between the finish of our nursery breakfast and the beginning of that downstairs, and asked questions of him, and, most gratifying to the childish mind, was talked to as if I was a companion and not a little ignorant child. He picked the leaves of the sage, rubbed his teeth with them, and said: 'That is the best thing in the world to take away the stain of tobacco,' for he was a great smoker, and I was turned out of my little bedroom when he visited us so that he might have a place to write and smoke in at pleasure, for my mother would not allow him to smoke in her best bedroom. Many years later he told me how he began to smoke. Jackson, the saddler at Louth, once gave me one of his strong cigars when I was a boy of twelve, and I smoked it all and flung the stump into a horse-pond, and was none the worse for it, so I was bound to be a smoker.'

It was in the previous year that I first made acquaintance, at Shiplake, with Emily Sellwood, my mother's cousin, for my mother had been an orphan brought up for a time with the three little Sellwood girls, her cousins, exactly as one of themselves, so that Emily, though not a Quaker, used to sign herself' thy loving sister.'

On June 13, 1850, just twenty years after their first meeting in the Fairy Wood at Somersby, Emily and Alfred were married by my father, assisted by the Rev. Greville Phillimore. Few people were present, and the relatives walked over from the vicarage, which was only separated from the churchyard by a lane. They were the bride's father and her brother-in-law, Mr. C. Weld, and the bridegroom's sister Cecilia and her husband, Professor Lushington, and my mother, and, as bridesmaids, my eldest sister, Mary, and our first cousin Jennie Elmhirst. I followed them as a page, a bit of syringa in my buttonhole, and the nurse, carrying my younger sister Margaret, brought up the rear. That sweet-smelling buttonhole is the one thing I remember of this notable function. To-day the bridesmaid cousin and I are the sole survivors of those present in the church that day.

In February of the next year Alfred was again at Shiplake, and as I entered the room where he and my father were sitting he greeted me with

And oh! far worse than all beside,
He whipped his Mary till she cried.

'What is that?' I said. 'You'll know to-morrow.' This puzzled me, for I had forgotten that to-morrow was my birthday. But my father and the poet had been into Reading and bought me for a birthday present that delightful book The English Struwelpeter, for, in spite of its abominable name, what a neverfailing fount of pleasure it has been, and, indeed, still is, to me,

and no doubt to hundreds of others! At that time I think it gave Tennyson as much pleasure as it did me.

This is the same with Ed. Lear's Nonsense Book and R. L. Stevenson's Verses for Children. They are an amusement alike to child and parent, but verses written down to what the writer considers to be a child's level are of little value to any age.

I have some very characteristic letters of Mary Tennyson, a very handsome woman and the most remarkable of Alfred's sisters.

We have heard of a lady who, like her, was, or affected to be, a misanthropist, and whom a friend described as not a misogynist, my dear, but, I suppose, an anthropogynist.' Mary affected to be such a one, and, after leaving Lincolnshire, wrote to her friend and neighbour at Somersby Rectory: 'O my beloved darling, what creatures men are! My brothers are the exception to this general rule,' and in a subsequent letter to the same lady : 'Since I have had some talk with Mrs. Henry' (also a Somersby neighbour) 'I find it is her opinion, from experience, that all men, with very few exceptions, are given to very shifty ways, not half so good and upright as women.'

At the time of his wedding, over which he had given a great deal of trouble to my mother by his inability to make up his mind, so that the marriage licence was dated May 15, though the wedding did not take place till June 13, she had endless trouble to get not only the cake and the bride's wedding dress ready, but also his own essential wedding garments.

This fact is disclosed in his brief note to my mother: 'Dear Kate, It is settled for the 13th, so the shirts may be gone on with.' His sister Mary at the same time writes: 'Alfred maintains silence about his engagement, which I think is not fair towards his family, especially as the Rawnsleys know it.' Indeed, her despondency is quite amusing: 'Poor thing, I daresay he is miserable enough at times, thinking of what he is about to do'; and her announcement to her friends reads like the news of a funeral: 'Well, all is over. Alfred was married to Emily Sellwood last Friday-Friday, and raining, about which I feel very superstitious. . . . I hope they will be happy, but I feel very doubtful about it.' But finding that it was not on a Friday and not raining, her spirits rise, and she has no doubt of her making him a good wife, as she is very fond of him,' as, indeed, they all were. Frederick lived abroad and married in Italy, and the mother and sisters looked to Charles, and still more to Alfred, for everything. Mary says: If ever there was a sweet, delightful character, it is that dear Charlie'; and in another letter: 'Alfred is universally beloved. We look upon him as the stay of the

family. It is to him we go when there is anything to be done.' And his wedding did not alter this.

They both wrote grateful letters on the day after the wedding, Emily thanking for 'kindnesses innumerable,' while Alfred's whole letter was just

MY DEAR KATE,-You managed it all very well yesterday. Many thanks. Ever yours,

A. T.

Dubbie's fees must be come at as he best can manage. The clerk and the shirts are owing.

On his revisiting Shiplake in December he added two stanzas to the four which he wrote on the wedding day, and which are in the Memoir. After the end of stanza 2, ' You have given me such a wife,' he continues thus:

Have I found in one so near

Aught but sweetness aye prevailing ?
Or through more than half a year
Half the fraction of a failing?
Therefore bless you, Drummond dear.

Good she is and pure and just,
Being conquered by her sweetness
I shall come, through her, I trust,}
Into fuller-orbed completeness,

Though but made of erring dust.

My father had the invaluable habit of reading to us children in the evenings both prose and poetry; and thus we heard most of Dickens, and also the beautiful songs of The Princess before they were published, and the Ode on the Death of the Great Duke. which Tennyson himself read to us at Shiplake. Matthew Arnold's Merman Tennyson also read to us aloud at Shiplake, and I heard him say as he finished it: 'I should like to have written that.'

The sound of a line of poetry (for poetry, to be fully understood, should be read aloud) was very much to him; and he certainly was unmatched in his use of vowels and in the melody of his verse. In speaking of Browning, he once said to me: 'I don't think that poetry should be all thought: there should be some melody'; and he carried his objection to a jingle so far that when, after publishing his first four Idylls of the King, he learnt that Enid' was properly pronounced Ennid,' he changed his line beginning' Had wedded Enid' to 'Had married Enid '; the jingle of 'wedded Ennid' was to his ear quite impossible. He instanced to me as fine-sounding lines and some of his best (and he made them all the finer by his magnificent way of rolling them out) the lines about the burial of Elaine :

The maiden buried, not as one unknown
Nor meanly, but with gorgeous obsequies
And mass and rolling music like a queen.

Many years later, walking with my wife over the heather on Blackdown, just outside Aldworth, he sat down on the edge of a deep cart track and recited in his magnificent voice:

Go fetch to me a pint o' wine,
And fill it in a silver tassie,
That I may drink before I go
A service to my bonnie lassie.

The trumpets sound, the banners fly,
The glittering spears are ranked ready,
The shouts o' war are heard afar,

The battle closes thick and bloody.

He repeated the last two lines, rolling them out with delighted admiration, and said: 'I would have given anything to have written that.' A line that he thought one of his best was—

The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm.

The richness of the bird's note is expressed by the 'u' sound in two consecutive words, and the 'el' in two other words gives a liquid tone which makes the line perfect. And yet,' he said, ' nine-tenths of the English readers would have been just as well pleased if I had written:

The merry blackbird sang among the trees.

Besides the well-known' moan of doves in immemorial elms and murmuring of innumerable bees,' another of his best lines he thought to be that which describes the sound of the bells in the poem Far, Far Away:

The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells.

He told my sister that the most beautiful and touching lines he knew were in the anonymous poem Forsaken :

ending with

O waly waly up the bank,

And waly waly down the brae,

And waly waly yon burn-side,
Where I and my love wont to gae

And O if my young babe were born

And set upon the nurse's knee,
And I myself were dead and gone,

And the green grass growing over me!

But to return to Elaine. Elaine's brother could not conceal his admiration for what he called 'the great Lancelot,' but Lancelot answers him :

Me you call great: mine is the firmer seat,
The truer lance: but there is many a youth
Now present who will come to all I am
And overcome it; and in me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great :
There is the man-

pointing to the king. About this passage Tennyson once said to me: 'When I wrote that I was thinking of myself and Wordsworth.' Did ever one poet pay a finer compliment to another? I might add that Wordsworth said of Tennyson: 'I have been trying all my life to write a poem like his Dora, but in vain.' It is pleasant to hear words of genuine praise from one real poet of another, and Tennyson spoke from his heart when he said: Read the exquisite songs of Burns, each perfect as a berry and radiant as a dewdrop. There never was an immortal poet if he be not one'; while of Keats he said to me: If Keats had lived he would have been the first of us all.'

The dewy radiance of Burns' songs recalls to me my first visit to Aldworth, when I saw him walking about the room looking at an etui case of his wife's which he held in his hand, in which was set a piece of the stone called avanturine, brown with innumerable gold sparkles in it. Look at it,' he said; see the stars in it, worlds within worlds!' He was clearly bent on making a simile from it for the poem he then had in hand, Gareth and Lynette. It was the passage where the daughters of the Dawn approach to arm the morning star' for combat. He had the first line in three different ways:

Shone gem or jewel on their dewy hair

There glanced

Or dew or jewel from their golden hair
Or gem or jewel sparkled in their hair

the second line in each case being

Like stars within the stone avanturine.

But when the poem came out it was different from and, I venture to think, better than all these, and read thus:

And the hair

All over glanced with dewdrop or with gem

Like sparkles in the stone avanturine.

We were speaking, as we paced the lawn at Aldworth, of the magnificent sound of some of Homer's lines, but he said that the grandeur of the lines in Homer was due to the Greek words being spoken by the Northern tongue. 'The Greeks,' he said, 'never polufloisboied; they polufleesbeed.' His own translation of Homer, of which he did so little, is so far superior to any other