It was inevitable that the later years of one so aged and so solitary should be more and more filled with the chronicle and anticipation of death. But he never sank into lethargy, as the following letter, written in his eighty-first year, shows:
My own sorrow is indeed continually revived by memories continually reawakened, not only by the comparatively recent occurrence of my own temporarily final separation from my best friend—but also by that bird’s-eye—so to speak—retrospect, which carries the imagination over lovely landscapes of the days of youth—out of the golden morning light of which emerge, in that unaccountable manner which is quite involuntary, even the most trivial circumstances—moments of no moment—yet somehow clothed in a more glittering light than the vast tracts drowned in the general splendour of the dawn, some tiny pinnacle that reflects the sun, some far off rillet that gushes out from the wayside.
Even when in his eighty-fourth year his sight began to fail him and the loss drove him still more back into his inner life, the old eagerness of mind remained, though finding a melancholy occupation in noting the changes to which age was daily subjecting his mental and physical constitution. The note of hope is, however, ineradicable:
An old man of my great age is already dead—old age being the only Death—and the faculties which I once possessed receive no impulse, as of old, for activity—no joyous inspiration. The intellect is cold and frozen like the mountain streams in Winter, a moonless midnight; and were it not for the increasing illumination of the immortal spirit which already beholds the dawn of a greater Day beyond the mountains, I should indeed be desolate, lost! For I am 84 years of age next June—and in looking back through my long life—it often seems to me like a dream—many movements, intellectual and physical, seem to me like impossibilities. When I see my little grandson Charlie skipping and hear him shouting and singing, and the light-limbed and light-hearted girls darting like living lightning down the staircase (which if I were to attempt to imitate I should undoubtedly break my neck), I say to myself, is it possible that I can ever have been like them? Alas! for old age. What can be more mournful than a retrospect of the days of childhood? But a truce to solemn thoughts—the Spring is come again, the leaves are unfolding, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, and surely, next to the human countenance, this is the most lovely emblem, the most beautiful representative material of inner spiritualities and the resurrection, and ought to have been so regarded since the dawn of Christianity; for as sure as Winter blossoms into Summer, the Winter of old age will spring into the Eternal Life. Fear not, hope all things! What a contrast to these consoling aspirations is presented in the touching fragment of the old Greek poet Moschus which no doubt expresses the scepticism of the ancient world—I give a free translation:
Aye, aye the garden mallows, mint and thyme
When they have wither’d in the winter clime,
After a little space do reappear,
And live again and see another year:
But we, the brave, the noble, and the wise,
When once for all pale Death hath closed our eyes,
Sink into dread oblivion dark and deep,
The everlasting, never-waking sleep.
With the approach of death he seemed to himself to undergo a kind of physical regeneration.
“Apropos to spiritual matters,” he writes in 1890, “I have had recently for several consecutive days some very strange experiences. One morning I awoke and seemed to have lost my natural memory. Objects daily presented to me for years seemed no longer familiar as of old—but as when a man after years of travel returning to his home and the chamber he formerly occupied takes some time and labour of thought to bring back to his recollection the whereabouts of objects once (as it were) instinctively known to him—I had the same difficulty in recovering my relations to my own surroundings. And this for days was supplemented by a strange sense of having been far away and conversant with wonderful things—movements and tumults—which only immeasurable distance deadened to my perception like great music borne away by the wind. Ever and anon there flashed up within me what I can only describe symbolically as Iridescences of feeling as when the prismatic colours of a rainbow succeed one another, or the coloured lights in Pyrotechnics cause objects in midnight darkness to assume their own hues. But all this, wonderful though it may seem, is not the only change that has come upon me—I am happy to say that simultaneously with these phenomena a revolution in my spiritual economy of far greater moment has, I believe, taken place. I have always prayed for that regeneration, or second birth (‘Thou must be born again,’ said the Lord to Nicodemus), to be shielded from selfhood—and as the divine answer to such prayers continually repeated, I can declare, without any self-delusion, that the answer has actually been a sensible change in the nature of my affections. Never have I felt towards those around me, such tender inclinations, such earnest desire to do them all possible good regardless of self-interest, such a spirit of forgiveness of any wrongs; and my earnest prayerful thankfulness for such inestimable benefits has been invariably acknowledged by that Voice from the Lord Himself by which He has repeatedly ratified to my spiritual ear His promise of blessing and the continuation thereof—and that ‘Thou hast nothing to fear, for I am with thee night and day, body and soul!’ Think of this! But for God’s sake do not attribute these statements of mine, which are comprehended in a period of many years, to self-delusion or self-righteousness. God knows, from whom nothing is hid, that I have never approached Him except in the spirit of profound humility and self-condemnation, and the answer has always been, ‘Thou hast nothing to fear. I am with thee.’”
As age settled upon him the violence of many of his views abated. His faith in Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism lost their hold on him and gave way to a more philosophic condition of mind. His activity, however, continued unabated. In 1890, after a silence of thirty-six years, he published his Isles of Greece, and the success of the volume encouraged him to give to the world two others, Daphne and other Poems in 1891, and Poems of the Day and Year (in which were included some of the verses contained in the volume of 1854) in 1898. In 1896 he left Jersey to join his eldest son, Captain Julius Tennyson, in whose house in Kensington he died on February 26, 1898.
It would be difficult to imagine two persons more strongly contrasted in life and character than Frederick and Charles. Charles (who was always Alfred’s favourite brother) had nothing of the powerful, erratic, tempestuous mind of his elder brother. One does not think of him, as FitzGerald did of Frederick, as a being born for the warmth and glow of the South, yet in appearance he was (like Alfred) far more Southern than the eldest brother. So Spanish were his swarthy complexion, brown eyes, and curly, dark hair, that Thackeray, meeting him in middle age, called him a “Velasquez tout craché.” Like Alfred, too, he had a magnificent deep bass voice; and even in dress the two brothers seem to have maintained their affinity, for Charles used to wear a soft felt hat and flowing black cloak much like those which the Millais portrait has identified with his brother, and these garments, with the addition of white cuffs, which he wore turned back over his coat sleeves, intensified the strangely foreign effect of his appearance. But the kinship of the two brothers extended beyond purely physical resemblance. They remained inseparable companions till Charles was ordained, and there was hardly a taste possessed by either which the other did not share. They read, played, and rambled together; both were extremely fond of dancing (one of Charles’s last Sonnets was “On a County Ball”) and were much sought after as partners at the balls of their countryside. The Poems by Two Brothers, which were almost entirely the work of Alfred and Charles, while displaying the differing qualities of each, were a joint production, the fruit of common reading and common enthusiasm. Both the brothers were regarded by their contemporaries at Cambridge as destined to achieve poetical greatness. Both possessed the unwearying patience of the craftsman, the same devotion to science and the same power of close and loving observation. Charles, however, lacked the fire and energy of temperament which made Frederick’s character remarkable and was to a great extent shared by Alfred. With all Alfred’s sensitiveness and shrinking from society, he had little of that sympathetic and passionate interest in the hopes and achievements of their age which drove the younger brother ever more and more into public life.
