With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

Tennyson differs widely from the other poets whom we are considering in
this connection. He was not born with the mystical temperament, but, on
the contrary, he had a long and bitter struggle with his own doubts and
questionings before he wrested from them peace. There is nothing of
mystic calm or strength in the lines--

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.

He has no mystic rapture in Nature like Wordsworth,

I found Him not in world or sun
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye;

no mystic interpretation of life as had Browning, no yearning for union
with the spirit of love and beauty as had Shelley. Tennyson's mysticism
came, as it were, rather in spite of himself, and is based on one thing
only--experience. He states his position quite clearly in _In Memoriam_,
cxxiv. As is well known, he had from time to time a certain peculiar
experience, which he describes fully both in prose and verse, a touch at