In intellect and power and will, hath heard
Time flowing in the middle of the night,
And all things creeping to a day of doom."


In this poem, never republished by the author, is an attempt to
express an experience which in later years he more than once
endeavoured to set forth in articulate speech, an experience which
was destined to colour his finial speculations on ultimate problems
of God and of the soul. We shall later have to discuss the opinion
of an eminent critic, Mr Frederic Harrison, that Tennyson's ideas,
theological, evolutionary, and generally speculative, "followed,
rather than created, the current ideas of his time." "The train of
thought" (in In Memoriam), writes Mr Harrison, "is essentially that
with which ordinary English readers had been made familiar by F. D.
Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr Martineau, Ecce Homo, Hypatia." Of
these influences only Maurice, and Maurice only orally, could have
reached the author of The Mystic and the Supposed Confessions. Ecce
Homo, Hypatia, Mr Jowett, were all in the bosom of the future when In
Memoriam was written. Now, The Mystic and the Supposed Confessions
are prior to In Memoriam, earlier than 1830. Yet they already
contain the chief speculative tendencies of In Memoriam; the growing
doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then familiar to Tennyson,
though not to "ordinary English readers"), the longing for a return
to childlike faith, and the mystical experiences which helped
Tennyson to recover a faith that abode with him. In these things he
was original. Even as an undergraduate he was not following "a train
of thought made familiar" by authors who had not yet written a line,
and by books which had not yet been published.