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Tennyson, who had an unhappy childhood, spent the happiest years of his life after entering Cambridge University, and much of this happiness came from his friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam. Hallam was Tennyson's best friend and the first critic to affirm Tennyson's poetic talent. He was also engaged to Tennyson's sister. But five years after the two met, Hallam died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage at the age of twenty-two. The poems in "In Memoriam" were written one after another in the more than ten years after Hallam's death. They not only record Tennyson's changes in mood from grief and regret to recovery, but also record his doubts and re-firmness in faith. T. S. Eliot called it "a diary-like whole". "Collection of Mourning" contains both abundant and direct emotions and profound contemplation, and is produced with exquisite poetic skills, achieving the perfect combination of form and content. Before "In Memoriam", Tennyson had stopped publishing poems publicly due to negative reviews from critics; after "In Memoriam", he received rave reviews and became the national poet in one fell swoop, succeeding Wordsworth as Poet Laureate.