The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-08-17

1.-THE year 1909 was one of splendid
 l0 births. It was then that Abraham
 Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes. William Ewart Clad stone, Charles Darwin, Edward Fitzgerald and Richard Monckton Milnes-to name only a few-first saw the light. They are all deserving of commemoration and of every posthumous honor which we can show them; but probably none of them has secured a higher niche in the temple of fame than the laureate poet who for nearly 50 years was the foremost singer of the Anglo-Sax race. It is unneces- sary to say that under that designation we refer to Alfred Tennyson.
 Tennyson, the son of an English coun- try clergyman, and one of family of 12, was born in his fathers rectory at Somersby, In Lincolnshire, on August 6, 1909. Like Pope, he "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came" He tells us him. self that at the age of he covered two sides of slate with Thomsonian blank verse in praise of flowers, and that at 10 he could turn out heroic couplets by the hundred At 12 he wrote an epic of 6ooo lines, and at IA a drama in blank verse; Nearly all these early efforts have been destroyed. He was educated first by his father and afterward at Louth Grammar school and at Trinity college, Cambridge, where he was associated with a brilliant group, which included Hallam, Merivale and Monckton Mines.
 In 1927, before going to Cambridge, he had Joined his brothers, Frederick and Charles, in the anonymous publication or Poems by Two Brothers" to which, de- spite the title, all three contributed. All freds first independent publication was "Poems, Chiefly Lyricar QS3O), and II was received coldly enough by the crit ics. whose canons dated from an earlier time. When his second volume, the
 "Poems." of 1883, made it's appearance, it was reviewed favorably in some mag azines, but the Quarterly Review was ao- solutely brutal in its criticism, so much SO that 1t retarded for years the poets output. But what England rejected or hseitatingly welcomed America received raad and quoted on this side of the Att 1antic and Tennyson never forgot the debt of gratitude he owed to the sister nation.
 He had full revenge on the critics with the two volumes which he published in 1s49 With them he took up his rightful and enduring place Among the great Eng fish poets. There are men still living who remember the thrill that "Locksley
 Hall' sent through England. '"The Prin-
 cess" us4D. "In Memoriam" us5W and
 '"The Idylls of the King ds5s-1ss5) raised his fame to the highest pinnacle. It was perhaps the first four "Idylls," which ap- peared in 1859, that definitely settled his reputation.
 | In 1850, on the death of Wordsworth, l Tennyson was appointed poet laureate, an office which he held for the remainder 1 of his life and honored by holding. In
 that year also he married Emily sellwood, and their union was an ideally happy | one. They settled at first at Freshwater, | In the Isle of Wight, not removing until I 19 years later to the new house, Ald- worth, which he built at Haselmere. At l Aldworth he wrote some of his principal l plays-"Harold," "The Falcon 'The Cup" "The Promise of May and Beck l et." ''The Cup and "Becket" were pro- duced on the stage by Henry Irving with
 great success. Volume after volume of poems continued to appear at frequent intervals until his death took place, in
 1892 In 1884 he had been created peer of the United Kingdom as Baron Tenny- son of Freshwater and Aldworth.
 l Tennyson loved travel. He loved, too, | among poets, Chaucer, Shakespeare. Mill l ton, Keats, wordsworth, Browning and l Goethe; and among prose works and writers, the Bible. the Book of Common | Prayer, Bacon, Hooker, Sir Thomas