The Scenery of South America; Babylon ; Phrenology; Exhortation to the Greeks; King Charles's Vision, etc. The poems are often introduced by quotations; among others, from Addison, Byron, Cicero, Claudian, Gray, Horace, Hume, Lucretius, Milton, Moore, Ovid, Racine, Rousseau, Sallust, Scott, Tacitus, Terence, and Virgil. There are also frequent foot-notes, which are more learned than we should expect from boys of eighteen, and yet without the affectation of scholarship that we might expect in connection with such a juvenile display of erudition. The brief preface to the volume is withal very modest and manly. Charles, who was associated with Alfred in this precocious poetical venture, afterwards took the name of Turner on inheriting certain estates from his great-uncle. He was a true poet, as his later published works amply prove. It may be mentioned incidentally here that most, if not all, of the Tennyson brothers have written poetry. Some of the critics exercised their ingenuity in trying to pick out Alfred's work from the poems in this early anonymous volume; but the most that they accomplished was to point out a few verbal resemblances between some of the juvenile pieces and certain acknowledged productions of Tennyson. In 1893, after the poet's death, the book was reprinted by his son, with the initials of the authors (some being merely conjectural) appended to the poems. We may see in these boyish verses of the two brothers the influence of Byron, who is quoted no less than six times, and whose recent death forms the subject of one poem while it is referred to in another. Alfred was not yet fifteen when the news of that event reached the little village in Lincolnshire. "" 'Byron was dead! I thought the whole world was at an end," he once said, recalling those early days; "I thought everything was over and finished for every one— that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out alone, and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone.' In 1828, Charles and Alfred Tennyson went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where their elder brother Frederick had just won the prize for a Greek poem. Here Alfred made the friendship of not a few young men who were destined, like himself, to gain a name in literature, among them Trench, Monckton Milnes, James Spedding, Henry Alford, W. H. Brookfield, J. M. Kemble, and Kinglake. More gifted than all the rest, but prevented by his early death (in his twenty-third year) from showing anything more than the budding promise of his powers, was Arthur Hallam, to whom the poet's In Memoriam will be an immortal monument. "It has pleased God that in his death, as well as in his life and nature, he should be marked beyond ordinary men." The Lover's Tale, though not published until a few years ago, was written the same year that Tennyson went to Cambridge; and the next summer he gained the Chancellor's gold medal for a poem on Timbuctoo- the first instance in which that honor had been awarded to a piece in blank verse. The Athenæum of July 22, 1829, in a highly eulogistic notice, remarked: "These productions have often been ingenious and elegant, but we have never before seen one of them which indicated really first-rate poetical genius, and which could have done honor to any man that ever wrote. In 1830, Tennyson brought out, under his own name, Poems, chiefly Lyrical, a volume of 154 pages, containing fifty-three pieces, thirtytwo of which were suppressed in subsequent editions, though nine of these have been since restored. This collection, published when the poet was only twenty-one, included Lilian, Isabel, The Mermaid, The Merman, The Owl, Recollections of the Arabian Nights, Ode to Memory, The Poet's Mind, and The Poet. The last-named piece is of special interest as indicating the high ideal of the poet's art and vocation with which the young singer started on his career. It received just recognition and praise in a notice of the book that appeared in the Westminster Review for January, 1831. The conclusion of the passage, which reads now like a prophecy fulfilled, was as follows: "He has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of a poet's destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment. It is not for such men to sink into mere verse-makers for the amusement of themselves or others. They can influence the associations of unnumbered minds; they can command the sympathies of unnumbered hearts; they can disseminate principles, they can give those principles power over men's imaginations; they can excite in a good cause the sustained enthusiasm that is sure to conquer; they can blast the laurels of the tyrants, and hallow the memories of the martyrs of patriotism; they can act with a force, the extent of which it is difficult to estimate, upon national feelings and character, and consequently upon national happiness. If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may he read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own work." Sixty-four years have passed since these eloquent and prophetic words were penned; and there could not be a more truthful description and history of Tennyson's work than those inspired strains of his youth. The estimate of the critic was correct. The young singer was a poet, and he has proved himself such a poet as he saw in that immortal vision. It was a lofty and noble ideal, but he has made it a living reality. Tennyson's book was also reviewed favorably by Leigh Hunt in The Tatler for 1831, and by Arthur Hallam in The Englishman's Magazine for August of the same year. In May, 1832, Christopher North (Professor Wilson) criticised the young poet's work in Blackwood in a very different vein, praising it indeed, but showing up its faults and defects with merciless severity. There was justice in some of its strictures, and they may have had their influence in leading Tennyson to suppress certain of the poems in later editions. At any rate, the passages held up to ridicule by the reviewer are mostly from these suppressed pieces. In the winter of 1832, Tennyson published another thin volume of verse, which was a great advance on that of two years previous, containing as it did some of the poems which have ever since been reckoned among his best, - as The Lady of Shalott, The Miller's Daughter, Enone, The Palace of Art, The Lotos-Eaters, and the Dream of Fair Women. It is true that every one of these poems has been more or less revised since then; but a careful comparison of the earlier and later versions shows that much that we should now mark as most admirable in them is unchanged from the reading of 1832. A considerable portion of this volume, though less than of the former one, has been suppressed in the more recent editions; but a few of the omitted pieces have since been restored under the head of "Juvenilia." The following little hit at Christopher North has not been thus reinstated: "You did late review my lays, Crusty Christopher; You did mingle blame and praise, When I learnt from whom it came, Musty Christopher; I could not forgive the praise, For the next ten years (1833-1842) Tennyson published almost nothing. The Lover's Tale was printed in 1833, but withdrawn before publication and not brought out again until 1879, after a pirated edition had appeared. St. Agnes and one or two other pieces were contributed to "Annuals" and similar collections during this period; but with these slight exceptions the silence of the poet was unbroken for the ten years. It is probable that this long silence was mainly due to the death of his friend Hallam in 1833; perhaps also, as has been suggested by more than one critic, to his desire to perfect himself in his art before giving the world further results of it. In Memoriam was elaborated during this period, though not published until 1850; and the best of the poems issued in 1830 and 1832 were carefully revised · some of them almost entirely rewritten and sundry new poems were produced. The fruits of this labor (In Memoriam excepted) appeared in 1842 in two volumes, one of which was chiefly made up of the earlier poems in their revised form, while the other was almost entirely new. Among the contents of the latter volume was the Morte d'Arthur, which we know, from a reference to it in one of Landor's letters, to have been written as early as 1837, and which, like The Lady of Shalott in the 1832 volume, shows that the Arthurian legends had begun to interest and inspire the poet long before he planned the extended epical treatment of them in the Idyls of the King. The Talking Oak, Dora, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, St. Agnes, and Sir Galahad are among the other remarkable poems published in 1842. The general recognition of Tennyson as the greatest poet of the time dates from this period. Hitherto his admirers had been the select few, and the leading critics had been divided in their estimate of his work; but now he was hailed with almost unanimous eulogies. As another has said, "all England rang with the stirring music of Locksley Hall," and “nearly all of the choicer spirits of the age conspired to chant the praises of the poet and to do him honor." Up to this time Tennyson was almost unknown in this country. It is doubtful whether a dozen copies of the volumes of 1830 and 1832 ever crossed the Atlantic. Neither of them is to be found in any of our great libraries, and in private collections they are excessively rare. The only extended notice of them in any of our literary journals of that day, so far as we can learn, was in the Christian Examiner in 1837, from the pen of Mr. John S. Dwight. He borrowed the books, as he informs us, of Emerson, who delighted to loan them to his friends and endeavored to have them reprinted in Boston.1 The edition of 1842 was reprinted here; but Mr. B. H. Ticknor, the son of the publisher, informs us that 1,500 copies supplied the American demand for the next three years. By this time, his fame in England was well assured. Wordsworth, in a letter dated July 1, 1845, says: "I saw Tennyson when I was in London several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things." It is a significant fact that, on the death of Southey in 1843, Tennyson was among the few poets who were talked of as successors to the laureateship, though the general opinion, as might have been expected, was in favor of the venerable poet on whom the honor was finally conferred. A second edition of the Poems of 1842 was called for within a year, and two more editions were issued in 1845 and 1846. In 1845 the poet was placed on the pension-list by Sir Robert Peel for an annuity of £200. The grant was the means of calling forth some ill-natured criticisms, the most notable of which was the following in Bulwer Lytton's New Timon, published in 1846: Let school-miss Alfred vent her chaste delight And flaunt, admired, the Rag Fair of the Nine." The attack drew from Tennyson a rejoinder printed in Punch, February 18, 1846, over the signature of “ Alcibiades," and followed in the next number by another, less severe, entitled Afterthought. In the former, Lytton is characterized as "The padded man that wears the stays "Who killed the girls and thrilled the boys 1 This we learn from Mr. Samuel Longfellow, who has shown us a letter from Messrs. C. C. Little & Co. to his brother the poet, dated April 27, 1838, in which they refer to Emerson's desire for an American reprint of Tennyson and their intention of making one. Why the plan was not carried out we are unable to say. The severest stanza is perhaps this: "What profits now to understand The merits of a spotless shirt The second poem in Punch has been lately included in the editions of Tennyson under the title of Literary Squabbles. No one would suspect any reference to Lytton in it if he did not know its history; and the conclusion to which the poet comes that silence is "the noblest answer" to all such spiteful attacks - is one to which he might well have come earlier. 66 It is pleasant to be able to add that Bulwer struck out the sneer at Tennyson from the third edition of The New Timon, and that the two poets afterwards became good friends. In a public speech in 1862, Lytton, in alluding to Prince Albert, quoted what he called "the thought so exquisitely expressed by our Poet Laureate "— namely, that the Prince is "The silent father of our kings to be"; and later Tennyson, in dedicating Harold to the younger Lytton, gracefully acknowledged his indebtedness to the novel on the same subject by the elder Lytton. O strange hate-healer, Time!" as the Laureate elsewhere exclaims. On the more recent history of the poet it is not necessary to dwell in detail. In 1847 The Princess appeared, and in 1850 In Memoriam was at last given to the world. The same year Tennyson was married, and was made Poet Laureate. In 1852 the Ode on the Death of Wellington was published, and the next year the eighth edition of the complete Poems was issued. Maud and other Poems appeared in 1855, and a second edition in 1856 with Maud in a considerably enlarged form. In 1859 followed the Idyls of the King, including Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere. Ten thousand copies of the volume were sold in a few weeks. Four more Idyls - The Coming of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre, and The Passing of Arthur (in which the Morte d'Arthur of 1842 was incorporated). were published ten years later, in 1869, when forty thousand copies of the book were ordered in advance. The Last Tournament and Gareth and Lynette were added in 1872. Meanwhile Enoch Arden, etc., had appeared in 1864, and The Window had been privately printed in 1867. Sundry poems had also been contributed to magazines, and were included in The Holy Grail and other Poems of 1869. In 1875 the drama of Queen Mary was given to the world, and in 1877 that of Harold. The former, in a condensed and altered form, was put on the stage in 1876 with moderate success, but the latter has never been acted. In 1879, as already stated, The Lover's Tale, withdrawn in 1833, was published, with the addition of a third part entitled The Golden Supper. Later in the same year, The Falcon, a oneact play based on the well-known story of Count Federigo and Monna Giovanna from Boccaccio that had been already told in verse by Barry Cornwall and Longfellow, was produced at the St. James Theatre in London. In the Ballads and other Poems of 1880 sundry pieces contributed to the Nineteenth Century in 1877-1879 were gathered up, with others that had not been previously printed. Early in 1881, The Cup, |