subduing floods and mountain barriers,
pestilence and the worst extremes of heat and cold; they also went forth
into the market-place and battled with their fellow men for laws, for
tariffs, for empire. Their triumphs, like those of the Romans, are
mostly to be seen in the practical sphere. But there were others of that
day who chose the contemplative life of the recluse, and who yet, by
high imaginings, contributed in no less degree to enrich the fame of
their age; and among these the first name is that of Alfred Tennyson,
the most representative of Victorian poets.

[Illustration: ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery]

His early environment may be said to have marked him out for such a
life. He was born in one of the remotest districts of a rural county.
The village of Somersby lies in a hollow among the Lincolnshire wolds,
twenty miles east of Lincoln, midway between the small towns of Spilsby,
Horncastle, and Louth. There are no railways to disturb its peace; no
high roads or broad rivers to bring trade to its doors. The 'cold
rivulet' that rises just above the village flows down some twenty miles
to lose itself in the sea near Skegness; in the valley the alders sigh
and the aspens quiver, while around are rolling hills covered by long
fields of corn broken by occasional spinneys. It is not a country to
draw tourists for its own sake; but Tennyson knew, as few other poets
know, the charm that human association lends to the simplest English
landscape, and he cherished the memory of these scenes long after he had
gone to live among the richer beauties of the south. From the garners of
memory he drew the familiar features of this homely land showing that he
had forgotten

No grey old grange, or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple stile from mead to mead,
Or sheepwalk up the winding wold.[23]

[Note 23: _In Memoriam_, c.]

There are days when the wolds seem dreary and monotonous; but if change
is wanted, a long walk or an easy drive will take us from Somersby, as
it often took the Tennyson brothers, to the coast at Mablethorpe, where
the long rollers of the North Sea beat upon the sandhills that guard
the flat stretches of the marshland. Here the poet as a child used to
lie upon the beach, his imagination conjuring up Homeric pictures of the
Grecian fleet besieging Troy; and if, on his last visit before leaving
Lin