or sixty-six years, from the appearance of the _Poems by Two
Brothers_, in 1827, until his death in 1892, he studied and practiced his
art continually and exclusively. Only Browning, his fellow-worker,
resembles him in this; but the differences in the two men are world-wide.
Tennyson was naturally shy, retiring, indifferent to men, hating noise and
publicity, loving to be alone with nature, like Wordsworth. Browning was
sociable, delighting in applause, in society, in travel, in the noise and
bustle of the big world.

Tennyson was born in the rectory of Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809. The
sweet influences of his early natural surroundings can be better understood
from his early poems than from any biography. He was one of the twelve
children of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, a scholarly clergyman, and
his wife Elizabeth Fytche, a gentle, lovable woman, "not learned, save in
gracious household ways," to whom the poet pays a son's loyal tribute near
the close of _The Princess_. It is interesting to note that most of these
children were poetically inclined, and that two of the brothers, Charles
and Frederick, gave far greater promise than did Alfred.

When seven years old the boy went to his grandmother's house at Louth, in
order to attend a famous grammar school at that place. Not even a man's
memory, which generally makes light of hardship and glorifies early
experiences, could ever soften Tennyson's hatred of school life. His
complaint was not so much at the roughness of the boys, which had so
frightened Cowper, as at the brutality of the teachers, who put over the
school door a wretched Latin inscription translating Solomon's barbarous
advice about the rod and the child. In these psychologic days, when the
child is more important than the curriculum, and when we teach girls and
boys rather than Latin and arithmetic, we read with wonder Carlyle's
description of his own schoolmaster, evidently a type of his kind, who
"knew of the human soul thus much, that it had a faculty called memory, and
could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch
rods." After four years of most unsatisfactory school life, Tennyson
returned home, and was fitted for the university by his scholarly father.
With his brothers he wrote many verses, and his first efforts appeared in a
little volume called _Poems by Two Brothers_, in 1827. The next year he
entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became the center of a
br