Tennyson summed up in his poetry all the spiritual aspiration and the eager search for knowledge of his time. He explored all domains of thought, and he enriched his verse with the fruit of his studies. All the great elemental forces are found in his poems: he is the laureate of love and sorrow, of grief and aspiration. Throughout his verse runs the great natural law that the man who is not pure in heart can never see the glory of the poet's vision. The purity of his own life was reflected in his verse, just as the mad license and the furious self-indulgence of Byron are mirrored in _Don Juan_, _Manfred_ and _Cain_. Even to extreme old age Tennyson preserved that high poetic faculty which he manifested in early youth. One of his latest poems, _Crossing the Bar_, is also one of the finest in the language, breathing the old man's assurance of a life beyond the grave and a reunion with the dear friend of his youth, whom he mourned and immortalized in _In Memoriam_. Alfred Tennyson had one of the finest lives in the roll of English authors. He was born in 1809 and lived to 1892. He spent his early years in one of the most beautiful parts of Lincolnshire. He enjoyed the personal training of his father, a very accomplished clergyman, and much of his boyhood and youth was spent in the open air. In this way he absorbed that knowledge of birds and animals, trees and flowers and all the aspects of nature which is reflected in his verse. As a youth he experimented in many styles of verse, and when only eighteen he issued, with his brother Charles, _Poems by Two Brothers_. The next year he and Charles entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There they received the greatest impulse toward culture in a society of undergraduates known as the "Apostles." Its membership included Thackeray, Trench, Spedding, Monckton Milnes and Alfred and Arthur Henry Hallam, sons of the famous author of _The Middle Ages_. In his second year at college Tennyson won the Chancellor's gold medal with his prize poem, _Timbuctoo_, and in the following year he published his first volume, _Poems, Chiefly Lyrical_. He left college without a degree, and in 1833 he issued another volume of poems which contained some of his best work--_The Lady of Shalott_, _The Lotos Eaters_, _The Palace of Art_ and _A Dream of Fair Women_. Any one of these poems if issued to-day would make the reputation of a poet, but this book made little impression on the Victorian public which had lost its taste for poetry and was devoted mainly to prose fiction. The world has yet to catch the note of this master singer.