Who, in comparison with him, has so felt the subtle charm, or so
interpreted to us the infinite beauty, of the world in which we live, or
more impressively deepened in the mind and conscience of the age belief
in the verities of religion, while quelling its doubts and quickening
its highest hopes and faith? "Tennyson was a passionate believer in the
immortal life; this was so real to him that he had no patience with
scepticism on the subject. To question it in his presence was to bring
upon one's head a torrent of denunciation and wrath. His great soul was
intuitively conscious of spiritual realities, and he could not
understand how little soulless microbes of men and women were destitute
of his deep perception. Prayer was to him a living fact and power, and
some of his words about it are among the noblest ever written. When some
one asked him about Christ, he pointed to a flower and said, 'What the
sun is to that flower, Christ is to my soul.'"

Apart as he stood from the tumult and the frivolities of his age, he was
yet of it, and sensibly and beneficently influenced it for its higher
and nobler weal. In politics, as we know, he was a liberal
conservative,--a conserver of what was best in the present and the past,
and an advancer of all that tended to true and harmonious progress. His
knowledge of men and things was wide and deep; in the philosophic
thought and even in the science of his time he was deeply read; while he
was lovingly interested in all nature, and especially in the common
people, whom he often wrote of and touchingly depicted in their humble
ways of toil as well as of joy and sorrow. Above all, he was a man of
high and real faith, who believed that "good" was "the final goal of
ill;" and in "the dumb hour clothed in black" that at last came to him,
as it comes to all, he confidingly put his trust in Loving Omnipotence
and reverently and beautifully expressed the hope of seeing the guiding
Pilot of his life when, with the outflow of its river-current into the
ocean of the Divine Unseen, he crossed the bar. For humanity's sake and
the weal of the world in a coming time this was his joyous cry:--

"Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

* * * * *

"Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

* * * * *

"Ring in the valiant man and free,
The l