All things grow with a peculiar luxuriance on Black Down, and the immediate surroundings of the house were beautiful from the first, though the garden with its flowers and trees has added a beauty to those natural ones. The Sussex country was lonely forty years ago, and the Poet could pace his heathery ridge, brooding upon his verse, untroubled by any risk of human intrusion.
My parents and their family came to know and love this new home as well as the old one at Freshwater, and although it represents a later stage of Tennyson’s life, the interest of the house is almost as great. The fine Laurence portrait is there, besides the admirable Watts portrait of the Poet’s wife, and that of his sons as boys. And many other pictures and things of interest and value have accumulated within its walls.
In his old age a change, easily understood, came over the old Bard. He lost his shyness of “the crowd,” and seemed thoroughly to enjoy his glimpses of London society. He never visited us at Oxford, but when my father succeeded Dean Stanley at Westminster, my parents once more enjoyed some delightful visits from him. He was there in company with his eldest son and his daughter-in-law, on the occasion of his taking his seat in the House of Peers. Then and at other times there were memorable meetings of great men—Gladstone and others—with the Poet, in the fitting frame of the ancient Deanery.
My mother writes of Tennyson in 1888, after thirty-three years of friendship, “he grows more and more unselfish and thoughtful for others.” She noted how the self-absorption and melancholy of his earlier years passed away in the calm sunshine of his old age.
The passing years had brought changes to others. The brilliant little scholar with the tongue which had once held in check the boldest offender against the laws of God or the Latin Grammar—although it never smote to defend or advance himself—had ripened into the constant peacemaker; one of the gentlest and humblest of that little band, who really walk in the footsteps of their Master Christ, and make those footsteps clearer for ever to all whose privilege it has been to live in their intimacy.
At length the day came when, full of years and honours, the famous singer, the Great Voice of Victorian England, lay silenced in the solemn shade of Westminster Abbey, with the clamour of London about him instead of the roar of his sea. It was his old friend, he who had walked and talked with him those long hours of the summer day and night thirty-seven years before, who pronounced the last blessing above his grave. And now that friend also sleeps, as it were, in the next room.
NOTES ON CHARACTERISTICS OF TENNYSON
By the late Master of Balliol (Professor Jowett)