4 INTRODUCTION
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ere John Mitchell Kemble, the Anglo-Saxon scholar; WilliamHenry Brookfield, long an eloquent preacher in London ; JamesSpedding, the biographer and editor of Lord Bacon ; Henry Alford,Dean of Canterbury ; Richard Monckton Milnes (afterwards LordHoughton), who united the poet and the politician, and was thebiographer of Keats ; and Richard Chenevix Trench, who becameDean of Westminster in 1856, and Archbishop of Dublin in 1864.A brilliant array of college friends ! Tennyson's prize poem was published shortly after the Cam-bridge Commencement of 1829, and was very favorably noticedin The Atheneum of July 22, 1829. In it can already be recognized much of the real Tennyson. There are, indeed, but very few .. poets whose earliest productions exhibit so much of their after- selves. The real Byron, the most vigorous in his diction of all modern poets, hardly appears at all in his Hours of Idleness, which was published when he was about the age that Tennyson .was when Timbuctoo was published. In 18380 appeared Poems; chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson.In this volume appeared, among others, the poems entitled Odeto Memory, The Poet, The Poet's Mind, The Deserted House, andThe Sleeping Beauty, which were full of promise, and struck key-notes of future works. The reviews of the volume mingled praiseand blame—the blame perhaps being predominant. In 1882 ap-peared Poems by Alfred Tennyson, among which were includedThe Lady of Shalott, The Miller's Daughter, The Palace of Art,The Lotos Haters, and A Dream of Fair Women, all showing agreat advance in workmanship and a more distinct7y articulate ©utterance—many of the poems of the previous v#lumes beingrather artist-studies in vowel and melody suggestiveness, It wasreviewed, somewhat facetiously, in The Quarterly, July, 1838,(vol. 49, pp. 81-96) by, as was generally understood, Sohn GibsonLockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, at that time editorof The Quarterly ; and in a more earnest and generous vein, byJohn Stuart Mill, in The Westminster, July, 1885. A silence of ten years succeeded the 1882 volume, broken ifyby an occasional contribution of a short poem to some magazineor collection. In 1842 appeared Poems by Alfred Tennyson, intwo volumes, containing selections from the volumes of 1830 and1832, and many new poems, among which were Ulysses, Love and ‘4
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