "Poems, Chiefly Lyrical," attested his industry and his faith in his genius. Those who read these early verses with a hospitable mind found them delicate finger-work on the keys of speech rather than records of poetic thought. The little volume of 1832 had more to say, for the sensitive touch was beginning to evoke exquisite music, as "The Lady of Shalott," "Enone," "The Palace of Art," and "The Miller's Daughter" indubitably showed. Here was verse of singular freshness of feeling for landscape, and purity of sentiment; how far this master of flowing melody would go was another matter.