"He knew exactly what he wished to say" (I am quoting from an article in The Guardian), "and completely forgot his audience in his anxiety to explain his point clearly. He thought of the subject only, and the words came of themselves. Looking straight in front of him he saw, as it were, his argument mapped out in the form of a diagram, and he set to work to prove it point by point, under its separate heads, and then summed up the whole."

One sermon which he preached in the University Church, on Eternal Punishment, is not likely to be soon forgotten by those who heard it. I, unfortunately, was not of that number, but I can well imagine how his clear-cut features would light up as he dwelt lovingly upon the mercy of that Being whose charity far exceeds "the measure of man's mind." It is hardly necessary to say that he himself did not believe in eternal punishment, or any other scholastic doctrine that contravenes the love of God.

He disliked being complimented on his sermons, but he liked to be told of any good effects that his words had had upon any member of the congregation. "Thank you for telling me that fact about my sermon," he wrote to one of his sisters, who told him of some such good fruit that one of his addresses had borne. "I have once or twice had such information volunteered; and it is a great comfort—and a kind of thing that is really good for one to know. It is not good to be told (and I never wish to be told), 'Your sermon was so beautiful.' We shall not be concerned to know, in the Great Day, whether we have preached beautiful sermons, but whether they were preached with the one object of serving God."

He was always ready and willing to preach at the special service for College servants, which used to be held at Christ Church every Sunday evening; but best of all he loved to preach to children. Some of his last sermons were delivered at Christ Church, Eastbourne (the church he regularly attended during the Long Vacation), to a congregation of children. On those occasions he told them an allegory—Victor and Arnion, which he intended to publish in course of time—putting all his heart into the work, and speaking with such deep feeling that at times he was almost unable to control his emotion as he told them of the love and compassion of the Good Shepherd.

I have dwelt at some length on this side of his life, for it is, I am sure, almost ignored in the popular estimate of him. He was essentially a religious man in the best sense of the term, and without any of that morbid sentimentality which is too often associated with the word; and while his religion consecrated his talents, and raised him to a height which without it he could never have reached, the example of such a man as he was, so brilliant, so witty, so successful, and yet so full of faith, consecrates the very conception of religion, and makes it yet more beautiful.

On April 13, 1859, he paid another visit to Tennyson, this time at Farringford.

After dinner we retired for about an hour to the smoking-room, where I saw the proof-sheets of the "King's Idylls," but he would not let me read them. He walked through the garden with me when I left, and made me remark an effect produced on the thin white clouds by the moon shining through, which I had not noticed—a ring of golden light at some distance off the moon, with an interval of white between—this, he says, he has alluded to in one of his early poems ("Margaret," vol. i.), "the tender amber." I asked his opinion of Sydney Dobell—he agrees with me in liking "Grass from the Battlefield," and thinks him a writer of genius and imagination, but extravagant.


ALICE LIDDELL AS BEGGAR-CHILD.
(From a photograph by Lewis Carroll).

On another occasion he showed the poet a photograph which he had taken of Miss Alice Liddell as a beggar-child, and which Tennyson said was the most beautiful photograph he had ever seen.

Tennyson told us he had often dreamed long passages of poetry, and believed them to be good at the time, though he could never remember them after waking, except four lines which he dreamed at ten years old:—


May a cock sparrow
Write to a barrow?
I hope you'll excuse
My infantile muse;

—which, as an unpublished fragment of the Poet Laureate, may be thought interesting, but not affording much promise of his after powers. He also told us he once dreamed an enormously long poem about fairies, which began with very long lines that gradually got shorter, and ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each!