The poet's versatility was displayed in the appearance with these records of "weird seizures", of the Irish dialect piece To-morrow, the popular Spinster's Sweet-Arts, and the Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the hero has relapsed on the gloom of the hero of Maud. He represents himself, of course, not Tennyson, or only one of the moods of Tennyson, which were sometimes black enough. A very different mood chants the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and speaks of "Green Sussex fading into blue With one gray glimpse of sea."The lines To Virgil were written at the request of the Mantuans, by the most Virgilian of all the successors of the "Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man."Never was Tennyson more Virgilian than in this unmatched panegyric, the sum and flower of criticism of that "Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more."Hardly less admirable is the tribute to Catullus, and the old poet is young again in the bird-song of Early Spring. The lines on Poets and their Bibliographies, with The Dead Prophet, express Tennyson's lifelong abhorrence of the critics and biographers, whose joy is in the futile and the unimportant, in personal gossip and the sweepings of the studio, the salvage of the wastepaper basket. The Prefatory Poem to my Brother's Sonnets is not only touching in itself, but proves that the poet can "turn to favour and to prettiness" such an affliction as the ruinous summer of 1879.
The year 1880 brought deeper distress in the death of the poet's son Lionel, whose illness, begun in India, ended fatally in the Red Sea.
The interest of the following years was mainly domestic. The poet's health, hitherto robust, was somewhat impaired in 1888, but his vivid interest in affairs and in letters was unabated. He consoled himself with Virgil, Keats, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Euripides, and Mr Leaf's speculations on the composite nature of the Iliad, in which Coleridge, perhaps alone among poets, believed. "You know," said Tennyson to Mr Leaf; "I never liked that theory of yours about the many poets." It would be at least as easy to prove that there were many authors of Ivanhoe, or perhaps it would be a good deal more easy. However, he admitted that three lines which occur both in the Eighth and the Sixteenth Books of the Iliad are more appropriate in the later book. Similar examples might be found in his own poems.
He still wrote, in the intervals of a malady which brought him "as near death as a man could be without dying." He was an example of the great physical strength which, on the whole, seems usually to accompany great mental power. The strength may be dissipated by passion, or by undue labour, as in cases easily recalled to memory, but neither cause had impaired the vigour of Tennyson. Like Goethe, he lived out all his life; and his eightieth birthday was cheered both by public and private expressions of reverence and affection.
Of Tennyson's last three years on earth we may think, in his own words, that his "Life's latest eve endured Nor settled into hueless grey."Nature was as dear to him and as inspiring as of old; men and affairs and letters were not slurred by his intact and energetic mind. His Demeter and other Poems, with the dedication to Lord Dufferin, appeared in the December of the year. The dedication was the lament for the dead son and the salutation to the Viceroy of India, a piece of resigned and manly regret. The Demeter and Persephone is a modern and tender study of the theme of the most beautiful Homeric Hymn.
The ancient poet had no such thought of the restored Persephone as that which impels Tennyson to describe her "Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies All night across the darkness, and at dawn Falls on the threshold of her native land."The spring, the restored Persephone, comes more vigorous and joyous to the shores of the AEgean than to ours. All Tennyson's own is Demeter's awe of those "imperial disimpassioned eyes" of her daughter, come from the bed and the throne of Hades, the Lord of many guests. The hymn, happy in its ending, has no thought of the grey heads of the Fates, and their answer to the goddess concerning "fate beyond the Fates," and the breaking of the bonds of Hades. The ballad of Owd Roa is one of the most spirited of the essays in dialect to which Tennyson had of late years inclined. Vastness merely expresses, in terms of poetry, Tennyson's conviction that, without immortality, life is a series of worthless contrasts. An opposite opinion may be entertained, but a man has a right to express his own, which, coming from so great a mind, is not undeserving of attention; or, at least, is hardly deserving of reproof. The poet's idea is also stated thus in The Ring, in terms which perhaps do not fall below the poetical; or, at least, do not drop into "the utterly unpoetical":-"The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man, But cannot wholly free itself from Man, Are calling to each other thro' a dawn Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil Is rending, and the Voices of the day Are heard across the Voices of the dark.
No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man, But thro' the Will of One who knows and rules -And utter knowledge is but utter love -
AEonian Evolution, swift or slow, Thro' all the Spheres--an ever opening height, An ever lessening earth."The Ring is, in fact, a ghost story based on a legend told by Mr Lowell about a house near where he had once lived; one of those houses vexed by "A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls, A noise of falling weights that never fell, Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand, Door-handles turn'd when none was at the door, And bolted doors that open'd of themselves."These phenomena were doubtless caused by rats and water-pipes, but they do not destroy the pity and the passion of the tale. The lines to Mary Boyle are all of the normal world, and worthy of a poet's youth and of the spring. Merlin and the Gleam is the spiritual allegory of the poet's own career:-"Arthur had vanish'd I knew not whither, The king who loved me, And cannot die."So at last "All but in Heaven Hovers The Gleam,"whither the wayfarer was soon to follow. There is a marvellous hope and pathos in the melancholy of these all but the latest songs, reminiscent of youth and love, and even of the dim haunting memories and dreams of infancy. No other English poet has thus rounded all his life with music. Tennyson was in his eighty-first year, when there "came in a moment" the crown of his work, the immortal lyric, Crossing the Bar. It is hardly less majestic and musical in the perfect Greek rendering by his brother-in-law, Mr Lushington. For once at least a poem has been "poured from the golden to the silver cup" without the spilling of a drop. The new book's appearance was coincident with the death of Mr Browning, "so loving and appreciative," as Lady Tennyson wrote; a friend, not a rival, however the partisans of either poet might strive to stir emulation between two men of such lofty and such various genius.