ALFRED TENNYSON 186 that has been made immortal in the poem " In Memoriam." The only distinction Tennyson would seem to have gained at Cambridge was the Chancellor's gold medal awarded for the prize-poem " Timbuctoo," a curious production long con- signed to oblivion but now included in the authorized edition of the poet's col- lected work. In 183 1 the Rev. Mr. Tennyson died, and on leaving Cambridge, Alfred re- turned to Somersby and lived with his mother and sisters. In 1830 he published " Poems chiefly Lyrical," in 1832 " Poems," and in 1842 "Poems," in two vol- umes, which first opened the eyes of the English public to the fact that a new planet had appeared in the heaven of poetry, and Tennyson's name soon became a household word. In 1845 he was awarded a pension of ,200 per annum from the Civil List, and in 1850 he was made Poet Laureate,- on the death of Words- worth. In the same year he married Miss Emily Sell wood, whom he had long known at Somersby, the daughter of a lawyer, and niece of Sir John Franklin. In 1855 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford and in 1 884, being then in his seventy-fifth year, he was raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Farringford. v Tennyson was an ardent lover of England, and seldom left his native coun- try, and never for any long time. He had two residences, one at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, and the other at Aldworth on the top of Blackdown, in Sur- rey. He changed from one of these places 'to the other according to the sea- sons and led in both the same quiet family life, devoted to poetry, and enjoying to the full the delights of the country, caring little for other society than that of his intimate friends a strong contrast in this respect to his great contemporary Browning, who delighted in the social life of London, as that life delighted in him. Mr. Edwin Arnold has given in a recent number of The Forum (1891) a very pleasant account of a day spent at Farringford in the company of the ven- erable poet and his only surviving son Hallam, named after the friend of his father's early years. Although Tennyson was averse to mingling in general society, and was difficult of access in his home, except to his intimate friends, yet those friends were among the elect spirits of England, and he has recorded his feeling for some of them for Maurice, Fitzgerald, Spedding, Lear, among others in poems that deserve a place among his best. .His friendship for Car- lyle grew out of his admiration for the genius of the man as well as his character, and Carlyle has left more than one sketch of his friend among his inimitable word-portraits of notable men. 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 inter- rupted by any events with which the public was concerned, or that can be said to have greatly influenced his poetry. He was no doubt the product of his time, and took a deep interest in what was going on in the world, especially in so much of it as affected England. But his strong conservatism made him unsym- pathetic with much that is called progress, and which at any rate is change ; and change of any sort was little welcome to Tennvson. He was not born to be a
