. In her youth she had been a noted beauty, and in her old
age was not too unworldly to remember that she had received twenty-five
proposals of marriage. It was from her that the family derived their
beauty of feature, while in their strength of intellect they resembled
rather their father. One of Alfred's earliest literary passions was a
love of Byron, and he remembered in after life how as a child he had
carved on a rock the woful tidings that his hero was dead. In this
period he was already writing poetry himself, though he did not publish
his first volume till after he had gone up to Cambridge.

From this home life, filled with leisurely reading, rambling, and
dreaming, he was sent in 1828 to join his brother Frederick at Trinity
College, Cambridge, and he came into residence in February of that year.
Cambridge has been called the poets' University. Here in early days came
Spenser and Milton, Dryden and Gray; and--in the generation preceding
Tennyson--Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron had followed in their steps.
However little we can trace directly the development of the poetic gift
to local influence, at least we can say that Tennyson gained greatly by
the time he spent within its walls. He came up an unknown man without
family connexions to help him, and without the hall-mark of any famous
school upon him. Shy and retiring by nature as he was, he might easily
have failed to win his way to notice. But there was something in his
appearance, in his manner, and in the personality that lay behind, which
never failed to impress observers, and gradually he attached to himself
the most brilliant undergraduates of his time and became a leader among
them. Thackeray and FitzGerald were in residence; but it was not till
later that he came to know them well, and we hear more of Spedding (the
editor of Bacon), of Alford and Merivale (deans of Canterbury and Ely),
of Trench (Archbishop of Dublin), of Lushington, who married one of his
sisters, and of Arthur Hallam, who was engaged to another sister at the
time of his early death. Hallam came from Eton, where his greatest
friend had been W. E. Gladstone, and he had not been long at Cambridge
before he was led by kindred tastes and kindred nature into close
friendship with Tennyson. In the judgement of all who knew him, a career
of the highest usefulness and distinction was assured to him. His
intellectual force and his high aspirations would have shone in the
public service; and a