This was published in 1832, a period when agitations about the suffrage, and the Corn Laws, and Catholic Emancipation—questions that shook England to its foundations, only to fix them deeper than before—were rife or looming up like awful spectres in the dim mist of the future. Tennyson did not dread them, though he realized their vastness and importance. Most certainly the verses just quoted stamp him as a close observer of events in those days and a man of right moral balance, to whom might with some measure of truth be applied his own words: “He saw thro’ life and death, thro’ good and ill, He saw thro’ his own soul. The marvel of the everlasting will, An open scroll, Before him lay....” Still, these nobler passages are only fragments. He prefers his quiet mood. In 1842 appeared the first of his idyls, the “Morte d’Arthur.” Here again the better nature of the poet—a nature that we are grieved to see apparently soured and crossed, not softened and made more venerable, by the hand of Time—breaks forth in the grand prayer of the dying king: “If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer, Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.” It was the Catholic instinct breaking through the wall of prejudice and false teaching which, in centuries of separation from the truth, have grown up around the English heart, that gave voice to this beautiful conception. Many are the instances where non-Catholic poets have leaped up to truths of this kind which the whole force of their training and education ran counter to. It is, as it were, the flash of inspiration coming on them in spite of themselves and issuing in music. The divinity of their art has lifted them above all prejudice into the sun-bright heaven. Thus Byron sings to the Blessed Virgin in strains that a saint might envy. Unfortunately, the instances are many also where men lifted up on the heights of inspiration, or by the deep yearnings of their own soul, have, as it were, glanced into heaven and seen the face of Truth, only to fall back again to their lower level, dazed and blinded by the very glimpse that was revealed to them. And we find them deny with their own lips and actions what their greater selves had announced.