The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1896-09-26

meated with that spirit of loneliness.
tinging the sober environment of
hereditary Puritanism in which he
had been brought up and in which
he lived with the glowing tints of
morning. AS scientist, and as one
of the worlds interpreters in prose
and verse, he penetrated to the pri-
NAL heart of love from which all
beauty, goodness and truth emanated
and found there nothing that CORE
sponded to the Cimmerian gloom of
the older Calvinism in which his
forebears in New England walked,
as in a vail of darkness brooded over
by Apollyon's wings, all their days.
His creed, as he wrote in his later
days to Harriet Beecher Stowe, is to
be found in the first two words of the
Pater Noster-Our Father. and may
be paralleled in Tennyson's lines in
SIN Memoriam:"
Love is and was my Lord and King.
And in his presence l attend
To hear the tidin IS of my friend.
Which every hour his couriers bring.
Love is and was my King and Lord,
And will be, tho as yet keep
Within his court on earth, and sleep
Encompassed by his faithful guard,
And hear at times a sentinel
Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers in the world of space,
In the deep night that all is well.
These stanzas from what may be
called the laureate poem of our ques
tioning age, saddened by the diff
Guilty, the apparent impossibilty of
penetrating the mystery of human
life and of the universe, do not,
however, given Tennyson's religious
creed so fully as these other stanzas
from the same grand poem:
o, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.,
To paDgs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and tains of blood.
That nothing walks with aimless feet.
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete.
That not worm is cloven in vain;
That not moth with vain desire
Is shoveled in fruitless fire.
Or but subserves another's gain.
Behold. we know not anything;
can but trust that good shall fall
At last-far off-at last to all,
And every winter change to spring.
When it is remembered that "Tn
Memoriam" was publ. he'd in 1850,
and that it was not till nine years
after that "The Autocrat of the Break
fast Table" was published in book
form, beginning that series of most
delightful and memorable books upon
which, together with his charming
verse, the fame of Oliver Wendell
Holmes rests so securely, the reader
will perceive the grounds on which
dissent is taken to DR.. Hervey' state
ment with which this article begins.
Tennyson was the reigning poet of the
golden prime OF Holiness powers and
the English poets influence not only
upon Holmes but upon nearly all the
other writer's of his time was enorm-
Gus, although not always accurately
perceived even by those who were
most indebted to him for the newer
and lovelier vision of life and human
destiny that Tennyson's verse re-
vealed.
Such stanzas as those quoted above
came like an evangel of hope to hu-
man hearts saddened by the anxieties
and doubts of the age. Love is re-
vealed only to love, and the poets
questions of life and destiny was in
wholly different way from that of
the laboratory, or the stern logic-mill
of the Calvinistic processes.
Emerson, in his serene, quiet,
self confident way, also, did far
more than Holmes to unsettle mems
faith in the gloomy creed of Puritan
ism which dominated mems souls
and consciences so long. But Emer-
sons thought is difficult to follow
and of system he can scarcely be said
to have any. His creed appears to
give him courage, hope and serene
confidence, but when his followers be-
gan to analyze and compare the state
ment with that, and endeavored to
make a working formula for life's