There are, or were, some Morland prints, too. George Morland lived and painted in Freshwater, in a bit cottage that stood in front of the site of this house, but which disappeared nearly a century ago. Mrs. Cameron, could she revisit the glimpses of the moon, would find her quiet old village developed into a sprawling, country town. It had five hundred inhabitants when Tennyson first came to it in a sailboat from the mainland, in 1852, or 1853; it has between five and ten thousand now, west of the Yar. The number shifts with the summer visitors, and the military cannot be counted, for they come and go in a variable stream. Ever since the war began, the fit and the wounded, the trained and the untrained have passed through in large numbers, or have stayed for longer or shorter terms. A war town has grown up on a border of the old town. Golden Hill is now an expanse of barrack huts and not of yellow gorse.
Mrs. Cameron believed in getting things done, not in talking about them. She transformed the coal shed at Dimbola into a dark room for developing her negatives; and the poultry house became a studio. When her husband, a recluse who had n't so much as seen the beach for a dozen years, wanted a lawn, she had turf dug by night and laid in the garden. Calling her husband to the window next morning, she pointed to the expanse of new-laid turf and said, "There 's your lawn!" as if any one would deny her power to work miracles.
Farringford, of course, is enclosed by hedges and trees, literally surrounded by them. The house itself is still further protected from the gaze of the outer world by an inner circle of trees and shrubbery. The estate is bisected by the lovely lane which has been described in every account ever written of Tennyson, and photographed a thousand times. It, in turn, has a hedgerow on each side and is over-arched by elms. It is really an approach to the farm which is attached to the home acres, and through it, for walking purposes, the public has a right-of-way. At the crest of the rising ground is a little green door, set in the high-banked hedge which guards the home lawns, and by this green door the poet would pass to the down along another lane which runs at right angles to the one associated with his name and immediately opposite the green door. A few feet beyond this, a rustic bridge overhead spans Tennyson's Lane, and by this bridge the poet could cross into a woodland without having to enter the Lane, where his privacy might be disturbed, and so walk to Maiden's Croft, where a little green summerhouse stands under the trees and where he often wrote and meditated. From this summerhouse he had the best view of the beautiful and noble down. From the windows of Farringford there are exquisite views of seascape and landscape, with lush fields in the foreground,—a view, on sunny days, of quite un-English colour. In the distance St. Catherine's Point and above it the white crown of the Landslip, and above that the dark shape of St. Boniface Down, lifting its head eight hundred feet toward the clouds; in the middle distance a tumble of green hills, and to the right the sea dappled with shafts of light and colour ever changing,—mauves and blues and greens, splashed with browns and reds, shifting and playing there under the sun. It might be Italian sea and Italian landscape. And Tennyson called it his "bit of Italy." You can see it just as he saw it, if you pause at an iron gate on your left, near the top of the rise in the Lane, and you will have in the foreground a group of Italian-like trees beyond which Stag Rock and Arched Rock stand with their feet in the tiny bay. It is of all bits of English land and water one of the most memorable for form and colour,—this little Italy. And it drew Tennyson to Farringford and held him there.
Tennyson was not seen much in the village, but he often walked to the bay. Here is my first glimpse of him: a tall man looking like a cloaked brigand; his head was swallowed by a great hat, soft and black, and he was pointing with a stick.
"Making yourself at home here, aren't you?" he was understood to say in something between a rumble and growl.
An artist friend of mine was seated on a sketching stool at the iron gate, making a study of the "bit of Italy." Before the stool was an easel, a palette, and a box of water colours. Tennyson, who was near-sighted, saw at first only the seated figure on the camp stool, leaning back against the open gate and gazing at the unique view.
"Very much at home," continued the poet.
The right-of-way was for walking only, not for sitting in chairs and encumbering the earth with easels and general impedimenta of the fine arts. My friend, who was a stranger in the land, had probably not thought of this, and, having a sudden consciousness of intrusion, whispered to me, around the hedge:
"Tennyson! O Lord!"