eal domestic life, and of a man of
rare gifts and fine culture, whose work and career have been and are the
pride and glory of the English-speaking race. But we have also the story
of an author not free from human weaknesses, and though endowed with
manifold and great gifts, yet who had to labor long and earnestly to
perfect himself in his art, and in his early years had much
discouragement and not a little adversity to contend with. With all the
toil and stress his early years had known, when success came to the poet
no one was less unspoiled by it; and when sunshine fell upon and gilded
his life, maturing years brought him serenity, happiness, and, at
length, peace.

Alfred Tennyson was born at his father's rectory, Somersby,
Lincolnshire, August 6,1809. He was the fourth of twelve children, seven
of whom were sons, two of them, Frederick and Charles, being endowed,
like Alfred, with poetic gifts. The poet's mother, a woman of sweet and
tender disposition, had much to do in moulding the future Laureate's
character; while from his father, a man of fine culture, he received not
only much of his education, but his bent towards a recluse, bookish
career. Alfred was from his earliest days a retired, shy child, fond of
reading and given to rhyming, and with a characteristic love of nature
and of quiet rural life. Later on he had a passion for the sea-coast,
and for those scenes of storm and stress about the seagirt shores of old
England which he was so feelingly and with such poetic beauty to depict
in "Sea Dreams," and in those incomparable songs, embodiments at once of
sorrow and of faith, 'Break, break, break,' and 'Crossing the Bar.'
Besides the education he received from his scholarly father, and at a
school at Louth for four years, young Tennyson spent some years at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where, though he did not take a degree, he
won in 1829 the Chancellor's medal for the best English poem of the
year, the subject of which was 'Timbuctoo.' At college he had the good
fortune to number among his friends several men who later in life were,
like himself, to rise to eminence,--such as Henry Alford (afterwards
Dean of Canterbury), R.C. Trench (later Archbishop of Dublin), C.
Merivale (historian and Dean of Ely), Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton),
James Spedding (editor of Lord Bacon's Works), Macaulay, Thackeray, and,
most endeared of all, Arthur Henry Hallam, son of the historian, whose
memory Tennyson has immortalized