Connecticut western news., 1892-10-13

with light. Tennyson watched it through the curtainless window with his hand rest ing between the leaves of "Cymbeline."
 At 10:30 o'clock he was sinking fast. Hallam Tennyson gave him few spoon fuls of brandy and milk. He swallowed with difficulty and was unable to take further nourishment. At midnight he whispered very feebly his last words to his wife. His finger still marked the passages of "Cymbeline' which he had last read, and thus he died.
 Tn all my experience" said Sir Andrew Clark, 'T never witnessed anything more glorious There were no artificial lights in the chamber. All was darkness except for the silver light of the full moon, which fell upon the bed and played upon the features of the dying poet like the halo in a Rem brandt picture"
 Lord Tennyson's Career.
 "There is place called Somerby in Lin colnshire, where an old white rectory stands on the slope of hill, and the winding lanes are shadowed by tall ash and elm trees, and where two brooks meet at the bottom of the glebe field. The wind that goes blowing where it listeth once in the early beginning of this century came sweeping through the garden of this old Lincolnshire rectory, and as the wind blew, a sturdy child of five years old, with shining locks, stood opening his arms upon the blast and letting himself be blown along, and as he travelled on he made his first line of poetry, and said, I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind, and he tossed | ha aA ing into the great abyss of winds"
 In such poetic fashion does Anne T. Ritchie, in an article written half a dozen years ago in Harper's, refer to the child hood of the poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, the germ of fancy flashing from within him at this tender age. It was at this Somerby, where his father ofliciated as a clergyman of the Church of England, that Tennyson was born in 1909. Here in the quiet of a country place-and there was then nothing but the numbering English coach to connect it with the outer world the child grew up.
 His First Poem.
 It was quite natural that the dainty bits of English scenery should have been in delibly impressed upon Tennyson's mind, ana that InrOuSnOuU q long Ille ueNoteu No the poetic art he should have painted them in so many charming word pictures. Tennyson's first written poem was, it is said, on the flowers in the garden, and the first money he ever received for poem was for an elegy on his grandmother. The price for his production was ten shillings, given him by his grandfather. Thomson was then a favorite poet and the boy mod eled his first verses upon ''The Seasons;" but Byron was the great rising luminary, and the youngster, who had not yet gone | so far as to write in style of his own, left off copying Thomson and began to copy Byron. When Byron died Tennyson was yet only fifteen years old, and it is not ap- parent that the younger bard ever ad- mired any other poet so much as to initiate him; besides he was growing into his own | individuality.
 At twenty he gained a prize at Cambridge | fora poem called 'Timbuctoo." With some trifing exceptions he published nothing | until he came of age, in 1880, when he got | out volume of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical" ]" | They did not cause his countrymen to re- | gard him as great poet. Tennyson was
 thirty three years old and had written con