rms, to define the poet's creed, though we know that he
was won by the Broad Church teaching of his friends, Frederick Robertson
and Denison Maurice, and had himself many a battle to fight with honest
doubts until--as his 'Crossing the Bar' shows us--he finally conquered
and laid them. But while there is an absence of definite doctrine in his
work there is no question about his religious convictions or of his
belief in the eternal verities, the immanence of God in man and the
universe. Throughout his poems he assumes the existence of a great
Spirit and recognizes that our souls are a part of Him, however Faith at
times seems to veil her face from the poet, and all appears a mystery,
though a mystery presided over by infinite Power and Love. The great
problems of metaphysics and of man's origin and destiny, we are told,
occupied much of his thought, and he dwelt upon them with eager, intense
interest, and touched upon them with great candor, earnestness, and
truthfulness. No sophistry could shake his belief in man's immortality,
for without belief in this doctrine the human race, he was convinced,
had not incentive enough to virtue, while all man's inspirations were
otherwise meaningless. For the doctrine of Evolution, in its
materialistic aspect, he had nothing but scorn, though he accepted it in
the more spiritual guise with which Russel Wallace propounded it. If we
come from the brutes we are nevertheless linked with the Divine, he
believed, and it was the Divine in man that was to conquer the brute
within him, and, in the upward struggle, work out salvation. So, in the
realm of physical science, on the principles of which, as Huxley tells
us, he had a great grasp, the poet, while appalled by the mystery,
accepts and indeed rejoices in its truths, though he cannot acquiesce in
a godless world or in the denial of a life to come, in which the race,
through infinite love, shall be brought into union with God.

But leaving here Tennyson's speculations and beliefs,--a most
interesting part of the poet's analytical and reflective character,--let
us look for a little at the man personally, and record briefly the chief
incidents in his quiet though ideal home-life. To those who know the
Memoir by his son, Hallam Tennyson,--a memoir that while paying honor to
filial reverence and devotion is at the same time and in all respects
most worthy of its high theme,--the events in the poet's life will
hardly need dwelling upon, though