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TENNYSON'S BIRTHPLACE, SOMERSBY RECTORY, LINCOLNSHIRE [Drawn by Alfred Parsons, after a photograph by Carlton & Sons, Horncastle]

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II. THE TENNYSONS

HE Norsemen who long ago strayed THE through a Lincolnshire hamlet, "deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns and bowery hollows," showed

In Somersby, at the century's beginning, was a small house draped with woodbine the rectory of the Rev. George Tennyson. Leigh Hunt, when he heard that three of the divine's sons and two of his

a wise and felicitous instinct when they daughters were poets, called it "a nest of

named it Somersby, or summer-town, because the birds and the flowers seemed always telling how the sun lingered over it. And I like to believe that the particular old Norseman who originated this poetic nomenclature and uttered this poetic fancy was somehow a forbear of the D'Eyncourt family of Norman blood, whence sprang a generation of singers who have made the little village a shrine for literary pilgrimages, whose meistersinger has echoed in his lines the bird and flower song heard by the Norsemen :

"When summer's hourly mellowing change
May breathe with many roses sweet
Upon its thousand waves of wheat."

nightingales." The humble homestead, with its umbrageous sycamores, larches, its "seven elms and poplars four," was indeed a nest of nightingales; but there seems no extravagance in calling it also a palace of art, since it was the dwelling of a king of letters as well as of those knights of the poetic quill, Frederick Tennyson and Charles Tennyson Turner, whose names and fame are dimmed by the brighter glory of their laureate brother. Arthur Hallam described the place's physical charm in a sonnet:

"Those Gothic windows are before me now,

Which long have shone dim-lighted in my mind;

That slope of softest green, the brook below,
Old musty stalls, and tedded hay behind—
All have I seen; and simple though they be,
A mighty awe steals with them on my heart,
For they have grown and lasted as a part
Of thy dear self upbuilding thine and thee:
From yon tall fir, weathering the April rain,
Came influence rare that deepened into song,
Beauty lurk'd for thee in the long gray fields,
By tufted knolls and, Alfred, made thee
strong."

The Gothic windows lighted the diningroom, where one can picture a group of handsome boys and girls with their high brows and dark eyes and hair, inherited from their Huguenot ancestor, sitting in the warmly colored light looking like so many models of Velasquez. One fancies. the infant Alfred mused on the woodbine that clambered into his nursery window, watching its climbing tendrils, getting the first impression and inspiration for

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Vine, vine and eglantine,

Clasp her window, trail and twine." And without doubt he often woke at peep of day-provoking the old nurse who irreverently said: "Poet or no poet, I ha' carried him on my shoulder "-with the question: "What does little birdie say?" Though the Tennysons' grandmother vaingloriously boasted that all her laurelled descendant's poetic nature was due to her, the earliest recorded effusion of the family muse is an ignoble effort perpetrated by the grandfather in collaboration with one of his sons:

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A glance at the generation of Tennysons immediately preceding the bards, reveals a light and a shadow on the poetic pedigree; the light represented by Mrs. Matthew Russell (Elizabeth Tennyson, sister of the Rev. George Tennyson), who wrote creditable verses polished with a care and nicety worthy of her nephew's artistic conscience; and the shadow represented by an uncle who is reported to have said: "My nephew has made a book of poetry? I'd a deal rather he had made a wheelbarrow." But the Rev. George Tennyson gave his children a rare intellectual dower; he was a linguist, an artist and a musician, which especially conduced to make his children sons of song. And, besides mental talents, he transmitted to them a marvelous physique, which a Somersby sage so eloquently admired: "What a clip the oud doctor used to go between the churches o' Somersby and Enderby." In the lines of Isabel, Tennyson's mother stands glorified, we must believe truthfully, so many are the other tributes to

her excellence. Literature contains few

portraitures so beautifully graven as these lyrical limnings of her physical graces and spiritual qualities:

"Eyes not dropt down nor over bright, but fed With the clear-pointed flame of chastity, ... locks not wide dispread, Madonna-wise on either side her head : Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign The summer calm of golden charity,

Revered Isabel the crown and head,

The stately flower of female fortitude, Of perfect wifehood and pure lowlihead."

This mother reigned over the home circle supreme as over the coterie of her girlhood, when she was wooed by twenty-five suitors, whose names she used to enumerate with pardonable pride. From her as well as from the father, who, on account of his social graces and his brilliant mental parts, was deemed an indispensable

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endeavoring to impress on the minds of others the precepts of his Holy Word."

The circumstances of the Tennysons' early life and education were particularly happy. The father, with his ample resources, was virtually the boys' only tutor till they entered Cambridge. This home instruction increased their spontaneity of thought, and gave full freedom to their youthful spirits. Somersby, with its wealth of lovely landscape, far removed from the city's hurly-burly, was an auspicious angle of earth for the upbuilding of a brood of poets; and assuredly the children enjoyed the place's natural advantages to their utmost. The hamlet's whole area was their playground. At an early age poetic tendencies began to manifest themselves-especially a passionate love of nature which was all in all to them, as to the boy Wordsworth. A favorite out-of-door sport was a game in which willow wythes were the toys-representing knights taking part in tournaments. On dreary days the children would gather in the house, perhaps in the little drawing room lined with bookshelves, from whose stately rows Shakespere, Milton, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Cervantes and Defoe presided as the household deities, whose mighty spirit was even then instilling the subtle influence which should raise one of the children unto an eminence not far inferior to their own. On such occasions story-telling was the form of entertainment, every one taking a turn. In the earliest days Alfred's fund of fables was not very opulent; in fact it consisted of one oft-repeated tale which, however, he was encouraged to tell again and again for the entertainment of the smallest folk, and the derision and amusement of the elders; later he reached the rank of chief story-teller and began to spin by many winter firelights yarns of Arthur and tilts and battles for the right. Some toplofty lines of Lord Tennyson's written at the

age of fourteen are applicable to him and his brothers in those childhood days:

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"Ha! by St. James,

Mine was no vulgar mind in infancy.

Even then the force of nature and high birth
Had writ nobility upon my brow."

The glorious annual incident of the Tennysons' boyhood was the setting forth for the sea at Mablethorpe, where they first heard the "league-long rolling thunder on the reef," the organ voice of ocean that haunted Alfred evermore. In later years he was accustomed to say that of the four elements, water was to him the most attractive. His many ocean metaphors are indeed sufficient evidence of this. Small wonder that it was so, considering that the magical cadences of the waves' marvellous music had rung so early and so often upon his ears that its echoes rolled continually in his soul like the soft roar in the sea-shell's convolutions. The summer days at Mablethorpe were gala days. What a source of inspiration they were may be indicated by a single incident. With part of the pittance (twenty pounds) received for that first book of verse, "Poems of Two Brothers," Charles and Alfred hired a coach to drive down to old Mablethorpe "to share their triumphs with the winds and the waves." The surge of the sea, nowhere so celebrated as on that Lincolnshire coast, is heard in the songs of the two other members of the poetic fraternity as it is in the Laureate's lines, and it seems to me no music of earth rings in these as does the diapason of the round ocean's swell and fall.

After the idyllic years of boyhood, it is small wonder that the youths, especially Alfred, found the early Cambridge life. irksome. On entering the university their home-spent years made them at first appear shy: Alfred and Charles were not able immediately to throw off the timidity resulting from narrow social life nor to profit by an advice the former had given

RAGENDERBY CHURCH

Frederick whom harrowing bashfulness once made afraid to attend a dinner party: "Just think of Herschel's star-patches, Fred, and you'll soon get over that." But these barriers of shyness and reserve soon broke down before the sallies of desire for good comradeship and the glorious opportunities offered for it by a coterie of young men whose names are enrolled with the Tennysons in the century's annals, the men who were then reflecting credit on old Cambridge, who are now reckoned among her illustrious alumni. The old university has rarely ranked among its students so many honorable names as those that stood beside the Tennysons' at that time. Foremost among these were the members of that famous society indigenous to Cambridge, always regarded as the intellectual elect, so appropriately named "the apostles," since they have preached to world-wide congregations the gospels of politics, ethics, literature and art. Among these young men were Richard Monkton Milnes, J. M. Kemble, James Spedding, and last but transcendently first Alfred's Pythias, Jonathan-what you will, provided epithet be found eloquent enough to name the young man whom "In Memoriam" apotheosized. Testimonies innumerable from his foremost con

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