"Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell When I embark; For though from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar." These thoughts of his filled the Abbey with a sense of their restfulness; then there thundered out from thousands of voices the familiar hymn— "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty!" and the words recalled to many a mind that Vision of which the clear-souled poet had sung, the Gleam he had so faithfully followed, until now it had surely led him right up to the presence of God. [Illustration: LORD TENNYSON.] Alfred Tennyson had been born at a country vicarage in Lincolnshire in the year 1809, and had begun to scribble verse almost as soon as he could write. When he was eight he produced such lines as— "With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood," which he thought "very grand" at the time; at twelve he wrote a poem of six thousand lines, and at fourteen a drama. He was not the sort of boy likely to be very happy at school, and he had, as he described it, "to shout his verses to the skies." But to his brother he was wont to say many a time, "Well, Arthur, I mean to be famous." He went to Cambridge, and when Thompson, that shrewd observer, afterwards Master of Trinity, saw him walk into the hall, "six feet high, broad-chested, strong-limbed, his face Shakespearean and with deep eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with dark wavy hair, his head firmly poised," he remarked, "That man must be a poet!" In 1829 he won the University Prize Poem on the not very inspiring subject of Timbuctoo, and soon afterwards published a volume of short poems, which was warmly welcomed and admired by his friends, one of whom, Arthur Hallam, remarked, "Tennyson will be the greatest poet of our generation." But the general public cared little for poetry, and preferred novels, so that Tennyson was thought to have scored quite a success when three hundred copies of his book had been sold.