"Ever young the face that dwells
With reason cloister'd in the brain." {10}


In this way to many In Memoriam is almost a life-long companion: we
walk with Great-heart for our guide through the valley Perilous.

In this respect In Memoriam is unique, for neither to its praise nor
dispraise is it to be compared with the other famous elegies of the
world. These are brief outbursts of grief--real, as in the hopeless
words of Catullus over his brother's tomb; or academic, like Milton's
Lycidas. We are not to suppose that Milton was heart-broken by the
death of young Mr King, or that Shelley was greatly desolated by the
death of Keats, with whom his personal relations had been slight, and
of whose poetry he had spoken evil. He was nobly stirred as a poet
by a poet's death--like Mr Swinburne by the death of Charles
Baudelaire; but neither Shelley nor Mr Swinburne was lamenting
dimidium animae suae, or mourning for a friend


"Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me."


The passion of In Memoriam is personal, is acute, is life-long, and
thus it differs from the other elegies. Moreover, it celebrates a
noble object, and thus is unlike the ambiguous affection, real or
dramatic, which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem
stands alone, cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking