T. “At ten years of age I wrote an epic poem of great length—it was in the ‘Marmion’ style. I used to rush about the fields, with a stick for a sword, and fancied myself a conqueror advancing upon an enemy’s country.”
T. “My prize poem ‘Timbuctoo’ was an altered version of a work I had written at home and called ‘The Battle of Armageddon.’ I fell out with my father, for I had no wish to compete for the prize and he insisted on my writing. To my amazement, the prize was awarded to me. I couldn’t face the public recitation in the Senate House, feeling very much as Cowper felt; Merivale declaimed my poem for me in the Senate House.”
T. “Arthur Hallam said to me in 1832: ‘To-day I have seen the last English King going in State to the last English Parliament.’”
I believe that one of Tennyson’s first idylls was addressed to Miss K. Bradshaw, sister of my beloved friend Henry Bradshaw (fellow and librarian of King’s College, Cambridge), whose relationship to the Judge who condemned Charles I. was rather a tender point with H. B., both at Eton and King’s.
Because she bore the iron name
Of him who doomed his king to die,
I deemed her one of stately frame
And looks to awe her stander by.
But find a maiden, tender, shy,
With fair blue eyes and winning sweet,
And longed to kiss her hand, and lie
A thousand summers at her feet.
I pressed the Poet more than once to put on record his own interpretation of passages in “In Memoriam” and others which needed the authority of his own explanation. “Surely you took ‘four square to all the winds that blow’ from Dante’s