A DAY WITH THE POET TENNYSON
·LONDON·
HODDER & STOUGHTON
In the same Series.
Longfellow.
Keats.
Browning
Wordsworth.
Burns.
Scott.
Byron.
Shelley.
A DAY WITH TENNYSON.
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.