Tennyson was born in the rectory of Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809.  The sweet influences of his early natural surroundings can be better understood from his early poems than from any biography.  He was one of the twelve children of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, a scholarly clergyman, and his wife Elizabeth Fytche, a gentle, lovable woman, “not learned, save in gracious household ways,” to whom the poet pays a son’s loyal tribute near the close of The Princess.  It is interesting to note that most of these children were poetically inclined, and that two of the brothers, Charles and Frederick, gave far greater promise than did Alfred.

When seven years old the boy went to his grandmother’s house at Louth, in order to attend a famous grammar school at that place.  Not even a man’s memory, which generally makes light of hardship and glorifies early experiences, could ever soften Tennyson’s hatred of school life.  His complaint was not so much at the roughness of the boys, which had so frightened Cowper, as at the brutality of the teachers, who put over the school door a wretched Latin inscription translating Solomon’s barbarous advice about the rod and the child.  In these psychologic days, when the child is more important than the curriculum, and when we teach girls and boys rather than Latin and arithmetic, we read with wonder Carlyle’s description of his own schoolmaster, evidently a type of his kind, who “knew of the human soul thus much, that it had a faculty called memory, and could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rods.”  After four years of most unsatisfactory school life, Tennyson returned home, and was fitted for the university by his scholarly father.  With his brothers he wrote many verses, and his first efforts appeared in a little volume called Poems by Two Brothers, in 1827.  The next year he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became the center of a brilliant circle of friends, chief of whom was the young poet Arthur Henry Hallam.

At the university Tennyson soon became known for his poetical ability, and two years after his entrance he gained the prize of the Chancellor’s Medal for a poem called “Timbuctoo,” the subject, needless to say, being chosen by the chancellor.  Soon after winning this honor Tennyson published his first signed work, called Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), which, though it seems somewhat crude and disappointing to us now, nevertheless contained the germ of all his later poetry.  One of the most noticeable things in this volume is the influence which Byron evidently exerted over the poet in his early days; and it was perhaps due largely to the same romantic influence that Tennyson and his friend Hallam presently sailed away to Spain, with the idea of joining the army of insurgents against King Ferdinand.  Considered purely as a revolutionary venture, this was something of a fiasco, suggesting the noble Duke of York and his ten thousand men,—­“he marched them up a hill, one day; and he marched them down again.”  From a literary view point, however, the experience was not without its value.  The deep impression which the wild beauty of the Pyrenees made upon the young poet’s mind is reflected clearly in the poem “Oenone.”