last!"
When eighteen years of age, with his brother, Charles, he produced a thin
book of thin verses.

We have the opinion of Coleridge to the effect that the only lines which
have any merit in the book are those signed C.T. Charles became a
clergyman of marked ability, married rich, and changed his name from
Tennyson to Turner for economic and domestic reasons. Years afterward,
when Alfred had become Poet Laureate, rumor has it he thought of changing
the "Turner" back to "Tennyson," but was unable to bring it about.

The only honor captured by Alfred at Cambridge was a prize for his poem,
"Timbuctoo." The encouragement that this brought him, backed up by Arthur
Hallam's declaiming the piece in public--as a sort of defi to
detractors--caused him to fix his attention more assiduously on verse. He
could write--it was the only thing he could do--and so he wrote.

At Cambridge he was in the habit of reading his poetry to a little coterie
called "The Apostles," and he always premised his reading with the
statement that no criticism would be acceptable.

The year he was twenty-one he published a small book called, "Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical." The books went a-begging for many years; but times
change, for a copy of this edition was sold by Quaritch in Eighteen
Hundred Ninety-five for one hundred eighty pounds. The only piece in the
book that seems to show genuine merit is "Mariana."

Two years afterward a second edition, revised and enlarged, was brought
out. This book contains "The Lady of Shalott," "The May Queen," "A Dream
of Fair Women" and "The Lotus-Eaters."

Beyond a few fulsome reviews from personal friends and a little surly
mention from the tribe of Jeffrey, the volume attracted little or no
attention. This coldness on the part of the public shot an atrabilarian
tint through the ambition of our poet, and the fond hope of a success in
literature faded from his mind.

And then began what Stopford Brooke has called "the ten fallow years in
the life of Tennyson." But fallow years are not all fallow. The dark
brooding night is as necessary for our life as the garish day. Great crops
of wheat that feed the nations grow only where the winter's snow covers
all as with a garment. And ever behind the mystery of sleep, and beneath
the silence of the snow, Nature slumbers not nor sleeps.

The withholding of quick recognition gave the mind of Tennyson an
opportunity to ripen. Fate held him in leash that he might be saved for