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GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

BIOGRAPHY.-I. Tennyson the man: His sense of Law shown in his concep-
tions (a) of Nature; (b) of Freedom; (c) of Love; (d) of Scenery. (2) His
nobility of thought. (3) His simplicity of emotion. II. Tennyson

the Poet. (1) As Representative of his Age. (2) As Artist: (a) His
observation; (b) His scholarship; (c) His expressiveness; (d) His avoid-
ance of commonplace; (e) His metrical characteristics: harmony of
style; melody of diction-Conclusion.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, was born on August 6th, Biography. 1809, at Somersby, a village in Lincolnshire, of which his father was rector. The wolds surrounding his home, the fen some miles away, with its "level waste" and "trenched waters," and the sea on the Lincolnshire coast, with "league-long rollers" and "table-shore,' are pictured again and again in his poems.

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When seven years old, he went to the Louth Grammar School, and returning home after a few years there, was educated with his elder brother Charles by his father. Charles and Alfred Tennyson, while yet youths, published in 1827 a small volume of poetry entitled Poems by Two Brothers. In 1828 the two brothers entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where Alfred gained the University Chancellor's gold medal for a poem on Timbuctoo, and where he formed an intimate friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam (son of the historian),

I. Tennyson the man.

whose memory he has immortalized in In Memoriam. Among his other Cambridge friends may be mentioned R. C. Trench (afterwards Archbishop of Dublin), Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), J. M. Kemble (the Anglo-Saxon scholar), Merivale (the historian, afterwards Dean of Ely), James Spedding, and W. H. Brookfield. In 1830 Tennyson published his Poems, chiefly Lyrica!, among which are to be found some sixty pieces that are preserved in the present issues of his works. In 1832 Poems by Alfred Tennyson appeared, and then, after an interval of ten years, two more volumes, also with the title Poems. His reputation as a poet was now established, though his greatest works were yet to come. Chief among these are The Princess (1847), In Memoriam (1850), Maud (1855), Idylls of the King (1859-1885), and Enoch Arden (1864). In 1875 Tennyson published his first drama, Queen Mary, which was followed by Harold (1877), The Cup (acted in 1881), The Promise of May (1882), The Falcon and Becket (1884). Meanwhile, on the death of Wordsworth in 1850, Tennyson was appointed to succeed him as Poet Laureate. In 1874, he was gazetted Baron of Aldworth and Farringford, his two seats in Sussex and in the Isle of Wight.

I. Of all modern English poets Tennyson has most readers the chief elements of the powerful charm which he exercises over the hearts and minds of all English-speaking peoples will be evident on even a brief survey of the character of his mind as revealed in his works, and of the form and matter of his verse. At the basis of all Tennyson's teaching, indeed of all his work, is Tennyson the man. The mould of a poet's mind is the mould in which his thoughts and even his modes of

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