The silence of the veiled OEnone, as
she springs into her lover's last embrace, is perhaps more affecting
and more natural than Tennyson's
"She lifted up a voice
Of shrill command, 'Who burns upon the pyre?'"
The St Telemachus has the old splendour and vigour of verse, and,
though written so late in life, is worthy of the poet's prime:-
"Eve after eve that haggard anchorite
Would haunt the desolated fane, and there
Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low
'Vicisti Galilaee'; louder again,
Spurning a shatter'd fragment of the God,
'Vicisti Galilaee!' but--when now
Bathed in that lurid crimson--ask'd 'Is earth
On fire to the West? or is the Demon-god
Wroth at his fall?' and heard an answer 'Wake
Thou deedless dreamer, lazying out a life
Of self-suppression, not of selfless love.'
And once a flight of shadowy fighters crost
The disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wings
Came sweeping by him, and pointed to the West,
And at his ear he heard a whisper 'Rome,'
And in his heart he cried 'The call of God!'
And call'd arose, and, slowly plunging down
Thro' that disastrous glory, set his face
By waste and field and town of alien tongue,
Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphere
Of westward-wheeling stars; and every dawn
Struck from him his own shadow on to Rome.
Foot-sore, way-worn, at length he touch'd his goal,
The Christian city."
Akbar's Dream may be taken, more or less, to represent the poet's own
theology of a race seeking after God, if perchance they may find Him,
and the closing Hymn was a favourite with Tennyson.
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