In 1833, the sudden death of Hallam, then Emily's betrothed, produced on Alfred's mind a deep and ineffaceable impression. While brooding over his sorrow, the idea came to him of expressing his emotions in verse which might be a fitting tribute to the dead. At different times and amid widely varying circumstances, were composed the elegiac strains and poetic musings that make up "In Memoriam," a poem representing many moods and experiences. It is a work occupying a place apart in literature. Its merits and defects are peculiar. There is no other elegy like it, and it may be doubted whether a second In Memoriam will ever be written. Tennyson erected an appropriate and imperishable monument to the memory of his lost friend. In conferring immortality upon his beloved Arthur, he gained it for himself. His best claim on the future is to be known and remembered as the author of "In Memoriam," his masterpiece. Equally enduring is the melodious wail--"Break, break, break," one of the sweetest dirges in all literature. Hallam was buried (Jan. 3, 1834) at Clevedon by the Severn, near its entrance to the Bristol Channel, within sound of the melancholy waves. Singularly this exquisite song, which breathes of the sea, was not composed here, but "in a Lincolnshire lane at five o'clock in the morning," as the Laureate himself has declared. It was written within a year after Hallam's death, Sept. 15, 1833. Not much has been learned of Tennyson's early manhood. No very definite picture can be formed of his life after he left college. He seldom wrote letters. Even his most intimate friends could not succeed in carrying on a correspondence with him. What happened to him is not, however, all a blank. A few scraps relating to his history are found in the letters of Carlyle, Fitzgerald, Milnes and others. A number of autobiographical fragments are sprinkled through the poems which he wrote between 1830 and 1850, but they refer more to his spiritual development than to the outward events which constitute memoirs. Mrs. Tennyson and her family continued to live at the Rectory after her husband died, March 16, 1831. In the autumn of 1835, she removed to High Beach, Epping Forest, ("In Memoriam," CII., CIV., CV.), and about 1840 to Well Walk, Hampstead. Here she made her home the rest of her life with her sister, Mary Ann Fytche--nearly all of her sons and daughters having married and scattered. She died February 21, 1865, at the age of eighty-four. Alfred's university career was cut short by his father's death. For some years he remained at home--a diligent student of books and a close observer of nature. He roamed back and forth between Somersby and London, alternately in solitude and with his friends.[4] Fitzgerald tells of his visiting with Tennyson at the Cumberland home of James Spedding in 1835.