This beast not unobserved by Nature fell,
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted by the poet to be
these woodland ruins--cruelly, because the daily sight of the world
blossoming over the agonies of beast and bird is made less tolerable to
us by such a fiction.

The Being that is in the clouds and air
. . .
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creature whom He loves.

The poet offers us as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible
alteration of Nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we have to
dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask
whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--on such
grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more
than a fictitious sign and a false proof?

Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's thought is there such an attack upon
our reason and our heart. He is more serious than the solemn Wordsworth.

_In Memoriam_, with all else that Tennyson wrote, tutors, with here and
there a subtle word, this nature-loving nation to perceive land, light,
sky, and ocean, as he perceived. To this we return, upon this we dwell.
He has been to us, firstly, the poet of two geniuses--a small and an
immense; secondly, the modern poet who answered in the negative that most
significant modern question, French or not French? But he was, before