The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 4 | Page 4

grossly pervert the poet's meaning. It is the faith that lives in honest doubt that his heart applauds. He is thinking of the fact that it is real faith in God which leads men to doubt the dogmas which misrepresent God. But conscious as he is of the shadow that lies upon our field of vision, he is always insisting that it is in the light and not in the shadow that we must walk. Therefore, although demonstration is impossible, faith is rational. So do those great words of "The Ancient Sage" admonish us:
"Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,?Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,?Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one.?Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no,?Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son.?Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee,?Am not thyself in converse with thyself,?For nothing worthy proving can be proven?Nor yet disproven. Wherefore be thou wise,?Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,?And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!?She reels not in the storm of warring words,?She brightens at the clash of 'Yes' and 'No,'?She sees the best that glimmers through the worst,?She feels the sun is hid but for a night,?She spies the summer through the winter bud,?She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,?She hears the lark within the songless egg,?She finds the fountain where they wailed 'Mirage!'"
This illustrates Tennyson's mental attitude. If all who plume themselves upon their doubts would put themselves into this posture of mind, they would find themselves in possession of a very substantial faith.
Tennyson has touched with light more than one problem of the soul. The little stanza beginning
"Flower in the crannied wall"
has shown us how the mysteries of being are shared by the commonest lives; the short lyric "Wages" condenses into a few lines the strongest proof of the life to come; and "Crossing the Bar" has borne many a spirit in peace out to the boundless sea.
Robert Browning's robust faith helps us in a different way. His daring and triumphant optimism makes us ashamed of doubt. In "Abt Vogler," in "Rabbi Ben Ezra," in "Pompilia," in "Christmas Eve," we are caught up and carried onward by an unflinching and overcoming faith. Perhaps the most convincing arguments for religious reality in Browning's poems are those of "An Epistle" and of "Cleon," where the cry of the human soul for the assurance which the Christian faith supplies is given such a penetrating voice. And there is no reasoning about the Incarnation, in any theological book that I have ever read, which seems to me so cogent as that great passage in "Saul," where David cries:
"Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, To fill up his life, starve my own out. I would--knowing which, I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now! Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou--so wilt thou!"
But, after all, Browning's great hymns of faith are those in which he faces the future, like "Prospice," and the prologue of "La Saisiaz," and the epilogue of "Asolando,"--triumphant songs, in which one of the healthiest-minded of human beings showed himself:
"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break,?Never dreamed though right were worsted wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake!"
It would be a grateful task to make extended record of the service rendered to religion by the great choir of singers whose names appear upon the pages of this book. To Elizabeth Barrett Browning our debt is large, though her note is oftenest plaintive and the faith which she illustrates is that by which suffering is turned to strength. Our own New England psalmist, also, has been to great multitudes a revealer and a comforter; few in any age have seen the central truths of Christianity more clearly, or felt them more deeply, or uttered them more convincingly. In such poems as "My Soul and I," "My Psalm," "Our Master," "The Eternal Goodness," "The Brewing of Soma," and "Andrew Ryckman's Prayer," Whittier has made the whole religious world his debtor.
How many more there are--of those whom the world reckons as the greater bards, and of those whom it assigns to lower places--to whom we have found ourselves indebted for the clearing of our vision or the quickening of our pulses, in our studies or our meditations upon the deepest questions of life! How many there are, whose faces we never saw, but who by some luminous word, some strain vibrant with tenderness, some flash of insight, have endeared themselves to us forever! They are the friends of our spirits, ministers to us of the holiest things. They have clothed