20 25 30 Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, And soon that toil shall end; Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest, Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart He who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, I Whither, etc. NOTES Bryant is said to have written this poem when he was about to begin practice as a lawyer. One day he visited Plainfield, to see if it offered any field for practice. He was somewhat discouraged as he approached the place, when he chanced to see a solitary bird flying across the western sky. Its steadfast flight inspired him with the thoughts he afterward wrote down in this poem. 2 Last steps. Day is here personified. 5 Fowlers. Hunters of birds. 7 As darkly, etc. Compare this line with the line as originally written: "As darkly painted on the crimson sky." 32 Aright. One critic says of this poem: "The soft and exquisite beauty of the lines entitled "To a Waterfowl," is appreciated by every reader of taste. They belong to that rare class of poems which, once read, haunt the imagination with a perpetual charm." BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH TENNYSON Wordsworth pronounced Tennyson decidedly the greatest of our living poets, and although this, unfortunately, can no longer be said of him, whatever rank future generations may assign him among Victorian poets, he is certainly the most representative of them all, the poet who has most fully expressed the intellectual and spiritual difficulties of our time. Like his great predecessor, Alfred Tennyson was born in the country and passed most of his life in the most secluded haunts of nature, with books for his chief friends and companions. His father and mother were both well born and both were singularly gifted in many directions. They lived at Somersby, a tiny village of Lincolnshire, where the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson was rector of the church. Here Alfred was born, August 6, 1809. His early life was well adapted to develop the boy's sensitive poetic nature. Somersby is in the midst of a beautiful country of sloping hills and fertile valleys beyond which the Lincolnshire wolds, "wide, wild and open to the air," stretch away to meet the shining waters of the Humber. His brothers and sisters were all congenial and began to make poetry before they could talk, and many a delightful evening was spent in the rectory in making rhymes and romances. Thus he grew up a shy, sensitive boy, who lived chiefly in a world of his own imagination, and whose greatest delight was poring over the pages of Byron and Chaucer, or tuning his pipes with Theocritus and riding to battle with the Knights of the Round Table. Alfred and his brother Charles were sent to a grammar school at Louth, a town about twenty miles from Somersby, and here they published together a little volume of poems, called Poems by Two Brothers, a book remarkable for its promise rather than for its achievement. In 1828, Alfred entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where at that time many men, afterward celebrated, were in residence. Although so shy and reticent, Tennyson showed that rare capacity for friendship which is often found in men of his temperament, whose very limitations make them more than usually dependent upon the appreciation and sympathy of their chosen comrades. Among these friends was Arthur Henry Hallam, a young man of rarely beautiful nature and great promise. In 1830, Tennyson's father died and he left Cambridge without taking a degree. At this time he is described by Edward Fitzgerald as “a man at all points, of grand proportion and feature, significant of that inward chivalry becoming his ancient and honorable race.' In 1833, the great grief of his life came to Tennyson in the sudden death of Arthur Hallam, which cast a great gloom over these years of the poet's life and forced him to consider the great problems of death and immortality, reflections which later bore fruit in In Memoriam. In 1850, he was made the successor of Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, and in the same year he published In Memoriam. After his marriage with Miss Emily Sellwood, he made his home at Farringford in the Isle of Wight, a beautiful spot, which "seemed like a charmed palace with green walls without and speaking walls within. There hung Dante with his solemn rose and wreath; Italy gleamed over doorways; friends' faces lined the wall; books filled the shelves, and a glow of crimson was everywhere; the great oriel drawing-room window was full of green and golden leaves, of the sound of birds and of the distant sea." Here and at his home in Surrey the poet lived in great seclusion, but ever with an ear keenly alive to all that was taking place in the world without. He attained to a beautiful and tranquil old age, and death came to him at last as a friend and found him ready. He died with his finger still marking his favorite passage in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, the moonlight making a white radiance upon the earth, borne on the bosom of Such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound or foam When that which drew from out the boundless deep, In his life as in his work Tennyson was supremely a poet. His very person stirred the imagination. "One of the finest looking men in the world," declared Carlyle. "A great shock of rough, dusty-dark hair; bright, laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive, yet most delicate; of sallow brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy. His voice is musical metallic - fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation fine and plenteous: I do not meet, in these late decades, such company!" ENOCH ARDEN NOTE Enoch Arden was published in 1864 and was Tennyson's first serious work after finishing the Idylls of the King. In this and other poems of the same period he turns to the simple life of the English people of to-day and pictures their joys and sorrows with a sympathetic pen. Like Wordsworth, he shows us the dignity and beauty of the humblest lives lived in the fear of God. Yet even when he deals with very simple themes, like the story of Enoch Arden, the humble fisherman and sailor, he invests the plain details with a magic cunning of words that quite transforms them. One has only to read the description of Enoch Arden plying his very prosaic trade of selling fish, or that of the tropic island, to understand this. But Tennyson was not a mere master of musical words. His mind turned naturally to noble and lofty themes. His beautiful imagery is never used to conceal pettiness of thought, and he has ever held pure ideals as well as beautiful pictures before the eyes of the English people. 5 ΙΟ 15 20 Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm; In cluster; then a moulder'd church; and higher Here on this beach a hundred years ago, 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 бо A narrow cave ran in beneath the cliff; But when the dawn of rosy childhood past, To hoard all savings to the uttermost, A carefuller in peril, did not breathe For leagues along that breaker-beaten coast Then, on a golden autumn eventide, |