The family generally went to bed at ten sharp.
I heard him read once. There were visitors in the house who wished to hear the great man, and it was after midnight before a general retirement could take place. He had a rich, sonorous, over-proof, pre-war voice, considerable irritability, and a pretty girl sitting on his knee. The last item was, of course, an instance of poetical licence.
The girl had asked him to read from “Maud” and he had consented. He began with his voice turned down so low that in my position behind the screen I could only just catch the opening lines:
“Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert...”
He opened the throttle a little wider when he came to the passage:
“His head was bare, his matted hair
Was buried in the sand.”
He read that last line “was serried in the band,” but immediately corrected himself. And the poignant haunting repetition of the last lines of the closing stanza were given out on the full organ:
“And everywhere that Mary went—
And everywhere that Mary went—
And everywhere that Mary went—
The lamb was sure to go.”
It was a great—a wonderful experience for me, and I shall never forget it.
I have spoken of his irritability. It is not unnatural in a great poet. He must live with his exquisite sentient nerves screwed up to such a pitch that at any moment something may give.