Tidbit from Tennyson for a Melancholy Day

I never thought of happy memories as being sad until the people giving them significance were taken away. Now "the days that are no more" and the reminders of them are painful. Yet, if I could go back in time, would I do without them? I think not, for as Tennyson points out in another poem; "I hold it true whate'er befall, I feel it when I sorrow most - 'tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." 

                                                                  
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

   Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

   Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

   Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!