"Thou shalt not be saved by works:
Thou hast been a sinner too :
Ruin'd trunks on wither'd forks,
Empty scarecrows, I and you!

"Fill the cup, and fill the can :
Have a rouse before the morn:

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.1

"We are men of ruin'd blood;

Therefore comes it we are wise.
Fish are we that love the mud,
Rising to no fancy-flies.

"Name and fame! to fly sublime

Thro' the courts, the camps, the schools,

Is to be the ball of Time,

Bandied by the hands of fools.

"Friendship!—to be two in one—
Let the canting liar pack!
Well I know, when I am gone,
How she mouths behind my back.

"Virtue !—to be good and just—
Every heart, when sifted well,
Is a clot of warmer dust,

Mix'd with cunning sparks of hell.

"O! we two as well can look
Whited thought and cleanly life
As the priest, above his book
Leering at his neighbour's wife.

"Fill the cup, and fill the can:

Have a rouse before the morn:

Every moment dies a man,

Every moment one is born.1

1 All up to and including 1850 read :—

Every minute dies a man,
Every minute one is born.

Mr. Babbage, the famous mathematician, is said to have addressed the following letter to Tennyson in reference to this couplet :—

"I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a

"Drink, and let the parties rave :
They are filled with idle spleen ;
Rising, falling, like a wave,

For they know not what they mean.

"He that roars for liberty

Faster binds a tyrant's1 power;
And the tyrant's cruel glee
Forces on the freer hour.

"Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,
And is lightly laid again.

"Greet her with applausive breath,
Freedom, gaily doth she tread;
In her right a civic wreath,

66

In her left a human head.

"No, I love not what is new;
She is of an ancient house:
And I think we know the hue
Of that cap upon her brows.
"Let her go! her thirst she slakes
Where the bloody conduit runs :
Then her sweetest meal she makes
On the first-born of her sons.
"Drink to lofty hopes that cool—
Visions of a perfect State :
Drink we, last, the public fool,
Frantic love and frantic hate.

"Chant me now some wicked stave,
Till thy drooping courage rise,
And the glow-worm of the grave
Glimmer in thy rheumy eyes.

well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that, in the next edition of your excellent poem, the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:— Every moment dies a man,

And one and a sixteenth is born.

I may add that the exact figures are i ^67, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre."

"Fear not thou to loose thy tongue;

Set thy hoary fancies free; What is loathsome to the young Savours well to thee and me.

"Change, reverting to the years,

When thy nerves could understand What there is in loving tears,

And the warmth of hand in hand.

"Tell me tales of thy first love—
April hopes, the fools of chance;
Till the graves begin to move,
And the dead begin to dance.

"Fill the can, and fill the cup:
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up,

And is lightly laid again.

"Trooping from their mouldy dens The chap-fallen circle spreads: Welcome, fellow-citizens,

Hollow hearts and empty heads!

"You are bones, and what of that?
Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modell'd on a skull.

"Death is king, and Vivat Rex! Tread a measure on the stones, Madam—if I know your sex,

From the fashion of your bones.

"No, I cannot praise the fire

In your eye—nor yet your lip: All the more do I admire

Joints of cunning workmanship.

"Lo! God's likeness—the ground-plan— Neither modell'd, glazed, or framed : Buss me thou rough sketch of man,

Far too naked to be shamed!

"Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance!

Hob-and-nob with brother Death!

"Thou art mazed, the night is long,
And the longer night is near:
What! I am not all as wrong
As a bitter jest is dear.

"Youthful hopes, by scores, to all,
When the locks are crisp and curled;
Unto me my maudlin gall

And my mockeries of the world.

"Fill the cup, and fill the can!
Mingle madness, mingle scorn!
Dregs of life, and lees of man :

Yet we will not die forlorn."

5

The voice grew faint: there came a further change:
Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range:
Below were men and horses pierced with worms,
And slowly quickening into lower forms;
By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross,
Old plash of rains, and refuse patch'd with moss,
Then some one spakel: "Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time".
2 Another said: "The crime of sense became

The crime of malice, and is equal blame ".

And one: "He had not wholly quench'd his power;
A little grain of conscience made him sour".

At last I heard a voice upon the slope

Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?"

To which an answer peal'd from that high land,

But in a tongue no man could understand;

11843. Said.

2 In the Selection published in 1865 Tennyson here inserted a couplet which he afterwards omitted:—

Another answer'd: "But a crime of sense!"

"Give him new nerves with old experience."

And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.1

First published in The Keepsake for 1851.

Come not, when I am dead,

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave,

To trample round my fallen head,

And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save.
There let the wind sweep and the plover cry;

But thou, go by.

2

Child, if it were thine error or thy crime
I care no longer, being all unblest :

Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time,3
And I desire to rest.

Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie:
Go by, go by.

THE EAGLE

FRAGMENT

First published in 1851. It has not been altered.

He clasps the crag with hooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

1 In Professor Tyndall's reminiscences of Tennyson, inserted in Tennyson's Life, he says he once asked him for some explanation of this line, and the poet's reply was: The power of explaining such concentrated expressions of the imagination was very different from that of writing them". And on another occasion be said very happily: "Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation, according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet". Poetry in its essential forms always suggests infinitely more than it expresses, and at once inspires and kindles the intelligence which is to comprehend it; if that intelligence, which is perhaps only another name for sympathy, does not exist, then, in Byron's happy sarcasm :—

"The gentle readers wax unkind,

And, not so studious for the poet's case,
Insist on knowing what he means, a hard
And hapless situation for a bard".

Possibly Tennyson may have had in his mind Keats's line :—

"There was an awful rainbow once in heaven "