This reminds me of a remark of Gladstone’s, who was giving us some delightful reminiscences of his days at Eton, and, speaking enthusiastically of Alfred Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam, when on my saying that I had spoken with Keate, he turned half round in his chair and said, “Well, if you say you have seen Keate I must believe you, but I should not have thought it possible.” He had forgotten for the moment that Keate, after retiring from Eton, lived thirteen years at Hartley Westpall (near Strathfieldsaye), where my father was curate. To return to Somersby. We read in the memoir of the poet an amusing account, by Arthur Tennyson, of how the Doctor’s approach when they were skylarking would make the boys scatter. [Sidenote: EARLY VOLUMES] In 1828 Charles and Alfred went up to Trinity, Cambridge. Frederick was already a University prize-winner, having got the gold medal for the Greek ode, and Charles subsequently got the Bell Scholarship, and Alfred the English Verse prize. The boys’ first poetical venture was the volume “Poems by Two Brothers,” published in 1826 by Jackson of Louth, who gave them £20, more than half to be taken out in books. To this volume Frederick contributed four pieces, the rest were by Charles and Alfred. The latter used very properly to speak with impatience of it in later years as his “early rot.” And it is quite remarkable how comparatively superior is the work done by Alfred as a boy of fourteen, and how little one can trace in the two brothers’ volume of that lyrical ability which in 1830 produced _Mariana_ and _The Arabian Nights_, _The Merman_, _The Dying Swan_ and the _Ode to Memory_. The majority of these poems were written at Cambridge, but there is much reference to Somersby in at least two of them, and the song, “A Spirit haunts the year’s last hours,” was, we know, written in the garden there with its border of hollyhocks and tiger-lilies. In the _Ode to Memory_ he invokes her to arise and come, not from vineyards, waterfalls, or purple cliffs, but to “Come from the Woods that belt the grey hill side, The seven elms, the poplars four That stand beside my father’s door, And chiefly from the brook that loves To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand. ... O! hither lead thy feet! Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds, Upon the ridgèd wolds.” This is reminiscent of Somersby. Then again, Memory calls up the pictures of “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea” at Mablethorpe, and the view over “the waste enormous marsh.”