Here is a fragment comparing life to a sea voyage,a comparison which occurs sooner or later to every thoughtful person, and which finds perfect expression in Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar.

Of her Tennyson said in The Princess: "Happy he With such a mother!

" It is probable that Tennyson holds the record among English poets of his class for the quantity of youthful verse produced.

Before leaving Cambridge, Tennyson had found a firm friend in a young college mate of great promise, Arthur Henry Hallam, who became engaged to the poet's sister, Emily Tennyson.

Tennyson published a small volume of poems in 1830, the year before he left college, and another volume in 1832.

When the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, read from Ulysses the passage beginning: "I am a part of all that I have met," he gave Tennyson a much-needed annual pension of £200.

While the poem as a whole is not a masterpiece, it contains some of Tennyson's finest lyrics.

Although the Idylls of the King are uneven in quality and sometimes marred by overprofusion of ornament and by deficiency of dramatic skill, their limpid style, many fine passages of poetry, appealing stories, and high ideals have exerted a wider influence than any other of Tennyson's poems.

Tennyson is a poetic interpreter of the thought of the Victorian age.

In these four lines from The Princess, Tennyson gives the evolutionary history of the world, from nebula to man: "This world was once a fluid haze of light.

Like Milton, Tennyson received much of his inspiration from books, especially from the classical writers; but this characteristic was more than counterbalanced by his acute observation and responsiveness to the thought of the age.

A twentieth century critic says that Tennyson is almost the inventor of such pictorial lyrics as A Dream of Fair Women and The Palace of Art.

The artistic finish of Tennyson's verse is one of its great charms.

Tennyson has, however, left sufficient work of abiding value, both for its exquisite form and for its thought, to entitle him to be ranked as a great poet.

Alfred Tennyson. HEINELET

Alfred Tennyson.

Alfred Tennyson.

TENNYSON, ALFRED LORD.

Author of "The Poetry of Tennyson," "Sermons to Young Men," "Little Rivers," "The Other Wise Man," "The First Christmas Tree," "The Builders, and Other Poems," "The Lost Word," "Fisherman's Luck," "The Toiling of Felix, and Other Poems," "The Blue Flower," "Music, and Other Poems," "Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land," "The Mansion," and "The Unknown Quantity."

Tennyson.

[Illustration: Tennyson] * * * * * 55 barns deaf en

In the meantime, as a true poet must necessarily be in advance of his age, Mr. Tennyson's earlier poems, rather than these latter ones, coincide with the tastes and speculations of the young men of this day.

Now Mr. Tennyson, while fully adopting Wordsworth's principle from the very first, seemed by instinctive taste to have escaped the snares which had proved too subtle both for Keats and Wordsworth.

This deep simple faith in the divineness of Nature as she appears, which, in our eyes, is Mr. Tennyson's differentia, is really the natural accompaniment of a quality at first sight its very opposite, and for which he is often blamed by a prosaic world; namely, his subjective and transcendental mysticism.

And even so it is just because Mr. Tennyson is, far more than Wordsworth, mystical, and what an ignorant and money-getting generation, idolatrous of mere sensuous activity, calls "dreamy," that he has become the greatest naturalistic poet which England has seen for several centuries.