wrote Edith Sichel at the time.
And some one who loved her, speaking lately, said to me:
‘Though her vocation was to be a poet’s wife she reminded me of a holy Abbess of old, and there was something almost cloistral about her.’
She had a gift we all felt, of harmonising and quieting by her presence alone; often too tired to say much, she could contribute the right word to the talk for which Farringford was always notable. I have a special memory of once dining with the Tennysons in the company of George Eliot and Lord Acton, but it was Mrs. Tennyson’s gentle voice which seemed to take the lead.
Tennyson had said: ‘I felt the peace of God come into my life at the altar before which I married her.’ And after more than forty years of marriage he dedicated his last book to her.
‘I thought to myself I would offer this work to you,
This, and my love together,
To you that are seventy-seven,
With a faith as clear as the height of the June-blue heaven