In 1831 Dr. Tennyson died, aged fifty-two, and his sons left Cambridge. His widow lived on for thirty-four years, dying at the age of eighty-four, in 1865. They stayed on in the Somersby home till 1837, and a new volume came out in 1832, with a whole array of poems of rare merit, showing how much the poet’s mind had matured in that last year at Cambridge. This volume, like the Louth volume, is dated for the year after that in which it was really published. It carried Alfred to the front rank at once, for in it was _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Miller’s Daughter_, _Œnone_, _The May Queen_, _New Year’s Eve_, _The Lotus Eaters_, _A Dream of Fair Women_, and the _Lines to James Spedding_, on the death of his brother Edward. Only think of all these wonderful poems in a thin book of 162 pages written before he was twenty-three. [Sidenote: THE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST] To Mablethorpe and Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast we find frequent allusions in many poems, _e.g._, he speaks in _The Last Tournament_ of “the wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh,” and when the Red Knight in drunken passion, trying to strike the King overbalances himself, he falls— “As the crest of some slow arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table shore, Drops flat, and after, the great waters break Whitening for half-a-league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing.” A most accurate picture of that flat Lincolnshire coast with its “league-long rollers,” and hard, wet sands shining in the moonlight. In another place he speaks of “The long low dune and lazy-plunging sea.” In his volume of 1832 there are many pictures drawn from this familiar coast, _e.g._, in _The Lotus Eaters_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Dream of Fair Women_; and in his 1842 volumes he speaks of “Locksley Hall that in the distance overlooks the sandy flats And the hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts.” A relative of mine was once reading this poem to the family of one of those Marsh farmers who had known “Mr. Alfred” when a youth, and who lived in the remotest part of that coast near the sandy dunes and far-spread flats between Skegness and “Gibraltar Point”; but she had not got far when at the line— “Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime, With the fairy tales of science——” she was stopped by the farmer’s wife. “Don’t you believe him, Miss, there’s nothing hereabouts to nourish onybody, ’cepting it be an owd rabbit, and it ain’t oftens you can get howd of them.” [Sidenote: IN MEMORIAM] _In Memoriam_ has many cantos descriptive of Somersby, both of the happy summer evenings on the lawn, when Mary “brought the harp and flung A ballad to the bright’ning moon,” or of the walks about home with Arthur Hallam—