Allan Cunningham, and John Stuart Mill bore helpful testimony to the rich and rare promise of Tennyson's muse. The feeling rapidly gained ground that, in spite of some verbal conceits, occasional crudities of rhythm, and metaphors that sometimes produced a jarring effect, an eminently English poet had arisen, capable, when he should have pruned away the wild growths of youth, of rising to the loftiest themes in the most melodious verse. But a great shadow was coming to sobor in affliction the fancy of the poet, and to chasten his soul with a memorable sadness. Arthur Hallam, to whose thread in the interest of our narrative it becomes needful to revert, took his degree and quitted Cambridge in 1832, and went to live with his father at 67 Wimpole Street-"the dark house in the long unlovely street "—the number of which he was wont to jocularly impress upon his friends by telling them that he would always be found "at sixes and sevens." Intended for the law, he was entered at the Inner Temple, and put to read with an eminent conveyancer. An intellect like his would have grappled easily enough with the entanglements and confusions of the great legal puzzle. One who could master a difficult work by Descartes at a single sitting, could have applied himself with some prospect of signal success to the niceties of forensic discussion. What he would have accomplished had he not been struck down in the very flower of his early manhood, no one can say. The dawn gave rich promise of a golden day, and many hopes centred in this "rose and expectancy" of his father's house. His health, which had been uncertain at Cambridge through the fault of an irregular circulation, seemed at this time to have mended, and he was strong enough to do considerable work in the way of translations and memoirs which evinced a remarkable insight into the springs of human action. But all this brilliancy of promise was to be roughly destroyed. In the autumn of 1833 he accompanied his father on a continental tour. While at Vienna, in the month of September, he was seized with a slight fever, from which nothing serious was apprchended. His father went out, and on his return found him lying, as he supposed, asleep on a couch. He was asleep, but it was the sleep of death. A sudden determination of blood to the head-his old disorder-caused by a weak action of the heart, had over-charged the cerebral vessels, and death must have been instantaneous: "God's finger touched him, and he slept,” "Those whose eyes must long be dim with tears," wrote his bereaved father, "brought him home to rest among his kindred and in his own country." They buried him in the chancel of Clevedon Church, on a hill overlooking the tawny waters of the Bristol Channel, where "the stately ship sails on to its haven under the hill." More than half a century has passed since they laid him there to rest, cut off so ruthlessly in the glory of his opening day; yet a sympathetic interest is still felt in the record of his brief life, and always will be felt as long as people shall read the noble requiem of his gifted friend.* * The tablet in the south transept of Clevedon Church reads as follows :~~ "TO THE MEMORY OF ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM, OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, B.A., WHO WAS SNATCHED AWAY BY SUDDEN DEATH, AND NOW IN THIS OBSCURE AND SOLITARY REPOSE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF FOR THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS GENIUS, Abundant testimony was forthcoming, from other contemporaries besides Tennyson, to the rare and special quality of the life thus cut short, through some inscrutable purpose of Providence, on the very threshold of its larger scope. His college friend, Alford, thus wrote of Hallam, when the impress of his influence was yet fresh : "Gentle soul, That ever moved among us in a veil Of heavenly lustre ; in whose presence thoughts To the full triumphs of thy gathered strength." Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) spoke of him as "not only a beloved friend, a delightful companion, but a most wise and influential counsellor in all the serious concerns of existence, an incomparable critic in all our literary efforts." Mr. Gladstone, who was his schoolfellow at Eton, wrote of him thus: 66 He is well known to have been one who, if the term of his days had been prolonged, would have needed no aid from a friendly hand, would have built his own enduring monument, and would have bequeathed to his country a name in all likelihood greater than that of his very distinguished father." And that father, with all a father's pardonable pride, has put it on record that Arthur's premature abilities were not more conspicuous than an almost faultless disposition, sustained by a more calm self-command than has often been witnessed in this season of life. Lord Tennyson, from whose memory the long roll of years never effaced the remembrance of his dead friend, spoke of him to intimate friends, within a comparatively recent period, as having been " as near perfection as a mortal man can be." Towards the close of 1833, Monckton Milnes wrote to Tennyson on the subject of his "Impressions of Greece," which he was about to bring out, and received the following letter in reply:— "MY DEAR MILNES, "December 3, 1833. "A letter from you was like a message from the land of shadows. It is so long since I have looked upon and conversed with you, that I will not deny but that you had withdrawn a little into the twilight. Yet you do me a wrong in supposing that I have forgotten you. I shall not easily forget you, for you have that about you which one remembers with pleasure. I am rejoiced to hear that you intend to present us with your Grecian impressions. Your gay and airy mind must have caught as many colours from the landskip you moved through as a flying soap-bubble-a comparison truly somewhat irreverent, yet I meant it not as such; though I care not if you take it in an evil sense, for is it not owed to you for your three years' silence to me whom you professed to love and care for? And in the second place, for your expression, clearing one's mind of Greek thoughts and Greek feelings to make way for something better.' It is a sad thing to have a dirty mind full of Greek thoughts and feelings. What an Augean it Lust have been before the Greek thoughts got there! To be done with this idle banter, I hope that in your book you have given us much glowing description and little mysticism. I know that you can describe richly and vividly. Give orders to Moxon, and he will take care that the volume is conveyed to me. "Believe me, dear Richard, "Ever thine, "A. T. "P.S.-Charles and Frederick are neither of them herc, so that I am forced to cover their remembrances to you." CHAPTER IV. TENNYSON, like Thackeray, left Cambridge without taking a degree. It may be conjectured that the consciousness of credentials surpassing those bestowed by any academical distinction made him indifferent to the honours of the schools. His intention, we may reasonably suppose, was already resolute to make literature the real business of his life. Knowing the measure of his own powers, and feeling within him the capability of accomplishing better things, he now suspended for a while the publication of new pieces, and allowed his fruit to ripen thoroughly before gathering it. The death of Hallam will account but very partially for this long withdrawal from the public arena. With the exception of "The Lover's Tale," privately printed and speedily suppressed, and a couple of lyrics in miscellaneous collections, nothing of his was issued from the press between the 1833 "Poems" and a revised and enlarged edition in 1842. These exceptions may be speedily dismissed. "The Lover's Tale," as has been already intimated, was written in Tennyson's nineteenth year. It consisted of three parts, only two of which were printed. "Feeling," says Lord Tennyson, in the preface to the 1879 edition, "the imperfection of the poem, I withdrew it from the press. One of my friends, however, who, boy-like, admired the boy's work, distributed among our common associates of that hour some copies of these two parts, without my knowledge, without the omissions and amendments I had in contemplation, and marred by the many misprints of the compositor." One of these copies was sold in London in 1870, and as a result became "mercilessly pirated." Lord Tennyson, thereupon, seeing that what he "had scarce deemed worthy to live was not allowed to die," suffered the whole poem to come into the light. In 1837, "St. Agnes" appeared in the Keepsake; and the beautiful stanzas, "Oh! that 'twere possible," which were subsequently incorporated in "Maud," and which have |