Chapter II

Shadow-maker, shadow-slayer, arrowing light from clime to clime,
Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their woodland rhyme.
Warble bird, and open flower, and, men, below the dome of azure
Kneel adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures Time!”

In this final volume the poet cast his handful of incense on the altar of Scott, versifying the tale of _Il Bizarro_, which the dying Sir Walter records in his Journal in Italy. _The Churchwarden and the Curate_ is not inferior to the earlier peasant poems in its expression of shrewdness, humour, and superstition. A verse of _Poets and Critics_ may be taken as the poet’s last word on the old futile quarrel:—

“This thing, that thing is the rage,
Helter-skelter runs the age;
Minds on this round earth of ours
Vary like the leaves and flowers,
Fashion’d after certain laws;
Sing thou low or loud or sweet,
All at all points thou canst not meet,
Some will pass and some will pause.

What is true at last will tell:
Few at first will place thee well;
Some too low would have thee shine,
Some too high—no fault of thine—
Hold thine own, and work thy will!
Year will graze the heel of year,
But seldom comes the poet here,
And the Critic’s rarer still.”

Still the lines hold good—

“Some too low would have thee shine,
Some too high—no fault of thine.”

The end was now at hand. A sense of weakness was felt by the poet on September 3, 1892: on the 28th his family sent for Sir Andrew Clark; but the patient gradually faded out of life, and expired on Thursday, October 6, at 1.35 A.M. To the very last he had Shakespeare by him, and his windows were open to the sun; on the last night they were flooded by the moonlight. The description of the final scenes must be read in the Biography by the poet’s son. “His patience and quiet strength had power upon those who were nearest and dearest to him; we felt thankful for the love and the utter peace of it all.” “The life after death,” Tennyson had said just before his fatal illness, “is the cardinal point of Christianity. I believe that God reveals Himself in every individual soul; and my idea of Heaven is the perpetual ministry of one soul to another.” He had lived the life of heaven upon earth, being in all his work a minister of things honourable, lovely, consoling, and ennobling to the souls of others, with a ministry which cannot die. His body sleeps next to that of his friend and fellow-poet, Robert Browning, in front of Chaucer’s monument in the Abbey.