University of Virginia Library


78

TWO MEANINGS OF FAME.

I.

To be hunted by curious thousands
As something that ought to be seen,
A Crowned Head, without the sentries
Which vexatiously fence a Queen;
A foreign untamable creature,
Which will not be stared at, through bars,
By the eyes which pursue the meteors,
But heed not the steadfast stars.
To be set (some say by a Tempter,
Two thousand years wiser grown,)
On a pinnacle of the Temple,
With no power to cast yourself down;
No angels to keep your footsteps;
Human, unshaded, alone,

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With a myriad eyes upon you,
And vainly wish yourself stone!
To find the day's labour doubled,
With its strength but as before,
For a soul ever craving perfection,
And a world ever clamouring “more.”

II.

'Tis a place in the homes of thousands
Where your feet will never tread,
Where your name is reverently spoken
As the name of their sacred dead.
'Tis a life in the hearts of thousands
You have struck to a living glow,
Who never hope to see you,
Whose names you will never know;
Who, if they met you to-morrow,
Could not utter their homage true,
Being but of the slow, dumb millions,
Whose thought wakes to music through you;
Who find the world wider and fairer,
Old truths made living and new,

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And life in its humblest duties
Nobler for ever through you!
'Tis the living bond of the ages,
Deathless as Beauty and Truth,
As the old world still fondly cons over
The names she loved in her youth;
And finds the Founts of her Eden
Spring fresh, at your touch, as when first
At the rod of her first Diviners
To music and light they burst:
Fresh now when Science their sources
Traces deep in the ages afar,
When she fathoms and spans the Ocean,
And measures and weighs the star,
As when one Ocean-river
Bathed all the lands in its tide;
Since, at last, the world grown wider,
Finds a Poet with vision as wide.
For the Poem all poets interpret
Better known can but seem more fair!
Not light robs the world of its beauty,
But earth-fogs of pride and care!
'Tis a music whose ocean-thunders,
Sound they ever so long and loud,

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Are fainter than summer breezes
At the height of a summer cloud.
'Tis a music which wakens echoes
Beyond heaven's farthest sun,
If at length earth's million voices
Die into one “Well done!”
 

To Lord Tennyson, after a morning at Farringford, April 26, 1867.