PREFACE. IN writing the following PROLEGOMENA to In Memoriam, my aim has been to bring out into clearness the religious soul-problem which forms its unity. Though I have been familiar with the poem from boyhood, it is only in the last few years that the full import of that problem and of the noble solution offered by the poet has become clear to me. The work, as I now understand it, seems to me not only the greatest English poem of the century,which I have always believed, but one of the great world-poems, worthy to be placed on the same list with the Oresteia, the Divina Commedia, and Faust. If my brief essay contribute to bring home this conviction to other persons, I shall feel that I have done them a service. The numerous parallel passages which I have introduced from other writers may per |