Only my reader must remember that of none of my poets am I free to choose that which is most characteristic: I have the scope of my volume to restrain me.
THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID.
He saves the sheep; the goats he doth not save! So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried: "Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave, Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave!" So spake the fierce Tertullian.

But she sighed, The infant Church: of love she felt the tide Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.
And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs, With eye suffused but heart inspired true, On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs, She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew; And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.
Of these writers, Tennyson is the foremost: he has written _the_ poem of the hoping doubters, _the_ poem of our age, the grand minor organ-fugue of _In Memoriam_.

It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished Love.

His friend is nowhere in his sight, and God is silent.

Death, God's final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry.
Meanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through the shifting cloudy dark.