"Long dim wolds ribbed with snow.
Willows whiten, aspens shiver;"
thorough fen-land objects;
"A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand;
Left on the shore."
These images show a familiarity with fen-lands, and flat sea-coast, to
a certainty; but Alfred Tennyson, after all, though a Lincolnshire
man, is not a native of the fens. He was born near enough to know them
well, but not in them. His native place is Somersby, a little village
lying about midway between the market-towns of Spilsby and Horncastle,
and containing less than a hundred inhabitants. His father, George
Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., was rector of that and the adjoining parish
of Enderby. He was a man of very various talents--something of a poet,
a painter, an architect, and a musician. He was also a considerable
linguist and mathematician. Dr. Tennyson was the elder brother of Mr.
Tennyson d'Encourt, M.P. Alfred Tennyson, one of several children, was
born at the parsonage at Somersby, of which a view stands at the head
of this chapter. From the age of seven till about nine or ten, he went
to the grammar-school of Louth, in the same county, and after that
returned home and was educated by his father, till he went to Trinity
College, Cambridge.
The native village of Tennyson is not situated in the fens, but in a
pretty, pastoral district of softly sloping hills and large ash-trees.
It is not based on bogs, but on a clean sandstone. There is a little
glen in the neighborhood called by the old monkish name of Holywell.
Over the gateway leading to it, some by-gone squire has put up an
inscription, a medley of Virgil and Horace.
"Intus aquæ dulces, vivoque sedilia saxo
Et paulum silvæ superest. His utere mecum;"
and within, a stream of clear water gushes out of a sand-rock, and
over it stands an old school-house, almost lost among the trees, and
of late years used as a wood-house, its former distinction only
signified by a scripture text on the walls--"Remember thy Creator in
the days of thy youth." There are also two brooks in this valley which
flow into one at the bottom of the glebe-field, and by these the young
poet used to wander and meditate. To this scenery we find him turning
back in his Ode to Memory.
"Come from the woods that belt the gray hillside,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father's door,
And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,
In every elbow and turn,
The filtered tribute of the rough woodlands.
O! hither bend thy feet!
Pour round mine eyes the livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleeced sheep frem wattled folds,
Upon the ridged wolds,
When the first matin-song hath wakened loud
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn,
What time the amber morn
Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud."
In the church-yard stands a Norman cross almost single of its kind in
England.
Of the subsequent haunts of Alfred Tennyson we can give no very
distinct account. I believe he has spent some years in London, and he
may be traced to Hastings, Eastborne, Cheltenham, the Isle of Wight,
and the like places. It is very possible you may come across him in a
country inn, with a foot on each hob of the fireplace, a volume of
Greek in one hand, his meerschaum in the other, so far advanced toward
the seventh heaven that he would not thank you to call him back into
this nether world. Wherever he is, however, in some still nook of
enormous London, or the stiller one of some far-off sea-side hamlet,
he is pondering a lay for eternity:--
"Losing his fire and active might
In a silent meditation,
Falling into a still delight
And luxury of contemplation."
That luxury shall, one day, be mine and yours, transferred to us in
the shape of a third volume; so come away and don't disturb him.
[Illustration: Antique Cross]