Tennyson’s education in early youth was very slight.  His father laid down rules and gave out lessons, but the strictness of discipline never lasted more than two days at a time.  The children ran wild and roamed the woods of Lincolnshire in search of all the curious things that the woods hold in store for boys.  The father occasionally made stern efforts to “correct” his sons.  In the use of the birch he was ambidextrous.  But I have noticed that in households where a strap hangs behind the kitchen-door, for ready use, it is not utilized so much for pure discipline as to ease the feelings of the parent.  They say that expression is a need of the human heart; and I am also convinced that in many hearts there is a very strong desire at times to “thrash” some one.  Who it is makes little difference, but children being helpless and the law giving us the right, we find gratification by falling upon them with straps, birch-rods, slippers, ferules, hairbrushes or apple-tree sprouts.

No student of pedagogics now believes that the free use of the rod ever made a child “good”; but all agree that it has often served as a safety-valve for a pent-up emotion in the parent or teacher.

The father of Alfred Tennyson applied the birch, and the boy took to the woods, moody, resentful, solitary.  There was good in this, for the lad learned to live within himself, and to be self-sufficient:  to love the solitude, and feel a kinship with all the life that makes the groves and fields melodious.

In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-eight, when nineteen years of age, Alfred was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge.  He remained there three years, but left without a degree, and what was worse, with the ill-will of his teachers, who seemed to regard his as a hopeless case.  He wouldn’t study the books they wanted him to, and was never a candidate for academic distinctions.

College life, however, has much to recommend it beside the curriculum.  At Cambridge, Tennyson made the acquaintance of a group of young men who influenced his life profoundly.  Kemble, Milnes, Brookfield and Spedding remained his lifelong friends; and as all good is reciprocal, no man can say how much these eminent men owe to the moody and melancholy Tennyson, or how much he owes to them.

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Tennyson began to write verse very young.  His first line is said to have been written at five, and he has told of going when thirteen years of age to visit his grandfather, and of presenting him a poem.  The old gentleman gave him half a guinea with the remark, “This is the first money you ever made by writing poetry, and take my word for it, it will be the 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.