Alfred Tennyson

modern poet, one says, because even poetry is now affected by the division of labour. We do not look to the poet for a large share in the practical activities of existence: we do

yson's career followed lines really more normal, the lines of the life of Wordsworth, wisdom and self-control directing the course of a long, sane, sound, and fortunate existence. The great physical strength which is commonly the basis of great mental vigour was not ruined in Tennyson by poverty and passion, as in the case of Burns, nor in forced literary labour, as in those of Scott and Dickens. For long he was poor, like Wordsworth and Southey, but never destitute. He made his e

"a remarkable and saintly woman." In the male line, the family was not (as the families of genius ought to be) brief of life and unhealthy. "The Tennysons never die," said the sister who was betrothed to Arthur Hallam. The father, a clergyman, was, says his grandson, "a man of great ability," and his "excellent library" was an element in the education of his family. "My father was a poet," Tennyson said, "and could write regular verse very skilfully." In physic

nd and tradition. The folk-lore of Lincolnshire, of which examples have been published, does seem to have a peculiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humorous than the poetical aspect of the country-people that Tennyson appears to hav

much, but did little that would attract notice. As a child and a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition and performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood varied somewhat in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of eight he covered a slate with blank verse in t

s sons of thunder

of course, but I

se verse. "Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, 'I hear a voice that'

ome six thousand lines. He "never felt himself more truly inspired," for the sense of "inspiration" (as the late Mr Myers has argued in an essay on the "Mechanism of Genius") has little to do with the actual

earth, the m

waste of r

-pregnant mo

of wilde

ire and mid

round their

d earth," d?dala tellus. There is the geological interest in the forces that shape

us autumn's

m boyhood was orig

on's poetry "too much akin to rhetoric." "Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is endlessly clever, and is now unduly

hen Poems by Two Brothers (himself and his brother Frederick) was published with the date 1827. These poems contain, as far as I have been able to discover, nothing really Tennysonian. What he had done in his own manner was omitted, "being thought too much out of the common for the public taste." The young poet had already saving common-sense, and understood the public. Fragments of the true gold are found in the volume of 1830, others are preserved in

ey, though it is called Shelleyan," he said; and indeed he believed that his work had never been imitative, after his earliest efforts in the manner of Thomson and of Scott. The only things in The Lover's Tale which would suggest that the poet here followed Shelley are the Italian scene of the story, the character of the versification, and the e

tood even from the opening lines, full of the ori

, seen from th

purple gloom

fted hills, th

en, and half way

louds, floated f

od of madness and illusion; while the third part, "The Golden Supper"-suggested by a story of Boccaccio, and written in maturity-is put in the mouth of another narrator, and is in a different style. The discarded lover, visiting the vault which contains the body of his lady, finds her alive, and restores her to her husband. The whole f

to me a

ough stra

n

low-hung an

ragged rims an

n

hout the twiligh

ound the bases

servation of nature i

partridge li

in a

nnyson's adolescent

popla

eside his fa

porary English literature, and in the classics. Already he was acquainted with the singular trance-like condition to which his poems occasionally allude, a subject for comme

poem in 1829, Tennyson took no honours at all. His classical reading was pursued as literature, not as a course of grammar and philology. No English poet, at least since Milton, had been better read in the classics; but Tennyson's studies did not aim at the gaining of academic distinction. His aspect was such that Thompson, later Ma

r, at various colleges, in the dawn of Pre-Raphaelitism. The Tennysons-Alfred, Frederick, and Charles-were members of such a set. There was Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, from Eton; there was Spedding, the editor and biographer of Bacon; Milnes (Lord Houghton), Blakesley (Dean of Lincoln), Thompson, Merivale, Trench (a poet, and later, Archbishop of Dublin), Brookfield, Buller, and, after Tennyson the greatest, Thackeray, a contempora

theme that he alone has made poetical, natural science. All poetry has its roots in the age before natural

awful rainbow

am recalls the conversations on labour and politics, discussions of the age of the Reform Bill, of rick-burning (expected to "make taters cheaper"), and of Catholic emancipation; also the emancipation of such negroes as had not yet tasted the blessings of freedom. In politics Tennyson was what he remained, a patriot, a friend of freedom, a foe of disorder. His politics, he said, were th

sh prize poem. The theme, Timbuctoo, was not inspiring. Thackera

ns the hill o

sugars on the

et the prostrat

ice and barte

lank verse, on the battle of Armageddon. The poem is not destitute of Tennysonian

s more likely to have been rusticated than rewarded. But already (1829) Arthur Hallam told Mr Gladst

eats, Shelley, and Byron were dead; Milman's brief vogue was departing. It seemed as if novels alone could appeal to readers, so great a change in taste had been wrought by the sixteen years of Waverley romances. The slim volume of Tennyson was naturally neglected, though Leigh Hunt reviewed it in the Tatler. Hallam's comments in the Englishman's Magazine, though enthusiastic (as was right and natural), were judicious. "The author imitates no one." Coleridge did not read all the book, but noted "things of a good deal of beauty. The misfortu

when under the influence of Leigh Hunt, may here and there be observed. Such faults as these catch the indifferent eye when a new book is first opened, and the volume of 1830 was probably condemned by almost every reader of the previous generation who deigned to afford it a glance. Out of fifty-six pieces o

the poet was born. If these verses alone survived out of the wreck of Victorian literature, they would demonstrate the greatness of the author as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. Isabel (a study of the poet's mother) is almost as remarkable in its stately dignity; while Recollections of the Arabian Nights attest the power of refined luxury in romantic description, and herald the unmatched beauty of The Lotos-Eaters. The Poet, again, is a picture of that which Tennyson himself was to fulfil; and Oriana is a revival of romance, and of the ballad, not lim

dark a full

i' the ech

ant whi

?' we have as answer a simile of the sea, w

into his

heaven which h

il inland

faith of his infant d

p eyes uprais

and repos

r spirit shi

n, and the long struggle fo

a man is necessarily a weakling or a hypocrite because, after trying all things, he is not an atheist or a materialist, then the reproach of insincerity or of feebleness of mind must rest upon Tennyson. But it is manifest that, almost i

with an undi

ad the marve

serene abs

uld b

the midst of

from eterni

untenance of

most invari

of these bo

g broad awa

rom the bod

nd power and w

in the middle

creeping to a

thought" (in In Memoriam), writes Mr Harrison, "is essentially that with which ordinary English readers had been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Dr Martineau, Ecce Homo, Hypatia." Of these influences only Maurice, and Maurice only orally, could have reached the author of The Mystic and the Supposed Confessions. Ecce Homo, Hypatia, Mr Jowett, were all in the bosom of the future when In Memoriam was written. Now, The Mystic and the Supposed Confessions are prior to In Memoriam, earlier than 1830. Yet th

me of the undergraduate. In The Mystic we notice a phrase, two words long, which was later

f the Gods, d

divinel

ugh they seem to have satisfied the poet less) than the galle

f dreams and

i

Fragolett

Yolande, a

Shelley; and young men of genius are not, in fact, usually content with universities which, perhaps, are

do profe

thing, feeding

ke Jowett and T. H. Green, Gamaliels at whose feet undergraduates sat with enthusiasm, "did eagerly frequent," like Omar Khayyám. In later years Tennyson found closer relations between dons and undergraduates, and recorded his affection for his university. She had s

ce: thirty years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the summer of 1830 Tennyson, wit

causes these phantasms, it is not the kind of phantasia which is consciously exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far too many ghosts to believe in them; and Coleridge and Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe and Shelley, who met themselves, what poet ever did "s

ntification in the district of places in his friend's poems-"critic after critic will trace the wanderings of the brook," as,-in fact, critic