A Day with the Poet Tennyson

by Unknown

"'Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
It was the deep mid-noon: one silvery cloud
Had lost his way between the piney sides
Of this long glen. Then to the bower they came,
Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower
And at their feet the crocus brake like fire,
Violet, amaracus, and asphodel,
Lotus and lilies; and a wind arose,
And overhead the wandering ivy and vine
This way and that, in many a wild festoon
Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs
With bunch and berry and flower thro' and thro'.
* * * *
"O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida,
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
Idalian Aphroditè beautiful,
Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells,
With rosy slender fingers backward drew
From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair
Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat
And shoulder: from the violets her light feet
Shone rosy-white, and o'er her rounded form
Between the shadows of the vine-bunches
Floated the glowing sunlights as she moved.

"Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
She with a subtle smile in her mild eyes,
The herald of her triumph, drawing nigh
Half-whisper'd in his ear, 'I promise thee
The fairest and most loving wife in Greece.'
She spoke and laugh'd: I shut my sight for fear:
But when I look'd, Paris had raised his arm,
And I beheld great Herè's angry eyes,
As she withdrew into the golden cloud,
And I was left alone within the bower;
And from that time to this I am alone.
And I shall be alone until I die."
Œnone.

The afternoon was spent, sometimes in further gardening pursuits, sometimes in a drive around the peaceful Island lanes and thatch-browed villages; frequently there were visitors to be met at Yarmouth, where the Tennysons' carriage might often be seen in the quaint cobbled streets. The soft and lovely colouring of the Solent was one to attract the poet's fancy: and it was after coming freshly one day into sight of the familiar waters of the estuary, and a tide, "that moving seems too full for sound or foam," lapping the lichened sea-walls of Yarmouth, that he composed, in his eighty-first year, the verses that he devised to be placed at the end of his whole collected poems:—"Crossing the Bar." The mystic simplicity of these lines strikes the very key-note of his character.

---

"Sleep and rest, sleep and rest,
Father will come to thee soon;
Rest, rest on mother's breast,
Father will come to thee soon;
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the west,
Under the silver moon:
Sleep my little one, sleep my pretty one, sleep!"

Painting by W. H. Margetson.
SWEET AND LOW.

Tea was served in the drawing-room, "its oriel window full of green and golden lights, of the sounds of birds and of the distant sea." The air of extreme and unstudied simplicity, which dominated the whole Farringford household, was just as noticeable here. Tea was a happy gathering of the family and friends, enlivened with talk on current topics. The Laureate's sympathies were wide-reaching, and his conversation, forcible and often racy, was characterised by the strongest common-sense. He held firmly-defined views on all social subjects; and had declared himself on the question of "Woman's Rights"—then comparatively fresh—at considerable length in The Princess.

"The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink
Together, dwarf'd or god-like, bond or free.
... For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words;
And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers.
... Let this proud watchword rest
Of equal; seeing either sex alone
Is half itself, and in the marriage ties
Nor equal, nor unequal; each fulfils
Defect in each, and always thought in thought,
Purpose in purpose, will in will they grow,
The single pure and perfect animal,
The two-cell'd heart beating with one full stroke
Life."
The Princess.

The poet's ideal of woman was set very high: he held her to be far above man, morally and spiritually: and an ideal as perfect as may well be conceived was daily before his eyes, in the person of his beautiful wife, with her pure and saintly face: who was yet