It was not Tennyson’s lot to illustrate any modern theory of the origin of genius. Born in 1809 of a Lincolnshire family, long connected with the soil but inconspicuous in history, Tennyson had nothing Celtic in his blood, as far as pedigrees prove. This is unfortunate for one school of theorists. His mother (genius is presumed to be derived from mothers) had a genius merely for moral excellence and for religion. She is described in the poem of _Isabel_, and was “a remarkable and saintly woman.” In the male line, the family was not (as the families of genius ought to be) brief of life and unhealthy. “The Tennysons never die,” said the sister who was betrothed to Arthur Hallam. The father, a clergyman, was, says his grandson, “a man of great ability,” and his “excellent library” was an element in the education of his family. “My father was a poet,” Tennyson said, “and could write regular verse very skilfully.” In physical type the sons were tall, strong, and unusually dark: Tennyson, when abroad, was not taken for an Englishman; at home, strangers thought him “foreign.” Most of the children had the temperament, and several of the sons had some of the accomplishments, of genius: whence derived by way of heredity is a question beyond conjecture, for the father’s accomplishment was not unusual. As Walton says of the poet and the angler, they “were born to be so”: we know no more. The region in which the paternal hamlet of Somersby lies, “a land of quiet villages, large fields, grey hillsides, and noble tall-towered churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold,” does not appear to have been rich in romantic legend and tradition. The folk-lore of Lincolnshire, of which examples have been published, does seem to have a peculiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humorous than the poetical aspect of the country-people that Tennyson appears to have known. In brief, we have nothing to inform us as to how genius came into that generation of Tennysons which was born between 1807 and 1819. A source and a cause there must have been, but these things are hidden, except from popular science.