Born, at Somersby, Lincs., 1808. Educated at Louth Grammar School till 1820; at home, 1820–28. Matric., Trin Coll., Camb., 1828; Bell Scholarship, 1828; B.A., 1832. Ordained Deacon, 1835. Curate of Tealby, 1835. Vicar of Grasby, Lincs., 1835–79. Married Louisa Sellwood, 1837. Took additional surname of Turner, on succeeding to estate of his great-uncle, 1838. Contrib. poems to “Macmillan’s Mag.,” 1860. Died, at Cheltenham, 25 April 1879. Works: “Poems by Two Brothers” (with Alfred and Frederick Tennyson), 1829; “Songs and Fugitive Pieces,” 1830; “Sonnets,” 1864; “Sonnets, Lyrics, and Translations,” 1873. Posthumous: “Collected Sonnets, old and new,” 1880.

Personal

	Midnight—in no midsummer tune
	The breakers lash the shores;
	The cuckoo of a joyless June
	Is calling out of doors.
	And thou hast vanish’d from thine own
	To that which looks like rest,
	True brother, only to be known
	By those who love thee best.
	Midnight—and joyless June gone by,
	And from the deluged park
	The cuckoo of a worse July
	Is calling thro’ the dark;
	But thou art silent underground,
	And o’er thee streams the rain,
	True poet, surely to be found
	When Truth is found again.

  His ideal was high, his opinion of himself low; he was not stimulated to self-assertion by any disputes or jealousies—if he ever thought ill of anybody but himself (which I doubt), he never acted upon the thought:—in such cases a sensitive mind will turn to self-criticism and fall into delusions; and as a foreign enemy is the best cure for internal dissension, it may well be that when he called in his genius to defend his creed, his old quarrel with it for want of originality was forgotten, and he consented to employ it again in its proper work…. He was a scholar, a reader, and, though not a great traveler, he had seen strange lands. His memory was well stored with classical imagery. The great events and great biographies of the past, the struggles of the nations and the victories of humanity in the present, and the hidden future of his country and his race, filled him with emotion, and inspired strains which will probably take place hereafter, many of them, among the memorable utterances of our time. He was always original; his thoughts and language, both, were always his own, whether they had been used by others or not; and his range was wide.

	With wreaths of love we crown thy natal day,
	Though thou hast vanished from thy fellow-men,
	The sweet voice silenced, and the ready pen,
	With all it might have painted, put away.
	Never again to us will light-winged lay
	New beauties waft, caught by the subtle ken,
	Nor to our longing ears ever again
	New music from thy cunning harp will stray.
	But still thy gentle presence seems to brood
	O’er the dim distance of the azure wold,
	O’er summer cornfield, and o’er lonely wood:
	Still in thy books communion I can hold
	With all that is most lovely, true, and good,
	And feel thy spirit stir me as of old.

  A mere obituary sketch scarcely admits of detail, otherwise many anecdotes might be told of his delight in his garden, of his fondness for his dogs, of his training his horses to obey his voice rather than rein or whip, and of his playful gentleness with children. No one, however, who reads his poems, can well fail to perceive the “alma beata e bella” breathing through them; and those who best knew him feel that in these he almost lives again as he was in his daily life. Yet, when I talked with him a year ago, nothing of what he had written seemed to me to represent in full measure that simplicity of the man—at once childlike and heroic.

  In reading the sonnets we can see him moving about in his parish, succouring the poor, consoling the sick, cheering the aged folk, and speaking kindly to the children; thinking, as he goes, of the news that had that day reached him from the great world, and with an eye ever open to new beauties and new phases of nature. One who knew Charles Tennyson well, could not help regarding Dr. Johnson’s Latin epigram on Parnell as especially applicable to him, and thus turned it into English verse, and wrote it in the fly-leaf of his sonnet-book:—

	“Poet and Priest alike, in neither least,
	In both complete, though far too meek to know it;
	For not the Poet’s sweetness lacks the Priest
	And not the Priestly holiness the Poet.”

The slightest incident, the most ordinary event of his daily life, is enough to stir his retiring muse; the first budding green of the spring, the later yellowing leaves of autumn still clinging to the trees, the harvest-field, the first note of cuckoo or nightingale, the coming of the swallows, the first ice in winter, the beautiful play of light through the lattice, the setting free of a prisoned bird, the impression made on his children by some new book,—these are his themes; and he treats them with such simplicity, grace, and occasional sustained beauty of phrase, never affected or overdone.

General

  In the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens, however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather a poet at all. Poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. But genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. Mr. Tennyson’s sonnets, such as I have seen, have many of the characteristic excellencies of those of Wordsworth and Southey.

  I read last month C. Tennyson Turner’s “Sonnets,” than which there are none in the language more beautiful in their sincerity and truth.

  The dominant charm of all these Sonnets is the pervading presence of the writer’s personality, never obtruded, but always impalpably diffused. The light of a devout, gentle, and kindly spirit, a delicate and graceful fancy, a keen, if not very broad, intelligence, irradiates their thoughts, while to the language in which they are condensed, Art lends a power that

	“Consolidates the flame,
	And keeps its colours, hardening to a gem.”

  I dare to say that Charles’s share in the volume of 1830, and his onward all-too-widely sundered and timidly-put-forth triplet of volumes, will satisfy whosoever cares to take pains to master them, that if he had elected to be Poet rather than Cleric, he might have run neck-to-neck in the glorious race and crown-winning of our Laureate. Nay, more. There are elements of poetic inspiration and motif in Charles, that the world had been the richer for had they been shared by Alfred; for where the younger brother is hazy and indefinite, and growingly inarticulate on the deepest facts and problems, the elder is open-eyed and clear-spoken, and that not professionally or because he is a parson, but from the inevitablenesses of his whole-brained, whole-hearted, though unclamorous godliness.

  Although strikingly original, both in subject and treatment, Mr. Turner’s muse cannot fail to suggest the piety, purity, and simplicity of Cowper; the deep, calm, reflective vein, with spirit analogies and teachings from nature, which is characteristic of Wordsworth; and also the condensation, felicitous epithet, and the exquisitely polished, careful art-finish of his brother—the poet laureate.

  Like Violets, I say: to be overlooked by the “madding Crowd,” but I believe to smell sweet and blossom when all the gaudy Growths now in fashion are faded and gone. He ought to be known in America—everywhere.

  Charles Turner has a clear and loving eye for outward Nature and her ways, but his bias was not towards the inner essence of her delicate idealism, nor was he enraptured into grave and mystic adoration in her venerable presence. He delighted in sunshine and shadow, he reflected on the singular powers of flying rain and tossing breeze, he was much with the sights and sounds of moorland and lea; but all these and their like were for him subordinate and instrumental, not so much guiding to ideal retreats and spiritual forces hidden away within and behind themselves, as co-operating with the individual soul towards the highest culture and the energies of pure Being. Nor is his attitude simply that of a moral disciplinarian or an ingenious artist of didactic allegories. To leave such an impression as that would be to entirely misrepresent the poet. His strength lies in that pure, healthy sentiment which depends on close and energetic association, and is illustrated rather in meditative gravity than in conclusive and axiomatic dogma. Undoubtedly there is a moral bias in these sonnets, but it never degenerates into monotonous advocacy or morbid appeal. Nature’s impressions on the poet’s mind are sharp and decisive, and they are invariably depicted so as to arrest and hold the reader; they are, moreover, inspiring and suggestive, and the feelings and reflections that arise out of them are natural and of pure and sterling quality.

  The graceful and finished compositions…. Reminding one of no other person in his own family or out of it.

  Charming, even permanently beautiful as many of his sonnet-stanzas are, their form cannot be admired: if we have been correct in considering the so-called pure types to be the true expression of certain metrical laws, then certainly these compositions of his are not sonnets, but only (to repeat Mr. Ashcroft Noble’s appropriate term for similar productions) sonnet-stanzas. The rhythm is much broken up, and the charm of assured expectancy is destroyed.

  He is delightfully single-minded, disinclined to any resource that may seem merely artistic or self-conscious. His mind is like a crystal to take the shape and colour of what is presented to it, and seen in that crystal all is transformed, beautified. He did not need to travel far—“to trundle back his soul a thousand years”—to find subjects for poetic treatment; the events, the sights, the scenes of every day, in his quiet rural parish, were enough. The book thus becomes a faithful mirror of a good man’s life, whose wealth of good will and charity are not exhausted in it. In few cases have poems been more directly written from the heart and personal feeling.

  Apart from the main stream of poetry, there were separate streams which represented distinct passages in the general movement. The “Sonnets” of Charles Tennyson Turner, which began in 1830, stand by their grace and tenderness at the head of a large production of poetry which describes with him the shy, sequestered, observant life of the English scholar and lover of nature, of country piety and country people.

  This poet’s sympathy was so gracious, so all-pervading, that it has dyed with its own colours not only the landscape with all its smaller features,—birds and flowers, but also the very tools of the labourer, the steam-thresher, the distant railway—the poet’s imagination not only personifying, but ensouling them with human life, under pressure of a strange personal energy. Henry Vaughan, two centuries before, has shown the same power, which is quite distinct from the gift of vivid description.

  Both as to fame, and probably as to his own productiveness, Charles Tennyson Turner was crushed, as it were, under his greater brother. He wrote little more, though he carefully revised and in some respects decidedly improved his sonnets. It is by virtue of them that he takes his place among English poets. They are graceful and sweet, but the substance is not always worthy of the form. They reveal everywhere the interests and the pursuits of the Vicar of Grasby, and they are honourable to his peaceful piety. It is evident that both Charles and Frederick Tennyson, and especially the latter, might have been disposed to adapt to themselves the humorous complaint of the second Duke of Wellington, and exclaim, “What can a man do with such a brother?”

  Like the only other master of the sonnet with whom he can be compared, Wordsworth, he wrote, or rather printed, too many for his fame. Some are on topics such as the questions at issue between orthodoxy and scepticism, which are wholly unfitted for declamatory treatment in the sonnet form, while others are of inadequate interest or workmanship. But when all deductions are made there remains a considerable body of sonnets of rare distinction for delicate and spiritual beauty, combined with real imagination.