sufficient closeness to form a continuous piece. There
is also an invocatory introduction, and a closing marriage poem,
written on the wedding of one of the writer's sisters, which, strange
as it may seem, serves again to introduce the memory of the departed.
The intervening poems are as various as a miscellaneous collection;
but the remembrance of the dead ever mingles with the thought of
the living. His birth-day, his death-day, the festive rejoicings of
Christmastide and the New Year, recall him; the scenes in which he was
a companion, the house where he was a welcome guest, the season when
the lawyer's vacation gave him leisure for a long visit, revive him
to the mind. The Danube, on whose banks he died--the Severn, by
whose banks he appears to have been buried--nay, the points of
the compass--are associated with him. Sometimes the association is
slighter still; and in a few pieces the allusion is so distant that it
would not have been perceived without the clew. Such is the following
(one of several poems) on the New Year.

CIV.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

"The following is of more direct bearing on the theme, and is moreover
one of those charming pieces of domestic painting in which Tennyson
e