orms--nay, in the ignoblest
form of a fashion--have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular
pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which
prevails. For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followed
the other in a past generation. Fleeting as they are, it cannot be
within their competence to neglect or reject the philosophy of "In
Memoriam." To the dainty stanzas of that poem, it is true, no great
struggle of reasoning was to be committed, nor would any such dispute be
judiciously entrusted to the rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson here
proposes, rather than closes with, the ultimate question of our destiny.
The conflict, for which he proves himself strong enough, is in that
magnificent poem of a thinker, "Lucretius." But so far as "In Memoriam"
attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is true to the experience of
human anguish and intellect.

I say intellect advisedly. Not for him such blunders of thought as
Coleridge's in "The Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hartleap Well."
Coleridge names the sun, moon, and stars as when, in a dream, the
sleeping imagination is threatened with some significant illness. We see
them in his great poem as apparitions. Coleridge's senses are infinitely
and transcendently spiritual. But a candid reader must be permitted to
think the mere story silly. The wedding-guest might rise the morrow morn
a sadder but he assuredly did not rise a wiser man.

As for Wordsworth, the most beautiful stanzas of "Hartleap Well" are
fatally rebuked by the truths of Nature. He shows us the ruins of an
aspen wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place, forlorn because an
innocent stag, hunted, had there broken his heart in a leap from the
rocks above; grass would not grow there.

This beast not unobserved by Nature fell,
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to be
these woodland ruins--cruelly, because the daily sight of the world
blossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable to
us by such a fiction.

The Being that is in the clouds and air
. . .
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creature whom He loves.

The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible
alteration of Nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we have to
dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to as