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HARVARD COLLEGE

NOV 21 1919

NULIBRARYO
Transferred from
Harvard University,

Dept. of Education Library,
Gift of the Publishers.

COPYRIGHT, 1908,

BY MAYNARD, MERRILL, & CO.

BIOGRAPHY

Or Alfred Tennyson it is preeminently true that the events of his life took place in his intellect. It was a peaceful, well-ordered life-that of this Lincolnshire rector's son, born August 6, 1809. His first published poetry was in a slim volume (1827) in partnership with his brother Charles. This brother, his senior by a year, was his close friend. Together they attended the Louth grammar school (1816-20), and, after being tutored by their father, together they went to Trinity College, Cambridge (1828), where Alfred gained the Chancellor's medal by his poem Timbuctoo (1829). At Cambridge then were many choice spirits -- Thackeray, Helps, Sterling, Kinglake, Maurice, Trench, Milnes, Merivale, Spedding. Tennyson's closest friend was the gifted young Arthur Henry Hallam, with whom he made a tour of the Pyrenees in their summer vacation (1830). Hallam's early death (1833) was the great sorrow of Tennyson's young manhood and the inspiration of "Break, Break, Break," and In Memoriam. Among his other early friends were Hunt, Hare, Fitzgerald, Carlyle, Gladstone, Rogers, Landor, Forster. These recognized his genius, but the public and critics generally were slow in doing so, and volume after volume of his poems met indifference, censure, ridicule. At last (1842) a volume containing among other noble poems Locksley Hall, Ulysses, The Two Voices, and the revised Palace of Art convinced the English people that a new poet had arisen in its midst. Tennyson's ensuing years were, for the most part, a progress from one literary triumph to another. The year 1850 was his Annus Mirabilis. In it he published In Memoriam, he was made

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