fragments in verse preluding to the poem of In Memoriam. He also
began, in a mood of great misery, The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a
Suicide. The poem seems to have been partly done by September 1834,
when Spedding commented on it, and on the beautiful Sir Galahad,
"intended for something of a male counterpart to St Agnes." The
Morte d'Arthur Tennyson then thought "the best thing I have managed
lately." Very early in 1835 many stanzas of In Memoriam had taken
form. "I do not wish to be dragged forward in any shape before the
reading public at present," wrote the poet, when he heard that Mill
desired to write on him. His OEnone he had brought to its new
perfection, and did not desire comments on work now several years
old. He also wrote his Ulysses and his Tithonus.

If ever the term "morbid" could have been applied to Tennyson, it
would have been in the years immediately following the death of
Arthur Hallam. But the application would have been unjust. True,
the poet was living out of the world; he was unhappy, and he was, as
people say, "doing nothing." He was so poor that he sold his
Chancellor's prize gold medal, and he did not


"Scan his whole horizon
In quest of what he could clap eyes on,"


in the way of money-making, which another poet describes as the
normal attitude of all men as well as of pirates. A careless
observer would have thought that the poet was dawdling. But he dwelt
in no Castle of Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his
verses: like Sir Walter in Liddesdale, "he was making himsel' a' the