"After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in dearest Albert's room for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there was another world where there would be no partings: and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe that there was no other world, no immortality, who tried to explain all away in a miserable manner. We agreed that, were such a thing possible, God, who is Love, would be far more cruel than any human being." It was, no doubt, a touching and memorable interview--these two, aged and great, meeting at a point of life when grandeur and genius alike feel themselves to be lonely, daily more lonely, and exchanging beliefs upon that unseen world where neither grandeur nor genius can plead more than that they have used their gifts for good. And yet was not Tennyson yielding to the old temptation to interpret the future life in terms of this one? Speculation will not carry us far upon this road; yet, so far as we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with feeling? Or what on the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pass into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that would make it a cheat would also blot out completely all chance of discovery, and therefore all pain of discovering. This is a question on which, beyond pleading that what little we say ought to be (but seldom is) the result of clear thinking, I propose to say little, not only because here is not the place for metaphysics, but because--to quote Jowett again--"considering the 'feebleness of the human faculties and the uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to believe that the fewer our words the better. At the approach of death there is not much said: good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they know. There is perhaps no important subject about which, at any time, even religious people speak so little to one another."