Is Lord Tennyson a Spiritualist?

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 342, 13 February 1889, Page 3

Is Lord Tennyson a Spiritualist?

A LKiTER written fourteen years ago by Lord Tennyson has come into possession of the -'Chicago Tribune,' which shows that he holds the conviction that consciousness may pass from the body and hold communion with the dead. The letter is dated Farringford, Freshwater, Isle of Wight; May 7, 1874. It professes to be written to a gentleman who communicated to the poet certain strange experiences he had had when passing from under the effect of anaesthetics. Tennyson writes : — ' I have never had any revelations through ansesthetics; but a kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name) I have frequently had, quite up to my boyhood, when I have been, all alone. This has often come upon, me through repeating my own name to myself till, all at - once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this nob a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.' As it conscious ot the incredible insignificance of the statemont thus compacted, ho adds : — ' lam ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utteily beyond words?' It is pointed out by Professor Thomas Davidson, who has seen the letter, that the same conviction, if nob the sameexpeiience, only with another, is described in ' In.Memoriam, xcv.' ' The stanzas are generally passed over as" referring to a mere poetic frenzy of grief. Bub reading them in the light of prose puts an entirely different aspect on the incident contained in the lines :—: — And in the house light after light Went out, and I was all alone.