Alfred Tennyson 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: "IN MEMORIAM" 33 poem that "the hope of man lay in the historic realisation of the gospel," and was deeply moved by the author's "splendid faith, in the face ... more »of the frankest acknowledgment of every difficulty, in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble destiny of the individual man." chapter{Section 4CHAPTER 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 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 pip...« less