LORD TENNYSON.

A

LFRED TENNYSON was born August 6, 1809, at Somersby, a village in Lincolnshire, England. In the family of Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., Rector of Somersby, and Vicar of Grimsby, the father of Alfred, there were twelve children, seven sons and five daughters. Alfred was the third son; Frederick and Charles, both poets, being older.

The Tennysons trace their descent through the old Norman family of D'Eyncourt, to the Plantagenets. Mrs. Tennyson, the mother of Alfred, was Elizabeth Fytche, the daughter of Rev. Stephen Fytche, Vicar of Louth.

The parents were well-educated, refined, and noble persons. The mother, writes Mrs. Thackeray-Ritchie, in Harper's Magazine, December, 1883, "was a sweet, and gentle, and most imaginative woman; so kindhearted 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. She was intensely, fervently religious, as a poet's mother should be."

Dr. Tennyson, the father, was a man of fine physique, "something of a poet, painter, architect, and musician,

and also a considerable linguist and mathematician." He built a picture-gallery in Somersby rectory, for which room he carved a mantelpiece out of the stone in the neighborhood.

The Tennyson home was a happy one. "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 dinnertime came, and they all sat round the table, each in turn put a chapter of his history underneath the potatobowl-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." "

The village of Somersby was a quiet, wooded town, with brooks and trees, fit home for a trio of young poets. Rev. Drummond Rawnsley thus describes the place: "To the north rises the long peak of the wold, with its steep white road that climbs the hill above Thetford; to the south the land slopes gently to a small, deep-channelled brook, which rises not far from Somersby, and flows just below the parsonage garden."

The place is pictured in the "Ode to Memory," published when Alfred was twenty-one:

"Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall
Which ever sounds and shines

A pillar of white light upon the wall
Of purple cliffs, aloof descried:

Come from the woods that belt the gray hillside,

The seven elms, the poplars four,

That stand beside my father's door,
And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,
In every elbow and turn,

The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland."

The children were educated partly at home and partly at Cadney's village school, afterwards at the Louth grammar-school. Alfred was known to the people chiefly by his passion for the sea. "Many of his early poems," writes Henry J. Jennings, in his Life of Tennyson, "are said to have been written to the moaning music of the German Ocean, as it rolled in restless breakers upon the Lincolnshire coast. There is a tradition that he once ran bareheaded all the way from Somersby to the shore, to be inspired by the never-ceasing suggestiveness of the melancholy sea."

"Alfred's first verses," says Mrs. Ritchie, "so I once heard him say, 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