lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYThe Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd ;But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating to the breath'Of the night-wind down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.Chambers' Vestiges of Creation (1844), an anticipationof Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), had agitatedTennyson's sensitive soul and evoked some of themost plangent strains of In Memoriam. Strauss'sDas Leben Jesu (translated by George Eliot, 1846),followed in 1842 by the work of Baur and the TubingenSchool, was the chief cause of Browning's restatementof his own religious feeling in Christmas Eve and EasterDay. A wave of materialism, or to avoid misleadingimplications, of Lucretianism, which was to attain toits full height in the scientific writings that followedon the publication of Darwin's work, e.g. Huxley onMan's Place in Nature (1863) and Tyndall's famousaddress at Belfast, was rising and gathering strength.But at the same time another and counter-influencewas rising also. The century was not done with theMiddle Ages. The mediaevalism of the early RomanticRevival had not in this country rehabilitated theCatholic Church. From the Wartons to Six WalterScott the romantics had remained, when not sceptics,firm in the conviction that the Bible Protestantismof the Reformation was pure Christianity and that theChurch of Rome, if not actually Antichrist, was "amean and depraving institution," that the designs ofher defenders in the sixteenth century " would haveriveted on Scotland" (and England) "the chains of88