Henry Hallam to Alfred Tennyson, on reading In Memoriam: 'I know not how to express what I have felt [...] I do not speak as another would to praise and admire: few of them [the poems] indeed I have as yet been capable of reading, the grief they express is too much akin to that they revive. It is better than any monument which could be raised to the memory of my beloved son [Arthur Henry Hallam, to whose death the poems were Tennyson's response], it is a more lively and enduring testimony to his great virtues and talents that the world should know the friendship which existed between you, that posterity should associate his name with that of Alfred Tennyson.'