by “Gray old grange or lonely fold, Or low morass and whispering reed, Or simple stile from mead to mead, Or sheepwalk up the windy wold.” Or the winter nights when “The Christmas bells from hill to hill Answer each other in the mist.” And nothing could be more full of tender feeling than this farewell to the old home in Canto CI., beginning— “Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down, Unloved, that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away.” And in Canto CII.— “We leave the well-beloved place Where first we gazed upon the sky; The roofs that heard our earliest cry Will shelter one of stranger race. We go, but ere we go from home As down the garden walks I move, Two spirits of a diverse love Contend for loving masterdom. One whispers ‘here thy boyhood sung Long since its matin song, and heard The low love-language of the bird In native hazels tassel-hung.’ The other answers, ‘yea, but here Thy feet have strayed in after hours With thy lost friend among the bowers, And this hath made them trebly dear.’ These two have striven half the day, And each prefers his separate claim, Poor rivals in a loving game, That will not yield each other way. I turn to go: my feet are set To leave the pleasant fields and farms; They mix in one another’s arms To one pure image of regret.” [Sidenote: ARTHUR HALLAM] Other sections speak of Arthur Hallam, and as each Christmas comes round, or each birthday of his friend, the poet’s feelings are voiced in such a way that, if we read it with care, the poem gives us a good deal of the author’s own life history. Arthur Hallam died on September 15, 1833, at Vienna, and his remains were brought home at the end of the year and interred at Clevedon in Somersetshire on January 4, 1834. “The Danube to the Severn gave The darken’d heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore And in the hearing of the wave.” Immediately after his death Tennyson had turned to work as the one solace in his overwhelming grief, although, but for those dependent on his aid, such as his sister Emily who was betrothed to Hallam, he said that he himself would have gladly died. He wrote the fine classic poem _Ulysses_, in which he voiced the need he felt of going forward and braving the struggle of life, and then, before it had reached England, he wrote the first section of _In Memoriam_ No. 9 addressed to the ship with its sad burden. “Fair ship that from the Italian shore Sailest the placid ocean plains With my lost Arthur’s loved remains, Spread thy full wings and waft him o’er.”