to the contempt of the cock-certain. The poem, says Mr Harrison,
"has made Tennyson the idol of the Anglican clergyman--the world in
which he was born and the world in which his life was ideally passed-
-the idol of all cultured youth and of all aesthetic women. It is an
honourable post to fill"--that of idol. "The argument of In Memoriam
apparently is . . . that we should faintly trust the larger hope."
That, I think, is not the argument, not the conclusion of the poem,
but is a casual expression of one mood among many moods.

The argument and conclusion of In Memoriam are the argument and
conclusion of the life of Tennyson, and of the love of Tennyson, that
immortal passion which was a part of himself, and which, if aught of
us endure, is living yet, and must live eternally. From the record
of his Life by his son we know that his trust in "the larger hope"
was not "faint," but strengthened with the years. There are said to
have been less hopeful intervals.

His faith is, of course, no argument for others,--at least it ought
not to be. We are all the creatures of our bias, our environment,
our experience, our emotions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike
the experience of most men. It yielded him subjective grounds for
belief. He "opened a path unto many," like Yama, the Vedic being who
discovered the way to death. But Tennyson's path led not to death,
but to life spiritual, and to hope, and he did "give a new impulse to
the thought of his age," as other great poets have done. Of course
it may be an impulse to wrong thought. As the philosophical
Australian black said, "We shall know when we are dead."

Mr Harrison argues as if, unlike Tennyson, Byron, Wordsworth,
Shelley, and Burns produced "original ideas fresh from their own