Word: tennysons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their wives for a year or more. Several recent psychiatric studies indicate that for most of the marriages, absence can make a wife's heart grow gloomy, resentful, alcoholic, hypochondriacal or even suicidal well before thoughts of adultery or divorce set in. Far from making "December June," as Tennyson once put it, reunion often leads to fights or sexual frigidity...
...Tennyson, Locksley Hall...
Like numerous Victorians, Lear was superficially normal and enviable. He kept a wonderful cat whom he immortalized under the preposterous name of Foss, as magical a literary companion in its way as Dr. Johnson's Hodge or Christopher Smart's Jeoffrey. He had enduring friends, including Tennyson and a man called Chichester Fortescue, a real name that sounds like a Lear invention. Lear's peregrinations over 30 years ranged from Calais to the coast of Coromandel, a course which enabled him to work at his art-essentially the trade of providing souvenirs of the Grand Tour...
Fighting the Morbids. There was a deep vein of inconsolable melancholia in many of Lear's contemporaries, though the age is still notorious for its fatuous, unquestioning optimism. It was Lear's friend Tennyson who wrote...
...idle tears . . . tears from the depth of some divine despair." Characteristically trying to keep cheerful, Lear referred to his own numbing bouts of depression as "the morbids." His versifier's reaction to such metaphysical miseries would never win him the laureateship, but they essayed an heroic humor outside Tennyson's reach...