"Heaven is not reached at a single bound;
But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And mount to its summit round by round."
Genius does the same. The stairs each generation climbed are rotten at its death, so that no foot's weight can be borne upon them afterward. Man builds his own stairway greatnessward. In the Idyl of the King, entitled "Gareth and Lynette," is application of this thought of manhood above title or name or blood. Worth, the main thing, is the theme of the idyl.
Hear Gareth call, like voice of trumpets,
"Let be my name; until I make my name
My deeds will speak."
He seemed, and was not, a kitchen knave. He seemed not, and he was, a knight of valor and of purity and might, of purpose and of succor. Silly Lynette might rain her superficial insults on him like a winter's sleet—this hindered not his service. He knew to wait, and dare, and do. His fame was in him. A great life bears not its honors on its back, as mountains do their pines, but in his heart, as women do their love. In Tennyson's concept of manhood, worth counts, not rank. To this argument, words from "In Memoriam" are a contribution:
"As some divinely-gifted man,
Whose life in low estate began
And on a simple village green;
Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance,
And grapples with his evil star;
Who makes by force his merit known,
And lives to clutch the golden keys,
To mold a mighty State's decrees,
And shape the whisper of the throne;
And moving on from high to higher,
Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope
The pillar of a people's hope,
The center of a world's desire."
Such words seem as if fallen from the lips of Lincoln in a dream. "Aylmer's Field" is a protest, written in grief and tears and blood against the iniquity of ancestry as divorced from the pure course of nobler love. God made of one blood all kindreds of the earth, and means to mix this blood till time shall die. Hearts give scant heed to heraldry. Life is wider than a baron's field. Arthur Hallam, whose epitaph is the sweetest ever written, and bears title of "In Memoriam,"—Arthur Hallam, so greatly loved and missed, was never nobleman in genealogy, but was full prince in youth and ideality and purity and genius and promise, worth more than all the ancestries of buried kings. More: Tennyson was as much self-made as King Arthur. He made a house which rose to the sound of poet's lute, rehearsing, in our days, the story of Orpheus in the remote yesterdays. So myths come to be history. And who would not rather be author of "The Lotos-Eaters," and "Oenone," and "Ulysses," and "Enoch Arden," and "In Memoriam" than to have been possessed, with Sir Aylmer Aylmer, of