With the exception of Tennyson, no other of the chief poets of the century need be considered in this connection with Browning, because, as we have seen in a previous chapter, they reflected on the whole the prevalent disbelief and doubt of the century which came with the revelations of science. Many people have regarded Tennyson as the chief prophet of the century. He seems, however, to the present writer to have held an attitude which reflected the general tone of religious aspiration in the century, rather than one which struck a new note indicating the direction in which future religious aspiration might turn. The conflict in his mind is between doubt and belief. To doubt he has often given the most poignant expression, as in his poem called "Despair." The story is of a man and his wife who have lost all religious faith through the reading of scientific books: "Have I crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? O, yes, For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press, When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are whooping at noon, And doubt is the lord of the dunghill, and crows to the sun and the moon, Till the sun and the moon of our science are both of them turned into blood. And hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good; For their knowing and know-nothing books are scatter'd from hand to hand-- _We_ have knelt in your know-all chapel, too, looking over the sand." If the effect of science was bad upon this weak-minded pair, the effect of religion as it had been taught them was no better. The absolute hopelessness of a blasted faith in all things reaches its climax in the following stanzas: "And the suns of the limitless universe sparkled and shone in the sky, Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light was a lie-- Bright as with deathless hope--but, however they sparkled and shone, The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our own-- No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below, A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe. "See, we were nursed in the drear nightfold of your fatalist creed, And we turn'd to the growing dawn, we had hoped for a dawn indeed, When the light of a sun that was coming would scatter the ghosts of the past. And the cramping creeds that had madden'd the peoples would vanish at last, And we broke away from the Christ, our human brother and friend, For He spoke, or it seemed that He spoke, of a hell without help, without end.