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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

ALFRED TENNYSON, the fourth of eight brothers (there were also four sisters), was born on the 6th of August, 1809, at Somersby, a village in Lincolnshire containing at that time less than a hundred inhabitants. His father, Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., was the rector of the parish, a man of energetic character, remarkable for his great strength and stature, and of very various talents, - something of a poet, painter, architect, and musician, and also a considerable linguist and mathematician.' Mrs. Tennyson, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Fytche, was the daughter of a clergyman, and is described as 'a sweet and gentle and most imaginative woman; so kind-hearted that it had passed into a proverb, and the wicked inhabitants of a neighboring village used to bring their dogs to her windows and beat them in order to be bribed to leave off by the gentle lady, or to make advantageous bargains by selling her the worthless curs.' 1

In those days Somersby was quite out of the world, so much so that the news of the battle of Waterloo did not reach it at the time, but the Tennyson children had a world of their own with its mimic history and romance. The boys,' says Mrs. Ritchie, 'played great games, like Arthur's knights; they were champions and warriors defending a stone heap; or, again, they would set up opposing camps with a king in the midst of each. The king was a willow wand stuck into the ground, with an outer circle of immortals to defend him of firmer, stiffer sticks. Then each party would come with stones, hurling at each other's king, and trying to overthrow him. Perhaps as the day wore on they became romancers, leaving the jousts deserted. When dinner-time came, and they all sat round the table, each in turn put a chapter of his history underneath the potato-bowl, — long endless histories, chapter after chapter, diffuse, absorbing, unending, as are the stories of real life of which each sunrise opens on a new part. Some of these romances were in letters, like "Clarissa Harlowe." Alfred used to tell a story which lasted for months, and which was called "The Old Horse."'

Earlier even than this the boy had begun to lisp in numbers.' When he was only five years old, he exclaimed as the wind swept through the rectory garden, I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind.' Mrs. Ritchie tells how, not long afterwards, he first put his baby poetry into writing. Alfred's first verses were written upon a slate which his brother Charles put into his hand one Sunday at Louth, when all the elders of the party were going into church, and the child was left alone. Charles gave him a subject, — the flowers in the garden, — and when he came back from church, little Alfred brought the slate to his brother, all covered with written lines of blank verse. They were made on the model of Thomson's "Seasons," the only poetry he had ever read. One can picture it all to one's self, the flowers in the garden, the verses, the little poet with waiting eyes, and the young brother scanning the lines. "Yes, you can write," said Charles, and he gave alfred back the slate. I have also heard another story, of his grandfather, later on, 1 Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, in Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning (New York, 1892), to which we are indebted for some interesting particulars of the poet's early life.

asking him to write an elegy on his grandmother, who had recently died, and, when it was written, putting ten shillings into his hands and saying, “There, that is the first money you have ever earned by your poetry, and, take my word for it, it will be the last."'

Alfred and Charles, who was a little more than a year the elder, were sent together to Louth grammar school; and there, in the latter part of 1826, we find them preparing for the press a collection of juvenile poems written from the age of fifteen upwards. It was published early in 1827 by the Messrs. Jackson, booksellers and printers in Louth, who paid the boys twenty pounds for the copyright. The book was entitled Poems by Two Brothers,' with the addition of the modest motto from Martial, 'Haec nos novimus esse nihil' (We ourselves know that these are nothing). The pieces, one hundred and two in number, aside from their interest as including the first printed verses of one who has since risen to the highest position as a poet, are worthy of note for their wide range of subjects and the extensive reading in classical and modern authors which they indicate. The themes are drawn from all ages and all lands, as a few of the titles may serve to show: Antony to Cleopatra; The Gondola; Written by an Exile of Bassorah, sailing down the Euphrates; Persia; Egypt; The Druid's Prophecies; Swiss Song; The Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan; Greece; The Maid of Savoy; Scotch Song, God's Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra; The Death of Lord Byron; The Fall of Jerusalem; Eulogium on Homer; The Scenery of South America; Babylon; Phrenology; Exhortation to the Greeks; King Charles's Vision, etc. The poems are often introduced by quotations; among others, from Addison, Byron, Cicero, Claudian, Gray, Horace, Hume, Lucretius, Milton, Moore, Ovid, Racine, Rousseau, Sallust, Scott, Tacitus, Terence, and Virgil. There are also frequent foot-notes, which are more learned than we should expect from boys of eighteen, and yet without the affectation of scholarship that we might expect in connection with such a juvenile display of erudition. The brief preface to the volume is withal very modest and manly.

Charles, who was associated with Alfred in this precocious poetical venture, afterwards took the name of Turner on inheriting certain estates from his great-uncle. He was a true poet, as his later published works amply prove. It may be mentioned incidentally here that several other of the Tennyson brothers have written poetry. Frederick, the eldest, who contributed four pieces to the Poems by Two Brothers,' published several volumes of verse.

Some of the critics exercised their ingenuity in trying to pick out Alfred's work from the poems in this early anonymous volume; but the most that they accomplished was to point out a few verbal resemblances between passages in the juvenile pieces and in the acknowledged productions of Tennyson. In 1893, after the poet's death, the book was reprinted by his son, with the initials of the authors (in part merely conjectural) appended to the poems.

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We may see in these boyish verses of the two brothers the influence of Byron, who is quoted no less than six times, and whose recent death forms the subject of one poem while it is referred to in another. Alfred was not yet fifteen when the news of that event reached the little village in Lincolnshire. Byron was dead! I thought the whole world was at an end,' he once said, recalling those early days, 'I thought everything was over and finished for every one that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out alone, and carved "Byron is dead" into the sandstone.'

In 1828, Charles and Alfred Tennyson went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where their elder brother Frederick had just won the prize for a Greek poem. Here Alfred made the friendship of not a few young men who were destined, like himself, to gain a

name in literature, — among them Trench, Monckton Milnes, James Spedding, Henry Alford, W. H. Brookfield, J. M. Kemble, and Kinglake. More gifted than all the rest, but prevented by his early death (in his twenty-third year) from showing anything more than the budding promise of his powers, was Arthur Hallam, to whom the poet's 'In Memoriam' will be an immortal monument. 'It has pleased God that in his death, as well as in his life and nature, he should be marked beyond ordinary men.'

'The Lover's Tale,' though not published until a few years ago, was written the same year that Tennyson went to Cambridge; and the next summer he gained the Chancellor's gold medal for a poem on Timbuctoo - the first instance in which that honor had been awarded to a piece in blank verse. The 'Athenæum' of July 22, 1829, in a highly eulogistic notice, remarked: These productions have often been ingenious and elegant, but we have never before seen one of them which indicated really first-rate poetical genius, and which could have done honor to any man that ever wrote.'

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In 1830, Tennyson brought out, under his own name, 'Poems, chiefly Lyrical,' a vol. ume of 154 pages, containing fifty-three pieces, thirty-two of which were suppressed in subsequent editions, though nine of these have been since restored.

This collection, published when the poet was only twenty-one, included ' Lilian,' 'Isabel,'The Mermaid,' 'The Merman,' 'The Owl,' 'Recollections of the Arabian Nights,' 'Ode to Memory,' 'The Poet's Mind,' and 'The Poet.' The last-named piece is of special interest as indicating the high ideal of the poet's art and vocation with which the young singer started on his career. It received just recognition and praise in a notice of the book that appeared in the Westminster Review,' for January, 1831. It was written, as the present Lord Tennyson informed me, by Sir John Bowring. The conclusion of the passage, which reads now like a prophecy fulfilled, was as follows:

'He has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of a poet's destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment. It is not for such men to sink into mere verse-makers for the amusement of themselves or others. They can influence the associations of unnumbered minds; they can command the sympathies of unnumbered hearts; they can disseminate principles, they can give those principles power over men's imaginations; they can excite in a good cause the sustained enthusiasm that is sure to conquer; they can blast the laurels of the tyrants, and hallow the memories of the martyrs of patriotism; they can act with a force, the extent of which it is difficult to estimate, upon national feelings and character, and consequently upon national happiness. If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may he read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own work.'

Tennyson lived and wrote for more than sixty years after these eloquent and prophetic words were penned; and there could not be a more truthful description and history of his work than those inspired strains of his youth. The estimate of the critic was correct. The young singer was a poet, and he proved himself such a poet as he saw in that immortal vision. It was a lofty and noble ideal, but he made it a living reality.

Tennyson's book was also reviewed favorably by Leigh Hunt in 'The Tatler' for 1831, and by Arthur Hallam in The Englishman's Magazine' for August of the same year. In May, 1832, Christopher North (Professor Wilson) criticised the young poet's work in 'Blackwood' in a very different vein, praising it indeed, but showing up its faults and defects with merciless severity. There was justice in some of its strictures, and they may have had their influence in leading Tennyson to suppress certain of the poems in later editions. At any rate, the passages held up to ridicule by the reviewer are mostly from these suppressed pieces.

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In the winter of 1832, Tennyson published another thin volume of verse, which was a great advance on that of two years previous, containing as it did some of the poems which have ever since been reckoned among his best, as 'The Lady of Shalott,' The Miller's Daughter,'' Enone,' 'The Palace of Art,' 'The Lotos-Eaters,' and the 'Dream of Fair Women.' It is true that every one of these poems has been more or less revised since then; but a careful comparison of the earlier and later versions shows that much that we should now mark as most admirable in them is unchanged from the reading of 1832. A considerable portion of this volume, though less than of the former one, has been suppressed in the more recent editions; but a few of the omitted pieces have since been restored under the head of ‘Juvenilia.' The following little hit at Christopher North has not been thus reinstated:

'You did late review my lays,

Crusty Christopher;

You did mingle blame and praise,

Rusty Christopher.

When I learnt from whom it came,
I forgave you all the blame,

Musty Christopher;

I could not forgive the praise,
Fusty Christopher.'

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For the next ten years (1833-1842) Tennyson published almost nothing. The Lover's Tale' was printed in 1833, but withdrawn before publication and not brought out again until 1879, after a pirated edition had appeared. 'Saint Agnes' and one or two other pieces were contributed to ‘Annuals' and similar collections during this period; but with these slight exceptions the silence of the poet was unbroken for the ten years.

It is probable that this long silence was mainly due to the death of his friend Hallam in 1833; perhaps also, as has been suggested by more than one critic, to his desire to perfect himself in his art before giving the world further results of it. In Memoriam' was elaborated during this period, though not published until 1850; and the best of the poems issued in 1830 and 1832 were carefully revised — some of them almost entirely rewritten - and sundry new poems were produced.

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The fruits of this labor (In Memoriam' excepted) appeared in 1842 in two volumes, one of which was chiefly made up of the earlier poems in their revised form, while the other was almost entirely new. Among the contents of the latter volume was the 'Morte d'Arthur,' which we know to have been written as early as 1835, and which, like The Lady of Shalott' in the 1832 volume, shows that the Arthurian legends had begun to interest and inspire the poet long before he planned the extended epical treatment of them in the Idylls of the King.'

'The Talking Oak,' ' Dora,' 'Ulysses,' 'Locksley Hall,'' Saint Agnes,' and 'Sir Galahad' are among the other remarkable poems published in 1842.

The general recognition of Tennyson as the greatest poet of the time dates from this period. Hitherto his admirers had been the select few, and the leading critics had been divided in their estimate of his work; but now he was hailed with almost unanimous eulogies. As another has said, 'all England rang with the stirring music of "Locksley Hall,”' and ' nearly all of the choicer spirits of the age conspired to chant the praises of the poet and to do him honor.'

Up to this time Tennyson was almost unknown in this country. It is doubtful whether a dozen copies of the volumes of 1830 and 1832 ever crossed the Atlantic. Neither of

them is to be found in any of our great libraries, and in private collections they are excessively rare. The only extended notice of them in any of our literary journals of that day, so far as I can learn, was in the Christian Examiner' in 1837, from the pen of Mr. John S. Dwight. He borrowed the books, as he told me, of Emerson, who delighted to loan them to his friends and endeavored to have them reprinted in Boston.1 The edition of 1842 was reprinted here; but Mr. B. H. Ticknor, the son of the publisher, informs me that 1500 copies supplied the American demand for the next three years.

By this time, his fame in England was well assured. Wordsworth, in a letter dated July 1, 1845, says: 'I saw Tennyson when I was in London several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things.' It is a significant fact that, on the death of Southey in 1843, Tennyson was among the few poets who were talked of as successors to the laureateship, though the general opinion, as might have been expected, was in favor of the venerable poet on whom the honor was finally conferred.

A second edition of the Poems' of 1842 was called for within a year, and two more editions were issued in 1845 and 1846. In 1845 the poet was placed on the pension-list by Sir Robert Peel for an annuity of £200. The grant was the means of calling forth some ill-natured criticisms, the most notable of which was a satirical fling, in BulwerLytton's 'The New Timon' (London, 1846), at the 'Theban taste' that 'pensions Tennyson while starves a Knowles.' The productions of 'school-miss Alfred' were described as 'out-babying Wordsworth and out-glittering Keats,' with much more in the same vein. The attack drew from Tennyson a rejoinder printed in Punch' (February 26, 1846) over the signature of 'Alcibiades,' and followed in the next number by another, less severe, entitled " Afterthought.' In this sober second thought' the poet comes to the wise conclusion that silence is the noblest answer' to all such spiteful attacks. This latter poem was afterwards included in the editions of Tennyson under the title of 'Literary Squabbles.' No one would suspect any reference to Lytton in it if he did not know its history.

It is pleasant to be able to add that Bulwer struck out the sneer at Tennyson from the third edition of 'The New Timon,' and that the two poets afterwards became good friends. In a public speech in 1862, Lytton, in alluding to Prince Albert, quoted what he called 'the thought so exquisitely expressed by our Poet Laureate '—namely, that the Prince is 'The silent father of our kings to be'; and later Tennyson, in dedicating 'Harold' to the younger Lytton, gracefully acknowledged his indebtedness to the novel on the same subject by the elder Lytton. O strange hate-healer, Time!' as the Laureate elsewhere exclaims.

On the more recent history of the poet it is not necessary to dwell in detail. In 1847 'The Princess' appeared, and in 1850 In Memoriam' was at last given to the world. The same year Tennyson was married, and was made Poet Laureate. In 1852 the 'Ode on the Death of Wellington' was published, and the next year the eighth edition of the complete 'Poems' was issued. 'Maud and Other Poems' appeared in 1855, and a second edition in 1856 with 'Maud' in a considerably enlarged form. In 1859 followed the 'Idylls of the King,' including 'Enid,' 'Vivien,''Elaine,' and 'Guinevere.' Ten thousand 1 This I learned from Mr. Samuel Longfellow, who showed me a letter from Messrs. C. C. Little & Co. to his brother the poet, dated April 27, 1838, in which they refer to Emerson's desire for an American reprint of Tennyson and their intention of making one. Why the plan was not carried out I am unable to say.

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