Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  My life before marriage was in many ways sad: in one, however, unspeakably happy. No one could have had a better father, or been happier with her two sisters, Anne and Louisa. Although, if we were too merry and noisy in the mornings, we were summoned by my Aunt Betsy (who lived with us) all three into her room, to hold out our small hands for stripes from a certain little riding-whip; or if, later in the day, our needlework was not well done we had our fingers pricked with a needle, or if the lessons were not finished, we had fools’ caps put on our heads, and were banished to a corner of the room. My aunt’s nature was by no means cruel; she was, on the whole, kind and dutiful to us, yet no doubt with effort on her part, for she had no instinctive love of children.

  Among our neighbours we had as friends the Tennysons, the Rawnsleys, the Bellinghams, and the Massingberds. The death of my cousin, Mr. Cracroft, was among my early tragedies. He had been on public business at Lincoln: and on his return to Horncastle, was seized at our house with Asiatic cholera, a solitary case, which proved fatal. Ourselves and his daughters heard of it in a strange way. We were in a tent at a sheep-shearing, the great rustic festival of that day. A village boy came into our tent, and swarmed up the pole, saying to us, “I know something; your father is dead.” We hurried home, and we, three sisters, were put by my aunt (to keep us quiet) to the hitherto-unwonted task of stoning raisins. This made me so indignant that I threw my raisins over the edge of the bowl, and forthwith my aunt caught me up, and — so rough was the treatment of children then — banged my head against the door of our old wainscoted rooms, until I called out for my father, crying aloud, “Murder”; when he rushed in and saved me.

  My next memory of my father is his giving me Latin lessons; and at this time I somehow came across a copy of Cymbeline, which I read with great delight. Then we had our first riding-lessons. I well recall my dislike of riding, when my pony was fastened to a circus stake, which I had to go round and round. Unfortunately, much as my father wished it, I never became a good horsewoman. He himself was so good a rider, when all the gentlemen of the county were volunteers, that he could ride horses which no one else could ride — so my grandmother would tell me with pride — adding, “Your father and his brother (both six foot three) were the handsomest men among them all.” At that time he kept guard with his fellow-volunteers over the French prisoners, who, he said, were always cheerful and always singing their patriotic songs.

  But to return to my sisters and myself. For exercise we generally took long walks in the country, and I remember that when staying at my father’s house in Berkshire we often used to wander up to a tower among our woods where a gaunt old lady lived, called Black Jane, who told our fortunes. We had our favourite theatricals, too, like other children. Our dramatic performances were frequent, and our plays were, some of them, drawn from Miss Edgeworth’s tales. I was always fond of music, and used to sing duets with my soldier cousin, Richard Sellwood.

  At eight years old I was sent, with my sisters, to some ladies for daily lessons, and later to schools in Brighton and London, for my father disliked having a governess in the house. So, much as he objected to young girls being sent from home, school in our case seemed the lesser evil. My sisters liked school; to me it was dreadful. As soon as I reached the Brighton seminary, I remember that for weeks I appeared to be in a horrible dream, and the voices of the mistresses and the girls around me seemed to be all thin, like voices from the grave. I could not be happy away from my father, who was my idol, though after a while I grew more accustomed to the strange life. My father would never let us go the long, cold journey at Christmas time from Brighton to Horncastle, but came up to town for the vacation, and took us for treats to the National Gallery, and other places of interest. Great was the joy, when the summer holidays arrived, and after travelling by coach through the day and night, we three sisters saw Whittlesea-mere gleaming under the sunrise. It seemed as if we were within sight of home.

  When I was eighteen, my Aunt Betsy left us to live by herself alone. We spent rather recluse lives, but we were perfectly happy, my father reading to us every evening from about half-past eight to ten, the hour at which we had family prayers. Most delightful were the readings; for instance, all of Gibbon that could be read to us, Macaulay’s Essays, Sir Walter Scott’s novels. For my private reading he gave me Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso, Molière, Racine, Corneille. Later I read Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter; and for English — Pearson, Paley’s Translation of the Early Fathers, Coleridge’s works, Wordsworth, and of course Milton and Shakespeare. We had walks and drives and music and needlework. Now and again we dined in the neighbourhood, and some of the neighbours dined with us; and once a year my father asked all the legal luminaries of Horncastle to dinner with him.

  Before my sister Louy married your Uncle Charles (Tennyson-Turner) in 1836, my cousin, Catherine Franklin, daughter of Sir Willingham Franklin, took up her abode with us, and we had several dances at our house. Two fancy-dress dances I well remember. Louy and I disliked visiting in London and in country-houses, and so we always refused, and sent Anne in our stead. My first ball, I thought an opening of the great portals of the world, and I looked forward to it almost with awe. It is rather curious that at one of my very few balls, Mr. Musters (Jack Musters his intimates called him), who married Byron’s Mary Chaworth, should have asked for, and obtained, an introduction to me.

  In 1842 came Catherine’s marriage to our true friend, Drummond Rawnsley, the parson of the Rawnsley family; and then my sister Anne married Charles Weld. After this my father and I lived together alone. The only change we had from our routine life was a journey, one summer, to Tours, with Anne and Charles Weld, and his brother Isaac Weld, the accomplished owner of Ravenswell, near Bray, in Ireland.

  At your father’s home, Somersby, we used to have evenings of music and singing. Your Aunt Mary played on the harp as her father used to do. She was a splendid-looking girl, and would have made a beautiful picture. Then your Aunt Emily (beloved of Arthur Hallam) had wonderful eyes — depths on depths they seemed to have — and a fine profile. “Testa Romana” an old Italian said of her. She had more of the colouring of the South, inherited, perhaps, from a member of Madame de Maintenon’s family who married one of the Tennysons. Your father had also the same kind of colouring. All, brothers and sisters, were fair to see. Your father was kingly, masses of fine, wavy hair, very dark, with a pervading shade of gold, and long, as it was then worn. His manner was kind, simple, and dignified, with plenty of sportiveness flashing out from time to time. During my ten years’ separation from him the doctors believed I was going into a consumption, and the Lincolnshire climate was pronounced to be too cold for me; and we moved to London, to look for a home in the south of England. We found one at last at Hale near Farnham, which was called by your father “my paradise.” The recollection of this delightful country made me persuade your father eventually to build a house near Haslemere. We were married on June 13, 1850, at Shiplake on the Thames.

  TENNYSON AND LINCOLNSHIRE by Willingham Rawnsley

  I

  Tennyson’s Country

  Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

  And on these dews that drench the furze,

  And all the silvery gossamers

  That twinkle into green and gold.

  Calm and still light on yon great plain

  That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

  And crowded farms and lessening towers,

  To mingle with the bounding main.

  Lincolnshire is a big county, measuring seventy-five miles by forty-five, but it is perhaps the least well known of all the counties of England. The traveller by the Great Northern main line passes through but a small portion of its south-western fringe near Grantham; and if he goes along the eastern side from Peterborough to Grimsby or Hull, he gains no insight into the picturesque parts of the county, for the line takes him over the rich flat fenlands with their black vegetable mould devoid of any kind of stone or pebble, and intersected
by those innumerable dykes or drains varying from 8 to 80 feet across, which give the southern division of Lincolnshire an aspect in harmony with its Batavian name “the parts of Holland.”

  The Queen of this flat fertile plain is Boston, with her wonderful church-tower and lantern 280 feet high, a marvel of symmetry when you are near it, and visible for more than twenty miles in all directions. Owing to its slender height it seems, from a distance, to stand up like a tall thick mast or tree-trunk, and is hence known to all the countryside as “Boston stump.”

  At this town, the East Lincolnshire line divides: one section goes to the left to Lincoln; the other, following the bend of the coast at about seven miles’ distance from the sea, turns when opposite Skegness and runs, at right angles to its former course, to Louth, — Louth whose beautiful church spire was painted by Turner in his picture of “The Horse Fair.”

  The more recent Louth-to-Lincoln line completes the fourth side of a square having Boston, Burgh, Louth, and Lincoln for its corners, which contains the fairest portion of the Lincolnshire wolds, and within this square is Somersby, Tennyson’s birthplace and early home. It is a tiny village surrounded by low green hills; and close at hand, here nestling in a leafy hollow, and there standing boldly on the “ridgèd wold,” are some half a dozen churches built of the local “greensand” rock, from whose towers the Poet in his boyhood heard:

  The Christmas bells from hill to hill

  Answer each other in the mist —

  the mist which lay athwart those “long gray fields at night,” and marked the course of the beloved Somersby brook.

  If we go past the little gray church with its perfect specimen of a pre-Reformation cross hard by the porch, and past the modest house almost opposite, which was for over thirty years the home of the Tennysons, we shall come at once to the point where the road dips to a little wood through which runs the rivulet so lovingly described by the Poet when he was leaving the home of his youth:

  Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea

  Thy tribute wave deliver:

  No more by thee my steps shall be,

  For ever and for ever.

  and again:

  Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

  The brook shall babble down the plain,

  At noon or when the lesser wain

  Is twisting round the polar star;

  Uncared for, gird the windy grove,

  And flood the haunts of hern and crake;

  Or into silver arrows break

  The sailing moon in creek and cove.

  Northward, beyond the stream, the white road climbs the wold above Tetford, and disappears from sight. These wolds are chalk; the greensand ridge being all to the south of the valley, except just at Somersby and Bag-Enderby, where the sandrock crops up by the roadside, and in the little wood by the brook.

  This small deep channelled brook with sandy bottom — over which one may on any bright day see, as described in “Enid,”

  a shoal

  Of darting fish, that on a summer morn...

  Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand,

  But if a man who stands upon the brink

  But lift a shining hand against the sun,

  There is not left the twinkle of a fin

  Betwixt the cressy islets white with flower —

  was very dear to Tennyson. When in his “Ode to Memory” he bids Memory

  Come from the woods which belt the gray hillside,

  The seven elms, the poplars four

  That stand beside my father’s door,

  he adds:

  And chiefly from the brook that loves

  To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand,

  Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,

  Drawing into his narrow earthen urn

  In every elbow and turn,

  The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland,

  O! hither lead thy feet!

  If we follow this

  pastoral rivulet that swerves

  To left and right thro’ meadowy curves,

  That feed the mothers of the flock,

  we, too, shall hear

  the livelong bleat

  Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds

  Upon the ridgèd wolds.

  And shall see the cattle in the rich grass land, and mark on the right the green-gray tower of Spilsby, where so many of the Franklin family lived and died, the family of whom his future bride was sprung.

  Still keeping by the brook, we shall see, past the tower of Bag-Enderby which adjoins Somersby, “The gray hill side” rising up behind the Old Hall of Harrington, and

  The Quarry trenched along the hill

  And haunted by the wrangling daw,

  above which runs the chalky “ramper” or turnpike-road which leads along the eastern ridge of the wold to Alford, whence you proceed across the level Marsh to the sea at Mablethorpe.

  The Marsh in Lincolnshire is a word of peculiar significance. The whole country is either fen, wold, or marsh. The wolds, starting from Keal and Alford, run in two ridges on either side of the Somersby Valley, one going north to Louth and onwards, and one west by Spilsby and Horncastle to Lincoln. Here it joins the great spine-bone of the county on which, straight as an arrow for many a mile northwards, runs the Roman Ermine Street; and but for the Somersby brook these two ridges from Louth and Lincoln would unite at Spilsby, whence the greensand formation, which begins at Raithby, sends out two spurs, one eastwards, ending abruptly at Halton, while the other pushes a couple of miles farther south, until at Keal the road drops suddenly into the level fen, giving a view — east, south, and west — of wonderful extent and colour, ending to the east with the sea, and to the south with the tall pillar of Boston Church standing up far above the horizon. This flat land is the fen; all rich cornland and all well drained, but with few habitations, and with absolutely no hill or even rise in the ground until, passing Croyland or Crowland Abbey, which once dominated a veritable land of fens only traversable by boats, you come, on the farther side of Peterborough, to the great North Road. Such views as this from Keal, and the similar one from Lincoln Minster, which looks out far to the south-west over a similar large tract of fen, are not to be surpassed in all the land.

  But the Poet’s steps from Somersby would not as a rule go westwards. The coast would oftener be his aim; and leaving Spilsby to the right, and the old twice-plague-stricken village of Partney, where the Somersby rivulet becomes a river, he would pass from “the high field on the bushless pike” to Miles-cross-hill, whence the panorama unfolds which he has depicted in Canto XI. of “In Memoriam”:

  Calm and still light on yon great plain,

  That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

  And crowded farms and lessening towers,

  To mingle with the bounding main.

  Thence descending from the wold he would go through Alford, and on across the sparsely populated pasture-lands, till he came at last to

  Some lowly cottage whence we see

  Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,

  Where from the frequent bridge,

  Like emblems of infinity,

  The trenchèd waters run from sky to sky.

  This describes the third section of Lincolnshire called the Marsh, a strip between five and eight miles wide, running parallel with the coast from Boston to Grimsby, and separating the wolds from

  the sandbuilt ridge

  Of heaped hills that mound the sea.

  This strip of land is not marsh in the ordinary sense of the word, but a belt of the richest grass land, all level and with no visible fences, each field being surrounded by a broad dyke or ditch with deep water, hidden in summer by the tall feathery plumes of the “whispering reeds.” Across this belt the seawind sweeps for ever. The Poet may allude to this when, in his early poem, “Sir Galahad,” he writes:

  But blessed forms in whistling storms

  Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields;

  a
nd “the hard grey weather” sung by Kingsley breeds a race of hardy gray-eyed men with long noses, the manifest descendants of the Danes who peopled all that coast, and gave names to most of the villages there, nine-tenths of which end in “by.”

  This rich pasture-land runs right up to the sand-dunes, — Nature’s own fortification made by the winds and waves which is just outside the Dutch and Roman embankments, and serves better than all the works of man to keep out the waters of the North Sea from the low-lying levels of the Marsh and Fen.

  The lines in the “Lotos-Eaters”:

  They sat them down upon the yellow sand

  Between the sun and moon upon the shore,

  describes what the Poet might at any time of full moon have seen from that “sand-built ridge” with the red sun setting over the wide marsh, and the full moon rising out of the eastern sea; and “The wide winged sunset of the misty marsh” recalls one of the most noticeable features of that particular locality, where, across the limitless windy plain, the sun would set in regal splendour; and when “cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn” his rising over the sea would be equally magnificent in colour.

  Having crossed the “Marsh” by a raised road with deep wide dykes on either side, and no vestige of hedge or tree in sight, except where a row of black poplars or aspens form a screen from the searching wind round a group of the plainest of farm buildings, red brick with roofing of black glazed pan-tiles, you come to the once tiny village of Mablethorpe, sheltering right under the sea-bank, the wind-blown sands of which are held together by the penetrating roots of the tussocks of long, coarse, sharp-edged grass, and the prickly bushes of sea buckthorn, gray-leaved and orange-berried.

  You top the sand-ridge, and below, to right and left, far as eye can see, stretch the flat, brown sands. Across these the tide, which at the full of the moon comes right up to the barrier, goes out for three-quarters of a mile; of this the latter half is left by the shallow wavelets all ribbed, as you see it on the ripple-marked stone of the Horsham quarries, and shining with the bright sea-water which reflects the low rays of the sun; while far off, so far that they seem to be mere toys, the shrimper slowly drives his small horse and cart, to the tail of which is attached the primitive purse net, the other end of it being towed by the patient, long-haired donkey, ridden by a boy whose bare feet dangle in the shallow wavelets. Farther to the south the tide ebbs quite out of sight. This is at “Gibraltar Point,” near Wainfleet Haven, where Somersby brook at length finds the sea, a place very familiar to the Poet in his youth. The skin of mud on the sands makes them shine like burnished copper in the level rays of the setting sun, which here have no sandbank to intercept them, but at other times it is a scene of dreary desolation, such as is aptly described in “The Passing of Arthur”: