bed, earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came." "You
see," he said, "ghosts do not generally come to imaginative people;"
a remark very true, though ghosts are attributed to "imagination."
Whatever causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of phantasia
which is consciously exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far
too many ghosts to believe in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart,
with the hallucinations of Goethe and Shelley, who met themselves,
what poet ever did "see a ghost"? One who saw Tennyson as he
wandered alone at this period called him "a mysterious being,
seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having a power of
intercourse with the spirit world not granted to others." But it was
the world of the poet, not of the "medium."

The Tennysons stayed on at the parsonage for six years. But,
anticipating their removal, Arthur Hallam in 1831 dealt in prophecy
about the identification in the district of places in his friend's
poems--"critic after critic will trace the wanderings of the brook,"
as,--in fact, critic after critic has done. Tennyson disliked--these
"localisers." The poet's walks were shared by Arthur Hallam, then
affianced to his sister Emily.



CHAPTER II.--POEMS OF 1831-1833.



By 1832 most of the poems of Tennyson's second volume were
circulating in MS. among his friends, and no poet ever had friends
more encouraging. Perhaps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness