were all enthusiastic admirers of Tennyson's work and art, and his close
personal friends, who have left on record many interesting sketches of
the poet in their published writings, or in letters to him, and
especially in reminiscences furnished for the Memoir by the poet's son.

Nine years before the appearance of the 1842 volume of Tennyson's verse
the poet's bosom friend, Arthur Hallam, died at an immature age at
Vienna, and his death was the subject of much brooding in noble, elegiac
verse, written, as was Milton's 'Lycidas,' to commemorate the loss of
one very dear to the poet. In "In Memoriam," as all know, Tennyson
sought to assuage his grief and give fine, artistic expression to his
profound sorrow at the loss of his companion and friend; but the work is
more than a labored monument of woe, since it enshrines reflections of
the most exalted and inspiring character on the eternally momentous
themes of life, death, and immortality. The work was published in 1850,
and it at once challenged the admiration of the world for the perfection
of its art, no less than for its high contemplative beauty. This was the
year when Wordsworth passed to the grave, and Tennyson, in his room, was
given the English laureateship. In this year, also, we find him happily
married to Emily S. Sellwood, a lady of Berks, to whom the poet had been
engaged since 1837. With his bride he took up house at Twickenham, near
London, where his son, Hallam Tennyson, was born in 1852. In the
following year he removed to Farringford, on the Isle of Wight, which
was to be his home for forty years, and where, as his son tells us, some
of his best-known works were written. Here, in 1854, his second son,
Lionel, was born, whose young life of promise was terminated by jungle
fever thirty-two years later on a return voyage from India,--all that
was mortal of him finding repose in the depths of the Red Sea. To
complete the chief incidents in the poet's personal career, we may here
record that while Tennyson acquired another home at Aldworth,
Surrey,--where he died Oct. 6, 1892, followed some four years later by
his wife,--his happiest days were spent at Farringford, the pilgrimage
place of many eminent worshippers of the poet's muse, where was
dispensed an unostentatious but open-handed and genial British
hospitality. It should be added that, besides the perquisites which
attach to the office of the Poet Laureate, Tennyson was given from 1845
a pension of L20