Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Hunt and Lee, comps. The Book of the Sonnet. 1867.

II. On Seeing a Child Blush on His First View of a Corpse

Charles Tennyson (1808–1879)

’T IS good our earliest sympathies to trace,

And I would muse upon a little thing,—

What brought the blush into that infant’s face,

When first confronted with the rueful King?

He boldly came: what made his courage less?

A signal for the heart to beat less free

Are all imperial presences; and he

Was awed by Death’s consummate kingliness,

And by the high and peerless front he bore.

No thought of dying armies crossed the lad;

He feared the stranger, though he knew no more;

Surmising and surprised, but most, afraid;

As Crusoe, wandering on the desert shore,

Saw but an alien footmark, and was sad!