“the dead
Are breathers of an ampler day
For ever nobler ends.”
If this solid earth came from elements dissolved by “fluent heat,” and man was the last result; then he, who is now enduring fears and sorrows and the battering “shocks of doom,” typifies “this work of time” on natural objects; for he must be, as they have been, in process of being moulded for a higher state. He is moving upward, “working out the beast,” and letting “the ape and tiger die,” while in his present probationary condition.
CXIX.
The work of resignation in the mourner’s heart is here acknowledged. In Poem vii. he represents himself as standing, “like a guilty thing,” at the door of the London house where they used to meet, and he was then all sad and comfortless.
But now he revisits the spot, at the same early hour, and his feelings have changed and have become reconciled and hopeful. He smells “the meadow in the street,” the waggon loads of hay and clover coming in from the country.
Wimpole Street is here again described, with morning breaking over the housetops:
“I see
Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
A light blue lane of early dawn.”
It was at No. 67 in this street that Mr. Hallam lived, and wrote his great historical works; and his son Arthur used to say, “We are always to be found at sixes and sevens.”
All is now welcome:
“I think of early days and thee,
And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,
And bright the friendship of thine eye;
And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
I take the pressure of thine hand.”