" {3}
The poet longs for the faith of his infant days and of his mother -
"Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew
The beauty and repose of faith,
And the clear spirit shining thro'."
That faith is already shaken, and the long struggle for belief has
already begun.
Tennyson, according to Matthew Arnold, was not un esprit puissant.
Other and younger critics, who have attained to a cock-certain mood
of negation, are apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not
finally agree with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a
weakling or a hypocrite because, after trying all things, he is not
an atheist or a materialist, then the reproach of insincerity or of
feebleness of mind must rest upon Tennyson. But it is manifest that,
almost in boyhood, he had already faced the ideas which, to one of
his character, almost meant despair: he had not kept his eyes
closed. To his extremely self-satisfied accusers we might answer, in
lines from this earliest volume (The Mystic):-
"Ye scorn him with an undiscerning scorn;
Ye cannot read the marvel in his eye,
The still serene abstraction."
He would behold
"One shadow in the midst of a great light,
One reflex from eternity on time,
One mighty countenance of perfect calm,
Awful with most invariable eyes."
His mystic of these boyish years -
"Often lying broad awake, and yet
Remaining from the body, and apart
In intellect and power and will, hath heard
Time flowing in the middle of the night,
And all things creeping to a day of doom.
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