Within a week of his father's death, Tennyson slept in the dead man's bed, ‘earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came.’ Years later, recalling his failed effort to conjure his father's spirit, he remarked that ‘a poet never sees a ghost.’ Tennyson's comment is at least as strange as his disquieting act. For it could be said that he saw nothing but ghosts; his greatest poetry is about absence rather than presence, about vanished persons and shadowy places, particularly the long and vivifying shadow cast over his life by the passing of Arthur Hallam.

Hallam and Tennyson met as undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the four years of their friendship, until Hallam's death at the age of twentytwo, marked the ‘most emotionally intense period he ever knew.’ There is no reason whatever to doubt this judgment of Robert B. Martin, the best of Tennyson's modern biographers, or to question Sir Charles Tennyson's account of his grandfather's devastated response to the ‘brutal stroke [that] annihilated in a moment a love passing the love of women. The prop, round which his own growth had twined itself for four fruitful years, was suddenly removed.’

Hallam died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna on 15 September 1833. The bad tidings reached Tennyson and his sister, Emily, to whom Hallam was engaged, in the first week of October.