I feel the thousand cankers of our State, I fain would shake their triple-folded ease, The hogs who can believe in nothing great, Sneering bedridden in the down of Peace Over their scrips and shares, their meats and wine, With stony smirks at all things human and divine!
I honour much, I say, this man's appeal. We drag so deep in our commercial mire, We move so far from greatness, that I feel Exception to be character'd in fire. Who looks for Godlike greatness here shall see The British Goddess, sleek Respectability.
Alas for her and all her small delights! She feels not how the social frame is rack'd. She loves a little scandal which excites; A little feeling is a want of tact. For her there lie in wait millions of foes, And yet the 'not too much' is all the rule she knows.
Poor soul! behold her: what decorous calm! She, with her week-day worldliness sufficed, Stands in her pew and hums her decent psalm With decent dippings at the name of Christ! And she has mov'd in that smooth way so long, She hardly can believe that she shall suffer wrong.
Alas, our Church! alas, her growing ills, And those who tolerate not her tolerance, But needs must sell the burthen of their wills To that half-pagan harlot kept by France! Free subjects of the kindliest of all thrones, Headlong they plunge their doubts among old rags and bones.
Alas, Church writers, altercating tribes-- The vessel and your Church may sink in storms. Christ cried: Woe, woe, to Pharisees and Scribes! Like them, you bicker less for truth than forms. I sorrow when I read the things you write, What unheroic pertness! what un-Christian spite!
Alas, our youth, so clever yet so small, Thin dilletanti deep in nature's plan, Who make the emphatic One, by whom is all, An essence less concentred than a man! Better wild Mahmoud's war-cry once again! O fools, we want a manlike God and Godlike men!
Go, frightful omens. Yet once more I turn To you that mould men's thoughts; I call on you To make opinion warlike, lest we learn A sharper lesson than we ever knew. I hear a thunder though the skies are fair, But shrill you, loud and long, the warning-note: Prepare!
[Lord Tennyson wrote, by Royal request, two stanzas which were sung as part of _God Save the Queen_ at a State concert in connection with the Princess Royal's marriage: these were printed in the _Times_ of January 26, 1858.]