ABSTRACT
The confident optimism of the philosophers, scientists, and theologians, the positive faith of Tennyson and Browning in one far–off divine event. To which the whole creation moves, to concur with the relatively isolated group of thinkers—Lord Byron, Benjamin Constant, Lamartine, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Senancour, Leopardi—who felt either continually or at times that the “world is an opus posthumum” created to “make eternity less burthensome to His immense existence”. The latter poem, after speaking of the cloying of joys, the sureness of death, and the swift passage of love in a fashion reminiscent of Swinburne, concludes that a “determined deftness” is necessary to eke out any joy from existence. The struggle for existence, directed by an indifferent Nature, does not ordinarily result in success for the most deserving. Love causes pain far more often than it does joy.
