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The interest of Tennyson's life really centres in his early days spent in his father's parish of Somersby; his later life has flowed on in a stream rarely interrupted by any events with which the public was concerned, or that can be said to have greatly influenced his poetry.
Tennyson was naturally shy, retiring, indifferent to men, hating noise and publicity, loving to be alone with nature, like Wordsworth. Browning was sociable, delighting in applause, in society, in travel, in the noise and bustle of the big world. Tennyson was born in the rectory of Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809.
This quaint little hamlet it can hardly be called a village is almost hidden among the hills, well off the main-traveled roads and railway. We dashed through the narrow lanes, shaded in many places by great over-arching trees and the road finally led across the clear little brook made famous by Tennyson's verse. After crossing the bridge we were in Somersby if such an expression is allowable.
His father died a few months later; but, by a generous arrangement with the new rector, the family retained the rectory at Somersby, and here, for nearly six years, Tennyson lived in a retirement which strongly suggests Milton at Horton.
The poem abounds in beautiful imagery and exquisite melody; but the solution of the question by the marriage of the princess has not completely satisfied modern thought. The finest parts of the poem are its artistic songs. In Memoriam, an elegy in memory of Arthur Henry Hallam, was begun at Somersby in 1833, the year of Hallam's death, and added to at intervals for nearly sixteen years.
It is several hundred years old, and in the churchyard is a tall, Norman cross, as old as the church itself. A rare thing it is to find the burying-ground around a church in England quite neglected, but the one at Somersby is the exception to the rule. The graves of the poet's father and brother were overgrown with grass and showed evidences of long neglect.
He learned nature at first hand, and had his lesson by heart, unconsciously imbibing it from his walks alone, or with his dearly loved elder brother, Charles elder by five years over all the country-side; and there is no doubt that the wild and dreary side of that region, the flat expanse of the fens slowly rescuing from the ever threatening and invading sea, the long line of the coast with its beaches and ridged mounds of sand built by the winds, and strengthened by the bird-sown seeds of grass to be barriers against the ocean that all these scenes made an impression on his mind strong to balance the sweet woodland pastoral note of the Somersby brooks and flowery hollows, no one can doubt who knows Tennyson's poetry.
For a long distance our road from Somersby to Boston ran on the crest of a hill, from which we had a far-reaching view over the lovely Lincolnshire country. Shortly after, we left the hills and found ourselves again in the fen country. Many miles before we reached Boston we saw the great tower of St. Botolph's Church, in some respects the most remarkable in England.
Alfred Tennyson, one of the twelve children of the rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire, was born in that hamlet in 1809, a year memorable, both in England and America for the birth of such men as Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.
At the same time it must be said that Swinburne shows less of the influence of the Bible in his style and in his spirit than any other of our great English writers. We come back again into the atmosphere of strong Bible influence when we name Alfred Tennyson. When Byron died, and the word came to his father's rectory at Somersby, young Alfred Tennyson felt that the sun had fallen from the heavens.
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