Her whose gentle will has changed my fate
      And made my life a perfumed altar flame,

whom he had loved for thirteen years, but whom his poverty had prevented him from marrying.  The year is made further remarkable by the publication of In Memoriam, probably the most enduring of his poems, upon which he had worked at intervals for sixteen years.  Three years later, with the money that his work now brought him, he leased the house Farringford, in the Isle of Wight, and settled in the first permanent home he had known since he left the rectory at Somersby.

For the remaining forty years of his life he lived, like Wordsworth, “in the stillness of a great peace,” writing steadily, and enjoying the friendship of a large number of people, some distinguished, some obscure, from the kindly and sympathetic Victoria to the servants on his own farm.  All of these he called with equal sincerity his friends, and to each one he was the same man, simple, strong, kindly, and noble.  Carlyle describes him as “a fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man, ... most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted.”  Loving solitude and hating publicity as he did, the numerous tourists from both sides of the ocean, who sought him out in his retreat and insisted upon seeing him, made his life at times intolerable.  Influenced partly by the desire to escape such popularity, he bought land and built for himself a new house, Aldworth, in Surrey, though he made his home in Farringford for the greater part of the year.

His labor during these years and his marvelous freshness and youthfulness of feeling are best understood by a glance at the contents of his complete works.  Inferior poems, like The Princess, which was written in the first flush of his success, and his dramas, which were written against the advice of his best friends, may easily be criticised; but the bulk of his verse shows an astonishing originality and vigor to the very end.  He died very quietly at Aldworth, with his family about him in the moonlight, and beside him a volume of Shakespeare, open at the dirge in Cymbeline:

    Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
      Nor the furious winter’s rages;
    Thou thy worldly task hast done,
      Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

The strong and noble spirit of his life is reflected in one of his best known poems, “Crossing the Bar,” which was written in his eighty-first year, and which he desired should be placed at the end of his collected works: 

    Sunset and evening star,
      And one clear call for me! 
    And may there be no moaning of the bar,
      When I put out to sea,
    But such a tide as, moving, seems asleep,
      Too full for sound and foam,
    When that which drew from out the boundless deep
      Turns again home. 
    Twilight and evening bell,
      And after that the dark!