Those who companied with Tennyson through his beautiful career were helped into a growing love of purity. He had no panegyric for lust and shame and sensuality, but made us feel they were shameful, so that we blushed for those who had not the modesty to blush for themselves. We are ashamed for Guinevere and Lancelot, and are proud of Enid and Elaine and Sir Galahad and King Arthur; and in them, and in others, have been helped to see the heroic beauty of simple virtue. This is an incalculable gain for soul. When we have learned that profligates, whatever their spasms of flashy achievements, are poor company, and that the pure are evermore good company, and goodness is a quest worthier than the quest for the golden grail, we have risen to nobility of soul which can never become out of date.
Noah was not more clearly a preacher of righteousness in his day than
Tennyson in his, of whom say, as highest encomium we know to pronounce,
"He made goodness beautiful to our eyes and desirable to our hearts;
and, beyond this, made it easier for us to be good."
Over all this poet wrote, he might have looked straight in God's eye, and prayed, as King Arthur:
"And that which I have done
May he within himself make pure!"
And we chant, sending our muse after him,—
"Nor was there moaning of the bar
When he set out to sea."
To him saying, "We love him yet, and shall while life endures," borrowing Whittier's God-speed to the dead Bayard Taylor:
"Let the home-voices greet him in the far,
Strange land that holds him; let the messages
Of love pursue him o'er the chartless seas
And unmapped vastness of his unknown star!
Love's language, heard above the loud discourse,
Of perishable fame, in every sphere
Itself interprets; and its utterance here,
Somewhere in God's unfolding universe,
Shall reach our traveler, softening the surprise
Of his rapt gaze on unfamiliar skies!"
VIII
The American Historians