It was on September 15, 1833, that Arthur Hallam died. Unheralded by sign or symptom of disease as it was, the news fell like a thunderbolt from a serene sky. Tennyson’s and Hallam’s love had been “passing the love of women.” A blow like this drives a man on the rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble problems of destiny. “Is this the end?” Nourished as on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthening doctrines of popular science, trained from childhood to forego hope and attend evening lectures, the young critics of our generation find Tennyson a weakling because he had hopes and fears concerning the ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life—his friendship. “That faith I fain would keep, That hope I’ll not forego: Eternal be the sleep— Unless to waken so,” wrote Lockhart, and the verses echoed ceaselessly in the widowed heart of Carlyle. These men, it is part of the duty of critics later born to remember, were not children or cowards, though they dreamed, and hoped, and feared. We ought to make allowance for failings incident to an age not yet fully enlightened by popular science, and still undivorced from spiritual ideas that are as old as the human race, and perhaps not likely to perish while that race exists. Now and then even scientific men have been mistaken, especially when they have declined to examine evidence, as in this problem of the transcendental nature of the human spirit they usually do. At all events Tennyson was unconvinced that death is the end, and shortly after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he began to write fragments in verse preluding to the poem of _In Memoriam_. He also began, in a mood of great misery, _The Two Voices_; _or_, _Thoughts of a Suicide_. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834, when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautiful _Sir Galahad_, “intended for something of a male counterpart to _St Agnes_.” The _Morte d’Arthur_ Tennyson then thought “the best thing I have managed lately.” Very early in 1835 many stanzas of _In Memoriam_ had taken form. “I do not wish to be dragged forward in any shape before the reading public at present,” wrote the poet, when he heard that Mill desired to write on him. His _Œnone_ he had brought to its new perfection, and did not desire comments on work now several years old. He also wrote his _Ulysses_ and his _Tithonus_. If ever the term “morbid” could have been applied to Tennyson, it would have been in the years immediately following the death of Arthur Hallam. But the application would have been unjust. True, the poet was living out of the world; he was unhappy, and he was, as people say, “doing nothing.” He was so poor that he sold his Chancellor’s prize gold medal, and he did not “Scan his whole horizon In quest of what he could clap eyes on,”