A TENNYSON PRIMER. CHAPTER I. and Childhood. ALFRED TENNYSON, the acknowledged representative of his age in poetry, was born on August 6, 1809, at Somersby Rectory, in the village of Somersby, in Lincolnshire. His parents were of gentle blood his father, the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, rector of Somersby and vicar of Grimsby, a man of exceptional culture, Parentage versatile powers, imaginative temper, and strongly marked character; his mother, a daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, vicar of Louth. Frederick and Charles (afterwards Charles Tennyson-Turner), who preceded Alfred in a family of twelve, both became distinguished as poets in after life. From his earliest years Alfred was devoted to poetry, and seemed destined for a poetical career. His first recorded verse was the cry that broke from him, when a child of five, as the wind hurried him down the garden walk : "I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind." While still very young, some verses written upon his slate the subject, the flowers in the rectory garden-modelled upon Thomson, the only poet he had then read, were rewarded by a " Yes, you can write," from his brother; a little later the death of his grand mother was the theme of a poem which drew from his grandfather half a sovereign, and the prophecy, soon to be falsified, That is the first money, my boy, that you've made by poetry, and, take my word for it, it will be the last. Perhaps the lines in the Poems by Two Brothers, be, ginning, “There on the bier she sleeps, are an im、 proved version of this early attempt.* In his twelfth year he was busy on an epic in imitation of Scott, which ran to some thousand lines, and in his fifteenth he essayed a drama. Of the epic it is interesting to note that, in his father's judgment, it gave promise of a famous future. "If that boy dies," said Mr. Tennyson, one of our greatest poets will have gone. 66 After the village school came the grammar school at Louth, followed in its turn by home tuition. The changes hardly broke the tranquil, dreamy life spent by the boy, chiefly alone-for he was naturally of retiring disposition—or in long rambles with his favourite brother Charles. The news of Byron's death, in 1824, was the first wave of emotion from the outside world that touched him. "I thought," he said, "that 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." Two years later Alfred and Charles joined in a poetical venture, and put forth a small volume ; but rather, it appears, in search of pocket-money than fame. A Louth bookseller, Jackson by name, was induced to give twenty pounds for the copyright of their juvenilia. The Poems by Two Brothers (1826), * Signed, however, "C. T." in the 1893 edition. |