The conviction here of immortality through personal love is born of the feeling that his friend whom he has loved must live forever. The note of "In Memoriam" is sounded again. Tennyson's philosophy, in a nutshell, seems to be that doubts are not so much overcome as quieted by a struggling faith in the truths of religion, of which the chief assurance lies in the thought of personal love. Not as in Browning, that human love, because of its beauty and ecstasy, is a symbol of divine love, but because of its wish to be reunited to the one beloved is an earnest of continued existence. While Tennyson's poetry is saturated with allusions to the science of the century, it seems to be ever the dark side of the doctrine of evolution that is dwelt upon by him, while his religion is held to in spite of the truths of science, not because the truths of science have given him in any way a new revelation of beauty. Much more emphasis has been laid upon Tennyson's importance as a prophet in religious matters than seems to the present writer warranted. He did not even keep pace with the thought of the century, though his poetry undoubtedly reflected the liberalized theology of the earlier years of the second half of the century. As Joseph Jacobs says, "In Memoriam" has been to the Broad Church Movement what the "Christian Year" has been to the High Church. But where is the Broad Church now? Tennyson was, on the whole, adverse to evolution, which has been almost an instinct in English speculation for the last quarter of a century. So far as he was the voice of his age in speculative matters, he only represented the thought of the "sixties." What vision Tennyson did have came not through intuition or the higher reason, but through his psychic power of self-hypnotism. In "The Ancient Sage" is a passage describing the sort of trance into which he could evidently cause himself to fall: "For more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the self was loosed, And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs Were strange, not mine--and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self, The gain of such large life as match'd with ours Were sun to spark--unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow world."