Tennyson, according to Matthew Arnold, was not _un esprit puissant_. Other and younger critics, who have attained to a cock-certain mood of negation, are apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not finally agree with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a weakling or a hypocrite because, after trying all things, he is not an atheist or a materialist, then the reproach of insincerity or of feebleness of mind must rest upon Tennyson. But it is manifest that, almost in boyhood, he had already faced the ideas which, to one of his character, almost meant despair: he had not kept his eyes closed. To his extremely self-satisfied accusers we might answer, in lines from this earliest volume (_The Mystic_):— “Ye scorn him with an undiscerning scorn; Ye cannot read the marvel in his eye, The still serene abstraction.” He would behold “One shadow in the midst of a great light, One reflex from eternity on time, One mighty countenance of perfect calm, Awful with most invariable eyes.” His mystic of these boyish years— “Often lying broad awake, and yet Remaining from the body, and apart In intellect and power and will, hath heard Time flowing in the middle of the night, And all things creeping to a day of doom.” In this poem, never republished by the author, is an attempt to express an experience which in later years he more than once endeavoured to set forth in articulate speech, an experience which was destined to colour his finial speculations on ultimate problems of God and of the soul. We shall later have to discuss the opinion of an eminent critic, Mr Frederic Harrison, that Tennyson’s ideas, theological, evolutionary, and generally speculative, “followed, rather than created, the current ideas of his time.” “The train of thought” (in _In Memoriam_), writes Mr Harrison, “is essentially that with which ordinary English readers had been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr Martineau, _Ecce Homo_, _Hypatia_.” Of these influences only Maurice, and Maurice only orally, could have reached the author of _The Mystic_ and the _Supposed Confessions_. _Ecce Homo_, _Hypatia_, Mr Jowett, were all in the bosom of the future when _In Memoriam_ was written. Now, _The Mystic_ and the _Supposed Confessions_ are prior to _In Memoriam_, earlier than 1830. Yet they already contain the chief speculative tendencies of _In Memoriam_; the growing doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then familiar to Tennyson, though not to “ordinary English readers”), the longing for a return to childlike faith, and the mystical experiences which helped Tennyson to recover a faith that abode with him. In these things he was original. Even as an undergraduate he was not following “a train of thought made familiar” by authors who had not yet written a line, and by books which had not yet been published.