We must now hasten to a close, delightful as it would be to linger over so attractive a theme, and to dwell upon the personality of one who so uniquely represents the mind, as he has so remarkably influenced the thought, of his age.  But considering the length of the present paper, this cannot be.  Happily, however, the fruitage is ever with us of the poet’s full fourscore years of splendid achievement with the hallowing memory of a forceful, opulent, and blameless life.  To few men of the past century can the reflecting mind of a coming time more interestingly or more instructively turn than to this profound thinker and mighty musical singer, steeped as he was in the varied culture of the ages, endowed with great prophetic powers, with phenomenal gifts of poetic expression, and with a soul so attuned to the harmonies of heaven as to make him at once the counsellor and the inspiring teacher of his time.  Who, in comparison with him, has so felt the subtle charm, or so interpreted to us the infinite beauty, of the world in which we live, or more impressively deepened in the mind and conscience of the age belief in the verities of religion, while quelling its doubts and quickening its highest hopes and faith?  “Tennyson was a passionate believer in the immortal life; this was so real to him that he had no patience with scepticism on the subject.  To question it in his presence was to bring upon one’s head a torrent of denunciation and wrath.  His great soul was intuitively conscious of spiritual realities, and he could not understand how little soulless microbes of men and women were destitute of his deep perception.  Prayer was to him a living fact and power, and some of his words about it are among the noblest ever written.  When some one asked him about Christ, he pointed to a flower and said, ’What the sun is to that flower, Christ is to my soul.’”

Apart as he stood from the tumult and the frivolities of his age, he was yet of it, and sensibly and beneficently influenced it for its higher and nobler weal.  In politics, as we know, he was a liberal conservative,—­a conserver of what was best in the present and the past, and an advancer of all that tended to true and harmonious progress.  His knowledge of men and things was wide and deep; in the philosophic thought and even in the science of his time he was deeply read; while he was lovingly interested in all nature, and especially in the common people, whom he often wrote of and touchingly depicted in their humble ways of toil as well as of joy and sorrow.  Above all, he was a man of high and real faith, who believed that “good” was “the final goal of ill;” and in “the dumb hour clothed in black” that at last came to him, as it comes to all, he confidingly put his trust in Loving Omnipotence and reverently and beautifully expressed the hope of seeing the guiding Pilot of his life when, with the outflow of its river-current into the ocean of the Divine Unseen, he crossed the bar.  For humanity’s sake and the weal of the world in a coming time this was his joyous cry:—­