Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/368

 Doctor's approach when they were skylarking would make the boys scatter.

In 1828 Charles and Alfred went up to Trinity, Cambridge. Frederick was already a University prize-winner, having got the gold medal for the Greek ode, and Charles subsequently got the Bell Scholarship, and Alfred the English Verse prize. The boys' first poetical venture was the volume "Poems by Two Brothers," published in 1826 by Jackson of Louth, who gave them £20, more than half to be taken out in books. To this volume Frederick contributed four pieces, the rest were by Charles and Alfred. The latter used very properly to speak with impatience of it in later years as his "early rot." And it is quite remarkable how comparatively superior is the work done by Alfred as a boy of fourteen, and how little one can trace in the two brothers' volume of that lyrical ability which in 1830 produced Mariana and The Arabian Nights, The Merman, The Dying Swan and the Ode to Memory. The majority of these poems were written at Cambridge, but there is much reference to Somersby in at least two of them, and the song, "A Spirit haunts the year's last hours," was, we know, written in the garden there with its border of hollyhocks and tiger-lilies. In the Ode to Memory he invokes her to arise and come, not from vineyards, waterfalls, or purple cliffs, but to

"Come from the Woods that belt the grey hill side, The seven elms, the poplars four That stand beside my father's door, And chiefly from the brook that loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbèd sand.

O! hither lead thy feet! Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds, Upon the ridgèd wolds."

This is reminiscent of Somersby.

Then again, Memory calls up the pictures of "the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea" at Mablethorpe, and the view over "the waste enormous marsh."

In 1831 Dr. Tennyson died, aged fifty-two, and his sons left Cambridge. His widow lived on for thirty-four years, dying at the age of eighty-four, in 1865. They stayed on in the Somersby home till 1837, and a new volume came out in 1832,