of Tennyson’s work, the poet manifests his historic sense and love for England’s legendary past, and achieves his design not only to glorify it, but to imbue it with a deep ethical motive and underlying purpose, the expression of his own chivalrous, knightly soul and strenuous, thoughtful, and blameless life.  In these splendid tales of knight-errantry we have the full flower of the poet’s genius, narrated in the true romantic spirit, but with an ideality and imagination quite Tennysonian, and with a spiritualistic touch in harmony with “the voice of the age” that reminds us that,—­

     “Our little systems have their day;
        They have their day and cease to be: 
        They are but broken lights of thee,
      And thou, O Lord, art more than they.”

It is with such themes and speculations that Tennyson has powerfully and impressively influenced his age.  Beyond and above the mere artistry of the poet, we recognize his interest in man’s higher, spiritual being, his love for nature, and awe in contemplating the heights and depths of infinite time and space, ever looking upward and inward at the mysteries of the world behind the phenomena of sense.  It is difficult, in set theological terms, to define the poet’s creed, though we know that he was won by the Broad Church teaching of his friends, Frederick Robertson and Denison Maurice, and had himself many a battle to fight with honest doubts until—­as his ‘Crossing the Bar’ shows us—­he finally conquered and laid them.  But while there is an absence of definite doctrine in his work there is no question about his religious convictions or of his belief in the eternal verities, the immanence of God in man and the universe.  Throughout his poems he assumes the existence of a great Spirit and recognizes that our souls are a part of Him, however Faith at times seems to veil her face from the poet, and all appears a mystery, though a mystery presided over by infinite Power and Love.  The great problems of metaphysics and of man’s origin and destiny, we are told, occupied much of his thought, and he dwelt upon them with eager, intense interest, and touched upon them with great candor, earnestness, and truthfulness.  No sophistry could shake his belief in man’s immortality, for without belief in this doctrine the human race, he was convinced, had not incentive enough to virtue, while all man’s inspirations were otherwise meaningless.  For the doctrine of Evolution, in its materialistic aspect, he had nothing but scorn, though he accepted it in the more spiritual guise with which Russel Wallace propounded it.  If we come from the brutes we are nevertheless linked with the Divine, he believed, and it was the Divine in man that was to conquer the brute within him, and, in the upward struggle, work out salvation.  So, in the realm of physical science, on the principles of which, as Huxley tells us, he had a great grasp, the poet, while appalled by the mystery, accepts and indeed rejoices in its truths, though he cannot acquiesce in a godless world or in the denial of a life to come, in which the race, through infinite love, shall be brought into union with God.