With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years, Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. Though earth and man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee. Tennyson differs widely from the other poets whom we are considering in this connection. He was not born with the mystical temperament, but, on the contrary, he had a long and bitter struggle with his own doubts and questionings before he wrested from them peace. There is nothing of mystic calm or strength in the lines-- Oh, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill. He has no mystic rapture in Nature like Wordsworth, I found Him not in world or sun Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; no mystic interpretation of life as had Browning, no yearning for union with the spirit of love and beauty as had Shelley. Tennyson's mysticism came, as it were, rather in spite of himself, and is based on one thing only--experience. He states his position quite clearly in _In Memoriam_, cxxiv. As is well known, he had from time to time a certain peculiar experience, which he describes fully both in prose and verse, a touch at intervals throughout his life of "ecstasy," and it was on this he based his deepest belief. He has left several prose accounts of this mental state, which often came to him through repeating his own name silently, till all at once, as it wore, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to resolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life[33] It is a somewhat similar experience which is described in _In Memoriam_, xcv. And all at once it seem'd at last The living soul was flash'd on mine, And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd About empyreal heights of thought, And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world. And again in the conclusion of the _Holy Grail_-- Let visions of the night or of the day Come, as they will; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that strikes his forehead is not air But vision--yea, his very hand and foot-- In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a A vision, nor that One Who rose again.