He still wrote, in the intervals of a malady which brought him "as near death as a man could be without dying." He was an example of the great physical strength which, on the whole, seems usually to accompany great mental power. The strength may be dissipated by passion, or by undue labour, as in cases easily recalled to memory, but neither cause had impaired the vigour of Tennyson. Like Goethe, he lived out all his life; and his eightieth birthday was cheered both by public and private expressions of reverence and affection.
Of Tennyson's last three years on earth we may think, in his own words, that his "Life's latest eve endured Nor settled into hueless grey."Nature was as dear to him and as inspiring as of old; men and affairs and letters were not slurred by his intact and energetic mind. His Demeter and other Poems, with the dedication to Lord Dufferin, appeared in the December of the year. The dedication was the lament for the dead son and the salutation to the Viceroy of India, a piece of resigned and manly regret. The Demeter and Persephone is a modern and tender study of the theme of the most beautiful Homeric Hymn.
The ancient poet had no such thought of the restored Persephone as that which impels Tennyson to describe her "Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies All night across the darkness, and at dawn Falls on the threshold of her native land."The spring, the restored Persephone, comes more vigorous and joyous to the shores of the AEgean than to ours. All Tennyson's own is Demeter's awe of those "imperial disimpassioned eyes" of her daughter, come from the bed and the throne of Hades, the Lord of many guests. The hymn, happy in its ending, has no thought of the grey heads of the Fates, and their answer to the goddess concerning "fate beyond the Fates," and the breaking of the bonds of Hades. The ballad of Owd Roa is one of the most spirited of the essays in dialect to which Tennyson had of late years inclined. Vastness merely expresses, in terms of poetry, Tennyson's conviction that, without immortality, life is a series of worthless contrasts. An opposite opinion may be entertained, but a man has a right to express his own, which, coming from so great a mind, is not undeserving of attention; or, at least, is hardly deserving of reproof. The poet's idea is also stated thus in The Ring, in terms which perhaps do not fall below the poetical; or, at least, do not drop into "the utterly unpoetical":-"The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man, But cannot wholly free itself from Man, Are calling to each other thro' a dawn Stranger than earth has ever seen; the veil Is rending, and the Voices of the day Are heard across the Voices of the dark.