"Or in the all-golden afternoon
A guest, or happy sister, sung,
Or here she brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon.
"Nor less it pleased the livelier moods,
Beyond the bounding hill to stray,
And break the live long summer day
With banquet in the distant woods."
And amid this pleasant country life the poet worked on, and presently another little book of poems appeared. Still fame did not come, and one severe and blundering review kept Tennyson, it is said, from publishing anything more for ten years.
But now there fell upon him what was perhaps the darkest sorrow of his life. Arthur Hallam, who was traveling on the Continent, died suddenly at Vienna. When the news came to Tennyson that his friend was gone—
"That in Vienna's fatal walls
God's finger touch'd him, and he slept,"
for a time joy seemed blotted out of life, and only that he might help to comfort his sister did he wish to live, for—
"That remorseless iron hour
Made cypress of her orange flower,
Despair of Hope."
As an outcome of this grief we have one of Tennyson's finest poems, In Memoriam. It is an elegy which we place beside Lycidas and Adonais. But In Memoriam strikes yet a sadder note. For in Lycidas and Adonais Milton and Shelley mourned kindred souls rather than dear loved friends. To Tennyson, Arthur Hallam was "The brother of my love"—
"Dear as the mother to the son
More than my brothers are to me."
In Memoriam is a group of poems rather than one long poem—