After Tennyson’s and Hallam’s memorable journey to the Pyrenees in aid of the revolutionary movement
against King Ferdinand of Spain, vividly described by Carlyle in his Life of John Sterling.
Alfred Tennyson (in profile), John Harden and Mrs. Harden (on the left), and the Miss Hardens.
ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM
By Dr. John Brown
[The following article, containing the Memoir of Arthur Hallam by his father, Henry Hallam, is reprinted from Horae Subsecivae.—Ed.]
Praesens imperfectum,—perfectum, plusquam perfectum Futurum.—Grotius.
| The idea of thy life shall sweetly creep Into my study of imagination; And every lovely organ of thy life Shall come apparelled in more precious habit— More moving delicate, and full of life, Into the eye and prospect of my soul, Than when thou livedst indeed. Much Ado about Nothing. |
In the chancel of Clevedon Church, Somersetshire, rest the mortal remains of Arthur Henry Hallam, eldest son of our great philosophic historian and critic,—and the friend to whom “In Memoriam” is sacred. This place was selected by his father, not only from the connection of kindred, being the burial-place of his maternal grandfather, Sir Abraham Elton, but likewise “on account of its still and sequestered situation, on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel.” That lone hill, with its humble old church, its outlook over the waste of waters, where “the stately ships go on,” was, we doubt not, in Tennyson’s mind when the poem, “Break, break, break,” which contains the burden of that volume in which are enshrined so much of the deepest affection, poetry, philosophy, and godliness, rose into his “study of imagination”—“into the eye and prospect of his soul.”[110]
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 their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d 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.