Spedding, speaking in a letter to Thompson in 1835 of Tennyson’s visit to the Lake country, lets fall a few words that describe the poet in the period before his marriage more fully than could have been done by a volume of subtle analysis:— “I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would have supposed who did not know his own almost personal dislike of the present, whatever it might be.” This is what makes us say that by far the most important thing in Tennyson’s life was his marriage. He began to enjoy the present: “The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her.” No more beautiful words than these were ever uttered by any man concerning any woman. And to say that the words were Tennyson’s is to say that they expressed the simple truth, for his definition of human speech as God meant it to be would have been “the breath that utters truth.” It would have been wonderful, indeed, if he, whose capacity of loving a friend was so great had been without an equal capacity of loving a woman. “Although as a son,” says the biographer, “I cannot allow myself full utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and ‘very woman of very woman’—‘such a wife’ and true helpmate she proved herself. It was she who became my father’s adviser in literary matters; ‘I am proud of her intellect,’ he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her and to no one else he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her ‘tender, spiritual nature,’ {156} and instinctive nobility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable letters addressed to him from all parts of the world. By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by ‘her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,’ she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his depression and of his sorrow.” There are some few people whose natures are so noble or so sweet that how rich soever may be their endowment of intellect, or even of genius, we seem to remember them mainly by what St. Gregory Nazianzen calls “the rhetoric of their lives.” And surely the knowledge that this is so is encouraging to him who would fain believe in the high destiny of man—surely it is encouraging to know that, in spite of “the inhuman dearth of noble natures,” mankind can still so dearly love moral beauty as to hold it more precious than any other human force. And certainly one of those whose intellectual endowments are outdazzled by the beauty of their qualities of heart and soul was the sweet lady whose death I am recording.