A TENNYSON STORY

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7914, 25 September 1911, Page 8

A TENNYSON STORY

Somersby Church, Lincolnshire, in which a bronze bust of Tennyson has just boon unveiled, was on one occasion the scene of an amusing incident. Loro Tennyson, in the biography of his father, writes:

“It was the ‘dead waste and middle of the night' when the news of the passing of the Reform Bill for England and Wales had reached Somersby. This ‘Eirm BUI.’ as the Lincolnshire people called it, had stirred all hearts; and my father and some of his brothers and sisters at once sallied out into the darkness and began to ring the church bells madly. The new parson, horrified at hearing his bells rung, and not merely rung, but furiously clashed without his leave, came rushing into his church, and in the pitch blackness laid hold of the first thing that he could clap hand to and this happened to be my Aunt Cecilia's little dog, which forthwith tried to bite. The Tennysons then disclosed themselves amid much laughter: and the parson, who, I suppose, was a Tory' of the old school, was pacified.’’ Lord Tennyson ad is that more than onco his father -thought of turning this scene into verso „,as an interesting picture of the times,’but ho seems never to have done so. "Half-way between Horncastle and Spilsby, in a land of quiet villages, large fields, gray hillsides, and noble, tail-tow-ered churches, on a lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold, the pastoral hamlet of Somersby nestles, embosomed in trees." It is thus that the present Lord Tennyson makes mention of the place. There the poet was born in his father’s rectory. In 18S2 Lord Tennyson visited the old home, and when he returned told the poet that the trees had grown up, obscuring the view from the rectory, and that the house itself looked very desolate. All he answered was “Po")r little place!’’ Ho always spoke of it with an affectionate remembrance. The Tennysons loft Somersby in 1837, when they went to stay at High Beech, in Epping Forest. There they lived till 18-10. t