arly outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his
finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be,
indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in
which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood,
frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: See _Christmas Eve_ and _Easter
Day._] of Tennyson, [Footnote: See _In Memoriam._] of Arnold, [Footnote:
See _Dover Beach._] of Clough. [Footnote: See _The New Sinai, Qui
Laborat Orat, Hymnos Amnos, Epistrausium._] So, too, James Thomson muses
with regret,

How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray
With all the others whom we love so well!
All disbelief and doubt might pass away,
And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell.
Conscience replies, There is but one good rest,
Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast.
[Footnote: _The Reclusant._]

In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet
sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious
questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick
to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind,
rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his
contemporaries,

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he
expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any
more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the
heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and
love." [Footnote: _Preface_ to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards
proved spurious).]

The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who
prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a
shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very
satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in
that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the
quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question
that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious
doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has
been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious
poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is
good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will
seriously conten