TENNYSON AND HIS BROTHERS FREDERICK AND CHARLES
My uncle Frederick lived near St. Heliers, and my father and I visited him (1887) in his house, overlooking the town and harbour of St. Heliers, Elizabeth Castle, and St. Aubyn's Bay. The two old brothers talked much of bygone days; of the "red honey gooseberry," and the "golden apples" in Somersby garden, and of the tilts and tourneys they held in the fields; of the old farmers and "swains"; of their college friends; and of the waste shore at Mablethorpe: and then turned to later days, and to the feelings of old age. My father said of Frederick's poems that "they were organ-tones echoing among the mountains." Frederick told Alfred as they parted that "not for twenty years had he spent such a happy day."--_Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son._
True poet, surely to be found When Truth is found again.
Of all the brothers of Alfred Tennyson the closest akin to him were Frederick and Charles. The three were born in successive years, Frederick in 1807, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. They slept together in a little attic under the roof of the old white Rectory at Somersby, they played together, read together, studied together under the guidance of their father, and all three left home to go together to the school at Louth, which Alfred and Charles at least held in detestation until their latest years. Frederick was the first to break up the brotherhood, for, in 1817, he left Louth for Eton, but to the end of his long life--he outlived all his brothers--he seems to have looked back on the days of his childhood through the medium of this fraternal trinity. Years afterwards he wrote of their common submission to the influence of Byron, who "lorded it over them, with an immitigable tyranny," and a fire at Farringford in 1876 brings to his mind the destruction of their Aunt Mary's house at Louth, in the gardens of which he wrote: "I, and Charles, and Alfred, enthusiastic children, used to play at being Emperors of China, each appropriating a portion of the old echoing garden as our domain, and making them reverberate our tones of authority."
At school the brothers seem to have kept much to themselves; they took little interest in the school sports, in which their great size and strength would have well qualified them to excel, and passed their time chiefly in reading and wandering over the rolling wold and flat shores of their native Lincolnshire. They began at an early age their apprenticeship to poetry. Alfred, at least, had written a considerable volume of verse by the time he was fourteen, and all three contributed to the _Poems by Two Brothers_, which were published at Louth in 1827, when Frederick, the author of four of the poems, had just entered St. John's, Cambridge (his father's old College). Charles used to tell how, when the tiny volume was published, he and Alfred hired a conveyance out of the £10 which the publisher had given them, and drove off for the day to their favourite Mablethorpe, where they shouted themselves hoarse on the shore as they rolled out poem by poem in one another's ears. The notes and headings to the poems give some idea of the breadth and variety of reading for which the brothers had found opportunity in their quiet country life, for the volume contains twenty quotations from Horace, eight from Virgil, six from Byron, five from Isaiah, four from Ossian, three from Cicero, two apiece from Moore, Xenophon, Milton, Claudian, and the Book of Jeremiah, with others from Addison, John Clare, Juvenal, Ulloa's _Voyages_, Beattie, Rennel's _Herodotus_, Savary's _Letters_, Tacitus' _Annals_, Pliny, Suetonius' _Lives of the Caesars_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, Racine, the _Mysteries of Udolpho_, _La Auruncana_, the _Songs of Jayadeva_, Sir William Jones (_History of Nadir Shah_, _Eastern Plants_, and _Works_, vol. vi.), Cowper, Ovid, _Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful_, Dr. Langhorne's _Collins_, Mason's _Caractacus_, Rollin, Contino's _Epitaph on Camoens_, Hume, Scott, the Books of Joel and Judges, Berquin, Young, Sale's Koran, Apollonius of Rhodes, Disraeli's _Curiosities of Literature_, Sallust, Terence, Lucretius, Coxe's _Switzerland_, Rousseau, the _Ranz des Vaches_, _Baker on Animalculae_, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman and various old English ballads, while many notes give odd scraps of scientific, geographical, and historical learning.