Precocity is not a sign of genius, but genius is perhaps always accompanied by precocity. This is especially notable in the cases of painting, music, and mathematics; but in the matter of literature genius may chiefly show itself in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott, who when a boy knew much, but did little that would attract notice. As a child and a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition and performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood varied somewhat in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of eight he covered a slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie Thomson, the only poet with whom he was then acquainted. In another passage he says, “The first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was eight I remember making a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was this— ‘With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood’— great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine!” It _was_ fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. Scott, Campbell, and Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this nonsense verse. “Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, ‘I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind,’ and the words ‘far, far away’ had always a strange charm for me.” A late lyric has this overword, _Far_, _far away_! A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets was more or less precocious. Tennyson also knew Pope, and wrote hundreds of lines in Pope’s measure. At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott’s manner, of some six thousand lines. He “never felt himself more truly inspired,” for the sense of “inspiration” (as the late Mr Myers has argued in an essay on the “Mechanism of Genius”) has little to do with the actual value of the product. At fourteen Tennyson wrote a drama in blank verse. A chorus from this play (as one guesses), a piece from “an unpublished drama written very early,” is published in the volume of 1830:— “The varied earth, the moving heaven, The rapid waste of roving sea, The fountain-pregnant mountains riven To shapes of wildest anarchy, By secret fire and midnight storms That wander round their windy cones.” These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical transcript, “the varied earth,” _dædala tellus_. There is the geological interest in the forces that shape the hills. There is the use of the favourite word “windy,” and later in the piece— “The troublous autumn’s _sallow_ gloom.” The young poet from boyhood was original in his manner.