many thoughts that were stirring the younger
spirits of his day. Perhaps the most perfect workmanship, in a volume
where much calls for admiration, is to be found in 'Ulysses', which the
poet's friend Monckton Milnes gave to Sir Robert Peel to read, in order
to convince him that Tennyson's work merited official recognition. His
treatment of the hero is as far from the classical spirit as anything
which William Morris wrote. He preserves little of the directness or
fierce temper of the early epic. Rather does his Ulysses think and speak
like some bold adventurer of the Renaissance, with the combination of
ardent curiosity and reflective thought which was the mark of that age.
Even so Tennyson himself, as he passed from youth to middle life, and
from that to old age, was ever trying to achieve one more 'work of noble
note', and yearning

To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

But between this and the production of his next volume comes the most
unhappy period in the poet's career, when his friends for a time
despaired of his future and even of his life. At the marriage of his
brother Charles in 1836, Tennyson had fallen in love with the bride's
sister, Emily Sellwood; and in the course of the next three or four
years they became informally engaged to one another. But his prospects
of earning enough money to support a wife seemed so remote that in 1840
her family insisted on breaking off the engagement, and the lovers
ceased to write to one another. Even the volumes of 1842, while winning
high favour with cultivated readers, and stirring enthusiasm at the
Universities, failed to attract the larger public and to make a success
in the market. So when he sustained a further blow in the loss of his
small fortune owing to an unwise investment, his health gave way and he
fell into a dark mood of hypochondria. His star seemed to be sinking,
just as he was winning his way to fame. Thanks to medical attention,
aided by his own natural strength and the affections of his friends, he
was already rallying in 1845, when Peel conferred on him the timely
honour of a pension; and he was able not only to continue working at _In
Memoriam_, but also to produce in 1847 _The Princess_, which gives clear
evidence of renewed cheerfulness and vigour. Dealing as it does, half
humorously, with the question of woman's education and her claim to a
higher place in the scheme of life, it illustrates t