Year will graze the heel of year,
But seldom comes the poet here,
And the Critic's rarer still."


Still the lines hold good -


"Some too low would have thee shine,
Some too high--no fault of thine."


The end was now at hand. A sense of weakness was felt by the poet on
September 3, 1892: on the 28th his family sent for Sir Andrew Clark;
but the patient gradually faded out of life, and expired on Thursday,
October 6, at 1.35 A.M. To the very last he had Shakespeare by him,
and his windows were open to the sun; on the last night they were
flooded by the moonlight. The description of the final scenes must
be read in the Biography by the poet's son. "His patience and quiet
strength had power upon those who were nearest and dearest to him; we
felt thankful for the love and the utter peace of it all." "The life
after death," Tennyson had said just before his fatal illness, "is
the cardinal point of Christianity. I believe that God reveals
Himself in every individual soul; and my idea of Heaven is the
perpetual ministry of one soul to another." He had lived the life of
heaven upon earth, being in all his work a minister of things
honourable, lovely, consoling, and ennobling to the souls of others,
with a ministry which cannot die. His body sleeps next to that of
his friend and fellow-poet, Robert Browning, in front of Chaucer's
monument in the Abbey.