In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind, rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his contemporaries, There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and love." [Footnote: _Preface_ to the Letters of Shelley (afterwards proved spurious).] The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold. Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry, Ah, but there should be one! There should be one. And there's the bitterness Of this unending torture-place for men, For the proud soul that craves a perfectness That might outwear the rotting of all things Rooted in earth. [Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody, _Marlowe._]