This was certainly one of the most astonishing revelations of finished genius ever produced by a young man of less than four and-twenty. Here were "The Lady of Shalott," "The Dream of Fair Woman," "Oenone " "The Lotos-Eaters," "The Palace of Art," and "The Miller's Daughter," with a score of other lyrics, delicious and divine. The advance in craftsmanship and com mand over the materiel of verse shown since the volume of 183o is astonishing. It was well that its publication was completed before the blow fell upon Tennyson which took for a while all the light out of him. In Aug. 1833 Arthur Hallam started with his father, the historian, for Tirol. On the way young Hallam died suddenly (Sept. 15) of a broken blood-vessel at Vienna. His body was brought back to England, and buried on Jan. 3, 1834 Hallam's death affected Tennyson extremely. He grew less than ever willing to come forward and face the world ; his health be came "variable and his spirits indifferent." The earliest effect of Hallam's death upon his friend's art was seen, in the summer of 1834, in The Two Voices; and to the same period belong the beginnings of the Idylls of the King and of In Memoriam, over both of which he meditated long. In 1835 he visited the Lakes, and saw much of Hartley Coleridge, but would not "obtrude on the great man at Rydal," although "Wordsworth was hospitably disposed." Careless alike of fame and of influence, Tennyson spent these years mainly at Somersby, in a uniform devotion of his whole soul to the art of poetry. In 1837, to their great dis tress, the Tennysons were turned out of the Lincolnshire rectory where they had lived so long. They moved to High Beech, in Epping Forest, which was their home until 1840. The poet was already engaged, or "quasi-betrothed," to Emily Sellwood, but ten years passed before they could afford to marry. At Torquay, in 1838, he wrote Audley Court on one of his rare excursions, for he had no money for touring, nor did he wish for change ; he wrote at this time, "I require quiet, and myself to myself, more than any man when I write." In 1840 the Tennysons moved to Tun bridge Wells, and a year later to Boxley, near Maidstone, to be close to Edmund Lushington, who had now married Cecilia Tenny son. Alfred was from this time frequently a visitor in London.
In 1842 the two-volume edition of his Poems broke the ten years' silence which he had enforced himself to keep. Here, with many pieces already known to all lovers of modern verse, were found rich and copious additions to his work. These he had originally intended to publish alone, and an earlier privately printed Morte d'Arthur, Dora, and other Idylls, of 1842, is the despair of book-collectors. Most of those studies of home-life in England, which formed so highly popular a section of Tenny son's work—such as "The Gardener's Daughter," "Walking to the Mail," and "The Lord of Burleigh"—were now first issued, and, in what we have grown to consider a much higher order, "Locks ley Hall," "Ulysses," and "Sir Galahad." To the older and more luxurious lyrics, as reprinted in 1842, Tennyson did not spare the curbing and pruning hand, and in some cases went too far in restraining the wanton spirit of beauty in its youthful impulse. It is from 1842 that Tennyson took his place as the leading poet of his age in England. Among the friends whom he now made, or for the first time cultivated, were Carlyle, Rogers, Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett.
Material difficulties now, however, for the first time intruded on Tennyson's path. He became the victim of a certain "earnest
frothy" speculator, who induced him to sell his little Lincolnshire estate at Grasby, and to invest the proceeds, with all his other money, and part of that of his brothers and sisters, in a "Patent Decorative Carving Company"; in a few months the whole scheme collapsed, and Tennyson was left penniless. He was attacked by so overwhelming a hypochondria that his life was despaired of, and he was placed for some time under the charge of a hydro pathic physician at Cheltenham, where absolute rest and isolation gradually brought him round to health again. The state of utter indigence to which Tennyson was reduced greatly exercised his friends, and in Sept. 1845, at the suggestion of Henry Hallam, Sir Robert Peel was induced to bestow on the poet a pension of £200 a year. Tennyson's health slowly became restored, and in 1846 he was hard at work on The Princess; in the autumn of this year he took a tour in Switzerland, and saw great mountains and such "stateliest bits of landskip" for the first time. In nervous prostration again obliged him to undergo treatment at Prestbury: "They tell me not to read, not to think; but they might as well tell me not to live." Dr. Gully's water-cure was tried, with success.
In his absent-minded way Tennyson was very apt to mislay objects; in earlier life he had lost the ms. of Poems, chiefly Lyrical, and had been obliged to restore the whole from scraps and memory. Now a worse thing befell him, for in February 185o, having collected into one "long ledger-like book" all the elegies (In Memoriam) on Arthur Hallam which he had been composing at intervals since 1833, he left this only ms. in the cupboard of some lodgings in Mornington Place, Hampstead Road. By extraordinary good chance it had been overlooked by the landlady, and Coventry Patrriore was able to recover it. In Memoriam was published, in its original anonymous form, in May 185o. The public was at first greatly mystified by the nature and object of this poem, which was not merely a chronicle of Tennyson's emotions under bereavement, nor even a statement of his philosophical and religious beliefs, but, as he long afterwards explained, a sort of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness in the marriage of his youngest sister, Cecilia Lushington. In fact, the great blemishes of In Memoriam, its redundancy and the dis location of its parts, were largely due to the desultory manner of its composition. The poet wrote the sections as they occurred to him, and did not think of weaving them together into a single poem until it was too late to give them real coherency.