One incident connected with the poet’s education at home is worth repeating. His father required him to memorize the odes of Horace and to recite them morning by morning until the four books were gone through. The Laureate in later years testified to the value of this practice in cultivating a delicate sense for metrical music. He called Horace his master. Certainly no other bard has ever excelled Tennyson in the art of expressing himself in melodious verse.
From his twelfth to his sixteenth year, Alfred was apparently idle much of the time, yet he was unconsciously preparing for his life-work. He was gathering material and storing up impressions which were afterwards utilized. It was with him a formative period. The hours he spent strolling in lanes and woods were not wasted. The quiet, meditative boy lived in a realm of the imagination, and his thoughts and fancies took shape in crude poems.
This period of day-dreaming was followed by one of marked intellectual activity. The thin volume—Poems by Two Brothers, printed in 1826, contained the pieces written by Alfred when he was only sixteen or seventeen. It shows that these were busy years. The Tennyson youths not only scribbled a great deal of verse—they ranged far and wide in the fields of ancient and modern literature. Their father had a good library, and they appreciated its treasures. In the footnotes of their first book were many curious bits of information, and quotations from the classics.
The Tennyson children were fortunate in having cultured parents. They were favored in another respect. Dr. Tennyson was comfortably well off for a clergyman. His means—which he shrewdly husbanded—enabled the family to spend the summers at Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast. Thus Alfred’s passion for the sea was early developed. For some time it was the rector’s custom to occupy a dwelling in Louth during the school year. In this way the seclusion and monotony of Somersby life were broken. The young Tennysons saw considerable of the world. They were often welcomed in the home of their grandmother, Mrs. Fytche, in Westgate Place, and occasionally visited the stately mansion at Bayons. Especially Charles and Alfred were at times the guests of their great-uncle Samuel Turner, vicar of Grasby and curate of Caistor, who afterwards left his property and parish livings to his favorite, Charles Tennyson Turner. Such were the experiences of the Laureate’s youth and childhood, which inevitably influenced his whole life and entered into his poetry. He illustrates the truth that a poet is largely what his environment makes him.
Byron exercised a magical spell over him in his teens, and this influence is apparent in his boyish rhymes which are tinged with Byronic melancholy. Afterwards Keats gained the ascendency. As a colorist, Tennyson owes much to this gorgeous word-painter, whom he has equaled, if not surpassed, in his own field.
Alfred, in his boyhood, gave unmistakable indications of genius. During his university course at Cambridge, he was generally looked upon as a superior mortal, of whom great things were expected by his teachers and fellow-collegians. Dr. Whewell, his tutor, treated him with unusual respect.
While at Trinity college (1828-31) he formed friendships which lasted till death ended them one by one. It was indeed a company of choice spirits with whom Tennyson had the good fortune to be associated. Among them were Thackeray, Helps, Garden, Sterling, Thompson, Kinglake, Maurice, Kemble, Milnes, Trench, Alford, Brookfield, Merivale, Spedding and others. Besides these, he numbered among the friends of his early manhood Fitzgerald, Hare, Hunt, Carlyle, Gladstone, Rogers, Landor, Forster, the Lushingtons and other famous scholars and men of letters.
In the companionship of such men, he found the stimulus necessary for the development of his poetical faculty. They all regarded him with feelings of warmest admiration.[2] The young poet had at least a few appreciative readers during the ten or twelve years of obscurity when the public cared little for his writings. He was encouraged by their words of commendation to pursue the bard’s divine calling, to which he was led by an overmastering instinct. He could afford to wait and smile at his slashing reviewers. Meanwhile he profited by the suggestions of his critics. In this respect he presents a striking contrast to Browning. He mercilessly subjected his productions to the most painstaking revision.[3] He attempted various styles, and experimented with all sorts of metres. Thus he served his laborious apprenticeship and acquired a mastery of his art. His eminent success has confirmed the expectations of his youthful admirers.
During his stay at Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam, a son of the historian. Hallam, who was a young man of extraordinary promise, became the dearest of his friends—more to him than brother. Their intimate fellowship was strengthened by Arthur’s love for the poet’s sister. It was his strongest earthly attachment. In 1830, the two friends traveled through France together, and stopped a while in the Pyrenees. On revisiting these mountains long afterward, the Laureate, overcome by reminiscences of other days, wrote the affecting lines entitled “In the Valley of Cauteretz”:
All along the valley, stream that flashest white,
Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,
All along the valley, where thy waters flow,
I walk’d with one I loved two and thirty years ago.
For all along the valley, while I walk’d to-day,
The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away;
For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed,
Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,
And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,
The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.