acquisition and performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood
varied somewhat in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of
eight he covered a slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie
Thomson, the only poet with whom he was then acquainted. In another
passage he says, "The first poetry that moved me was my own at five
years old. When I was eight I remember making a line I thought
grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was
this -


'With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood' -


great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine!"

It WAS fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. Scott, Campbell, and
Byron probably never produced a line with the qualities of this
nonsense verse. "Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy
day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, 'I hear a voice
that's speaking in the wind,' and the words 'far, far away' had
always a strange charm for me." A late lyric has this overword, FAR,
FAR AWAY!

A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets was more or less
precocious. Tennyson also knew Pope, and wrote hundreds of lines in
Pope's measure. At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott's
manner, of some six thousand lines. He "never felt himself more
truly inspired," for the sense of "inspiration" (as the late Mr Myers
has argued in an essay on the "Mechanism of Genius") has little to do
with the actual value of the product. At fourteen Tennyson wrote a