Daughter.  He was seventeen (1826) when Poems by Two Brothers (himself and his brother Frederick) was published with the date 1827.  These poems contain, as far as I have been able to discover, nothing really Tennysonian.  What he had done in his own manner was omitted, “being thought too much out of the common for the public taste.”  The young poet had already saving common-sense, and understood the public.  Fragments of the true gold are found in the volume of 1830, others are preserved in the Biography.  The ballad suggested by The Bride of Lammermoor was not unworthy of Beddoes, and that novel, one cannot but think, suggested the opening situation in Maud, where the hero is a modern Master of Ravenswood in his relation to the rich interloping family and the beautiful daughter.  To this point we shall return.  It does not appear that Tennyson was conscious in Maud of the suggestion from Scott, and the coincidence may be merely accidental.

The Lover’s Tale, published in 1879, was mainly a work of the poet’s nineteenth year.  A few copies had been printed for friends.  One of these, with errors of the press, and without the intended alterations, was pirated by an unhappy man in 1875.  In old age Tennyson brought out the work of his boyhood.  “It was written before I had ever seen Shelley, though it is called Shelleyan,” he said; and indeed he believed that his work had never been imitative, after his earliest efforts in the manner of Thomson and of Scott.  The only things in The Lover’s Tale which would suggest that the poet here followed Shelley are the Italian scene of the story, the character of the versification, and the extraordinary luxuriance and exuberance of the imagery. [7]  As early as 1868 Tennyson heard that written copies of The Lover’s Tale were in circulation.  He then remarked, as to the exuberance of the piece: “Allowance must be made for abundance of youth.  It is rich and full, but there are mistakes in it. . . . The poem is the breath of young love.”

How truly Tennysonian the manner is may be understood even from the opening lines, full of the original cadences which were to become so familiar:—

“Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff,
Filling with purple gloom the vacancies
Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas
Hung in mid-heaven, and half way down rare sails,
White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky.”

The narrative in parts one and two (which alone were written in youth) is so choked with images and descriptions as to be almost obscure.  It is the story, practically, of 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 for poetry in the world as seen through microscope and telescope,