sign or symptom of disease as it was, the news fell like a
thunderbolt from a serene sky. Tennyson's and Hallam's love had been
"passing the love of women." A blow like this drives a man on the
rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. "Is this
the end?" Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and
strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to
forego hope and attend evening lectures, the young critics of our
generation find Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears
concerning the ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life--
his friendship.


"That faith I fain would keep,
That hope I'll not forego:
Eternal be the sleep -
Unless to waken so,"


wrote Lockhart, and the verses echoed ceaselessly in the widowed
heart of Carlyle. These men, it is part of the duty of critics later
born to remember, were not children or cowards, though they dreamed,
and hoped, and feared. We ought to make allowance for failings
incident to an age not yet fully enlightened by popular science, and
still undivorced from spiritual ideas that are as old as the human
race, and perhaps not likely to perish while that race exists. Now
and then even scientific men have been mistaken, especially when they
have declined to examine evidence, as in this problem of the
transcendental nature of the human spirit they usually do. At all
events Tennyson was unconvinced that death is the end, and shortly
after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he began to write