's pages with her own story in mind, the shadows are
heavy. In the over-active, restless reflections, one feels the working
of a mind incessantly exercised by its own self-defense. The suggestion
comes to us of a nature which has lavished all its energies on thinking,
and lacked strength for living, and so has failed of that vision which
comes not from thought but from life. The cramping horizon, the low sky,
the earthly limit within which love saddens and hope dies,--all seem to
bespeak that loss of truest touch with the universe which comes when one
is not true in act to the law he acknowledges. The sense of a tragedy in
herself, more pathetic than any she has depicted, touches us with awe,
with tenderness, with compunctious thought of our own failures. We are
"purified by terror and by pity."

The largest wisdom and the finest insight of our age are blended in
Tennyson's "In Memoriam." Written half a century ago, its truth not less
than its beauty stands unshaken by the later thought and knowledge.
Antedating the work of Darwin and Spencer, it accepts the principles of
Evolution. Its atmosphere is wholly modern. It is pervaded by the
sentiment of Christian faith, but it does not lean for support on dogma
or miracle. The difficulties it encounters are neither the terror in the
old view of the hereafter nor the problems incident to the supernatural
theology. The poet stands before the amazing spectacle of nature as seen
by science, beholding along with its prodigal beauty its appalling
destruction and its unswerving march. It is no longer hell, but
extinction, which seems to threaten man.

The intellectual problem of the universe is faced, but the medium through
which it is seen is the experience of a human heart filled by a sacred
love and then struck by bereavement. It is the old, typical, deepest
experience of man,--love confronted by death.

The poem moves like a symphony, weaving together requiem, cradle-song,
battle-march, and psalm, to a consummation of tender and majestic peace.
As the recurrent theme which governs the whole may be taken this:---

"How pure at heart and sound in head,
With what divine affection bold,
Should be the man whose thoughts would hold
An hour's communion with the dead."

These are the conditions,--fidelity, sanity, divinely bold affections;
this is the fruition, the sense of a mystic communion with the unseen
friend.

One passage gives the reconciliatio