Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair
of Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too modest to be introduced to
the great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so nobly. Oddly enough
Douglas Jerrold enthusiastically assured Tennyson, at a dinner of a
Society of Authors, that "you are the one who will live." To that
end, humanly speaking, he placed himself under the celebrated Dr
Gully and his "water-cure," a foible of that period. In 1848 he made
a tour to King Arthur's Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland,
where the Pass of Brander disappointed him: perhaps he saw it on a
fine day, and, like Glencoe, it needs tempest and mist lit up by the
white fires of many waterfalls. By bonny Doon he "fell into a
passion of tears," for he had all of Keats's sentiment for Burns:
"There never was immortal poet if he be not one." Of all English
poets, the warmest in the praise of Burns have been the two most
unlike himself--Tennyson and Keats. It was the songs that Tennyson
preferred; Wordsworth liked the Cottar's Saturday Night.
CHAPTER V.--IN MEMORIAM.
In May 1850 a few, copies of In Memoriam were printed for friends,
and presently the poem was published without author's name. The
pieces had been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is to
be observed that the "section about evolution" was written some years
before 1844, when the ingenious hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in
Vestiges of Creation, were given to the world, and caused a good deal
of talk.
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