Ua 
 
 ^.
 
 This h- - k is DUE on the last date stamped below 
 
 MAR ■• 
 
 UN/vSr^"^^ BRANCH 
 ^^ ANGELES. CAUP. 

 
 780^
 
 ALFRED TENNVSON 
 From a photograph by the Autotype Company, London
 
 RECORDS OF 
 
 Tennyson, Rlskin, Browning 
 
 BY 
 
 ANNE RITCHIE 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 1 zn6 
 
 HARPER & BR OTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 1899 
 
 i\
 
 "Mind that there is always a certain cachet about great men — they 
 speak of common life more largely and generously than common men 
 do — they regard the world with a manlier countenance, and see its real 
 features more fairly than the timid shufflers who only dare to look up 
 at life through blinkers, or to have an opinion when there is a crowd 
 to back it." — English Humorists. 
 
 " ' I remember poor Byron, Hobhouse, Trelawney, and myself, 
 dining with Cardinal Mezzocaldo at Rome,' Captain Sumph began, 
 'and we had some Orvieto wine for dinner, which Byron liked very 
 much. And I remember how the Cardinal regretted that he was a 
 single man. We went to Civita Vecchia two days afterwards where 
 Byron's yacht was — and, by Jove, the Cardinal died within three weeks, 
 and Byron was very sorry for he rather liked him.' 
 
 "'A devilish interesting story, indeed,' Wagg said. 'You should 
 publish some of these stories. Captain Sumph, you really should,' 
 Shandon said." — Pendcnnis. 
 
 Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 
 
 All rights reserved.
 
 
 SlAKifOlv^n. 
 
 
 TO 
 
 HELENA FAUCIT, LADY MARTIN 
 
 AND TO 
 
 SIR THEODORE MARTIN, K.C.B. 
 DciMcatcO 
 
 WITH OLD AFFECTION AND 
 REMEMBRANCE 
 
 1 1 ISIay, 1892 
 
 Imogen. " 'Mongst Friends" Cymbeline, IIL vi.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON i 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN . . 6r 
 
 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 127
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Alfred Tennyson Frontispiece 
 
 Tennyson's Birthplace, Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire . 5 
 
 Mrs. Tennyson g 
 
 Tennyson's Children 15 
 
 Clevedon Court ig 
 
 The Meeting of the Severn and Wye 24 
 
 Caerleon upon Usk 27 
 
 Burleigh House, by Stamford Town 30 
 
 Almesbury 33 
 
 Farringford House, Isle of Wight 37 
 
 In the New Forest 41 
 
 Tennyson Reading "Maud" 45 
 
 Farringford Beacon 47 
 
 The Oak Lawn, Aldworth 4g 
 
 The Edge of Blackdown, Showing Tennyson's House . 53 
 
 Tennyson's Home at Aldworth, Surrey .... 57 
 
 The Tennyson Coat of Arms 60 
 
 Brantwood 63 
 
 John Ruskin 71 
 
 Looking from Brantwood Towards the Head of Coniston 
 
 Lake 75 
 
 The Turret Room — Ruskin's Bedroom . . . . 7g 
 
 Coniston— Old Hall and Old Man 85 
 
 Entrance to Brantwood gi 
 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 133 
 
 Robert Browning 141 
 
 Mrs. Browning's Tomb at Florence 151 
 
 Mr. Milsand -159
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON
 
 ''yl footfall Ibcre 
 Suffices to iiptiini to the warm air 
 Half geriin'iiatii/g spices ; mere decay 
 Trodiices richer life ; and day by day 
 New pollen on the lily- petal grows. 
 And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.' 
 
 SORDELLO-
 
 THERE is a place called Somersby in Lincolnshire, 
 where an old white rectory stands on the slope of a 
 hill, and the winding lanes are shadowed by tall ashes and 
 elm-trees, and where two brooks meet at the bottom of the 
 glebe field. It is a place far away from us in silence and in 
 distance, lying upon the " ridged wolds." They bound the 
 horizon of the rectory garden, whence they are to be seen 
 flowing to meet the sky. I have never known Somersby, 
 but I have often heard it described, and the pastoral country 
 all about, and the quiet, scattered homes. One can picture 
 the rectory to one's self with something of a monastic sweet- 
 ness and quiet: an ancient Norman cross is standing in the 
 church-yard, and perhaps there is still a sound in the air of 
 the bleating of flocks. It all comes before one as one reads 
 the sketch of Tennyson's native place in the Homes and 
 Haunts of the British Poets: the village not far from the 
 fens, '"in a pretty pastoral district of softly sloping hills and 
 large ash-trees. . . . The little glen in the neighborhood is 
 called by the old monkish name of Holywell." Lord Tenny- 
 son sometimes speaks of this glen, which he remembers 
 white with snow-drops in their season ; and who will not 
 recall the exquisite invocation : 
 
 "Come from the woods that belt the gray hill-side, 
 The seven elms, the poplars four 
 That stand beside my father's door, 
 3
 
 And cliiefly from the brook that loves 
 
 To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, 
 
 Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves. . . . 
 
 O ! hither lead thy feet ! 
 Pour round mine ears the livelong beat 
 Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds, 
 
 Upon the ridged wolds." 
 
 The wind that goes blowing where it listeth, once, in the 
 early beginning of this century, came sweeping through the 
 garden of this old Lincolnshire rectory, and, as the wind 
 blew, a sturdy child of five years old with shining locks stood 
 opening his arms upon the blast and letting himself be blown 
 along, and as he travelled on he made his first line of poetry 
 and said, " I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind," and 
 he tossed his arms, and the gust whirled on, sweeping into 
 the great abyss of winds. One might, perhaps, still trace in 
 the noble, familiar face of our Poet Laureate the features of 
 this child, one of many deep-eyed sons and daughters born 
 in the quiet rectory among the elm-trees. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August, 1809. 
 He has heard many and many a voice calling to him since 
 the time when he listened to the wind as he played alone 
 in his father's garden, or joined the other children at their 
 games and jousts. They were a noble little clan of poets 
 and of knights, coming of a knightly race, with castles to 
 defend, with mimic tournaments to fight. Somersby was so 
 far away from the world, so behindhand in its echoes (which 
 must have come there softened through all manner of green 
 and tranquil things, and, as it were, hushed into pastoral 
 silence), that though the early part of the century was stir- 
 ring with the clang of legions, few of its rumors seem to 
 have reached the children. They never heard at the time 
 of the battle of Waterloo. They grew up together playing 
 their own games, living their own life ; and where is such
 
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 life to be found as that of a happy, eager family of boys and 
 girls before Doubt, the steps of Time, the shocks of Chance, 
 the blows of Death, have come to dim or shake their creed ? 
 
 These handsome children had beyond most children that 
 wondrous toy at their command which some people call 
 unagination. The boys played great games like Arthur's 
 knights ; they were champions and warriors defending a 
 stone heap, or again they would set up opposing camps with 
 a king in the midst of each. The king was a willow wand 
 stuck into the ground, with an outer circle of immortals to 
 defend him of firmer, stiffer sticks. Then each party would 
 come with stones, hurling at each other's king, and trying to 
 overthrow him. Perhaps as the day wore on they became 
 romancers, leaving the jousts deserted. When dinner-time 
 came, and they all sat round the table, each in turn put a 
 chapter of his story underneath the potato-bowl — long, end- 
 less stories, chapter after chapter diffuse, absorbing, unend- 
 ing, as are the histories of real life ; some of these romances 
 were in letters, like Clarissa Harlowe. Alfred used to tell 
 a story which lasted for months, and which was called "The 
 Old Horse." 
 
 Alfred's first verses, so I once heard him say, were written 
 upon a slate which his brother Charles put into his hand one 
 Sunday at Louth, when all the elders of the party were go- 
 ing into church, and the child was left alone. Charles gave 
 him a subject — the flowers in the garden — and when he 
 came back from church little Alfred brought the slate to his 
 brother all covered with written lines of blank verse. They 
 were made on the model of Thomson's Seasons, the only 
 poetry he had ever read. One can picture it all to one's 
 self: the flowers in the garden, the verses, the little poet 
 with waiting eyes, and the young brother scanning the lines. 
 '' Yes, you can write," said Charles, and he gave Alfred back 
 the slate. 
 
 7
 
 I have also heard another story of his grandfather, later 
 on, asking him to write an elegy on his grandmother, who 
 had recently died, and when it was written, putting ten shil- 
 lings into his hands and saying, " There, that is the first 
 money you have ever earned by your poetry, and, take my 
 word for it, it will be the last." 
 
 The Tennysons are a striking example of the theory of 
 family inheritance. Alfred was one of twelve children, of 
 whom the eldest, Frederick, who was educated at Eton, is 
 known as the author of very imaginative poems. Charles 
 was the second son, and Alfred was the third, Charles 
 and little Alfred were sent for a few years to the Grammar 
 School at Louth, where the Laureate was not happy, al- 
 though he still remembers walking adorned with blue rib- 
 bons in a procession for the proclamation of the corona- 
 tion of George the Fourth. The old wives said at the time 
 that the boys made the prettiest part of the show. 
 
 Charles Tennyson — Charles Turner he was afterwards 
 called, for he took the name with a property which he in- 
 herited— Avas Alfred's special friend and brother. In his 
 own most sweet degree, Charles Tennyson too was a true 
 poet. Who that has ever read his sonnets will cease to love 
 them ? His brother loves and quotes them with affection. 
 Coleridge loved them ; James Spedding, wise critic, life-long 
 friend, read them with unaltered delight from his youth to 
 his much-honored age. In an introductory essay to a volume 
 of the collected sonnets, published after Charles Turner's 
 death, Mr. Spedding quotes the picture of a summer's day- 
 break •. 
 
 " Rut one sole star, none other anywhere ; 
 A wild-rose odour from the fields was borne ; 
 The lark's mysterious joy filled earth and air, 
 And from the wind's top met the hunter's horn ; 
 The aspen trembled wildly; and the morn 
 Breathed up in rosy clouds divinely fair."
 
 PMMHPnnn^ffi^ 
 
 MRS. TENNYSON 
 After the paintinjj at Aldwonh by G. H. Watts, R.A.
 
 Charles Tennyson was in looks not unlike his younger 
 brother. He was stately, too, though shorter in stature, 
 gentle, spiritual, very noble, simple. I once saw him kneel- 
 ing in a church, and only once again. He was like some- 
 thing out of some other world, more holy, more silent than 
 that in which most of us are living ; there is a picture in 
 the National Gallery of St. Jerome which always recalls 
 him to me. The sons must have inherited their poetic gifts 
 from their father. He was the Rev. George Clayton Ten- 
 nyson, LL.D., a tall, striking, and impressive man, full of 
 accomplishments and parts, a strong nature, high-souled, 
 high- tempered. He was the head of the old family; but 
 his own elder-brother share of its good things had passed 
 by will into the hands of another branch, which is still 
 represented by the Tennysons d'Eyncourt. Perhaps be- 
 fore he died he may have realized that to one of his had 
 come possessions greater than any ever yet entailed by 
 lawyer's deeds — an inheritance, a priceless Benjamin's por- 
 tion, not to be measured or defined. 
 
 n 
 
 Alfred Tennyson, as he grew up towards manhood, 
 found other and stronger inspirations than Thomson's gen- 
 tle Seaso?is. Byron's spell had fallen on his generation, and 
 for a boy of genius it must have been absolute and overmas- 
 tering. Tennyson was soon to find his own voice, but mean- 
 while he began to write like Byron. He produced poems 
 and verses m endless abundance : trying his wings, as peo- 
 ple say, before starting on his own strong flight. One day 
 the news came to the village — the dire news which spread
 
 across the land, filling men's hearts with consternation — 
 that Byron was dead. Alfred was then a boy about fifteen. 
 
 " Byron was dead ! I thought the whole world was at an 
 end," he once said, speaking of these by-gone days. " I 
 thought everything was over and finished for every one — 
 that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out 
 alone, and carved ' Byron is dead' into the sandstone." 
 
 I have spoken of Tennyson from the account of an old 
 friend, whose recollections go back to those days, which 
 seem perhaps more distant to us than others of earlier date 
 and later fashion. Mrs. Tennyson, the mother of the family, 
 so this same friend tells me, was a sweet and gentle and 
 most imaginative woman, so kind-hearted that it had pass- 
 ed into a proverb, and the wicked inhabitants of a neigh- 
 boring village used to bring their dogs to her windows and 
 beat them in order to be bribed to leave off by the gentle 
 lady, or to make advantageous bargains by selling her the 
 worthless curs. She was intensely, fervently religious, as a 
 poet's mother should be. After her husband's death (he 
 had added to the rectory, and made it suitable for his large 
 family) she still lived on at Somersby with her children and 
 their friends. The daughters were growing up, the elder 
 sons were going to college. Frederick, the eldest, went first 
 to Trinity, Cambridge, and his brothers followed him there 
 in turn. Life was opening for them, they were seeing new 
 aspects and places, making new friends, and bringing them 
 home to their Lincolnshire rectory. In Mcmoriam gives 
 many a glimpse of the old home, of which the echoes still 
 reach us across half a century. 
 
 "O sound to rout the brood of cares, 
 
 The sweep of scythe in morning dew, 
 The gust that round the garden flew, 
 And tumbled half the mellowing pears !
 
 O bliss, when all in circle drawn 
 
 About him, heart and ear were fed 
 
 To hear him, as he lay and read 
 The Tuscan poets on the lawn : 
 
 Or in the all-golden afternoon 
 A guest, or happy sister, sung. 
 Or here she brought the harp and flung 
 
 A ballad to the brightening moon." 
 
 Dean Garden was one of those guests here spoken of, 
 who with Arthur Hallam, the reader of the Tuscan poets, 
 and James Spedding and others, used to gather upon the 
 lawn at Somersby — the young men and women in the hght 
 of their youth and high spirits, the widowed mother leading 
 her quiet life within the rectory walls. Was it not a happy 
 sister herself who in after-days once described how, on a 
 lovely summer night, they had all sat up so late talking in 
 the starlight that the dawn came shining unawares ; but the 
 young men, instead of going to bed, then and there set off 
 for a long walk across the hills in the sunrise. 
 
 "And suck'd from out the distant gloom 
 A breeze began to tremble o'er 
 The large leaves of the sycamore,* 
 And fluctuate all the still perfume, 
 
 And gathering freshlier overhead, 
 
 Rock'd the fuU-foliaged elms, and swung 
 The heavy-folded rose, and flung 
 
 The lilies to and fro, and said 
 
 'The dawn, the dawn,' and died away; 
 And East and West, without a breath, 
 Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, 
 To broaden into boundless day." 
 
 * I am told that the sycamore has been cut down, and the lawn is altered to another 
 shape. 
 
 13
 
 Ill 
 
 One thing which cannot fail to strike us when we are 
 looking over the records of these earlier days is the remark- 
 able influence which Alfred Tennyson seems to have had 
 from the very first upon his contemporaries, even before his 
 genius had been recognized by the rest of the world. Not 
 only those of his own generation, but his elders and masters 
 seem to have felt something of this. I remember hearing 
 one of Tennyson's oldest friends, Dr. Thompson, the late 
 Master of Trinity, say that " Whewell, who was a man him- 
 self, and who knew a man when he saw him,'' used to pass 
 over in Alfred Tennyson certain informalities and forget- 
 fulness of combinations as to gowns, and places, and times, 
 which in another he would never have overlooked. 
 
 Whewell ruled a noble generation — a race of men born 
 in the beginning of the century, whose praise and loyal 
 friendship were indeed worth having, and whose good opin- 
 ion Tennyson himself may have been proud to possess. 
 Wise, sincere, and witty, these contemporaries spoke with au- 
 thority, with the moderation of conscious strength. Those 
 of tliis race that I have known in later days — for they were 
 many of them my father's friends also — have all been men 
 of unmistakable stamp, of great culture, of a certain digni- 
 fied bearing, and of independence of mind and of nature. 
 
 Most of them have succeeded in life as men do wiio are 
 possessed of intellect and high character. Some have not 
 made the less mark upon their time because their names are 
 less widely known ; but each name is a memorable chapter 
 
 14
 
 TEXNVSON S CHILDREN 
 After the paiming at Aldvvorth by G. F. Watts, R.A. 
 
 in life to one and another of us who rememl^er them. One 
 of those old friends, who also loved my father, and whom 
 he loved, who has himself passed away ; one who saw life 
 with his own eyes, and spoke with his own words has de- 
 scribed Tennyson in his youth, in a fragment which is a 
 remembrance, a sort of waking dream, of some by-gone days
 
 and talks. How many of us might have been glad to listen 
 to our poet, and to the poet who has made the philosophy 
 of Omar Khayam known to the world, as they discoursed 
 together ; of life, of boyish memories, of books, and again 
 more books; of chivalry — mainly but another name for 
 youth — of a possible old age, so thoroughly seasoned with 
 its spirit that all the experience of the world should serve 
 not to freeze but to direct the genial current of the soul ! 
 and who that has known them both will not recognize the 
 truth of this description pi Alfred in early days ? 
 
 " A man at all points, of grand proportion and feature, significant of 
 that inward chivalry becoming his ancient and honorable race ; when 
 himself a ' Yonge Squire,' like him in Chaucer, ' of grete strength,' that 
 could hurl the crowbar farther than any of the neighboring clowns, whose 
 humors, as well as of their betters — knight, squire, landlord, and lieu- 
 tenant—he took quiet note of, like Chaucer himself ; like Wordsworth on 
 the mountain, he too when a lad abroad on the world, sometimes of a 
 night with the shepherd, watching not only the flock on the greensward, 
 but also 
 
 ' the fleecy star that bears 
 Andromeda far off Atlantic seas,' 
 
 along with those other Zodiacal constellations which Aries, I think, leads 
 over the field of heaven." 
 
 Arthur Hallam has also written of him in some lines to R. 
 J. Tennant of 
 
 " a friend, a rare one, 
 A noble being full of clearest insight, 
 
 . . . whose fame 
 Is couching now with ])antherized intent. 
 As who shall say, I'll spring to him anon. 
 And have him for my own." 
 
 All these men could understand each other, although they 
 had not then told the world their secrets. Poets, critics, 
 
 i6
 
 men of learning — such names as Trench and Monckton 
 Milnes, George Stovin Venables, the Lushingtons and 
 Kinglake, need no comment ; many more there are, and 
 deans and canons — a band of youthful friends in those days 
 meeting to hold debate 
 
 " on mind and art, 
 
 And labor, and the changing mart, 
 And all the framework of the land ; 
 When one would aim an arrow fair, 
 
 But send it slackly from the string ; 
 
 And one would pierce an outer ring, 
 And one an inner, here and there ; 
 
 And last the master-bowman, he. 
 Would cleave the mark." 
 
 The lines to J. S. were written to one of these earlier 
 associates. 
 
 "And gently comes the world to those 
 That are cast in gentle mould." 
 
 It was the prophecy of a whole lifetime. There were but few 
 signs of age in James Spedding's looks, none in his charm- 
 ing companionship, when the accident befell him which took 
 him away from those who loved him. To another old com- 
 panion, the Rev. W. H. Brookfield, is dedicated that sonnet 
 which flows like an echo of Cambridge chimes on a Sabbath 
 
 morning. 
 
 B 17
 
 IV 
 
 It is in this sonnet to W. H. Brookfield that Tennyson 
 writes of Arthur Hallam : " Him the lost light of those dawn- 
 golden days." 
 
 Arthur Hallam was the same age as my own father, and 
 born in 1811. When he died he was but twenty-three; 
 but he had lived long enough to show what his life might 
 have been. 
 
 In the preface to a little volume of his collected poems 
 and essays, published some time after his death, there is a 
 pathetic introduction. " He seemed to tread the earth as 
 a spirit from some better world," writes his father; and a 
 correspondent, who is, as I have been told, Arthur Hallam's 
 and Tennyson's common friend, Mr. Gladstone, says, with 
 deep feeling : " It has pleased God that in his death, as well 
 as in his life and nature, he should be marked beyond 
 ordinary men. When much time has elapsed, when most 
 bereavements will be forgotten, he will still be remembered, 
 and his place, I fear, will be felt to be still vacant ; singularly 
 as his mind was calculated by its native tendencies to work 
 powerfully and for good, in an age full of import to the 
 nature and destinies of man." 
 
 How completely these words have been carried out must 
 strike us all now. The father lived to see the young man's 
 unconscious influence working through his friend's genius, 
 and reaching whole generations unborn. A lady, speaking 
 of Arthur Hallam after his death, said to Tennyson, "I think 
 
 he was perfect." " And so he was," said Lord Tennyson. 
 
 18
 
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 I
 
 " as near perfection as a mortal man can be." Arthur 
 Hallam was a man of remarkable intellect. He could take 
 in the most difficult and abstruse ideas with an extraordinary 
 rapidity and insight. On one occasion he began to work 
 one afternoon, and mastered a difficult book of Descartes at 
 a single sitting. In the preface to the Memorials Mr. Hallam 
 speaks of this peculiar clearness of perception and facility 
 for acquiring knowledge ; but, above all, the father dwells 
 on his son's undeviating sweetness of disposition and ad- 
 herence to his sense of what was right. In the Quarterlies 
 and Reviews of the time, his opinion is quoted here and 
 there with a respect which shows in what esteem it was 
 already held. 
 
 At the time w^hen Arthur Hallam died he was engaged to 
 be married to a sister of the poet's. She was scarcely seven- 
 teen at the time. One of the sonnets addressed by Arthur 
 Hallam to his betrothed was written when he began to 
 teach her Italian : 
 
 " Lady, I bid thee to a sunny dome, 
 
 Ringing with echoes of Italian song ; 
 
 Henceforth to thee these magic halls belong, 
 And all the pleasant place is like a home. 
 Hark, on the right, with full piano tone, 
 
 Old Dante's voice encircles all the air ; 
 
 Hark, yet again, like flute-tones mingling rare 
 Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarca's moan. 
 Pass thou the lintel freely ; without fear 
 
 Feast on the music. I do better know thee 
 
 Than to suspect this pleasure thou dost owe me 
 Will wrong thy gentle spirit, or make less dear 
 
 That element whence thou must draw thy life — 
 
 An English maiden and an English wife." 
 
 As we read the pages of this little book we come upon 
 more than one happy moment saved out of the past, hours
 
 of delight and peaceful friendship, saddened by no fore- 
 boding, and complete in themselves. 
 
 "Alfred, I would that you beheld me now, 
 Sitting beneath an ivied, mossy wall. 
 
 . . . Above my head 
 Dilates immeasurable a wild of leaves, 
 Seeming received into the blue expanse 
 That vaults the summer noon." 
 
 There is something touching in the tranquil ring of the 
 voice calling out in the summer noontide with all a young 
 man's expansion. 
 
 It seemed to be but the beginning of a beautiful happy 
 life, when suddenly the end came. Arthur Hallam was 
 travelling with his father in Austria when he died very sud- 
 denly, with scarce a warning sign of illness. Mr. Hallam 
 had come home and found his son, as he supposed, sleep- 
 ing upon a couch ; but it was death, not sleep. " Those 
 whose eyes must long be dim with tears " — so writes the 
 heart-stricken father — "brought him home to rest among 
 his kindred and in his own country." They chose his rest- 
 ing-place in a tranquil spot on a lone hill that overhangs the 
 Bristol Channel. He was buried in the chancel of Cleve- 
 don Church, in Somerset, by Clevedon Court, which had 
 been the early home of his mother, an Elton by birth. 
 
 In all England there is not a sweeter place than the 
 sunny old Court upon the hill, with its wide prospects and 
 grassy terraces, where Arthur Hallam must have played in 
 his childhood, whence others of his kindred, touched with 
 his own bright and beautiful spirit, have come forth. 
 
 When Mr. Hallam. after a life of repeated sorrows, at last 
 went to his rest with his wife and his children, it was Alfred 
 Tennyson who wrote his epitaph, which may still be read in 
 the chancel of the old Clevedon Church. 

 
 Once in their early youth we hear of the two friends, 
 Tennyson and Hallam, travelling in the Pyrenees. This 
 was at the time of the war of Spanish independence, when 
 many generous young men went over with funds and good 
 energies to help the cause of liberty. These two were tak- 
 ing money and letters written in invisible ink to certain 
 conspirators who were then revolting against the intolerable 
 tyranny of Ferdinand, and who were chiefly hiding in the 
 Pyrenees. The young men met, among others, a Senor 
 Ojeda, who confided to Tennyson his intentions, which were 
 to caliper la gori^^i' a tons ics cures. Senor Ojeda could not talk 
 English or fully explain all his aspirations. ''Mais 7Viis coii- 
 fiaissez mon coeur,'" said he, effusively; and a pretty black 
 one it is, thought the poet. I have heard Tennyson described 
 in those days as "straight and with a broad breast," and 
 when he had crossed over from the Continent and was com- 
 ing back, walking through Wales, he went one day into a 
 little way-side inn, where an old man sat by the fire, who 
 looked up, and asked many questions. '"Are you from the 
 army ? Not from the army ? Then where do you come 
 from ?" said the old man. " I am just come from the Pyre- 
 nees," said Alfred. "Ah, I knew there was a something," 
 said the wise old man. 
 
 John Kemble was among those who had gone over to 
 Spain, and one day a rumor came to distant Somersby that 
 he was to be tried for his life by the Spanish authorities. No 
 one else knew much about him e.xcept Alfred Tennyson, who 
 
 23
 
 
 
 
 ^>^i-^f;^-x*2^ 
 
 2^-^v 
 
 THE MEETING OF THE SEVERN AND WYE. 
 
 Started before dawn to drive across the country in search of 
 some person of authority who knew the Consul at Cadiz, and 
 who could send letters of protection to the poor prisoner. 
 
 It was a false alarm. John Kemble came home to make 
 a name for himself in other fields. Meanwhile Alfred Ten-
 
 nyson's own reputation was growing, and when the first two 
 volumes of his collected poems were published in 1842, fol- 
 lowed by The Princess, in 1847, ^is fame spread throughout 
 the land. 
 
 Some of the reviews were violent and antagonistic at first. 
 One especially had tasted blood, and the " Hang, draw, and 
 Quarterly,'' as it has been called, of those days, having late- 
 ly cut up Endyinion, now proceeded to demolish Tennyson. 
 
 But this was a passing phase. It is curious to note the 
 sudden change in the tone of the criticisms — the absolute 
 surrender of these knights of the pen to the irresistible and 
 brilliant advance of the unknown and visored warrior. The 
 visor is raised now, the face is familiar to us all, and the 
 arms, though tested in a hundred fights, are shining and un- 
 conquered still. 
 
 William Howitt, whom we have already quoted, has writ- 
 ten an article upon the Tennyson of these earlier days. It 
 is fanciful, suggestive, full of interest, with a gentle myste- 
 rious play and tender appreciation. Speaking of the poet 
 himself, he asks, with the rest of the world at that time : 
 "You mav hear his voice, but where is the man? He is 
 wandering in some dream-land, beneath the shade of old 
 and charmed forests, by far-off shores, where 
 
 ' all nit^lit 
 The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
 Their moon-led waters white ; 
 
 by the old mill-dam, thinking of the merry miller and his 
 pretty daughter ; or wandering over the open wolds where 
 
 ' Norland whirlwinds blow.' 
 
 From all these places — from the silent corridor of an an- 
 cient convent, from some shrine where a devoted knight re- 
 cites his vows, from the drear monotony of ' the moated
 
 grange,' or the forest beneath the 'talking oak' — comes the 
 voice of Tennyson, rich, dreamy, passionate, yet not impa- 
 tient, musical with the airs of chivalrous ages, yet mingling 
 in his song the theme and the spirit of those that are yet 
 to come." . . . 
 
 This article was written many years ago, when but the 
 first chords had sounded, before the glorious Muse, passing 
 beyond her morning joy, had met with the sorrow of life. 
 l!ut it is well that as we travel on through later, sadder 
 scenes we should still carry in our hearts this romantic 
 music. One must be English born, I think, to know how 
 English is the spell which this great enchanter casts over 
 us; the very spirit of the land falls upon us as the visions 
 he evokes come closing round. Whether it is the moated 
 grange he shows us, or Locksley Hall that in the dis- 
 tance overlooks the sandy tracts, or Dora standing in the 
 corn, or the sight of the brimming wave that swings 
 through quiet meadows round the mill, it is all home in its 
 broadest, sweetest aspect. 
 
 It would not be easy for a generation that has grown up 
 
 to the music of Tennyson, that has in a manner beaten 
 
 time to it with the pulse of its life, to imagine what the 
 
 world would be without it. Even the most original among 
 
 us must needs think of things more or less in the shape in 
 
 which they come before us. The mystery of the charm of 
 
 words is as great as that by which a wonder of natural 
 
 beauty comes around us, and lays hold of our imagination. 
 
 It may be fancy, but I for one feel as if summer-time could 
 
 scarcelv be summer without the son": of the familiar green 
 
 books. 
 
 26
 
 VI 
 
 In Memoriam, with music in its cantos, belonging to the 
 school of all men's sad hearts, rings the awful DeProfundis 
 of death, faced and realized as far as may be by a human 
 soul. It came striking suddenly into all the sweet ideal 
 beauty and lovely wealth which had gone before, with a 
 revelation of that secret of life which is told to each of us 
 in turn by the sorrow of its own soul. Nothing can be 
 more simple than the form of the poem as it flows. 
 
 "Short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
 Their wings in tears, and skim away," 
 
 as the poet says himself, but it is something else besides — 
 something which has given words and ease to many of 
 those who in their lonely frozen grief perhaps feel that 
 they are no longer quite alone, when such a voice as this 
 can reach them : 
 
 "Peace; come away: the song of woe 
 Is after all an earthly song : 
 Peace ; come away : we do him wrong 
 To sing so wildly : let us go." 
 
 And as the cry passes away, come signs of peace and dawn- 
 ing light : 
 
 "Be neither song, nor game, nor feast; 
 
 Nor harp be touch'd, nor flute he blown ; 
 No dance, no motion, save alone 
 What lightens in the lucid east 
 29
 
 "Of rising workls l)y yonder wood. 
 
 Long sleeps the summer in the seed ; 
 Run out your measured arcs, and lead 
 The closing cycle rich in good." 
 
 And the teacher who can read the great book of nature in- 
 terprets for us as he turns the page. 
 
 With /;/ Menwritim, which was not pubHshed till 1850, 
 Alfred Tennyson's fame was firmly established ; and when 
 
 
 
 BURLEIGH HOUSE, BY STAMFORD TOWN 
 
 Wordsworth died (on Shakespeare's day in that same year) 
 its author was appointed by the Queen Poet Laureate. 
 There is a story* that at the time Sir Robert Peel was con- 
 sulted he had never read any Tennyson, but he read "Ulys- 
 ses " and warmed up, and acknowledged the right of this 
 new-come poet to be England's Laureate. 
 
 The home at Somersby was broken up by this time, by 
 
 * See Lord Houghton's Memoirs. 
 30 
 
 I
 
 marriages and other family events. Alfred Tennyson had 
 come to live in London. He was poor; he had in turn to 
 meet that struggle with wholesome poverty which brings the 
 vagueness of genius into contact with reality, and teaches, 
 better, perhaps, than any other science, the patience, the for- 
 bearance, and knowledge of life which belong to it. 
 
 The Princess, with all her lovely court and glowing har- 
 monies, had been born in London, among the fogs and 
 smuts of Lincoln'^ Inn, although, like all works of true art, 
 this poem must have grown by degrees in other times and 
 places as the poet came and went, free, unshackled, medi- 
 tating, inditing. He says that " Tears, Idle Tears," was sug- 
 gested by Tintern Abbey: but who shall define by what 
 mysterious wonder of beauty and regret, by what sense of 
 the "transient with the abiding?" 
 
 /;/ Mcmoriam was followed by the tirst part of the Idylls, 
 and the record of the court King Arthur held at Camelot, 
 and at "old Caerleon upon Usk" on that eventful Whitsun- 
 tide when Prince Geraint came quickly flashing through the 
 shallow ford to the little knoll, where the queen stood with 
 her maiden, and 
 
 . . . " listen'd for tlie distant hunt, 
 And chiefly for the baying of Cavall." 
 
 If /;/ Memoriam is the record of a human soul, the Idylls 
 mean the history, not of one man or of one generation, but 
 of a whole cycle, of the faith of a nation failing and falling 
 away into darkness. The first " Idyll " and the last, I have 
 heard Lord Tennyson say, are intentionally more archaic 
 than the others. " The whole is the dream of man coming 
 into practical life, and ruined by one sin." Birth is a mys- 
 tery, and death is a mystery, and in the midst lies the table- 
 land of life, and its struggle and performance. 
 
 The poet once told us that the song of the knights march- 
 
 31
 
 ing past the King at the marriage of Artiiur was made one 
 spring afternoon on Clapham Common as he walked along. 
 
 "Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May; 
 Blow trumpet, the long night hath roll'd away! 
 Blow through the living world — 'Let the King reign.'" 
 
 So sang the young knights in the first bright days of early 
 chivalry. 
 
 "Clang battle-axe, and clash brand! Let the King reign. 
 The King will follow Christ, and we the King." 
 
 And then when the doom of evil spread, bringing not sor- 
 row alone, but destruction in its train, not death only, but 
 hopelessness and consternation, the song is finally changed 
 into an echo of strange woe ; we hear no shout of triumph, 
 but the dim shocks of battle, 
 
 ' ' the crash 
 Of battle-axe on shatter'd helms, and shrieks 
 After the Christ, of those who falling down 
 Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist." 
 
 All is over with the fair court ; Guinevere's golden head 
 is low ; she has fled to Almesbury — 
 
 "Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald, 
 And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald 
 Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan: 
 And in herself she moan'd, ' Too late, too late !' 
 Till in the cold wind that foreruns the morn, 
 A blot in heaven, the Raven, frying high, 
 Croak'd, and she thought, 'He spies a field of death.'" 
 
 And finally comes the conclusion, and the " Passing of 
 Arthur," and he vanishes as he came, in mystery, silently 
 floating away upon the barge towards the East, whence all 
 religions are said to come. 
 
 32
 
 As the writer notes down these various fragments of re- 
 membrance, and compiles this sketch of present things, she 
 cannot but feel how much of the past it all means to 
 her, and how very much her own feeling is an inheritance 
 which has gathered interest during a lifetime, so that the 
 chief claim of her words to be regarded is that they are 
 those of an old friend. Her father's warmth of admiration 
 comes back vividly as she writes, all his pleasure when he 
 secured " Tithonus " for one of the early numbers of the 
 Cornhill Magazine, his imm.ense and outspoken admiration 
 for the Idylls of the King. 
 
 I have heard them all speak of these London days when 
 Alfred Tennyson lived in poverty with his friends and his 
 golden dreams. He lived in the Temple, at 58 Lincoln's 
 Inn Fields, and elsewhere. 
 
 It was about this time that Carlyle introduced Sir John 
 Simeon to Tennyson one night at Bath House, and made 
 the often-quoted speech, "There he sits upon a dung-heap 
 surrounded by innumerable dead dogs ;" by which dead 
 dogs he meant " CEnone " and other Greek versions and 
 adaptations. He had said the same thing of Landor and 
 his Hellenics. "I was told of this," said Lord Tennyson, 
 " and some time afterwards I repeated it to Carlyle : ' I'm 
 told that is what you say of me.' He gave a kind of guf- 
 faw. ' Eh, that wasn't a very luminous description of you,' 
 he answered." 
 
 The story is w-ell worth retelling, so completely does it 
 illustrate the grim humor and unaffected candor of a dys- 
 peptic man of genius, w-ho flung words and epithets without 
 malice, who neither realized the pain his chance sallies 
 might give, nor the indelible flash which branded them 
 upon people's memories. 
 
 The world has pointed its moral finger of late at the old 
 man in his great old age, accusing himself in the face of all, 
 
 35
 
 and confessing the overpowering irritations which the suf- 
 fering of a lifetime had laid upon him and upon her he 
 loved. That old caustic man of deepest feeling, with an ill 
 temper and a tender heart and a racking imagination, speak- 
 ing from the grave, and bearing unto it that cross of pas- 
 sionate remorse which few among us dare to face, seems to 
 some of us now a figure nobler and truer, a teacher greater 
 far, than in the days when his pain and love and remorse 
 were still hidden from us all. 
 
 Carlyle and Mr. Fitzgerald used to be often with Tenny- 
 son at that time. They used to dine together at the " Cock " 
 tavern in the Strand among other places ; sometimes Ten- 
 nyson and Carlyle took long, solitary walks into the night. 
 
 Here is Carlyle's description of the poet, written to Emer- 
 son in America : 
 
 "Tennyson came in to us on Sunday evening, a truly in- 
 teresting Son of Earth and Son of Heaven. . . . One of the 
 finest-looking men in the world. His voice is musical, me- 
 tallic — fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that 
 may be between ; speech and speculation free and plente- 
 ous. I do not meet in these late decades such company 
 over a pipe. ... A true human soul or some authentic ap- 
 proximation thereto, to whom your soul can say, Brother; a 
 man solitary and sad as certain men are, dwelling in an at- 
 mosphere of gloom — carrying a bit of chaos about kirn, in 
 short, which he is Tuamifacturing into cosmos T I have vent- 
 ured to put the italics ; had I letters of gold to write with I 
 would set them to the stately words. 
 
 The other day a lady was describing a by-gone feast giv- 
 en about this time by the poet to Lady Duff Gordon, and 
 to another young and beautiful lady, a niece of Mr. Hallam's. 
 Harry Hallam, his younger son, was also asked. Lord Ten- 
 nyson, ih his hospitality, had sent for a carpenter to change 
 the whole furniture of his bedroom in order to prepare a 
 
 36

 
 proper drawing-room for the ladies. Mr. Brookfield, com- 
 ing in, was in time to suggest some compromise, to which 
 the host reluctantly agreed. One can imagine that it was 
 a delightful feast, but indeed it is always a feast-day when 
 one breaks bread with those one loves, and the writer is 
 glad to think that she, too, has been among those to sit at 
 the kind board where the salt has not lost its savor in the 
 years that have passed, and where the guests can say then 
 grace not for bread and wine alone. May she add that 
 the first occasion of her having the honor of breaking bread 
 in company with Lord Tennyson was in her father's house, 
 when she was propped up in a tall chair between her 
 parents .-' 
 
 VII 
 
 Some of the writer's earliest recollections are of days 
 now long gone by, when many of these young men of whom 
 she has been speaking, grown to be middle-aged, used to 
 come from time to time to her father's house, and smoke 
 with him, and talk and laugh quietly, taking life seriousl), 
 but humorously too, with a certain loyalty to others and 
 self-respect which was their characteristic. They were 
 somewhat melancholy men at soul; but for that very rea- 
 son, perhaps, the humors of life may have struck them 
 more especially. It is no less possible that our children 
 will think of us as cheerful folks upon the whole, with no 
 little affectation of melancholy and all the graces. 
 
 I can remember on one occasion through a cloud of 
 smoke looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave 
 head of the Poet Laureate. He was sitting with my father 
 in the twilight after some family meal in the old house in 
 
 39
 
 Kc:isington. It is Lord Tennyson himself wiio has le- 
 minded me how upon this occasion, while my father was 
 speaking, my little sister looked up suddenly from the book 
 over which she had been absorbed, saying, in her sweet 
 childish voice, " Papa, why do you not write books like 
 Nicholas NicklebyV^ Then again I seem to hear, across 
 that same familiar table, voices without shape or name, 
 talking and telling each other that Lord Tennyson was mar- 
 ried — that he and his wife had been met walking on the 
 terrace at Clevedon Court ; and then the clouds descend 
 again, except, indeed, that I still see my father riding off 
 on his brown cob to the Tennysons' house at Twickenham 
 (Chapel House, which I can remember with its oak staircase 
 and the carved figure of a bishop blessing the passers-by) 
 to attend the christening of Hallam, their eldest son. In 
 after- days we were shown the old ivy -grown church and 
 the rectory at Shiplake, by the deep bend of the Thames, 
 where their marriage took place, after long years of faithful 
 constancy. 
 
 It was at Somersby that Alfred Tennyson first became 
 acquainted with his wife. She was eldest daughter of 
 Henry Selwood, the last but one of a family of country 
 gentlemen settled in Berkshire in the time of Charles I., 
 and before that, in Saxon times, as it is said, more impor- 
 tant people in the forest of their name. Her mother was a 
 sister of Sir John Franklin. 
 
 Not many years after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Tenny- 
 son settled at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight. There is 
 a photograph I have always liked, in which it seems to me 
 the history of this home is written, as such histories should 
 be written, in sunlight, in the flashing of a beam, in an 
 instant, and forever. It was taken in the green glade at 
 Farringford. Hallam and Lionel Tennyson stand on either 
 
 side of their parents, the father and mother and children, 
 
 40
 
 hand in hand, come advancing towards us — who does not 
 know the beautiful lines to the mother : 
 
 "Dear, near, and true — no truer Time himself 
 Can prove you, though he make you evermore 
 Dearer and nearer." 
 
 And though years have passed in which the boys with 
 their wind-blown locks grew up to man's estate, so that it 
 is now their boys who are in turn picking the daffodils under 
 the Farringford hedge, yet the old picture remains, in which 
 that one dear remembered figure, so early carried by the 
 flood far " from out our bourne of Time and Space," seems 
 to shine brighter than the rest. 
 
 VIII 
 
 One autumn, when everything seemed happy at home, 
 Mrs. Cameron took me with her to Freshwater for a few de- 
 lightful weeks, and then, for the first time, I lived with them 
 all, and with kind Mrs. Cameron, in the ivy-grown house 
 near the gates of Farringford. For the first time I stayed 
 in the island, and with the people who were dwelling there, 
 and walked with Tennyson along High Down, treading the 
 turf, listening to his talk, while the gulls came sideways, 
 flashing their white breasts against the edge of the cliffs, and 
 the poet's cloak flapped time to the gusts of the west wind. 
 
 The house at Farringford itself seemed like a charmed 
 palace, with green walls without, and speaking walls within. 
 There hung Dante with his solemn nose and wreath ; Italy 
 gleamed over the doorways; friends' faces lined the pas- 
 
 43
 
 sages ; books filled the shelves, and a glow of crimson was 
 everywhere ; the great oriel drawing-room window was full 
 of green and golden leaves, of the sound of birds and of 
 the distant sea. 
 
 The very names of the people who have stood upon the 
 lawn at Farringford would be an interesting study for some 
 future biographer : Longfellow, Maurice, Kingsley, the Duke 
 of Argyll, Locker, Dean Stanley, the Prince Consort. Good 
 Garibaldi once planted a tree there, off which some too ar- 
 dent republican broke a branch before twenty-four hours 
 had passed. Here came Clough in the last year of his life. 
 Here Mrs. Cameron fixed ber lens, marking the well-known 
 faces as they passed : Darwin and Henry Taylor, Watts and 
 Aubrey de Vere, Lecky and Jowett, and a score of others. 
 
 I first knew the place in the autumn, but perhaps it is 
 even more beautiful in the spring-time, when all day the 
 lark trills high overhead, and then when the lark has flown 
 out of hearing the thrushes begin, and the air is sweet with 
 scents from the many fragrant shrubs. The woods are full 
 of anemones and primroses ; narcissus grows wild in the 
 lower fields ; a lovely creamy stream of flowers flows along 
 the lanes, and lies hidden in the levels ; hyacinth pools of 
 blue shine in the woods; and then with a later burst of 
 glory comes the gorse, lighting up the country round about, 
 and blazing on the beacon hill. The little sketch here given 
 was made early one morning by Frederick Walker, who had 
 come over to see us at Freshwater. The beacon hill stands 
 behind Farringford. If you cross the little wood of night- 
 insrales and thrushes, and follow the lane where the black- 
 thorn hedges shine (lovely dials that illuminate to show the 
 hour), you come to the downs, and climbing their smooth 
 steeps you reach "High Down," where the beacon-staff 
 stands firm upon the mound. Then, following the fine of 
 the cliffs, you come at last to the Needles, and may look 
 
 44
 
 
 TENNYSON READING MAUD 
 From a sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1855. [See Note on pagu 60.,
 
 down upon the ridge of rocks that rise, crisp, sharp, shin- 
 ing, out of the blue wash of fierce, dehcious waters. 
 
 The lovely places and sweet country all about Farring- 
 ford are not among the least of its charms. Beyond the 
 Primrose Island itself and the blue Solent, the New Forest 
 spreads its shades, and the green depths reach to the very 
 shores. Have we not all read of the forest where Merlin 
 was becharmed, where the winds were still in the wild 
 
 FARRINGFORD BEACON 
 From an unpublished sketch by Frederick Walker 
 
 woods of Broceliande ? The forest of Brockenhurst, in 
 Hampshire, waves no less green, its ferns and depths are 
 no less sweet and sylvan, than those of Brittany. 
 
 Before an oak, so hollow, huge, and old 
 It look'd a tower of ruin'd mason-work. 
 At Merlin's feet the wily Vivien lay." 
 
 47
 
 Some people camping in the New Forest once told me of 
 a mysterious figure in a cloak coming suddenly upon them 
 out of a deep glade, passing straight on, looking neither to 
 the right nor the left. " It was either a ghost or it was Mr. 
 Tennyson," said they. 
 
 In Sir John Simeon's lifetime there was a constant inter- 
 course between Farringford and Swanston. Sir John was 
 one of Tennyson's most constant companions — a knight of 
 courtesy he calls him in the sad lines written in the garden 
 at Swanston. 
 
 Maud grew out of a remark of Sir John Simeon's, to 
 whom Tennyson had read the lines, 
 
 "O that 'twere possible 
 After long grief and pain," 
 
 which lines were, so to speak, the heart of Maud. Sir John 
 said that it seemed to him as if something were wanting to 
 explain the story of this poem, and so by degrees it all grew. 
 One little story was told me on the authority of Mr. Henry 
 Sidgwick, who was perhaps present on that occasion. Ten- 
 nyson was reading the poem to a silent company assembled 
 in the twilight, and when he came to the birds in the high 
 hall garden calling Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, he stopped 
 short, and asked an authoress who happened to be present 
 what birds these were. The authoress, much alarmed, and 
 feeling that she must speak, and that the eyes of the 
 whole company were upon her, faltered out, " Nightin- 
 gales." "Pooh," said Tennyson, "what a cockney you 
 are ! Nightingales don't say Maud. Rooks do, or some- 
 thing like it. Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw." Then he went 
 on reading. 
 
 Reading, is it ? One can hardly describe it. It is a sort 
 of mystical incantation, a chant in which every note rises 
 and falls and reverberates again. As we sit around the 
 
 48
 
 THE OAK LAWN, ALDWORTH
 
 twilight room at Farringford, with its great oriel-window 
 looking to the garden, across fields of hyacinth and self- 
 sowed daffodils towards the sea, where the waves wash 
 against the rock, we seem carried by a tide not unlike the 
 ocean's sound ; it fills the room, it ebbs and flows aw^ay ; 
 and when we leave, it is with a strange music in our ears, 
 feeling that we have for the first time, perhaps, heard what 
 we may have read a hundred times before. 
 
 Let me here note a fact, whether a tort or apropos of 
 nightingales: once when Mr. Tennyson was in Yorkshire, 
 so he told me, as he was walking at night in a friend's gar- 
 den, he heard a nightingale singing with such a frenzy of 
 passion that it was unconscious of everything else, and 
 not frightened though he came and stood quite close be- 
 side it ; he could see its eye flashing, and feel the air bub- 
 ble in his ear through the vibration. Our poet, with his 
 short-sighted eyes, can see farther than most people. Al- 
 most the first time I ever walked out with him, he told me 
 to look and tell him if the field -lark did not come down 
 sideways upon its wing. 
 
 Nature in its various aspects makes up a larger part of 
 this man's life than it does for other people. He goes his 
 way unconsciously absorbing life, and its lights and sounds, 
 and teaching us to do the same as far as may be. There 
 is an instance of this given in the pamphlet already quoted 
 from, where the two friends talk on of one theme and an- 
 other from Kenelm Digby to Aristophanes, and the poet 
 is described as saying, among other things, that he knows 
 of no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant's 
 eyes, and that it was from those of his own he learned that 
 those of the Divine Child in Raffaello's Sistine Madonna 
 were not overcharged with expression. 
 
 Here is a reminiscence of Tennyson's about the echo at 
 Killarney, where he said to the boatman, " When I last was 
 here I heard eight echoes, and now I only hear one." To 
 
 SI
 
 which the man, who had heard people quoting the bugle 
 song, replied, " Why, you must be the gentleman that 
 brought all the money to the place." 
 
 People have different ideas of poets. Mrs. B , of 
 
 Totland's Bay, once asked a Freshwater boy, who was driv- 
 ing her, " if he knew Mr. Tennyson." "He makes poets for 
 the Queen," said the boy. "What do you mean?" said the 
 lady, amused. " I don't know what they means," said the 
 boy, " but p'liceman often seen him walking about a-making 
 of 'em under the stars." The author of Euphranor has his 
 own definition of a poet : 
 
 " The only living — and like to live — poet I have known, when he 
 found himself beside the ' bonnie Doon,' whether it were from recollec- 
 tion of poor Burns, or of ' the days that are no more ' which haunt us 
 all, I know not — I think he did not know — ' broke into a passion of 
 tears ' (as he told me). Of tears, which during a pretty long and inti- 
 mate intercourse I had never seen glistening in his eyes but once, when 
 reading Virgil — ' dear old Virgil,' as he called him — together ; and then 
 — oh, not of Queen Dido, nor of young Marcellus even, but of the burn- 
 ing of Troy, in the second /Eneid — whether moved by the catastrophe 
 itself, or the majesty of the verse it is told in, or as before, scarce know- 
 ing why. For as King Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin he, 
 though, as a great poet, comprehending all the softer stops of human 
 emotion in that diapason where the intellectual, no less than what is 
 called the poetical, faculty predominated." 
 
 " You will last," Douglas Jerrold said. And there was 
 Carlyle's " Eh ! he has got the grip of it," when Tennyson 
 read him the Revenge. But perhaps the best compliment 
 Mr. Tennyson ever received was one day when walking in 
 Covent Garden, when he was stopped by a rough-looking 
 man, who held out his hand, and said : " You're Mr. Tenny- 
 son. Look here, sir, here am I. I've been drunk for six 
 days out of the seven, but if you will shake me by the hand, 
 I'm d d if I ever get drunk again."
 
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 IX 
 
 Aldworth was built some twenty years ago, when Lady 
 Tennyson had been ordered change, and Freshwater was 
 found to be unbearable and overcrowded during the sum- 
 mer months. It must be borne in mind that to hospitable 
 people there are dangers from friendly inroads as well as 
 from the attacks of enemies. The new house, where for 
 many years past the family has spent its summers, stands on 
 the summit of a high, lonely hill in Surrey, and yet it is not 
 quite out of reach of London life. It is a white stone house 
 with many broad windows facing a great view and a long 
 terrace, like some one of those at Siena or Perugia, with a 
 low parapet of stone, where ivies and roses are trained, 
 making a foreground to the lovely haze of the distance. 
 Sometimes at Aldworth, when the summer days are at their 
 brightest, and Blackdown top has been well warmed and 
 sunned, I have seen a little procession coming along the 
 terrace walk, and proceeding by its green boundary into a 
 garden, where the sun shines its hottest, upon a sheltered 
 lawn, and where standard rose-trees burn their flames: 
 Lord Tennyson, in his cloak, going first, perhaps dragging 
 the garden chair in which Lady Tennyson was lying ; Hal- 
 lam Tennyson following, with rugs and cushions for the rest 
 of the party. If the little grandsons and their mother, in 
 her white dress and broad, shady hat, and Lionel Tenny- 
 son's boys, absorbed in their books of adventure, are there, 
 the family group is complete. One special day I remember 
 when we all sat for an hour round about the homely chair 
 
 55
 
 and its gentle occupant. It seemed not unlike a realization 
 of some Italian picture that I had somewhere seen : the 
 tranquil eyes, the peaceful heights, the glorious summer 
 day, some sense of lasting calm, of beauty beyond the 
 present hour. 
 
 Lord Tennyson works alone in the early hours of the 
 morning, and comes down long after his own frugal meal is 
 over to find his guests assembling round the social break- 
 fast-table. He generally goes out for a walk before lunch- 
 eon, with his son and a friend, perhaps, and followed by 
 a couple of dogs. Most of us know the look of the stately 
 figure, the hanging cloak, and broad felt hat. 
 
 There used to be one little ceremony peculiar to the 
 Tennyson family, and reminding one of some college cus- 
 tom which continued, that when dinner was over the 
 guests used to be brought away into a second room, where 
 stood a white table, upon which fruit and wine were set, 
 and a fire burned bright, and a pleasant hour went by, 
 while the master of the house sat in his carved chair and 
 discoursed upon any topic suggested by his guests, or 
 brought forth reminiscences of early Lincolnshire days, or 
 from facts remembered out of the lives of past men who 
 have been his friends. There was Rogers, among the rest, 
 for whom he had a great affection, with whom he con- 
 stantly lived during that lonely time in London. "I have 
 dined alone with him," I heard Lord Tennyson say, "and 
 we have talked about death till the tears rolled down his 
 face." 
 
 Tennyson met Tom Moore at Rogers's, and there, too, 
 he first met Mr. Gladstone. John Forster, Leigh Hunt, and 
 Landor were also friends of that time. One of Tenny- 
 son's often companions in those days was Mr. Hallam, 
 whose opinion he once asked of Carlyle's French Revolution. 
 Mr. Hallam replied, in his quick, rapid way, " Upon my 
 
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 so 
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 word, I once opened the book, and read four or five pages. 
 The style is so abominable I could not get on with it." 
 Whereas Carlyle's own criticism upon the History of the 
 Middle Ages was, " Eh ! the poor, miserable skeleton of a 
 book !" 
 
 Was it not Charles Lamb who wanted to return grace 
 after reading Shakespeare, little deeming in humble sim- 
 plicity that many of us yet to come would be glad to return 
 thanks for a jest of Charles Lamb's. The difference be- 
 tween those who speak with reality, and those who go 
 through life fitting their second-hand ideas to other peo- 
 ple's words, is one so marked that even a child may tell the 
 difference. When the Laureate speaks, every word comes 
 wise, racy, absolutely natural, and sincere ; and how gladly 
 do we listen to his delightful stories, full of odd humors and 
 knowledge of men and women, or to his graver talk ! I re- 
 member thinking how true was the phrase of Lionel Tenny- 
 son's concerning his father, " When a man has read so much 
 and thought so much, it is an epitome of the knowledge 
 of to-day we find in him," an epitome indeed touched by 
 the solemn strain of the poet's own gift. I once heard 
 Tennyson talking to some actors, to no less a person in- 
 deed than to Hamlet himself, for after the curtain fell the 
 whole play seemed to flow from off the stage into the box 
 where we had been sitting, and I could scarcely tell at last 
 where reality began and Shakespeare ended. The play was 
 over, and we ourselves seemed a part of it still ; here were 
 the players, and our own prince poet, in that familiar simple 
 voice we all know, explaining the art, going straight to the 
 point in his own downright fashion, criticising with delicate 
 appreciation, by the simple force of truth and conviction 
 carrying all before him. "You are a good actor lost," one 
 of these, the real actor, said to him. 
 
 It is a gain to the world when people are content to be 
 
 59
 
 themselves, not chipped to the smooth pattern of the times, 
 but simple, original, and unaffected in ways and words. 
 Here is a poet leading a poet's life ; where he goes there 
 goes the spirit of his home, whether in London among the 
 crowds, or at Aldworth on the lonely height, or at Farring- 
 ford in that beautiful bay. The last time I went to see him 
 in London he was smoking in a top room in Eton Square, 
 It may interest an American public to be told that it was 
 Durham tobacco from North Carolina, which Mr. Lowell 
 had given him. I could not but feel how little even cir- 
 cumstance itself can contribute to that mysterious essence 
 of individuality which we all recognize and love. In this 
 commonplace London room, with all the stucco of Belgravia 
 round about, I found the old dream realized, the old charm 
 of youthful impression. There sat my friend as I had first 
 seen him years ago among the clouds. 
 
 Note. — This early sketch was preserved by Robert Browning, to 
 whose courtesy we are indebted for its use, and v/as one of the interest- 
 ing pictures of the Rossetti exhibition held in London after the painter's 
 death. ]Mrs. Browning was anotlier of the distinguished company. 
 
 THE TENNYSON COAT OF ARMS
 
 JOHN RUSKIN
 
 " Let hiiowledge grow from more to more, 
 But more of reverence in ns dwell ; 
 That mind and soul, according well, 
 Maj> make one vmsic as before."
 
 
 
 w:, 
 
 BRANTWOOD 
 
 [EN the writer of 
 this essay tries to 
 go back to her first impres- 
 sions of John Ruskin, she 
 finds that they must date 
 from the round-table in the middle of her father's drawing- 
 room in Kensington — the little drawing-room in Younf 
 
 63
 
 Street, with the bow-windows, the oak-leaved carpet, the 
 poHshed bookcase with its glass doors, and the aforesaid 
 round-table with its dial of books arranged in a circle, and 
 faithfully marking the march of time. For, looking at a 
 list of Mr. Ruskin's works, I find that the Seven Lamps of 
 Architecture was published in 1849, soon after we came to 
 live in England in our father's house. And in this year 
 there appeared among the Punches and the lovely red silk 
 Annuals and Keepsakes that illuminated the bow-windowed 
 room a volume bound (so it seemed to us children) in 
 moulded slabs of pure chocolate. I can still recall the 
 look of the broad margins, the pictures, and noble-looking 
 printed pages, and although the Annuals with the fascinat- 
 ing brides and veiled ladies, and the ghosts and guitars and 
 brigands, were perhaps more to our childish tastes, even 
 then we realized in some indefinite way the importance of 
 the big brown book which opened like a casket, and gath- 
 ered some impressions of palace windows and of carved 
 shadows from its pages — impressions to be afterwards turned 
 into actual stone and sunlight. 
 
 As time went on, the Stones of Venice in due course took 
 their place upon our dial, and meanwhile the name of the 
 writer of the beautiful authoritative books is among those 
 other echoes, which are so familiar that one can scarcely 
 tell when they begin to sound. 
 
 In the first page of the eleventh chapter of Prceterita 
 occurs the name of " Mrs. John Simon, who," says Ruskin, 
 " in my mother's old age was her most deeply trusted 
 friend." It was at this lady's house, sitting by the kind 
 hostess of many a year to be, that the writer first saw the 
 author of Modern Painters, while at the other end of the 
 table Mr. Simon, now Sir John (" Brother John," Ruskin 
 dubbed him long since), sat carving, as was his wont, roast 
 mutton — " be it tender and smoking and juicy " — and dis- 
 
 64
 
 pensing, as is still his wont, trimmings and oracles and 
 epigrams with every plateful. 
 
 I could even now quote some of the words Ruskin spoke 
 on that summer's evening in Great Cumberland Street, and 
 I can see him as he was then almost as plainly as on the 
 last time that we met. His mood on that first occasion 
 Avas one of deep depression, and I can remember being 
 frightened as well as absorbed by his talk. Was he joking ? 
 was he serious ? I could hardly follow what he said then, 
 though now it all seems simple enough. But good company 
 is like good wine, and improves by keeping, and let us hope 
 that this applies to the recipients as well as to the feast 
 itself. 
 
 Ruskin seemed less picturesque as a young man than in 
 his later days. Perhaps gray waving hair may be more 
 becoming than darker locks, but the speaking, earnest eyes 
 must have been the same, as well as the tones of that de- 
 lightful voice, with its slightly foreign pronunciation of the 
 r, which seemed so familiar again when it welcomed us to 
 Coniston long, long years after. Meeting thus after fifteen 
 years, I was struck by the change for the better in him ; by 
 the bright, radiant, sylvan look which a man gains by living 
 among woods and hills and pure breezes. 
 
 65
 
 II 
 
 The road to Brantwood* runs beneath the old trees 
 which shade the head of Coniston Water, and you leave 
 ihe village and the inn behind, and the Thwaite, with 
 its pretty old gardens and peacocks, and skirt the beautiful 
 grounds of Monk Coniston ; you pass the ivy tower where 
 the lords of the manor keep their boats ; and the reeds 
 among which the swallows and dragon -flies are darting; 
 and as you advance, if you look back across the green hay- 
 fields and wooded slopes of Monk Coniston, you can see 
 Weatherlam and Ravenscrag, with Yewdale for a back- 
 ground, while Coniston Old Man on the opposite side of 
 the lake rises like a Pilatus above the village, and soars 
 into changing lights and clouds. Then, as you walk still 
 farther along the road, leaving all these things behind, you 
 pass into a sweet Arcadia, in which, indeed, one loses one's 
 self again in after- times. You go by Tent Lodge, where 
 Tennyson once dwelt, where the beautiful Romneys are 
 hanging on the walls ; you pass the cottage with roses for 
 bricks, and with jasmines and honeysuckles for thatch, and 
 the farm where the pet lamb used to dwell, to the terror of 
 the children (it seemed appropriate enough to Wordsworth's 
 
 * Ruskin, writing of liis earliest recollections of Coniston in Prceterita, says : " The 
 inn at Coniston was then actually at the upper end of the lake, the road from Amble- 
 side to the village passing just between it and the water, and the view of the long reach 
 of lake, with its softly wooded lateral hills, had for my father a tender charm which ex- 
 cited the same feeling as that with which he afterwards regarded the lakes of Italy. 
 Lowwood Inn also was then little more than a country cottage, and Ambleside a rural 
 village, and the absolute peace and bliss which any one who cared for grassy hills and 
 for sweet waters might find at every footstep and at every turn of crag or bend of bog. 
 was totally unlike anything I ever saw or read of elsewhere." 
 
 66
 
 country, but I can remember a little baby girl wild with ter- 
 ror and flying from its gambols) ; then, still following the 
 road, you reach a delightful cackling colony of poultry and 
 ducks, where certain hospitable ladies used to experiment- 
 alize, and prove to us whether or no eggs are eggs (as these 
 ladies have determined eggs should be) ; then comes Low 
 Bank Ground, our own little farm lodging among the chest- 
 nut-trees and meadows full of flowers. It had been the site 
 of a priory once, and on this slope and in the shade of the 
 chestnut-trees, where monks once dwelt, the writer met Rus- 
 kin again after many years. He, the master of Brantwood, 
 came, as I remember, dressed with some ceremony, meeting 
 us with a certain old-fashioned courtesy and manner ; but he 
 spoke with his heart, of which the fashion doesn't change 
 happily from one decade to another; and as he stood in his 
 tall hat and frock-coat upon the green, the clouds and drifts 
 came blowing up from every quarter of heaven, and I can 
 almost see him while he talked with emphasis and remem- 
 brance of that which was then in both our minds. Low 
 Bank Ground is but a very little way from Brantwood ; you 
 can go there by land or by water. If you v/alk, the road 
 climbs the spur of the hill, and runs below moors by a wood 
 where squirrels sit under the oak-trees and honeysuckles 
 drop from the branches ; or, if you like to go by the lake, 
 you can get Timothy from the farm to row you. " A dash 
 of the oars, and you are there," as Ruskin said, and accord- 
 ingly we started in the old punt for our return visit to 
 Brantwood. 
 
 The sun came out between rain clouds as the boat struck 
 with a hollow crunch against the stones of the tiny landing 
 pier. Timothy from the farm, who had come to pilot us, told 
 us with a sympathetic grin that Mr. Ruskin — " Rooskin," 
 I think he called him — " had built t' pier, and set t' stoans 
 
 himsel' wi' the other gentlemen, but they had to send for t' 
 
 67
 
 smith from the village to make t' bolts faaster." The pier 
 is fast enough, running out into the lake, with a little fleet 
 safely anchored behind it, while Brantwood stands high up 
 on the slope, with square windows looking across the waters. 
 Just on the other side of the lake, wrapped in mysterious 
 ivy wreaths, where the cows are whisking their tails beneath 
 the elms, rise the gables of the old farm, once the manor- 
 house where " Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," once 
 dwelt. Sir Philip Sidney used to come riding across the dis^ 
 tant hills to visit her there — so tradition says. The mere 
 thought of Coniston Water brings back the peaceful le- 
 gends and sounds all about Ruskin's home : the plash of 
 the lake, the rustle of the leaves and rushes, the beat of 
 birds on their whirring wings, the flop of the water-rats, the 
 many buzzing and splashing and delicious things. A path 
 up a garden of fruit and flowers, of carnations and straw- 
 berries, leads with gay zigzags to the lawn in front of the 
 Brantwood windows. 
 
 The house is white, plain, and comfortable, absolutely 
 unpretending. I remember noticing, with a thrill, the um- 
 brella-stand in the glass door. So Mr. Ruskin had an um- 
 brella just like other people ! It seemed to me to be a 
 dwelling planned for sunshine, and sunshine on the lakes 
 is of a quality so sweet and rare that it counts for more 
 than in any other place. The brightness of Brantwood, 
 the squareness, and its unaffected comfortableness, were, I 
 think, the chief characteristics. You had a general impres- 
 sion of solid, old-fashioned furniture, of amber-colored dam- 
 ask curtains and coverings ; there were Turners and other 
 water -color pictures in curly frames upon the drawing- 
 room walls — a Prout, I think, among them ; there was a 
 noble Titian in the dining-room, and the full-length portrait 
 of a child in a blue sash over the sideboard, which has be- 
 come familiar since then to the readers of Pr(Zterita ; and 
 
 68 -^^ 
 
 J 
 
 r
 
 most certainly was there an absence of any of the art-diph- 
 thongs and peculiarities of modern taste : only the simplest 
 and most natural arrangements for the comfort of the in- 
 mates and their guests. Turkey carpets, steady round-tables, 
 and above all a sense of cheerful, hospitable kindness, which 
 seems to be traditional at Brantwood. For many years past 
 Mrs. Severn has kept her cousin's house, and welcomed his 
 guests with her own. 
 
 That evening — the first we spent at Brantwood — the 
 rooms were lighted by slow sunset cross-lights from the lake 
 without. Mrs. Severn sat in her place behind a silver urn, 
 while the master of the house, with his back to the window, 
 was dispensing such cheer, spiritual and temporal, as those 
 who have been his guests will best realize. Fine wheaten 
 bread and Scotch cakes in many a crisp circlet and crescent, 
 and trout from the lake, and strawberries such as only grow 
 on the Brantwood slopes. Were these cups of tea only, or 
 cups of fancy, feeling, inspiration ? And as we crunched 
 and quaffed we listened to a certain strain not easily to be 
 described, changing from its graver first notes to the sweet- 
 est and most charming vibrations. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Who can ever recall a good talk that is over.? You can 
 remember the room in which it was held, the look of the 
 chairs, but the actual talk takes wings and flies away. A 
 dull talk has no wings, and is rememberd more easily ; so 
 are those tiresome conversations which consist of sentences 
 which we all repeat by rote, sentences which have bored us 
 a hundred times before, and which do not lose this property
 
 by long use. But a real talk leaps into life ; it is there al- 
 most before we are conscious of its existence. What system 
 of notation can mark it down as it flows, modulating from 
 its opening chords to those delightful exhilarating strains 
 which are gone again almost before we have realized them, 
 Ruskin w^as explaining his views in his own words as we 
 sat there. I should do him ill justice if I tried to transcribe 
 his sermon. The text was that strawberries should be ripe 
 and sweet, and we munched and marked it then and there ; 
 '.that there should be a standard of fitness applied to every 
 detail of life ; and this standard, with a certain gracious 
 malice, Avit, hospitality, and remorselessness, he began to 
 apply to one thing and another, to one person and another, 
 to dress, to food, to books. I remember his describing to 
 my brother-in-law Leslie Stephen the shabby print and 
 paper that people were content to live with, and contrasting 
 with these the books he himself was then printing for the 
 use of the shepherds round about. And among the rest he 
 showed us Sir Philip Sidney's pharaphrase of the Psalms, 
 which he has long since given to the world in the Biblio- 
 theca Pastor Hin. Let us trust these fortunate shepherds 
 are worthy of their print and margins. 
 
 If, as I have already said, we compare the talk of great 
 men and women "who will cause this age to be remem- 
 bered," one element is to be found in them all — a certain 
 directness, simplicity, and vivid reality ; a gift for reaching 
 their hearers at once, giving light straight from themselves, 
 and not in reflections from other minds ; sunshine, in short, 
 not moonshine. Perhaps something of this may be due to 
 the habit of self-respect and self-reliance which success and 
 strength of purpose naturally create. Many uncelebrated 
 people have the grace of convincing simplicity, but I have 
 never met '. really great man without it. As one thinks of 
 
 it, one ree gnizes that a great man is greater than we are 
 
 70
 
 JOHN RUSKIN — [From portrait by Hubert Herkomer, A. K. A.] 
 From the etching published by Fine Art Society, London
 
 because his aim (consciously or unconsciously) is juster, his 
 strength stronger and less strained ; his right is more right 
 than ours, his certainty more certain ; he shows us the best 
 of that which concerns him, and the best of ourselves too 
 in that which concerns us in his work or his teaching. 
 
 If we look at the Elgin marbles, for instance, we feel that 
 the standard of human attainment is forever raised by those 
 broken lines in eternal harmony, and we also indefinitely 
 realize that while looking at them we ourselves are at our 
 best in sculpture ; and so listening back to the echoes of a 
 lifetime, we can most of us still hear some strains very clear, 
 very real and distinct, out of all the confusion of past noise 
 and chatter ; and the writer (nor is she alone in this) must ever 
 count the magic of the music of Brantwood oratory among 
 such strains. Music, oratory, I know not what to call that > 
 wondrous gift which subjugates all who come within its reach. 
 
 " God uses us to help each other so, lending our minds out." 
 
 ^ If ever a man lent out his mind to help others, Ruskin is 
 the man. From country to country, from age to age, from 
 element to element, he leads the way, while his audience, 
 laughing, delighted, follows with scrambling thoughts and 
 apprehensions and flying leaps, he meanwhile illustrating 
 each delightful, fanciful, dictatorial sentence with pictures 
 by the way — things, facts, objects interwoven, bookcases 
 opening wide, sliding drawers unlocked with his own mar- 
 vellous keys — and lo ! we are perhaps down in the centre of 
 the earth, far below Brantwood and its surrounding hills, 
 among specimens, minerals, and precious stones, Ruskin 
 still going ahead, and crying " sesame " and " sesame," and 
 revealing each secret recess of his King's Treasury in turn, 
 pointing to each tiny point of light and rainbow veined in 
 marble, gold and opal, crystal and emerald. Then, perhaps, 
 while we are wondering, and barely beginning to apprehend 
 
 ^—2 73
 
 his delightful illustrations, the lecturer changes from natural 
 things to those of art, from veins of gold meandering in the 
 marble and speaking of ages, to coins marking the history 
 of man. I was specially struck by some lovely old Holbein 
 pieces of Henry VHI. which he brought out. I can still 
 see Ruskin's hand holding the broad gold mark in its palm. 
 Who could help speculating at such a moment .'' Whence 
 had it come, that golden token, since Holbein laid his 
 chisel down ? From what other hands had it reached this 
 one ? Had Shakespeare once had the spending of it, had 
 Bacon clutched at it, or had Buckingham flung it to the 
 wind, or had Milton owned it, perhaps, before Cromwell 
 called the King's money back into his own treasury ? Any- 
 how, this golden piece has escaped the Puritan's crucibles, 
 and here it is still, to show us what a golden coin has been, 
 and lying safe in the Brantwood treasury. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is now several years since we were at Coniston, and I 
 may have perhaps somewhat confused the various occasions 
 when we went to Brantwood. One year the family was ab- 
 sent during our stay, but tokens of present kindness came 
 day after day — basketfuls brought up by the gardener, roses 
 and the afore-mentioned strawberries, and other ripe things 
 that had colored in its sunshine. 
 
 Another year when we were staying at the farm Ruskin 
 was at Brantwood, alone with a young relative, and he asked 
 us to go up and see him. Again I remember one of those 
 long monologues, varied, absorbing, combining pictures and 
 metaphors into one delightful whole, while the talker, carried 
 
 74

 
 I
 
 along by his own interest in his subject, would be starting 
 to his feet, bringing down one and another volume from the 
 shelf, opening the page between his hands, and beginning 
 to read the passage appropriate to his theme. It was some 
 book of Indian warfare that he brought down from its place, 
 and as he opened it he then and there began his sermon : 
 spoke of the example which good Christian men and wom- 
 en might set in any part of the world , quoted Sir Herbert Ed- 
 wards, whom he loved and admired, as an example of what 
 a true man should be. He spoke of him with kindling eyes, 
 warming as he went on to tell, as only a Ruskin could tell 
 it, the heroic history of the first Sikh war. What happened 
 in India yesterday he did not know ; he said he sometimes 
 spent months without once looking at the papers, and in de- 
 liberate ignorance of what was happening and not happen- 
 ing in their columns. 
 
 There is a story told of Ruskin receiving a telegram not 
 long ago from some member of the royal family, of which 
 he could not construe the meaning until he called in the 
 telegraph boy, who then informed him of an event with 
 which the country had been ringing for weeks past, and to 
 Avhich the telegram related. 
 
 I further remember, among other things, after his little 
 lecture upon "True Knights," a delightful description of 
 what a True Lady should be. " A princess, a washer-woman," 
 he said — "yes, a washer-woman ! To see that all is fair and 
 clean, to wash with water, to cleanse and purify wlierever she 
 goes, to set disordered things in orderly array — this was a 
 Njvoman's mission." Which sentence has often occurred to 
 me since then at irritating moments of household adminis- 
 tration. Ruskin has written something not unlike it in his 
 lecture upon "Queen's Gardens;" but how different is the 
 impression left, even by such printers' type as his, from that 
 of the words and the voice flowing on in its measure ! 
 
 77
 
 (! 
 
 The writer, speaking to one of Ruskin's most constant 
 and faithful readers, once compared him to a Prospero, 
 thinking of this strange power of his over the minds of those 
 who are in liis company, of the sweet harmonies he can raise 
 at will, of the wanderings he can impose upon his subjects, 
 and of his playful humors and fanciful experiments upon 
 the audience, " be it to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to 
 ride on the curl'd cloud." Mrs. Fanny Kemble, who was 
 the lady in question (she sat with a volume of Modern Paint- 
 ers open before her), said ; " No ; I myself see no resem- 
 blance whatever between the two : Prospero dealt with magic 
 and unreality ; the power of Ruskin lies in the extraordinary 
 reality of his teaching. Think what a vision of beauty lies 
 spread before that man." And this is certainly high and 
 worthy praise, coming from one who herself belongs to the 
 noble race of spiritual pastors and masters. Mrs. Kemble 
 concluded by quoting Ruskin's account of a heap of gravel 
 by the road-side, which she had just been reading, and which 
 she said had struck her as one Of the most remarkable de- 
 scriptions ever written in the English language. 
 
 V 
 
 Ruskin has said somewhere that his three great masters 
 have been Tintoret, Carlyle, and Turner. When John Rus- 
 kin, the son of John Ruskin, was bornMn 1819, Titian had 
 been dead over two hundred years ; Carlyle, beginning life, 
 was living in Edinburgh, where he was supporting himself 
 by literature and by articles in Dr. Brewster's Encyclopcedia ; 
 Turner was a man of forty-four, already Avell advanced in 
 life; he had published his Liber Sti/dionim, painted many
 
 v« 
 
 
 
 f 
 
 
 ^l 
 
 THE TURRET ROOM — RUSKIN b BEDROOM 
 
 noble pictures; he had built his 
 house in Queen Anne Street, and 
 was then starting for Italy. It was 
 a dull and unromantic time in the 
 history of England, a time reach- 
 ing beyond the fifty years' radius of our recent Jubilee. 
 Men, weary of war, were resting and counting its cost; 
 the poor were suffering, the rich were bankrupt ; the old 
 King was dying, Princess Charlotte was dead ; the Regent 
 was absorbed in his schemes and selfish ends ; corn was 
 at starvation prices ; mobs were breaking out in discon- 
 tent and riot-, and yet no less than in more propitious 
 hours were the divine sparks falling from heaven — upon chil- 
 dren at their play, upon infants in their cradles, who were 
 to grow up with hearts kindled by that sacred flame which, 
 refracted from generation to generation, keeps the world 
 alive. 
 
 79
 
 "See a disenchanted nation 
 Spring like day from desolation ; 
 To Truth its state is dedicate, 
 And Freedom leads it forth." 
 
 So wrote Shelley, at that time looking his last at the Bay 
 of Naples, and completing the first act of his Prometheus, 
 while Browning and Tennyson were childreii at play in their 
 fathers' gardens — Tennyson hidden far away among Lin- 
 colnshire wolds and levels, Browning plucking his own brand . 
 of Promethean fire somewhere on the heights that encircle 
 the great city where Ruskin, still lying in his cradle, had 
 not as yet found a miraculous voice to cry out with, and to 
 protest that though love of Truth and Justice might be the 
 same for both, Shelley's Freedom and John Ruskin's Free- 
 dom were as unlike as night and day.* 
 
 " I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of 
 the old school — Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and 
 Homer's," says Ruskin in the first lines of Prceterita, going 
 back to those early days when his lately married father and 
 mother had settled down in Bloomsbury, and when he him- 
 self first comes upon the scene, " a child with yellow hair, 
 dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad, light blue 
 sash and blue shoes to match," standing at a window, and 
 watching the events of the street. 
 
 As one reads Prceterifa it seems as if John Ruskin wrote 
 his history not with ink, but painted it down with light 
 and color; he brings the very atmosphere of his life and its 
 phases before us with such an instantaneous mastery as few 
 besides have ever reached — the life within, without the 
 sweet eternal horizons (even though they be but Norwood 
 
 * " My own teaching has been and is that Liberty, whether in the body, soul, or 
 political estate of men, is only another word for Death, and tlie final issue of Death — 
 Putrefaction ; the body, spirit, and political estate being healthy only by their bonds 
 and laws " — 1875, Fors, Letter 411, 
 
 80
 
 hills and ridges), the living and delightful figures in the 
 foreground. 
 
 Its author has chosen to christen the story Prcrterita, but 
 was ever a book less belonging to the past and more en- 
 tirely present to our rnood than this one ? Not Goethe's 
 own autobiography, not even Carlyle's passionate reminis- 
 cences, come up to it in vividness. There are so few words, 
 such limpid images are brought flashing before us, that in 
 our secret consciousness we /-emember rather than we read." 
 Are we not actually living in its pages, in the dawning light 
 of that austere yet glorious childhood ? Half a century rolls 
 back, and we see the baby up above at the drawing-room 
 Avindows, standing absorbed, watching the water-carts, and 
 that wondrous turn-cock, "who turns and turns till a fount- 
 ain springs up in the middle of the street," and as we still 
 watch the child, gazing out with his blue, deep-set eyes, the 
 brown brick walls somehow become transparent, as they did 
 for Ebenezer Scrooge, and we are in the same mysterious 
 fashion absorbed into the quiet home and silent life. We 
 get to know the inmates with some immaterial friendship 
 and intimacy. The father, " that entirely honest man " of 
 rare gifts and refinement, going and coming to his wine- 
 merchant's office in Billeter Street ; the mother, combining 
 the spirit of Martha and of Mary, unflinching, orderly, living 
 for her husband and her son, not rejecting the better part, 
 but forcing every member of her household to conform to 
 her views of both worlds, and binding down their lives by 
 some emphatic and restraining power. But how soon the 
 child born to such liberty of thought, to such absolute obedi- 
 ence of will, learns to escape from his bonds, to create his 
 own life and world ! His very playthings (all others being 
 denied to him) he makes for himself out of the elements, the 
 air above, the waters beneath, the craters of the coal-heavers 
 as they empty the sacks at the door. " My mother's general
 
 principles of the first treatment were to guard me with steady 
 watchfuhiess from all avoidable pain or danger; and for the 
 rest to let me amuse myself ; but the law was I should find 
 my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first al- 
 lowed, and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic., 
 poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birth 
 days, thinking to overcome my mother's resolution by splen- 
 dor of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and 
 Judy she could find in all the Soho Bazar, as big as a real 
 Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that 
 would dance. . . . My mother was obliged to accept them, 
 but afterwards quietly told me it was not right I should have 
 them, and I never saw them again." 
 
 This Croydon aunt must have been a good and loving 
 aunt to little John. "Whenever my father was ill," he says 
 — " and hard work and sorrow had already set their mark on 
 him — we all went down to Croydon to be petted by my 
 homely aunt, and walk on Duppas Hill and on the heather 
 of Addington." He dwells with affectionate remembrance 
 upon the house and its gables and early fascinations for 
 him. " My chosen domain being the shop, the back room, 
 and the stones round the spring of crystal water at the back 
 door (long since let down into the modern sewer), and my 
 chief companion my aunt's dog Towser, whom she had 
 taken pity on when he was a snappish, starved vagrant, and 
 made a brave and affectionate dog of, which was the kind 
 of thing she did for every living creature that came in her 
 way all her life long." 
 
 Mrs. Ruskin, with all her passionate devotion to her son, 
 
 seems to have had no idea whatever of making a little child 
 
 happy. The baby's education was terribly consistent; he 
 
 was steadily whipped w^hen he was troublesome or when he 
 
 tumbled down-stairs. "We seldom had company even 
 
 on week-days, and I was never allowed to come down to 
 
 82
 
 dessert until much later in life, when I was able to crack 
 other people's nuts for them, but never to have any myself, 
 nor anything else of a dainty kind. Once at Hunter Street 
 I recollect my mother giving me three raisins in the forenoon 
 out of the store -cabinet." But not all the rules and rails 
 and restrictions of Hunter Street and Brunswick Square 
 could prevent the child from finding out for himself that 
 brick walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. He 
 stands in the light of the window, in his silent, thoughtful 
 fashion, creating his own existence for himself, and just as 
 the turn -cock turned and turned until a fountain sprang 
 from the pavement, so even in baby life does Ruskin lay his 
 master-hand upon the stones, and lo ! the stream of life be- 
 gins to flow. In later days he smites the rock, and bids the 
 children drink living waters from the spring of life eternal, 
 sometimes also to be mingled with those waters of strife 
 "called Meribah."* 
 
 VI 
 
 It was up on the summit of Heme Hill that John Ruskin 
 the elder (when he felt that his affairs justified him in so 
 doing) bought the semi-detached house standing among 
 the almond blossoms, from whence Ruskin dates the pref- 
 ace to Prmterita. " I write these few prefatory words on 
 my father's birthday," says Ruskin, in the year 1886, "in 
 what was once my nursery in his old house, to which he 
 brought my mother and me sixty- two years since, I being 
 then four years old." 
 
 We have good reason to be grateful to a writer who sets 
 down for our happy reading such remembrance, such silence, 
 
 * See the first volume of Modern Painters and certain numbers of Deucalion, etc. 
 
 83
 
 as this. Almost every child has some natural glamour and 
 instinct of its own by which the glare of life is softened, and 
 the first steep ways garlanded and eased and charmed. We 
 call those men poets who retain this divine faculty all their 
 lives, and who are able to continue looking at the world 
 with the clear gaze of childhood, discerning the unchanging 
 ^natural things and beauties in the midst of all the wanderings 
 V)f disappointment and confusion. Such a poet is Ruskin, 
 if ever a man was born one. Take the story of little John at 
 play in his childish garden, where the mulberry-tree and the 
 white heart cherry-tree are growing : " The ground was ab- 
 solutely beneficent with magical splendor of abundant fruit, 
 fresh green, soft amber, and rough bristled crimson, bending 
 the spinous branches, clustered pearl and pendent ruby, 
 joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked like 
 vine." ..." The differences of primal importance which~T 
 observed," he says, " between the nature of this garden and 
 that of Eden, as I imagined it, were that in this one all the 
 fruit was forbidden, and there were no companionable beasts." 
 Then follows a touch of which many a parent will ruefully 
 acknowledge the truth : " My mother, finding her chief per- 
 sonal pleasure in her flowers, was often planting or pruning 
 beside me, at least if I chose to stay beside her. . . . Her 
 presence was no restraint to me, and also no particular 
 pleasure, for, from having always been left so much alone, I 
 had generally my own little affairs to see to, and by the time 
 I was seven years old I was already independent mentally 
 both of my father and mother, and having nobody else to 
 be dependent upon, began to lead a yery small, poky, con- 
 tented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life." 
 
 How these words set one to the measure and the feeling: 
 of that isolated mystical little life in the central point of the 
 universe, as he says it appeared to him, as it must generally 
 
 appear to geometrical animals ! 
 
 84
 
 p
 
 When little John grew older he learned to read and to spell 
 with what seems absolutely wonderful quickness. Every 
 morning after breakfast he sat down with his mother to 
 read the Bible. " My mother never gave me more to learn 
 than she knew I could easily get learned, if I set myself 
 honestly to work, by twelve o'clock. She never allowed 
 anything to disturb me when my task was set ; and in gen- 
 eral, even when Latin grammar came to supplement the 
 Psalms, I was my own master for at least half an hour 
 before the half-past one dinner." The list of those portions 
 of the Psalms and chapters of the Bible which little John 
 Ruskin had to learn by heart is conscientiously given, and 
 might seem to some of us an appalling list. But upon this 
 he comments as follows : " Truly, though I have picked up 
 the elements of a little further knowledge, and owe not a 
 little to the teaching of many people, this maternal installa- 
 tion of my mind in that property of chapters I count very 
 confidently the most precious, and on the whole the one 
 essential, part of my education." " Peace, Obedience, Faith," 
 were the three great boons of his early life, he says, and 
 *'the habit of fixed attention." The defects of it are told 
 very forcibly in language which is pathetic in its directness. 
 " I had nothing to love. My parents were, in a sort, visible 
 powers of nature to me ; no more loved than the sun and 
 moon." And thus he sums it up. His life was too formal 
 and too luxurious ; " by protection innocent, instead of by 
 practice virtuous." 
 
 Ruskin should have been a novelist. It is true, he says 
 he never knew a child more incapable than himself of tell- 
 ing: a tale, but when he chooses to describe a man * or a 
 woman, there stands the figure before us ; when he tells a 
 
 * Take these few lines descriptive of Severn : " Lightly sagacious, lovingly hu- 
 morous, daintily sentimental, as if life were but for him the rippling chant of his fa- 
 vorite song, ' Gente '. e qui l^uccellatore.'' " 
 
 87
 
 story, we live it. His is rather the descriptive than the con- 
 structive faculty ; his mastery is over detail and quality 
 rather than over form. How delightfully he remembers ! 
 How one loves his journeys in Mr. Telford's post-chaise, 
 where he sits propped upon his own little trunk between 
 father and mother, looking out at the country through the 
 glass windows. Mr. Ruskin the elder is travelling for or- 
 ders, and he brings his family north, and finally to his sis- 
 ter's home in Perth, where we read of the Scottish aunt and 
 the playfellow cousins, of the dark pools of Tay, of the path 
 above them, " being seldom traversed by us children, except 
 at harvest-time, when we used to go gleaning in the fields 
 beyond." "I hesitate in recording as a constant truth_ior 
 the world the impression left on me, when I went gleaning 
 with Jessie, that Scottish sheaves are more golden than are 
 found in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible 
 to human eyes are so like the. corn of heaven* as those of 
 Strath Tay and Strath Earn." 
 
 Was ever story more simple, more pathetic, than the story 
 of little Peter and his mother ! " My aunt, a pure dove- 
 priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona, was 
 of a far gentler temper, but still to me remained at a wistful 
 distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of 
 three of her children before her husband's death. Little 
 Peter especially had been the corner-stone of her love's 
 building ; and it was thrown down swiftly. White-swelling 
 came in the knee ; he suffered much, and grew weaker grad- 
 ually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She 
 wanted him one day to take half a glass of port-wine, and 
 took him on her knee and put it to his lips. 'Not now, 
 mamma ; in a minute,' said he, and put his head on her 
 shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died." 
 
 * Psalms, Ixxviii., 24. 
 
 88
 
 Little Peter's mother followed him before many years, and 
 the rest of her children having passed one by one through 
 the dark river, Mary, the only survivor, comes to live in the 
 Ruskin household, " a serene additional neutral tint " in 
 the home. 
 
 The two children read the Bible together, write abstracts 
 of the sermons in the chapel at Walworth, which they at- 
 tend. On the Sundays when the family remain at home 
 the father reads Blair's sermons aloud, or if a clerk or cus- 
 tomer dines with them, "the conversation in mere necessary 
 courtesy would take the direction of sherry" (Dickens him- 
 self might have envied this touch), while the two children 
 sit silent in their corner with the Pilgrini's Progress and 
 Quarles's Emblems and Fox's Book of Martyrs to pass the 
 time. 
 
 On week-days John, who is now ten years old, is learning 
 Greek with Dr. Andrews, copying Cruikshank's illustrations, 
 and writing English doggerel. 
 
 When Ruskin was turned twelve his mother had taken 
 him six times through the Bible \ he had had various clas- 
 sical masters, drawing masters, and other teachers ; he had 
 begun to study mineralogy, was allowed to taste wine, to 
 go to a theatre, and on festive days to dine with his father 
 and mother, and to listen to his father's reading of the 
 Nodes Ambrosiance and of Byron. On Ruskin's thirteenth 
 birthday his father's partner, Mr. Henry Telford, gives him 
 Rogers's Italy, with its illustrations, and, so he says, de- 
 termined the main tenor of his life. "The drawing-master 
 liad vaguely stated that the world had been greatly dazzled 
 and led away by some splendid ideas thrown out by burner, 
 but until then Turner had not existed for the quiet family 
 on Heme Hill." 
 
 Besides all these rising interests there are also the de- 
 scriptions of the people (not very numerous) who begin to
 
 cross the stage, we get glimpses of the neighbors, and we 
 seem to know them as we know the people out of Vanity 
 Fair, or out of Miss Austen's novels : Mr. Telford, the 
 owner of the travelling carriage and the giver of illustrated 
 books ; the two clerks at their work — Henry Ritchie, who 
 loves Margate — (If you want to be happy, get a wife and 
 come to Margate, he writes) — and Henry Watson and his 
 musical sisters. Then there is Miss Andrews, who sang 
 " Tambourgi, Tambourgi ;" old Mrs. Munroe, with Petite, 
 her white poodle ; and her daughter Mrs. Richard Gray, 
 "entirely simple, meek, loving, and serious, saved from be- 
 ing stupid by a vivid nature full of enthusiasm, likelier hus- 
 band's." It is English middle-class life for the most part, 
 described with something of George Eliot's racy reality. 
 
 VII 
 
 In the early chapters of Prceterita there is the story of 
 Ruskin's first acquaintance with the enchanting Domecq 
 family, which played so important a part in his young life — 
 the four girls who, arriving unexpectedly, reduced him "to 
 a heap of white ashes," which mercredi des cendres, we read, 
 lasted four years. We are not exactly told which of the 
 sisters — whether Adele, the graceful blonde of fifteen, Ce- 
 cile, the dark-eyed, finely browed girl of thirteen, or Elise 
 or little Caroline of eleven, was the chief favorite. They 
 had all been born abroad ; they spoke Spanish and French 
 with perfect grace, English with broken precision ; he de- 
 scribes "a Southern Cross of unconceived stars floating on 
 a sudden into my obscure firmament of a London suburb." 
 
 The writer can picture to herself something of the charm 
 
 go
 
 
 
 e-7 
 
 
 
 
 « 4 
 
 , ' <r'' .'.'' •'
 
 1 
 
 \
 
 of these most charming sisters, for once by cliance, travel- 
 ling on Lake Leman, she found herself watching a lady 
 who sat at the steamer's end, a beautiful young woman, all 
 dressed in pale gray, with a long veil floating on the wind, 
 who sat motionless and absorbed, looking towards the dis- 
 tant hills, not unlike the vision of some guiding, wistful 
 Ariel at the prow, while the steamer sped its way between 
 the banks. The story of the French sisters has gained an 
 added interest from the remembrance of those dark, lovely 
 eyes, that charming countenance, for afterwards, when I 
 knew her better, the lady told me that her mother had been 
 a Domecq, and had once lived with her sisters in Mr. Rus- 
 kin's home. Circumstances had divided them in after-days, 
 but all the children of the family in turn had been brought 
 ^ip to know Mr. Ruskin by name, and to love and appreci- 
 ate his books. The lady sent him many messages by me, 
 which I delivered ni after-days, v/hen, alas ! it was from Mr. 
 Ruskin himself I learned that the beautiful traveller — Isa- 
 belle, he called her — had passed away before her time to 
 those distant hills where all our journeys end. 
 
 Ruskin's jubilee should be counted from the year 1833, 
 when he tells us he went with his father to a shop to enter 
 their names as subscribers to Trout's Sketches in Flanders 
 and Italy, and they were shown the specimen print of the 
 turreted window over the Moselle at Coblentz. "We got 
 the book home to Heme Hill before the time of our usual 
 annual tour, and as my mother watched my father's pleas- 
 ure and mine in looking at the wonderful places, she said, 
 why should not we go and see some of them in reality.'' My 
 father hesitated a little, and then, with glittering eyes, said, 
 why not ?" How plainly one can see the picture ! The little 
 family assembled in its quiet after-dinner conclave, the boy 
 turning over the pages of his book, the father opening the 
 big map, the practical mother transforming dreams into re- 
 
 93
 
 ality. Quiet and monotonous lives lend themselves more 
 readily than more brilliant existences to possibilities, to im- 
 mense events, and this was an event for all the world as well 
 as for the Ruskin family. 
 
 Was there ever, will there ever be such a journey again, 
 such a combination of comfort, of dawning genius, of actual 
 dignity and leisure, of eyes to see, of wheels to roll smoothly 
 along the broad roads ? The child no longer sits perched 
 on his improvised little bracket-seat, but is one of a digni- 
 fied family with a maid and courier travelling as quickly as 
 four horses and postilions in huge boots can carry them 
 towards the wonder-land beyond the horizon, that country 
 of vines, of distant Alpine ranges, of cloud and sky and 
 mountain pass, of fair city and glorious art. 
 
 He says: "We found our pleasant rooms always ready, 
 our good horses always waiting ; everybody took their hats 
 off when we arrived and when we departed ; Salvador pre- 
 sented his accounts weekly, and they were settled without a 
 word of demur. To all these conditions of luxury and felic- 
 ity can the modern steam-puffed tourist conceive the added 
 and culminating one that we were never in a hurry ?" 
 
 The story of Ruskin's first sight of the Alps is one that 
 no one who has ever seen a snowy range will pass over or 
 forget. 
 
 "We dined at four as usual, and the evening being en- 
 tirely fine, went out to walk, all of us — my father and mother 
 and Mary and I. 
 
 " We must have still spent some time in town-seeing, 
 for it was drawing towards sunset when we got up to some 
 garden promenade, west of the town, I believe, and high 
 above the Rhone, so as to command the open country 
 across it to the south and west, when suddenly — behold — 
 beyond. There was no thought in any of us for a moment 
 of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp on 
 
 94 *..
 
 the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the 
 sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought 
 or dreamed, the seen walls of Eden could not have been 
 more beautiful to us ; not more awful round heaven the 
 walls of sacred Death. . . . Thus in perfect health of life 
 and fire of heart, not wanting to have anything more than I 
 had, knowing of sorrow onl}' just so much as to make life 
 serious to me, not enough to slacken in the least its sinews, 
 and with so much of science mixed with feeling as to make 
 the sight of the Alps not only the revelation of the beauty 
 of the earth, but the opening of the first page of its volume, 
 I went down that evening from the garden terrace of Schaff- 
 hausen with my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be most 
 sacred and useful. To that terrace and to the shore of the 
 Lake of Geneva my heart and faith return to this day in 
 every impulse that is yet nobly alive in them, and every 
 thought that has in it help or peace." 
 
 It would be too long to transcribe at length, as one would 
 like to do, the pages of Frczterita which take us from one 
 lovely height to another, from summer to summer, from 
 Schaffhausen to Milan, to the " encompassing Alps, the per- 
 fectness and purity of the sweet, stately, stainless marble 
 against the sky." 
 
 We all build tabernacles here and there in life. It was 
 on the Col de la Faucille that John Ruskin erected his in 
 
 1835- 
 
 " The Col de la Faucille on that day opened to me in 
 
 distinct vision the Holy Land of my future work and true 
 home in this world," he says. " Far as the eye could reach 
 — that land and its moving or pausing waters ; Arve, and 
 his gates of Cluse, and his glacier fountains ; Rhone, and 
 the infinitude of his sapphire lake, his peace beneath the 
 narcissus meads of Vevay, his cruelty beneath the promon- 
 tories of Sierre. And all that rose against and melted into 
 
 * 95
 
 the sky, of mountain and mountain snow ; and all that 
 living plain, burning with human gladness, studded with 
 white houses, a Milky Way of star dwellings cast across its 
 sunlit blue." * 
 
 And so we are able to follow the child year by year ; we 
 see little John grow from out his blue shoes and ribbons, 
 Tia frilled collars and boyish buttons, to rustling dignities of 
 silken robe and tasselled cap, and promoled^from his niche 
 behind the drawing-room chimney-piece to the run of all the 
 cloisters of Oxford. His father meanwhile returns con- 
 tentedly to his desk opposite the brick wall, where he sits 
 
 * The following fac-simile note in allusion to the above was written long after: 
 i.A<^ C^kjl,C^ ) Wv cc^-tL^ '^tC^ lv—«>-^
 
 quietly amassing the fortune he spends so generously and 
 in so liberal a spirit. 
 
 The history of the Turners is also to be noted : of the 
 collection gradually increasing; of the father's pleasure, of 
 the son's delight, in the pictures of Richmond Bridge and 
 Gosport ; in the drawing of Winchelsea, "the chief recrea- 
 tion of my fatigued hours.'" Sir John Simon tells a story 
 of a visit Ruskin once paid to a sale of pictures, and of his 
 return home dispirited, saying there was but one picture he 
 had wanted in the whole collection, and that one was already 
 sold. And there it was before him. It was his father who 
 had bought it, thinking it was one he would be sure to de- 
 light in. Ruskin the elder must have had a most unerring, 
 and remarkable critical faculty, and it was undoubtedlyA 
 from him that John Ruskin inherited his own genius for art. 
 There is the record of the paternal gift of i^2oo a year in 
 the funds upon the son's coming of age, out of which an- 
 other Turner is bought for £']o. " It was not a piece of 
 painted paper, but a Welsh castle and village and Snowdon 
 in blue cloud that I bought for my seventy pounds." 
 
 VIII 
 
 Ruskin was entered as Gentleman-Commoner at Christ- 
 church, Oxford, and came up in January, 1837. " I was 
 entered as Gentleman- Commoner without further debate, 
 and remember still as if it were yesterday the pride of 
 walking out of the Angel Hotel and past University Col- 
 lege, holding my father's arm, in my velvet cap and silk 
 gown." 
 
 The father and mother had set their hearts on his going 
 
 G 97
 
 into the Church. He would have made a bishop, said his 
 father long years after, with tears in his eyes ; and we may 
 read now, indeed, of the first sermon Raskin ever preached, 
 a baby one, in which he describes himself as standing up 
 with a red cushion before him, and thumping and preach- 
 ing •' People be good." * 
 
 Ruskin remained at Oxford until 1840. The story of 
 his stay there, of his work, of his friends, is all delightful 
 reading ; not the least touching part of it all is the account 
 of his mother (with his father's entire acquiescence) leaving 
 her home, her daily habits, and establishing herself in lodg- 
 ings in the Oxford High Street, so as to be at hand in case 
 of need. Ruskin's own filial devotion is also to be admired. 
 He tells us that his wishes and his happiness were the chief 
 preoccupations of their lives, and he accepts the loving tie 
 generously, as all sons do not. Speaking of his degree, 
 Ruskin says : " When I was sure I had got through, I went 
 out for a walk in the fields north of New College (since 
 turned into the Parks), happy in the sense of recovered 
 freedom, but extremely doubtful to what use I should put 
 it. There 1 was at two -and -twenty, with such and such 
 powers, all second-rate except the analytical ones, which 
 were as much in embryo as the rest, and which I had no 
 means of measuring; such and such likings hitherto in- 
 dulged rather against conscience, and a dim sense of duty 
 to myself, my parents, and a daily more vague shadow of 
 Eternal Law. What should I be or do ?" This question 
 was to be answered very shortly by publication of the first 
 volume of Modern Painters. Before coming away from Ox- 
 ford I must not omit to quote a curious passage concerning 
 Dean Liddell, " one of the rarest types of nobly presenced 
 Englishmen, the only man in Oxford in his day who cared 
 
 * Nor, indeed, has he happily ceased to preach this sermon, the text of which brings 
 back to one's mind the touching words of dying Scott. 
 
 98
 
 about art, and whose ' keen ' saying concerning Turner, ' that 
 he had got hold of a false ideal,' " is here noted (curiously 
 enough) by Ruskin as one which would have been eminently 
 helpful to him at the time, had it been then impressed upon 
 him. After that we come to the history of that illness after 
 overwork which sent Ruskin and his parents abroad again 
 for an indefinite period, travelling away by Rouen and Tours,~ 
 by the Rhone to Avignon, thence by the Riviera to Florence 
 and the South, in search of health. There is also this epi- 
 taph upon Oxford : " Oxford taught me as much Greek as 
 she could, and though I think she might have also told me 
 that fritillaries grew in Ififley meadow, it was better that she 
 left me to find them for myself. 1 must get on," he con- 
 tinues, "to the days of opening sight and efifective labor, 
 and to the scenes of nobler education, which all men who 
 keep their hearts open receive in the end of days." 
 
 It is always interesting to ascertain when a great man be- 
 gins his life's work ; but, after all, it is scarcely the printing 
 of the book or the framing of the picture which puts a date 
 to the hour in which the mind ripens or carries out its con- 
 ception ; and the casual mention in Prceterita of the publi- 
 cation of Modem Painters shows how much of thought and 
 feeling had already gone towards the book, of which the act- 
 ual publishing seemed the least memorable part to the au- 
 thor. Speaking of the first volume of Modern Painters, he 
 only says: ''It took the best part of the winter's leisure," 
 and dismisses the subject with, ■' The said first volume must 
 have been out by my father's birthday ; its success was as- 
 sured by the end of the year." 
 
 The book made its mark then and there. Those qualities 
 which Ruskin prefers to call his analytical qualities seem to 
 others to be a happy combination of intuition, of industry, 
 and vivid imagination. Though the graduate's principles 
 and teachings were variously esteemed, every one acknowl- 
 
 99
 
 edged their importance, and it seems but justice to Mr. 
 Ruskin to suggest tliat he was not altogether accountable 
 for the seriousness with which his admirers have sometimes 
 accepted his eloquent paradoxes and humors. It is hardly 
 fair, perhaps, to look back alrthe by-gone criticisms of this 
 startling and eloquent publication. Reviewers writing long 
 after, with experience and knowledge of the road, can drive 
 their team steadily, cracking their long whips with a sense 
 of dignity and final authority which is admirable for retro- 
 spective commonplace ; but how are they to rein in a Pe- 
 gasus who has inadvertently found himself harnessed to the 
 old coach, and who puts out his wings and flies straight up 
 into the air ? Pegasus in his flight does not hesitate to kick 
 out right and left, overturning as he goes the various " Van 
 Somethings and Bac Somethings," with other shrines that 
 we would more gladly sacrifice. Blackwood of those days 
 took up the battle in an overbearing and angry spirit. The 
 reviewer comes to the defence of the giants and windmills 
 this new Don Quixote is attacking right and left— Claude, 
 Salvator, Cuyp, Berghem, Ruysdael, etc. "You cannot 
 judge with judgment if you have not the sun in your spirit 
 and passion in your heart," cries the young champion, deal- 
 ing his thrusts. But this is not language to be applied to 
 such authorities as those of Blackwood then, or perhaps of 
 the Edinburgh nowadays ; and the critics in return strike at 
 the 2raduate with the sun in their eyes, and with passion in 
 their words if not in their hearts. 
 
 A second article which appeared in Blackwood some years 
 later was far more within the limits of fair and measured 
 criticism, allowing the book to be the work of a man of 
 power, thinking independently, feeling strongly, and with 
 " a mortal aversion to be in a crowd." Meanwhile Fraser, 
 in its article on the second edition, declares that " the Ox- 
 ford graduate has sought a reputation even in the cannon's
 
 mouth, has scaled the wall of the Castle of Prejudice, and 
 from its embattled parapet waves us to follow." The grad- 
 uate's volume " prompts us to leave the conventional for 
 the true, and quitting the cant of gallery connoisseurship, to 
 find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons 
 in stones, and good in everything." From the Ethics of the 
 Dust to the Stones of Ve?iice, from the Springs of Wandel to 
 Deucalion, there is nothing which has once attracted him 
 which he does not study with love and intuition, nothing he 
 does not use with admiration. This applies most especially 
 to his love for Nature. For the more human part in art his 
 feeling is different altogether, and there his instinct for de- 
 struction is often as fierce as his gift for construction is ex- 
 quisite when he treats of Nature and her silent belongings. 
 
 IX 
 
 The writer of this little essay certainly cannot pretend 
 either to the knowledge or to the infallibility of an art critic, 
 and she has therefore ventured to take Ruskin from her own 
 point of view only, as a "Light-bearer," as a writer of the 
 English language, as a poet in his own measure. How is it 
 possible to a man writing, as he says, "with passion," with all 
 the vibrating chords of a thousand interests and revelations, 
 to be the temperate and dispassionate awarder of that bare 
 justice which is all an orthodox critic should bestow? Many 
 things, indeed, leave him altogether silent and apparently 
 irresponsive ; he does not always contradict the verdict of 
 generations, but he accepts it without enthusiasm. The in- 
 stinctive form which beauty takes for him is that of Nature 
 and her direct influence upon himself. His attitude towards
 
 Greek art is curiously cliaracteristic of this ; so were his 
 first impressions of Rome. 
 
 Very long afterwards Ruskin said of his mother's house- 
 keeping arrangements : " I don't think the reader has yet 
 been informed that I inherited to the full my mother's love of 
 tidiness and cleanliness, and that in Switzerland, next to her 
 eternal snows, what I most admired was her white sleeves." 
 
 Was it Ruskin's love of order, then, which caused him to 
 suffer so much in Rome, where he waywardly painted the 
 rags fluttering in a by-street, and would not give a thought 
 to the ancient churches and statues and pictures and ruins ? 
 Was it his love of tidiness or his sincerity which made him 
 at first write almost cruelly of Italy, of Florence, and of the 
 Uffizi, of Siena and its cathedral, "costly confectionery, 
 faithless vanity?" The first sight of St. Peter's, he tells us, 
 was to him little more than a gray milestone, announcing 
 twenty miles yet of stony road. He ascertained that the 
 Stanze could not give him any pleasure. " What the Fo- 
 rum or Capitol had been he did not in the least care. Raph- 
 ael's ' Transfiguration ' and Domenichino's ' St. Jerome " he 
 pronounced, without the smallest hesitation — Domenichi- 
 no's a bad picture, and Raphael's an ugly one " (which ver- 
 dict I can remember my own father indorsing, as far as the 
 Raphael was concerned). I ought also in fairness to add 
 that, later on, many of Ruskin's unqualified early criticisms 
 are entirely modified and swept away. 
 
 For the second volume of Modem Painters, " not meant 
 to be in the least like what it is," Ruskin wanted " more 
 Chamouni ;" and further on, feeling that he must know 
 more of Italy, see Pau and Florence again, before writing 
 another word, he tells his indulgent parents of his wish. 
 Turner, of all people, strongly opposed the journey, the 
 Continent being then in an angry and disturbed condition; 
 but papa and mamma seem to have agreed. And so the
 
 new life began for him as we read in the chapters headed 
 Campo Santo and Macugnaga. " Serious, enthusiastic, 
 worship and wonder and work ; up at six, drawing, study- 
 ing, thinking; breaking bread and drinking wine at inter- 
 vals: homeward the moment the sun went down." "The 
 days that began in the cloister of the Campo Santo at Pisa 
 ended by my getting upon the roof of Santa Maria della 
 Spnia, and sitting in the sunlight that tranfused the warm 
 marble of its pinnacles till the unabated brightness went 
 down beyond the arches of the Ponte a Mare, the few foot- 
 steps and voices of the twilight silent in the streets, and 
 the city and her mountains stood mute as a dream beyond 
 the soft eddying of Arno." We may judge by these illus- 
 trations to his life what sort of material it was that Ruskin 
 himself put into his noble books. 
 
 It was between the publication of the first and second 
 volumes of Modern Painters- that Ruskin came under Car- 
 lyle's influence. Long years afterwards Carlyle himself, 
 writing to Emerson, says: "There is nothing going on 
 among us as notable to me as those fierce lightning-bolts 
 Ruskin is copiously and desperately pouring into the black 
 world of Anarchy all around him. No other man in Eng- 
 land that I meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, 
 falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has, and that every man 
 ought to have. Unhappily he is not a strong man — one 
 might say a weak man rather — and has not the least pru- 
 dence of management, though if he can hold out for anoth- 
 er fifteen years or so. he miy produce, even in this way, 
 a great effect or so. God grant it. say I." 
 
 1 heard a pretty account once from Mr. Alfred Lyttel- 
 ton of a visit paid by Ruskin to Carlyle in the familiar 
 room in Cheyne Walk, with the old picture of Cromwell on 
 the wall, and Mrs. Carlyle's little tables and pretty knick- 
 knacks still in their quiet order. Mr. Ruskin had been ill 
 
 103
 
 not long before, and as he talked on of something he cared 
 about, Mr. Lyttelton said his eyes lighted up, and he seem- 
 ed agitated and moved. Carlyle stopped him short, saying 
 the subject was too interesting. "You must take care," he 
 said, with that infinite kindness which Carlyle could show ; 
 " you will be making yourself ill once more." And Ruskin, 
 quite simply, like a child, stopped short. " You are right," 
 he said, calling Carlyle "master," and then went on to talk 
 of something else, as dull, no doubt, as anything could be 
 that Ruskin and Carlyle could talk about together. 
 
 In the first volume of Frictcrita there is one particular 
 passage about Carlyle to which many of us will demur. 
 
 Ruskin himself this time is now quoting from the Emer- 
 son correspondence, and he says: "I find at page i8 this 
 to me entirely disputable, and to my thought, so far as un- 
 disputed, niuch blamable and pitiable exclamation of my 
 master's :" *Not till we can think that here and there one 
 is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste earth 
 become a peopled garden.' My training, as the reader has 
 perhaps enough perceived, produced in me the precisely 
 opposite sentiment. My times of happiness had always 
 been when nobody was thinking of me. . . . The garden at 
 home was no waste place to me because I did not suppose 
 myself an object of interest either to the ants or the but- 
 terflies, and the only qualification of the delight of my even- 
 ing walk at Champagnole was the sense that my father and 
 mother wete thinking of me, and would be frightened if 1 
 was ten minutes late for tea. . . . 
 
 " I don't mean in the least that I could have done with- 
 out them. They were to me much more than Carlyle's wife 
 to him. . . . But that the rest of the world was waste to him 
 unless he had admirers in it is a sorry state of sentiment 
 enough, and I am somewhat tempted for once to admire 
 
 the exactly opposite temper of my own solitude. My en- 
 
 104
 
 tire delight was in observing without leing observed ; if I 
 could have been invisible, all the bettei I was absolutely 
 interested in men and in their ways as 1 was interested in 
 marmots and chamois and in trouts. . . . The living habita- 
 tion of the world, the grazing and nesting in it, the spirit- 
 ual power of the air, the rocks, the waters — to be in the 
 midst of it, and rejoice, and wonder at ; . . . this was the 
 essential love of nature in me, this the root of all that I 
 have usefully become." 
 
 As I have already said, this peculiar sense of solemn 
 responsibility to nature and to mankind, and irresponsibil- 
 ity to individuals, is most specially to be noted in Ruskin ; 
 more specially in the young Ruskin, who writes as people 
 of strong imaginations write when the impulse is on them, 
 realizing at the moment but one aspect of a feeling. But 
 though he writes in this detached and lofty fashion, every 
 page of his memoir vibrates with the warm light of a united 
 home, where exist mutual love, confidence, sympathy, with- 
 out which half the charm of the whole picture would be gone. 
 
 X 
 
 At Macugnaga, Ruskin, maturing his second volume, 
 seems to have lived in good company, with a couple of 
 Shakespeare's plays and his own thoughts, but not to have 
 enjoyed his solitude so much as might have been expected 
 from his theories. Mr. Boxall and Mr. Hardinge presently 
 joined him for a time, and then came another serious ill- 
 ness, after which the second volume of Modern Painters was 
 published, in 1846. 
 
 This second volume concerns the schools of Italy and 
 its histories of art, and raised as much indignation as the 
 
 I OS
 
 first had done, thcaigh less irritation. Critics thanked 
 Heaven openly th?t they were publicans and still able to 
 admire, not Phar'^ees rejecting right and left. Then fol- 
 lowed another beautiful sermon and more parables. " The 
 book I called The Seven Lamps was to show that certain 
 right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic 
 powers by which all good architecture, without exception, 
 had been produced." The Stones of Venice appeared be- 
 tween the years 1851 and 1853, and had from beginning 
 to end no other aim than to show that the Gothic archi- 
 tecture of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all 
 its features, a state of pure national faith and of domestic 
 virtue, and that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out 
 of, and indicated in all its features, a state of concealed 
 national infidelity and of domestic corruption. 
 
 Again and again, as we read our Ruskin, the truth of 
 his father's saying occurs to one, " He should have been 
 a bishop !" Everything has a moral to him and a meaning. 
 " In these books of mine, their distinctive character as es- 
 says on art is their bringing everything to a root in human 
 passion or in human hope," he says in Modern Painters 
 (vol. v.). The law of perfectness is one of his favorite 
 texts, one that he would have us all pursue. He culls and 
 he chooses at will, dwelling upon each detail which illus- 
 trates his own vast and lovely conception of things as they 
 should be — as they might be for us if we were all Ruskins ; 
 and the chief danger for his disciples is that of seeing de- 
 tails too vividly, and missing the whole. There is also all 
 the extraordinary influence of his personality in his teach- 
 ing. Oracles such as Mill and Spencer veil their faces 
 when they utter. Poets and orators like Ruskin uncover 
 their heads as they address their congregations. 
 
 Ruskin has not only words at his command, but deli- 
 cate hands. Look at the sketches and drawings in the 
 
 106
 
 latter volumes of Modern Painters. How eloquent and 
 graceful they are, whether it is indicated motion or shad- 
 ow, whether clouds or spiral leaf and upspringing branch ! 
 
 When Raskin records his past, it is as often as not by 
 the sketches he has taken along the way that he marks his 
 progress. And how true the saying is that nothing else — no 
 descriptions — ever bring back a former state of mind and be- 
 ins: as an old sketch will do ! Sometimes one's old self actual- 
 ly seems to come up and take it out of one's hand. ( )nly last 
 night, apropos of these sketches of Ruskin's, and of a new 
 portfolio of them lately published, I heard no less an author- 
 ity than the Slade Professor at Cambridge saying that, with 
 all the credit Professor Ruskin has justly won as a master of 
 English diction, ke has scarcely gained as much as he de- 
 served for the exquisite character of his actual drawing. 
 
 As one looks down the list of Ruskin's writings* one can 
 
 * It may be convenient to give the following list of Mr. Ruskin's works, taken 
 from Me7i of the Time, and from the fly-leaves of Mr. George Allen : 
 
 Poems. Friendship's Offering. 1835 t° Unto this Last. Cornhill Magazine. 
 
 1843. 1S60-1S62. 
 
 Modem Painters. Vol. I., 1843. Munera Pulveris. Frazer''s Magazine. 
 Modern Painters. Vol. II., 1846. 1S62-1863. 
 
 Art. Quarterly Review, June, 1847, Lord Notes on the Alps. 
 
 Lindsay's Christian Art March, 1848, Cestus of Aglaia. 1865. 
 
 Eastlake on the History of Painting. Sesame and Lilies. 1865. 
 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture. Ethics of the Dust. 1865. 
 
 King of the Golden River. 1849. Illus- Crown of Wild Olive. 1866. 
 
 trated by R. Doyle. Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne. 
 
 Stones of Venice. Vol. III., '5i-'53. 1851. Queen of the Air. i86g. 
 
 Lectures on Architecture and Painting. Lectures on Art. 1871 to 1878. 
 
 1853. Fors Clavigera. 
 
 Giotto and his Works in Padua, 1854, for Aratra Pentelice. 1872. 
 
 the Arundel Society. The Relation between Michael Angelo 
 Notes on the Royal Academy. Five parts. and Tintoret. 1872. 
 
 1855 to 1859. The Eagle's Nest. 1872. 
 
 Modern Painters. Vol. III., 1856. Ariadne Florentina. 1873-1876. 
 
 Modern Painters, Vol. IV., 1S56. Love's Meinie. 1873. 
 
 Notes on the Turner Collection. 1857. Val d' Arno. 1874. 
 
 Political Economy of Art. 1857. Two Proserpina. 1875-1876. 
 
 Lectures. 1859-1860. Deucalion. 1875-1878. 
 
 The Two Paths. (Lectures on Art.) Mornings in Florence. 1875-1877. 
 
 Modern Painters. Vol. V., 1S60. Bibliotheca Pastorum. 1877. 
 
 Sir Joshua Holbein. Cornhill Magazine. Prajterita. (Still publishing.) 1888. 
 
 i860. 
 
 107
 
 roughly read the story of his life. In the early numbers of 
 the Conihill ATagazine his papers on political economy ap- 
 peared, and it must have been about that time that he en- 
 tered into his partnership with Miss Octavia Hill, resulting 
 in one of the most important and interesting movements of 
 the day. 
 
 There is a short article by Miss Hill in a by-gone Fort- 
 7iighily jRe7'iew, describing the beginning of what has led to 
 so much. The article is called " Cottage Property in Lon- 
 don." The said cottages, begrimed, and overcrowded by 
 the dreary London peasantry, were whitewashed and drain- 
 ed with the help of Mr. Ruskin's ;^7oo, and relet again by 
 Miss Hill to the poor people themselves, of whom she al- 
 ways writes with admirable discernment and sympathy. 
 As she tells of her tenants, of their fortitude, their power 
 of hope, their simple, entire confidence, their extraordinary 
 patience. Miss Hill speaks with the knowledge that people 
 bring whose genius is in the work into which they throw 
 their hearts, and Mr. Ruskin was the first to recognize her 
 gift. 
 
 " I had not great ideas of what must be done," she says. 
 " My strongest endeavors were to be used to rouse habits 
 of industry and effort. The plan was one which depended 
 on just governing more than on helping. The first point 
 was to secure such power as would enable me to insist on 
 some essential sanitary arrangements. I laid the scheme 
 before Mr. Ruskin, who entered into it most warmly. He 
 at once came forward with all the money necessary, and 
 took the whole risk of the undertaking upon himself. He 
 showed me, however, that it would be far more useful if it 
 could be made to pay — that a workingman ought to be able 
 to pay for his own house." . . . 
 
 I found a letter among my father's papers the other day 
 which must have been written by Mr. Ruskin about this 
 
 io8
 
 time, and as it bears upon one of his many theories, and is 
 interesting and characteristic, I will insert it here. It con- 
 cerned an old friend of my father's, Monsieur Louis Marvy, 
 who spent one winter in Young Street. He was an engrav- 
 er by profession; he had, as I believe, been mixed up in 
 some of the revolutionary episodes of 1848. He was a very 
 charming and gentle person, in delicate health. He used 
 to work hour after hour at his plates. He lived quietly in 
 our house, chiefly absorbed by his work. He died quite 
 young, not long after his return to France. Mr. Ruskin's 
 letter refers in a measure to this by -gone episode, and I 
 have his permission to transcribe it : 
 
 " Denmark Hill, 2isi Decemher, i860. 
 "Dear Mr. Thackeray, — I think (or should think if I did not 
 know) that you are quite right in this general law about lecturing, though, 
 until I knew it, I did not feel able to refuse the letter of request asked 
 of me. 
 
 " The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a 
 matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the 
 time or face to talk to you of it. 
 
 " In somebody's drawing-room ages ago you were speaking accident- 
 ally of M. de Marvy. I expressed my great obligation to him, on which 
 you said that I could now prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow, 
 which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the cir- 
 cumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the gen- 
 eral impression on your mind of the hollowness of people's sayings and 
 hardness of their hearts. 
 
 " The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours. 
 I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one 
 who will help at a hopeful pinch, and when I have choice I nearly al- 
 ways give where I think the money will be fruitful rather than merely 
 helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would not for a distressed 
 author, and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but 
 not — unless I had no other object — his widow after he was gone. In a 
 word, 1 like to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen. This, if 
 you ever find out anything of my private life, you will know to be true; 
 
 109
 
 but 1 bhall never feel cointortable, nevertheless, about that Marvy busi- 
 ness unless you send to me for ten pounds for the next author, or artist, 
 or widow of either, whom you want to help. 
 
 " And with this weight at last off my mind, I pray you to believe me 
 always faithfully, respectfully yours, J. Ruskin. 
 
 " All best wishes of the season to you and your daughters." 
 
 And my father's daughter may be perhaps forgiven for 
 adding that there are few among us who will not sympa- 
 thize as much witli Mr. Ruskin when he breaks his theories 
 as when he keeps to them. I don't know if it is fair to 
 quote the story I heard at Coniston, long after, of the 
 man who had grossly lied and cheated at Brantwood for 
 years, and whose wages Mr. Ruskin went on paying, be- 
 cause he could not give him a character, and could not 
 let him and his children starve. 
 
 XI 
 
 It may be here as well to say a few words of Mr. Rus- 
 kin's public work. In the statement of the purposes of St. 
 George's Guild published by him he explains the two chief 
 objects of the society : — Firstly, agricultural work, reclaim- 
 ing waste lands, and the encouragement of manual labor 
 without the help of steam (*' a cruel and furious waste of 
 fuel to do what every stream and breeze are ready to do"); 
 Secondly, the building of museums and schools of art and 
 study. " I continually see subscriptions of ten, fifteen, or 
 twenty thousand pounds for new churches. Now a good 
 clergyman never wants a church. He can say all his pa- 
 rishioners essentially need to hear in any of his parishion- 
 ers' best parlors or upper chambers, or, if these are not large
 
 enough, in the market-place or harvest-field. What does 
 he want with altars — was the Lord's Supper eaten on one ? 
 — what with pews — useless rents for the pride of them; 
 what with font and pulpit that the next way -side brook 
 or mossy bank cannot give him ?". . . In order to form 
 wholesome habits they (the young) must be placed under 
 wholesome conditions. For the pursuit of any intellectual 
 inquiry to advantage not only leisure must be granted them 
 but quiet. . . . The words "school," "college," "univer- 
 sity," rightly understood, imply the leisure necessary for 
 learning, the companionship necessary for sympathy, and 
 wilfulness restrained by the daily vigilance and firmness of 
 tutors and masters. 
 
 The writer has not seen the museum at Sheffield, but 
 happening to admire the work of a young water-color paint- 
 er only a day ago, and to ask where he had studied, she was 
 told that he had studied with nature for a teacher ; but that 
 besides working in this great academy he had also greatly 
 profited by Mr. Ruskin's museum at Sheffield, where the 
 most interesting and valuable art treasures are to be found 
 in a couple of rooms opening on each side of the door of a 
 road- side cottage. At one time Mr. Ruskin intended to 
 build an art museum for Sheffield, and commissioned Mr. 
 William Marshall to prepare the plans. I do not know why 
 this scheme was never carried beyond the designs. Oxford 
 first elected him to the Slade Professorship. Cambridge 
 also made signals of respect and admiration, and he was 
 elected Rede Lecturer in 1867. But it is difficult to imag- 
 ine Ruskin at Cambridge ; Oxford seems to belong far more 
 to his genius, to his emotional gifts, his playful mediaeval 
 and romantic views of life. I have heard of him entertain- 
 ing his guests as iiospilably in his rooms at Corpus as 
 at Brantwood by the waters of the lake. A friend de- 
 scribed to us the well -served breakfast, ample beyond
 
 all appetite of host or guest, and Ruskin, fearing to dis- 
 appoint the cook, sending friendly and appreciative mes- 
 sages. " A very nice relish for breakfast, sir," says the 
 scout, offering some particular dish. "A very nice relish 
 at any time," says Ruskin, kindly, refusing, " and tell the 
 cook I said so." 
 
 The following note of welcome shows what trouble Brant- 
 wood takes for its friends : 
 
 " King's Arms, Lancaster, Saturday. 
 
 " Dear Mr. , — I have left orders to make you comfortable ; it 
 
 is just possible, after these two days of darkness, you may even have a 
 gleam of sun on Monday morning. 
 
 " Eleven train to Carnforth Junction, where change carriages for Ul- 
 verstone, where getting out, you will, I doubt not, see a dark post- 
 chaise, into which getting, an hour and a half's pleasant drive brings 
 you to Brantwood, where I hope you may be not uncomfortable what- 
 ever the weather. 
 
 " Yours faithfully, J. RUSKIN." 
 
 Not the least among Ruskin's gifts to his fellow-men are 
 the beautiful copies of beautiful pictures which he has had 
 executed for the students at Sheffield and elsewhere : the 
 best copies that the best talent art and knowledge could 
 produce, bestowed with like liberality and sympathy upon 
 those who have no means of reaching the originals. The 
 following letters relating to this work will be found interest- 
 ing. One is struck by the care for the work and the interest 
 in the worker, to whose great kindness I owe this record : 
 
 "Oxford, 2ot/i A/ay, 1873. 
 
 " My dear , — I have your interesting letter, with the (to me 
 
 very charming) little sketch of ' The Peace.' By the Virtues o>i the left 
 I meant what perhaps my memory fails in placing there — on the left- 
 hand wall, standing with your back to the window. 'The Peace' is 
 opposite window, isn't it ? I can only say, do any face that strikes you.
 
 In this composition I care more for completeness of record than for ac- 
 curate copying. There is nothing in it that I esteem exquisite as paint- 
 ing ; but all is invaluable as design and emotion. Do it as thoroughly 
 as you can pleasantly to yourself. For me, the Justice and Concord are 
 the importanlest. As you have got to work comfortably on it, don't 
 hurry. Do it satisfactorily ; and then to Assisi, where quite possibly I 
 may join you, though not for a month or six weeks. 
 
 " Keep me well in knowledge of your health and movements (writing 
 now to Coniston), and believe me 
 
 " Very faithfully yours, J. Ruskin. 
 
 ..." I shall soon be writing to the good monks at Assisi; give them 
 my love always. 
 
 " Do not spare fees to custodes, and put them down separately to me. 
 
 " People talk so absurdly about bribing. An Italian cannot know 
 at first anything about an Englishman but that he is either stingy or gen- 
 erous. The money gift really opens his heart, if he has one. You can 
 do it in that case without money, indeed, eventually, but it is amazing 
 how many people can have good (as well as bad) brought out of them by 
 gifts, and no otherwise." 
 
 "London, i^thjune, 1873. 
 
 " My dear , — I am very glad to have your letters, and to see 
 
 that you are on the whole well, and happy in your work. One's friends 
 never do write to one when one's at Siena ; somehow it is impossible to 
 suppose a letter ever gets there. 
 
 "You may stay at your work there as long as you find necessary for 
 easy completion. It will be long before I get to Assisi. 
 
 " I don't care about anything in the Villa Spanocchi. All my pleas- 
 ant thoughts of it — or any other place nearly — are gone. Do ' The 
 Peace ' as thoroughly as possible, now you are at it. 
 
 " I have intense sympathy with you about Sunday, but fancy my con- 
 science was unusually morbid. I am never comfortable on the day. Of 
 course the general shop-shutting and dismalness in England adds to the 
 efiect of it. 
 
 "Your day is admirably laid out, except that in your walk after 
 four you go to look at pictures. You ought to rest in changed thoughts 
 as much as possible, to get out on the green banks and brows, and think 
 of nothing but what the leaves and winds say. 
 
 " I have nothing to tell you of myself that is pleasant ; not much that 
 
 H IIS
 
 is specially otherwise. The weather has been frightful in London. It 
 was better at Coniston, but it appalls me ; it is a plague of darkness such 
 as I never believed nature could inflict or suffer. 
 
 " Always afTectionately yours, J. Ruskin." 
 
 "Herne Hill, 22,d April, 1882. 
 
 ..." That is a good passage of Leonardo's, but if you had read my 
 Oxford lectures you would find their whole initiatory line and shade 
 practice is (with distinct announcement of his authority) based on his 
 book. I had read every word of it with care before I finished iMod. P." 
 
 XII 
 
 Sir Charles Newton writes on one occasion : " I spent 
 last night with Ruskin, and very delightful it was. He is 
 now taking that larger view of art which I always expected 
 he would, and begins to regard Greek art from the point of 
 view in which it ought to be looked at, and was regarded 
 by the Greeks themselves." This letter was shown me by 
 the kindest of friends, whose own noble inspiration is a 
 blessing and a light to the age. Watts has often described 
 his discussions with Ruskin during their long and intimate 
 companionship. That Ruskin is remorseless all his friends 
 must allow, but he is remorseless to himself as soon as a 
 conviction is borne in upon him. 
 
 Here is a charming example of a recantation in a letter 
 to Mr. Burne-Jones : 
 
 "Venice, 13^/2 May, 1869. 
 
 " My dearest Ned,— There's nothing here like Carpaccio! There's 
 a little bit of humble-pie for you ! 
 
 " Well, the fact was, I had never once looked at him, having classed 
 him in glance and thought with Gentile Bellini and other men of the
 
 more or less incipient and hard schools, and Tintoret went better with 
 clouds and hills. But this Carpaccio is a new world to me. . . . I've 
 
 only seen the Academy ones yet, and am going this morning ( 
 
 cloudless light) to your St. George of the Schiavoni ; but I must send 
 this word first to catch post. 
 
 " From your loving J. R. 
 
 "I don't give up my 'imtorei, nut his dissoluteness of expression 
 into drapery and shadow is too licentious for me now." 
 
 It is to Watts I also owe the following letters, which 
 are so interesting in themselves, and do such honor to the 
 candor and love of truth of the recipients, that I will set 
 them down without comment. The letters recall that past 
 vision of Little Holland House and its gardens, where for 
 many years Watts, "the Signor," as his friends all call him, 
 dwelt on, recording the generation of noble people passing 
 by, as well as the beautiful ideals of his own mind, working 
 day after day quietly from dawn of light to afternoon in 
 that home of so much vivid life and original color, which 
 has left the remembrance of kind deeds and happy, gracious 
 ways shining like a track on the waters. 
 
 " Saturday Evening, icjth Septettiher, i860. 
 
 " Dear Watts, — I am very glad to have your letter to-night, having 
 been downhearted lately and unable to write to my friends, yet glad of 
 being remembered by them. I have kept a kind letter of Mrs. Prinsep's 
 by me ever so long. It came too late to be answered before the birth- 
 day of which it told me. 
 
 " I will come and sit whenever and wherever and as long as you 
 like. I have nothing whatever to do, and don't mean to have. I hope 
 to be at National (lallery on Tuesday [erased], Wednesday [erased ; see 
 end of note], and Thursday afternoons, two to four, not exactly working, 
 but wondering. I entirely feel with you that there is no dodge in Titian. 
 It is simply right doing with a care and dexterity alike unpractised among 
 us nowadays. It is drawing with paint as tenderly as you do with chalk. 
 ... I suspect that Titian depended on states and times in coloring more 
 
 "5
 
 than we do — tliat he left such and such colors for such and such times 
 always before retouching, and so on ; but this you would not call dodge 
 — would you? — but merely perfect knowledge of means. It struck me 
 in looking at your group with child in the Academy that you depended 
 too much on blending and too little on handling color ; that you were 
 not simple enough nor quick enough to do all you felt ; nevertheless it 
 was very beautiful. I should think you were tormented a little by hav- 
 ing too much feeling. 
 
 " If it is tine to-morrow I have promised to take a drive, but the 
 second fine day, whatever that may be this week, I shall be at Trafalgar 
 Square." 
 
 "February 5, 1861. 
 
 " My dear Watts, — Kind thanks for writing to ask for me. I am 
 not unwell materially, but furiously sulky and very quiet over my work, 
 and mean to be so, and having been hitherto a rather voluble and dem- 
 onstrative person, people think I'm ill. I'm not cheerful, certainly, and 
 don't see how anybody in their senses can be. 
 
 " I did not say — did I ? — that you were not to aim at all qualities ; 
 but not all at o)ice. Titian was born of strong race, and with every con- 
 ceivable human advantage, and probably before he was twelve years old 
 knew all that could be done with oil-painting. We are under every 
 conceivable human disadvantage, and we must be content to go slowly. 
 If you try at present to get all Titian's qualities, you will assuredly get 
 none. You not only ha7<f seen Titians and Correggios which united all, 
 but I don't suppose you ever saw a true Titian or Correggio which did 
 t7ot unite all. But that does not in the least warrant you in trying at 
 once to do the same — you have many things to discover which they 
 learned with their alphabet, many things to cure yourself of which their 
 master never allowed them to fall into habit of. For instance, from long 
 drawing with chalk point you have got a mottled and broken execution, 
 and have no power of properly modulating the brush. Well, the way 
 to cure yourself of that is not by trying for Titian or Correggio, whose 
 modulations are so exquisite that they perpetually blend invisibly with 
 the point-work, but take a piece of absolute modulation — the head of 
 the kneeling figure in Sir Joshua's ' Three Graces ' at Kensington, for 
 instance — and do it twenty times over and over again, restricting your- 
 self wholly to his number of touches and thereabouts. Then you will 
 feel exactly where you are, and what is the obstacle in that direction to 
 
 116
 
 be vanquished ; you will feel progress every day, and be happy in it ; 
 while when you try for everything, you never know what is stopping 
 you. Again, the chalk drawing has materially damaged your perception 
 of the subtlest qualities of local color. When a form is shown by a 
 light of one color and a reflex of another, both equal in depth, if we are 
 drawing in chalk we must exaggerate either one or the other, or the form 
 must be invisible. The habit of exaggeration is fatal to the color vision; 
 to conquer it you should paint the purest and subtlest colored objects on 
 a small scale till you can realize them thoroughly. I say on a small 
 scale ; otherwise the eye does not come to feel the value of points of 
 hue. This exercise, nearly the reverse of the modulation exercise, could 
 not be healthily carried on together with it. And so on with others. 
 
 " I write with an apparently presumptuous positiveness, but my own 
 personal experience of every sort of feebleness is so great that I have a 
 right to do so on points connected with it. 
 
 " Sincere regard to all friends. 
 
 " Ever affectionately yours, J. R." 
 
 " Denmark Hill, S. , 
 " Wednesday, z^th July, i866. 
 
 " My dear Watts, — I heard to-day from Edward* that he thought 
 you would like to come and see me — or me to come to you. 
 
 " You have not been here for ever so long. Can you come out any 
 day to breakfast? — and we'll have a nice talk — or would you rather I 
 should come in the afternoon ? I rarely stir in the morning. I want to 
 see you. I've been very ill and sad lately, or should have managed it. 
 
 " Send me just a line to say what day you could come, or see me. 
 " Ever affectionately yours, J. RusKlN. 
 
 " G. Watts, Esq 
 
 " Ned says you have been doing beautiful things. And therefore I 
 should like to come, as you won't exhibit and leave Maclise's ' Death of 
 Nelson ' to edify the public of taste, but I think you would enjoy one 
 picture here." 
 
 And so, as one thinks of it all, of the people living round 
 about us shaping their own and other people's lives, one 
 admires and wonders at this unending variety of power and 
 
 * Mr. E. Bume-Jones- 
 "7
 
 f 
 
 voice of apprehension, of teaching, of opinion. Few things 
 strike one more among the chief men who come to the front 
 — not by chance, but by force of hard work and natural 
 right— than their good-fellowship, their trust in one another, 
 and their genuine appreciation of each other, whatever their 
 opinions may be. It is more commonly the second rate 
 among us who are critical and impatient. And this is in- 
 deed the secret of the rule of those Captains of our race 
 who are Captains by reason of their swifter knowledge and 
 insight, their greater courage and fairness. 
 
 We have all been reading lately of generous Darwin and 
 his friends. Genuine excellence is distinguished by this 
 mark, that it belongs to all mankind, says Goethe, writing to 
 Carlyle. Carlyle himself, with his flashing wit and his pas- 
 sionate flashing words, discriminates even while he grum- 
 bles. Ruskin has phases of impression, but his noble in- 
 stinct is for the truth, although the examples he gives at 
 times seem so changeable, and his systems of instruction 
 almost hopeless for students who have to live during their 
 short lives ; to pay their way and their long bills as well as 
 to study their art. Ruskin's own peculiar system is in real- 
 ity almost more of a trial of patience than of skill; he has a 
 series of pitfalls for unwary students, among which the white 
 jam pots he used to prescribe to those of Oxford may be 
 counted. But though his practice may be fanciful, his light 
 is a beacon indeed, steadily flashing from the rock upon 
 which it is set. The rays fall upon uncertain waves, change 
 their color, turn and return, dazzle or escape you altogether ; 
 but the longer you look at them, the more you realize their 
 truth and their beauty. You can't take up a book with any 
 one of the fanciful charming names, whether the Queen oj 
 the Air, or Sesame and Lilies, or the Crown of Wild OltTe, 
 that you don't find conscience and good common -sense 
 wrapped up and hidden among the flowers. The shrewd-
 
 ness, the wisdom of it all strikes us as much as the variety 
 of his interests. 
 
 "A few words," he says somewhere, "well chosen and 
 well distinguished, will do work that a thousand cannot, 
 when every one is acting equivocally in the function of an- 
 other. Yes ; and words, if they are not watched, will do 
 deadly work sometimes, masked words — unjust stewards of 
 men's ideas." 
 
 How true is this sentence concerning the idle and the 
 busy : " All rich people are not idle. There are the idle 
 rich and the idle poor, as there are the busy rich and the 
 busy poor. Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had ten 
 thousand a year ; many a man of fortune is busier than his 
 errand-boy." 
 
 Here is his definition of a true Church : " Wherever one 
 hand meets another helpfully — that is the Holy or Mother 
 Church which ever is or ever shall be." 
 
 About books : '"Will you go and gossip with your house- 
 maid or your stable-boy when you may talk with queens 
 and kings ? But we cannot read unless our minds are fit. 
 Avarice, injustice, vulgarity, base excitement, all unfit us. 
 Beware of reading in order to say, ' Thus Milton thought,' 
 rather than, 'Thus I thought in misreading Milton.' " 
 
 Here is another hint respecting books for women : 
 "Whether novels or history or poetry be read, they should 
 be chosen not for what is out of them, but for what is /;/ 
 them. The chance and scattered evil that may here and 
 there haunt and hide itself in a powerful book never does 
 any harm to a noble girl, but the emptiness of an author 
 oppresses her and his amiable folly degrades her." On 
 education, as on the relations between men and w^omen, he 
 has a thousand delightful things to say. '• Keep a fairy or 
 two for your children," says kind Ruskin ; and doubtless 
 
 acting upon this friendly hint, the School Board has 
 
 119
 
 adopted that charming history of the King of the Golden 
 River as a standard prize book. 
 
 It is pretty to read of the way in which Ruskin adjusts 
 the different offices of the husband and the wife. The 
 woman's a guiding, not a determining function. The man 
 is the doer, the creator ; the woman's power is for rule and 
 not for battle. Her great function is praise ; she enters into 
 no contest, but adjudges the crown. 
 
 XIII 
 
 I AM told by Mr. Allen that Mr. Ruskin thinks that the 
 book which will stand the longest is the Crown of Wild 
 Olive. Sesame and Lilies is, and most deservedly so, a favor- 
 ite book with the public. Who can ever forget the closing 
 passages, in which the poet, looking round about, seeing 
 the need of the children even greater than that of their 
 elders, bids women go forth into the garden and tend the 
 flowerets lying broken, with their fresh leaves torn ; set 
 them in order in their little beds, fence them from the fierce 
 wind — " flowers with eyes like yours, with thoughts like 
 yours." Was ever a lesson more tenderly given? 
 
 How true is this description of Holman Hunt : " To Ros- 
 setti the Old and New Testaments were only the greatest 
 poems he knew. But to Holman Hunt the story of the 
 New Testament, when once his mind entirely fastened on 
 it, became what it was to an old Puritan, . . . not merely a 
 Reality, not merely the greatest of Realities, but the only 
 Reality." 
 
 I have perhaps quoted too much already, but I cannot 
 help giving a passage from the Stones of Venice, which is
 
 written in a different key, a very grave and noble one. He 
 says : " The passions of mankind are partly protective, 
 partly beneficent, like the chaff and grain of the corn, but 
 none without their use, none without nobleness when seen 
 in balanced unity with the rest of the spirit they are charged 
 to defend. The passions of which the end is the contin- 
 uance of the race, the indignation which is to arm it against 
 injustice or strengthen it to resist wanton injury, and the 
 fear which lies at the root of prudence, reverence, and awe, 
 are all honorable and beautiful so long as man is regarded 
 in his relations to the existing world." 
 
 Another lesson which Ruskin would impress upon us all 
 is one more easy to grasp, and it applies to the whole con- 
 duct of life, whether in art, or in nature and natural phe- 
 nomena. "The seed the sower sows grows up according 
 to its kind : let us sow good seed with care and liberality." 
 When Ruskin tells us that modesty, piety, humility, and a 
 number of somewhat unexpected attributes are to be found 
 in the curl of a leaf, in the painted background of a pipture, 
 or in the arch of a window, a moment's thought will show 
 how true his words are. Qualities take different forms in 
 their exercise: Modesty in design would mean care and 
 accuracy ; Humility would mean interest in the object 
 copied, not a vulgar desire for self-glorification and for 
 rapid effect ; Piety represents that sweet sense which some 
 call sentiment. 
 
 Then again listen to Ruskin writing upon a different 
 theme, that of Shakespeare's chivalry. " Note broadly in 
 the outset that Shakespeare has no heroes, whereas there is 
 hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast 
 in grave hope and errorless purpose. Cordelia, Desde- 
 mona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Katherine, Per- 
 dita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last and perhaps 
 loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless, conceived in the highest
 
 heroic type of humanity. Then observe, secondly, the ca- 
 tastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or 
 fault of a man ; the redemption, if there be any, is by the 
 wisdom or virtue of a woman." 
 
 One of Shakespeare's heroines (a Helen happily belong- 
 ing to our own time) has dedicated to Ruskin one of her 
 charming renderings of her not forgotten parts. " She " 
 (Lady Martin) "has shown her beautiful sympathy with 
 character in choosing Beatrice," Ruskin writes in return to 
 Sir Theodore Martin, " and she may be assured that I am 
 indeed listening with all my heart to every word she will 
 say." And then again to Lady Martin herself: "I thought 
 I knew Beatrice of any lady by heart, but you have made 
 her still more real and dear to me, especially by the little 
 sentences in which you speak of your own feelings in cer- 
 tain moments in acting her. You have made me wretched 
 because Beatrice is not at Brantwood." ..." I should like 
 a pomegranate or two in Juliet's balcony," he adds. I take 
 up another letter to Sir Theodore Martin at hazard, and 
 read : " You are happy at Llangollen in this season. The 
 ferns and grass of its hills are far more beautifully and soft- 
 ly opposed than on ours." How few of us know how to 
 think with such vividness ! — we think of a valley, of a 
 mountain, of the skies beyond it, but we don't instinctively 
 see the details ; we don't contrast the hue of the ferns and 
 of the turf of Cumberland and of Wales, perceiving it all 
 with that instantaneous conception which is genius, in 
 short. 
 
 I once heard a well-known man of science speaking of 
 Ruskin ; some one had asked him whether Ruskin or Goethe 
 had done most for science. Sir John Lubbock replied that 
 Ruskin undoubtedly had done very much more valuable 
 work than Goethe ; and that without any pretensions to 
 profound scientific knowledge, he had an extraordinary
 
 natural gift for observation, and seemed to know by instinct 
 what to observe, what was important amid so much that 
 was fanciful and poetical ; and then he went on to quote 
 the description of the swallow from Love's Meinie, one of the 
 loveliest things imaginable, and which it would not be diffi- 
 cult to apply to Ruskin's own genius— so swift, so unerring 
 in its flight, so incalculable, so harmonious and fascinating 
 always. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin is a figure standing out distinguished among 
 the many figures and characters which make up the dramatis 
 persona of our time ; and this being so, legends gather round 
 him as clouds gather round the peak of his own Coniston 
 Old Man. One story I have vaguely heard which describes 
 a Haroun-al-Raschid expedition of his through the streets 
 of London, a flight from the mosque to the jeweller's store, 
 where the loveliest gems are heaped before him, of which he 
 can best tell the secrets. Then from the jeweller's store to 
 the pascry-cook's, where in an inner room a table is spread, 
 not with the cream tarts of fiction, but with the British fare 
 of roast mutton and potatoes, and where, as the poet lunches, 
 salting his food meanwhile with his enchanting talk, little 
 by little all the people already in the shop leaving their buns 
 and sandwiches, gather round to listen. Another legend, 
 which I cannot vouch for either, but which seems suitable 
 somehow, begins with a dream, in which Ruskin dreamt 
 himself a Franciscan friar. Now I am told that when he 
 was at Rome there was a beggar on the steps of the Pincio 
 who begged of Mr. Ruskin every clay as he passed, and who 
 always received something. On one occasion the grateful 
 beggar suddenly caught the out-stretched hand and kissed 
 it. Mr. Ruskin stopped short, drew his hand hastily away, 
 and then, with a sudden impulse, bending forward, kissed 
 the beggar's cheek. The next day the man came to Mr. 
 
 Ruskin's lodging to find him, bringing a gift, which he offered 
 
 123
 
 with tears in his eyes. It was a reHc, he said, a shred of 
 brown cloth which had once formed part of the robe of St. 
 Francis. Mr. Ruskin remembered his dream when the poor 
 beggar brought forth his reUc, and thence, so I am told, 
 came his pilgrimage to the convent of St. Francis Assisi, 
 where he beheld those frescos by Giotto which seemed to 
 him more lovely than anything Tintoret himself had ever 
 produced. I personally should like to believe that the 
 mendicant was St. Francis appearing in the garb of a beggar 
 to his great disciple, to whom also had been granted the gift 
 of interpreting the voice of Nature. 
 -^' • We are all apt to feel at times that meat is more than life, 
 and the raiment more than the soul ; at such times let us 
 turn to Ruskin. He sees the glorious world as we have 
 never known it, or have perhaps forgotten to look upon it. 
 He takes the first example to hand ; the stones, which he 
 makes into bread ; the dust and scraps and dry sticks and 
 moss which are lying to his hand ; he is so penetrated with 
 the glory and beauty of it all, of the harmony into which we 
 are set, that it signifies little to him upon what subject he 
 preaches, and by what examples he illustrates his meaning ; 
 there is a blessing upon his words, and surely the fragments 
 which remain are worthy of the twelve baskets of the 
 Apostles. 
 
 It seemed to me one day last summer as if in truth Rus- 
 kin's actual page was shining before me as I waited on the 
 slope of Blackdown Moor in Surrey. It was the day of the 
 Naval Review, and as I rested in a blackberry-bordered field 
 I could see the tossing land-waves alive with summer and 
 summer toil, the laborers patiently pacing and repacing the 
 furrows, the hay-carts unloading ; other hedges again divid- 
 ing harvest from harvest, labor from labor ; and in the far 
 
 distance a dazzling plain, with gleams of white like the 
 
 124
 
 breakers of the sea, and overhead a midsummer vault of 
 blue, across which a hawk was darting in glorious serenity. 
 One of Ruskin's books was lying open on the grass, and 
 the very page seemed to slide forth to fill the air ; now and 
 then a faint breeze would shake the leaves and the count- 
 less points and blossoms upon the trees and hedges still in 
 my Ruskin land round about ; while from time to time could 
 be heard the distant echo of the Portsmouth guns saluting 
 the Queen as she passed among her ships. 
 
 Note. — This note is from the Pall Mall Gazette of March 28, 1887, 
 and was compiled from information given by Mr. Allen, to show w hat 
 the comparative sale of Mr. Ruskin's books had been for 1886 : 
 
 Sesame and Lilies (small edition), 2122 ; Frondes Agrestes, 1273 ; Stones of Venice 
 /large edition), 939; Unto this Last, 874; Ethics of the Dust, 808; Fors Clavigera 
 (volumes of), 730; Seven Lamps of Architecture, 668; Modern Painters, Vol. IL (small 
 edition), 652 ; Stones of Venice (small travellers' edition, in two vols.), each, 675 ; On 
 the Old Road, 597 ; King of the Golden River, 388. 
 
 Of the books issuing in parts, the following figures will be interesting : 
 
 Praterita (20 parts issued), 63,386; The Art of England (7 parts issued), 1929; 
 Road-side Songs of Tuscany (10 parts issued), 1459; Proserpina, 921. 
 
 The King of the Golden Rivei\ it may be interesting to add, is largely 
 bought by the London School Board for prizes. Mr. Ruskin's Letter 
 to Young Girls has also a large sale, 264 packets (containing 3168 copies 
 in all) having been sold during last year. 
 
 With regard to the "Revised Series" of Mr. Ruskin's works, the 
 following were the sales during 1886 : 
 
 Sesame and Lilies, 272 ; Crown of Wild Olive, 188; Queen of the Air, 108 ; Eagle's 
 Nest, 104 ; Two Paths. 96 ; Time and Tide, 89 ; Munera Pulveris, 73 ; * Val d'Arno, 54 ; 
 *Aratra Pentelice, 53; A Joy Forever, 51 ; *Ariadne Florentina, 40. 
 
 This series, it should be stated, is a very expensive one, the ordinary 
 volumes costing \y. each (unbound), the illustrated (marked above with 
 an asterisk), 22J-. bd. The unillustrated volumes are, however, all in 
 course of being issued in cheap form, similar to the small Sesame and 
 Lilies, of which over 2poo copies were sold last year. Prcsterita is 
 steadily increasing in popularity. Last year 3169 copies of each part 
 were sold on an average. Mr. Allen is now printing fur first edition 
 5000 copies of each. 
 
 125
 
 I
 
 ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT 
 BROWNING
 
 " / do not know, and much wiser people than I do not know, 
 what writings are inspired and which are not, but I do know of 
 those I have read which are classical belonging to the Eteina! 
 Senate.'' 
 
 Treface to the " Bibliotheca Pastorum," Ruskin.
 
 THE sons and daughters of men and women eminent in 
 their generation are from circumstances fortunate in 
 their opportunities. From childhood they know their par- 
 ents' friends and contemporaries, the remarkable men and 
 women who are the makers of the age, quite naturally and 
 without excitement. At the same time this facility may 
 perhaps detract in some degree from the undeniable gla- 
 mour of the Unknown, and, indeed, it is not till much later 
 in life that the time comes to appreciate. 
 
 B or C or D are great men ; we know it because our fa- 
 thers have told us ; but the moment when we feel it for 
 ourselves comes suddenly and mysteriously. My own expe- 
 rience certainly is this : the friends existed first; then, long 
 afterwards, they became to me the notabilities, the interest- 
 ing people as well, and these two impressions were oddly 
 combined in my mind. When we were children living in 
 Paris, we used to look with a certain mingled terror and fas- 
 cination at various pages of grim heads drawn in black and 
 red chalk, something in the manner of Fuseli. Masks and 
 faces were depicted, crowding together with malevolent or 
 agonized or terrific expressions. There were the suggestions 
 of a hundred weird stories on the pages at which one gazed 
 with creeping alarm. These pictures were all drawn by a 
 kind and most gentle neighbor of ours, whom we all often 
 met and visited, and of whom we were not in the very least 
 afraid. His name was Mr. Robert Browning. He was the 
 father of the poet, and he lived with his daughter in calm 
 I 129
 
 and pleasant retreat in those Champs-Elysees to which so 
 many people used to come at that time seeking well-earned 
 repose from their labors by crossing the Channel instead of 
 the Styx. I don't know whether Mr. and Miss Browning 
 always lived in Paris ; they are certainly among the people 
 I can longest recall there. I3ut one day I found myself 
 listening with some interest to a conversation which had 
 been going on for some time between my grandparents and 
 Miss Browning — a long matter-of-fact talk about houses, 
 travellers, furnished apartments, sunshine, south aspects, 
 etc., and on asking who were the travellers coming to 
 inhabit the apartments, I was told that our Mr. Browning 
 had a son who lived abroad, and who was expected shortly 
 with his wife from Italy, and that the rooms were to be en- 
 gaged for them ; and I was also told that they were very 
 gifted and celebrated people ; and I further remember that 
 very afternoon being taken over various vacant houses and 
 lodgings by my grandmother. Mrs. Browning was an in- 
 valid, my grandmother told me, who could not possibly live 
 without light and warmth. So that by the time the travel- 
 lers had really arrived, and were definitively installed, we 
 were all greatly excited and interested in their whereabouts, 
 and well convinced that wherever else the sun might or 
 might not fall, it must shine upon than. In this homely 
 fashion the shell of the future — the four walls of a friend- 
 ship—began to exist before the friends themselves walked 
 into it. We were taken to call very soon after they arrived. 
 Mr. Bi-owning was not there, but Mrs. Browning received us 
 in a low room with Napoleonic chairs and tables, and a 
 wood-fire burning on the hearth. 
 
 I don't think any girl who had once experienced it could 
 fail to respond to Mrs. Browning's motherly advance. There 
 was something more than kindness in it ; there was an im- 
 plied interest, equality, and understanding which is very 
 
 130
 
 difficult to describe and impossible to forget. This gener- 
 ous humility of nature was also to the last one special at- 
 tribute of Robert Browning himself, translated by him into 
 cheerful and vigorous good-will and utter absence of affec- 
 tation. But again and again one is struck by that form 
 of greatness which consists in reaching the reality in all 
 things, instead of keeping to the formalities and the af- 
 fectations of life. The free-and-easiness of the small is a 
 very different thing from this. It may be as false in its way 
 as formality itself, if it is founded on conditions which do 
 not and can never exist. 
 
 To the writer's own particular taste there never will be 
 any more delightful person than the simple-minded woman 
 of the world, who has seen enough to know what its praise is 
 all worth, who is sure enough of her own position to take it 
 for granted, who is interested in the person she is talking 
 to, and unconscious of anything but a wish to give kindness 
 and attention. This is the impression Mrs. Browning made 
 upon me from the first moment I ever saw her to the last. 
 Alas ! the moments were not so very many when we were 
 together. Perhaps all the more vivid is the recollection of 
 the peaceful home, of the fireside where the logs are burn- 
 ing while the lady of tliat kind hearth is established in her 
 sofa corner, with her little boy curled up by her side, the 
 door opening and shutting meanwhile to the quick step of 
 tlie master of the house, to the life of the world without as 
 it came to find her in her quiet nook. The hours seemed 
 to my sister and to me warmer, more full of interest and 
 peace, in her sitting-room than elsewhere.- Whether at 
 Florence, at Rome, at Paris, or in London once more, she 
 seemed to carry her own atmosphere always, something seri- 
 ous, motherly, absolutely artless, and yet impassioned, noble, 
 and sincere. 1 can recall the slight figure in its thin black 
 dress, the writing apparatus by the sofa, the tiny inkstand, 
 
 131
 
 the quill-nibbed pen — the unpretentious implements of her 
 magic. " She was a little woman ; she liked little things," 
 Mr. Browning used to say. Her miniature editions of the 
 classics are still carefully preserved, with her name written 
 in each in her delicate, sensitive handwriting, and always 
 with her husband's name above her own, for she dedicated 
 all her books to him; it was a fancy that she had. Nor 
 must his presence in the home be forgotten any more than 
 in the books — the spirited domination and inspired common- 
 sense, which seemed to give a certain life to her vaguer vi- 
 sions. But of these visions Mrs. Browning rarely spoke; she 
 was too simple and practical to indulge in many apostrophes. 
 
 II 
 
 To all of us who have only known Mrs. Browning in her 
 own home as a wife and a mother, it seems almost impossi- 
 ble to realize the time before her home existed — when Mrs. 
 Browning was not, and Elizabeth Barrett, dwelling apart, 
 was weaving her spells like the Lady of Shalott, and sub- 
 ject, like the lady herself, to the visions in her mirror. 
 
 Mrs. Browning* was born in the County of Durham, on 
 the 6th of March, 1809. It was a golden year for poets, 
 for it was also that of Tennyson's birth. She was the eldest 
 daughter of Edward Moulton, and was christened by the 
 names of Elizabeth Barrett. Not long after her birth Mr. 
 Moulton, succeeded to some property, and took the name 
 of Barrett, so that in after-times, when Mrs. Browning signed 
 
 * The passages relating to Mrs. Browning's life are taken (by the permission of 
 the proprietor and editor) from an article contributed by the present writer to the 
 " Biographical Dictionary " published by Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. 
 
 132
 
 
 IP 
 
 '' m''   i 
 
 r -^ 
 
   
 
 . 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
 
 herself at length as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it was her 
 own Christian name that she used without any further lit- 
 erary assumptions. Her mother was Mary Graham, the 
 daughter of a Mr. Graham, afterwards known as Mr. Graham 
 Clark, of Northumberland. Soon after the child's birth her 
 parents brought her southward, to Hope End, near Ledbury, 
 in Herefordshire, where Mr. Barrett possessed a considera- 
 ble estate, and had built himself a country-house. The house 
 is now pulled down, but it is described by Lady Carmichael, 
 one of the family, as "a luxurious home standing in a lovely 
 park, among trees and sloping hills all sprinkled with sheep;" 
 and this same lady remembers the great hall, with the great 
 organ in it, and more especially Elizabeth's room, a lofty 
 chamber, with a stained-glass window casting lights across 
 the floor, and little Elizabeth as she used to sit propped 
 against the wall, with her hair falling all about her face. 
 There were gardens round about the house leading to the 
 park. Most of the children had their own plots to culti- 
 vate, and Elizabeth was famed among them all for success 
 with her white roses. She had a bower of her own all over- 
 grown with them ; it is still blooming for the readers of the 
 lost bower "as once beneath the sunshine." Another fa- 
 vorite device with the child was that of a man of flowers, 
 laid out in beds upon the lawn — a huge giant w-rought of 
 blossom. " Eyes of gentianella azure, staring, winking at 
 the skies." 
 
 Mr. Barrett was a rich man, and his daughter's life was 
 that of a rich man's child, far removed from the stress and 
 also from the variety and experience of humbler life ; but 
 her eager spirit found adventure for itself. Her gift for 
 learning was extraordinary. At eight years old little Eliza- 
 beth had a tutor and could read Homer in the original, 
 holding her book in one hand and nursing her doll on the 
 other arm. She has said herself that in those days " the 
 
 135
 
 Greeks were her demi - gods ; she dreamed more of Aga- 
 memnon than of Moses, her black pony." At the same 
 small age she began to try her childish powers. When she 
 was about eleven or twelve, her great epic of the battle of 
 Marathon was written in four books, and her proud father 
 had it printed. " Papa was bent upon spoiling me," she 
 writes. Her cousin remembers a certain ode the little girl 
 recited to her father on his birthday ; as he listened, shading 
 his eyes, the young cousin was wondering why the tears 
 came falling along his cheek. It seems right to add on this 
 same authority that their common grandmother, who used 
 to stay at the house, did not approve of these readings and 
 writings, and said she had far rather see Elizabeth's hem- 
 ming more carefully finished off than hear of all this Greek. 
 Elizabeth was growing up meanwhile under happy influ- 
 ences ; she had brothers and sisters in her home ; her life 
 was not all study ; she had the best of company — that of 
 happy children as well as of all natural things ; she loved 
 her hills, her gardens, her woodland play-ground. As she 
 grew older she used to drive a pony and go farther afield. 
 There is a story still told of a little child, flying in terror along 
 one of the steep Herefordshire lanes, perhaps frightened by 
 a cow's horn beyond the hedge, who was overtaken by a 
 young girl, with a pale, spiritual face and a profusion of 
 dark curls, driving a pony-carriage, and suddenly caught up 
 into safety and driven rapidly away. But, alas ! it was very 
 earlv in her life that Elizabeth's happy drives and rides were 
 discontinued, and the sad apprenticeship to suffering began. 
 Was it Moses, the black pony, who was so nearly the cause 
 of her death ? One day, when she was about fifteen, the 
 young girl, impatient to get out, tried to saddle her pony in 
 a field alone, and fell, with the saddle upon her, in some way 
 injuring her spine so seriously that she lay for years upon 
 
 her back. 
 
 136
 
 She was about twenty when her mother's last illness be- 
 gan, and at the same time some money catastrophe, the re- 
 sult of other people's misdeeds, overtook Mr. Barrett. He 
 would not allow his wife to be troubled or to be told of this 
 crisis in his affairs, and he compounded with his creditors 
 at an enormous cost, materially diminishing his income for 
 life, so as to put off any change in the ways at Hope End 
 until change could trouble the sick lady no more. After 
 her death, when Elizabeth was a little over twenty, they 
 came away, leaving Hope End among the hills forever. 
 "Beautiful, beautiful hills!" Miss Barrett wrote long after 
 from her closed sick-room in London, " and yet not for the 
 whole world's beauty would I stand among the sunshine 
 and shadow of them any more. It would be a mockery, 
 like the taking back a broken flower to its stalk." 
 
 The family spent two years at Sidmouth, and afterwards 
 came to London, where Mr. Barrett first bought a house in 
 Gloucester Place, and then removed to Wimpole Street. His 
 daughter's continued delicacy and failure of health kept her 
 for months at a time a prisoner to her room, but did not 
 prevent her from living her own life of eager and beautiful 
 aspiration. She was becoming known to the world. Her 
 Prometheus, which was published when she was twenty-six 
 years old, was reviewed in the Quarterly Review for 1840, 
 and there Miss Barrett's name comes second among a list 
 of the most accomplished women of those days, whose little 
 tinkling guitars are scarcely audible now, while this one voice 
 vibrates only more clearly as the echoes of her time die away. 
 
 Her noble poem on " Cowper's Grave" was republished 
 with the "Seraphim,"* by which (whatever her later opinion 
 may have been) she seems to have set small count at the 
 
 * In a surviving copy of this book, belonging to Mr. Dykes Campbell, there is an 
 added stanza to the " Image of God " never yet printed, and also many corrections in 
 her delicate handwriting. 
 
 137
 
 time, " all the remaining copies of the book being locked 
 away in the wardrobe in her father's bedroom," " entombed 
 as safely as CEdipus among the Olives." 
 
 From Wimpole Street Miss Barrett went, an unwilling 
 exile for her health's sake, to Torquay, where the tragedy 
 occurred which, as she writes to Mr. Home, "gave a night- 
 mare to her life forever." Her companion -brother had 
 come to see her and to be with her and to be comforted by 
 her for some trouble of his own, when he was accidentally 
 drowned, under circumstances of suspense which added to 
 the shock. All that year the sea beating upon the shore 
 sounded to her as a dirge, she says in a letter to Miss Mit- 
 ford. It was long before Miss Barrett's health was suffi- 
 ciently restored to allow of her being brought home to 
 Wimpole Street, where many years passed away in confine- 
 ment to a sick-room, to which few besides members of her 
 own family were admitted. Among these exceptions was 
 her devoted Miss Mitford, who would " travel forty miles 
 to see her for an hour." Besides Miss Mitford, Mrs. Jame- 
 son also came, and, above all, Mr. Kenyon, the friend and 
 dearest cousin, to whom Mrs. Browning afterwards dedi- 
 cated Aurora Leigh. Mr. Kenyon had an almost fatherly 
 affection for her, and from the first recognized his young 
 relative's genius. He was a constant visitor and her link 
 with the outside world, and he never failed to urge her to 
 write, and to live out and beyond the walls of her chamber. 
 
 Miss Barrett lay on her couch with her dog Flush at her 
 feet, and Miss Mitford describes her reading every book, 
 in almost every language, and giving herself heart and soul 
 to poetry. She also occupied herself with prose, writing lit- 
 erary articles for the Athenceum, and contributing to a mod- 
 ern rendering of Chaucer, which was then being edited by 
 her unknown friend, Mr. R. H. Home, from whose corre- 
 spondence with her I have already quoted, and whose inter- 
 
 138
 
 est in literature and occupation with literary things must have 
 brought wholesome distractions to the monotonies of her life. 
 The early letters of Mrs. Browning to Mr. Home, written 
 before her marriage, and published with her husband's sanc- 
 tion after her death, are full of the suggestions of her de- 
 lightful fancy. Take, for instance, " Sappho, who broke off 
 a fragment of her soul for us to guess at." Of herself she 
 says (apparently in answer to some questions), " My story 
 amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a 
 catastrophe ! A bird in a cage would have as good a story ; 
 most of my events and nearly all my intense pleasures have 
 passed in my thoughts^ But such a woman, though living 
 so quietly and thus secluded from the world, could not have 
 been altogether out of touch with its changing impressions. 
 Here is an instance of her unconscious presence in the 
 minds of others : " I remember all those sad circumstances 
 connected with the last doings of poor Haydon." Mr. 
 Browning writes to Professor Knight, in 1882 : " He never 
 saw my wife, but interchanged letters with her occasionally. 
 On visiting her, the day before the painter's death, I found 
 her room occupied by a quantity of studies — sketches and 
 portraits — which, together with paints, palettes, and brushes, 
 he had chosen to send, in apprehension of an arrest or, at 
 all events, an ' execution ' in his own house. The letter 
 which apprised her of this step said, in excuse of it, ' they 
 may have a right to my goods ; they can have none to my 
 mere work tools and necessaries of existence,' or words to 
 that effect. The next morning I read the account in the 
 Times, and myself hastened to break the news at Wimpole 
 Street, but had been anticipated. Every article was at once 
 sent back, no doubt. I do not remember noticing Words- 
 worth's portrait — it never belonged to my wife, certainly, at 
 any time. She possessed an engraving of the head ; I sup- 
 pose a gift from poor Haydon. . . ." 
 
 139
 
 Ill 
 
 When Mrs. Orr's authoritative history of Robert Brown- 
 ing appeared, the writer felt that it was but waste of time 
 to attempt anything Hke a biographical record. Hers is 
 but a personal record of impressions and remembrances. 
 Others, with more knowledge of his early days, have de- 
 scribed Robert Browning as a child, as a boy, and a very 
 young man. How interesting, among other things, is the 
 account of the little child among his animals and pets ; 
 and of the tender mother taking so much pains to find the 
 original editions of Shelley and of Keats, and giving them 
 to her boy at a time when their works were scarcely to be 
 bought!* Browning was a year younger than my own fa- 
 ther, and was born at Camberwell, in May, 1812. He went 
 to Italy when he was twenty years of age, and there he 
 studied hard, laying in a noble treasury of facts and fancies 
 to be dealt out in after-life, Avhen the time comes to draw 
 upon the past, upon that youth which age spends so liber- 
 ally, and which is "the background of pale gold" upon 
 which all our lives are painted. 
 
 Browning's first published poem was " Pauline," coming 
 out in 1833, the same year as the "Miller's Daughter" and 
 the " Dream of Fair Women." And we are also told that 
 
 * There is a little story in Mrs. Orr's book which Mr. Browning himself once told 
 some of the children of our family : how, when he was a small boy at school, there was 
 one solemn day in the week when all the little scholars' hairs were brushed and rubbed 
 with oil, which was the fashion in those days, while their mistress chanted Watts's 
 hymns to them, especially that one which begins " Anoint with heavenly grace." 
 
 140
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 From a copyrighted photograph by W. H. Grove, 1-4 Broniplon Road. London
 
 Dante Rossetti, then a very young man, admired " Pauline "^ 
 so much that he copied* the whole poem out from the book 
 in the British Museum. 
 
 In 1834 Robert Browning went to Russia, and there wrote 
 " Porphyria's Lover," published by Mr. Fox in a Unitarian 
 magazine, where the poem must have looked somewhat out 
 of place. It was at Mr. Fox's house that Browning first 
 met Macready. 
 
 Notwithstanding many differences and consequent es- 
 trangements, I have often heard Mr. Browning speak of the 
 great actor with interest and sympathy ; the last time being 
 when Recolkctioiis of Macready, a book by Lady Pollock, 
 had just come out. She had sent Mr. Browning a copy, 
 with which he was delighted. He said he had stopped at 
 home all that winter's day reading it by the fire, and now 
 that dinner-time was come he could quote page after page 
 from memory. His memory was to the last most remark- 
 able. 
 
 There is a touching passage in Mrs. Orr's book describ- 
 ing the meeting of Browning and Macready after their long 
 years of estrangement. Both had seen their homes wrecked 
 and desolate ; both had passed through deep waters. They 
 met unexpectedly and grasped each other's hands again. 
 "Oh! Macready," said Browning. And neither of them 
 could speak another word. 
 
 I have been fortunate for years past in being able to 
 count upon the help of a recording friend and neighbor, to 
 whom I sometimes go for the magic of a suggestive touch 
 when together we conjure up things out of the past. 
 
 I wrote to ask Lady Martin about the production of Mr. 
 Browning's plays upon the stage, and she sent me the fol- 
 lowing account of her recollections of " Strafford ;" nor can 
 
 *The writer has in her possession a book in which her own father, somewhers 
 about those same years, copied out Tennyson's " Day Dream " verse by verse. 
 
 143
 
 I do better now than insert her answer here at length, for 
 to cut out any word is to destroy the impression which it 
 giv^es : 
 
 '^ April 10, 1S91, Brighton. 
 
 " The production of Browning's ' Strafford,' which you ask me about, 
 occurred so early in my career that anything I could say about it would 
 be, T fear, of little use to you. I was so young then, and just a mere 
 novice in my art, so tliat my first feeling, when I heard the play read, 
 was one of wonder that such a weighty character as Lucy, Countess of 
 Carlisle, should be intrusted to my hands. I was told that Mr. Brown- 
 ing had particularly wished me to undertake it. I naturally felt the 
 compliment implied in the wish, but this only increased my surprise, 
 which did not diminish as I advanced in the study of the character. 
 
 " Lady Carlisle, as drawn by Mr. Browning, a woman versed in all 
 the political struggles and intrigues of the times, did not move me. The 
 only interest she awoke in me was due to her silent love for Strafford 
 and devotion to his cause ; and I wondered why, depending so abso- 
 lutely as he did upon her sympathy, her intelligence, her complete self- 
 abnegation, he should only have, in the early part, a common expression 
 of gratitude to give her in return. 
 
 "This made the treatment of Lucy's character, as you will readily 
 see, all the more difficult in the necessity it imposed upon me of letting 
 her feeling be seen by the audience, without its being perceptible to 
 Strafford. 
 
 "Of course I did my best to carry out what I conceived was Mr. 
 Browning's view ; and he, at all events, I had reason to know, was well 
 satisfied with my efforts. I had met him at Mr. and Mrs. Macready's 
 house previously, so that at the rehearsals we renewed our acquaintance. 
 
 "I suppose he was nervous, for I remember Mr. Macready read the 
 play to us in the greenroom. And how finely he read ! He made the 
 smallest part distinct and prominent. He was accused of under-reading 
 his own part. But I do not think tiiis was so. 
 
 "At the rehearsals, when Mr. Browning was introduced to those 
 ladies and gentlemen whom he did not know, his demeanor was so kind, 
 considerate, and courteous, so grateful for the attention shown to his 
 wishes, that he won directly the warm interest of all engaged in the 
 play. So it was that although many doubtful forecasts were made in 
 the greenroom as to the ultimate attraction of a play so entirely turn- 
 
 144
 
 ing- on politics, yet all were determined to do their very best to insure 
 its success. 
 
 "In the play Lucy has only to meet Strafford, King Charles, and 
 Henrietta. It seemed to me that Mr. Macready's Strafford was a fine 
 performance. The character fitted in with his restless, nervous, change- 
 able, impetuous, and emphatic style. He looked the very man as we 
 knew him in Vandyck's famous picture. The royal personages Avere 
 very feebly represented. I could not hel]) feeling in the scenes with 
 them that my earnestness was overdone, and that I had no business to 
 appear to dominate and sway and direct opinions while they stood 
 nerveless by. 
 
 " There were some fine moments in the play. The last scene must 
 have been very exciting and touching. Lucy believes that by her means 
 Strafford's escape is certain ; but when the water-gates open, with the 
 boat ready to receive him, Pyni steps out of it ! . . . This effect was most 
 powerful. 
 
 " It was a dreadful moment. My heart seemed to cease to beat. I 
 sank on my knees, burying my head in my bosom, and stopping my ears 
 with my hands while the death-bell tolled for Strafford. 
 
 "I can remember nothing more than that I went home very sad; 
 for although the play was considered a success, yet, somehow, even my 
 small experience seemed to tell me it would not be a very long life, and 
 that perhaps kind Mr. Browning would think we had not done our best 
 for him. 
 
 '■' The play was mounted in all matters with great care. Modern 
 critics seem to have little knowledge of the infinite pains bestowed in 
 all respects before their day upon the representation of historical and 
 Shakespearian plays and noteworthy people in romance or history. 
 
 ' ' I can see my gown now in Lucy Percy, made from a Vandyck 
 picture, and remember the thought bestowed even upon the kind of fur 
 with which the gown was trimmed. The same minute attention to 
 accuracy of costume prevailed in all the characters produced. The 
 scenery was alike accurate, if not so full of small details as at present. 
 The human beings dominated all." 
 
 I need scarcely add that I have heard from others of Miss 
 Helen Faucit's perfect rendering of the part of Lucy Car- 
 lisle. Browning himself spoke of Miss Faucit's " playing 
 as an actress, and her perfect behavior as a woman." 
 1^ 145
 
 IV 
 
 Mv friend, Professor Knight, has kindly given me leave 
 to quote from some of his interesting letters from Robert 
 Browning. One most interesting record describes the poet's 
 own first acquaintance with Mr. Kenyon. The letter is 
 dated January the loth, 1884, but the events related, of 
 course, to some forty years before : 
 
 "With respect to the information you desire about Mr. Kenyon, all 
 that I do ' know of him — better than anybody,' perhaps — is his great 
 goodness to myself. Singularly, little respecting his early life came to 
 my knowledge. He was the cousin of Mr. Barrett ; second cousin, 
 therefore, of my wife, to whom he was ever deeply attached. I first 
 met him at a dinner of Sergeant Talfourd's, after which he drew his 
 chair by mine and inquired whether my father had been his old school- 
 fellow and friend at Cheshunt, adding that, in a poem just printed, he 
 had been commemorating their play -ground fights, armed with sword 
 and shield, as Achilles and Hector, some half-century before. On tell- 
 ing this to my father at breakfast, next morning, he at once, with a pen- 
 cil, sketched me the boy's handsome face, still distinguishable in the 
 elderly gentleman's I had made acquaintance with. Mr. Kenyon at 
 once renewed his own acquaintance with my father, and became my fast 
 friend ; hence my introduction to Miss Barrett. 
 
 " He was one of the best of human lieings, with a general sympathy 
 for excellence of every kind. He enjoyed the friendship of Words- 
 worth, of Southey, of Landor ; and, in later days, was intimate with 
 most of my own contemporaries of eminence. I believe that he was 
 born in the West Indies, whence his property was derived, as was that 
 of Mr. Barrett, persistently styled a ' merchant ' by biographers who 
 will not take the pains to do more than copy the blunders of their fore- 
 runners in the business of article-mongery. He was twice married, but 
 
 .46
 
 left no family. I should suggest Mr. Scharf (of the National Portrait 
 Gallery) as a far more qualified informant on all such matters ; my own 
 concern having mainly been with his exceeding goodness to me and 
 mine." 
 
 Mr. Kenyon has sometimes dined with my father. I can 
 remember him, and also a smooth, fair printed book of his 
 poems, with broad margins, and some odd suggestive look 
 of its author. For many years he lived in Regent's Park. 
 After his death, Mrs. Bayne, a kind and hospitable cousin 
 of my father's, dwelt in the house with her daughter, who 
 still resides there. My father used to say that the dining- 
 room was the prettiest room in all London. It has wide 
 green windows looking across the park, and there were grace- 
 ful pillars to support the bay. As I sat at the round-table I 
 used to hear of Mr. Kenyon's gatherings and the friends who 
 met in the pretty sunny room where his picture still hangs, 
 and where so many of his guests returned at the summons of 
 their kind hostess, I remember my father sitting there and 
 talking of the past, with affectionate words of remembrance, 
 and Mr. Browning used to be often present with another of 
 Mrs. Bayne's old friends, Dr. Connop Thirlwall; and as one 
 thinks of it all, one feels, perhaps, that to remember old 
 friends in peaceful festive hours is better for our souls than 
 all the memento mori that ever were set up by perverse mor- 
 tals struggling in vain against the repeated benedictions of 
 Providence. 
 
 As we all know, it was Mr. Kenyon who first introduced 
 Robert Browning to his future wife ; and the story, as 
 told by Mrs. Orr, is most romantic. The poet was about 
 thirty-two years of age at this time, in the fulness of his 
 powers. She was supposed to be a confirmed invalid, con- 
 fined to her own room and to her couch, seeing no one, 
 living her own spiritual life indeed, but looking for none 
 
 147
 
 other, when her cousin first brought Mr. Browning to the 
 house. Miss Barrett's reputation was well established by 
 this time. " Lady Geraldine's Courtship" was already pub- 
 lished, in which the author had written of Browning, among 
 other poets, as of " some pomegranate, which, if cut deep 
 down the middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a 
 veined humanity;" and one can well believe that this present 
 meeting must have been but a phase in an old and long-exist- 
 ing sympathy between kindred sjjirits. Very soon afterwards 
 the two became engaged, and they were married at Mary-le- 
 Bone* Parish Church in the autumn of the year 1846. 
 
 Who does not know the story of this marriage of true 
 souls ? Has not Mrs. Browning herself spoken of it in 
 words indelible and never to be quoted without sympathy 
 by all women ; while he from his own fireside has struck 
 chord after chord of manly feeling than which this life con- 
 tains nothing deeper or more true. 
 
 The Sonnets from the Portuguese were written by Eliza- 
 beth Barrett to Mr. Browning before her marriage, although 
 she never even showed them to him till some years after 
 they were man and wife. They were sonnets such as no 
 Portuguese ever wa'ote before, or ever will write again. 
 There is a quality in them which is beyond words, that 
 echo which belongs to the highest human expression of 
 feeling. But such a love to such a woman comes with its 
 own Testament. 
 
 Some years before her marriage the doctors had positively 
 declared that Miss Barrett's life depended upon her leaving 
 England for the winter, and immediately after their marriage 
 Mr. Browning took his wife abroad. 
 
 Mrs. Jameson was at Paris when Mr. and Mrs. Browning 
 arrived there. There is an interesting account of the meet- 
 
 * See Biographical Dictionarj'. 
 148
 
 ing, and of their all journeying together southward by Avig- 
 non and Vaucluse.* Can this be the life-long invalid of 
 whom we read, perching out-of-doors upon a rock, among 
 the shallow, curling waters of a stream ? They come to a 
 rest at Pisa, whence Mrs. Browning writes to her old friend, 
 Mr. Home, to tell him of her marriage, adding that Mrs. 
 Jameson calls her, notwithstanding all the emotion and fa- 
 tigue of the last six weeks, rather "transformed" than im- 
 proved. From Pisa the new-married pair went to Florence, 
 where they finally settled, and where their boy was born in 
 1849. 
 
 Poets are painters in words, and the color and the atmos- 
 phere of the country to which they belong seem to be re- 
 peated almost unconsciously in their work and its setting. 
 Mrs. Browning was an Englishwoman ; though she lived in 
 Italy, though she died in Florence, though she loved the 
 land of her adoption, yet she never, for all that, ceased to 
 breathe her native air, as she sat by the Casa Guidi windows ; 
 and though Italian sunshine dazzled her dark eyes, and 
 Italian voices echoed in the street, though her very ink was 
 mixed with the waters of the Arno, she still wrote of Here- 
 fordshire lakes and hills, of the green land where " jocund 
 childhood " played " dimpled close with hills and valley, 
 dappled very close with shade." . . . Now that the writer 
 has seen the first home and the last home of that kind friend 
 of her girlhood, it seems to her as if she could better listen 
 to that poet's song growing sweeter, as all true music does, 
 with years. 
 
 We had been spending an autumn month in Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's country when we drove to visit the scene of her early 
 youth, and it seemed to me as if an echo of her melody was 
 still vibrating from hedge-row to hedge-row, even though the 
 
 * Life of Mrs. Javiesoit, by Mrs. Macpherson, 
 149
 
 birds were silent, and though summer and singing-time were 
 over. We drove along, my little son and I, towards Hope 
 End, by a road descending gradually from the range of the 
 Malvern Hills into the valley — it ran across commons 
 sprinkled with geese and with lively donkeys, and skirted 
 by the cottages still alight with sunflowers and nasturtium 
 beds, for they were sheltered from the cold wind by the 
 range of purple hills " looming a-row ;" then we dipped into 
 lanes between high banks heaped with ferns and leaves of 
 every shade of burnished gold and brown, fenced up by the 
 twisting roots of the chestnuts and oak-trees ; and all along 
 the way, as our old white horse jogged steadily on, we could 
 see the briers and the blackberry sprays travelling too, ad- 
 vancing from tree to tree and from hedge to hedge, flashing 
 their long flaming brands and warning tokens of winter's 
 approaching armies. The wind was cold and in the north, 
 the sky overhead was broken and stormy. Sometimes we 
 dived into sudden glooms among rocks overhung with ivy 
 and thick brushwood; then we came out into the open 
 again, and caught sight of vast skies dashed with strange 
 lights, a wonderful cloud-capped country up above, where 
 the storm-clouds reared their vast piles out of sapphire 
 depths — 
 
 ... "a boundless depth 
 Far sinking into splendor without end." 
 
 Our adventures were not along the road, but chiefly over- 
 head. My boy amused himself by counting the broken 
 rainbows and the hail -storms falling in the distance; and 
 then at last, just as we were getting cold and tired, w^e 
 turned into the lodge gates of Hope End. 
 
 I don't know how^ the park strikes other people ; to me, 
 who paid this one short visit, it seemed a sort of enchanted 
 garden revealed for an hour, and I almost expected that it 
 
 150
 
 
 ..- v^,4^^. - ., - 
 
 ^J^I^^^gjpiS^ A^f^J^J^-J^ _^„^-^ 
 
 
 
 
 MRS. browning's TOMB AT FLORENCE 
 
 would then vanish away.* Everything was wild, abrupt, and 
 yet suddenly harmonious. We passed an unsuspected lake 
 covered with water-lilies. A flock of sheep at full gallop 
 plunged across the road ; then came ponies, with long manes 
 and round, wondering eyes, trotting after us. Sometimes in 
 the Alps one has met such herds, wild creatures, sympathet- 
 ic, not yet afraid ! Finally we caught sight of the river, 
 
 * " Here's the garden she walked across . . . 
 Down this side of tlie gravel walk 
 She went while her robe's edge brushed the box : 
 And here she paused in her gracious talk 
 To point me a moth on the milk-white flox. 
 Roses ranged in valiant row 
 I will never think she passed you byl". . . 
 
 Garden Faticies, R. B. 
 
 151
 
 where a couple of water-fowl were' flying into the sedges. 
 But where was the wild swan's nest, and why was not the 
 great god Pan there blowing upon his reed ? It all seemed 
 so natural and so vivid that I should not have been startled 
 to see him sitting quietly by the side of the river. 
 
 V 
 
 The only memoranda I ever made of Mrs. Browning's 
 talk was when I was quite a young girl keeping a diary, and 
 I heard her saying that Tennyson's Maud was "splendid;" 
 and " that without illness she saw no reason why the mind 
 should ever fail." The visitor to whom she expressed this 
 opinion seems to have come away with me complaining that 
 the conversation had been too matter-of-fact, too much to 
 the point ; nothing romantic, nothing poetic, such as one 
 might expect from a poet ! Another person also present 
 had answered that was just the reason of Mrs. Browning's 
 power — she kept her poetry for her poetry, and didn't scat- 
 ter it about in conversation where it was not wanted ; and 
 then follows a girlish note in the old diary : " I think Mrs. 
 Browning is the greatest woman I ever saw in all my life. 
 She is very small, she is brown, with dark eyes and dead 
 brown hair ; she has white teeth, and a low, curious voice ; 
 she has a manner full of charm and kindness ; she rarely 
 laughs, but is always cheerful and smiling ; her eyes are very 
 bright. Her husband is not unlike her. He is short ; he is 
 dark, with a frank, open countenance, long hair, streaked 
 with gray; he opens his mouth wide when he speaks; he 
 has white teeth ;" and there the diary wanders off. 
 
 When I first remember Mr. Browning he was a compara- 
 
 152
 
 tively young man — though, for the matter of that, he was 
 always young, as his father had been before him — and he 
 was also happy in this, that the length of his life can best be 
 measured by his work. In those days I had not read one 
 single word of his poetry, but somehow one realized that it 
 was there. /Vlmost the first time I ever really recall Mr. 
 Browning, he and my father and Mrs. Browning* were dis- 
 cussing spiritualism in a very human and material fashion, 
 each holding to their own point of view, and my sister and 
 I sat by listening and silent. My father was always im- 
 mensely interested by the stories told of Spiritualism and 
 table-turning, though he certainly scarcely believed half 
 of them. Mrs. Browning believed, and Mr. Browning was 
 always irritated beyond patience by the subject. I can re- 
 member her voice, a sort of faint minor chord, as she, lisp- 
 ing the "r" a little, uttered her remonstrating "Robert!" 
 and his loud, dominant barytone sweeping away every pos- 
 sible plea she and my father could make ; and then came 
 my father's deliberate notes, which seemed to fall a little 
 sadly — his voice always sounded a little sad — upon the ris- 
 ing waves of the discussion. I think this must have been 
 just before we all went to Rome — it was in the morning, 
 in some foreign city. I can see ISIr. and Mrs. Browning, 
 with their faces turned towards the window, and my fa- 
 ther with his back to it, and all of us assembled in a little 
 high-up room. Mr. Browning was dressed in a brown rough 
 suit, and his hair was black hair then, and she, as far as I 
 can remember, was, as usual, in soft-falling flounces of black 
 silk, and with her heavy curls drooping, and a thin gold 
 chain hanging round her neck. 
 
 In the winter of 1853-54 we lived in Rome, in the Via della 
 Croce, and the Brownings lived in the Bocca di Leone, hard 
 
 * An ambiguous extract in Mrs. Orr's Life of Brrnvniuf; has only recalled my own 
 most vivid impression of the happy relations between my father and Mrs. Browning. 
 
 153
 
 by. The evenings our father dined away from home our old 
 donna (so I think cooks used to be called) would conduct 
 us to our tranquil dissipations, through the dark streets, past 
 the swinging lamps, up and down the black stone staircases; 
 and very frequently we spent an evening with Mrs. Brown- 
 ing in her quiet room, while Mr. Browning was out visiting 
 some of the many friends who were assembled in Rome 
 that year. At ten o'clock came our father's servant to fetch 
 us back, with the huge key of our own somewhat imposing 
 palazzo. It was a happy and an eventful time, all the more 
 eventful and happy to us for the presence of the two kind 
 ladies, Mrs. Browning and Mrs. Sartoris, who befriended us. 
 I can also remember one special evening at Mrs. Sartoris's, 
 when a certain number of people were sitting just before 
 ■dinner-time in one of those lofty Roman drawing-rooms, 
 which become so delightful when they are inhabited by Eng- 
 lish people — which look so chill and formal in their natural 
 condition. This saloon was on the first floor, with great 
 windows at the farther end. It was all full of a certain 
 mingled atmosphere, of flowers and light and comfort and 
 color. It was in contrast but not out of harmony with Mrs. 
 Browning's quiet room — in both places existed the individu- 
 ality which real home-makers know how to give to their 
 homes. Here swinging lamps were lighted up, beautiful 
 things hung on the wall, the music came and went as it listed, 
 a great piano was drawn out and open, the tables were piled 
 with books and flowers. Mrs. Sartoris, the lady of the shrine, 
 dressed in some flowing, pearly satin tea-gown, was sitting by 
 a round-table reading to some other women who had come 
 to see her. She was reading from a book of Mr. Brown- 
 ing's poems which had lately appeared ; and as she read in 
 her wonderful muse -like way she paused, she reread the 
 words, and she emphasized the lines, then stopped short, 
 the others exclaiming, half laughing, half protesting. ... It 
 
 •54
 
 was a lively, excitable party, outstaying the usual hour of a 
 visit ; questioning, puzzling, and discursive — a Browning 
 society of the past — into the midst of which a door opens 
 (and it is this fact which recalls it to my mind), and Mr. 
 Browning himself walks in, and the burst of voices is sud- 
 denly reduced to one single voice, that of the hostess, call- 
 ing him to her side, and asking him to define his meaning. 
 But he evaded the question, began to talk of something else 
 — he never much cared to talk of his own poetry — and the 
 Browning society dispersed. 
 
 Mrs. Sartoris used to like to speak of a certain luncheon 
 to which Mr. and Mrs. Browning once invited them when 
 they were all staying in some country place in Italy, and 
 which, so she always said, was one of the most delightful 
 entertainments she could remember in all her life. One 
 wonders whether the guests or the hosts contributed most. 
 Each one has been happy and talked his or her best, and 
 when the Sartorises got up reluctantly to go, saying, " How 
 delightful it has been," Mr. Browning cried, " Come back 
 to sup with us, do;'' and Mrs. Browning exclaimed, "Oh, 
 Robert, how can you ask them ! There is no supper, noth- 
 ing but the remains of the pie." And then, cries Robert 
 Browning, " Well, come back and finish the pie." 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette of April 9, 1891, contains an 
 amusing account of a journey from London to Paris taken 
 forty years ago by Mr. and Mrs. Browning. The compan- 
 ion they carried with them writes of the expedition, dating 
 from Chelsea, September 4, 185 1 : 
 
 "The day before yesterday, near midnight, I returned from a very 
 short and very insignificant excursion to Paris, which, after a month at 
 Malvern water-cure and then a ten days at Scotsbrig, concludes my 
 travels for this year. Miserable puddle and tumult all my travels are ; 
 of no use to me except to bring agitation, sleeplessness, sorrow, and dis- 
 tress. Better not to travel at all unless when I am bound to do it. But 
 
 ■55
 
 this tour to Paris was a promised one. I had engaged to meet the Ash- 
 Inirtons (Lord and I.ady) there, on their return from Switzerland and 
 Hamburg, before either party left London. The time at last suited ; 
 all was ready except will on my part ; so, after hesitation and painful 
 indecision enough, I did resolve, packed my baggage again, and did the 
 little tour I stood engaged for." 
 
 The chronicle begins on Monday, September 21st, when 
 " Brother John " and Carlyle go to Chorley to consult about 
 passports, routes, and conditions. . . . 
 
 "At Chapman's shop I learned that Robert Browning (poet) and his 
 wife were just about setting out for Paris. I walked to their place ; 
 had, during that day and the following, consultations with these fellow- 
 pilgrims, and decided to go with them via Dieppe on Thursday. . . . 
 
 " Up, accordingly, oii Thursday morning, in unutterable flurry and tu- 
 mult — phenomena on the Thames all dream-like, one spectralism chasing 
 another— to the station in good time ; found the Brownings just arriv- 
 ing, which seemed a good omen. Browning with wife and child and 
 maid, then an empty seat for cloaks and baskets ; lastly, at the opposite 
 end from me, a hard-faced, honest Englishman or Scotchman all in gray 
 with a gray cap, who looked rather ostrich-like, but proved very harm- 
 less and quiet — this was the loading of our carriage ; and so away we 
 went. Browning talking very loud and with vivacity, I silent rather, 
 tending towards many thoughts. . . . 
 
 " Our friends, especially our French friends, were full of bustle, full 
 of noise, at starting ; but so soon as we had cleared the little channel of 
 Newhaven, and got into the sea or British Channel, all this abated, 
 sank into the general sordid torpor of sea-sickness, with its miserable 
 noises — ' houhah, hoh !' — and hardly any other, amid the rattling of the 
 wind and sea. A sorry phasis of humanity! Browning was sick— lay 
 in one of the bench tents horizontal, his wife below. I was not abso- 
 lutely sick, but had to be quite quiet and without comfort, save in one 
 cigar, for seven or eight hours of blustering, spraying, and occasional 
 rain." 
 
 And so with mention of prostration into doleful silence, 
 
 of ev^anition into utter darkness, of the poor Frenchman who 
 
 was so lively at starting, the story continues : 
 
 .56
 
 "At Dieppe, while tiie others were in the liotel liaviiig some very 
 bad cold tea and colder coffee, Browning was passing our luggage, 
 brought it all in safe about half-past ten o'clock, and we could address 
 ourselves to repose. So ' to bed in my upper room, bemoaned by the sea 
 and small incidental noises of the harbor. . . . Ne.xt morning Browning, 
 as before, did everything. I sat out-of-doors on some logs at my ease, 
 and smoked, looking at the population and their ways. Browning 
 fought for us, and we — that is, the woman, the child, and I — had only 
 to wait and be silent.' . . . At Paris the travellers came into a ' crowding, 
 jingling, vociferous tumult, in which the brave Browning fought for us, 
 leaving me to sit beside the woman.' " 
 
 Mr. Browning once told u* a little anecdote of the Car- 
 lyles at tea in Cheyne Row, and of Mrs. Carlyle pouring 
 out the tea, while a brass kettle was boiling on the hob, and 
 Mr. Browning, presently seeing that the kettle was needed 
 and that Carlyle was not disposed to move, rose from his 
 own chair, and filled the teapot for his hostess, and then 
 stood by her tea-table still talking and absently holding the 
 smoking kettle in his liand. 
 
 "Can't you put it down .-*" said Mrs. Carlyle, suddenly; 
 and Mr. Browning, confused and somewhat absent, imme- 
 diately popped the kettle down upon the carpet, which was 
 a new one. 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle exclaimed in horror — I have no doubt she 
 was half-laughing — " See how fine he has grown ! He does 
 not any longer know what to do with the kettle." 
 
 And, sure enough, when Mr. Browning penitently took it 
 up again, a brown oval mark was to be seen clearly stamped 
 and burned upon the new carpet. "You can imagine what 
 I felt," said Mr. Browning. " Carlyle came to my rescue. 
 'Ye should have been more explicit,' said he to his wife." 
 
 •57
 
 VI 
 
 When my father went for the second time to America, 
 in 1856, my sister and I remained behind, and for a couple 
 of days we stayed on in our home before going to Paris. 
 Those days of parting are always sad ones, and we were 
 dismally moping about the house and preparing for our own 
 journey when we were immensely cheered by a visitor. It 
 was Mr. Browning, who came in to see us, and who brought 
 us an affectionate little note from his wife. We were to 
 go and spend the evening with them, the kind people 
 said. They had Mr. Kenyon's brougham at their disposal, 
 and it would come and fetch us and take us back at niaht, 
 and so that first sad evening passed far more happily 
 than we could ever have imagined possible. I remember 
 feeling, as young people do, utterly, hopelessly miserable, 
 and then suddenly very cheerful every now and then. I 
 believe my father had planned it all with them before he 
 went away. 
 
 This was in the autumn of 1856, and Aurora Leigh was 
 published in 1857. It was on the occasion of this journey 
 home to England that the MS. of the poem was lost in a 
 box at Marseilles. 
 
 In this same box were also carefully put away certain vel- 
 vet suits and lace collars, in which the little son was to 
 make his appearance among his English relatives. Who 
 shall blame Mrs. Browning if her taste in boy's costume 
 was somewhat too fanciful and poetic for the days in which 
 
 she lived ? At any rate, her chief concern was not for her 
 
 15S
 
 MR. MILSAND 
 From a copyrighted photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron
 
 MSS., but for the loss of her Httle boy's wardrobe, which 
 had been devised witli so much motherly pride. 
 
 Happily for the world at large, one of Mrs. Browning's 
 brothers chanced to pass through Marseilles, and the box was 
 discovered by him stowed away in a cellar at the customs. 
 
 We must have met again in Paris later in this same year. 
 The Brownings had an apartment near the Rond-Point, and 
 we were living close by with our grandparents during my 
 father's absence. We used frequently to go and see them, 
 only to find again the same warm and tranquil atmosphere 
 that we used to breathe at Rome — the sofa drawn out, the 
 tiny lady in the corner, the sun dazzling in at the window. 
 On one occasion Mr. Hamilton Aide was paying a visit. He 
 had been talking about books, and. half laughing, he turned 
 to a young woman who had just come in, and asked her 
 when her forthcoming work would be ready. Young persons 
 are ashamed, and very properly so, of their early failures, of 
 their pattes de mouchcs and wild attempts at authorship, and 
 this one was no exception to the common law, and answered 
 " Never," somewhat too emphatically. And then it was that 
 Mr. Browning spoke one of those chance sayings which make 
 headings to the chapters of one's life. " All in good time," 
 he said, and he went on to ask us all if we remembered the 
 epitaph on the Roman lady who sat at home, who spun 
 wool. "You must spin your wool some day," he said, 
 kindly, to the would-be authoress ; " every woman has wool 
 to spin of some sort or another ; isn't it so ?" he asked, and 
 he turned to his wife. 
 
 I went home feeling quite impressed by the little speech, 
 it had been so gravely and kindly made. My blurred pages 
 looked altogether different somehow. It was spinning wool 
 — it was not wasting one's time, one's temper — it was some- 
 thing more than spoiling paper and pens. And this much 
 I may perhaps add for the comfort of the future race of
 
 authoresses who are now twisting the cocoons from which 
 the fluttering butterflies and Psyches yet to be will emerge 
 some day upon their wings : never has anything given more 
 trouble or seemed more painfully hopeless than those early 
 incoherent pages, so full of meaning to one's self, so abso- 
 lutely idiotic in expression. In later life the v/ords come 
 easily, only too readily ; but then it is the meaning which 
 lags behind. 
 
 It was in that same apartment that I remember hearing 
 Mr. Browning say (across all these long years): "It may 
 seem to you strange that such a thing as poetry should be 
 written with regularity at the same hour in every day. But, 
 nevertheless, I do assure you it is a fact that my wife and I 
 sit down every morning after breakfast to our separate work \ 
 she writes in the drawing-room and I write in here," he said, 
 opening a door into a little back empty room with a window 
 over a court. And then he added, " I never read a word of 
 hers until I see it all finished and ready for publication." 
 
 Among the people that belong to these old Paris days, 
 there is one friend of very early date v/hom we used to meet 
 from time to time with Mr. and Miss Browning at the house 
 of Mrs. Corkran and elsewhere ; this was Mr. Milsand, a 
 man to whom every one turned with instinctive trust and 
 sympathy, a slight body, a great and generous nature. Mr. 
 Browning has described him in " Red Cotton Nightcap 
 Country" — "a man of men" he calls him : 
 
 "Talk to him for five minutes, 
 Nonsense, sense, no matter what . . . 
 Tliere he stands, reads an English newspaper, 
 Stock still, and now again upon the move 
 Paces the beach, to taste the spring like you 
 (Since both are human beings in God's eyes) ; 
 That man will read you rightly head to foot." 
 162
 
 A little further on follows a touching, outspoken expres- 
 sion of true feeling : 
 
 " He knows more and loves better than the ■world 
 That never heard his name and never may . . . 
 What hinders that my heart relieve itself : 
 ' O friend ! who makest warm my wintry world, 
 And wise my heaven, if there we consort too.'" 
 
 To Mr. Milsand, Browning has dedicated one of the later 
 editions of '' Sordello " and others of his poems. By the 
 kindness of Madame Milsand I am able to give some pas- 
 sages of Mr. Browning's correspondence with his friend. 
 She has sent me the letters from her home at Dijon, and 
 with the letters comes a little humorous sketch by the poet, 
 of which a fac-simile is given here : 
 
 " Florenxe, February 24, '58. 
 "It is far too many weeks now, my dear Milsand, since we got your 
 letter — and certainly it has never been out of sight any more than out 
 of mind, for I put it over the fireplace where we both sit these long win- 
 ter evenings, and often, indeed, a glance at it has brought you beside 
 us again, as on those pleasant Paris evenings. We English have a su- 
 perstition that when people talk of us our ears burn — have yours 
 caused you any serious inconvenience that way ? You know we three 
 have long since passed the stage in friendship when assurances are 
 necessary to any one of us. For us two here, we gained nothing by 
 our sojourn in Paris like the knowledge and love of you, and yet Paris 
 gave us many valuable things. One day, in all probability, we shall 
 come together again, and meantime the news of you, though never so 
 slight, will be a delight to us, yet your letter has been all this time un- 
 answered ; but one reason was that only in the last day or two have I 
 been able to get the review with your article in ; it is here on the table 
 at last. In what is it obscure ? Strong, condensed, and direct it is, 
 and no doulit the common readers of easy writing feel oppressed by 
 twenty pages of such masculine stufT. . . . My wife will write a few lines 
 about ourselves ; she is suffering a little from the cold which has come 
 late, nor very severely either, but enough to influence her more than 
 
 •63
 
 I could wish. We live wlioll)' alone here ; I have not left the house 
 one evening since our return. I am writing — a first step towards pop- 
 ularity for me — lyrics with more music and painting than before, so as 
 to get people to hear and see . . . something to follow if I can com- 
 pass it. . . . 
 
 "I have a new acquaintance here, much to my taste — Tennyson's 
 eldest brother, who has long been settled here, with many of his brother's 
 qualities : a very earnest, simple, and truthful man, with many admirable 
 talents and acc[uirements, the whole sicklied o'er by an inordinate dose of 
 our English disease, shyness ; he sees next to no company, but comes 
 here, and we walk together. ... I knew too little of Mr. Barley.* Will 
 he keep the slender memory of me he may have, and do you, dear Mil- 
 sand, ever know me for yours affectionately, R. B." 
 
 In this same letter there is a paragraph which runs as 
 follows : 
 
 " Helen Faucit is going to produce an old play of mine, never acted, 
 at the Haymarket, " Colombe's Birthday;" look out for it in April, keep- 
 ing in mind the proverbial uncertainty of things theatrical. My main 
 hope of its success lies in its being wholly an actor's and manager's 
 speculation, not the writer's." 
 
 VII 
 
 It was in Florence Mrs. Browning wrote Casa Guidi Win- 
 dows,^ containing the wonderful description of the proces- 
 sion passing by, and that noble apostrophe to freedom be- 
 ginning, " O ! magi from East and from the West." Aurora 
 Leigh was also written here, which the author herself calls 
 *' tlie most mature of her works," the one into which her 
 
 * The writer has left the little message to Mr. Darley, which commemorates anoth- 
 er very early recollection : that of a gentle, handsome painter, whom she as a child re- 
 members. His paintings made no particular impression upon us all, but his kind 
 tranquillity of manner and courteous ways are not to be forgotten. 
 
 t See Biographical Dictionary. 
 
 164
 
 I 
 
 highest convictions have entered. The poem is full of 
 beauty from the first page to the last, and beats time to a 
 noble human heart. The opening scenes in Italy; the im- 
 pression of light, of silence ; the beautiful Italian mother, 
 the austere father, with his open books; the death of the 
 mother, who lies laid out for burial in her red silk dress ; 
 the epitaph " weep for an infant too young to weep much, 
 when Death removed this mother;" Aurora's journey to 
 her father's old home ; her lonely terror of England ; her 
 slow yielding to its silent beauty; her friendship with her 
 cousin, Romney Leigh; their saddening, widening knowl- 
 edge of the burden and sorrow of life, and the way this 
 knowledge influences both their fates — all is described with 
 that irresistible fervor which is the translation of the es- 
 sence of things into words. 
 
 Mrs. Browning was a great writer; but I think she was 
 even more a wife and a mother than a writer, and any ac- 
 count of her would be incomplete which did not put these 
 facts first and foremost in her history. 
 
 The author of Aurora Leigh once added a characteristic 
 page to one of her husband's letters to Leigh Hunt. She has 
 been telling him of her little boy's illness. "You are aware 
 that of that child I am more proud than twenty Auroras, 
 even after Leigh Hunt has praised them. When he was 
 ill he said to me, ' You pet, don't be unhappy about ine; 
 think it's only a boy in the street, and be a little sorry, but 
 not unhappy.' Who could not be unhappy, I wonder? . . . 
 I never saw your book called The Religion of the Heart. I 
 receive more dogmas, perhaps (my 'perhaps ' being in the 
 dark, rather), than you do." 
 
 She says in conclusion, " Churches do all of them, as at 
 present constituted, seem too narrow and low to hold true 
 Christianity in its proximate development — I, at least, can- 
 not help believing them so." 
 
 165
 
 She seemed, even in her life, something of a spirit, as her 
 friend has said, and her view of life's sorrow and shame, of 
 its beauty and eternal hope, is not milike that which one 
 might imagine a spirit's to be. She died at Florence in 
 i86r. It is impossible to read without emotion the account 
 of her last hours — given in Robert Browning's Life — of her 
 tender, nay, playful courage and sweetness, of his passion 
 of grief. 
 
 A tablet has been placed on Casa Guidi, voted by the 
 municipality of Florence, and written by Tommaseo : 
 
 "Here wrote and died Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose woman's 
 heart combined the wisdom of a wise man with the genius of a poet, and 
 whose poems form a golden ring which joins Italy to England. The 
 town of Florence, ever grateful to her, has placed this epitapli to her 
 memory." 
 
 There was a woman living in Florence, an old friend — 
 clever, warm-hearted Miss Isa Blagden, herself a writer — 
 who went to Mr. Browning and his little boy in their terrible 
 desolation, and who did what little a friend could do to 
 help them. Day after day, and for two or three nights, she 
 watched by the stricken pair until she was relieved ; then the 
 father and the little son came back to England. They set- 
 tled near Miss Barrett, Mrs. Browning's sister, who was liv- 
 ing in Delamere Terrace, and upon her own father's death 
 Miss Browning came to be friend, comforter, home-maker, 
 for her brother. 
 
 I can remember walking with my father under the trees 
 of Kensington Gardens, when we met Mr. Browning just 
 after his return to England. He was coming towards us 
 along the broad walk in his blackness through the sunshine. 
 We were then living in Palace Green, close by, and he came 
 to see us very soon after. But he was in a jarred and 
 troubled state, and not himself as yet, although I remember 
 
 i66
 
 I 
 
 his speaking of the house he had just taken for himself and 
 his boy. This was only a short time before my father's 
 death. In 1864 my sister and I left our home and went 
 abroad, nor did we all meet again for a long time. 
 
 It was a mere chance, so Mr. Browning once said, whether 
 he should live in this London house that he had taken, and 
 join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be 
 seen no more; but for great poets, as for small ones, events 
 shape themselves by degrees, and after the first hard years 
 of his return, a new and gentler day began to dawn for him. 
 Miss Browning came to them, new interests arose, acquaint- 
 ances ripened to friends (this blessed human fruit takes 
 time to mature), his work and his influence spread. 
 
 He published some of his finest work about this time. 
 Dramatis Personce, a great part of which had been written 
 before, came out in 1864; then followed the Ring and the 
 Book, published by his good friend, and ours, Mr. George 
 Murray Smith, and Bataustion, that exquisite poem, in 187 1. 
 Recognition, popularity, honorary degrees, all the tokens of 
 appreciation, which should have come sooner, now began 
 to crowd in upon "our great commoner," as some one 
 called Mr. Browning when Lord Tennyson accepted his 
 peerage — Lord Rectorships and Fellowships and dignities 
 of every sort came in due course. He went his own way 
 through it all, cordially accepted the recognition, but chiefly 
 avoided the dignities, and kept his two lives distinct. He 
 had his public life and his own private life, with its natural 
 interests and outcoming friendships, and constant alternate 
 pulse of work and play. 
 
 ijrowning has been described as looking something like 
 a hale naval officer; but in later life, when his hair turned 
 snowy white, he seemed to me more like some sage of by- 
 gone ages. There was a statue in the Capitol of Rome to 
 
 which Mrs. Sartoris always likened him. I cannot imagine 
 
 ,67
 
 that any draped and filleted sage could ever have been so 
 delightful a companion, so racy, so unselfishly interested in 
 the events of the hour as he. " He was not only ready for 
 talk, but fond of it," said the writer of an admirable article 
 in the Standard* "He was absolutely unaffected in his 
 choice of topics : anything but the cant of literary circles 
 pleased him. If only we knew a tithe of what he knew, 
 and of what, unluckily, he gives us credit for knowing, many 
 a hint that serves only to obscure the sense would be clear 
 enough." 
 
 Among Browning's many gifts, that of delightful story- 
 telling is certainly one which should not be passed over. 
 His memory was very remarkable for certain things; gen- 
 eral facts, odds and ends of rhyme and doggerel, bits of 
 recondite knowledge came back to him spontaneously and 
 with vivacity. This is all to be noticed in his books, which 
 treat of so many quaint facts and theories. His stories 
 were specially delightful, because they were told so appo- 
 
 * To quote the many voices as they speak of him is to quote the voices of a whole 
 host of friends and followers in the spirit or the letter. Guided by Mr Furnival I have 
 read a cycle of commentaries, among which I should like to mention two articles in the 
 Jewish Quarterly Review, which seem to me specially interesting. " Browning is a 
 poet for the old as well as for the young. Some poets write of summer, others of 
 spring. Browning belongs even more to wintry times, or to the early silent months 
 which precede the spring. The branches of the trees may be dry and frozen, but in 
 them lies the sap of hope and life, the frost-bound earth contains the harvests of the 
 year, its joys and fragrance and sweetness to be. Who more than Browning has ever 
 made us realize that life which exists alongside with death, that truth and law which 
 underlies confusion. ' I press (5od's lamp close to my breast, its splendor soon or late 
 will pierce the gloom.' " Sir James Fitz James Stephen, in his '' Essay on Hooker," 
 quotes a passage which might almost serve for a motto to some of Browning's finest 
 work. " In all created and imperfect beings there is an appetite and desire whereby 
 they incline to something which they may be, which as yet they are not in act. 
 
 " ' So in man's life arise 
 August anticipations, symbols, types 
 Of a dim splendor ever on before. 
 In that eternal circle life pursues.'" — Pahacelsus. 
 
 And again, " That which doth assign to each thing the kind, that which doth moderate 
 the force and power, that which dotli appoint the form and measure of working, the 
 same we term a law." Again hear Paracelsus : 
 
 " Piut thou shall painfully attain to joy 
 While hope and fear and love shall keep thee man." 
 
 1 68
 
 sitely, and were so simple and complete in themselves. A 
 doggerel always had a curious fascination for him, and he 
 preferred to quote the very worst poetry in his talks. On 
 one occasion we were dining at Air. and Mrs. Lehmann's 
 house in Half- moon Street; it was a cottage of delight 
 rather than a palace, and the guests were somewhat crowd- 
 ed. Millais, turning round, happened to brush off the head 
 of a flower that Browning wore in his button-hole. Concern- 
 ing the said flower, the poet immediately remembered a story 
 of a city clerk who had considered himself inspired, and had 
 some of his verses printed. One poem began something 
 like this : 
 
 " I love, the gentle primrose 
 That grows beside the rill ; 
 I love the water-lily, 
 Narcissus, and jonquil." 
 
 This last word was by mistake printed "John Quill," which 
 seemed so appropriate a name, and the clerk got so much 
 chaffed about it. that his poetical inspirations were nipped 
 in the bud, and he printed no more poems. 
 
 Another reminiscence which my friend Mrs. C also 
 
 recalls is in a sadder strain. It was a description of some- 
 thing Mr. Browning once saw in Italy. It happened at 
 Arezzo, where he had turned by chance into an old church 
 among the many old churches there, that he saw a crowd of 
 people at the end of an aisle, and found they were looking 
 at the skeleton of a man just discovered by some workmen 
 who were breaking away a portion of tlie wall opposite the 
 high altar. The flesh was like brown leather, but the feat- 
 ures were distinguishable. Mr. Browning made inquirie.s 
 as to who it was. He could hear of no tradition even of a 
 man being walled up. The priests thought it must have 
 
 been done three or four hundred years ago. A hole had 
 
 169
 
 been left above his head to enable him to breathe. Mr. 
 Browning said the dead man was standing with his hands 
 crossed upon his breast ; on the face was a look of expecta- 
 tion, an expression of hoping against hope. The man 
 looked up, knowing help could only come from above, and 
 
 must have died still hoping. Mrs. C said to Mr. 
 
 Browning she wondered he had not written a poem about 
 it. He replied he had done so, and had given it away. 
 
 I often find myself going back to Darwin's saying about 
 the duration of a man's friendships being one of the best 
 measures of his worth, and Browning's friendships are very 
 characteristic and convincing. He specially loved Landor, 
 to whom he and his wife were Good Samaritans indeed. 
 For the Tennysons his was also a real and warm affection. 
 Was there ever a happier, truer dedication than that of his 
 collected selections ? — 
 
 "TO ALFRED TENNYSON: 
 " In poetry illustrious and consummate. In friendship nol)le and 
 
 sincere ! 
 
 How enduring was his friendship for Mr. Procter, and how 
 often has his faithful coming cheered the dear and kind 
 old man ! Of his feeling for Mr. Milsand I have already 
 spoken. Among the women who were Mr. Browning's real 
 and confidential friends there is the same feeling of trust 
 and dependence. 170
 
 VIII 
 
 Besides actual personal feelings, there are also the Affini- 
 ties of a life to be taken into account. The following pas- 
 sages, which I owe to Professor Knight's kindness, are very 
 remarkable, for they show what Browning's estimation was 
 of Wordsworth, and although they were not written till much 
 later, I give them here. Indeed, the point of meeting of 
 these two beneficent poet streams is one full of interest to 
 those upon the shore. The first paragraph of the first letter 
 relates to some new honors and dignities gratefully and 
 firmly declined : 
 
 "March 2ii/, 'S3. 
 
 " 1 do feel increasingly (cowardly as seems the avowal) the need of 
 keeping the quiet corner in the world's van which I have got used to for 
 so many years. 
 
 " I will, as you desire, attempt to pick out the twenty poems which 
 striivc me (and so as to take away my l)reath) as those worthiest of the 
 master Wordsworth. 
 
 "Speaking of a classification of Wordsworth's poems, in my heart 
 I fear I should do it almost chronologically, so immeasurably superior 
 .seem to me the first sprightly runnings ; your selection would apj^ear 
 to be excellent, and the partial admittance of the latter work prevents 
 one from observing the too definitely distinguishing black line between 
 supremely good and — well ! what is fairly tolerable from Wordsworth 
 always understand." 
 
 At the end of the letters addressed to Professor Knight 
 
 there is this touching postscript : 
 
 171
 
 "I open the envelope to say — what I had nearly omitted — that L.d. 
 Coleridge pioposed, and my humble self — at his desire — seconded you, 
 last evening, for admission to the Athenteum. I had the less scruple 
 in offering my services that you will most likely never see in the offer 
 anything but a record of my respect and regard, since your election 
 will come on when I shall be — dare I hope ? — ' elect ' in even a higher 
 society !" 
 
 Here is another letter also relating to Wordsworth 
 
 " ig Warwick Crescent, W., 
 
 February 24, '86. 
 
 " IMy dear Professor, — I have kept you waiting this long while — 
 and for how shabby a result ! You must listen indulgently while I at- 
 tempt to explain why I am forced to disappoint you. One remembers 
 few more commonplace admonitions to a poet than that ' he would 
 wiselier have written but a quarter of the works which he has labored 
 at for a lifetime,' unless it be this other, often coupled with it, ' that 
 such works ought to be addressed to the general apprehension, not ex- 
 clusively suited to the requirements of a (probably quite imaginary) few.' 
 Each precept contradicts the other. Write, on set purpose, for the many, 
 and you will soon enough be reminded of the old ' Tot homines ;' and 
 write as conscientiously for the few — your idealized ' Double ' (it comes 
 to that) — and you may soon suit him with the extremely little that suits 
 yourself. Now in view of which of these objects should the maker of a 
 selection of the works of any poet worth the pains begin his emploj'ment ? 
 
   ' I have myself attempted the business, and know something of the 
 achievements in this kind of my betters. They furnish a list of the 
 pieces which the selector has found most delight in. And I have found 
 also, that others, playing the selector with apparently as good a right 
 and reason, were dissatisfied with this unaccountable addition, and that 
 as inexplicable omission ; in short, that the sole selector was not himself. 
 The only case in which no such stumbling-block occurs being that obvi- 
 ous one — if it has ever occurred — when a public, wholly unacquainted 
 with an author, is presumed to be accessible to a specimen of his alto- 
 gether untried productions — for, by chance, the sample of the poetry of 
 Brown and Jones may pierce the ignorance of somebody — say of Rob- 
 inson. It is quite another matter of interest to know what Matthew 
 Arnold thinks most worthy in Wordsworth. But should anybody have 
 
 172
 
 curiosity to inquire which ' fifteen or twenty' of his poems have most 
 thoroughly impressed such a one as myself, all I can affirm is that I 
 treasure as precious every poem written during about the first twenty 
 years of the poet's life ; after these, the solution grows weaker, the crys- 
 tals gleam more rarely, and the assiduous stirring up of the mixture is 
 too apparent and obtrusive. To the end crystals are to be come at ; 
 ^ut my own experience resembles that of the old man in the admirable 
 ' Resolution and Independence :' 
 
 "'Once I could meet with them on every side. 
 But they have dwindled long by slow decay. 
 Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may ' 
 
 — that is, in the poet's whole work, which I should leave to operate in 
 the world as it may, each recipient his own selector. 
 
 " I only find room to say that I was delighted to make acquaintance 
 with your daughter, and that should she feel any desire to make that of 
 my sister, we shall welcome her gladly. 
 
 " Believe me, my dear Professor, 
 
 "Yours most tnily, 
 
 " Robert Brownixg." 
 
 IX 
 
 We were all living in "sea-coast-nook-full " Normandy 
 one year, scattered into various chateaus and shops and tene- 
 ments. Some of our joarty were installed in a clematis- 
 wreathed mansion near the church - tower ; others were at 
 the milk -woman's on the road to the sea. Most of the 
 lively population of the little watering-place was stowed 
 aw'ay in chalets of which the fronts seemed wide open to the 
 road from morning to night ; numbers of people content- 
 edly spent whole days in tents on the sea-shore. It was a 
 fine hot summer, with sweetness and completeness every- 
 where ; the cornfields gilt ar.d far- stretching, the waters 
 blue, the skies archiiig high and clear, and the sunsets sue 
 
 173 
 
 I
 
 ceeding each other, in most glorious light and beauty. Mr. 
 Milsand had a little country lodge at St. Aubin, near Luc- 
 sur - Mer, and I wrote to him from the shady court-yard of 
 our chateau, and begged him to come over and see us ; and 
 when he came he told us Mr. and Miss Browning were 
 also living close by. We were walking along the dusty road 
 and passing the old square tower when he suddenly stood 
 still, and, fixing his earnest look upon me, said : 
 
 " Tell me, why is there some reserve ; is anything wrong 
 between you and Robert Browning .' I see you are re- 
 served ; I see he is also constrained ; what is it .''"' 
 
 To which I replied, honestly enough, that I did not know 
 what it was ; there was some constraint between me and 
 my old friend. I imagined that some one had made mis- 
 chief; I could see plainly enough when we met that he was 
 changed and vexed and hurt, but I could not tell why, and 
 it certainly made me very unhappy. " But this must not be," 
 said Milsand; "this must be cleared." I said it was hope- 
 less ; it had lasted for months, and in those days I was still 
 young enough to imagine that a mood was eternal ; that 
 coldness could never change. Now I find it almost impos- 
 sible to give that consideration to a quarrel which is inva- 
 riably claimed under such circumstances. 
 
 I happened to be alone next day ; the cousins and the 
 children who were with me had gone down to the sea. I 
 
 was keeping house in the blazing heat with F (the 
 
 family despot, the late nurse and present house-keeper of 
 the party). The shutters were closed against the blinding 
 light ; I was writing in my bedroom, with a pleasant sense 
 of temporary solitude and silence, when I chanced to go 
 to the window, and looked into the old walled court. I saw 
 the great gates open a little way, and a man's broad-shoul- 
 dered figure coming through them, and then advance, strid- 
 ing across the stones, towards the house. It was Mr. 
 
 174
 
 Browning, dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella 
 under his arm. It was the poet himself, and over and 
 beyond this, it was my kind, old friend returned, all reserve 
 and coldness gone, never to trouble or perplex again. \\'e 
 had no explanations. 
 
 "Don't ask," he said; "the facts are not worth remem- 
 bering or inquiring into ; people make mischief without 
 even meaning it. It is all over now. I have come to ask 
 when you will come to St. Aubin ; my sister is away for a 
 few days, but the Milsands are counting on you." 
 
 We started almost the next day in a rattle-trap chaise, 
 with an escort of donkeys ridden by nephews and nieces, 
 along the glaring sandy road to Luc. The plains were 
 burning hot and the sea seemed on fire, but the children 
 and donkeys kept up valiantly. At last we reached a little 
 village on the outer edges of Luc-sur-Mer, and in the street 
 stood Monsieur Milsand, in front of a tiny house. How 
 kind was his greeting ! How cordial was that of his wife 
 and daughter, coming to the door to make us welcome! 
 Mr. Browning was also waiting in the diminutive sitting- 
 room, where I remember a glimpse of big books and com- 
 fortable seats and tables. The feast itself was spread out- 
 of-doors on the terrace at the back, with a shady view of 
 the sea between lilac-bushes ; the low table was laid with 
 dainties, glasses, and quaint decanters. Mr. Milsand was 
 the owner of vineyards in the South, and abstemious though 
 he was himself, he gave his triends the best of good wine, 
 as well as of words and welcome. From this by-gone and 
 happy feast two dishes are still present to my mind: a cer- 
 tain capon and a huge fish, lying in a country platter, curled 
 on a bed of fennel, surrounded by a WTeath of marigolds, 
 and in its mouth a bunch of fiowers. The host helped us 
 each in turn ; the Normandy maid appeared and disappeared 
 with her gleaming gold ear-rings ; then came a pause, dur- 
 
 '75
 
 ing which Madame Milsand rose quietly, and went into the 
 house. The gentlemen were talking pleasantly, and the 
 ladies listening agreeably (there are many local politics to 
 be discussed on the Normandy coast). But somehow, after 
 a time, the voices ceased, and in the silence we heard the 
 strains of distant martial music. Mr. Milsand looked in- 
 quiringly at his daughter. 
 
 " It is the regiment marching by," said Mile. Milsand. 
 
 "But where is my wife?" said Monsieur Milsand. '■'' She 
 cannot have gone to the review." 
 
 Still the music sounded ; still we waited. Then to us re- 
 turned our handsome, dignified hostess. " She had not been 
 to the review," she said, laughing and apologizing; "but, 
 ladies and gentlemen," she added, "you must please con- 
 tent yourselves with your fricandeau, for, alas ! there is no 
 news of my larded capon. It went to the pastry-cook's to 
 be roasted ; I have just sent the maid to inquire ; it was 
 despatched, ready for the table, half an hour ago, on a tray 
 carried by the pastry-cook's boy. It is feared that it is 
 running after the soldiers. I am in despair at your meagre 
 luncheon." 
 
 But I need not say we were in a land flowing with milk 
 and honey. As we feasted on, as the last biscuit was crum- 
 bled, the last fragrant cup of coffee handed round, once 
 more came the Normandy ear-rings. 
 
 " Shall I serve the capon, madame .' Pierre has just re- 
 turned from the review." 
 
 But we all cried out that we must come back another clay 
 to eat the capon. The sun was getting low. If we carried 
 out our intention of walking to St. Aubin and seeing Mr. 
 Browning's cottage, we must start forthwith. 
 
 The path ran along the high cliff. Mr. Browning went 
 iDefore us, leadmg the way to " mine own hired house." 
 
 Once more the whole scene comes before me : the sea- 
 
 176
 
 coast far below our feet, the arid vegetation of the sandy 
 wa}^ the rank, yellow snap-dragons lining the paths. There 
 was not much other color ; the tones were delicate, half 
 airy, half solid ; the sea was in a vast circle around us ; 
 the waves were flowing into the scooped sandy bay of Luc- 
 sur-Mer ; the rocks of the Calvados were hidden behind the 
 jutting promontories ; here and there a rare poppy, like a 
 godsend, shone up by chance. It took us half an hour's 
 quick walk to reach the two little straight sentry-boxes 
 standing on the cliffs against the sky, to which Mr. Brown- 
 ing pointed. He himself has described this habitation in 
 " Red Cotton Nightcap Country :" 
 
 " That just behind you is mine own hired liouse, 
 With right of pathway tlirough the fiehl in front. 
 No prejudice to all its growth unsheath'd 
 Of emerald Luzern bursting into blue. . . . 
 Be sure I keep the path that hugs the wall 
 Of mornings, as I pad from door to gate ! 
 Yon yellow — what if not wild-mustard flower? 
 Of that my naked sole makes lawful prize, 
 Bruising the acrid aromatics out . . . 
 And lo, the wave protrudes a lip at last, 
 And flecks my foot with froth, nor tempts in vain." 
 
 We entered the Brownings' house. The sitting-room 
 door opened to the garden and the sea beyond — a fresh- 
 swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon 
 the table. Mr. Browning told us it was the only book he 
 had with him. The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting- 
 room, but I remember a little dumb piano standing in a 
 corner, on which he used to practise in the early morning. 
 I heard Mr. Browning declaring they were perfectly satisfied 
 with their little house. That his brains, squeezed as dry as 
 a sponge, were only ready for fresh air. 
 
 But has not Browning himself best summed up the con- 
 
 177
 
 trast between the meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-place 
 and London, where 
 
 " My toe trespassed upon your flounce, 
 Small blame unto you, seeing the staircase party in the square 
 Was small and early, and you broke no rib." 
 
 X 
 
 This visit to St. Aubin was followed by the publication 
 of " Red Cotton Nightcap Country," from which I have been 
 quoting, and on this occasion I must break my rule, and 
 trench upon the ground traversed by Mrs. Orr. I cannot 
 give myself greater pleasure than by inserting the following 
 passage from the Life : 
 
 " The August of 1872 and of 1S73 again found him and his sister at 
 St. Aubin, and the earlier visit was an important one, since it supplied 
 him with the materials of his next work, of which jNIiss Annie Thack- 
 eray, there also for a few days, suggested the title. The tragic drama 
 ^\■hich forms the sul)ject of Mr. Browning's poem had been in great part 
 nacted in the vicinity of St. Aubin, and the case of disputed inheritance 
 to which it had given rise was pending at that moment in the tribunals 
 of Caen. The prevailing impression left on Miss Thackeray's mind by 
 this primitive district was, she declared, that of white cotton nightcaps 
 (the habitual head-gear of the Normandy peasants). She engaged to 
 write a story called 'White Cotton Nightcap Country,' and Mr. Brown- 
 ing's quick sense of both contrast and analogy inspired the introduction 
 of this element of repose into his own picture of that peaceful, prosaic 
 existence, and of tlie ghostly, spiritual conflict to which it had served as 
 background." 
 
 And perhaps the writer may be excused for adding a 
 letter which concerns the dedication of " Red Cotton Night- 
 
 178
 
 
 
 
 Vi 
 
 ^ 
 
 
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 ^ 
 
 1^. 
 
 
 
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 I
 
 cap Country " — a very unexpected and delightful conse- 
 quence of our friendly meeting : 
 
 " Afay 9, 1873. 
 " Dear Miss Thackeray, — Indeed the only sort of pain that any 
 sort of criticism could give me would be by the reflection of any particle 
 of pain it managed to give yoii. I dare say that, by long use, I don't 
 feel or attempt to feel criticisms of this kind, as most people might. 
 Remember that everybody this thirty years has given me his kick and 
 gone his way, just as I am told the understood duty of all highway trav- 
 ellers in Spain is to bestow at least one friendly thump for the Mayoral's 
 sake on his horses as they toil along up-hill, 'so utterly a puzzle,' ' or- 
 gan-grinding,' and so forth, come and go again without much notice ; but 
 any poke at me which would touch yoii, would vex me indeed ; there- 
 fore pray don't let n;y critics into that secret ! Indeed, / thought the 
 article highly complimentary, which comes of being in the category cel- 
 ebrated by Butler : 
 
 " ' Some have been kicked till they know [not] whether 
 The shoe be Spanish or neat's leather.' 
 
 "You see the little patch of velvet in the toe-piece of this slipper 
 seemed to tickle by comparison. Ever yours affectionately, 
 
 "Robert Browning." 
 
 But, whatever the past may have contained, Mr. Browning 
 had little to complain of in his future critics. This is not 
 an unappreciative age ; the only fault to be found with it is 
 that there are too many mouths using the same words over 
 and over again, until the expressions seem to lose their 
 senses and fly about almost giddily and at hap-hazard. The 
 extraordinary publicity in which our bodies live seems to 
 frighten away our souls at times ; we are apt to stick to 
 generalities, or to well -hackneyed adjectives which have 
 ceased to have much meaning or responsibility; or if we 
 try to describe our own feelings, it is in terms which some- 
 times grow more and more emphatic as they are less and 
 less to the point. When we come to say what is our simple
 
 and genuine conviction, the effort is almost beyond us. We 
 remember so many clever confusing things that other people 
 have said. The truth is too like Cordelia's. To say that you 
 have loved a man or a woman, that you admire them and 
 delight in their work, does not any longer mean to you or 
 to others what it means in fact. It seems almost a test of 
 Mr. Browning's true greatness that the love and the trust in 
 his genius have survived the things which have been said 
 about it. 
 
 XI 
 
 Not the least interesting part of the Milsand correspond- 
 ence relates to the MSS. which the cultivated Frenchman 
 now regularly revised for his English friend before they 
 were sent to the printer. Here is a letter to Mr. Milsand, 
 dated May, 1872: "Whenever you get the whole series," 
 Browning says, " you will see what I fail to make you un- 
 derstand, how inestimable your assistance has been ; there is 
 not one point to which you called attention which I was not 
 thereby enabled to improve, m some cases essentially ben- 
 efit ; the punctuation wms nearly as useful as the other ap- 
 parently more important assistance. The fact is that in the 
 case of a writer with my peculiarities and habits, somebody 
 quite ignorant of w^hat I may have meant to write, and only 
 occupied with what is really written, is needed to supervise 
 the thing produced, and I never hoped or dreamed that I 
 should find such intelligence as yours at my service. I 
 won't attempt to thank you, dearest friend, but simply in 
 my own interest do not you undervalue your service to me, 
 because in logical consequence the next step ought to be 
 that you abate it or withdraw it." In another letter, dated
 
 FAC-SIMILE OF MRS. BROWNING S HANDWRITING 
 
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 '^(UL<f
 
 i87S> Mr. Browning writes again about punctuation. " Your 
 way of punctuation (French way) is different from ours — I 
 don't knowwh}^; we use-:-where you prefer-;- but I have 
 Frenchified myself in this respect for your sake." " I know 
 how I trouble all but your goodness," he repeats to his 
 friend. Is it not a pleasure to think of the records in the 
 old carved house at Dijon ; of the good service rendered, 
 and so generously acknowledged ? 
 
 Here is one more extract from the Dijon correspondence, 
 dated April 7, 1878 : "I am glad you like the poems. The 
 measures were hitherto unused by me. That of the first 
 poems is 
 
 and the caesura falls just as you say, and should, as a rule, 
 be strictly observed, but to prevent monotony, I occasion- 
 ally break it." This letter concludes by an allusion to a 
 French friend who is learning English, and speaking of the 
 difficulties of a foreign tongue, Mr. Browning says: "The 
 thoughts outstrip and leave behind the words ; in the slow- 
 er process of writing, the thought is compelled to wait, and 
 get itself suited in a phrase." " Now for yourself," he con- 
 cludes, " I enjoy altogether your enjoyment of Bebe', and 
 wish that grand'mere may be tyrannized over more and 
 more Turkishly. It is the good time. Give my true love 
 to whoever will take it of your joyous party. Sarianna 
 writes often, I know. We hail the announcement of your 
 speedy arrival as ever." 
 
 The house by the water-side, in Warwick Crescent, which 
 Browning hastily took, and in which he lived for so many 
 years after his return to England, was a very charming cor- 
 ner, I used to think. It was London, but London touched 
 
 by some indefinite romance ; the canal used to look cool 
 
 .85
 
 and deep, the green trees used to shade the crescent ; it 
 seemed a peaceful oasis after crossing that dreary yEolia of 
 Paddington, with its many despairing shrieks and whirling 
 eddies. The house was an ordinary London house, but the 
 carved oak furniture and tapestries gave dignity to the long 
 drawing-rooms, and pictures and books lined the stairs. 
 In the garden at the back dwelt, at the time of which I am 
 writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering silver wings 
 and Ions throats, who used to come to meet their master 
 hissing and fluttering. When I said I liked the place, he 
 told us of some visitor from abroad, who had lately come to 
 see him, who also liked Warwick Crescent, and who, look- 
 ing up and down the long row of houses and porticos in 
 front of the canal, said, " Why, this is a mansion, sir ; do 
 you inhabit the whole of this great building, and do you al- 
 low the public to sail upon the water ?" 
 
 As we sat at luncheon I looked up and down the room, 
 with its comfortable lining of books, and also I could not 
 help noticing the chimney- board heaped with invitations. 
 I never saw so many cards in my life before. Lothair him- 
 self might have wondered at them. 
 
 Mr. Browning talked on, not of the present London, but 
 of Italy and villeggiatni-a, with his friends, the Storys ; of 
 Siena days and of Walter Savage Landor. He told us the 
 piteous story of the old man wandering forlorn down the 
 street in the sunshine without a hole to hide his head. 
 He kindled at the remembrance of the old poet, of whom 
 he said his was the most remarkable personality he had 
 ever known ; and then, getting up abruptly from the table, 
 he reached down some of Landor's many books from the 
 shelves near the fireplace, declaring he knew no finer reading. 
 
 He read us some extracts from the " Conversations with 
 the Dead," quickly turning over the leaves, seeking for his 
 favorite passages. 
 
 1 86
 
 There is a little anecdote which I think he also told us on 
 this occasion. It concerned a ring which lie used to wear, 
 and which had belonged to his wife. One day in the 
 Strand he discovered that the intaglio from the setting was 
 missing. People were crowding in and out, there seemed 
 no chance of recovering; but all the same he retraced his 
 steps, and lo ! in the centre of the crossing, there lay the 
 jewel on a stone, shining in the sun. He had lost the ring 
 on a previous occasion in Florence and found it there by 
 another happy chance. 
 
 XII 
 
 It was not until 1S87 that Mr. Browning moved to De 
 Vere Gardens, where I saw him almost for the last time. 
 I remember calling there at an early hour with my children. 
 The servant hesitated about letting us in. Kind Miss 
 Browning came out to speak to us, and would not hear of 
 us going away. 
 
 " Wait a few minutes. I know he will see you," she said. 
 <' Come in. Not into the dining-room; there are some ladies 
 waiting there ; and there are some members of the Brown- 
 ing Society in the drawing-room. Robert is in the study, 
 with some Americans who have come by appointment. 
 Here is my sitting-room," she said; "he will come to you 
 directly." 
 
 We had not waited five minutes, when the door opened 
 wide, and Mr. Browning came in. Alas ! it was no longer 
 the stalwart visitor from St. Aubin. He seemed tired, hur- 
 ried, though not less outcoming and cordial, in his silver age. 
 
 " Well, what can I do for you ?" he said, dropping into a 
 
 chair, and holding out both his hands. 
 
 18'/
 
 I told him it was a family festival, and that I had "brought 
 the children to ask for his blessing." 
 
 " Is that all ?" he said, laughing, with a kind look, not 
 without some relief. He also hospitably detained us, and 
 when his American visitors were gone, took us in turn up 
 into his study, where the carved writing-tables were covered 
 with letters — a milky way of letters, it seemed to me, flow- 
 ing in from every direction. 
 
 " What ! all this to answer ?" I exclaimed. 
 
 " You can have no conception what it is," he replied. " I 
 am quite worn out with writing letters by the time I begin 
 my day's work." 
 
 But his day's work wms ending here. In the autumn of 
 the year 1889 he went to Italy, and from Asolo wrote a 
 happy and delightful letter to his brother-in-law, Mr. George 
 Barrett, describing the " ancient city older than Rome," 
 the immense indescribable charm of the surrounding coun- 
 try — the Alps on one side, the Asolan Mountains all round, 
 and opposite the vast Lombard Plains. ..." We think of 
 leaving in a week or two," so he says, for Venice — guests 
 of Pen and his wife. He writes of his children, and of his 
 and his sister's happiness in their beautiful home, and also 
 of the new edition of the works of " E. B. B." He seemed 
 well when he first reached Venice, but it was winter even 
 in Venice, Mrs. Orr says, and taking his usual walk on the 
 Lido he caught cold. Attacks of faintness set in, and two 
 hours before midnight on Thursday, December 12th, he 
 breathed his last, closing his eyes in his son's beautiful home 
 at Venice among those he loved best. His son, his sister, 
 his daughter-in-law, were round about his bed tending and 
 watching to the last. When all was over, they brought him 
 home to England to rest. 
 
 When Spenser died in the street in Westminster, in whicli 
 
 188
 
 he dwelt after his home in Ireland was burned and his child 
 was killed by the rebels, it is said, that after lingering in this 
 world in poverty and neglect, he was carried to the grave in 
 state, and that his sorrowing brother-poets came and stood 
 round about his grave, and each in turn flung in an ode to 
 his memory, together with the pen with which it had been 
 written. The present Dean of Westminster, quoting this 
 story, added that probably Shakespeare had stood by the 
 grave with the rest of them, and that Shakespeare's own 
 pen might still be lying in dust in the vaults of the old ab- 
 bey. There is something in the story very striking to the 
 imagination. One pictures to one's self the gathering of 
 those noble dignified men of the Elizabethan age, whose 
 thoughts were at once so strong and so gentle, so fierce and 
 so tender, whose dress was so elaborate and stately. Per- 
 haps in years to come people may imagine to themselves 
 the men who stood only the other day round Robert Brown- 
 ing's grave, the friends who loved him. the writers who have 
 written their last tribute to this great and generous poet. 
 There are still some eagles' quills among us ; there are 
 others of us who have not eagles' quills to dedicate to his 
 memory, only nibs with which to pen a feeling, happily 
 stronger and more various than the words and scratches 
 which try to speak of it : a feeling common to all who knew 
 him, and who loved the man of rock and sunshine, and who 
 were proud of his great gift of spirit and of his noble human 
 nature. 
 
 It often happens when a man dies in the fulness of years, 
 that as you look across his grave, you can almost see his life- 
 time written in the faces gathered round about it. There 
 stands his history. There are his companions and his early 
 associates and those who loved him, and those with whom 
 his later life was passed. You may hear the voices that have 
 
 greeted him, see the faces he last looked upon ; you may 
 
 189
 
 even go back and find some impression of early youth in 
 the young folks who recall a past generation to those who 
 remember the past. And how many phases of a long and 
 varied Hfe must have been represented in the great proces- 
 sion which followed Robert Browning to his honored grave! 
 passing along the London streets and moving on through 
 the gloomy fog, assembling from many a distant place to 
 show respect to one 
 
 "Who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 
 Never doubted clouds would break ; 
 Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, 
 Wrong would triumph. 
 
 Held — we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
 Sleep to wake." 
 
 THE END 
 
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