"Hoped for a dawn, and it came, but the promise had faded away; We had passed from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day; He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire, The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire-- Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong, Of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder and wrong." There are many hopeful passages in Tennyson to offset such deep pessimism as is expressed in this one, which, moreover, being a dramatic utterance it must be remembered, does not reflect any settled conviction on the poet's part, though it shows him liable to moods of the most extreme doubt. In "The Ancient Sage" the agnostic spirit of the century is fully described, but instead of leading to a mood of despair, the mood is one of clinging to faith in the face of all doubt. The sage speaking, says: "Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in, Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one. Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son, Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee, Are not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven. Wherefore thou be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith! She reels not in the storm of warring words, She brightens at the clash of 'Yes' and 'No.' She sees the best that glimmers thro' the worst, She feels the sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer thro' the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wail'd Mirage!" There is nothing here more reassuring than a statement made by the sage, based upon no argument, nor revelation, nor intuition--nothing but the utilitarian doctrine that it will be wiser to cling to Faith beyond Faith! This is a sample of the sort of assurance in the reality of God and of immortality which Tennyson was in the habit of giving. In the poem called "Vastness" he presents with genuine power a pessimistic view of humanity and civilization in all its various phases--all of no use, neither the good any more than the bad, "if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last?" The effect of the dismal atmosphere of the poem as a whole is supposed to be dissipated by the last stanza: "Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him forever: the dead are not dead but alive."