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. He shunned society in the ordinary London sense, but he welcomed kindred spirits to his beautiful home, with large-hearted cordiality. To be acquainted with Farringford was in itself a liberal education. Farringford was an ideal home for a great poet. To begin with, it was somewhat secluded and remote from the world's ways, especially in the early 'fifties, when the Isle of Wight was much more of a terra incognita than traffic now permits. One had to travel down some hundred miles from town, cross from the quaint little New Forest port of Lymington to the still quainter little old-world Yarmouth—"a mediæval Venice," the poet called it—and then drive some miles to Freshwater, before one attained the stately loveliness of Farringford embowered in trees.

The interior of the house—a very ancient one—was no less ideal than its outward aspect, "it was like a charmed palace, with green walks without and speaking walls within." And its occupants crowned all—the ethereally lovely mistress with her "tender spiritual face," and the master, tall, broad-shouldered, and massive, dark-eyed and dark-browed, his voice full of deep organ-tones and delicate inflections, his mind shaped to all fine issues. "The wisest man," said Thackeray, "that ever I knew."

Farringford was the ideal home of the great poet. "A charmed palace with green walks without,"

Painting by E. W. Haslehust.
FARRINGFORD.

Subject to slight inevitable variations, a certain method and routine governed the day of Tennyson. He had definite working-times, indoors and out, and accustomed habits of family life. The morning brought him letters from all parts of England: there was hardly any great man who did not desire to exchange salutations and discuss world-subjects with a thinker so far above the rest. The poet, with the prophetic soul of genius, had always been well in advance of his times.

The daily papers are somewhat late in reaching the Isle of Wight: but the poet could find inspiration even in a source so apparently prosaic as a Times column. He noted down some of those valiant and soul-stirring episodes which go unrecorded save by a passing paragraph: and the poem which, perhaps, has held the public fancy longest, the Charge of the Light Brigade, was written a few minutes after reading the Times' description of the battle containing the phrase "Someone had blundered."