Of these writers, Tennyson is the foremost: he has written _the_ poem of
the hoping doubters, _the_ poem of our age, the grand minor organ-fugue
of _In Memoriam_. It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark
infinite after the vanished Love. His friend is nowhere in his sight, and
God is silent. Death, God's final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its
gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry.
Meanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of
philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and
then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through
the shifting cloudy dark. And if the sun has not arisen on the close of
the book, yet the Aurora of the coming dawn gives light enough to make
the onward journey possible and hopeful: who dares say that he walks in
the full light? that the counsels of God are to him not a matter of
faith, but of vision?
Bewildered in the perplexities of nature's enigmas, and driven by an
awful pain of need, Tennyson betakes himself to the God of nature, thus:
LIV.
The wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave;
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams,
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear;
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God;
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
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