of higher worlds, then sink into the wild, hungry Thus, sea? "Lest she should fail and perish utterly The abysmal deeps of Personality, Plagued her with sore despair." She Then she awakes to the sense of loneliness. "Deep dread and loathing of her solitude Her sense of loneliness becomes a terror. The beautiful palace is filled with phantoms weeping tears of blood, and with ghosts bearing hearts of flame, and with corpses standing against the wall. Are not they the shadows of realities falling on her wakeful vision ? She begins to realise her hateful self and lonely isolation. Now she is like a fixed spot amid infinite motion, and now she is like a pool on the shore listening to the music of the sea, and now she is like a star that watches the starry dance, itself motionless. Nature thus aids art in impressing the terror of loneliness. "Back on herself her serpent pride had curl'd. 'No voice,' she shriek'd in that lone hall, Then despair enters. In her slothful shame she feels exiled from God, and hates death and life, time and eternity. "She finds no comfort anywhere." Is there no satisfaction to be found in her beautiful palace? None! Her crime is selfishness. She has lost her pity for the world, and her penalty is to crave the sympathy denied to others. Fierce is her torment, her own self is her hell, and it blurs the palace and blots out the face of beauty. Now she seems to hear the sound of "human footsteps." Her humanity is returning; she will be selfish no more, and will seek the lowly lives in their innocence and purity. The soul had lived in the pride of voluptuous enjoyment of nature and art and culture, only to find that these cannot solve "the riddle of the painful earth," nor give peace amid the surging problems of time. "Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said, She learns to pray! She comes now to God and duty; and, giving the right place to religion, she may go back to her palace with others, to make art and culture aids to religion and humanity. The poem teaches that the meaning of life cannot be found in selfish solitude and sensuous enjoyment. Love of beauty in itself is noble, but love of beauty all for self is fatal to religious life. Nature and art and culture may not take the place of religion, We may love the beautiful without feeling any pulse of pity for the world; but to love God and man is to feel the pain of creation, and to awake out of self and the sensuous to a life of pure sacrifice and helpful service. The Two Voices.* To mingle imagination with philosophy, and write the purest poetical diction while engaged in metaphysical analysis, is the problem of the poet. Tennyson, in "The Two Voices," has solved the problem by giving us in a philosophical poem sublime poetry. While sounding the deeps of personality, and showing the conflict of soul with direst doubt and tormenting fear, his music never falters, but flows on until it falls into peaceful triumph. Two voices are represented as speaking within the soul. The one voice stands for faith, and the other voice stands for doubt. DOUBT sees no way out of the "curse," nor how to solve "the riddle of the painful earth," but thinks death is the end * "When I wrote 'The Two Voices,' I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said, 'Is life worth anything'?"-TENNYSON, A Memoir, i., p. 193. of all being, and truth a phantom on far-off hills alluring the soul into blinding mist. It urges selfdestruction as giving instant relief to the agony of being. FAITH relies chiefly on the "inner evidence" of soul against sense, on its hunger for God and immortality, which is ever the protest from within against the doubt that would make God the fiction of fancy and immortality the dream of delusion. Listen to the discussion. DOUBT, in view of the miseries of the soul, urges suicide. "Were it not better not to be?" FAITH replies that personality, with its wonders of reason and will and consciousness, is of too great worth to be flung away on the voids of death. DOUBT will not concede the value claimed for personality, and draws an illustration from the dragon-fly as it leaves its husk. What could be more beautiful than this bright creature, with its gleaming plates of sapphire mail flashing on its winged way? Are you of greater worth than the dragon-fly, that you should live ? FAITH will not grant the equality, but claims supremacy for personality in power of mind and heart over the dragon-fly with its fading beauty. DOUBT cynically charges the soul with the blindness of self-pride, and alleges, what it does not prove, that in the boundless universe are beings of vast superiority. Granted you are superior to the dragon-fly, there are many beings superior to you. FAITH replies that there are no two things alike, but there is great diversity, and so a specific value attaches to the unit. DOUBT, while conceding the argument, scoffs at the conceit of the soul that thinks it will be missed, or that any one will weep, or that any beam of light will be less radiant. This is not argument, but cynicism, in which FAITH is silenced by satire. DOUBT, mistaking silence for consent, again urges self-destruction, and draws a vivid picture of the soul's anguish-sleepless nights and impaired reason. FAITH answers that life is full of possibilities, and to end it is to destroy its "happier chance." Life is an evolution, and it is instructive to watch the unfolding. "And men, thro' novel spheres of thought DOUBT replies that the end must come sooner or later, and the man cannot remain to witness the evolution of all "new things." FAITH affirms that the process is constant, and every month shows some new feature of growth. And so it would be folly to commit suicide, and not see |