That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular modern moral.
But Honour is the better part, and here was a poet who had the
courage to say so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an
age when highly respectable matrons assure us that "passion," like
charity, covers a multitude of sins. Love and Duty, we must admit,
is "early Victorian."

The Ulysses is almost a rival to the Morte d'Arthur. It is of an
early date, after Arthur Hallam's death, and Thackeray speaks of the
poet chanting his


"Great Achilles whom we knew,"


as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. But it is later
than these. Tennyson said, "Ulysses was written soon after Arthur
Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward,
and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything
in In Memoriam." Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more
noble, and the personal emotion more dignified for the classic veil.
When the plaintive Pessimist ("'proud of the title,' as the Living
Skeleton said when they showed him") tells us that "not to have been
born is best," we may answer with Ulysses -


"Life piled on life
Were all too little."