Alfred Tennyson | Page 7

a love like that of Paul and Virginia, but the
love is not returned by the girl, who prefers the friend of the narrator.
Like the hero of Maud, the speaker has a period of madness and
illusion; while the third part, "The Golden Supper"--suggested by a
story of Boccaccio, and written in maturity-- is put in the mouth of
another narrator, and is in a different style. The discarded lover, visiting
the vault which contains the body of his lady, finds her alive, and
restores her to her husband. The whole finished legend is necessarily
not among the author's masterpieces. But perhaps not even Keats in his
earliest work displayed more of promise, and gave more assurance of

genius. Here and there come turns and phrases, "all the charm of all the
Muses," which remind a reader of things later well known in pieces
more mature. Such lines are -
"Strange to me and sweet, Sweet through strange years,"
and -
"Like to a low-hung and a fiery sky Hung round with RAGGED RIMS
and burning folds."
And -
"Like sounds without the twilight realm of dreams, Which wander
round the bases of the hills."
We also note close observation of nature in the curious phrase -
"Cries of the partridge like a rusty key Turned in a lock."
Of this kind was Tennyson's adolescent vein, when he left
"The poplars four That stood beside his father's door,"
the Somersby brook, and the mills and granges, the seas of the
Lincolnshire coast, and the hills and dales among the wolds, for
Cambridge. He was well read in old and contemporary English
literature, and in the classics. Already he was acquainted with the
singular trance-like condition to which his poems occasionally allude, a
subject for comment later. He matriculated at Trinity, with his brother
Charles, on February 20, 1828, and had an interview of a not quite
friendly sort with a proctor before he wore the gown.
That Tennyson should go to Cambridge, not to Oxford, was part of the
nature of things, by which Cambridge educates the majority of English
poets, whereas Oxford has only "turned out" a few--like Shelley. At
that time, as in Macaulay's day, the path of university honours at
Cambridge lay through Mathematics, and, except for his prize poem in
1829, Tennyson took no honours at all. His classical reading was

pursued as literature, not as a course of grammar and philology. No
English poet, at least since Milton, had been better read in the classics;
but Tennyson's studies did not aim at the gaining of academic
distinction. His aspect was such that Thompson, later Master of Trinity,
on first seeing him come into hall, said, "That man must be a poet."
Like Byron, Shelley, and probably Coleridge, Tennyson looked the
poet that he was: "Six feet high, broad-chested, strong-limbed, his face
Shakespearian and with deep eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with
dark wavy hair, his head finely poised."
Not much is recorded of Tennyson as an undergraduate. In our days
efforts would have been made to enlist so promising a recruit in one of
the college boats; but rowing was in its infancy. It is a peculiarity of the
universities that little flocks of men of unusual ability come up at
intervals together, breaking the monotony of idlers, prize scholars, and
honours men. Such a group appeared at Balliol in Matthew Arnold's
time, and rather later, at various colleges, in the dawn of
Pre-Raphaelitism. The Tennysons--Alfred, Frederick, and
Charles--were members of such a set. There was Arthur Hallam, son of
the historian, from Eton; there was Spedding, the editor and biographer
of Bacon; Milnes (Lord Houghton), Blakesley (Dean of Lincoln),
Thompson, Merivale, Trench (a poet, and later, Archbishop of Dublin),
Brookfield, Buller, and, after Tennyson the greatest, Thackeray, a
contemporary if not an "Apostle." Charles Buller's, like Hallam's, was
to be an "unfulfilled renown." Of Hallam, whose name is for ever
linked with his own, Tennyson said that he would have been a great
man, but not a great poet; "he was as near perfection as mortal man
could be." His scanty remains are chiefly notable for his divination of
Tennyson as a great poet; for the rest, we can only trust the author of In
Memoriam and the verdict of tradition.
The studies of the poet at this time included original composition in
Greek and Latin verse, history, and a theme that he alone has made
poetical, natural science. All poetry has its roots in the age before
natural science was more than a series of nature-myths. The poets have
usually, like Keats, regretted the days when

"There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,"
when the hills and streams were not yet "dispeopled of their dreams."
Tennyson, on the other hand, was already finding material