"Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away."
It is written in a meter which Tennyson believed he had invented, but which Ben Jonson and others had used before him. Two hundred years before Jonson had written a little elegy beginning—
"Though Beautie be the Marke of praise,
And yours of whom I sing be such
As not the world can praise too much,
Yet is't your vertue now I raise."
Here again we see that our literature of to-day is no new born thing, but rooted in the past. Jonson's poem, however, is a mere trifle, Tennyson's one of the great things of our literature. The first notes of In Memoriam were written when sorrow was fresh, but it was not till seventeen years later that it was given to the world. It is perhaps the most perfect monument ever raised to friendship. For in mourning his own loss Tennyson mourned the loss of all the world. "'I' is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro' him," he says.
After the prologue, the poem tells of the first bitter hopeless grief, of how friends try to comfort the mourners.
"One writes, that 'Other friends remain,'
That 'Loss is common to the race'—
And common is the common-place,
And vacant chaff well meant for grain.
"That loss if common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break."
And yet even now he can say—
"I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
And so the months glide by, and the first Christmas comes, "The time draws near the birth of Christ," the bells ring—