The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson eBook

loyal to us, and by the three hundred millions who in India own us as their rulers:  of this vast empire England is now the capital and centre.  That she should fulfil completely and honourably the duties to which destiny has called her will be the prayer of every patriot, that he should by his own efforts contribute all in his power to further such fulfilment must be his earnest desire.  It would be no exaggeration to say that Tennyson contributed more than any man who has ever lived to what may be called the higher political education of the English-speaking races.  Of imperial federation he was at once the apostle and the pioneer.  In poetry which appealed as probably no other poetry has appealed to every class, wherever our language is spoken, he dwelt fondly on all that constitutes the greatness and glory of England, on her grandeur in the past, on the magnificent promise of the part she will play in the future, if her sons are true to her.  There should be no distinction, for she recognises no distinction between her children at home and her children in her colonies.  She is the common mother of a common race:  one flag, one sceptre, the same proud ancestry, the same splendid inheritance.  “How strange England cannot see,” he once wrote, “that her true policy lies in a close union with her colonies.”

  Sharers of our glorious past,
  Shall we not thro’ good and ill
  Cleave to one another still? 
  Britain’s myriad voices call,
  Sons be welded all and all
  Into one imperial whole,
  One with Britain, heart and soul! 
  One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!

Thus did the poetry of Tennyson draw closer, and thus will it continue to draw closer those sentimental ties—­ties, in Burke’s phrase, “light as air, but strong as links of iron,” which bind the colonies to the mother country; and in so doing, if he did not actually initiate, he furthered, as no other single man has furthered, the most important movement of our time.  Nor has any man of genius in the present century—­not Dickens, not Ruskin—­been moved by a purer spirit of philanthropy, or done more to show how little the qualities and actions which dignify humanity depend, or need depend, on the accidents of fortune.  He brought poetry into touch with the discoveries of science, and with the speculations of theology and metaphysics, and though, in treating such subjects, his power is not, perhaps, equal to his charm, the debt which his countrymen owe him, even intellectually, is incalculable.

[Footnote 1:  See Wordsworth’s letter to Lady Beaumont, ‘Prose Works’, vol. ii., p. 176.]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION