He took a deep interest in those borderland questions which sometimes seem so near an answer and yet never are answered. At the hour of death what are the sights which rush upon the vision? Of these he would sometimes speak; he told me how William Allingham, when dying, said to his wife, "I see things beyond your imagination to conceive." Some vision seemed to come to such at death. One lady in the Isle of Wight exclaimed, as though she saw "Cherubim and Seraphim." But these incidents did not disturb the steady thought and trust which found its strength far deeper down than in any surface phenomena. He never shirked the hard and dismaying facts of life. Once he made me take to my room Winwoode Reade's _Martyrdom of Man_. There never was such a passionate philippic against Nature as this book contained. The universe was one vast scene of murder; the deep aspirations and noble visions of men were the follies of flies buzzing for a brief moment in the presence of inexorable destruction. Life was bottled sunshine; death the silent-footed butler who withdrew the cork. The book, with its fierce invective, had a strange rhapsodical charm. It put with irate and verbose extravagance the fact that sometimes Nature, red in tooth and claw, With ravin shrieked against his creed; but it failed to see any but one side of the question. The writer saw clearly enough what Tennyson saw, but Tennyson saw much more. He could not make his judgment blind against faith any more than he would make it blind against facts. He saw more clearly because he saw more largely. He distrusted narrow views from whatever side they were advanced. The same spirit which led him to see the danger of the dogmatic temper in so-called orthodox circles led him to distrust it when it came from other quarters. There was a wholesome balance about his mind. Nothing is farther from the truth than to suppose that men of great genius lack mental balance. Among the lesser lights there may be a brilliant but unbalanced energy, but among the greater men it is not so; there is a large and wholesome sanity among these. There is sufficient breadth of grasp to avoid extremes in Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; it was the same with Tennyson. We may be right, for instance, in classing Tennyson among those Whose faith has centre everywhere Nor cares to fix itself to form; but we should be wholly wrong if we supposed that he did not realize the value of form. He knew that faith did not lie in the form, but he knew also the protective value of form to faith; the shell was not the kernel, but the kernel ripened all the better in the shelter of the shell. He realized how sacred was the flesh and blood to which truth divine might be linked, and he uttered the wise caution: Hold thou the good: defend it well For fear divine philosophy Should push beyond her mark and be Procuress to the lords of Hell.