The purity of his own life was reflected in his verse, just as the mad license and the furious self-indulgence of Byron are mirrored in Don Juan, Manfred and Cain. Even to extreme old age Tennyson preserved that high poetic faculty which he manifested in early youth. One of his latest poems, Crossing the Bar, is also one of the finest in the language, breathing the old man's assurance of a life beyond the grave and a reunion with the dear friend of his youth, whom he mourned and immortalized in In Memoriam.
Alfred Tennyson had one of the finest lives in the roll of English authors. He was born in 1809 and lived to 1892. He spent his early years in one of the most beautiful parts of Lincolnshire. He enjoyed the personal training of his father, a very accomplished clergyman, and much of his boyhood and youth was spent in the open air. In this way he absorbed that knowledge of birds and animals, trees and flowers and all the aspects of nature which is reflected in his verse. As a youth he experimented in many styles of verse, and when only eighteen he issued, with his brother Charles, Poems by Two Brothers. The next year he and Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There they received the greatest impulse toward culture in a society of undergraduates known as the "Apostles." Its membership included Thackeray, Trench, Spedding, Monckton Milnes and Alfred and Arthur Henry Hallam, sons of the famous author of The Middle Ages.
In his second year at college Tennyson won the Chancellor's gold medal with his prize poem, Timbuctoo, and in the following year he published his first volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. He left college without a degree, and in 1833 he issued another volume of poems which contained some of his best work—The Lady of Shalott, The Lotos Eaters, The Palace of Art and A Dream of Fair Women. Any one of these poems if issued to-day would make the reputation of a poet, but this book made little impression on the Victorian public which had lost its taste for poetry and was devoted mainly to prose fiction. The world has yet to catch the note of this master singer.
In 1837 Arthur Hallam, Tennyson's friend and other self, the one man who predicted that he would be the greatest poet of his age, died suddenly in Vienna while traveling abroad. The shock made a profound impression on Tennyson. For ten years he put forth no work. Finally, in 1842, he issued two volumes of poems that at once caught the public fancy. Among the poems that brought him fame were Locksley Hall, Lady Godiva, Ulysses, The Two Voices and Morte d' Arthur. The latter was the seed of the splendid Idylls of the King. Five years later he published The Princess, with its beautiful songs, and three years after In Memoriam the greatest elegiac poem in the language, in which he lamented the fate of Arthur Hallam and poured forth his own grief over this irreparable loss. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sellwood, who made his home a haven of rest and of whom he once said that with her "the peace of God came into my life."
Maud, his most dramatic poem, was issued in 1855. As early as 1859 he published the first part of The Idylls of the King, but it was not until 1872 that the complete sequence of the Idylls was given to the public. These Arthurian legends are cast by Tennyson in his most musical blank verse, and he has given to them a tinge of mysticism that seems to lift them above the everyday world into a realm of pure romance and chivalry.
Facsimile of Tennyson's Original Manuscript of "Crossing the Bar" Copyright by The Macmillan Company[ToList]
Enoch Arden, a domestic idyll, written in 1864, made a great hit. It was followed by several plays—Queen Mary, Harold, Becket and others—all finely written, but none appealing to the great public. Up to his last years Tennyson remained the real laureate of his people, his words always tinged with the fire of inspiration. Only three years before his death he wrote Crossing the Bar, a poem which met with instant response from the English-speaking world because of its signs of courage in the face of death and its proofs of steadfast faith in the life beyond the grave.
No adequate estimate of Tennyson's work can be made in the small space allotted to this article. All that can be done is to mention a few of his best works and to quote a few of his stirring lines. If the reader will study these poems he will be pretty sure to read more of Tennyson. To my mind, Locksley Hall is Tennyson's finest poem, as true to-day as when it was written seventy years ago. The long, rolling, trochaic verse, like the billows on the coast that it pictures, suits the thought. The poem is the passionate lament of a returned soldier from India over the mercenary marriage of the cousin whom he loved. Here are a few of the lines that will never die: