seventeen, sister to the wife of his brother Charles. The engagement and their correspondence lasted till 1840, when it was broken off with no prospect of marriage ever ensuing. The stimulus which would have driven another man to seek employment and money wherever it could be found, even in the merest hack-work, did not turn Tennyson from his purpose. He was even unwilling to allow publication of his finished work in magazines, and as for what had been already published, he deprecated all public criticism of it. Nothing, not even his desire for the woman he had chosen, interfered with what he conceived to be the necessity of his art. So there came a separation between the lovers which lasted over a silence of ten years. In the meantime the household of which Tennyson was now the head had been torn up from its roots in Somersby. In 1837 they left the Rectory and migrated first to Tunbridge Wells, then to Boxley, near Maidstone. This brought the poet nearer to London, and his visits were frequent enough to the friends of his own generation and to those of an older standing, from Rogers to Carlyle. These were the days of tavern dinners, such as are celebrated in Will Waterproof, and it was at this period that Carlyle etched one of his inimitable portraits in a letter to Emerson.

"Alfred is one of the few British and foreign figures (a not increasing number, I think) who are and remain beautiful to me, a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say 'Brother'. However, I doubt he will not come [to see me]; he often skips me, in these brief visits to town; skips everybody, indeed; being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom, carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos. . . . He had his breeding at Cambridge, as if for the Law or Church; being master

of a small annuity on his father's decease, he preferred clubbing with his mother and some sisters, to live unpromoted and write Poems. In this way he lives still, now here, now there; the family always within reach of London, never in it; he himself making rare and brief visits, lodging in some old comrade's rooms. I think he must be under forty, not much under it. One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusky dark hair; bright, laughing, hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, massive yet most delicate; of sallow brown complexion, almost Indian looking, clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy, smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous; I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe! we shall see what he will grow to.'

Carlyle's advice to Tennyson is notable as one of the few positive recommendations laid down by that sage. It was to the effect that he should leave verse and rhyme and apply his genius to prose-a singularly unwise exhortation, as the volume published in 1842 was soon to prove. This contained among the new poems Locksley Hall and the Morte d'Arthur; but the main character of the additions was given by the English Idyls, Dora, The Gardener's Daughter, and the rest. His fame may be dated definitely from the publication of this volume. Posterity, someone has said, commences at the frontier; and his work was widely read and criticised outside of this country. At home Oxford was now scarcely less enthusiastic than Cambridge, and Carlyle wrote the "true deposition of a volunteer witness", in a wonderful letter of gratitude. Still there were many harassing circumstances in his existence. All his own private fortune, which had hitherto yielded a small income, and a portion of that belonging to his brothers and sisters, was

In

invested in a manufactory for turning out woodcarvings, and the whole was lost. But his brotherin-law insured the life of Dr. Allen, the company promoter, in Tennyson's interest, and this gentleman very opportunely died in the following year. Luck now turned. In 1845, at the instance of Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Peel granted a pension of £200 a year; the argument used was, it is said, a reading of Ulysses. In 1847 The Princess appeared, in which Tennyson with his usual tact gave a direction to the thoughts upon woman's position then occupying the popular mind. 1850 came In Memoriam, and the poet at once stepped into the position which became increasingly imposed upon him, of religious teacher outside the pale of dogma. This year marks the turning-point in his life. In the spring he met Miss Sellwood after a separation of ten years; and he felt that his means were now sufficient to offer her a home. They were married on June 13th-he aged 41, she 37-and it seems clear that he never said a truer thing than the utterance quoted by his son, "The peace of God came into my life before the altar when. I wedded her". In the following November came the offer of the laureateship; and from this onward the Life is nothing but the unbroken record of a series of successes.

One misfortune came at the outset: his first child, a boy, was born dead. On Mrs. Tennyson's recovery they went abroad, travelled in Italy, and met the Brownings. Returning to England in the close of 1851, they found the country in a high fever of anxiety about its defences, and Tennyson wrote the earliest of his national songs-Britons guard your own and Hands all round: but his strong feeling for the greatness of his race found a far nobler expression in his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington—a magnificent poem which

by some amazing error in popular judgment was received with almost universal condemnation. It was a new experience and an embittering one to his over-sensitive nature; but, conscious of his developed art, he went straight on his way. His personal concerns were prosperous; two sons were born to him in quick succession, and children always seem to have been to him a source of delight. In 1853 he felt justified in taking a lease of Farringford, the beautiful house in the Isle of Wight, with the option to purchase, and so he settled down into the home, and among the scenes, with which his memory will for ever be associated.

In December, 1854, The Charge of the Light Brigade was written, and the enthusiasm which it aroused among the soldiers in the Crimea was such a reward as comes to few writers. A thousand copies were printed by Tennyson and circulated among the troops as a mark of his gratitude for their welcome to the verse. In 1855 came Maud, and at this distance of time it is difficult to account for the storm which that poem roused. To the end of his days Tennyson cherished a special affection for it, and for the Funeral Ode, which was probably born in part of the instinct to rise in defence of them. But the man who within five years had published Maud and In Memoriam, had no occasion to trouble about critics-though he did so. He had reached the climax of his genius; and though he wrote things later on, even up to the very slope of the grave, that may challenge comparison with the glow of his earlier poems, the concentrated force of In Memoriam, or the passion of Maud, his work from this onward began to decline.

The

Not that his contemporaries thought so. first Idylls of the King, Enid, Vivien, Elaine, Guinevere, appeared in 1858, and were received "with tumult of acclaim". Whereas before it had often

From

been the many, the average well-informed critics or reviews, who censured, and the few who applauded, it was now a general chorus of enthusiasm in which the most enthusiastic voices came from men like Thackeray and Gladstone. But at the same time, from certain among the faithful of old days,-notably from Ruskin and FitzGerald,-there came now a half-uttered protest-praise tempered with deprecation of the new departure. I shall have more to say of this later, but this is the place to note that Tennyson, becoming more exclusively a writer of picturesque description, and assuming more and more consciously a didactic purpose, drew further and further away from the real heart of life. this onward there is really nothing to record. In 1873 the offer of a baronetcy was refused. In 1875 Tennyson embarked upon a new branch of literature, and published Queen Mary, which was played in the next year. Harold followed in 1877. Becket, though not published till 1884, was written by 1879, in which year The Falcon was produced by Mr. and Mrs. Kendal. Meanwhile the receipts from his poems had made this poet perhaps the richest man who ever earned his money by verse. His beautiful house of Aldworth was built (by Mr. James Knowles) on Blackdown among the Surrey Hills, but the Isle of Wight was still the home of his choice. In 1880 appeared the volume of Ballads and other Poems containing Rizpah and The Revenge, which rank with his best work. In the same year Sir Henry Irving and Miss Terry played in The Cup, and in 1882 Mrs. Bernard Beere brought out The Promise of May. 1883 saw his famous cruise in the Pembroke Castle, when Mr. Gladstone, then at the height of his reputation, scarcely attracted more attention than the poet. In the autumn of this year a peerage was offered him, and after some hesitation was accepted. In 1885