"Ring Out, Wild Bells"

Tennyson, from "In Memoriam," 1850

When our poet this week, Alfred Tennyson, was a young man at Cambridge, in 1829, he met the best friend he ever had in his life, Arthur Henry Hallam.  This was at a time and in a place where friendship might be founded on more than merriment – though the boys had plenty of that, to be sure.  They became friends because they shared the same intellectual …