Tennyson did not take a degree at Cambridge, for, owing to his father’s failing health, he was called home.  He left college, perhaps with no very keen regret, for his heart was not in sympathy with the teaching.  In his undergraduate days he wrote some scathing lines about it.  You “teach us nothing,” he said, “feeding not the heart.”  But he did remember with tenderness that Cambridge had been the spot where his first and warmest friendship had been formed.

Soon after Alfred left college, his father died very suddenly.  Although the father was now gone the Tennysons did not need to leave their home, for the new rector did not want the house.  So life in the Rectory went quietly on; friends came and went, the dearest friend of all, Arthur Hallam, came often, for he loved the poet’s young sister, and one day they were to be married.  It was a peaceful happy time—­

    “And all we met was fair and good,
        And all was good that Time could bring,
        And all the secret of the Spring,
    Moved in the chambers of the blood.”

Long days were spent reading poetry and talking of many things—­

    “Or in the all-golden afternoon
        A guest, or happy sister, sung,
        Or here she brought the harp and flung
    A ballad to the brightening moon.

    “Nor less it pleased the livelier moods,
        Beyond the bounding hill to stray,
        And break the live long summer day
    With banquet in the distant woods.”

And amid this pleasant country life the poet worked on, and presently another little book of poems appeared.  Still fame did not come, and one severe and blundering review kept Tennyson, it is said, from publishing anything more for ten years.

But now there fell upon him what was perhaps the darkest sorrow of his life.  Arthur Hallam, who was traveling on the Continent, died suddenly at Vienna.  When the news came to Tennyson that his friend was gone—­

“That in Vienna’s fatal walls
God’s finger touch’d him, and he slept,”

for a time joy seemed blotted out of life, and only that he might help to comfort his sister did he wish to live, for—­

“That remorseless iron hour
Made cypress of her orange flower,
Despair of Hope.”

As an outcome of this grief we have one of Tennyson’s finest poems, In Memoriam.  It is an elegy which we place beside Lycidas and Adonais.  But In Memoriam strikes yet a sadder note.  For in Lycidas and Adonais Milton and Shelley mourned kindred souls rather than dear loved friends.  To Tennyson, Arthur Hallam was “The brother of my love”—­

“Dear as the mother to the son
More than my brothers are to me.”

In Memoriam is a group of poems rather than one long poem—­

    “Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
        Their wings in tears, and skim away.”

It is written in a meter which Tennyson believed he had invented, but which Ben Jonson and others had used before him.  Two hundred years before Jonson had written a little elegy beginning—­