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series of pictures or symbols, intended to instruct and to educate, but never revealing a present Divinity. I am inclined to connect this view of nature with Tennyson's general tendency to agnosticism. In this respect I think both Wordsworth and Browning far more vigorous and pronounced believers than Tennyson. And this agnosticism is accompanied by an idealism more subjective than Browning's, an idealism that at times seems to doubt the real existence of any world but that of feeling and of thought.

The world is not so much the immediate product of a present God as it is the shadow of a God who is far away:

Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by, Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye,

Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, through the human soul;

Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the whole.

In fact, this picture or shadow of the Infinite One does not answer to the Reality except in part. Nature, owing to our imperfect vision, is a distorted image of Him who is reflected in it:

My God, I would not live

Save that I think this gross, hard-seeming world
Is our misshaping vision of the Powers

Behind the world, that make our griefs our gains.

Our mortal veil

And shatter'd phantom of that infinite One,

Who made thee unconceivably Thyself
Out of His whole World-self and all in all.

I cannot understand the least flower that blows; but such is the order of the universe, that knowledge of that one flower, if I only did possess it, would be knowledge of all:

Little flower-but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Tennyson made it no secret to his friends that from boyhood, sometimes when he was all alone and sometimes when he was in the presence of others, he had been subject to a sort of waking trance. Four times in "The Princess " he describes such a one :

And truly waking dreams were, more or less,
An old and strange affection of the house,
Myself too had weird seizures, heaven knows what :
On a sudden, in the midst of men and day,
And while I walk'd and talk'd as heretofore,
I seem'd to move among a world of ghosts
And feel myself the shadow of a dream.

The Princess with her monstrous woman-guard,
The jest and earnest working side by side,
The cataract and the tumult of the Kings,
Were shadows; and the long fantastic night
With all its doings had and had not been,
And all things were and were not.

"In Memoriam" tells of another :

So word by word, and line by line,

The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last

The living soul was flashed on mine,

THE WORLD IS A SHADOW-WORLD

And mine in his was wound, and whirl' d
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,

Æonian music measuring out

The steps of Time-the shocks of Chance

The blows of Death.

And similarly in "The Ancient Sage" we read:

For more than once when I

Sat all alone, revolving in myself

The word that is the symbol of myself,

The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud

Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and through loss of Self
The gain of such large life as match'd with ours
Were Sun to spark-unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.

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A shadow-world, especially when that world of shadows only imperfectly answers to the Reality, affords no object of communion. It is only the dim symbol of Him who dwells behind the darkness and the shadowit is never the manifestation of a present God. Yet I must make a single exception, one which has doubtless occurred to the reader, namely, the remarkable poem entitled "The Higher Pantheism." Here, for a moment, the poet is endowed with Wordsworth's deeper insight, and actually sees God in nature:

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains, Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him that reigns?

But the vision does not tarry. Tennyson has hardly expressed the sublime thought when doubt again seizes him. The vision is a misleading vision, true only to us and only while the vision lasts :

Is not the Vision He? Though He be not that which he seems? Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Here is the old Kantian relativity. All knowledge is relative to the knowing agent. Tennyson is not content with knowing the Reality in the phenomena; he is trying to know the Reality apart from the phenomena, trying to know without fulfilling the conditions of knowledge, in short, trying to know without knowing. Agnosticism regards God as concealed by his own manifestation-it should hold instead that in knowing the phenomena we know the Reality itself. Our poet is infected with this agnostic philosophy; and, though he has a moment of insight when the truth dawns upon him, the clouds shut in again; though he listens for a little to the wise, the unwise must have their say also:

God is law, say the wise; O soul, and let us rejoice,
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.

Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool;

For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool.

And so the conclusion is a mixture of faith and of unbelief:

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see; But if we could see and hear, this Vision-were it not He?

Would that the poet had grasped the principle that the laws of our knowing are not merely arbitrary and

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regulative, but correspond to the nature of things! But he did not grasp this principle, and Nature remained to him a sort of dream, in which God manifested himself indeed, but only distantly and irregularly. Tennyson therefore does not care to be alone with Nature. Only when some fellow-man is by, has he interest in physical beauty or in physical grandeur. The external universe is only the setting for humanity, the background for the human figure. But, with man to interpret, the world has a meaning. Our poet's greatest art, indeed, consists in finding a fitting environment for every emotion of the soul. He can create, not dramatic scenes, but material landscapes, to reflect, symbolize, and intensify every phase of thought and emotion.

I venture to give one out of many possible illustrations of Tennyson's use of nature, not as a living, but as a symbolic thing. He makes nature express otherwise unutterable yearnings in his little poem:

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

The dull recurrence of the wave-beats answers to heartbeats even more monotonous and sad. And now the poet heightens the impression of grief by contrast:

O well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay !

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill ;