After a school career which lasted four years, Alfred returned to Somersby to continue his studies under his father’s tuition. This course of instruction was supplemented by classics at the hands of a Roman Catholic priest, and music-lessons given him by a teacher at Horncastle. In 1828 Charles and Alfred Tennyson followed their elder brother Frederick to Trinity College, Cambridge. They began their university life in lodgings at No. 12, Rose Crescent, moving later to Trumpington Street, No. 57, Corpus Buildings. Of his early experiences of life at Cambridge, Alfred wrote to his aunt: “I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my rooms (nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles). The hoof of the steed, the roll of the wheel, the shouts of drunken Gown and drunken Town come up from below with a sea-like murmur.... The country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so much matter of fact. None but dry-headed, calculating, angular little gentlemen can take much delight in them.” [Sidenote: =Arthur Hallam (from the bust by Chantrey)= _see page 8_] It was at Trinity College that Tennyson first made the acquaintance of Arthur Hallam, youngest son of the historian, whose friendship so profoundly influenced the poet’s character and genius. “He would have been known if he had lived,” wrote Tennyson, “as a great man, but not as a great poet; he was as near perfection as mortal man could be.” [Sidenote: =The Lady of Shalott= _see page 10_] In February 1831 Tennyson left Cambridge without taking a degree, and returned to Somersby, his father dying within a month of his arrival. From this time onward Hallam became an intimate visitor at the Rectory, and formed an attachment for his friend’s sister Emily. In July 1832 Tennyson and Hallam went touring on the Rhine, and at the close of the year appeared the volume of “Poems by Alfred Tennyson,” which contained, amongst others, “The Lady of Shalott,” “The Miller’s Daughter,” “The Palace of Art,” “The Lotos Eaters,” and “A Dream of Fair Women.” “Well I remember this poem,” wrote Fitzgerald, with reference to “The Lady of Shalott,” “read to me, before I knew the author, at Cambridge one night in 1832 or 3, and its images passing across my head, as across the magic mirror, while half asleep on the mail-coach to London ‘in the creeping dawn’ that followed.” There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colours gay. She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she, The Lady of Shalott. The idea of “Mariana in the South” came to Tennyson as he was [Sidenote: =“Mariana in the South”= _see page 13_] travelling between Narbonne and Perpignan. Hallam interpreted it to be the “expression of desolate loneliness.”