THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 417
A span is all that we can boast,
An inch or two of time ; Man is but vanity and dust,
In all his flow r and prime.
Hymn 819. Sunset and evening star. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.
Lord Tennyson was born at Somersby, in the Wesley county, in 1 809, and was Poet Laureate, 1 850-92. Crossing the Bar was written in his eighty-first year, on an October day (1889), as he crossed from Aldworth to Farringford. His son says, Before he reached Farringford he had the Moaning of the Bar in his mind, and after dinner he showed me this poem written out. I said, " That is the crown of your life s work." He answered, " It came in a moment." He explained the " Pilot" as " That Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us." A few days before my father s death, in 1892, he said to me, "Mind you put Crossing the Bar at the end of all editions of my poems."
A facsimile of the original MS. shows no trace of a single correction. Tennyson told Dr. Butler, of Cambridge, that a nurse who had been with him for about eighteen months, and had great influence over him, asked him to write a hymn. He replied, Hymns are often such dull things. But the suggestion bore fruit, and he said she was the cause of his writing it. He added, They say that I compose very slowly, but I knocked that off in ten minutes. On the tablet erected to his memory in Freshwater Church are the lines- Speak, living Voice ! With thee death is not death ; Thy life outlives the life of dust and breath.
Tennyson is pre-eminently a Christian poet. No one ever loved the things that were lovely more than he, or more faithfully shaped his work by them. Strong faith bore him up in all life s uncertainties. I am always amazed when I read the New Testament at the splendour of Christ s purity and holiness, and at His infinite pity.
He said, I can hardly understand how any great, imagina tive man, who has deeply lived, suffered, thought, and wrought, can doubt of the soul s continuous progress in the after-life. 1 In Memoriam is the poem of immortality.
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