Moreover, he was always speculating upon the mystery and the wonder of the human story. “The far future,” he says in a letter to Miss Sellwood, written from High Beech in Epping Forest, “has been my world always.” And yet so powerless is reason in that dire wrestle with temperament which most poets know, that with all these causes for despising criticism of his work, Tennyson was as sensitive to critical strictures as Wordsworth was indifferent. “He fancied,” says his biographer, “that England was an unsympathetic atmosphere, and half resolved to live abroad in Jersey, in the South of France, or in Italy. He was so far persuaded that the English people would never care for his poetry, that, had it not been for the intervention of his friends, he declared it not unlikely that after the death of Hallam he would not have continued to write.” And again, in reference to the completion of ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ his son says, “He warmed to his work because there had been a favourable review of him lately published in far-off Calcutta.” We dwell upon this weakness of Tennyson’s—a weakness which, in view of his immense powers, was certainly a source of wonder to his friends—in order to show, once for all, that without the tender care of his son he could never in his later years have done the work he did. This it was which caused the relations between Tennyson and the writer of this admirable memoir to be those of brother with brother rather than of father with son. And those who have been eagerly looking forward to these volumes will not be disappointed. In writing the life of any man there are scores and scores of facts and documents, great and small, which only some person closely acquainted with him, either as relative or as friend, can bring into their true light; and this it is which makes documents so deceptive. Here is an instance of what we mean. In writing to Thompson, Spedding says of Tennyson on a certain occasion: “I could not get Alfred to Rydal Mount. He would and would not (sulky one!), although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him.” This remark would inevitably have been construed into another instance of that churlishness which is so often said (though quite erroneously) to have been one of Tennyson’s infirmities. But when we read the following foot-note by the biographer, “He said he did not wish to intrude himself on the great man at Rydal,” we accept the incident as another proof of that “humility” which the son alludes to in his preface as being one of his father’s characteristics. And of such evidence that had not the poet’s son written his biography the loss to literature would have been incalculable the book is full. Evidence of a fine intellect, a fine culture, and a sure judgment is afforded by every page—afforded as much by what is left unsaid as by what is said.