Byron made him _blasé_ at fourteen. Then Byron died, and Tennyson scratched on a rock “Byron is dead,” on “a day when the whole world seemed darkened for me.” Later he considered Byron’s poetry “too much akin to rhetoric.” “Byron is not an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, but a strong personality; he is endlessly clever, and is now unduly depreciated.” He “did give the world another heart and new pulses, and so we are kept going.” But “he was dominated by Byron till he was seventeen, when he put him away altogether.” In his boyhood, despite the sufferings which he endured for a while at school at Louth; despite bullying from big boys and masters, Tennyson would “shout his verses to the skies.” “Well, Arthur, I mean to be famous,” he used to say to one of his brothers. He observed nature very closely by the brook and the thundering sea-shores: he was never a sportsman, and his angling was in the manner of the lover of _The Miller’s Daughter_. He was seventeen (1826) when _Poems by Two Brothers_ (himself and his brother Frederick) was published with the date 1827. These poems contain, as far as I have been able to discover, nothing really Tennysonian. What he had done in his own manner was omitted, “being thought too much out of the common for the public taste.” The young poet had already saving common-sense, and understood the public. Fragments of the true gold are found in the volume of 1830, others are preserved in the Biography. The ballad suggested by _The Bride of Lammermoor_ was not unworthy of Beddoes, and that novel, one cannot but think, suggested the opening situation in _Maud_, where the hero is a modern Master of Ravenswood in his relation to the rich interloping family and the beautiful daughter. To this point we shall return. It does not appear that Tennyson was conscious in _Maud_ of the suggestion from Scott, and the coincidence may be merely accidental. _The Lover’s Tale_, published in 1879, was mainly a work of the poet’s nineteenth year. A few copies had been printed for friends. One of these, with errors of the press, and without the intended alterations, was pirated by an unhappy man in 1875. In old age Tennyson brought out the work of his boyhood. “It was written before I had ever seen Shelley, though it is called Shelleyan,” he said; and indeed he believed that his work had never been imitative, after his earliest efforts in the manner of Thomson and of Scott. The only things in _The Lover’s Tale_ which would suggest that the poet here followed Shelley are the Italian scene of the story, the character of the versification, and the extraordinary luxuriance and exuberance of the imagery. {7} As early as 1868 Tennyson heard that written copies of _The Lover’s Tale_ were in circulation. He then remarked, as to the exuberance of the piece: “Allowance must be made for abundance of youth. It is rich and full, but there are mistakes in it. . . . The poem is the breath of young love.”