Aubrey de Vere on time spent with Alfred Tennyson in London during 1850: 'Few of the hours I spent with Alfred surive with such a pathetic sweetness and nearness in my recollection as those which are associated with that time and with "In Memoriam" [...] 'I went to him very late each night, and he read many of the poems to me or discussed them with me till the early hours of the morning. The tears often ran down his face as he read, without the slightest apparent consciousness of them on his part. The pathos and grandeur of those poems were to me greatly increased by the voice which rather intoned than recited them [...] Sometimes towards the close of a stanza his voice dropped; but I avoided the chance of thus losing any part of the meaning by sitting beside him, and glancing at the pieces he read. They were written in a long and narrow manuscript book, which assisted him to arrange the poems in due order by bringing many of them at once before his eye.'