Lastly, I may be told that in any case it is idle to trouble about those puzzles whose solution would bring hardly any poetical profit, and absurd to write pages on ‘God shut the doorways of his head.’ Perhaps. But, to go no further, there are people who cannot be content to live with such puzzles in a poem that they love. I shall be satisfied if my book helps them to read In Memoriam without a check, or saves them from spending on its difficulties one hundredth part of the labour I have spent.
I am under obligations to the following among books which I have consulted: Lord Tennyson’s Memoir of his father, first edition, in two volumes; Mr. Churton Collins’s Illustrations of Tennyson; Dr. Gatty’s Key to In Memoriam, fourth edition; Mr. J. F. Genung’s Tennyson’s In Memoriam: its Purpose and its Structure; Miss E. R. Chapman’s Companion to In Memoriam; Mr. E. C. Tainsh’s Study of Tennyson’s Works, new edition, 1893; Mr. James Knowles’s article in The Nineteenth Century for January, 1893. Where I was conscious of a particular obligation I have specially acknowledged it, but I may not always have remembered my debts, and I should like to say that, though I differ from him constantly, I think Mr. Genung’s book has not met with full recognition.
