How truly Tennysonian the manner is may be understood even from the opening lines, full of the original cadences which were to become so familiar:— “Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff, Filling with purple gloom the vacancies Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas Hung in mid-heaven, and half way down rare sails, White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky.” The narrative in parts one and two (which alone were written in youth) is so choked with images and descriptions as to be almost obscure. It is the story, practically, of a love like that of Paul and Virginia, but the love is not returned by the girl, who prefers the friend of the narrator. Like the hero of _Maud_, the speaker has a period of madness and illusion; while the third part, “The Golden Supper”—suggested by a story of Boccaccio, and written in maturity—is put in the mouth of another narrator, and is in a different style. The discarded lover, visiting the vault which contains the body of his lady, finds her alive, and restores her to her husband. The whole finished legend is necessarily not among the author’s masterpieces. But perhaps not even Keats in his earliest work displayed more of promise, and gave more assurance of genius. Here and there come turns and phrases, “all the charm of all the Muses,” which remind a reader of things later well known in pieces more mature. Such lines are— “Strange to me and sweet, Sweet through strange years,” and— “Like to a low-hung and a fiery sky Hung round with _ragged rims_ and burning folds.” And— “Like sounds without the twilight realm of dreams, Which wander round the bases of the hills.” We also note close observation of nature in the curious phrase— “Cries of the partridge like a rusty key Turned in a lock.” Of this kind was Tennyson’s adolescent vein, when he left “The poplars four That stood beside his father’s door,” the Somersby brook, and the mills and granges, the seas of the Lincolnshire coast, and the hills and dales among the wolds, for Cambridge. He was well read in old and contemporary English literature, and in the classics. Already he was acquainted with the singular trance-like condition to which his poems occasionally allude, a subject for comment later. He matriculated at Trinity, with his brother Charles, on February 20, 1828, and had an interview of a not quite friendly sort with a proctor before he wore the gown.