From what we have said it will be clear to the reader that while it is the _fen_ land only that the railway traveller sees, it is the _Marsh_ and the _Wolds_--and particularly in Lord Tennyson's mind the Wolds--that make the characteristic charm of the county, a charm of which so many illustrations are to be found throughout his poems. Certainly in her wide extended views, in the open wolds with the villages and their gray church towers nestling in the sheltered nooks at the wold foot, and also (to quote again from the "Lincolnshire Rector") "in her glorious parish churches and gigantic steeples, Lincolnshire has charms and beauties of her own. And as to fostering genius, has she not proved herself to be the 'meet nurse of a poetic child'? for here, be it remembered, here in the heart of the land, in Mid-Lincolnshire, Alfred Tennyson was born, here he spent all his earliest and freshest days; here he first felt the divine afflatus, and found fit material for his muse: The Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times in the Camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol." II THE SOMERSBY FRIENDS We leave the well-beloved place Where first we gazed upon the sky; The roofs, that heard our earliest cry, Will shelter one of stranger race. * * * * * I turn to go: my feet are set To leave the pleasant fields and farms; They mix in one another's arms To one pure image of regret. It is no wonder that the Tennysons loved Somersby. They were a large family, and here they grew up together, making their own world and growing ever more fond of the place for its associations. "How often have I longed to be with you at Somersby!" writes Alfred Tennyson's sister, Mary,[7] thirteen years after leaving the old home. "How delightful that name sounds to me! Visions of sweet past days rise up before my eyes, when life itself was new, And the heart promised what the fancy drew." Here, when childhood's happy days were over, the Tennyson girls rejoiced in the society of their brothers' Cambridge friends, and, though the village was so remote that they only got a post two or three times a week,[8] here they not only drank in contentedly the beauty of the country, but also passed delightful days with talk and books, with music and poetry, and dance and song, when, on the lawn at Somersby, one of the sisters brought the harp and flung A ballad to the brightening moon. Here, as Arthur Hallam said, "Alfred's mind was moulded in silent sympathy with the everlasting forms of Nature."