Heroic sailor-soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now,
Toward no earthly pole.]
Fixed in the wall of Freshwater Church as a memorial to Lionel Tennyson is a marble tablet on which these lines are inscribed:
Truth for truth is truth he worshipt, being true as he was brave;
Good for good is good he follow’d, yet he looked beyond the grave;
Truth for truth, and good for good! The good, the true, the pure, the just!
Take the charm “for ever” from them, and they crumble into dust.
The signature “A. T.” is not needed to show whose was the pen that traced them.
Sir Vincent Eyre, a retired Major-General of the Indian army, found the grave and tombstone of Keats, the poet, who died in Rome in 1821, and who was buried in the old cemetery for English Protestants, wholly neglected. The inscription on the stone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” was almost illegible from dirt and decay. He made a collection, repaired the grave, cleaned the tombstone, and placed a medallion of Keats on the wall near the grave, with the following acrostic: