undulations. Nowhere is it more difficult to know whom to mention and whom to omit.

In poetry, a body of writing which had been kept back by the persistent public neglect of its immediate inspirers, Shelley and Keats, took advantage of the growing fame of these authors to insist on recognition for itself. Hence, although Alfred Tennyson had been a published author since 1826, the real date of his efflorescence as a great, indisputable power in poetry is 1842; Elizabeth Barrett, whose first volume appeared in 1825, does not make her definite mark until 1844; and Robert Browning, whose Pauline is of 1833, begins to find readers and a discreet recognition in 1846, at the close of the series of his Bells and Pomegranates. These three writers, then, formed a group which it is convenient to consider together: greatly dissimilar in detail, they possessed distinctive qualities in common; we may regard them as we do Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, or Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The vogue, however, of this latest cluster of poets was destined to develop more slowly, perhaps, but much more steadily and for a longer period than that of any previous trio. After fifty years

of production and increasing popularity two of them were still amongst us, in the enjoyment of an almost unparalleled celebrity. It is important, so far as possible, to clear away from our minds the impression which half a century of glory has produced, and to see how these poets struck their first candid admirers in the forties.

In the first place, it is obvious that their unquestionable merits were Tennyson dimmed by what were taken to be serious defects of style. Oddly enough, it was ALFRED TENNYSON who was particularly assailed for faults which we now cheerfully admit in Miss Barrett, who to her own contemporaries seemed the most normal of the three. That Keats was "misdirected" and "unripe" had been an unchallenged axiom of the critical faculty; but here were three young writers who were calmly accepting the formulas of Keats and of "his deplorable friend Mr. Shelley," and throwing contempt on those so authoritatively laid down by the Edinburgh Review. Tennyson was accused of triviality, affectation, and quaintness. But his two volumes of 1842 were published at a moment when public taste was undergoing

Alfred Tennyson

a radical change. The namby-pamby of the thirties was disgusting the younger men, and the new burden imposed by the Quarterlies was being

tossed from impatient shoulders. When R. H. Horne, in 1844, called upon Englishmen to set aside "the thin gruel of Kirke White" and put to their lips "the pure Greek wine of Keats," he not only expressed a daring conviction to which many timider spirits responded, but he enunciated a critical opinion which the discussions of fifty years have not superseded.

What such candid spirits delighted in in the Tennyson of 1842 was the sensuous comprehensiveness of his verse. He seemed to sum up, in a composite style to which he gradually gave a magic peculiarly his own, the

Somersby Rectory, the Birthplace of Tennyson

finest qualities of the school that had preceded him. He studied natural phenomena as closely as Wordsworth had, his melodies were almost as liquid and aerial as those of Coleridge, he could tell a story as well as Campbell, his songs were as pure and ecstatic as Shelley's, and for depth and splendour of colour Keats hardly surpassed him. As soon, therefore, as the general public came to recognise him, he enchanted it. To an enthusiastic listener the verse of Tennyson presently appeared to sum up every fascinating pleasure which poetry was competent to offer, or if anything was absent, it was supposed to be the vigour of Byron or the manly freshness of Scott. To the elements he collected from his predecessors he added a sense of decorative beauty, faintly archaic and Italian, an unprecedented refinement and high finish in the execution of verse, and a philosophical sympathy with the broad outlines of such

social and religious problems as were engaging the best minds of the age. Those who approached the poetry of Tennyson, then, were flattered by its polished and distinguished beauty, which added to their own self-respect, and were repelled by none of those austerities and violences which had estranged the early readers of Wordsworth and Shelley.

Alfred Tennyson, the first Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), was the fourth of the twelve children of the Rev. George Tennyson and his wife, Elizabeth Fytche. He was born in the rectory of Somers

by, in Lincolnshire, on the 6th of August 1809. In 1815 he was sent to the Louth grammar school, and five years later returned home to be prepared for college by his father. He began to write verses, copiously, when he was twelve, in company with his elder brothers, Frederick (1807-1898) and Charles (1808-1879). The three combined in a volume, which was nevertheless called Poems by Two Brothers, in 1827. In February of the next year Charles and Alfred proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Tennyson soon became the centre of a brilliant group of friends. In 1829 he gained the Chancellor's Medal for his poem called Timbuctoo, and in 1830 appeared his Poems chiefly Lyrical. Among his leading friends at Cambridge were Trench, Monckton Milnes, Spedding, Thompson, FitzGerald, and above all, A. H. Hallam. The volume of 1830 attracted little outside notice, except

Clevedon Church

Somersby Church

from those to whom these friends introduced it, but it won the close attention of S. T. Coleridge. In the summer of this year Tennyson and Hallam volunteered in the army of the Spanish insurgent, Torrijos, and marched about in the Pyrenees, but were never under fire. Tennyson left Cambridge in February 1831, and made Somersby his residence, his father at this time dying, but the family being allowed to stay in the rectory until 1837. Tennyson was now in excellent health and at the height of his genius; he was writing abundantly and delighting in the friendship of Hallam, who was enThe result of these months was given to the 1833, a book which, in spite of the trans

cendent beauty of its contents, met with a reception from the critics which greatly depressed and angered the poet. In the subsequent autumn (September 15, 1833), Arthur Hallam died very suddenly in a hotel in Vienna. Tennyson's nerves were violently shaken, and after this event his health "became variable and his spirits indifferent." Until after the burial of Hallam at Clevedon in January 1834 he wrote nothing; but as his mind grew calmer, he began the Idylls of the King and In Memoriam, and once more spent the quiet years in his Lincolnshire village in a uniform devotion of his whole soul to the art of poetry. When the Tennysons were

at length obliged to leave Somersby, they moved to High Beech, in Epping Forest; the poet was now attached and "quasibetrothed" to Emily Sellwood. In 1840 the family moved to Tunbridge Wells, and in 1841 to Boxley, near Maidstone. It was now nearly ten years since Tennyson, greatly discouraged, had broken silence with the public, but in 1842 he consented, after much debate, to publish, in two volumes, his Poems, new and old. In this collection appeared for the first time the modern. narratives, mostly in blank verse, which he then called "Idylls," such as "The Gardener's Daughter," and "Dora," as well as lyrical and epical studies of a graver kind, such as "Locksley Hall," "Morte d'Arthur," and "Enone." The book made an instant sensation, and it is from 1842 that the universal fame of Tennyson must be dated. Unfortunately, he needed encouragement, for a speculator had tempted him to sell his little estate, and to invest all his property in a "Patent Decorative Carving Company." In a few months the scheme collapsed and Tennyson was left penniless. The loss affected him so severely that his life was despaired of, and he had to be placed in the charge of a hydropathic physician at Cheltenham, where his peace of mind very gradually returned. 1845 he was raised from the most grinding poverty by a pension of £200 bestowed by Sir Robert Peel. He was nervously prostrated again in 1847, and underwent treatment at Prestbury. About this time The Princess was published, and pleased a wide circle of readers. Tennyson's home was now at Cheltenham. In 1850 In Memoriam, on which he had been engaged for many years, was published anonymously, and in June of the same year he married Emily Sellwood at Shiplake. This was a most fortunate union; as Tennyson said long afterwards, "The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her." Before the year was out he had succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate. The Tennysons settled at Warninglid, on the South Downs, and then at Twickenham. In 1851 they made the tour in Italy, many incidents of which are recorded in "The Daisy." The Ode on the Death of the

Tennyson's Rooms in Corpus Buildings,
Cambridge