Thus when in the "spiritual prime" the soul reawakens, love must waken with it too. Whether in death there be consciousness he will not decide, or whether it be merely sleep. But if I follow rightly the very complex stanzas in the forty-fourth and forty-fifth cantos-in the grown man there is oblivion of the past; yet now and then comes some unaccounted memory, "a little flash, a mystic hint". So too among the happy dead, there may be a sudden memory of the earlier life in which the happy spirit may recall the one he loved. Yet this does not suffice to allay the poet's desire for communion; and the argument leads to a hope of less fleeting glimpses. It is only the baby who has not the sense of separate existence, "has never thought that 'this is I'". But the senses teach him

As thro' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.

The lesson thus taught him by the "separateness of blood and breath" is never forgotten; else to what end were they given,

Had man to learn himself anew

Beyond the second birth of Death?

And though in this life the path behind us, which we have travelled in our progress of development, is dark, "shadowed by the growing hour", yet "in that deep dawn behind the tomb" there can be no blackness. The landscape of the past will lie clear from margin to margin, and love, not circumscribed to those few years of earthly knowledge, will shed over it "a rosy warmth from marge to marge". For against the thought that after death each separate self may fuse into the "general soul" the poet protests; such a belief

Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide

The eternal soul from all beside;

And I shall know him when we meet.

But to this belief, it will be seen, the seeker is led by no other guide than hope. He interprets rightly the aspiration of the lover, which is no vague longing but definite desire to meet again the loved one; and the reason for believing that this aspiration will be gratified is just the same as for believing in an after life. The aspiration is natural to man, and God made him with it, therefore the aspiration will be answered.

Yet the poet knows well that his "brief lays of sorrow born cannot be held to close " grave doubts and answers here proposed". He admits that Sorrow takes doubts "and makes them vassals unto Love", to find some solace; and it is little solace: for we go back to the cry of anguish, the petition for presence of the dead. But then, with the thought of the dead always at hand, comes another wave in the tide of speculation (for the movement of the poem is rather that of wave after wave than step after step in an ascent; the march is bounded by the point whence it set out). Do we indeed desire the dead beside us that they may see into our hearts? Whose heart will bear the scrutiny? Yet the dead watch, like God, with large allowance for human frailty. Can we therefore, who live, make the like allowance? Can we preach that human frailty matters little in the long account? and if so, may not divine Philosophy become "procuress to the lords of hell"?

Once again the poet falls back on his cry of hope and faith, "that somehow good will be the final goal of ill"; but the world offers little confirmation. Nature squanders the single life to save the type: is God more careful than Nature, or at strife with

her? Even the type passes: may not man, too, pass? even man

Who trusted God was love indeed,

And love Creation's final law-
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed.

And once again there is no answer but in hope. It is in passages like these, where Tennyson admits unquestioningly to the fullest the hard records discovered by science in the rocks and stones, while he doubts and questions of the truth which the Bible and all the framework of Christianity affirm, that he seemed to the mind of his own day to border upon heresy. To us such writings seem scarcely to bear upon religion. We assume that the facts of geology are facts, which reason cannot ignore. The facts of revelation reason must put into a wholly different category; and here was his service to the religious thought of his time, that he led the way in accepting what must be accepted, and in directing the battle where the battle can be fought. He served at once free-thought and religion in a way that no divine, who is in a sense a soldier set to defend certain positions irrespective of his personal convictions, could ever have done.

After this fifty-sixth canto, which states the case for despair at its strongest, there is a slackening in the tension of thought. One might almost say that a series closes with the fifty-seventh canto and a new one opens with the fifty-eighth. The poem turns from the problems of the universe, as they are evoked by the stimulus of sorrow, to a reflection of the passing moods of grief. Thus you have the plea of the one left on earth not to be forgotten, though his friend in that high sphere of "ransomed reason may converse with the flower of all the ages. Out of all the question

ing and all the imagining there has come this certitude, arrived at by no logical process, but by brooding meditation, that somewhere and somehow that friend survives as that friend's self, though emancipated from the bondage and limitations of sense. And so we pass to earthlier thoughts, forecasts of what the dead man might have attained to on this earth; his likeness comes out to those of his spiritual kin; the stamp of greatness is recognized in death; and gradually the passion quiets down till at the second Christmas all that is left of revolt is a revolt against grief's inevitable decay.

O grief, can grief be changed to less!

The

But the answer is now sane and peaceable. passing of grief's poignancy means only its diffusion through the whole nature, and there remains only the abiding resentment against Death, in that

He put our lives so far apart

We cannot hear each other speak.

But that both lives last and will be again united is now held for certain. Yet still there is the "backward fancy" which pictures what might have been; children of their mixed blood, who should have "babbled 'Uncle' on my knee"; of lives lived together and together ended.

And he that died in Holy Land

Would reach us out the shining hand,
And take us as a single soul.

There again is what seems an explicit adherence to the truth of revealed Christianity; but a student of Tennyson's thought must insist upon the fact that such belief is nowhere treated as vital; it is indeed put in this passage as the culmination of a train of fancy and not as the pillar of a faith.

With the eighty-fifth canto new influences come

into the work. The lines are addressed to a friend who shared with him the "common grief" of Hallam's death; and they have for their message that the poet does not shut himself up in his sorrow, but rather courts human fellowship and sympathy, though what he has to offer is not the prime of love, but rather its aftermath:

The primrose of the later year,
As not unlike to that of Spring.

And with the renewed fellowship comes new life"after showers, ambrosial air" to blow the fever from his cheek, and to quicken fancy with new and glowing images. Nor is this the only new sympathy. The ninety-sixth canto is plainly addressed

to a woman:

Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
Are tender over drowning flies;

and to this new love the man has to justify himself -to this woman who holds that "doubt is devilborn". And the answer is, to plead the case of Hallam, one who, "perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds", did at the last "beat his music out". The lines upon the faith that lives in honest doubt have been hackneyed by endless quotation, and have for the moment lost their thrill; yet they were a message of comfort for Tennyson's generation,-for the race whose mind is reflected in Kingsley's Yeast and the like. The fight has been fought, and so much of peace and agreement has followed that we scarcely think of Tennyson as among the fighters; yet his tranquil wisdom perhaps won more battles than were gained by angrier disputants.

From this point onward in the poem the concentration of thought lessens; or say rather, the eye focuses itself to a wider prospect. Through all the moods of memory one can follow the widening of