Alfred Tennyson was born at Lincolnshire in 1809. In 1828 he wrote, with his brother, the “Poems by Two Brothers.” He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met his friend, Arthur Hallam, upon whose death he wrote “In Memoriam.” When Wordsworth died in 1850, the laureateship was given to Tennyson; later he was made a Baron. He died at Aldworth, on the Isle of Wight, in 1892, and has been given a place in Westminster Abbey near the grave of Chaucer. Other of his longer poems beside the one mentioned above are: “The Princess,” “Maud,” “Enoch Arden,” and the “Idyls of the King.”

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O, sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman’s boy
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on,
To the haven under the hill;
But O, for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O, sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.