It is hard to-day to respond to these last words of the dying philosopher. Heaven and earth remain, but they seem cold and grey when the great heart in which they were united has ceased to beat, and when our sweet English singer has gone silent. By the passing away of the two highest-mounted minds in Europe this society is especially bereaved. The earliest welcome given to the genius of young Tennyson came from the pen of William Johnston Fox, the first Minister of this Chapel; here has his spiritual pilgrimage been followed, and its songs here sung as hymns. But for their magnitude Tennyson and Renan might have been considered together. They were children of the same spiritual epoch; the son of the Catholic Church, and the English Rector’s son, were fellow-pilgrims on the painful road of scepticism; they encountered the same phantoms, were attended by the same mighty shades, and found no altar but such as their own genius could raise and their glowing hearts kindle in the wilderness of doubt and denial. Alike they distrusted democracy, and dreamed of the ideal monarch,—as of Arthur, “flower of kings,” whom ancient legends of Britain and Brittany said would some day return to lead up the Golden Year. Renan loved to tell the story of how Tennyson, roaming in Brittany, stopped at an inn in Lannier, birthplace of Renan’s mother. In the morning the poet demanded his account, but the hostess said, “There is nothing to pay, Monsieur. It is you who have sung of our King Arthur.” But the people have a greatness of their own. They enshrine Tennyson in Westminster Abbey, Renan in the Pantheon. The career of Renan is a triumph of republican France. Under the Empire he was deprived of his professorship, and of his office in the Imperial Library, for writing the “Life of Jesus.” But the Republic made him President of the College of France, gave him every honor, in life as in death. The national homage to that ex-priest, that outspoken rationalist, who flattered not the masses nor fawned on power, is a high water-mark of civilisation. For it marks the rise of a steady tide of liberty, and not the mere leap of waves under some tempest of momentary emotion. The great fact is that this unique heretic, thinker, and scholar, has been able, without compromising his independence, without help of any sect or school, to live his life, think his thought, and round out his life-work with completeness, on the scene of a thousand martyrdoms. In Renan’s “Feuilles Détachées,” which appeared last spring but is not yet translated, there are outbursts of gratitude to his time, which, he says, has been good to him, and pardoned many faults. He had just finished, he says, his “History of the People of Israel”—“the serious work of my life.”