For power. Let her know her place; 195 She is the second, not the first. A higher hand must make her mild, For she is earthly of the mind, But Wisdom heavenly of the soul, So early, leaving me behind. I would the great world grew like thee, CXV Now fades the last long streak of snow, Now burgeons every maze of quick3 About the flowering squares, and thick By ashen roots the violets blow. Now rings the woodland loud and long, Now dance the lights on lawn and lea, Where now the seamew pipes, or dives 200 205 210 And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom 250 215 220 660 Is that enchanted moan only the swell My own heart's heart, my ownest own, farewell; but for a little space I go: e meanwhile far over moor and fell "Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill! Late, late, so late! but we can enter still. "No light had we; for that we do repent, "No light! so late! and dark and chill the night! O, let us in, that we may find the light! Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. "Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet? O, let us in, tho' late, to kiss his feet! 10 Late, my grandson! half the morning have I paced these sandy tracts, Watch'd again the hollow ridges roaring into cataracts, Wander'd back to living boyhood while I heard the curlews call, I myself so close on death, and death itself in Locksley Hall. 1 This poem was composed in 1880, after a day's ramble over the peninsula of Sirmio, which stretches, almost cut off from the mainland, into the Lake of Garda, Italy. Catullus, the Latin lyric poet, had a villa on Sirmio, and the region is full of memories of him and his poems. Tennyson was rowed out to Sirmio from Desenzano, a town at the southern end of the lake. "O delightful Sirmio," from Cat. Carm. 31. "Brother, hail and then farewell!" the solemn words of farewell to the dead. The reference is to Catullus's tribute to his dead brother, Carm. 101. An echo of Catullus', Carm. vii. 31. "Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque Ocelle;" (Sirmio, scarcely an island, a little darling of an island.) 1 Tennyson believed that the "two Locksley Halls were likely to be in the future two of the most historically interesting of his poems, as descriptive of the tone of the age at two distant periods of his life." H. Tennyson's Memoir, ii. 329. |