This conception not only enormously excited and stimulated thought, but it gave thinkers a strange sense of confidence and certainty not possessed by the age before.

Everything seemed plain to them; they were heirs of all the ages.

Their doubts were as certain as their faith.
"There lives more faith in honest doubt Believe me than in half the creeds." said Tennyson; "honest doubt," hugged with all the certainty of a revelation, is the creed of most of his philosophical poetry, and what is more to the point was the creed of the masses that were beginning to think for themselves, to whose awakening interest his work so strongly appealed.

There were no doubt, literary side-currents.

Disraeli survived to show that there were still young men who thought Byronically.
Rossetti and his school held themselves proudly aloof from the rationalistic and scientific tendencies of the time, and found in the Middle ages, better understood than they had been either by Coleridge or Scott, a refuge from a time of factories and fact.