onslaught upon the poet. In vain his friends endeavored to cheer him by telling him that "his very creative originality and unlikeness to any poet, his uncommon power over varied meters and rare harmonies of sound and sense, needed the creation of a taste for his work before he could be appreciated." An old Lincolnshire squire, however, expressed the estimation in which the Quarterly was generally held when he said to Tennyson that the Quarterly "was the next book to God's Bible." After the publication of the 1832 volume ten years elapsed before the poet again addressed the reading world. Tennyson was deeply discouraged. He fancied that England was an uncongenial atmosphere, and began to think of living abroad in Jersey, in the south of France, or in Italy. "He was so far persuaded that the English people would never care for his poetry that, had it not been for the intervention of friends, he declared it not unlikely that after the death of Hallam he would not have continued to write."

The last letter which Tennyson received

from his friend Hallam contained these manuscript lines:

I do but mock me with the questionings.

Dark, dark, irrecoverably dark

Is the soul's eye; yet how it strives and battles
Through the impenetrable gloom to fix

That master light, the secret truth of things,
Which is the body of the Infinite God.

Arthur Hallam died at Vienna, September 15, 1833. When his father returned from his usual daily walk he saw Arthur asleep, as he supposed, upon the couch. A blood vessel near the brain had suddenly burst; the young man was not asleep, but dead. The germ of that great threnody, "In Memoriam"-the one adequate and matchless elegy in any language—appears in the following fragment:

Where is the voice I loved? ah, where

Is that dear hand that I would press?
Lo! the broad heavens, cold and bare,
The stars that know not my distress!

The vapor labors up the sky,

Uncertain forms are darkly moved!
Larger than human passes by

The shadow of the man I loved,

And clasps his hands, as one that prays!

Under the shadow of this great loss and sorrow was begun the poem entitled "The Two Voices." The poet was most exacting as to his art. It is said that "The Brook" was actually rescued from the waste-paper heap. His fine sense of proportion caused him to elide from "The Two Voices" so excellent a stanza as this:

From when his baby pulses beat
To when his hands in their last heat
Pick at the death-mote in the sheet.

To adverse criticism Tennyson was sensitive in an extreme degree; not, he declared, so far as his art was concerned, but because of the petty personal spites and wretched meannesses disclosed. On the other hand, intelligent praise instantly gave him encouragement, and a favorable review from faroff Calcutta could so brace the poet's spirits as to make him warm to his work. We are told that the localities of Tennyson's subject poems are wholly imaginary. He himself says of "The Miller's Daughter," which was much altered and enlarged from the edition of 1832, "The mill was no particular

mill; if I thought at all of any mill, it was that of Trumpington near Cambridge.”

The grandfather desired to make parsons of all the Tennyson brothers, but only oneCharles-fulfilled this pious wish. Charles and Alfred married sisters, daughters of Henry Sellwood, Esq. Arthur Hallam, who was visiting at Somersby rectory, asked Emily Sellwood to walk with him in the Fairy Wood. At a turn of the path they came upon Alfred Tennyson, "who, at the sight of the slender, beautiful girl of seventeen in her simple gray dress, moving 'like a light across the woodland ways,' suddenly said to her, 'Are you a dryad or an oread wandering here?" The long-dreaded separation from Somersby took place in 1837. After this the Tennysons flitted several times, first to High Beech in Epping Forest, then to Tunbridge Wells, thence to Boxley near Maidstone. In 1839 the poet wrote to Emily Sellwood, his future wife: "Perhaps I am coming to the Lincolnshire coast, but I scarcely know. The journey is so expensive and I am so poor." Again, "I shall

never see the Eternal City, nor that dome, the wonder of the world; I do not think I would live there if I could, and I have no money for touring." After 1840 all correspondence between Alfred Tennyson and Emily Sellwood was forbidden, since there seemed to be no prospect of their ever being married, owing to a perpetual want of funds. The poet was forty-one years old when he at length found it possible to wed the woman of his choice. Not until that time did his poems bring him even a limited competency. His courtship was a long romance of hope, and patience, and trust. In after years he said of his bride, “The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her." She was the poet's earliest and latest critic, to whose judgment he always deferred. Their domestic life was supremely happy, and of the wife some of her friends were wont to say, “She is as great as Alfred." As an illustration of her character Jowett was told by Tennyson that his wife once said, "When I pray I see the face of God smiling upon me."