His golden year was 1850, the year of the publication
of In Memoriam, of his selection as poet laureate,
to succeed Wordsworth, and of his marriage to Emily
Sellwood. He had been in love with her for fourteen
years, but insufficient income had hitherto prevented
marriage.
[Illustration: FARRINGFORD.]
In 1855 Oxford honored him by bestowing on him the
degree of D.C.L. The students gave him an ovation
and they properly honored his greatest poem, In
Memoriam by mentioning it first in their loud
calls; but they also paid their respects to his May
Queen, asking in chorus: “Did they
wake and call you early, call you early, Alfred dear?”
The rest of his life was outwardly uneventful.
He became the most popular poet of his age. Schools
and colleges had pupils translate his poems into Latin
and Greek verse. Of Enoch Arden (1864),
at that time his most popular narrative poem, sixty
thousand copies were sold almost as as soon as it
was printed. He made sufficient money to be able
to maintain two beautiful residences, a winter home
at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, and a summer
residence at Aldworth in Sussex. In 1884 he was
raised to the peerage, with the title of Baron of
Aldworth and Farringford. He died in 1892, at
the age of eighty-three, and was buried beside Robert
Browning in Westminster Abbey.
Early Verse.—Tennyson published a small
volume of poems in 1830, the year before he left college,
and another volume in 1832. Although these contained
some good poems, he was too often content to toy with
verse that had exquisite melody and but little meaning.
The “Airy, fairy Lilian” and “Sweet,
pale Margaret” type of verse had charmed him
overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely
criticized. Blackwood’s Magazine called
same of the lyrics “drivel,” and Carlyle
characterized the aesthetic verse as “lollipops.”
This adverse criticism and the shock from Hallam’s
death caused him to remain silent for nearly ten years.
His son and biographer says that his father during
this period “profited by friendly and unfriendly
criticism, and in silence, obscurity, and solitude,
perfected his art.”
In his thirty-third year (1842), Tennyson broke his
long silence by publishing two volumes of verse, containing
such favorites as The Poet, The Lady of Shalott,
The Palace of Art, The Lotos Eaters, A Dream of Fair
Women, Morte d’Arthur, Oenone, The Miller’s
Daughter, The Gardener’s Daughter, Dora, Ulysses,
Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, and Sir Galahad.
Unsparing revision of numbers of these poems that
had been published before, entitles them to be classed
as new work. Some critics think that Tennyson
never surpassed these 1842 volumes. His verse
shows the influence of Keats, of whom Tennyson said:
“There is something of the innermost soul of
poetry in almost everything that he wrote.”
One of Tennyson’s most distinctive qualities,
his art in painting beautiful word-pictures, is seen
at its best in stanzas from The Palace of Art.
His mastery over melody and the technique of verse
is evident in such lyrics as Sir Galahad, and
The Lotos Eaters. When the prime minister,
Sir Robert Peel, read from Ulysses the passage
beginning:—
