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:—­