Of these writers, Tennyson is the foremost:  he has written the poem of the hoping doubters, the poem of our age, the grand minor organ-fugue of In Memoriam.  It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished Love.  His friend is nowhere in his sight, and God is silent.  Death, God’s final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry.  Meanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through the shifting cloudy dark.  And if the sun has not arisen on the close of the book, yet the Aurora of the coming dawn gives light enough to make the onward journey possible and hopeful:  who dares say that he walks in the full light? that the counsels of God are to him not a matter of faith, but of vision?

Bewildered in the perplexities of nature’s enigmas, and driven by an awful pain of need, Tennyson betakes himself to the God of nature, thus: 

  LIV.

  The wish, that of the living whole
    No life may fail beyond the grave;
    Derives it not from what we have
  The likest God within the soul?

  Are God and Nature then at strife,
    That Nature lends such evil dreams,
    So careful of the type she seems,
  So careless of the single life;

  That I, considering everywhere
    Her secret meaning in her deeds,
    And finding that of fifty seeds
  She often brings but one to bear;

  I falter where I firmly trod,
    And falling with my weight of cares
    Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
  That slope thro’ darkness up to God;

  I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
    And gather dust and chaff, and call
    To what I feel is Lord of all,
  And faintly trust the larger hope.

[Illustration: 

  “... he was dead, and there he sits,
  And he that brought him back is there.”]

Once more, this is how he uses the gospel-tale:  Mary has returned home from the sepulchre, with Lazarus so late its prey, and her sister and Jesus:—­

  XXXII.

  Her eyes are homes of silent prayer,
    Nor other thought her mind admits
    But, he was dead, and there he sits,
  And he that brought him back is there.

  Then one deep love doth supersede
    All other, when her ardent gaze
    Roves from the living brother’s face,
  And rests upon the Life indeed.

  All subtle thought, all curious fears,
    Borne down by gladness so complete,
    She bows, she bathes the Saviour’s feet
  With costly spikenard and with tears.

  Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,
    Whose loves in higher love endure;
    What souls possess themselves so pure,
  Or is there blessedness like theirs?