Young Hallam was engaged to Tennyson's sister, to whom he refers as "the lost light of those dawned golden days." Both had promise of future greatness. Hallam starts with his father for the Tyrol, and sends a parting present to Emily Tennyson. He visits the mountains and picture galleries, where he finds a special interst in Titian and Rubens. On September 15, 1833, in Vienna, Mr. Hallam, returning from his daily walk, found Arthur, as he supposed, asleep upon a couch, but it was the sleep of death.
In Vienna's fatal walls
God's finger touch'd him, and he slept.
The father writes, "Those whose eyes must long be dim with tears, brought him home to rest among his kindred and in his own country." He was buried in Clevedon Church, round whose grassy slopes he played when a child, and from the graveyard of which, heard the music of the tide as it washed against the high cliffs, not a hundred yards away. The ever-restless waters described in another poem voice the griefs of Tennyson:
Break, break, break,
On the cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But oh for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
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Revision r1.1 - 27 Jun 2004 - 10:16 by EliMantel
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