A KEY TO LORD TENNYSON’S
“IN MEMORIAM.”
GEORGE BELL & SONS,
LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN
NEW YORK: 66, FIFTH AVENUE, AND
BOMBAY: 53, ESPLANADE ROAD
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO
A KEY TO
LORD TENNYSON’S
“IN MEMORIAM”
BY ALFRED GATTY, D.D.
VICAR OF ECCLESFIELD
AND
SUB-DEAN OF YORK
LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1900
First Published, 1881.
Second Edition, 1885; Third Edition, 1891;
Fourth Edition, 1894; Reprinted, 1897, 1900.
Dedication.
TO THE CHERISHED MEMORY OF THE MOTHER OF MY CHILDREN,
I DEDICATE THIS BRIEF LABOUR OF LOVE.—A. G.
PREFACE.
When any one has survived the allotted age of man, there is a long past toremember, and a short future to expect; and it is the period of youthwhich is then found most clearly recorded on the tablets of the brain—thedays, probably, of school and college, and the first establishment of aself-made home.
Middle life, with its work and anxieties, is by comparison only feeblyretained; as though there had been found no room for fuller records on thepreoccupied mind. But, in the indistinct interval of forty or fifty years,the loss by death of those whom we have loved cannot be forgotten; andwhen one dearer than any friend is also taken[Pg viii] away, then, under suchbereavement, may be found an amount of comfort and support in the PoetLaureate’s In Memoriam which no other secular writing can supply.
To me, this Poem has been an additional buttress to the faith, which myeducation and sacred profession had sustained.
When a great mind, at once so speculative and so untrammelled, runs overthe whole field of thought, and comes to the conviction that the hope ofthe Christian is the one sure prospect beyond the grave; this imparts tothe mourner a consolation, to which nothing earthly can compare.
My own interest in this great Poem has been farther enhanced by the factthat I and mine, long years ago, enjoyed friendly intercourse with thePoet at Freshwater; and this was afterwards renewed in the lives of hisyounger son and mine.
The incidents of the Poem have also slightly touched me, inasmuch as I wasa contemporary of Arthur H. Hallam, at[Pg ix] Eton; and I was in Chapman’shouse, at Charterhouse, with Edmund Law Lushington, when he was, at a veryearly age, captain of the school. The associates of Hallam’s schooldays Iwell recall, for they included several who became eminent in the serviceof the state, and in the ranks of literature; and most of these have nowpassed away. In Memoriam has thus, in a measure, been the means ofrecalling my own early youth; and I have felt that the subject of the Poembefitted the study of my advanced life.
The scenery of In Memoriam being principa