Alfred Tennyson was born at Lincolnshire in 1809. In 1828 he wrote, with his brother, the “Poems by Two Brothers.” He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met his friend, Arthur Hallam, upon whose death he wrote “In Memoriam.” When Wordsworth died in 1850, the laureateship was given to Tennyson; later he was made a Baron. He died at Aldworth, on the Isle of Wight, in 1892, and has been given a place in Westminster Abbey near the grave of Chaucer. Other of his longer poems beside the one mentioned above are: “The Princess,” “Maud,” “Enoch Arden,” and the “Idyls of the King.”
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O, sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman’s boy
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on,
To the haven under the hill;
But O, for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O, sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
THERE IS NO DEATH.
BY J. L. McCREERY.
This beautifully touching poem is the creation of Mr. J. L. McCreery, a native of Iowa, and at one time editor of the Delaware County Journal, of that state. The poem was written in 1863 and was first published in Arthur’s Home Magazine in July of that year. The authorship of the poem was for many years erroneously attributed to Lord Lytton, the English poet. A thorough investigation carried on by Lippincott’s a few years ago fully established the authorship. The poem has been printed in every state of the Union, in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Canada, and even in Australia. It has gone into dozens of school books and been incorporated in scores of miscellaneous collections of poetry. It has been quoted in full or in part at least five times on the floor of Congress. Mr. McCreery has for the past few years been a resident of the national capital and his best poems have been collected into a volume entitled “Songs of Toil and Triumph.”
There is no death, the stars go down
To rise upon some other shore,
And bright in heaven’s jeweled crown
They shine forever more.
There is no death! the forest leaves
Convert to life the viewless air;
The rocks disorganize to feed
The hungry moss they bear.
There is no death! the dust we tread
Shall change, beneath the summer showers,
To golden grain, or mellow fruit,
Or rainbow-tinted flowers.