The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;
“A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent....”
The intense difference between the spirit here expressed and that of his more immediate and brilliant predecessors and countrymen, Byron and Shelley and Keats, may possibly account in some degree for the hold which Tennyson has taken on the English heart. He was a man, too, who felt the throbbings of the age and touched with skilful fingers the pulse of Time. Though anxious for the future, he was troubled with no “Dreams of Darkness,” or hollow-eyed despair, or morbid imaginings. He realizes change; he has hopes for a world over which he sees a God ruling. He sings boldly of “immortal souls,” and knows no “first dark day of nothingness.” He warns the intelligence of his countrymen to—
“... pamper not a hasty time,
Nor feed with crude imaginings
The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings,