CHAPTER XII
THE LITTLE FOLK
In the midst of all the royalties that were present at the wedding of the Prince of Wales were the two great novelists of the realm, Thackeray and Dickens; but Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, was not there. Again "someone had blundered," and his invitation had been missent. Both the Queen and Prince Albert felt a sincere admiration and reverence for the poet, and the Prince had asked the favor of an autograph with far more hesitation than most schoolboys would have shown. This is the way in which he made his very modest petition:
"Will you forgive me if I intrude upon your leisure with a request which I have thought some little time of making, viz., that you would be good enough to write your name in the accompanying volume of the 'Idylls of the King'?" Prince Albert was very fond of the "Idylls," and when, only a month after his death, Tennyson brought out a new edition of the poems, it contained a beautiful dedication, which began:
"These to his memory—since he held them dear."
The lines do not sound as if the poet felt obliged to write them because he had been appointed Laureate, but rather as if he meant every word that he wrote. In this dedication he speaks very earnestly of Prince Albert's wisdom and ability and unselfishness, and gives us the exquisite line which everyone quotes who writes of the Prince Consort:
"Wearing the white flower of a blameless life."
The following year, just before the wedding of the Prince of Wales, Tennyson wrote a welcome to the bride, beginning:
"Sea-kings' daughter from over the sea,