Perhaps the most loved of all Tennyson’s works is In Memoriam, which, on account of both its theme and its exquisite workmanship, is “one of the few immortal names that were not born to die.”  The immediate occasion of this remarkable poem was Tennyson’s profound personal grief at the death of his friend Hallam.  As he wrote lyric after lyric, inspired by this sad subject, the poet’s grief became less personal, and the greater grief of humanity mourning for its dead and questioning its immortality took possession of him.  Gradually the poem became an expression, first, of universal doubt, and then of universal faith, a faith which rests ultimately not on reason or philosophy but on the soul’s instinct for immortality.  The immortality of human love is the theme of the poem, which is made up of over one hundred different lyrics.  The movement takes us through three years, rising slowly from poignant sorrow and doubt to a calm peace and hope, and ending with a noble hymn of courage and faith,—­a modest courage and a humble faith, love-inspired,—­which will be a favorite as long as saddened men turn to literature for consolation.  Though Darwin’s greatest books had not yet been written, science had already overturned many old conceptions of life; and Tennyson, who lived apart and thought deeply on all the problems of his day, gave this poem to the world as his own answer to the doubts and questionings of men.  This universal human interest, together with its exquisite form and melody, makes the poem, in popular favor at least, the supreme threnody, or elegiac poem, of our literature; though Milton’s Lycidas is, from the critical view point, undoubtedly a more artistic work.

The Idylls of the King ranks among the greatest of Tennyson’s later works.  Its general subject is the Celtic legends of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, and the chief source of its material is Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.  Here, in this mass of beautiful legends, is certainly the subject of a great national epic; yet after four hundred years, during which many poets have used the material, the great epic is still unwritten.  Milton and Spenser, as we have already noted, considered this material carefully; and Milton alone, of all English writers, had perhaps the power to use it in a great epic.  Tennyson began to use these legends in his Morte d’Arthur (1842); but the epic idea probably occurred to him later, in 1856, when he began “Geraint and Enid,” and he added the stories of “Vivien,” “Elaine,” “Guinevere,” and other heroes and heroines at intervals, until “Balin,” the last of the Idylls, appeared in 1885.  Later these works were gathered together and arranged with an attempt at unity.  The result is in no sense an epic poem, but rather a series of single poems loosely connected by a thread of interest in Arthur, the central personage, and in his unsuccessful attempt to found an ideal kingdom.