“It may be as well to say here that all the letters from my father to Arthur Hallam were destroyed by his father after Arthur’s death: a great loss, as these particular letters probably revealed his inner self more truly than anything outside his poems.” We confess to belonging to those who always read with a twinge of remorse the private letters of a man in print. But if there is a case where one must needs long to see the letters between two intimate friends, it is that of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. They would have been only second in interest to Shakespeare’s letters to that mysterious “Mr. W. H.” whose identity now can never be traced. For, notwithstanding all that has recently been said, and ably said, to the contrary, the man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed was he whom “T. T.” addresses as “Mr. W. H.” But for an intimacy to be so strong as that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam there must be a kinship of soul so close and so rare that the tie of blood relationship seems weak beside it. It is then that friendship may sometimes pass from a sentiment into a passion. It did so in the case of Shakespeare and his mysterious friend, as the sonnets in question make manifest; but we are not aware that there is in English literature any other instance of friendship as a passion until we get to ‘In Memoriam.’ So profound was the effect of Hallam’s death upon Tennyson that it was the origin, his son tells us, of ‘The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide.’ What was the secret of Hallam’s influence over Tennyson can never be guessed from anything that he has left behind either in prose or verse. But besides the creative genius of the artist there is that genius of personality which is irresistible. With a very large gift of this kind of genius Arthur Hallam seems to have been endowed. “In the letters from Arthur Hallam’s friends,” says Lord Tennyson, “there was a rare unanimity of opinion about his worth. Milnes, writing to his father, says that he had a ‘very deep respect’ for Hallam, and that Thirlwall, in after years the great bishop, for whom Hallam and my father had a profound affection, was ‘actually captivated by him.’ When at Cambridge with Hallam he had written: ‘He is the only man here of my own standing before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.’ Alford writes: ‘Hallam was a man of wonderful mind and knowledge on all subjects, hardly credible at his age. . . . I long ago set him down for the most wonderful person I ever knew. He was of the most tender, affectionate disposition.’”