The Holy Grail, and Other Poems

Excerpt from The Holy Grail, and Other Poems Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 at the rectory at Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. He was the fourth of twelve children, who grew up under the guidance of parents singularly high-minded and unworldly of temper and cultivated in their tastes. All through the years he retained the tenderest memories of the rectory - of "the Gothic vaulted dining-room, with stained-glass windows making 'butterfly souls' on the walls; of the woodbine that climbed into the bay window of his nursery; of the beautiful stone chimney-piece carved by his father; of the pleasant little drawing-room lined with bookshelves, and furnished with yellow curtains, sofas, and chairs, and looking out on the lawn." The children who grew up in these attractive surroundings were fond of imaginative ventures of all kinds; at least three of them wrote Verse, and in their games they had jousts and tourneys, or delighted themselves in listening to Alfred's stories of knights and heroes among untravelled forests. When Charles Tennyson was between sixteen and eighteen and Alfred between fifteen and seventeen, they wrote their first volume, "Poems by Two Brothers," published in 1837 by a bookseller at Louth. During these formative years of youth, Alfred Tennyson led a very quiet life in the country; he was taught Greek and Latin by his father; a well-trained scholar, and given free range of a library which had in it the standard classics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.