The year 1880 brought deeper distress in the death of the poet’s son Lionel, whose illness, begun in India, ended fatally in the Red Sea. The interest of the following years was mainly domestic. The poet’s health, hitherto robust, was somewhat impaired in 1888, but his vivid interest in affairs and in letters was unabated. He consoled himself with Virgil, Keats, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Euripides, and Mr Leaf’s speculations on the composite nature of the _Iliad_, in which Coleridge, perhaps alone among poets, believed. “You know,” said Tennyson to Mr Leaf; “I never liked that theory of yours about the many poets.” It would be at least as easy to prove that there were many authors of _Ivanhoe_, or perhaps it would be a good deal more easy. However, he admitted that three lines which occur both in the Eighth and the Sixteenth Books of the _Iliad_ are more appropriate in the later book. Similar examples might be found in his own poems. He still wrote, in the intervals of a malady which brought him “as near death as a man could be without dying.” He was an example of the great physical strength which, on the whole, seems usually to accompany great mental power. The strength may be dissipated by passion, or by undue labour, as in cases easily recalled to memory, but neither cause had impaired the vigour of Tennyson. Like Goethe, he lived out all his life; and his eightieth birthday was cheered both by public and private expressions of reverence and affection. Of Tennyson’s last three years on earth we may think, in his own words, that his “Life’s latest eve endured Nor settled into hueless grey.” Nature was as dear to him and as inspiring as of old; men and affairs and letters were not slurred by his intact and energetic mind. His _Demeter and other Poems_, with the dedication to Lord Dufferin, appeared in the December of the year. The dedication was the lament for the dead son and the salutation to the Viceroy of India, a piece of resigned and manly regret. The _Demeter and Persephone_ is a modern and tender study of the theme of the most beautiful Homeric Hymn. The ancient poet had no such thought of the restored Persephone as that which impels Tennyson to describe her “Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies All night across the darkness, and at dawn Falls on the threshold of her native land.”