From F. T. Palgrave's 'Personal Recollections' of Tennyson: 'Often, I believe, as life advanced, he would renew earlier familiarity with the great poets of all time [...] One evening [...] he read out off-hand Pindar's great picture of the life of Heaven in the second Olympian into pure modern prose, splendidly lucid and musical [...] Another time, late over the midwinter fire, reading the terrible lines in which Lucretius preaches his creed of human annihilation (Book III. especially ll. 912-977, ed. Munro) [...] so carried away and overwhelmed were the readers by the poignant force of the great poet, that, next morning, when dawn and daylight had brought their blessed natural healing to morbid thoughts, it was laughingly agreed that Lucretius had left us last night all but converts to his heart-crushing atheism.'