Yea, tho’ it spake and bared to view A fact within the coming year; And tho’ the months, revolving near, Should prove the phantom-warning true, They might not seem thy prophecies, But spiritual presentiments, And such refraction of events As often rises ere they rise.” The author thus shows himself _difficile_ as to recognising the personal identity of a phantasm; nor is it easy to see what mode of proving his identity would be left to a spirit. The poet, therefore, appeals to some perhaps less satisfactory experience:— “Descend, and touch, and enter; hear The wish too strong for words to name; That in this blindness of the frame My Ghost may feel that thine is near.” The third poem is the crown of _In Memoriam_, expressing almost such things as are not given to man to utter:— 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, Æonian music measuring out The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance— The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt. Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame In matter-moulded forms of speech, Or ev’n for intellect to reach Thro’ memory that which I became.” Experiences like this, subjective, and not matter for argument, were familiar to Tennyson. Jowett said, “He was one of those who, though not an upholder of miracles, thought that the wonders of Heaven and Earth were never far absent from us.” In _The Mystic_, Tennyson, when almost a boy, had shown familiarity with strange psychological and psychical conditions. Poems of much later life also deal with these, and, more or less consciously, his philosophy was tinged, and his confidence that we are more than “cunning casts in clay” was increased, by phenomena of experience, which can only be evidence for the mystic himself, if even for him. But this dim aspect of his philosophy, of course, is “to the Greeks foolishness.”