The same movement visible in the poetry of Arnold and Clough may be detected still moulding and modifying the works of Tennyson. In the year 1850 _In Memoriam_ appeared. It was the product of long meditation, and part is known to have been written as early as 1833. Nevertheless it is remarkable that just in the year when Browning published his _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_, and just about the time when Arnold's verse was exhibiting another aspect of the interest in religion, Tennyson too should have made his greatest contribution in this kind to literature. For while _In Memoriam_ is of all great English elegies the most closely associated with the man to whom it is dedicated, still the treatment opens up the questions of death and immortality; and the passages of the poem which have clung to the popular memory are those in which the poet expresses his convictions or his hopes on these subjects. Perhaps the greatest weakness of _In Memoriam_ is its length. It is difficult if not impossible to dwell on the subject of death long, and to preserve perfect healthiness of tone. The other great English elegies are in the first place much shorter, and in the second place the writers find more relief to them than Tennyson does. The intensity of his friendship for Arthur Hallam kept him perhaps even too strictly to his subject.
_In Memoriam_ is essentially a lyrical poem, and the years immediately before and after its publication are those in which Tennyson's lyrical genius was in fullest flower. _Maud_ (1855) is a lyrical poem. The beautiful songs interspersed between the parts of _The Princess_ belong to this period, and so does the grand _Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_. The lyrics of these years are on the whole superior both in fervour of passion and in weight of thought to the earlier lyrics. Some of the songs, like 'Tears, idle tears,' are, as songs, almost overcharged with thought, yet they are beautifully melodious; and Tennyson never wrote anything more full of exquisite sound than 'The splendour falls on castle walls.'
The _Ode on the Death of Wellington_ is worthy of study, because it is the best specimen of a class of poems for which Tennyson was distinguished from first to last. He was always a patriot, and there is no feeling he expresses more fervently than that of pride in England. He contrasts her stability with the fickleness of France. He is proud of her freedom slowly won and surely kept. Patriotic ballads like _The Revenge_ and _The Defence of Lucknow_ are among the most prominent characteristics of his later volumes. His great success in the case of the _Ode_ is due to the fact, first that his heart is stirred by the sense that 'the last great Englishman is low;' and secondly, to the fact that he saw in Wellington an impersonation of all that he had admired in England. The picture he draws of the duke is identical in its great features with that he had painted of the nation, and it has the advantage of being concrete.