We are all the creatures of our surroundings—the poets perhaps more than most.  Those who read Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” which was not published till after his death, will realise how the sights, sounds, and features of the locality in which poets pass their boyhood, become part and parcel of them, colour their imagination right into the far-off years and become permanent possessions of their whole life.  The sooner the poet begins to feel the wings of his fancy, the firmer hold does it seem that the associations of his surroundings will get of him, and we are not surprised to find that Lincolnshire, or that part of it in which Tennyson spent his early years, is found to be embedded in the late Laureate’s poems, and that memories of “Linkishire daäys” ring up through them to the very last. (p. 1)

Anyone familiar with the Somersby neighbourhood, or who knows the wolds between Keal Hill and Louth, the “fen” between Spilsby and Burgh or Alford and Boston, the “marsh” between Burgh and the sea at Skegness, the coast line between Mablethorpe and Gibraltar Point, will constantly, as he reads his Tennyson, find himself back in Lincolnshire.  Nor is this felt alone in such a poem as the “Ode to Memory,” but in single lines throughout the “Idylls,” and in whole passages in “In Memoriam.” (p. 2)

We find this to be so not only in the work of the younger Tennyson, our late Laureate Lord of Song, but in the case of the poems written by the eldest Tennyson, Frederick, and in the sonnets with which Charles Tennyson Turner has enriched our literature. (p. 2)….

But it was not only that Lincolnshire, its sights and scenes, soaked into the minds of the Tennyson boys and girls, just at the time when these minds were most receptive and the dewy-dawn of memory freshest; the language of Lincolnshire also entered into their ears, and this, such pure dialect as the colony of Danes, who in olden time peopled the triangle between Boston, Horncastle, and Louth, had kept in purity quite till the middle of the present century. (p. 4)

More than fifty years had passed since Lord Tennyson had left his father’s homeland, but he never seemed to me to be so entirely his best self as when, brimming over with humour, he repeated, in the broad Lincolnshire dialect, some of the quaint conversations that he had in his bygone days with the typical northern farmer. (p. 4)

His poet’s ear was as “practised as a blind man’s touch,” and he remembered the least modifications and variety of tone, as he spoke or read the dialect of the old countryside.  Anyone who knows the dialect to-day and listened to him could see where and what changes had taken place in it for the worse during the last two generations. (p. 5)

(Memories of the Tennysons, pp. 1-26)

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Go, Lady, ask Lord Lucy of his grace
        To grant us land, so did Saint Bega say,
Where we may rear a house to watch and pray:
The storm that flung us to the landing-place
Robbed us of all.  Lord Lucy from the chase
Came laughing home: Good dame, I answer, Nay,
Yet promise all on next Midsummer day
Is white with snow to mend the stranger’s case.
God hath His book, St. Bega’s prayer is won,
Vows made in haste are vows eternally:
There came the hallow-eve of Great Saint John,
Forth looked the young moon from a sultry sky;
But ere the night to Midsummer had gone,
Beneath the snow three miles of seaboard lie.

(Sonnets Round the Coast, p. 101)

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[Correspondence between HDR and G. W. Duff Assheton Smith, proprietor of part of Snowden.]

Dear Sir,—I have hesitated to write to you till I heard some certainty as to the railway so deplorably projected up Snowden, and I am the more emboldened to approach you because I know of your opposition, on former occasions, to the project.  I write now—in the name of the National Trust for the Preservation of Sites of Historical Interest and Natural Beauty, which has been lately incorporated by charter of the Board of Trade—to ask if, at this eleventh hour, you would, in the best interests of the nation, reconsider the matter; and, if it could be shown you that the preponderant sense of the nation were against such innovation, you would then take firm steps to prevent so sacred an inheritance as Snowden being thus robbed of its chief charm for future generations, and being vulgarized for ever.  It is not only that the example set on Snowden will be followed on the Scotch and English and Irish mountains at the bidding of the railway engineer and the hotel speculator that I dare appeal to you, but, in view of the ever-increasing number of tourists who take an intelligent interest in natural scenery, I cannot help feeling that to do this thing would be a national harm.  It will hurt the nation in its tenderest part—its patriotism.  Ask the Swiss people and they will tell you that, since the railways have run up their mountain heights, something of that indefinable love of their own country, which patriots feel, has passed away for ever.  It is in very few places in our crowded country that men can be alone with nature, and with their God—and Snowden is one of them.  To rob Snowden, so easily accessible as it is both by night and by day, of its grand natural solitude and super-eminent charm will be to inflict a loss upon the whole world.  

Assheton Smith replied:

Dear Sir,—In reply to your letter of this morning, I regret to say that I cannot take the same view of the matter as your association appears to do.  You are right in saying that I was in former years opposed to the scheme; but times have changed, and if in many ways one does not advance with them, one is left alone.  In trying to direct the tourists to Llanberis, and making things easy for them, I am consulting the interest of this estate and the neighbourhood in which I live, and I cannot recognize any outside interference in the matter.

(Times, 6 November 1894, p. 8)

[The railway was officially opened on 6 April 1896]

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It stood, the genius of the sea-blown bank,
        And rocked to every passing wind that blew:
Far out at sea that house the pilot knew,
Its friendly light the fishermen would thank.
For entrance, served a solitary plank,
Loud with the feet that pattered to and fro:
Up to the wolds the rising sun looked through,
Down to the sea looked through the sun that sank.
The housewife there had little need to keep
Of rosemary and lavender sweet store,
Her chests were fragrant with the salt sea-air.
There would the weary quite forget his care,
All day could revel on the healthful shore,
Lulled by its tidal tune all night could sleep.

(Sonnets Round the Coast, p. 211)

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