in the way of money-making, which another poet describes as the normal attitude of all men as well as of pirates. A careless observer would have thought that the poet was dawdling. But he dwelt in no Castle of Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his verses: like Sir Walter in Liddesdale, “he was making himsel’ a’ the time.” He did not neglect the movements of the great world in that dawn of discontent with the philosophy of commercialism. But it was not his vocation to plunge into the fray, and on to platforms. It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in England, for a man deliberately to choose poetry as the duty of his life, and to remain loyal, as a consequence, to the bride of St Francis—Poverty. This loyalty Tennyson maintained, even under the temptation to make money in recognised ways presented by his new-born love for his future wife, Miss Emily Sellwood. They had first met in 1830, when she, a girl of seventeen, seemed to him like “a Dryad or an Oread wandering here.” But admiration became the affection of a lifetime when Tennyson met Miss Sellwood as bridesmaid to her sister, the bride of his brother Charles, in 1836. The poet could not afford to marry, and, like the hero of _Locksley Hall_, he may have asked himself, “What is that which I should do?” By 1840 he had done nothing tangible and lucrative, and correspondence between the lovers was forbidden. That neither dreamed of Tennyson’s deserting poetry for a more normal profession proved of great benefit to the world. The course is one which could only be justified by the absolute certainty of possessing genius. III. 1837–1842. IN 1837 the Tennysons left the old rectory; till 1840 they lived at High Beech in Epping Forest, and after a brief stay at Tunbridge Wells went to Boxley, near Maidstone. It appears that at last the poet had “beat his music out,” though his friends “still tried to cheer him.” But the man who wrote _Ulysses_ when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac. “If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness,” he said at this time; “for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except _King Arthur_, had been done.” The age had not _la tête épique_: Poe had announced the paradox that there is no such thing as a long poem, and even in dealing with Arthur, Tennyson followed the example of Theocritus in writing, not an epic, but epic idylls. Long poems suit an age of listeners, for which they were originally composed, or of leisure and few books. At present epics are read for duty’s sake, not for the only valid reason, “for human pleasure,” in FitzGerald’s phrase. Between 1838 and 1840 Tennyson made some brief tours in England with FitzGerald, and, coming from Coventry, wrote _Godiva_. His engagement with Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned _sine die_, as they were forbidden to correspond.