immersed in a sea of light and love, so frequently a phenomenon
of Illumination; he retained throughout all his life a complete and perfect
assurance of immortality.

His sense of union with and relationship to all living things was as much a
part of him as the color of his eyes and hair; he did not have to remind
himself of it, as a religious duty.

He experienced a keen joy in nature and in the innocent, childlike
pleasures of everyday things, and at the same time possessed a splendid
intellect.

All consciousness of sin or evil had been erased from his mind and actually
had no place in his life.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

In the case of Lord Tennyson, we have a definite recognition of two
distinct states of consciousness, finally culminating in a clear experience
of cosmic consciousness; this experience was so positive as to leave no
doubt or indecision in his mind regarding the reality of the spiritual, and
the illusory character of the external life.

In truth Tennyson had so fixed his consciousness in the spiritual rather
than in the external, that he looked out from that inner self, as through
the windows of a house; he was prepared, as he said, to believe that his
body was but an imaginary symbol of himself, but nothing and no one could
persuade him that the real Tennyson, the _I am_ consciousness of being
which was he, was other than spiritual, eternal, undying.

Like so many others, notably Whitman, who have realized a more or less full
degree of cosmic consciousness, Tennyson was deeply and reverently
religious, although not partisanly connected with church work. Tennyson's
early boyhood was marked by experiences which usually befall persons of the
psychic temperament. As he himself described these states of consciousness,
they were moments in which the ego transcended the limits of self
consciousness and entered the limitless realm of spirit.

They do not tabulate with the ordinary trance condition of the
spiritualistic medium, who subjects his own self consciousness to a
"control," although Tennyson always believed that the best of his writings
were inspired by, and written under "the direct influence of higher
intelligences, of whose presence he was distinctly conscious. He felt them
near him and his mind was impressed by their ideas."

The point which we emphasize is that these peculiar states of consciousness
are not synonymous with the western idea of trance as seen in mediumship,
although Tenn