Upon the ridgèd wolds.”
This is reminiscent of Somersby.
Then again, Memory calls up the pictures of “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea” at Mablethorpe, and the view over “the waste enormous marsh.”
In 1831 Dr. Tennyson died, aged fifty-two, and his sons left Cambridge. His widow lived on for thirty-four years, dying at the age of eighty-four, in 1865. They stayed on in the Somersby home till 1837, and a new volume came out in 1832, with a whole array of poems of rare merit, showing how much the poet’s mind had matured in that last year at Cambridge. This volume, like the Louth volume, is dated for the year after that in which it was really published. It carried Alfred to the front rank at once, for in it was The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Miller’s Daughter, Œnone, The May Queen, New Year’s Eve, The Lotus Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, and the Lines to James Spedding, on the death of his brother Edward. Only think of all these wonderful poems in a thin book of 162 pages written before he was twenty-three.
THE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST
To Mablethorpe and Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast we find frequent allusions in many poems, e.g., he speaks in The Last Tournament of “the wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh,” and when the Red Knight in drunken passion, trying to strike the King overbalances himself, he falls—
“As the crest of some slow arching wave,
Heard in dead night along that table shore,
Drops flat, and after, the great waters break
Whitening for half-a-league, and thin themselves,