“I am a part of all that I have met,”

he gave Tennyson a much-needed annual pension of L200.

These volumes show that he was coming into touch with the thought of the age. Locksley Hall communicates the thrill which he felt from the new possibilities of science:—­

  “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
  Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
       * * * * *
  I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.”

Hallam’s death had also developed in him the human note, resonant in the lyric, Break, break, break:—­

  “But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
  And the sound of a voice that is still.”

The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud.—­Tennyson had produced only short poems in his 1842 volumes, but his next three efforts, The Princess (1847), In Memoriam (1850), and Maud (1855), are of considerable length.

The Princess:  A Medley, as Tennyson rightly called it, contains 3223 lines of blank verse.  This poem, which is really a discussion of the woman question, relates in a half humorous way the story of a princess who broke off her engagement to a prince, founded a college for women, and determined to elevate her life to making them equal to men.  The poem abounds in beautiful imagery and exquisite melody; but the solution of the question by the marriage of the princess has not completely satisfied modern thought.  The finest parts of the poem are its artistic songs.

In Memoriam, an elegy in memory of Arthur Henry Hallam, was begun at Somersby in 1833, the year of Hallam’s death, and added to at intervals for nearly sixteen years.  When Tennyson first began the short lyrics to express his grief, he did not intend to publish them; but in 1850 he gave them to the world as one long poem of 725 four-line stanzas.

In Memoriam was directly responsible for Tennyson’s appointment as poet-laureate.  Queen Victoria declared that she received more comfort from it than from any other book except the Bible.  The first stanza of the poem (quoted on page 9) has proved as much of a moral stimulus as any single utterance of Carlyle or of Browning.

This work is one of the three great elegies of a literature that stands first in elegiac poetry.  Milton’s Lycidas has more of a massive commanding power, and Shelley’s Adonais rises at times to poetic heights that Tennyson did not reach; but neither Lycidas nor Adonais equals In Memoriam in tracing every shadow of bereavement, from the first feeling of despair until the mourner can realize that—­

  “...the song of woe
  Is after all an earthly song,”

and can express his unassailable faith in—­

  “One God, one law, one element,
  And one far-off divine event
  To which the whole creation moves.”