There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.                                                            —Alfred Tennyson  Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) was a striking young man, standing over six feet tall and with a powerful physique. The mass of his somewhat unkempt black hair was set upon a noble head. His tanned face carried an intense expression of melancholy. The son of a gloomy Lincolnshire clergyman, he arrived at Cambridge University in 1827 already an accomplished and precocious poet. The Somersby rectory had been a dysfunctional household to say the least, with the eleven children largely left to amuse themselves by wandering…