A FACSIMILE TENNYSON’S MANUSCRIPT, “CROSSING THE BAR”
(Reproduced from “Tennyson: A Memoir,” by kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)
poetry which comes so near to satisfying all tastes, reconciling all tendencies, and registering every movement of the intellectual life of the period. Had his mental balance been less accurately poised, he might have been the laureate of a party, but he could not have been the laureate of the nation. As an intellectual force he is, we think, destined to be powerful and durable, because the charm of his poetry will always keep his ideas before the popular mind; and these ideas will always be congenial to the solid, practical, robust, and yet tender and emotional mind of England. They may be briefly defined as the recognition of the association of continuity with mutability in human institutions: the utmost reverence for the past combined with the full and not regretful admission that
The old order changes, giving place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways;
the conception of Freedom as something that “broadens down, from precedent to precedent”; veneration for “the Throne unshaken still,” so long as it continues “broad-based upon the People’s will,” which will always be the case so long as
Statesmen at the Council meet
Who know the seasons.
From a water-colour drawing by Mrs. Allingham