Tennyson was, and is, to me the most remarkable man that I have ever met. Often when I was with him, whether in long walks or in his study, and when I came to think of him silently afterwards, I used to recall his own lines on Wellington:
Our greatest yet with least pretence...,
Rich in saving common-sense,
And, as the greatest only are,
In his simplicity sublime.
Simple, natural, shrewd, humorous; feeling strongly on a vast variety of subjects, and saying freely just what he felt; passing rapidly and easily from the gravest matters of speculation or conduct to some trifling or amusing incident of the moment, or some recollection of the years of his youth; he seemed to me unconscious of being a great man, though he must have known himself to be one of the foremost thinkers, and quite the foremost poet of his day. He was wholly free from affectation. He was never an actor of a part. There was about him always an atmosphere of truth.
Truth-teller was our Alfred named,
was a line that again and again recurred to the memory as one heard him speak out his mind either on men, or on politics, or on the deepest mysteries of philosophy or religion. He was pre-eminently one of the Children of Light. Of light, whether from science, or from literary criticism, or from the progress of the human conscience, he hailed thankfully and expectantly every fresh disclosure. There was a deep reverence in him for the Unseen, the Undiscovered, the as yet Unrevealed. This on the intellectual side; and on the moral side there was a manly, a devout, and a tender veneration for purity and innocence and trustfulness, and, to borrow his own stately words, written early in his life:
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.
I regret that I cannot convey more worthily what I have felt in the presence of this great and truly noble man. To go to either of his beautiful homes, to see him as the husband of his wife and the father of his sons, was to me and mine for many years a true pilgrimage, both of the mind and of the heart. That I was once able to feel this, and that I am able to feel it gratefully even now, I count among the richer blessings of a long and happy life.