We also note close observation of nature in the curious phrase -


"Cries of the partridge like a rusty key
Turned in a lock."


Of this kind was Tennyson's adolescent vein, when he left


"The poplars four
That stood beside his father's door,"


the Somersby brook, and the mills and granges, the seas of the
Lincolnshire coast, and the hills and dales among the wolds, for
Cambridge. He was well read in old and contemporary English
literature, and in the classics. Already he was acquainted with the
singular trance-like condition to which his poems occasionally
allude, a subject for comment later. He matriculated at Trinity,
with his brother Charles, on February 20, 1828, and had an interview
of a not quite friendly sort with a proctor before he wore the gown.

That Tennyson should go to Cambridge, not to Oxford, was part of the
nature of things, by which Cambridge educates the majority of English
poets, whereas Oxford has only "turned out" a few--like Shelley. At
that time, as in Macaulay's day, the path of university honours at
Cambridge lay through Mathematics, and, except for his prize poem in
1829, Tennyson took no honours at all. His classical reading was