gratification by falling upon them with straps, birch-rods, slippers,
ferules, hairbrushes or apple-tree sprouts.

No student of pedagogics now believes that the free use of the rod ever
made a child "good"; but all agree that it has often served as a
safety-valve for a pent-up emotion in the parent or teacher.

The father of Alfred Tennyson applied the birch, and the boy took to the
woods, moody, resentful, solitary. There was good in this, for the lad
learned to live within himself, and to be self-sufficient: to love the
solitude, and feel a kinship with all the life that makes the groves and
fields melodious.

In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-eight, when nineteen years of age, Alfred was
sent to Trinity College, Cambridge. He remained there three years, but
left without a degree, and what was worse, with the ill-will of his
teachers, who seemed to regard his as a hopeless case. He wouldn't study
the books they wanted him to, and was never a candidate for academic
distinctions.

College life, however, has much to recommend it beside the curriculum. At
Cambridge, Tennyson made the acquaintance of a group of young men who
influenced his life profoundly. Kemble, Milnes, Brookfield and Spedding
remained his lifelong friends; and as all good is reciprocal, no man can
say how much these eminent men owe to the moody and melancholy Tennyson,
or how much he owes to them.

* * * * *

Tennyson began to write verse very young. His first line is said to have