Two years afterward a second edition, revised and enlarged, was brought
out. This book contains "The Lady of Shalott," "The May Queen," "A Dream
of Fair Women" and "The Lotus-Eaters."

Beyond a few fulsome reviews from personal friends and a little surly
mention from the tribe of Jeffrey, the volume attracted little or no
attention. This coldness on the part of the public shot an atrabilarian
tint through the ambition of our poet, and the fond hope of a success in
literature faded from his mind.

And then began what Stopford Brooke has called "the ten fallow years in
the life of Tennyson." But fallow years are not all fallow. The dark
brooding night is as necessary for our life as the garish day. Great crops
of wheat that feed the nations grow only where the winter's snow covers
all as with a garment. And ever behind the mystery of sleep, and beneath
the silence of the snow, Nature slumbers not nor sleeps.

The withholding of quick recognition gave the mind of Tennyson an
opportunity to ripen. Fate held him in leash that he might be saved for a
masterly work, and all the time that he lived in semi-solitude and read
and thought and tramped the fields, his soul was growing strong and his
spirit was taking on the silken self-sufficient strength that marked his
later days. This hiatus of ten years in the life of our poet is very
similar to the thirteen fallow years in the career of Browning. These men
crossed and recrossed each other's pathway, but did not meet for many
years. What a help they might have been to each other in those years of
doubt and seeming defeat! But each was to make his way alone.

Browning seemed to grow through society and travel, but solitude served
the needs of Tennyson.