But all this was the shadow of a very sensitive and melancholy temperament.  Comparatively little is known of the first forty years of his life; it is after that time that the elaborate legend begins.  Till the time of his marriage, he must have been a constant anxiety to his friends; his gloom, his inertia, his drifting mooning ways, his hypochondria, his incapacity for any settled plan of life, all seemed to portend an ultimate failure.  But this troubled inertness was the soil of his inspiration; his conceptions took slow and stately shape.  He never suffered from the haste, which as Dante says “mars all decency of act.”  After that time he enjoyed a great domestic happiness, and practised considerable sociability.  His terrifying demeanour, his amazing personal dignity and majesty, the certainty that he would say whatever came into his head, whether it was profound and solemn, or testy and discourteous, gave him a personal ascendancy that never disappointed a pilgrim.

But he lived all his life in a perpetual melancholy, feeling the smallest slights acutely, hating at once obscurity and publicity, aware of his renown, yet shrinking from the evidences of it.  He could be distracted by company, soothed by wine and tobacco; but left to itself, his mind fell helplessly down the dark slope into a sadness and a dreariness which deprived life of its savour.  It was not that his dread was a definite one; he was strong and tough physically, and he regarded death with a solemn curiosity; but he had a sense of the profitlessness of vacant hours, unthrilled by beauty and delight, and had also a morbid pride, of the nature of vanity, which caused him to resent the smallest criticism of his works from the humblest reader.  There are many stories of this, how he declaimed against the lust of gossip, which he called with rough appositeness “ripping up a man like a pig,” and thanked God with all his heart and soul that he knew nothing of Shakespeare’s private life; and in the same breath went on to say that he thought that his own fame was suffering from a sort of congestion, because he had received no letters about his poems for several days.

In later life he became very pessimistic, and believed that the world was sinking fast into dull materialism, petty selfishness, and moral anarchy.  He had less opportunity of knowing what was going on in the world than most people, in his sheltered and secluded life, with his court of friends and worshippers.  And indeed it was not a rational pessimism; it was but the shadow of his fear.  And the fact remains that in spite of a life of great good fortune, and an undimmed supremacy of fame, he spent much of his time in fighting shadows, involved in clouds of darkness and dissatisfaction.  That was no doubt the price he paid for his exquisite perception of beauty and his power of melodious expression.  But we make a great mistake if we merely think of Tennyson as a rich and ample nature moving serenely through life.