in "In Memoriam." With him at college
was also his brother Charles, one year his senior, with whom he
collaborated in the collection of verse, issued in 1827, under the title
of "Poems by Two Brothers." In 1830, Tennyson made a journey to the
Pyrenees with Arthur Hallam, who was engaged to the poet's sister
Emilia, and in the same year he published an independent volume,
entitled "Poems chiefly Lyrical." In this, his first venture alone in
poetry, and in another issued in 1832, Tennyson was to manifest to the
world his poetic powers and art, for they contained, besides much
rhythmical and contemplative verse, such poems as 'Mariana,' 'Claribel;
'Lilian,' 'Lady Clare,' 'The Lotus Eaters,' 'A Dream of Pair Women,'
'The May Queen,' and 'The Miller's Daughter,' In spite of the great
promise bodied forth in these works, the volumes were subject to not a
little unfavorable criticism, which stayed his further publishing for a
period of ten years, though not the furtherance of his creative work,
nor his enthusiastic efforts towards increasing the perfection of
his art.

It was not until 1842 that the poet again appeared in print, this time
with a volume to which he appended his name, "Poems by Alfred Tennyson,"
and which gave him high rank among the acknowledged singers of his
day,--Wordsworth, Southey, Landor, Campbell, Rogers, and Leigh Hunt, in
England; and in the New World, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, and
Emerson. The poet-contemporaries of his youth--Byron, Scott, Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats--had by this time all died, and in 1843 Southey died,
when Wordsworth, whom Tennyson reverenced, became Poet Laureate. The
gap occasioned by the death of these early English poets of the century
was now to be filled in large measure by Tennyson, though among the
writers of song to arise were the Brownings, Rossetti, Matthew Arnold,
and Swinburne. Critical appreciation of the volume of 1842 was happily
encouraging to the poet; indeed, it was most gratifying, for its many
remarkable beauties were now justly and adequately appraised,
particularly such fine new themes as the volume contained--'Ulysses,'
'Godiva,' 'The Two Voices,' 'The Talking Oak,' 'Oenone,' 'Locksley
Hall,' 'The Vision of Sin,' and 'Morte D'Arthur,' the germ of the future
"Idylls of the King." Nor on this side the Atlantic did the new volume
lack substantial recognition, and from such competent critics as Emerson
and Hawthorne; while among his English contem