London Days

d by its remarkably wholesome air. Man has done his best to spoil Freshwater, but he has not wholly succeeded-yet. Give him time, and more radicalism

fiddling, amateurish railway, which has come in since then, has not only robbed Freshwater of its seclusion but has saddled parts of the rolling country with shabby streets of mean houses wort

le from Tennyson's Lane, and many of the poet's friends have stayed in it, and friends of Watts, for that great artist also lived in Freshwater, first at a house which is now called Dimbola, and subsequently at "The Briary", a charming home built by the Prinseps and facing Tennyson's "noble Down." In the rooms to which I have so often retreated, and where I so

her skill in it was quite remarkable. So was her persistence. She would not permit a possible "subject" to escape without "taking" him or her. She was quite intimate with the Tennysons, and always called the poet by his Christian name. One day, while there was a sm

to an adjoining room and

led, "I've brought a doctor. You m

was no

re a coward! Come

e

as my old-timer had tried to convey, she had that morning hastened to Farringford without hat, or gloves, and with her sleeves rolled up, just as she came from her "dark room", and her

She always won

rs, passed into the possession of a son. I do not know what has been their subsequent fate; but if uninjured they would be very interesting now, and a collection of prints from them would have a val

ties", or, failing these, by main force, to "come and be photographed" in this character or that, and there were maid servants with classic faces and ploughmen with fine heads who posed for her as characters in pl

black morning coat, closely buttoned, cut in the fashion of the time. Instead of the big rolling collar usually shown in his portraits, here is the stiff "dickey" of Piccadilly; the cuffs, too, are in the mode, and over the coat a monocle hangs. It is quite out of the style of other T

r 'The D

other

enny

one by

sence, I looked, as usual, for this precious pair. But they had gone, and no one could

to a sprawling, country town. It had five hundred inhabitants when Tennyson first came to it in a sailboat from the mainland, in 1852, or 1853; it has between five and ten thousand now, west of the Yar. The number shifts with the summer visitors, and the military cannot be counted, for they come and go i

y house became a studio. When her husband, a recluse who had n't so much as seen the beach for a dozen years, wanted a lawn, she had turf dug by night and laid in the garden.

ne associated with his name and immediately opposite the green door. A few feet beyond this, a rustic bridge overhead spans Tennyson's Lane, and by this bridge the poet could cross into a woodland without having to enter the Lane, where his privacy might be disturbed, and so walk to Maiden's Croft, where a little green summerhouse stands under the trees and where he often wrote and meditated. From this summerhouse he had the best view of the beautiful and noble down. From the windows of Farringford there are exquisite views of seascape and landscape, with lush fields in the foreground,-a view, on sunny days, of quite un-English colour. In the distance St. Catherine's Point and above it the white crown of the Landslip, and above that the dark shape of St. Boniface Down, lifting i

is my first glimpse of him: a tall man looking like a cloaked brigand; his hea

t you?" he was understood to say in

" Before the stool was an easel, a palette, and a box of water colours. Tennyson, who was near-sighted, saw at

home," conti

s and general impedimenta of the fine arts. My friend, who was a stranger in the land, had probably n

son! O

rer, and then, taking

Brothers in art

ried because Jove had passed, remained at work. I forget, though, whether the sketch was ever completed. I was curious enough, however, to

f photographs among the inhabitants of the West Wight; and where there was a souvenir to be given or a tip to be left, mounted portraits of celebrities, or of models

pied by them. For some years the private chaplain at Weston Manor was Father Peter Haythornthwaite, a most agreeable and hard-working man. Father Peter, as they called him in the island, was also a friend of Tennyson and frequently a companion of his walks. He told me an amusing story connected with his first dinner at Farringford. Tennyson had an Irish maid, Mary by name. The family w

said he. "I 'll

ins

yson. "I am to wear the

ze,

in his altar r

s forbid!"

, why should they c

ll ye, for the sake of the ho

?" the poet asked of Father Peter

in a humorous mood, composed rhyming epi

say of me?" as

plet rolled from t

P. Haytho

ature, Rom

necdotes and records; that the desiring of anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; and that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and would kno

gates." Perhaps so, but it was a case of "It needs be that offences come, but woe be to him through whom the offence cometh." He hated to have tributes thrust upon him; he hated intrusions upon his privacy, and had suffered too much from that sort of thing at

mes Knowles, of the Nineteenth Century, designed the house, and there Tennyson passed many happy summers and autumns. And there, on a moonlit night in the autumn of 1892, he

lf up" in close imitation of his dress and manner. He was a warm admirer of Tennyson, and was immensely flattered to be mistaken for him by strangers. Small boys of the neighbourhood learned speedily to extract penny tips from this adoring person by pretending to mistake him for their celebrated townsman. On the whole it wa

quarter. One morning he heard that the Poet Laureate had died. Meeting Father Peter in the road he express

. Hallam will follow

thought it qu

er, much relieved. "I

f his eighty-three years were Farringford years. Never was poet more happily placed than in this earthly paradise. Every circumstance of loyalty and love, of understanding and devotion, surrounded him here and at Aldworth. And never had genius a more devoted aid than Tennyson had in his son Hallam, the present Lord

f erecting some memorial in the rural region where half his life had been passed. The memorial was meant to be a local and neighbourly undertaking, and it was t

ken over by the Lighthouse Board and had served through decades as a mark for navigation for the endless processions of ships passing up and down the English Channel and through the Solent by the Needles. Six or seven hundred feet above the sea, and near the edge of a long white cliff, it was ea

nted to preserve it in perpetuity if the committee would provide for its erection. I communicated with my old friend, Mrs. James T. Fields of Boston, the widow of Tennyson's American publisher, and she brought together an American committee for the purpose of co?perating with the one in Freshwater. Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes became her first associate and the first American subscriber. The daughters of Longfellow and Lowell were members of the American committee, and so were Mrs. Agassiz, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Margaret Deland, Miss Sarah

carcely a sign of weather, though it fronts the sun, and the storms bea

MEM

ALF

TEN

CRO

D A B

AILO

PEOP

HWAT

R FR

ENG

AM

the cross. By or before the middle of the present century it may b

burial that the following letter appeare

elated as they were in a paper read privately by the l

dark and wild night, the sea breaking at the foot of the cliffs. Knowing the dangers of the place and his near-sightedness, I fear

Get thee down and have a smell; it will make thee sleep the better!' He had detected them by his acute sense of smell, aided by his strong love of nature. I dropped

imed, 'Oh! how exquisite!' 'I should say it was,' replied the poet. At another time he said no one could read 'Maud' but himself. 'Fields, come and see me, and I will gi

, he said that too. He was not imposed upon by flattery, and he hated that and detected it easily enough. The "violet" incident above has been quoted frequently. It is quoted here because Mr. Fields was mistaken about "the thick grass." That does not grow on the down. Besides the furze bushes, there is only close-cropped turf. If he walked through "thick grass" it may have been on the way to and from the down, perhaps, by the way of Maiden's Croft. And on the

, even if he received none in return. He had been a dealer in antiques, I forget where, but I remember that he told me he had made and lost two fortunes, and was sheltering his last years under the shreds of the second. He told me, too, that he had been offered the curatorship of a well-known museum, but had declined, prefe

ips" of the Phoenicians "were little more than open boats, partly decked, and liable to be swamped by the dash of the waves over their sides and prows. They were propelled by rowers, numbering from thirty to fifty; if wind served they stepped a single mast and hoisted a single sail." They avoided the heavy seas of the Bay of Biscay, and came by the rivers of Fra

h was formed after modern man had constructed a causeway there. In those days the waters of the Channel flowed into the Yar, making a shallow estuary sufficient for an anchorage, where the Phoenician craft could lie while their adventuro

ted evidence which I have not space to record. Being an antiquary he turned on other antiquaries. He wrote a pamphlet. The Antiquary magazine took up the case and cited similar discoveries, undoubtedly Phoenician, in South Devon. Warm arguments for and against the Phoenician theory were thrown back and forth. And Freshwater laughed. It was sure, and is sure still, that the anti-Phoenicians had the best of it, and Neighbour Walker the worst of it. A neighbour would have the wor

ithout excess of honour. Tennyson himself used to

rd," said a cabman

e latter, "a great

cabby. "He only keeps one man,

h. This means the breaking of almost the last link of that old Island circle. And it means the vanishing fro

s past she had a little house there. "The Porch" it was called. The colder half of the year she lived in London, in St. Leonard's Terrace, Chelsea; the warmer half at "The Porch." In 1918, when Chelsea Hospital, the home of the red-coated Old Pensioners, was bombed by German aircraft, she had a narrow escape. Her house faces the hospital grounds, and every window pane in the front was shattered. She was sitting in her drawing-room at the time, but was unhurt by the flying gl

t letter from an old friend of hers in New York. Her friend had writt

ladies of eighty fighting shoulder to shoulder!" And straightway she made a l

sed, and alluded to, the first Lord Tennyson as "Alfred." And she was as full of stori

new boy-in-buttons, a country lad whom he had just taken into service, ans

he Prince Consort has cal

e youngster, who fled to the

found the Prince waiting at the door, still laughing at the boy'

there and only there. And now, to-day that gracious lady of the old time has gone, never to return. How kindly she was, and gentle! What sweet dignity and thoughtfulness, a manner that was not put on and off like a gown. It was innate. There are few left in the world like that dear lady. The present g