TENNYSON
DAYS WITH THE POETS
A Day with Tennyson
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go.
But I go on for ever."
Painting by E. W. Haslehust.THE BROOK.
A DAY WITH THE POET TENNYSON
·LONDON·
HODDER & STOUGHTON
In the same Series.
Longfellow.
Keats.
Browning
Wordsworth.
Burns.
Scott.
Byron.
Shelley.
A DAY WITH TENNYSON.
TENNYSON was no recluse. Heshunned society in the ordinaryLondon sense, but he welcomedkindred spirits to his beautifulhome, with large-hearted cordiality.To be acquainted withFarringford was in itself aliberal education. Farringford was an idealhome for a great poet. To begin with, itwas somewhat secluded and remote from theworld's ways, especially in the early 'fifties,when the Isle of Wight was much more of aterra incognita than traffic now permits. Onehad to travel down some hundred miles fromtown, cross from the quaint little New Forestport of Lymington to the still quainter little old-worldYarmouth—"a mediæval Venice," thepoet called it—and then drive some miles toFreshwater, before one attained the statelyloveliness of Farringford embowered in trees.
I watch the twilight falling brown
All around a careless-ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down."
* * * *
"Groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand;
And further on, the hoary Channel
Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand."
Lines to the Rev. F. D. Maurice.
The interior of the house—a very ancientone—was no less ideal than its outward aspect,"it was like a charmed palace, with greenwalks without and speaking walls within."And its occupants crowned all—the ethereallylovely mistress with her "tender spiritualface," and the master, tall, broad-shouldered,and massive, dark-eyed and dark-browed, hisvoice full of de