The light retreated,
The Landskip darken’d,
The melody deaden’d,
The Master whisper’d,
‘Follow the Gleam.’
“Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to follow his ideal. And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by the harmonies of nature, ‘the warble of water,’ and ‘cataract music of falling torrents,’ the inspiration of the poet was renewed. His Eclogues and English Idyls followed, when he sang the songs of country life and the joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through,
Innocent maidens,
Garrulous children,
Homestead and harvest,
Reaper and gleaner,
And rough-ruddy faces
Of lowly labour.
“By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and of humanity from his own experience, he rose to a melody ‘stronger
and statelier.’ He celebrated the glory of ‘human love and of human heroism’ and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his epic of King Arthur, ‘typifying above all things the life of man,’ wherein he had intended to represent some of the great religions of the world. He had purposed that this was to be the chief work of his manhood. Yet the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of the whole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose; nor any longer for a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, nor in the Gleam that had ‘waned to a wintry glimmer.’
Clouds and darkness
Closed upon Camelot;
Arthur had vanish’d
I knew not whither,
The King who loved me,
And cannot die.
“Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur of the Idylls and the Arthur ‘the man he held as half divine.’ He himself had fought with death, and had come out victorious to find ‘a stronger faith his own,’ and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for universal human kind, that never forsook him through the future years.
And broader and brighter
The Gleam flying onward,
Wed to the melody,
Sang thro’ the world.* * *
I saw, wherever
In passing it glanced upon
Hamlet or city,
That under the Crosses
The dead man’s garden,
The mortal hillock,
Would break into blossom;
And so to the land’s
Last limit I came.
“Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing courage that he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and the mystery of the Infinite.
I can no longer,
But die rejoicing,
For thro’ the Magic
Of Him the Mighty,
Who taught me in childhood,
There on the border
Of boundless Ocean,
And all but in Heaven
Hovers the Gleam.