Alfred Tennyson - 1907 Author:Arthur Christopher Benson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE year 1850 was indubitably the most memorable in Tennyson's life—the annus mirabilis. He reached the summit; and his life after that date was a... more » peaceful, prosperous progress down the easy vale of days. He had come to the conclusion that his books seemed likely to produce, together with the pension and certain small property, a sufficient income for marriage. On the 13th of June, 1850, he married Emily Sarah Sellwood, sister of Mrs. Charles Tennyson-Turner, at Shiplake, near Henley. The bridegroom was forty, the bride a few years younger. It was the happiest and most fortunate act of a life that had hitherto been troubled and vexed; " the peace of God came into my life before the altar when I married her," he said. Mrs. Tennyson was a woman of extraordinary loyalty and unfailing sweetness, with a delicate critical taste, cheerful, wise, courageous and sympathetic. She was an ideal companion for a great lonely nature in constant need of tender love and unobtrusive sympathy. It is the kind of marriage LAUREATE 35 that seems to make the institution deserve the name of a Sacrament. The rest of her life was entirely given to her husband. She sustained, encouraged and sheltered him ; though for many years she was an invalid and seldom left her sofa, yet the holy influence never diminished. It is worth quoting that a few weeks after the marriage Tennyson, sitting one evening smoking with Venables and Aubrey de Vere, said, between puffs of his pipe, as though pursuing a lonely train of thought, " I have known many women who were excellent, one in one way and one in another way, but this woman is the noblest I have ever known." In the same year he was offered the Laureateship, vacant by the death of Wordsworth. The only other poet whose claims were seriously discu...« less