Poets generally must have felt it as a terrible time. What refuge existed for a poet save to isolate himself from the turmoil, shut himself into his cabin, and think of other times and other surroundings, away from the uproar and the gale. Those who did not thus shelter themselves were liable to bewail the time because the days were evil; as Arnold did, and Clough. But thus did not Tennyson. Out through the tempest he strode, open-eyed and bare-headed, with figure erect, glorying in the conflict of the elements, and summoning the men of his generation to reverence and worship. Doubt, yes doubt he justified--doubt, so it were straightforward and honest. Forms and accessories--these he was willing to let go--though always with respect and care for the weaker brothers and sisters to whom they stood for things of value; but Faith beyond those forms he clung to, faith fearless and triumphant, uprising out of temporary moods of despondency into ever securer conviction of righteous guidance throughout creation and far-seeing divine Purpose at the heart of things. Other men retained their faith too, but many only attained security by resolutely closing their eyes and bolting the doors of their water-tight compartments. But the glory of Tennyson's faith was that it never led him to be unfaithful to the kinds of truth that were being revealed to his age. That, too, was an age of revelation, and he knew it; the science of his epoch was true knowledge, as far as it went; it was over-emphatic and explosive, and to weaker or less inspired minds was full of danger, but it was genuine cargo, nevertheless, which must be taken on board; there was a real overload of superstition which had to be discarded; and it was his mission, and that of a few other noble souls, to help us to accomplish with calmness and something like wisdom the task of that revolutionary age. In the conflict between Science and Faith our business was to accept the one without rejecting the other: and that he achieved. Never did his acceptance of the animal ancestry of man, for instance, upset his belief in the essential divinity of the human soul, its immortality, its supremacy, its eternal destiny. Never did his recognition of the materialistic aspect of nature cloud his perception of its spiritual aspect as supplementing and completing and dominating the mechanism. His was a voice from other centuries, as it were, sounding through the nineteenth; and by his strong majestic attitude he saved the faith of thousands who else would have been overwhelmed; and his writings convey to our own age a magnificent expression of that which we too have still not fully accepted, but which we are on the way to believe.