“Though Beautie be the Marke of praise,
        And yours of whom I sing be such
        As not the world can praise too much,
    Yet is’t your vertue now I raise.”

Here again we see that our literature of to-day is no new born thing, but rooted in the past.  Jonson’s poem, however, is a mere trifle, Tennyson’s one of the great things of our literature.  The first notes of In Memoriam were written when sorrow was fresh, but it was not till seventeen years later that it was given to the world.  It is perhaps the most perfect monument ever raised to friendship.  For in mourning his own loss Tennyson mourned the loss of all the world. “‘I’ is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking thro’ him,” he says.

After the prologue, the poem tells of the first bitter hopeless grief, of how friends try to comfort the mourners.

    “One writes, that ‘Other friends remain,’
        That ’Loss is common to the race’—­
        And common is the common-place,
    And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

    “That loss if common would not make
        My own less bitter, rather more: 
        Too common!  Never morning wore
    To evening, but some heart did break.”

And yet even now he can say—­

    “I hold it true, whate’er befall;
        I feel it, when I sorrow most;
        ’Tis better to have loved and lost
    Than never to have loved at all.”

And so the months glide by, and the first Christmas comes, “The time draws near the birth of Christ,” the bells ring—­

    “Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
        Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.

    “This year I slept and woke with pain,
        I almost wish’d no more to wake,
        And that my hold on life would break
    Before I heard those bells again.”

But when Christmas comes again the year has brought calm if not forgetfulness—­

    “Again at Christmas did we weave
        The holly round the Christmas hearth;
        The silent snow possess’d the earth,
    And calmly fell our Christmas-eve: 

    “The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,
        No wing of wind the region swept,
        But over all things brooding slept
    The quiet sense of something lost.

    “As in the winters left behind,
        Again our ancient games had place,
        The mimic picture’s breathing grace,
    And dance and song and hoodman-blind.”

The years pass on, the brothers and sisters grow up and scatter, and at last the old home has to be left.  Sadly the poet takes leave of all the loved spots in house and garden.  Strangers will soon come there, people who will neither care for nor love the dear familiar scene—­

    “We leave the well-beloved place
        Where first we gazed upon the sky;
        The roofs, that heard our earliest cry,
    Will shelter one of stranger race.