Across the sea, along the shore, In numbers more and ever more, From lonely hut and busy town, The valley through, the mountain down, What was it ye went out to see, Ye silly folk of Galilee? The reed that in the wind doth shake? The weed that washes in the lake? The reeds that waver, the weeds that float?-- young man preaching in a boat. What was it ye went out to hear By sea and land, from far and near? A teacher? Rather seek the feet Of those who sit in Moses' seat. Go humbly seek, and bow to them, Far off in great Jerusalem. From them that in her courts ye saw, Her perfect doctors of the law, What is it came ye here to note?-- A young man preaching in a boat A prophet! Boys and women weak! Declare, or cease to rave: Whence is it he hath learned to speak? Say, who his doctrine gave? A prophet? Prophet wherefore he Of all in Israel tribes?-- _He teacheth with authority, And not as do the Scribes_. Here is another from one who will not be offended if I class him with this school--the finest of critics as one of the most finished of poets--Matthew Arnold. Only my reader must remember that of none of my poets am I free to choose that which is most characteristic: I have the scope of my volume to restrain me. THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID. He saves the sheep; the goats he doth not save! So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried: "Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave, Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave!" So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed, The infant Church: of love she felt the tide Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave. And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs, With eye suffused but heart inspired true, On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs, She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew; And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid. Of these writers, Tennyson is the foremost: he has written _the_ poem of the hoping doubters, _the_ poem of our age, the grand minor organ-fugue of _In Memoriam_. It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished Love. His friend is nowhere in his sight, and God is silent. Death, God's final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry. Meanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through the shifting cloudy dark. And if the sun has not arisen on the close of the book, yet the Aurora of the coming dawn gives light enough to make the onward journey possible and hopeful: who dares say that he walks in the full light? that the counsels of God are to him not a matter of faith, but of vision?