meant to be adumbrated. Or rather, for that, I think, is the true account, we who fell oft disliked a philosophy which required to be insinuated through an allegorical clothing. We were going through an intellectual crisis; and if we exaggerated its importance, Tennyson at least, as many other utterances prove, and as his memoirs show most convincingly, was equally impressed by the greatness of the issues. But for that reason, we (I repeat that by 'we' I only mean the wicked) wanted something more downright and dogmatic. A religious philosophy which hides itself behind mythical figures and vague personifications of abstract qualities; which can only be shadowed forth and insinuated through a rehabilitated romance, seemed inadequate and even effeminate. We fancied that if it ventured into broad daylight it would turn out to be mere commonplace disguised or made of moonshine and flimsy sentimentalisms. Or, possibly, we were not distinctly aware that there really was any mystical meaning at all, and simply felt that when such vital questions were being raised, we could not be really interested in this dim poetic land of unsubstantial shadows. When, a little later, we began to know what Omar Khàyyàm had said some eight centuries
