Your pennons raised, your clarions sounding,

Fiercely your steeds beneath ye bounding."

The following extract from "Antony to Cleopatra" foreshadows the finer treatment of the same subject in "The Dream of Fair Women:" "O Cleopatra ! fare thee well

We two can meet no more;

This breaking heart alone can tell

The love to thee I bore.

But wear thou not the conqueror's chain
Upon thy race and thee;

And tho' we ne'er can meet again

Yet still be true to me:

For I for thee have lost a throne

To wear the crown of love alone.

"Fair daughter of a regal line!
To thraldom bow not tame;
My every wish on earth was thine,
My every hope the same.

And I have moved within thy sphere,
And lived within thy light;

And oh! thou wert to me so dear

I breathed but in thy sight!

A subject world I lost for thee,

For thou wert all my world to me!

"Then, when the shriekings of the dying
Were heard along the wave,

Soul of my soul! I saw thee flying,
I followed thee to save.

The thunder of the brazen prows
O'er Actium's ocean rung,

Fame's garland faded from my brows,
Her wreath away I flung.

I sought, I saw, I heard but thee;

For what to love was victory?”

It will be admitted that there is an intensity of mood about these verses in which a shrewd critic might have discovered the potentiality of future greatness. It is an easy thing to be wise after the event, and no great penetration is required to find out the evidences of promise with the finger-post of performance to guide us. Only a poet could have described the rising of the sun in Egypt in such a passage as this :—

"The first glitter of his rising beam

Falls on the broad-based pyramids sublime;"

and the lines "On a Dead Enemy" contain a thought which, however crudely expressed, indicates a deeper vein of reflection than is common with lads :

:

"I came in haste with cursing breath
And heart of hardest steel;

But when I saw thee cold in death

I felt as man should feel.

"For when I look upon that face,

That cold, unheeding, frigid brow,
Where neither rage nor fear has place,
By Heaven! I cannot hate thee now."

Still, the recognition of some poetical quality in these poems does not justify the reader of the present day in sneering at the want of prescience in the critics of half a century ago. Like the "Hours of Idleness," there was not in "Poems by Two Brothers" that golden wealth of promise which augured the presence of a heaven-born genius. Lord Tennyson has wisely declined to rescue any of these schoolboy efforts from the oblivion into which they have passed, except so far as the book-collectors and the second-hand dealers are concerned. The "Poems," when published, caused no stir in the literary world. The sale, it may be judged, was confined to the friends of the young authors in their native county, and the world in general was altogether unconscious of the fact that a new poet had arisen whose works were destined to shed a lustre on the literature of the Victorian era.

CHAPTER II

IN the year 1828, Charles and Alfred Tennyson went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where their elder brother Frederick-who had been "Captain of Eton, and was there the most celebrated Latin and Greek verse-maker of the school-was already a student of one or two years' standing, and had just gained the prize for the university Greek poem. The influences of university life are, whether for good or evil, fraught with momentous consequences to youths of imaginative and highly strung temperament. College days are a character-making epoch in a man's life. From the little humdrum town of Louth, with its dull provincialism, to Cambridge, with its keen intellectual activities, was one of those sudden changes that could not fail to make its imprint on the minds of the two Lincolnshire lads. The leap from a bucolic environment to academic surroundings, with the strife

of wits and the audacity of youthful speculation, was like one of those theatrical effects by which a snow-clad winter scene is suddenly changed into a bright and sunny landscape. The associations and friendships of this new sphere were destined to colour the whole of Alfred's after-life. Cambridge had an expanding and maturing influence on an intellect already characterized by a vigour of inquiry and a comprehensive receptivity of new ideas rare in one so young. This influence may be likened to the effect of the lapidary's operations on the rough diamond. Tennyson was brought into contact with vigorous, thoughtful minds, and the friction took off the edges of his crudeness and inexperience. He found himself, with a reputation for intellectual promise, in a centre of modern culture and mental activity, and the result could not but be stimulating in the highest degree. Happily, it was his lot to fall among young men of his own age who were imbued with kindred tastes. A penetrating judgment of character enabled him to choose exactly the right sort of friends. He was not many months in residence before he became one