To many readers the whole letter will seem to render fitly their feeling of the pathetic intensity with which the everlasting problems of love and death, of human doubts and destinies, are set forth in "In Memoriam." It will also remind them of the limitations, the inevitable inconclusiveness, of a poem which deals emotionally with questions that foil the deepest philosophers. The profound impression that was immediately produced by these exquisitely musical meditations may be ascribed, we think, to their sympathetic association with the peculiar spiritual needs and intellectual dilemmas of the time. It may be affirmed, as a general proposition, that up to about 1840, and for some years later, the majority among Englishmen of thought and culture were content to take morality as the chief test of religious truth, were disposed to hold that the essential principles of religion were best stated in the language of ethics. With this rational theology the pretensions of Science, which undertook to preserve and even to strengthen the moral basis, were not incompatible. But about this time came a spiritual awakening; and just then Tennyson came forward to insist, with poetic force and fervour, that the triumphant advance of Science was placing in jeopardy not merely the formal outworks but the central dogma of Christianity, which is the belief in a future life, in the soul's conscious immortality.[95] Is man subject to the general law of unending mutability? and is he after all but the highest and latest type, to be made and broken like a thousand others, mere clay under the moulding hands that are darkly visible in the processes of Nature? The Poet transfigured these obstinate questionings into the vision of an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in a godless sea. He turned our ears to hear the sound of streams that, swift or slow, Draw down Æonian hills, and sow The dust of continents to be-- and he was haunted by the misgiving that man also might be a mere atom in an ever-changing universe. Yet after long striving with doubts and fears, after having "fought with death," he resolves that we cannot be "wholly brain, magnetic mockeries," not only cunning casts in clays: Let Science prove we are, and then What matters Science unto men, At least to me? I would not stay.