Search -
The Life and Times of Tennyson, From 1809 to 1850 | by Thomas R. Lounsbury
The Life and Times of Tennyson From 1809 to 1850 by Thomas R Lounsbury Author:Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1915 Original Publisher: Yale University Press Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the Genera... more »l Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III UNIVERSITY LIFE It was about ten months after their poetical venture that Charles and Alfred Tennyson went to Cambridge University. Both were matriculated at Trinity College. To be exact, the date was February 20, 1828. There they had been preceded by their eldest brother Frederick. He had gone up from Eton where he had distinguished himself as a most successful writer of Greek and Latin verse. At Cambridge he had already made a still further reputation for himself by gaining the university medal for the best Greek poem. With most persons poetically inclined a little mathematics goes a long way, and Cambridge had then long been and still continued to be the most mathematical of universities. Excellence in that subject was essential to the attainment of the highest honors. Yet never has it fallen to the lot of any institution of learning -- at least in English-speaking lands -- to have on its rolls so large a number of illustrious men of letters, most of whom knew little of that special subject and some of whom hated it. From this most mathematical of universities had been graduated before Tennyson was born a large majority of the greatest poets of England. In literature, there was to be no falling off in the period which immediately followed. In the course of the third decade of the nineteenth century, particularly, appeared at the university a most remarkable body of men. In the early part of it Macaulay was graduated. During his first residence he expressed his feel...« less