Left on the shore."
These images show a familiarity with fen-lands, and flat sea-coast, to a certainty; but Alfred Tennyson, after all, though a Lincolnshire man, is not a native of the fens. He was born near enough to know them well, but not in them. His native place is Somersby, a little village lying about midway between the market-towns of Spilsby and Horncastle, and containing less than a hundred inhabitants. His father, George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., was rector of that and the adjoining parish of Enderby. He was a man of very various talents—something of a poet, a painter, an architect, and a musician. He was also a considerable linguist and mathematician. Dr. Tennyson was the elder brother of Mr. Tennyson d'Encourt, M.P. Alfred Tennyson, one of several children, was born at the parsonage at Somersby, of which a view stands at the head of this chapter. From the age of seven till about nine or ten, he went to the grammar-school of Louth, in the same county, and after that returned home and was educated by his father, till he went to Trinity College, Cambridge.
The native village of Tennyson is not situated in the fens, but in a pretty, pastoral district of softly sloping hills and large ash-trees. It is not based on bogs, but on a clean sandstone. There is a little glen in the neighborhood called by the old monkish name of Holywell. Over the gateway leading to it, some by-gone squire has put up an inscription, a medley of Virgil and Horace.
"Intus aquæ dulces, vivoque sedilia saxo
Et paulum silvæ superest. His utere mecum;"
and within, a stream of clear water gushes out of a sand-rock, and over it stands an old school-house, almost lost among the trees, and of late years used as a wood-house, its former distinction only signified by a scripture text on the walls—"Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth." There are also two brooks in this valley which flow into one at the bottom of the glebe-field, and by these the young poet used to wander and meditate. To this scenery we find him turning back in his Ode to Memory.
"Come from the woods that belt the gray hillside,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father's door,
And chiefly from the brook that loves