“The warders of the growing hour,
But vague in vapor, hard to mark;
And round them sea and air are dark
With great contrivances of Power.”
This was published in 1832, a period when agitations about the suffrage, and the Corn Laws, and Catholic Emancipation—questions that shook England to its foundations, only to fix them deeper than before—were rife or looming up like awful spectres in the dim mist of the future. Tennyson did not dread them, though he realized their vastness and importance. Most certainly the verses just quoted stamp him as a close observer of events in those days and a man of right moral balance, to whom might with some measure of truth be applied his own words:
“He saw thro’ life and death, thro’ good and ill,
He saw thro’ his own soul.
The marvel of the everlasting will,
An open scroll,
Before him lay....”