A Day with the Poet Tennyson

TENNYSON DAYS WITH THE POETS
A Day with Tennyson
I murmur under moon and stars In brambly wildernesses; I linger by my shingly bars; I loiter round my cresses;
And out again I curve and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go. But I go on for ever.
Painting by E. W. Haslehust. THE BROOK.
·LONDON· HODDER & STOUGHTON
In the same Series. Longfellow. Keats. Browning Wordsworth. Burns. Scott. Byron. Shelley.
TENNYSON was no recluse. He shunned society in the ordinary London sense, but he welcomed kindred spirits to his beautiful home, with large-hearted cordiality. To be acquainted with Farringford was in itself a liberal education. Farringford was an ideal home for a great poet. To begin with, it was somewhat secluded and remote from the world's ways, especially in the early 'fifties, when the Isle of Wight was much more of a terra incognita than traffic now permits. One had to travel down some hundred miles from town, cross from the quaint little New Forest port of Lymington to the still quainter little old-world Yarmouth— a mediæval Venice, the poet called it—and then drive some miles to Freshwater, before one attained the stately loveliness of Farringford embowered in trees.
Where, far from noise and smoke of town, I watch the twilight falling brown All around a careless-ordered garden, Close to the ridge of a noble down. Groves of pine on either hand, To break the blast of winter, stand; And further on, the hoary Channel Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand. Lines to the Rev. F. D. Maurice.
The interior of the house—a very ancient one—was no less ideal than its outward aspect, it was like a charmed palace, with green walks without and speaking walls within. And its occupants crowned all—the ethereally lovely mistress with her tender spiritual face, and the master, tall, broad-shouldered, and massive, dark-eyed and dark-browed, his voice full of deep organ-tones and delicate inflections, his mind shaped to all fine issues. The wisest man, said Thackeray, that ever I knew.