S7^ LiSRA UNIVERSlTf OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO This book may be kept LJ ' ronPTFP-IM DAYS ^uKed for each •'' g:;^. Oversize TK r> c .\ %> _^J'_at'f< ■ /f //// //■)!>/ THE LAUREATES COUNT RT A Description - of Places connected with the Life of ALFRED LORD TENNYSON I ALFRED J. CHURCH, M.A. Lately Professor of Latin in University College, London WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWIXGS EDWARD HULL Wer den Dichter will verstelien Muss in Dichtevs Lande gehen Goethe LONDON SEELEY AND CO., LIMITED ESSEX STREET, STRAND 1891 Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, LONDON and BUNGAY. TO AUDREY GEORGIANA FLORENCE WIFE OF THE HONOURABLE HALLAM TENNYSON THIS BOOK IS BY PERMISSION DEDICATED CONTENTS I. Prefatory Words i II. Lincolnshire 3 III. SOMERSBY 8 IV. Bag Enderby 44 V. Louth 4S VI. Horncastle 54 VII. Te.alby S7 VIII. Bayons Manor 59 IX. Caistor ■ ^^ . X. Grasby 66 XI. The Lincolnshire Coast 7° XII. Cambridge 74 XIII. Shiplake 90 XIV. Freshwater 93 X\'. Farringford 95 XVI. Aldworth '°7 .^^ tt-- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS COPPER PLATES Portrait of Lord Tennyson, from a photo- graph by J. Mayall, by permission . Front. Tetford and the Lincolnshire Wolds ... 5 Somersby 11 Somersby Brook 15 Somersby Rectory ig Clevedon Church 37 Bag Enderby 45 Louth 49 Bayons Manor 61 The Lincolnshire Coast 71 Grantchester Mill 85 Farringford 97 Freshwater Down, from the Grounds of Farringford 101 St. Catherine's Head, from the Grounds of Farringford 105 Aldworth, Blackdown 109 VIGNETTES PAGE View from a Hill near Somersby .... 4 The Glen at Somersby 13 The Brook at Somersby 14 A Hump-backed Willow by the Brook . . 18 Gate of Somersby Rectory 21 Gable of Somersby Rectory 23 Somersby Church 25 The Cross in Somersby Churchyard ... 26 An Ancient Holy-Water Stoup, Somersby Church 27 Staircase in the Manor Farm, Somersby . 29 A Bridge on Somersby Brook 31 Clevedon, Somerset 36 Bag Enderby Church 44 A Fourteenth Century Font in Bag Enderby Church 47 The Old Grammar School at Louth ... 51 The Market-Place, Horncastle Tealby Church Bayons Manor Caistor Memorial Tablet in Grasby Church . . . Grasby Vicarage Grasby Church Corpus Buildings, Cambridge New Court of Trinity College, Cambridge Avenue of Trinity College, Cambridge . . Shiplake Church — Exterior Shiplake Church — Interior Freshwater Farringford The Dairy Farm, Farringford Aldworth 55 58 60 64 66 67 68 So 81 S3 90 91 94 96 99 107 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY PREFATORY WORDS " FiFTV years hence people will make pilgrimages to this place." These words were spoken by one young man to another some sixty years ago. The place was what was then the Rectory-house of Somersby parish in Lincolnshire ; the speaker was Arthur Hallam ; the person to whom he spoke was Alfred Tennyson. This prediction showed a peculiarly keen literary insight. That Alfred Tennyson was a poet any critic not wholly obtuse and incompetent could have seen even in those early days ; but that he should be one of the famous few whose birthplaces are objects of pilgrimage, it was scarcely given to any one but his friend to see. Just now, however, I am not concerned with the truth of the prophecy, or the insight of the prophet ; I would rather see in it an apology for all who are concerned in the production of this book, publisher, draughtsman and writer. Sixty years ago the profession of the "interviewer" had not been invented ; the passion of the public for seeing famous men, and some who are famous with a difference, had not come into being, at least had not a whole literature designed to satisfy it. But there has always been a desire, which, duly controlled, is a lawful desire, to know something of the surroundings among which great writers have grown up. This desire is especially strong where the great writer is a poet ; and can then btst justify its existence. One can think of famous books that are wholly detached from the circum- 2 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY stances amidst which they are written. Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, were epoch-making works ; but it would have been little better than idle curiosity in the student of science or history to make a pilgrimage to Grantham or Putney. The case is often, though not indeed always, different with great poems. Here the surroundings of the writer are part of the literary history of his work. That work is the expression of the man, and it is helpful, if it is not essential, to the full appreciation of it, to see and know something of the scenes amidst which the man's powers grew to their maturity, or when so matured, were exercised. The degree in which this knowledge of surroundings helps the student varies, of course, with different writers. Wordsworth represents one class. We lose much of his spirit if we have never seen, if not with our own eyes, at least with the eyes of another, Esthwaite Lake, and Hawkshead, and Grasmere, and Grisdale Tarn, and Rydal Water, and Helvellyn. Crabbe represents another. We can adequately appreciate him without knowing anything of where he was born or where he lived ; yet him too we seem to know the better, when we see the outward semblances of Aldborough, and Woodbridge, and Beccles. Lord Tennyson belongs indeed, so far as this matter is concerned, to the class of Crabbe, rather than to the class of Wordsworth. The part of his poetry that is interpreted to us, even in degree, by a knowledge of the surroundings of his life is comparatively small ; yet it is enough to give to such knowledge no little interest and value. " Literary history," says Mr. Edmund Gosse, in his article on the " Early Career of Robert Browning,"' " is a very different thing from personal history, and there are certain facts about the development of a poet's intellect, and the direction which it took, . . . about which curiosity is perfectly legitimate." This is the principle by which I shall endeavour to guide myself. I shall at least hope not to offend, if ever I pass the line, not always to be easily distinguished, that separates the literary from the personal. 1 Published originally in the Century Magazine, December, 1881 ; re-published, with additions, this year (1890), by Mr. T. Fisher Unwin. (The title-page bears his name ; but the work is an American publication.) LINCOLNSHIRE II LINCOLNSHIRE Fuller, quoted In the excellent Handbook for Lincolnshire^ lately published, says of Lincolnshire : " It is observable that as it equalled other shires in all ages, so it went before itself in one generation, viz., in the reign of Queen Elizabeth." The editor of the handbook excepts, indeed, from its superiority among English counties Devonshire, which also had its golden age in Elizabethan days, and Middlesex, which, as he justly remarks, does not afford a fair comparison. Out of the list of Lincolnshire worthies that he gives may be mentioned, Stephen Langton, William of Waynfleet, Arch- bishop Whitgift, John Wesley, Lord Burleigh, Dr. Busby, most famous of schoolmasters. Sir Isaac Newton, and Sir John Franklin. A not less imposing list of adopted sons might be made out, were it relevant to my purpose. Two causes among many that might be given for this pre-eminence may be mentioned — the great wealth of the county in the pre-manufacturing days of England, and the strong admixture of the vigorous Danish race with its population. Nowhere, if the evidence of local names is to be trusted, was the Scandinavian element stronger." This is said to be a potent factor in the generation of mental power. The popular idea of Lincolnshire is fairly well represented by the way 1 Handbook for Lincolnshire. London : John Murray, 1890. I must take exception, indeed, to the writer's criticism of Lord Tennyson's Lincolnshire dialect poems. These are written in the mid-Lincolnshire dialect, one that differs considerably from that spoken in the northern and southern parts of the county. 2 "One hundred and ninety-five places in the county, a third of the whole, end in the characteristic Danish termination by, and seventy-six more in thorpe. {Handbook for Lincolnshire). B 2 4 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY in which in Sir Walter Scott's novel of IVoodsiock the roystering cavalier in- troduces himself — " Roger Wildrake of Squattleseamere, in the moist county of Lincoln." As a matter of fact it is not a 7!!oist county at all, thanks to the energy and skill which have been liberally expended upon it during the last two centuries. The Feu and the Marsh ^ are as dry as most of England, so effective is the system of drainage which is at work throughout VU-M from n Hill near Somershy it, and dryer than some places on a more elevated level where nature has been left to itself. But there is a considerable part of the county which never could have been described as " moist " at all. Standing second in size of the English shires (it reckons 2,611 square miles as against the 6,067 of York- shire) it contains a large proportion of hilly country. The region with which we are at present concerned is a well-defined district known as the Wolds. This region occupies the central part of the Lindsey division 1 The broad distinction between these two kinds of land is this : " Fen " is land reclaimed from fresh water, and " marsh " land reclaimed from the sea or left by it (as at Pevensey in East Sussex and the region between Sandwich and the coast). 5n :* TETFORD yiND THE LINCOLNSHIRE WOLDS ^ t LINCOLNSHIRE 7 of the county, and runs in a direction which may be roughly described as north-north-west from ■ Spilsby to Barton, which is close to the southern shore of the H umber. Its extreme length is something less than fifty miles, its average breadth between seven and eight. The Wolds are chalk hills, and indeed may be said to be part of a great line which extends, though not continuously, from Scarborough to Salisbury Plain. For the most part, however, it is the subsoil only that is chalk. Above this lie many varieties of soil. Sometimes the rock crops up ; sometimes there is a sandy or flinty loam, scarcely fit for anything but rabbit-warrens ; elsewhere we find a mixture of clay, making, as at Barton-field, a mixture of remarkable richness. THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY III SOMERSBY Not far from the South-eastern extremity of this Wold country is the little village of Somersby. The nearest town to it is Horncastle, which is six miles to the south-west. Alford is about nine miles to the east, and Spilsby seven to the south-south-east. The gazetteer states that it contains 600 acres and a population of forty-three (a number which indicates a con- siderable decrease from the time of which I am about to speak). ^ Ecclesi- astically it is a rectory (united with Bag Enderby, of which more will be said hereafter) in the archdeaconry of Stow and diocese of Lincoln. To these benefices the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson was presented in 1808. He had graduated at St. John's College seven years before," and had married (August 6, 1805) Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, Vicar of Louth, Lincolnshire. (She died in 1865 in her eighty-fifth year.) It may be convenient to give at this place some particulars of Mr. Tennyson's descent. In this descent two lines are blended, the middle class line of the Tennysons, and the noble and even royal line of the D'Eyncourts. To speak first of the Tennysons. The earliest notice of them that has at present been found locates them at Holdernesse in Yorkshire, in the first half of the sixteenth century. The will of John Tennyson, of Ryall, in Holdernesse, in the county of York, directs that his body is to be buried in the Kirkgarth of All Hallows, in Skekelyng, and bequeaths to Margaret 1 In 1821 there were 62 inhabitants. ' He proceeded to the further degrees of M.A in 1805, and of LL. 1). in 1S13. SOMERSBY 9 his wife an oxyard of land and half a close called Stockett Close during widowhood. Bequests are made to various sons and daughters, one William among them. This William appears to have been Mayor of Holdernesse, for he is found leaving by will his " best mace " to his son John. Another of the sons of this William is described as Lancelot Tennyson of Preston, an interesting collocation of names, because it was to a Tennyson of Preston that the descendant of the D'Eyncourts was married. The D'Eyncourt descent is thus exhibited by Mr. Joseph Foster, by common consent, a most trustworthy genealogist' : John of Gaunt (fourth son of Edward III.), married Katharine Swynford (widow of Sir Otes Swinford, Knt.). The marriage was irregular, but the children of it were legitimated by Act of Parliament in the reign of Henry V., only without the rights of succession to the Crown. Following the line of descent we come to Edmund, Duke of Somerset, killed at the first battle of St. Alban's. From him the pedigree displays itself as follows — (i) His daughter Eleanor married Thomas Cary, of Chilton Folliott, in the county of Wilts. (2) Sir John Cary, of Thremball Priory, Essex, son of Thomas and Eleanor. (3) Sir Edward Cary, of Aldenham, Herts, son of Sir John Cary. (4) Anne, sixth daughter of Sir Edward Cary, married Sir Francis Leke, of Sutton, in the county of York, created Baron Deincourt in 1624. (5) Anne, eldest daughter of Sir Francis Leke, and Anne his wife, married Henry Hildyard, of Winestead, in the county of York, who died January, 1674. (6) Henry Hildyard, son of Henry Hildyard. (7) Christopher, son of Henry Hildyard (II.), married Jane, daughter of George Pitt (descended from Lionel, Duke of Clarence). (8) Dorothy, daughter of Christopher Hildyard, married George Clayton, Baltic merchant, of Great Grimsby. 1 The Royal Lineage of Our Noble a?id Gentle Families. By Joseph Foster. (Hatchards, 1887.) C n lo THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY (9) Elizabeth, daughter of George Clayton and Dorothy his wife, married Michael Tennyson of Preston, who died 1796. (10) George Tennyson, M.P., of Bayons Manor, in the county of Lincoln, married Mary, daughter of John Turner. Of this George Tennyson, George Clayton Tennyson, born at Market Rasen, December 10, 1778, was the elder son. The barony of Deincourt was the revival of an older peerage ; with this also the Tennysons are connected. The line of descent is as follows — (i) John, 1 2th Baron D'Eyncourt of Blankney {cifxa 141 5). (2) Alice, his daughter. Baroness D'Eyncourt, married William, Lord Lovel. (3) William, his son, married Alianore, Baroness Morley. (4) Alice Lovel, daughter of William and Alianore, married William (Lord Morley y«;Y nxoris). (5) Henry, son of Alice and William. (6) Henry (II.), son of Henry. (7) Edward, son of Henry (H.)- (8) William, son of Edward (Lord Monteagle, in right of his mother), the discoverer of the Gunpowder Plot. (9) Catherine, his daughter, married John, Earl Rivers. (10) Jane, their daughter, married George Pitt, and was the mother of Jane Pitt, who married, as may be seen by reference to the first genealogy, Christopher Hildyard. An interesting fact relating to the poet's descent may here be mentioned. His mother's mother (Mrs. Fytche) was a granddaughter of a certain Mons. Fauvelle, a French Huguenot, who was related to Madame de Maintenon. The most striking feature in the landscape of the parish of Somersby is a wooded ravine known as the " Glen," and also bearing the local name of Holywell. Nothing could less resemble the notion commonly entertained of Lincolnshire scenery than this spot. It is not unlike Fairlight,' on a small ^ Fairlight is two or three miles to the east of Hastings. X; SOMERSBr * C 2 SOMERSBY 13 scale. But happily it has not yet been trimmed and civilized to make it a pro- menade for visitors. There is no path through it, and any one who would penetrate from end to end will find rough walking. The little streams that run through it have made quagmires here and there, and the underwood is The Glen at Somersby thick. Here and there a tall pine has been suffered to lie where it fell. At the upper end of this glen are some sandstone rocks. Here we come across the first local association with the poet. On one of these rocks the young Alfred Tennyson — he was then some three months short of completing his fifteenth year — wrote Byron is Dead. We may suppose the time to have 14 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY been some day early in May, for Byron died on April 19th, 1824, and the news must have taken at least a fortnight in reaching this remote Lincoln- shire village. No one can wonder at the profound impression made by the event on the lad's mind. How profound it was may be gathered from his own description of his feeling as given to a friend^ long afterwards : " I thought the whole world was at an end ; I thought that everything was over The Brook at Sonursby and finished for every one, that nothing else mattered." And indeed Byron was more, or seemed more, to the youth of that time than any poet has ever been since to his contemporaries. But though the very earliest of Tenny- son's poems betray some signs of this influence, such signs soon cease to appear. All the work that is truly characteristic of him, all that he has deliberately adopted as his own, has absolutely nothing of Byron's style or tone of thought. The next thing to be mentioned is directly associated with 1 Miss Thackeray {Harper's Magazine, Christmas Number 1887). ^ SOMERSET BROOK • SOMERSBY 17 Tennyson's verse. At the lower end of the glen flows a brook, a pictur- esque little stream, showing many various beauties, as it makes its way, now- through woodland, now by meadow or ploughed land. But the reader must not identify it, as he will naturally be disposed to do, with the brook that has given a name to one of the poems published in the same volume with " Enoch Arden " and "Aylmer's Field." Of course there are points of resemblance between the brook of which the short-lived Edmund Aylmer sang ere he slept — " Not by the well-known stream and rustic spire. But unfamiliar Arno, and the dome Of Brunelleschi." There are " hazel covers " and " sweet forget-me-nots," and " many a silvery waterbreak above the golden gravel." The Somersby rivulet may say, as the " babbling brook " said to its questioner — " I chatter over stony ways. In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles. With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow. And many a fairy foreland set With willow-weed and mallow." But there are some things in its supposed prototype which manifestly it could not claim. It does not hurry down, for instance, by " thirty hills," for it soon makes its way into the low country, nor is there " a brimming river " for it to join. Finally, it cannot make at least one-half of the boast that it holds " Here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling." There may be, or anyhow have been, trout in the brook ; but scarcely a grayling. The grayling is not a Lincolnshire fish, except so far as Trent I) i8 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY numbers him among his thirty kinds.^ Even Trent, I imagine, holds the grayhng only in his upper waters. His stream, where he borders or divides Lincolnshire, is not congenial to the habits of the fish. This may seem hypercritical ; perhaps it would be were it said of some poets ; but it is one of the characteristics of Tennyson to be exact in all his treatment of nature. If it had been in his mind to describe this particular brook, we may be sure that he would not have made it flow by one hill too many, or placed a A Humf-hacked Willow by the Brook foreign fish in its waters. It is in the Ode to Memory, an early poem, that we find the actual Somersby stream. This is " The brook that loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves. Drawing into his narrow earthen urn. In every elbow and turn. The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland." ' A sufficiently absurd conjecture derives the name of Trent from the thirty (trente) species of fish which, it is said, are found in the waters of the river. r N: S0MERSB7^ RECTORT D 2 ^' SOMERSBY 21 This, it must not be forgotten, is one of the common memories to which the poet appeals in his address to his brother (Charles, doubtless), " For us the same cold streamlet curl'd Thro' all his eddying coves." Every syllable of this is true ; not less true is it that the poet bids the Memory which he invokes come, as from other objects familiar to the eyes of his childhood, " from the woods that belt the gray hill-side," and the trees in his father's garden, so '' chiefly ivom. the brook." For a child there is Gate of Somershy Kectory nothing like the fascination of a stream. Any one who will carefully search into his early associations will find the memories of running water, if only he has had the opportunity of acquiring them, the most vivid of all his recollections. But we have yet to see what is of course the most interesting spot in Somershy, the poet's actual birth-place. This is the house now known as the " Old Rectory." Here Mr. Tennyson took up his residence on being presented in 1808 to the united benefices of Somershy and Bag Enderby, and here, on August 5th, 1809, the poet was born. (The tradition which points 22 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY out one particular room— a very small one, by the way — as that in which he actually saw the light is, I have been given to understand, incorrect.) The house stands on the right-hand side of the road (I presume that the traveller will approach it from Horncastle). One misses at once a feature that a study of the Ode to Memory may have led us to expect, "The poplars four That stand beside my father's door." Not a vestige of these trees is left. They are always short-lived, and it will be remembered that three-fourths of a century have passed since the poet first saw them.^ The house, when Mr. Tennyson took possession of it, must have been somewhat smaller than the average English parsonage. He added to it, in the course of his occupation, a room of semi-ecclesiastical appearance, which the visitor- — visitors to Somersby have come to have the local name of " Tennysons "■ — will see on the left of the house. Pre- sumably he was his own architect, and he built before even professional architects knew much about the "Gothic" style which he endeavoured to imitate. The available space, too, was limited. The room is spacious and well-proportioned, and must have been a convenient addition to the accommodation of the house. He also built a large kitchen. Of one other room in the house some mention should be made. One of our sketches shows a window in the gable end. This marks the situation of the room which the young Tennyson had for his study or "den," and which may be regarded as the veritable birth-place of some of the Juvenilia, the earliest of the great artist's workshops, and serving the same purposes that the well-known rooms of Farringford and Aldworth have done in later years. There is an anecdote connected with this room which must not be omitted. It illustrates one side of the poet's character which careful 1 It is said that the first poplars planted in England — I speak of the lofty tree known as the Lombardy poplar — were those which many readers will recollect as one of the features in the landscape seen from the bridge of Henley-upon-Thames. Marshal Conway (1720^1795) ])lanted them, presumably about 1780. They were in their full glory about forty years ago. Now only one or two .stumps remain. SOMERSBY 23 students of his work will not have failed to discover. Sitting one nisfht in this room he heard an owl cry. He answered with the bird's peculiar "snore" ; the bird flew into the room. There it was kept, and there, in process of time, it became so tame that it would sit by its master and affectionately rub its beak against his face. It is impossible not to think, in connection with this anecdote, of the two songs in Juvenilia, which have the owl for their Gable of Somersby Rectory theme. The poet has kept a place for them among his " Works " while he has excluded more than one piece which most of his readers would probably have preferred to put there. May we guess that the choice has something to do with an affectionate remembrance of that favourite of sixty years ago ? In the second stanza of the second song he, curiously enough, disclaims, while he seems to practise, the imitative power. 24 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY " I would mock thy chaunt anew ; But I cannot mimick it ; Not a whit of thy tuwhoo Thee to woo to thy tuwhit, Thee to woo to thy tuwhit, With a lengthen'd loud halloo, Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuvvhoo-o-o." The poet's keen observation of nature is so obvious throughout his work that it has become one of the commonplaces of criticism to enlarge upon it. Every one knows the ashbuds black " in the front of March," and how the chestnut " divides three-fold to show the fruit within," and " the rosy plumelets tuft the larch," how dawn "raises the black republic on the elms," and how " The hedgehog underneath the plaintain bores. The rabbit fondles his own harmless face." and when there is keen observation there is pretty sure to be strong affec- tion. It is not difficult to understand how the poet whose heart goes out so strongly to bird and beast could tame that not very tameable creature the owl. It may not, I hope, be " impertinent," in either sense of the word, to mention that the poet has the gift of imitating the cries of animals with remarkable accuracy. Though the " poplars four " are gone, and the " towering sycamore " has followed them, yet the " seven elms," mentioned along with them in the passage quoted from the Ode to Memory, still remain. They are in the garden behind the house, on the left-hand side as one looks down it from the windows, the same " Witch elms that counterchangc the floor Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright." The rest of the garden, though, it may be, a little idealized, one may see in the " Garden bower'd close With plaited alleys of the trailing rose. Long alleys falling down to twilight grots. Or opening upon level plots Of crowned lilies, standing near Purple-spiked lavender." SOMERSBY 25 It has been greatly altered by successive occupants. The shape of the lawn has been changed ; in fact little remains but the trees. It may be explained that the house is no longer the rectory of the parish. By an arrangement made through the Ecclesiastical Commissioners it has become the property of the Lord of the Manor, who has given in exchange a house situated in the parish of Bag Enderby. From the rectory we naturally pass to the church. This is a small building in the Early Perpendicular style. It consists of a very squat tower, a nave with a north aisle, and a chancel. The material is of sand- stone, which has been largely repaired with brick. The interior is dis- tinctly uninteresting. It has been restored in the "correct and elegant" style which commended itself to church architects some forty years ago. Its neat pavement of encaustic tiles, though these are not very har- moniously coloured, and open seats of indifferent design, must have been, in one way, an improvement on the uneven flags and high pews which they superseded ; but they have a very dull and monotonous appearance : and in the eyes of the visitor they have the disadvantage of being 26 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY obviously more recent than the period which specially interests him There is one wall monument. It is to the memory of Mrs. Katharine Burton and her husband Richard Burton, citizen of London. It belongs to the middle of the last century. The Burtons are still lords of the manors of Somersby and Bag Enderby. The exterior of the church and churchyard present some more noteworthy objects. Over the south porch The Cross in Somcrshy Churchyard there is a sundial with the inscription, in seventeenth-century letters, I should imagine, of Time Passcth, and on the north side may be seen a holy-water stoup, while within a short distance rises a very remarkable Roman preaching cross. It consists of a well-proportioned octagonal shaft, placed on a plain cubical stone pedestal, and surmounted by a crucifix. There are, I believe, very few of the kind in England. Those that escaped the destroyer in the days of the Edwardian and Elizabethan Reformations fell victims to the fiercer iconoclasm which, in the times of the Commonwealth, swept out of England all "idolatrous" symbols. Happy Somersby seems to have been in a measure untouched by either wave of change ; and it is not difficult, so quiet is the place and so remote, to understand this exemption. SOMERSBY 27 A little to the west of the tower is the tomb of the poet's father. It is a fiat stone inclosed with high railinofs, and bears the followinof inscription : — TO THE MEMORY OF THE REVEREND GEORGE CLAYTON TENNYSON, LL.D. ELDEST SON OF GEORGE TENNYSON, ESQ., OF BAYONS MANOR, AND RECTOR OF THIS PARISH OF BAG ENDERBY AND BENNIWORTH AND VICAR OF GREAT GRIMSBY IN THIS COUNTY. HE DEPARTED THIS LIFE ON THE i6tH DAY OF MARCH, 1831, AGED FIFTY-TWO YEARS. Among the other gravestones there is only one which belongs to the time of Dr. Tennyson's incumbency. This bears the name of Anne ") I Jfn ^"'••CiCii/if , - (H<>'^) Uj^1«5^' 3;;i fe.J^,-C m BATONS MANOR BAYONS MANOR 63 large and well proportioned, with an open roof, and a music gallery at one end, is the principal feature. There is also a spacious library. Both these are, of course, modern. The actual connection of the poet is with the rooms of the old house. One of these is shown as the chamber which he was accustomed to occupy when he visited his grandfather. An anecdote has been preserved which shows that the old man knew, but did not highly appreciate, his grandson's poetical gifts. He was told, "Your grandson Alfred has made a volume of poems," and replied, " I had sooner have heard that he had made a wheelbarrow." That the house was the birthplace of some of Alfred Tennyson's early poems is certain. Quite recently a paper was discovered in his handwriting containing a translation from Homer into English verse, and there is a tradition of a summer-house the walls of which were covered by scribblings of his pencil. Unfortunately these graffiti, to use the word applied to one of the most interesting of the Pompeian antiquities, were obliterated by the village painter. A brief account of the possessors of Bayons Manor may be found interesting. From George Tennyson it passed, as has been said, to Charles, his younger son. He was then fifty-one years of age, and had sat in Parliament for Great Grimsby, Bletchingly, and Stamford, defeating at this last place a great county magnate in the person of Colonel Chaplin. He had distinguished himself as an ardent advocate for Parliamentary reform, being one of the promoters of the Bill for the disfranchisement of East Retford, with which the battle was, so to speak, opened. After the passing of the Reform Bill of 1S32, he sat for Lambeth, retiring from the representation in 1852. In the year of his succession to the inheritance of Bayons Manor he took, by Royal license, the name of d'Eyncourt. Dying in 1 861, he was succeeded by his son, George Hildyard Tennyson d'Eyncourt, born in 1809. On his death in 1871 the inheritance passed to his brother, Edwin Clayton, Admiral R.N. It has recently been transferred by a family arrangement to the third son, Louis Charles, police magistrate at Westminster, 1851-1890. 64 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY IX CAISTwR Caistor, approached from Moortown on the Lincohi, Cleethorpe, and Hull branch of the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Railway, is one of the oldest towns in Lincolnshire. It has a fine church, built within the site of an ancient fortress, and containing in the lower part of its tower and Co_,r„. Mi,»&T->ta Caiilor in the arch opening into the nave some undoubted remains of Saxon work. Originally a stronghold of the Britons, it became a Roman station. Some remains of the wall may still be seen. From our present point of view the most interesting thing in the town is a house of the Georgian period, which stands in the market-place, and of which a picture is given. This was for many years the residence of the Rev. Samuel Turner, a great-uncle of the CAISTOR 6s poet.^ Charles, as we shall see, was his favourite nephew, and both Charles and Alfred were not unfrequently his guests. An interestinof anecdote has been told me of an occurrence which might have curiously changed the future. The grandfather and grand- mother of the poet had been sitting in their courting days on the curb- stone in front of the Caistor house. A few moments after they rose a huge coping stone fell from the roof on to the very place. Mr. Turner, whose portrait still hangs on the walls of his house, was a clergyman of the old school. In his day (he died in 1833 at the age of seventy-nine), every clergyman, if he was lucky enough to find patrons, was a pluralist, and parishes were frequently content with a fortnightly or even a monthly service. Mr. Turner was Vicar of Grasby, Rector of Rothwell, and held besides the curacy of Caistor, where he resided." He left his property to his great-nephew Charles, of whom something will be said in the following chapter. 1 The poet's grandfather, George Tennyson, married Mary, the daughter of John Turner. Samuel Turner was a son of this John Turner. 2 A story is told of one of these many-cured Lincolnshire parsons, a divine who was probably a neighbour and contemporary of Samuel Turner. He had added a fresh curacy to sundry charges which he already held. It was the curacy of a particularly inaccessible village on the southern bank of tlie Humber, and its new parson found it convenient to intermit even the very rare services which it had been customary to hold there. For a whole winter the church remained unserved. This came to the ears of the Bishop, and he, though bishops were longsuffering in those days, felt it to be his duty to remonstrate. " My lord," said the curate, when summoned to the episcopal presence, " no harm can have been done, for I am sure that the Devil himself could not get to X in the winter." K 66 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY X GRASBY On the south wall of the chancel of Grasby Church is a memorial tablet of white marble — its design copied from one to be found in the Roman Catacombs — which we here engrave. ^■M-i^Va>«vas^^kAASsa>^AjA'.^£SSaSaja- i &2 VICAR«»PATRONop GRA5BV D1 ED ArwL oa*^ m3 . ' TftUE POET SURELf TO BE. FOUND WHEN TRVTH IS FOUND AGAIN " MI3 WIFE. DIED MAY 20" \B79. " MORE THAN CONQUERORS TBRDUCH HIPfl THAT tOVED US " ;;t their own expense thev built the vicarage schools, and RttUItT THE CHURCH . THEY REST "WITH CHAR.LOTr6 TE-NNtSOH IN THE. CEMtTERY AT CHELTENHAM , SI^^SS^^ S^ Grasby, a pleasant little village on the western, or, to speak more accurately, the south-western slope of the Wolds, was for more than forty years the home of Charles Tennyson Turner. Some mention has already been made of him,' but the history of one who was so closely connected with Alfred Tennyson's intellectual life may well have a further notice. Charles Tennyson graduated in 1832, and took orders in 1835. Three years later he had succeeded to the inheritance of his great-uncle, Samuel Turner of Caistor, and, fulfilling a condition of his inheritance, had taken the additional name of Turner. For a time he was Curate of Tealby," and in 1836 became Vicar of Grasby, the advowson of the living having been part of the property which had come to him from his great-uncle. The reader has learnt from the memorial inscription an outline of what Charles Turner did for the parish which, with an interval of compulsory absence caused by illness, he made his home from youth to old age. Many clergymen have done as much, though scarcely with the same open- ^ Sec pp. 52 et seq. - See p. 57. GRASBY 67 handed generosity ; ' but very few have left behind them such a name for all that is good and gracious. Mr. Turner published a volume of Sounds in 1830, and another in 1864, a volume entitled Small Tableaux in 1868, and another, Sonne/ s, Lyrics, and Translations, in 1873. The year after his death, a volume of Collected Sonnets, Old and New (Macmillan), appeared with an introductory Grasby VUnrage essay by James Spedding, who had been one of his contemporaries at Cambridge (James Spedding graduated in 183 1), edited by his nephew Hallam Tennyson. These sonnets, though not formed on the strict sonnet model,' are 1 The story of the rebuilding of the church may be told as a sample of what was Mr. Turner's habitual temper. He had been induced, very much against his will, to take proceed- ings against an agent who had for some time managed his property, and had not, as Mr. Turner's friends believed, duly accounted for the proceeds. He was successful in his suit, and recovered the sum of _;^3,ooo. This he devoted to the rebuilding of the church, which indeed is practically a new edifice, though the architect has preserved the Early English pillars between the nave and the north aisle, and an arch with dog-tooth ornament over the south doorway. It should be said that he spent much more than the ;£,'3,ooo. 2 They are not entirely uniform, but it may be said generally of them that the rhymes arc less elaborate. The orthodox sonnet has two quadruple and two trijile rhymes. Mr. Turner's, for the most part, four double and two triple rhymes ; sometimes they .consist wholly of double rhymes. K 2 68 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY often singularly happy, and have all the exquisite finish and unity of thought which befit this kind of poem. They are full of the associations of Grasby — the willow which he had set for a rose-prop in his garden, and which had grown almost unawares into a tall tree ; * the nightingales which he intro- i^mmm'W^xs^-^^ Grasby Church duced into the place, and had the satisfaction of acclimatizing ; the school feast, which makes him think how, " ere a new feast-day shall shine," "Another head in childhood's cause may plot. Another Pastor muse in this same spot;" the church clock striking the hour o( noon, and which he loves because " it tells us boldly how we pass away," are some of the things which he commemorates in verse which shows the quick eye and tender heart of a true lover of nature. One sonnet I may venture to quote because it happily exemplifies both his feeling and his art — 1 A characteristic story is told of Chades Turner's love of trees. Just outside the larder may be seen the stump of what must have been a splendid specimen of the willow. He paid jQio to the owner of the tree on the condition that it should not be cut down in his lifetime. &^ GRASBY THE OAK AND THE HILL. " When the storm fell'd our oak, and thou, fair wold, Wert seen beyond it, we were slow to take The lesson taught, for our old neighbour's sake. We thought thy distant presence wan and cold, And gave thee no warm welcome ; for whene'er We tried to dream him back into his place, Where late he stood a giant of his race, 'Twas but to lift an eye, and thou wert there, His sad remembrancer, the monument That told us he was gone ; but thou hast blent Thy beauty with our love so long and well. That in all future griefs we may foretell Some lurking good behind each seeming ill. Beyond each fallen tree some fair blue hill." The community of feeling and experience between the brothers Charles and Alfred is beautifully described in /« IMcmoriaiu, Lx.xix. : — " ' More than my brothers are to me,' — Let this not vex thee, noble heart ! I know thee of what force thou art To hold the costliest love in fee. " But thou and I are one in kind. As moulded like in Nature's mint ; And hill and wood and field did print The same sweet forms on either mind. " For us the same cold streamlet curl'd Thro' all his eddying coves ; the same All winds that roam the twilight came. In whispers of the beauteous world. " At one dear knee we proffer'd vows. One lesson from one book we learn'd Ere childhood's flaxen ringlet turn'd To black and brown on kindred brows." More than forty years afterwards we have the last expression of this life-long affection. The poem, prefixed to the Collected Sonnets, is dated "Midnight, June 30th, 1879," when time had made it possible, we may suppose, for the survivor to give words to the sorrow that had been in his heart, and to the thought of what they had been to each other — " When all my griefs' were shared with thee, And all my hopes were thine." , 70 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY XI THE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST The Lincolnshire coast, in common with the greater part of that which stretches between the Humber and the Thames, is tame and uninteresting. None of the few spots which break the monotony of the eastern sea-board of England lie within its borders. It has nothing to show like Cromer, jutting boldly out into the sea ; or Dunwich, with its fine background of moorland, and its tradition of a great past, when it was the seat of the East Anglian Bishops. The shore of Holland, the southernmost division of the county, consists of vast mud-flats, which might be turned into corn-land, only that corn -land, in these days, does not repay the cost of cultivation, much less of reclamation. This almost inaccessible region past, villages begin to dot the shore. Some of these, as Skegness, and Sutton-on-the-Sea, and Mablethorpe, and Cleethorpes, have been enlarged by modern enter- prise into watering-places which are popular, if not fashionable. They have the merit of being easily accessible from the midland towns, but, beyond the fresh breezes from the sea, scarcely any other attraction. Whatever charm the coast with its monotonous sand-hills and its dull colourless waters may possess is a charm largely dependent upon solitude. There are places which even a crowd cannot spoil, but such a sj^ot as that which is represented in our picture would not attract either the artist or the lover of scenery were it peopled with a crowd of miscellaneous visitors. But the lonely stretches even of this dull shore are not without a certain beauty. Whether there is sunshine to bring out the yellow of the sand and the blue-green of the sea-holly, or the more suitable accompaniments ^ e<^ rUE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST ^ THE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST ji of a roaring wind and low scudding clouds, there is something to impress us, though it appeals rather, it may be said, to the imagination than to the eye. Here we may find the originals of "the sandy tracts, And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts." And here certainly, "The drain-cut levels of the marshy lea — Gray sandbanks and pale sunsets, — dreary wind. Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy clouded sea ! " It is needless to connect our picture with any particular spot, but it may be noted that Somersby is something less than fifteen miles from the sea. The nearest spot on the coast would even now be found sufficiently solitary ; and Mablethorpe, where a house is shown as having been that in which the poet's family sometimes spent a few weeks in the summer, was not thronged sixty years ago with the crowd which the railways now discharge into it. 74 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY XII CAMBRIDGE In October, 1828, as has been already said, Tennyson went up to reside at Trinity College, Cambridge. He had been previously entered as a "pensioner"^ on November 9th, 1827. His two elder brothers were already in residence ; and there was a fourth Tennyson, a cousin, also at Cambridge. The tutor to whom both Charles and Alfred Tennyson were assigned - was William Whewell, afterwards Master of the College. Whewell had then been recently elected to the Professorship of Mineralogy. The college books show that Alfred Tennyson came up too late in the Michaelmas term of the academical year 1828-29 ^o keep the six weeks of residence required, and that he resided for the whole of the academical year 1829-30, and for the first term of the next, 1830-31, leaving college about the end of February. This premature departure from the University, which, it will be seen, he left without graduating, was due to his father's death. Frederick and Charles graduated in 1832. Though Alfred Tennyson's academical career was incomplete it was not undistinguished. For the honours to be won in the University exam- inations, the Mathematical and the Classical Tripos, he and his immediate 1 It may be as well to explain, for the benefit of such of my readers as are not acquainted with academical terms, that undergraduates were entered under the three designations of fellow- commoners, pensioners, and sizars. A fellow-commoner was, so to speak, a superior being, who, in consideration of larger payments, enjoyed certain privileges, such as dining at the high, or Fellows' table. A sizar, on the other hand, was a poor student, who received certain emolu- ments from the college, and so had his expenses reduced below the average standard. The pensioner was an ordinary student ; paying the usual fees, and receiving no allowances. In describing the present condition of things a fourth designation, " scholar," would have to be added. The scholars at the time of which I am writing were elected from undergraduates, pensioners or sizars, actually in residence. This indeed is still the case with the scholars jjroper, but minor scholars, as they are called, are now chosen by open competition from candi- dates presenting themselves from schools, &c. ^ Every student entering the college is assigned to a tutor, who exercises a certain supervision over his course of study, his expenditure, and conduct in general. CAMBRIDGE 75 friends seem to have had Httle ambition. Most of them were content with an ordinary, or, as it was then called, a " poll " ' degree. The only other distinctions to be won were the University prizes and scholarships. Charles was bracketed with the successful Bell scholars, on account of his admir- able classical papers (the mathematics he did not touch) : the prize for a Greek ode was obtained by Frederick Tennyson in 1828, and in 1829 Alfred obtained the Chancellor's Medal for English verse, the subject of his poem being Tiiiibncioo. At that time Africa was as much " in the air " as it is now. The exploits of a series of intrepid explorers, among whom may be mentioned Houghton, Mungo Park, Denham, Clapperton, and the Landers, had excited the public interest. Timbuctoo, which had long been the Ultima Tlmle of African discovery, had been recently visited for the first time by a young Frenchman. The poet tells a curious story of the way in which this English verse prize came to be won. His father imagined, not, it may be, wholly without reason, that his son was doing very little at the University, and knowing that he had a certain gift for writing verse, told him that he ought to compete for the Chancellor's Medal. Alfred Tennyson had composed, two years before, a poem on the Battle of Armageddon. This he took, furnished it with a new beginning and a new end, and sent it in for the theme of Timbuctoo. Timbuctoo was written in blank verse. This was a darino; innovation on academical traditions. The prize, founded in 1813 by the Duke of Gloucester, then Chancellor of the University, had always before been adjudged to a poem written in the orthodox heroic couplet. Against blank verse in particular, so easy to write badly, so difficult to write well, 1 From the Greek 01 iroWot', " the many." Candidates who passed the examination for an ordi- nary degree were arranged in order of merit in a long Hst which was known by the name of the Poll. To be " Captain of the Poll," that is, first in this list, was held to be a distinction of some value. Honours could be obtained in Mathematics and Classics (the honours in Law were never held in any account), but no one was allowed to compete in Classics except he had previously taken honours in Mathematics. ■jG THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY there was a strong and not ill-founded prejudice, and it says mucli for the vigour and originality of the poem, and it is only fair to add, for the liberal and open-minded temper of the examiners,' that the metre was not considered a disqualification. I have thought it right not to quote from, or even to mention by name, any poem which Lord Tennyson's mature judgment has not thought proper to include in the later collections of his works. This, it must be owned, is somewhat of a self-denying ordinance. Not only has the severe taste of the author rejected much that most readers would probably agree in thinking very good, but there is also a natural, and, we may say, not illegitimate, interest in observing how practice betters the work even of a supremely skilful workman. Still, in such a matter the wish of the author ought to be final. A prize poem, however, seems to stand on a somewhat different footing. By the very nature of the case it has been given to the world beyond recall. It has become a part of academical history. It Is one of the notes which indicate the thought and culture of the time. The writer, one may safely say, would not wish, even if he were able, to take it from its place In the records of the University, even If he does not choose to include it in his works. The poet's treatment of his theme Is singularly bold, and offers a remarkable contrast to the rhetoric, sometimes elevated but always conventional, of the exercises which are commonly honoured with academical prizes. In this boldness, showing as it does the real touch of genius, and, not unfrequently, in the stately music of the verse, we see the great poet of the future. The subject was one which, handled by a versifier of ordinary powers, might easily have been made dull and unpoetlcal. The special danger would be in dwelling on the details of African travel or African scenery — matters of which, as has been said, the publications of the day were very full. This danger the poet wholly escapes, lifting his subject on to a quite 1 Their names, which it seems only an act of justice to give, were Thomas Crick, Fellow ot' St. John's, who succeeded Christopher Wordsworth in the office of Public Orator (1836), Edward Baines, Fellow of Christ's, Julius Charles Hare, and Connop 'rhirlwall. CAMBRIDGE -jj different plane of thought. The central idea of the poem may be said to be the relation of Fable and Truth. The poet, standing on "the mountain which o'erlooks The narrow sea whose rapid interval Parts Afric from green Europe," muses on the great legends of the past, such as were those that had pictured Atalantis and " Imperial Eldorado, roofed with gold," and asks — "Wide Afric, doth thy Sun Lighten, thy hills enfold, a city as fair As those which starred the night o' the elder world ? " He is answered by a Spirit who opens the eyes of his soul, till "each failing sense. As with a momentary flash of light. Grew thrillingly distinct and keen." " I saw," he goes on, " The smallest grain that dappled the dark earth, The indistinctest atom in deep air, The moon's white cities, and the opal width Of her small glowing lakes, her silver heights Ur.visited with dew of vagrant cloud. And the unsounded, undescended depth Of her black billows." Among the glories thus revealed to him is the sight of the great African city — " Within the South methought I saw A wilderness of spires and chrystal pile Of rampart upon rampart, dome on dome, Illimitable range of battlement On battlement, and the Imperial height Of canopy o'er-canopied. ' 78 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY Finally, the Spirit explains the secret of his being : — " I am the Spirit, The permeating Hfe which courseth through All th' intricate and labyrinthine veins Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread With growth of shadowing leaf and clusters rare, Reacheth to every corner under heaven, Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth." But the time was near when this the Spirit's latest throne would have to be yielded up to '" keen discovery " : — "Soon yon brilliant towers Shall darken with the waving of the wand ; Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts. Black specks amidst a waste of dreary sand, Low-built, mud-walled barbarian settlements." Who were the competitors who had to yield the prize to this composi- tion we have no means of knowing, except, indeed, in the case of one name. Arthur Hallam sent in an exercise written in the terza rinia which his study of the Tuscan poets, already, as we may conjecture, commenced, had made familiar to him. It will be interesting to compare with the extracts from the successful poem already given a specimen of Hallam's com- position : — " Thy palaces and pleasure-domes to me Are matter of strange thought ; for sure thou art A splendour in the wild ; and aye to thee Did visible guardians of the Earth's great heart Bring their choice tributes culled from many a mine — Diamond, and jasper, porphyr}', and the art Of figured chrysolite : nor silver shrine There wanted, nor the mightier power of gold. " So wert thou reared of yore, City divine. And who arc they, of blisses manifold, That dwelt within thee ^ Spirits of delight, It may be spirits whose pure thoughts enfold Some eminence of Being, all the light That interpenetrates this mighty all, And doth endure in its own beauty's sight. And oh ! the vision was majestical." CAMBRIDGE 79 Timbuctoo received a few weeks after its publication a remarkable notice in the Athenauni. This was written by John Sterling, and is worth quoting : — • "We have accustomed ourselves to think, perhaps without any very good reason, that poetry was hkely to perish among us for a very considerable period after the great generation of poets which is now passing away. The age seems determined to contradict us, and that in the most decided manner, for it has put forth poetry by a young man, and that where we should least expect to find it — in a prize poem. These productions have often been ingenious and elegant, but we have never before seen one which indicated really first-rate poetic genius, and which would have done honour to any man that ever wrote. Such we do not hesitate to affirm is the little work before us, and the examiners seem to have felt about it like ourselves, for they have assigned the prize to its author, although the measure in which he writes was never before (we believe) thus selected for honour." The reviewer then quotes some forty lines — the verses already given, ^ beginning " The smallest grain," being among them — and he adds, " How many men have lived for a century that could equal that } " The writer of this notice was, it should be said, acquainted with the author of Tiuibjictoo, and had some private knowledge of his powers, which were already remarkable. Still, his critical insight, and the courage with which he pronounces an opinion that must have seemed somewhat extrava- gant at the time, are noteworthy. Some names that afterwards became eminent were already included in the list of winners of the prize. Macaulay, Praed, and Christopher Wordsworth (this last an elder contemporary of the poet, coming up in 1826 and graduating in 1830) had gained it twice, and Lytton Bulwer (after Lord Lytton) once. But, however creditable their exercises, no one had ever thought of saying of them that they had but seldom been equalled for a century. Timbuctoo, perhaps, is rather a spes than a res^- but it was an instance of remarkable critical sagacity to discern the future in the present. Tennyson never "kept," as the local term has it, or resided, to use ' See page 77. - " Difficile est laudarc puerum," says Cicero, " non enim res sed spes est." So THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY ordinary language, within the college walls. He lodged' in one of a row of houses known as Corpus Buildings, from their proximity to the college of that name. There is no reference to this place in any of the poems, but in the eighty-seventh poem of /;/ Memoriam is the lociis Corpus BitiiiHngSy Cambridge classiciis which describes the visit paid by the poet to his old college, and especially to the rooms once tenanted by his friend Arthur Hallam : — " I past beside the reverend walls In which of old I wore the gown ; I roved at random thro' the town, And saw the tumult of the halls ; " And heard once more in college fanes The storm their high-built organs make, And thunder-music, rolling, shake The prophets blazon'd on the panes ; " And caught once more the distant shout, The measured pulse of racing oars Among the willows ; paced the shores And many a bridge, and all about ^ A considerable proportion of the Trinity undergraduates have always lodged outside the college ; " always," that is, since the University recovered from the depression caused by the long war with France. Its actual nadir was in 1775, when the number of matriculations sank to 121 ; but in 1804 it was only 128, and during the twelve years 1794-1805 the average was 153. CAMBRIDGE 8i " The same gray flats again, and felt The same, but not the same ; and last Up that long walk of limes I past To see the rooms in which he dwelt." ' " The rooms in which he dwelt " are on the west side of the New Court, looking into the quadrangle on the one side, and having a prospect, on the other, of the "long walk of limes." The " New Court " was in those days NrM Court of Trinity College, Cambridge really new, for it had been opened only five years before ; opened, it may be said in passing, with festivities that were ludicrously marred by a quarrel between the " dons " and the undergraduates.^ 1 There was to be a grand banquet in Hall, at which all the college were to be present. But it seemed good to the authorities that the undergraduates should not be permitted to stay and hear the speeches. The undergraduates resented this exclusion, somewhat perversely, one might say, as they cannot be supposed to have had any special eagerness to listen to their teachers. Doubtless they resented the supposed imputation on their good manners. Anyhow they absented themselves with one consent from the feast, and the speakers of the evening were without a "gallery." M 82 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY The poet found a noisy wine party going on within the place where, as he says, " once we held debate, a band Of youthful friends, on mind and art. And labour, and the changing mart, And all the framework of the land." This "band of youthful friends" was, in fact, a small literary and debating society, that called itself the Twelve Apostles. It was a certain distinction to be made a member of it. Henry Alford records with pride in his diary that he had been " elected an Apostle," and when he sums up the academical successes of the year he reckons this among them. I have not been able to recover the names of the " Apostles " ; but some among the poet's contemporaries may be mentioned. There was W. H. Brookfield, the " Old Brooks," whom he addresses in that pathetic sonnet of which I may quote a few lines : — " How oft we two have heard St. Mary's chimes, How oft the Cantab supper, host and guest. Would echo helpless laughter to your jest! How oft with him we paced that walk of limes, Him, the lost sight of those dawn-golden times, \\' ho loved you well I " Francis Garden, afterwards sub-Dean of the Chapels Royal ; A. W. King- lake, the author of Eothcn, and the historian of the Crimean War ; Richard Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton ; Richard Chenevix Trench, Dean of Westminster and Archbishop of Dublin ; and William Hepworth Thompson, who succeeded Whewell in the Mastership of Trinity. The "long walk of limes," shown in our picture, is one of the most picturesque features of that most picturesque region, popularly known as the " Backs," ' one of the special glories of Cambridge, and an effective weapon in that never-to-be-decided controversy touching the relative beauty of the two University towns. The walk is divided by one of the " many bridges " across the Cam ; the others being a very ugly building known as the " Town Bridge," the Bridge of Clare College, a handsome Renaissance ^ " The Backs," i.e. of the colleges, especially Trinity, St. John's, Clare, and King's. CAMBRIDGE 83 structure, adorned with stone spheres, one of which, says a local prophecy, will fall into the river when Clare has another Senior Wrangler,' and King's Bridge. Beyond the bridge it extends to the Fellows' Garden, well known as the Roundabout.^ In the distance a Church tower could formerly be seen, an Avittue of Trinity Collegf, Cambridge object which gave rise to Person's famous bon-7not, that the walk resembled the life of a Trinity Fellow — a long line with a church (by which, of course, lie meant a college living) at the end. The church is not now visible through the trees, as indeed it may be said to have disappeared from the prospect 1 The last was in 1760. The prophecy is obviously one of the kind that fulfils itself. - The name had its origin in the configuration of the ground. The central portion did not belong to the college, and the garden itself was a circular strip of land round it. The garden now includes the whole plot. M 2 84 , THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY of a Trinity Fellow. It is very seldom nowadays that a Fellow avails him- self of the college patronage ; indeed, very few of the number are in orders. The walk and its surroundings are somewhat changed from what they were sixty years ago. The trees, which must have then been in their prime, begin to show the signs of decay. In another sixty years, if the ground has not been meanwhile laid out in allotments, the avenue will have given place to the successor which has been prudently provided, but which will scarcely equal it in beauty. Though there are none of the loca sacra of Trinity that are connected with Tennyson himself, the college has not, of course, been forgetful of one of the greatest of its alumni. It has made him an Honorary Fellow; among the busts of famous men that adorn its magnificent library is one of the poet executed in 1857 by Thomas Woolner ; and on one of the library shelves is as curious a token of respect as an admirer ever paid to the genius of a favourite author. This is a handsome volume, elegantly bound and adorned with some really excellent illustrations. The Idylls of the King {in Shorthand), by Arthur G. Doughty. The book comes from across the Atlantic, having been produced at the Dominion Illustrated Press in Toronto. One more Cambridge locality remains to be briefly noticed. Among what may be called the genre pictures given us in Lord Tennyson's poetry, there is not one that has given more universal pleasure ^ than The Miller s Daughter. It was this, there seems to be some ground for ^ We must except a crabbed Quarterly Reviewer. But then reviewers have made themsehes conspicuously foolish when writing about Tennyson's verse. It was a critic in the Quarterly — though not the particular critic who fell foul of The Miller's Daughter — that made what is, perhaps, the most absurd blunder contained in all the records of reviewing. It will be remem- bered that in The Princess the secret of the three disguised guests is discovered by Melissa, daughter of the Lady Blanche, who overhears the talk of the Lady Psyche and her brother Florian. We are made to see her as she stood — " with her hand upon the lock, A rosy blonde, and in a college gown. That clad her like an April daffodilly (Her mother's colour)." Of course it means that the students on the Lady Blanche's " side " wore yellow gowns. But what says the intelligent reviewer ? " What a pity to break this beautiful picture with tliat harsh stroke about her mother s faded hue.'' -r^ — z- ^ GRANTCHESTER MILL CAMBRIDGE 87 saying, that determined the Queen to make Tennyson the successor of Wordsworth in the Laureateship. Three mills in the neighbourhood of Somersby — Tetford, Aswardby, and Stockforth — have been named as competitors for the honour of having suggested the poem. One (Tetford) is put out of court, it is suggested, in what is surely a somewhat prosaic spirit, by the fact that the wheel has, it is probable, always been inclosed. Of the two others, Stockforth, for some reason, has been preferred, the " local touches" in the poems being, we are told, " very precise" in pointing in this direction. One would naturally have been content to regard the story as what it manifestly is — an ideal. But as the attempt to identify it has been made, it may be as well to give Lord Tennyson's own words : " If it was anywhere, it was Trumpington." By " Trumpington," of course, he meant Grantchester Mill, which is close by, and of which we have accordingly given a picture. Of course we may look in vain for the old mansion looking down upon the village spire (Grantchester Church has a tower), for the " firry woodlands," and the " white chalk quarry on the hill," having to be content with the very vague identification of " if it was anywhere." But no one will regret seeing one of the prettiest spots, approached by what is certainly the very prettiest walk in the vicinity of Cambridge, and connecting it, though by the slightest link, with a poem that is exquisitely graceful and tender. A curious story is told that illustrates happily enough the intellectual activity of the set of which Arthur Hallam was one of the leading spirits, and, I may add, shows that in its criticism and appreciation of literary merit, it was not a little in advance of the day. It was resolved by the Cambridge Union, a literary club and debating society which was then of recent origin, to send a deputation to the sister institution at Oxford, to maintain the proposition that Shelley was a greater poet than Byron. The deputation went, and the debate was held, Henry Edward Manning, now Cardinal, then a scholar of Balliol, being one of the chief speakers on the Oxford side. But Oxford did not shine in the discussion. Its orators seem scarcely to have been aware of Shelley's existence. Indeed, 88 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY it became apparent, as was said by one who took part in the contest, that the Oxford speakers were for some time under the impression that the poet whom Cambridge sought to exalt above Byron was Shenstone. Hence, he remarked, and we can easily imagine it, they did not appear to advantage. Among the deputation from Cambridge were Arthur Hallam, whose literary enthusiasm is said to have greatly impressed his hearers, and one Sunder- land, whose brilliant oratory was long remembered by those who knew him. Moncktcn Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, who told the story to a friend of mine, was another member of the Cambridge deputation. In a speech which he delivered some years back at the Wordsworth dinner, he said that he had sometimes asked himself how he could possibly have obtained the necessary permission from the Vice-Chancellor, "that somewhat narrow- minded theologian," Dr. Wordsworth, Master of Trinity. It was certain that if Dr. Wordsworth knew anything of Shelley, that knowledge would not dispose him in his favour. How then had he given leave to a mission which had for its purpose to celebrate his praise ? All that Lord Houghton could say was that it was possible that he had by mistake represented the object of the deputation as being to defend the thesis that Wordszoorth was a greater poet than Byron. Lord Houghton added that probably this was not the case, but my readers may be of opinion that it probably w^as. It may be convenient to give at this place a brief chronological account of the poet's earlier publications. Of Poems by Tioo Brothers (1827) and Timbuctoo (1S29) I have already spoken. In 1830, the second year of Tennyson's residence at Cambridge, he published a volume bearing the title of Poems chiefly Lyrical. It is interesting to note that it contains the following out of what may be called the acknowledged poems : — - "Claribel," "Lilian," "Isabel," "Mariana," "To " (beginning "Clear-headed friend, whose joyful scorn" — the "clear-headed friend," it may be said, was J. W. Blakesley, afterwards Dean of Lincoln ; but the poem does not wholly apply to him), "Song — The Owl," "Second Song — To the Same," " Recollections of the Arabian Nights," " Ode to CAMBRIDGE 89 Memory" (a very early poem), "Song," "A Character," "The Poet," "The Poet's Mind," "The Deserted House," "The Dying Swan," "A Dirge," " Love and Death," " The Ballad of Oriana, ' " Circumstance," " The Sleeping Beauty," " The Sea-Fairies." Twenty-seven poems contained in this volume have been suppressed. On the other hand, the division of Juvenilia contains various additions, especially under the head of " Early Sonnets." The volume was reviewed in an appreciative way by John Stuart Mill in the Westminster Review, January, 1831. Leigh Hunt also reviewed it, together with a volume published by Charles Tennyson in the same year in four successive numbers of the Tatlcr. Finally, Professor Wilson (Christopher North) wrote a long notice of it in Blackiuoods Magazine, May, 1832. In 1833 appeared Poems, by Alfred Tennyson (Moxon). This volume contained : " The Lady of Shalott," " Mariana in the South," " Eleanore," "The Miller's Daughter," " CEnone," "The Two Sisters," "To " " The May Queen " and " New Year's Eve," " The Lotos Eaters," " A Dream of Fair Women," " Margaret," " The Death of the Old Year," " To J. S." (James Spedding), and twelve other poems, afterwards suppressed. This volume was contemptuously reviewed in the Qtiarteriy. Cole- ridge is reported to have made about it a remark which reads very strangely in view of what is now universally acknowledged — the poet's excellence as a metrist — that Mr. Tennyson had begun to write verse without very well understanding what metre was. The fact was that he had had much practice in writing in the accepted metres, and that his father had even advised him not to be so regular in his rhythms. In 1833 The Love^^'s Tale, written five years before, was printed, and immediately recalled. After 1833 came nine years of silence, broken only by one or two single poems. In 1842 a volume selected from the poems of 1830 and 1832, together with another volume of pieces entirely new, appeared. This was reviewed in a highly appreciative way by John Sterling in the Qua7'terly. In 1847 The Princess was published, and in 1850 In Memoriam. N 90 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY XIII SHIPLAKE ^ The marriaoje of Alfred Tennyson and Emily Sellwood was solemnized at Shiplake Church on June 13th, 1850. Shiplake is a river-side parish, on the Oxfordshire bank of the Thames, between two and three miles west of Henley-on-Thames. The church and vicarage stand upon a some- Shiflakc CIturck what bold eminence overlooking the valley of the Thames in the direc- tion of Sonning and Reading. The view, of which some glimpses can be obtained through the trees which almost encircle the churchyard, but which can be seen in perfection from the vicarage garden, is not wholly unlike the prospect of the Thames from Richmond Hill. But it is far less varied, and, indeed, less beautiful. The river, tco, does not display SHIPLAKE 91 itself to advantage. Its volume has been already diminished by that curious effluent, as it may be called, St. Patrick's river,^ and the stream is divided by an island of considerable extent. The church is a handsome structure in various styles of architecture, from Early English downwards. The oldest portion is to be seen in the tower and in the north aisle. These indeed constituted the original church, which was a chapel served from the monastery of Great Missenden in Shiflake Church the county of Bucks. The tower is built of flint, with large roughly- dressed blocks of chalk, after a fashion not uncommon in South O.xfordshire, and was used, in the days when the church was dependent on Great Missenden, as a lodging for the monk who served it. After the dissolution of the monasteries the rights of the Abbey came into the hands of the Dean and Chapter of Windsor, who are still impropriators of the great tithes and patrons. ^ St. Patrick's river flows out of the Thames, and joins the Loddon, after a wandering course of two or three miles. The Loddon flows into the Thames below Shiplake lock, and thus restores to the main river its contribution. N 2 92 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY The church was restored twenty years ago by Mr. Street. Mr. Street was an architect whose skill and taste it would be most ungracious to depreciate. Still I may say without offence that, in 1870, what may be called the historic sense in church restoration had not been fully developed, and that much was swept away in obedience to rigid laws of architectural propriety which would now, it is probable, be retained. The main fea- tures of the structure remain the same, but, in detail, the views which we give of the exterior of the church do not, it must be confessed, very closely resemble the building in which Alfred Tennyson and Emily Sarah Sellwood were married forty years ago. The ceremony was performed by the vicar of the time, a Lincolnshire friend, the Rev. D. Rawnsley^ and the attesting witnesses are four, signing in the following order : — " Cecilia Lushington, Edmund Law Lushington, Catharine Ann Rawnsley, Henry Sellwood." It may be mentioned that the bridegroom's signature is very plainly written, and is not unlike the calligraphy of his father, as exhibited in the register of Somersby and Bag Enderby. The bride was married from the vicarage house. The vicar was the bride's cousin by marriage. The house, though succeeding Incumbents have added to It, is less changed than the church. A room in It is shown as that which the poet was accustomed to occupy on his frequent visits to Shiplake. FRESHWATER 93 XIV FRESHWATER Freshwater, to use the name without quaHfication, is an extensive parish occupying the south-western corner of the Isle of Wight. It is divided into the five hamlets of Easton, Weston, Norton, Totland Bay, and School Green, extends over more than five thousand acres, and contains between two and three thousand inhabitants. Freshwater Gate is, properly speaking, a natural cave in the cliff, but the name is sometimes used of the opening in the line of downs that form the south-western coast of the island, an opening that may be otherwise described as Freshwater Bay. The " fresh water " from which it gets its name, probably given by seafarers eastward bound who found here their first opportunity of replenishing their empty barrels, is to be found not many yards from the beach, in the springs of the Yar, a little stream which soon opens out into a wide estuary, and so flows into the channel of the Solent at the ancient little town of Yarmouth. The Gate or Bay is a picturesque little stretch of beach, not more than a few hundred yards in length. At its eastern point are some curious detached masses of chalk cliff which stand out in the sea, some five hundred yards from the shore at high water, one of them hollowed by the action of the water into the shape of an arch. Beyond these, as the traveller pursues his way eastward, the down continues to ascend, though not without interruption, till it reaches in St. Catherine's Hill, the highest point of the island, an altitude of more than eight hundred feet above the sea-level. Westward of the Bay there is a somewhat steep ascent, which leads to one of the many forts which guard the approaches to the Channel. Beyond 94 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY the fort the traveller comes on a fine stretch of open down, now called Tennyson's Down. Its seaward boundary is a range of lofty cliffs, some- times showing a sheer fall into the water, sometimes sufficiently inclined to allow of a somewhat perilous descent into one of the little shingly bays which have been hollowed out by the waves. At the western extremity of the island they have been broken by the storms of centuries into those strangely shaped rocks which are known as the Needles, a name associated with many a tragic story of shipwreck. Above the Needles is the lighthouse, standing on the highest point of the downs, and not less than six hundred feet above the sea. The Needles past, our faces being now turned from northward to eastward, we come first to Alum Bay, with its sand cliffs so picturesquely diversified in colour, then to Totland Bay, and so to the cliffs' end, when nearly opposite the formidable bastions of Hurst Castle on the mainland. ^ '-*T a:;s=»-t- C^'^i/T;. Freshwater FARRINGFORD 95 XV FARRINGFORD The domain of Farringford can be seen on the traveller's right hand, as he makes his way westward from Freshwater Bay, lying at the foot of the inland slope of the down. The house itself is not visible from any point of this route, but a glimpse of the roof may be caught from the ascent on the eastern side of the Bay. The estate extends to between four and five hundred acres, part of them downland, and contains what is known as King's Manor. The royal ownership indicated by this name is recorded by Domesday Book where we find the following entry : — " Ye King holds Frescewatre, in demesne. It was held by Tosti [Earl Tostig, brother of King Harold — this, of course, refers to the " time of King Edward," a standard of comparison used throughout the Survey], and was then assessed at 15 hides. It is now assessed at 6 hides. There are fifteen ploughlands, two ploughlands are in demesne, and 18 villagers and 10 borderers employ 8 ploughs. There are seven servants and six acres of meadow. It was worth in King Edward's time sixteen pounds, and afterwards twenty pounds ; but it is let at thirty pounds." At this time, therefore, all I'Veshwater was what we should call Crown land. But it would appear that part of it was afterwards bestowed on some ecclesiastical body. This body seems to have been the Abbey of Ouarr or Ouarrera (so called from the stone quarries in the neighbourhood). Quarr was near the town of Ryde, and was one of the first Cistercian monasteries established in England. Its first foundation was due to Baldwin, Earl of Devon, who endowed it in the thirty-second year of Henry I. 96 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY Subsequent benefactors added to its revenues, and at the dissolution its income was estimated ?it a. nd sum of >^ 134 3^. i\d. Some of the local names recall this ecclesiastical ownership. Among them are : " Maidens' Croft," ("Virgin Mary's Field,") "Abraham's Mead," and "The Clerks' Hill." Lord Tennyson has in his possession transference deeds signed by Walter de Fferingford, evidently the chief owner of land at Freshwater. Farr'ntgjord The domain of Farringford was purchased by Mr. Tennyson in 1852, its former possessor having been Mr. Seymour, father of the late Lady Coleridge. The house, while not possessing any architectural pretensions, has something singularly attractive about it. Not the least of its charms are the creeping plants which clothe it from roof-tree to foundation with a mantle of green. A delightful garden, laid out by the poet and his wife, surrounds it, and beyond this again is a small well-wooded park. 1^ FARRINGFORD o FARRINGFORD 99 Both park and house are sheltered from the south-westerly gales by a ridge of down. Westward of the house is a walled garden, and beyond this again the home or dairy farm, of which we have given a picture. The first locus classictis in the poems relating to Farringford is, of course, the well-known " Invitation" to the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Mr. Maurice, it should be explained, had just been expelled from his professorships, one of history, and another of theology, by the Council of King's College, The Dairy Farm, Farringford London. He had published a book entitled Theological Essays. Not a few of the views which were there advanced are now become, it may be said, commonplaces of theology ; but at that time they seemed very dangerous to many worthy people. Alarm was especially excited by the way in which the essayist dealt with the subject of everlasting punishment. While not dogmatizing upon it in the fashion of the Universalists,^ he pointed out that the word {aionios), translated by " eternal," is not equivalent to " ever- lasting," but relates rather to the nature and quality than the duration of that, be it life or death, which it qualifies. Of course the general tendency The Universalists maintain as an article of faith that salvation is universal. O loo THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY of this teaching was in the direction of that " larger hope " to which Tennyson himself had given utterance, when in In Ilfcuioriaiii, liv., he wrote — " O yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood : " That nothing walks with aimless feet ; That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete." The friendship between Tennyson and Maurice was of considerable standing, and it had been drawn closer by the fact that Maurice had stood godfather to the poet's son, Hallam, born in 1852 at Twickenham. In January, 1854, a time, it will be remembered, when the breaking out of war between Russia and England was imminent, Tennyson addressed a poetical epistle to his friend, inviting him to pay a visit at Farringford. " Come," it said, " Come, when no graver cares employ. Godfather, come and sec j^our boy ; Your presence will be sun in winter ■^•- Making the little one leap for joy." He is to come to a place, " Where far from noise and smoke of town I watch the twilight falling brown All round a careless-order'd garden, Close to the ridge of a noble down. " You'll have no scandal while you dine. But honest talk and wholesome wine. And only hear the magpie gossip Garrulous under a roof of pine. " For 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." These last lines have a pathetic association with a poem written a ^^ s ^ k ^ ^ ^ FRESHWATER DOJVN FROM THE GROUNDS OF FARRINGFORD FARRINGFORD 103 twenty-five years afterwards, to which reference has already been made. In the "joyless June" that followed the death of his brother Charles the poet hears this billow breaking, and its hoarse roar seems to be in melancholy harmony with his grief. In the last volume, again, that we have had from the same pen [Demeicr, and Other Poems, 1SS9) we hear of the woods and the garden of Farringford. It is peculiarly interesting to compare the language of Ulysses with that of the Invitation to F. D. Maurice. More than thirty years have past. For now, says the poet " The century's three strong eights have met To drag me down to seventy-nine In summer, if I reach my day." Meanwhile he has learnt to love the place with a more particular- izing love. " to trace On paler heavens the branching grace Of leafless elm, or naked lime ; " And see my cedar green, and there My giant ilex keeping leaf When frosts are keen and days are brief, Or marvel how, in English air, " My yucca, which no winter quells, Altho' the months have scarce begun, Has pushed towards our faintest sun A spike of half-accomplished bells. " Or watch the braving pine which here The warrior of Caprera set, A name that earth will not forget, Till earth has rolled her latest year." The references here are distinct and direct, but we may find other allu- sions, especially in Maud, which shows, perhaps, more of the local colour of this house by the sea than any other of the poems. Here the hero at one time walks by himself in his "own dark garden ground " — " Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar. Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragged down by the sea ; " 104 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY and at another watches when " the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime, Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea, The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land;" and again hears " the v-oice of the long sea wave as it swelled Now and then in the dun-gray dawn." The sea, w^hether seen or heard, dashing under stormy skies against the towering cliffs of Farringford Beacon, or shining blue in the sunshine at the end of some vista of trees, is the most characteristic feature of this home of the poet. There is one more thing to be mentioned before we leave the poet's Isle of Wight home. The poet's younger son Lionel was born here ; the tablet which commemorates him — he died on his way home from India — is to be seen in Freshwater Church. It bears the following inscription, written by his brother, Hallam Tennyson, doubtlessunder the supervisionof his father : — IN MEMORIAM LIONEL TENNYSON, Fii.n, MARrri, patris carissimi FORMA, MENTE, MORUM SIMPLICITATE LAUDEM INTER AEQUALES MATURE ADEPTI, FAMAM QUOQUE IN REPUBLICA, SI VITA SUFFECISSET, SINE DUBIO ADEPTURI. OBDORMIVIT IN CHRISTO DIE APR. XX. ANNO CHRISTI MDCCCLXXXVl. ^TAT. XXXII. ET IN MARI APUD PERIN INDORUM SEPL'LTUS EST. The father's own tribute to his son is to be found in the dedicatory poem of his latest volume {Deiucicr) : — " A soul that watched from earliest youth, And on thro' many a lightening year. Had never swerved from craft or fear By one side-path from simple truth : " Who might have chased and claspt Renown, And caught her chaplet here — and there In haunts of jungle-poisoned air The flame of life went flickering down." A beautiful statue of St. John, from the chisel of Miss Mary Grant, has been erected by Lord and Lady Tennyson near the Communion Table of the Church in memory of their son. 1^ ^ X ^^^, ST. CATHERINE'S HEAD FROM THE GROUNDS OF FARRINGFORD ALDWORTH 107 XVI ALDWORTH In 1872, Mr. Tennyson purchased a small estate on the top of Black Down, a moorland height that rises to the height of some hundred feet, south of the town of Haslemere, and near to the borders of the three AUiwoylk counties of Hampshire, Surrey, and Sussex. A more bracing air than could be found at Freshwater during the heats of summer, and a retirement which it was difficult to secure at what was becoming a popular seaside resort, were among the attractions of the new spot. The house, which goes by the p 2 io8 THE LAUREATE'S COUNTRY name of Aklworth, called after one of the old Sellwood demesnes, stands on the southern slope of the Down, a magnificent expanse of open country, covered with heather, bracken, and whortleberry. It was built from the designs, under the superintendence of Lord Tennyson, of Mr. J. T. Knowles, known to most people as the founder and editor of the Nineteenth Century, but also an architect in large practice, some of who.se work may be seen in Victoria Street, London, and in the western extensions of Brighton. The prospect from the terrace of the house, reaching, it will be under stood, in the opposite direction to that taken in our picture, is one of the finest to be found in the south of England. The scene is touched in the verses addressed to General Hamley — ' Our beeches yellowing, and from each The light leaf falling fast, While squirrels from our fiery beech Were carrying off the mast, You came and looked, and lov'd the view Long known and loved by me ; Green Sussex fading into blue. With one gray glimpse of sea." It is indeed the whole of "green Sussex" that lies before one as one looks from where the Fairlight Downs dip into the Pitt Level on the left to Chichester on the right. And indeed more than Sussex is visible : on one side no small part of Kent can be seen ; and if one half turns, the noble eminence of Leith Hill, and on the other Portsmouth and the Hampshire Downs. The " one gray glimpse of sea" is where there is an opening in the South Downs at Arundel. I may now complete the list of Lord Tennyson's works. That which will be found on pp. 88-9, gave the poems connected with Lincolnshire, with Cambridge, and with the period that followed his departure from his birthplace — a period which our illustrations touch only at the point of is. ALD WORTH, BLACKDOPVN ALDWORTH 1 1 1 Afaiid i8ss Idylls of the King 1859 Enoch A rden 1864 The Holy Grail ... 1870 Gareth and Lynette 1872 Queen Mary 1875 Harold 1877 Shiplake. Those that follow belong to the homes of his later life — Farringford and Aldworth. The Lover's Tale 1879 Ballads and other Poems ... 1880 The Cup and the Falcon .. 1884 Becket 1884 Tiresias and other Poems ... 1885 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After 1886 Demeter and other Poems ... 1889 I have now finished my task, which, indeed, has been in a singular degree a labour of love. Never has the humble function of writing the letterpress for a series of illustrations been more keenly felt to be both delightful and honourable. I owe to the poems of Lord Tennyson more than I can estimate in my intellectual and spiritual life. It would be arrogant to claim for these pages the character of what the Greeks used to call threpteria, the return for nurture that children make to their parents. I cannot suppose that they will have any value for the poet. Yet I would fain hope that, in helping others to understand some of the circumstances under which his genius has grown and borne fruit, I have been able to show a gratitude that is not altogether idle. It only remains for me to thank the friends that have helped me. I may name the Rev. J. Soper, Rector of Somersby, the Rev. J. F. Quirk, Vicar of Grasby, and the Rev. S. Lewin, Vicar of Tealby. My warmest acknowledgments are due to Lord Tennyson, and to Messrs. Macmillan and Co., for the liberality with which they have permitted me to quote. THE END. Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, london and bungay. L t fi4J UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY D 000 979 243 3