the troubles with the Colonies, the struggles between the Protectionists
and the Free Traders, Municipal Reform, the advance of the democracy,
Chartism, the popular education question. He travelled on the Continent,
he travelled in Wales and Scotland, he visited most parts of England,
not as an idle tourist, but as a student with note-book in hand. And he
had been submitted also to the discipline which is of all disciplines
the most necessary to the poet, and without which, as Goethe says, "he
knows not the heavenly powers": he had "ate his bread in sorrow". The
death of his father in 1831 had already brought him face to face, as he
has himself expressed it, with the most solemn of all mysteries. In 1833
he had an awful shock in the sudden death of his friend Arthur Hallam,
"an overwhelming sorrow which blotted out all joy from his life and made
him long for death". He had other minor troubles which contributed
greatly to depress him,--the breaking up of the old home at Somersby,
his own poverty and uncertain prospects, his being compelled in
consequence to break off all intercourse with Miss Emily Selwood. It is
possible that 'Love and Duty' may have reference to this sorrow; it is
certain that 'The Two Voices' is autobiographical.

Such was his education between 1832 and 1842, and such the influences
which were moulding him, while he was slowly evolving 'In Memoriam' and
the poems first published in the latter year. To the revision of the old
poems he brought tastes and instincts cultivated by the critical study
of all that was best in the poetry of the world, and more particularly
by a familiarity singularly intimate and affectionate with the
masterpieces of the ancient classics; he brought also the skill of a
practised workman, for his diligence in production was literally that of
Sir Joshua Reynolds in the sister art--'nulla dies sine linea'. Into the
composition of the new poems all this entered. He was no longer a
trifler and a Hedonist. As Spedding has said, his former poems betrayed