A Day with the Poet Tennyson Part 3

_The Brook._

In the course of the evening, the poet would retire to the "den" for a second "sacred half-hour" of unbroken silence, into which we need not follow him. Lastly, when slumber filled the house, and night hung black above the trees, he ascended to a platform on the leads of the house-top, to observe the march and majesty of the stars. Farringford, it has been said, "seemed so remote and still, and as though the jar of the outside world had never entered it." But in the throbbing starlight, the sea purring in the distance, the seer on the roof communing with the mysterious skies above him, it was more than ever a House of Dream--a house whose roof touched heaven. Here and thus were thrilling _nocturnes_ imagined.

"Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

"Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me.

"Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves A s.h.i.+ning furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

"Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of the lake: So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip Into my bosom and be lost in me."

_The Princess._

And so we leave Alfred Tennyson, at the end of his day, gazing "forward to the starry track glimmering up the height beyond," alone with the Creator.

"He lifts me to the golden doors: The flashes come and go; All heaven bursts her starry floors, And strews her lights below;"

while the discords of earth are hushed beneath the magic of the spheral harmony, and "The Gleam" hovers upward into heaven.