hanasian Creeds, or the fables incorporated in the Hebrew
Cosmogony. But that past is past indeed, and never can come back
again. The world returns no more to discarded ideals; the conception
of theology as "queen of the sciences" is as hopelessly impossible in
the civilised world as the Divine right of kings.

The result is that prophets and poets are "men of God" still, and
notwithstanding Lalande and Comte, the heavens are not so dazzling as
to quench for them the glory of a Diviner revelation which they scarce
conceal. I frankly say that I had rather believe all the fables of the
Talmud and the Koran than that the empty shadows of a vulgar
superstition are all that lie beneath the stately verse of "In
Memoriam," or the "Rabbi Ben Ezra" of Browning.

The religion of Tennyson is a perfume which fills much that he writes.
It is a "spirit" which broods over many a song, but is incarnate, so to
speak, in the elegy which immortalises the tomb of his lost friend.
For Tennyson, the spirit of poetry is the spirit of religion--a blowing
to music of the deepest thoughts of the philosopher. In "Merlin and
the Gleam" we may read this as in an allegory:--

Great the Master
And sweet the magic,
When o'er the valley
In early summers,
O'er the mountain,
On human faces,
And all around me
Moving to melody
Floated the gleam.

The spirit of poetry, which bade him follow on in spite of
discouragement, touched all on which it hovered with a mystic light,
"moving him to melody". It was the soul of religion, binding the
spirit of man to nature and to "human faces" in themselves, and to the
Supreme, in whom all is One.

But what is an allegory in the spirit of the gleam is a reality in the
song of love, "passing the love of women," which he laid as the noblest
offering ever yet made at the bier of a departed friend. The religion
of Tennyson is there, but the poem must be carefully studied if its
true inwardness is to be grasped. Isolating a few stanzas wherein the
poet, alarmed and perplexed at the cruelties and terrors of Nature, her
dark and circuitous ways, her astounding prodigality and wastefulness,
lifts up in his helplessness "lame hands of faith," and falters where
once he firmly trod, many writers have professed to see in Tennyson the
expression of a reverent agnosticism. Such agnosticism we may all
respect, for it is very different from the noisy, clamorous thing
which, aping in name the humilit