They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.”
The dream was over. Life began its “search for rest.” Beautiful indeed, and exactly observed.
I must here leave the Muse with barely a glance at the Victorians, which suffices nevertheless to reveal that they adopted the rhetorical device of the peroration. Tennyson uses it in In Memoriam and Maud, Browning in The Ring and the Book, Swinburne, very finely, in Tristram of Lyonesse, and very characteristically too with his usual catchword. I don’t know how many considerable poems there may be of Swinburne’s which do not end with the word “sea,” but believe that the fingers of one hand would be too many for them. In Sordello Browning chose the mediæval colophon, the Ci falt la geste, when he shut down his long enigma with
“Who would has heard Sordello’s story told,”
and laid himself open to the easy retort that it was not at all true. But the grandest finale of our times remains to be told: Tennyson’s closing lines of Idylls of the King. I do not refer to the Envoy, which is only a postscript to the Dedication. I mean rather the end of “The Passing of Arthur”: Sir Bedivere on the shore, “straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand” to see the barge out of sight, “down that long water opening on the deep”; to see it go,
“From less to less and vanish into light—”
Then one more line, one more picture:
“And the new sun rose bringing the new year.”
Superb! Nothing in the Idylls became Tennyson like the leaving them. They do not form an epic; but the end is epical.