EARLY EFFORTS.—­He was the son of a clergyman of Lincolnshire, and was born at Somersby, in 1810.  After a few early and almost unknown efforts in verse, the first volume bearing his name was issued in 1830, while he was yet an under-graduate at Cambridge:  it had the simple title—­Poems, chiefly Lyrical.  In their judgment of this new poet, the critics were almost as much at fault as they had been when the first efforts of Wordsworth appeared; but for very different reasons.  Wordsworth was simple and intensely realistic.  Tennyson was mystic and ideal:  his diction was unusual; his little sketches conveyed an almost hidden moral; he seemed to inform the reader that, in order to understand his poetry, it must be studied; the meaning does not sparkle upon the surface; the language ripples, the sense flows in an undercurrent.  His first essays exhibit a mania for finding strange words, or coining new ones, which should give melody, to his verse.  Whether this was a process of development or not, he has in his later works gotten rid of much of this apparent mannerism, while he has retained, and even improved, his harmony.  He exhibits a rare power of concentration, as opposed to the diffusiveness of his contemporaries.  Each of his smaller poems is a thought, briefly, but forcibly and harmoniously, expressed.  If it requires some exertion to comprehend it, when completely understood it becomes a valued possession.

It is difficult to believe that such poems as Mariana and Recollections of the Arabian Nights were the production of a young man of twenty.

In 1833 he published his second volume, containing additional poems, among which were Enone, The May Queen, The Lotos-Eaters, and A Dream of Fair Women. The May Queen became at once a favorite, because every one could understand it:  it touched a chord in every heart; but his rarest power of dreamy fancy is displayed in such pieces as The Arabian Nights and the Lotos-Eaters.  No greater triumph has been achieved in the realm of fancy than that in the court of good Haroun al Raschid, and amid the Lotos dreams of the Nepenthe coast.  These productions were not received with the favor which they merited, and so he let the critics alone for nine years.  In 1842 he again appeared in print, with, among other poems, the exquisite fragment of the Morte d’Arthur, Godiva, St. Agnes, Sir Galahad, Lady Clara Vere de Vere, The Talking Oak, and chief, perhaps, of all, Locksley Hall.  In these poems he is not only a poet, but a philosopher.  Each of these is an extended apothegm, presenting not only rules of life, but mottoes and maxims for daily use.  They are soliloquies of the nineteenth century, and representations of its men and conditions.

THE PRINCESS.—­In 1847 he published The Princess, a Medley—­a pleasant and suggestive poem on woman’s rights, in which exquisite songs are introduced, which break the monotony of the blank verse, and display his rare lyric power.  The Bugle Song is among the finest examples of the adaptation of sound to sense in the language; and there is nothing more truthful and touching than the short verses beginning,