TEN YEARS' SILENCE.
87
Too sadly for their peace, so put it back
For calmer hours in memory's darkest hold,
If unforgotten! should it cross thy dreams
So might it come like one that looks content"
1842–1850.
For calmer hours in memory's darkest hold,
If unforgotten! should it cross thy dreams
So might it come like one that looks content"
1842–1850.
"Ulysses." Unaltered.
A line of this poem was quoted by Thomas Carlyle, in "Past and Present" (1843), p. 49, from which we may conclude that the first edition of these Poems had fallen into his hands, and been read by him.
The poem of "Ulysses" is founded on a passage in the "Divina Commedia" of Dante.
In the following lines—
"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use,
As tho' to breathe were life,"
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use,
As tho' to breathe were life,"
there seems to be a remarkable resemblance of thought and expression to a speech of Ulysses, in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" (act iii. sc. 3).
