Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13: Great Writers: Dr Lord's Uncompleted Plan, Supplemented with Essays by Emerson, Macaulay, Hedge, and Mercer AdamLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13: Great Writers: Dr Lord's Uncompleted Plan, Supplemented with Essays by Emerson, Macaulay, Hedge, and Mercer Adam
Lord, John
History
intentional roughness, from the individual early verse. The new burthen
is termed pessimistic, but for all its impatient summary of ills, it
ends with a cry of faith."
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.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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