For himself many passages in Wordsworth and other poets have been entirely spoilt by the modern habit of giving every various reading along with the text. Besides, in his case, very often what is published as the latest edition has been the original version in his first manuscript, so that there is no possibility of really tracing the history of what may seem to be a new word or a new passage. ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘in “Maud” a line in the first edition was ‘I will bury myself in _my books_, and the Devil may pipe to his own,’ which was afterwards altered to ‘I will bury myself _in myself_, &c.’: this was highly commended by the critics as an improvement on the _original_ reading—but it was actually in the first MS. draft of the poem.” Again, it is important to get a statement by one entitled to speak with authority as to what Tennyson did and what he did not believe upon religious matters. He had in ‘In Memoriam’ and other poems touched with a hand so strong and sometimes so daring upon the teaching of modern science, and yet he had spoken always so reverently of what modern civilization reverences, that the most opposite lessons were read from his utterances. To one thinker it would seem that Tennyson had thrown himself boldly upon the very foremost wave of scientific thought. To another it would seem that Wordsworth (although, living and writing when he did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently than any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so “God-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question at rest in the following pregnant words:—