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 through 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."

"So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries a thousand types are gone :

I care for nothing, all shall go.'

More than all this, when he has shared, sympathised with, used the scientific learning of modern thought, he can share too in the fears it excites; can express the dangers it holds in its hands, can warn it against the pride of independence.

"Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix

With men and prosper! Who shall fix

Her pillars? Let her work prevail.

But on her forehead sits a fire;

She sets her forward countenance
And leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.

Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain—

She cannot fight the fear of death.
What is she, cut from love and faith,
But some wild Pallas from the brain

Of Demons? fiery-hot to burst

All barriers in her onward race

For power. Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first."

There is another range of the characteristics of the present more important than these, and with which Tennyson's poetry is proportionally deeply occupied. It is he who, more than any other, echoes back the complexities, the subtleties, the difficulties of the more advanced stages of the world's history,-not as they appear on the broad historic ground, however, but as they spring from, and affect individual minds. It is he, too, who treads with closer footsteps than any other on the heels of those whisperings of the unseen that never cease to haunt us ; it is he who grasps most eagerly at the spiritual world within us and beyond us, who presses behind the curtain, who "stretches lame hands of faith, and gropes;" to whom sometimes, like Stephen, the heavens are opened, and who sometimes fades into silence with the sad, almost despairing cry, "Behind the veil, behind the veil." We believe the very reverse of that theory to be true, which represents the infant ages of the world as lying closest to the spiritual and invisible mystery which permeates and embraces our mortal life. That portion of Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Youth," which has made this doctrine so familiar, was probably suggested by Henry Vaughan's poem of the "Retreate,' beginning

"Happy those early dayes when I
Shined in my angell-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white celestiall thought."

The older poem gives expression to the sad yearnings of our nature after a lost purity and innocence. Wordsworth has taken the exquisite idea and imagery there

suggested, and, while improving its beauty a thousandfold, he has transformed the original thought, and chosen to represent the child, not as allied in its unstained whiteness to the angel-world, but as emerging fresh from the world of spirits, retaining something of its light, and standing in closer and more conscious relations to it than the grown man. We apprehend the element of truth involved in this view lies in the fact, that to the early dwellers on earth, and to the child, external Nature itself suffices to excite those feelings of wonder, and faith, and longing, with which we now gaze into the unseen beyond it. The world is at once unfamiliar, and yet the spirit is in an unbroken harmony with it; and hence that which is to the child the spiritual world lies close about him ; while we, whose imaginations, fleeting intuitions, and dim promptings, have apprehended another more hidden existence, try vainly to penetrate thither, and look back with envy on the child moving freely in that finer air of influence for which we pant; we confound his spiritual world with our own, and dream that an ante-natal splendour still glitters on his head. And for Wordsworth, indeed, this dream had a truth it has not for most men. He may be said, to the end of his days, to have moved in this child's world, and never, as a permanent state of feeling, to have penetrated beyond those more elementary spiritual influences, of which external Nature is the dispenser. The unseen, with which he is ever surrounded, lies in the hidden existence, the "sublime sense," which pervades the mountain, lake, and river, "the round ocean and the living air," which whispers in the night-winds, gives grace to the fleeting clouds, majesty to the sunset, and makes sad the shining stars. He is still in the child's universe. He brings to it a deeper yearning and a wider vision, an insight subtler, finer, profounder than the child's; but, like the child's, calm and unharassed. External Nature is satisfying to him. In this lovely earthly island, hanging in its mysterious limits of space and time,

sea,

he is content to gather beauty in the interior, among the mountains and woodlands; he has no call to go down to the shore, and listen to the solemn roar of the mysterious and waste his eyes in gazing over the dim and limitless waters. And so in the early ages of the world, the broad Homeric days, few and brief were the glances which even the most commanding intellect threw beyond the limits of terrestrial being. In Nature's hidden powers and influences they too found their field of spiritual curiosity. Occasional glances, no doubt, struck further; and the profound spiritual convictions of the Hebrews furnish an exception to the general rule of this limitation; but even their idea of the Divine Being was chiefly confined to his operations in this world only. As the world has grown older, its accumulated experience and gathered insight have never, indeed, sufficed to exhaust the mystery of the natural world; but side by side with it another has been growing more apparent.

Every observant man must, we think, allow that mankind stand in a more peculiar relation to spiritual things than they have hitherto done. Spiritual things are at once nearer to us and less certain; we feel them folding closer about us, and in another moment we doubt them altogether; in proportion as they seem within our reach, is the terror mixed with our disappointment when we attempt to grasp them. Tennyson has expressed, in the most daring manner, the utmost intensity of this feeling:

"That which we dare invoke to bless ;

Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
He, They, One, All; within, without;
The Power in darkness whom we guess."

More intimate spiritual convictions may in former times have possessed individual souls, but there never was a time when the invisible world occupied the thoughts and mingled itself with the daily interests of so large a mass of men as now. When another world was, to living and

dead alike, a future world, was relegated in universal opinion to a period beyond the undated sleep of the grave, men believed in it with less difficulty, and lived less concerned by it. Now there are a mass of minds who cannot conceive it as merely future; it is another coexistent world, occupied by the same vital interests as our own, and separated from us by a veil at once thin and impenetrable. And with the growing sense of its closeness and its importance have grown the eagerness of our questionings, the impatience of our uncertainties, the bold and face-to-face grappling of our doubts. Every now and then a new medicine is discovered; it is a specific; we indulge the hope that a disease is destroyed; and for a time it seems to work cures proportioned to its reputation. But before long there comes a reaction; it is found to fail; it seems to lose its virtue, even to become powerless, and falls into utter disrepute. And so how many books have been written to prove that which men most desire to believe, how eagerly have they been welcomed, how wilfully believed! how have thousands rested on them, who never read them, through their faith in those who have been truly convinced by them! Then, as the number spreads of those who judge for themselves, there are seen some who find they do not touch their symptoms. The rumour spreads that they are not infallible, and the gloom is proportioned to the over-confident hope. How many hands have been pierced by leaning on Paley's Theology! And it is the same of those who strive to disprove. How many a desperate charge has flattered itself it should cut through to the very standard of faith, and rushed on to be broken like breaking water, yet leaving terrible memorials of its power! Backwards and forwards rolls the tide of battle, and in proportion as the infantry of Trust wins its slow and painful steps forward, the more desperate and overwhelming seem the onslaughts of the enemy.

In the "In Memoriam" of Tennyson, this modern