certain satisfaction.

But when he tells of his poverty to Emily Sellwood, the woman of his
choice, there is anguish in his cry. In fact, her parents succeeded in
breaking off her relations with Tennyson for a time, on account of his
very uncertain prospects. His brothers, even those younger than he, had
slipped into snug positions--"but Alfred dreams on with nothing special in
sight." Poetry, in way of a financial return, is not to be commended.
Honors were coming Tennyson's way as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty-two,
but it was not until Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, when a pension of two
hundred pounds a year was granted him by the Government, that he began to
feel easy. Even then there were various old scores to liquidate.

The year Eighteen Hundred Fifty, when he was forty-one, has been called
his "golden year," for in it occurred the publication of "In Memoriam,"
his appointment to the post of Poet Laureate, and his marriage.

Emily Sellwood had waited for him all these years. She had been sought
after, and had refused several good offers from eligible widowers and
others who pitied her sad plight and looked upon her as an old maid
forlorn. But she was true to her love for Alfred. Possibly she had not
been courted quite so assiduously as Tennyson's mother had been. When that
dear old lady was past eighty she became very deaf, and the family often
ventured to carry on conversations in her presence which possibly would
have been modified had the old lady been in full possession of her
faculties. On a day as she sat knitting in the chimney-corner, one of her
daughters in a burst of confidence to a visitor, said, "Why, before Mamma
married Papa she had received twenty-three offers of marriage!"

"Twenty-four, my dear--twenty-four," corrected the old lady as she shifted