Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
    Will be the final goal of ill.

He has no mystic rapture in Nature like Wordsworth,

    I found Him not in world or sun
    Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye;

no mystic interpretation of life as had Browning, no yearning for union with the spirit of love and beauty as had Shelley.  Tennyson’s mysticism came, as it were, rather in spite of himself, and is based on one thing only—­experience.  He states his position quite clearly in In Memoriam, cxxiv.  As is well known, he had from time to time a certain peculiar experience, which he describes fully both in prose and verse, a touch at intervals throughout his life of “ecstasy,” and it was on this he based his deepest belief.  He has left several prose accounts of this mental state, which often came to him through repeating his own name silently,

till all at once, as it wore, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to resolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life[33]

It is a somewhat similar experience which is described in In Memoriam, xcv.

    And all at once it seem’d at last
    The living soul was flash’d on mine,
    And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d
    About empyreal heights of thought,
    And came on that which is, and caught
    The deep pulsations of the world.

And again in the conclusion of the Holy Grail—­

    Let visions of the night or of the day
    Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
    Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
    This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
    This air that strikes his forehead is not air
    But vision—­yea, his very hand and foot—­
    In moments when he feels he cannot die,
    And knows himself no vision to himself,
    Nor the high God a A vision, nor that One
    Who rose again.

“These three lines,” said Tennyson, speaking of the last three quoted, “are the (spiritually) central lines in the Idylls.”  They are also the central lines in his own philosophy, for it was the experience of this “vision” that inspired all his deepest convictions with regard to the unity of all things, the reality of the unseen, and the persistence of life.