No, it was
not the speculations and arguments that consoled or encouraged us.
We did not listen to Tennyson as to Mr Frederic Harrison's glorified
Anglican clergyman. We could not murmur, like the Queen of the May -
"That good man, the Laureate, has told tis words of peace."
What we valued was the poet's companionship. There was a young
reader to whom All along the Valley came as a new poem in a time of
recent sorrow.
"The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away,"
said the singer of In Memoriam, and in that hour it seemed as if none
could endure for two-and-thirty years the companionship of loss. But
the years have gone by, and have left
"Ever young the face that dwells
With reason cloister'd in the brain." {10}
In this way to many In Memoriam is almost a life-long companion: we
walk with Great-heart for our guide through the valley Perilous.
In this respect In Memoriam is unique, for neither to its praise nor
dispraise is it to be compared with the other famous elegies of the
world. These are brief outbursts of grief--real, as in the hopeless
words of Catullus over his brother's tomb; or academic, like Milton's
Lycidas. We are not to suppose that Milton was heart-broken by the
death of young Mr King, or that Shelley was greatly desolated by the
death of Keats, with whom his personal relations had been slight, and
of whose poetry he had spoken evil.
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