The sceptres of her West, her East,
To one, that ruling has increased
Her greatness and her self-content.
III
Your rule has made the people love
Their ruler. Your viceregal days
Have added fulness to the phrase
Of "Gauntlet in the velvet glove."
IV
But since your name will grow with Time,
Not all, as honouring your fair fame
Of Statesman, have I made the name
A golden portal to my rhyme:
V
But more, that you and yours may know
From me and mine, how dear a debt
We owed you, and are owing yet
To you and yours, and still would owe.
VI
For he[42]--your India was his Fate,
And drew him over sea to you--
He fain had ranged her thro' and thro',
To serve her myriads and the State,--
VII
A soul that, watch'd from earliest youth,
And on thro' many a brightening year,
Had never swerved for craft or fear,
By one side-path, from simple truth;
VIII
Who might have chased and claspt Renown
And caught her chaplet here--and there
In haunts of jungle-poison'd air
The flame of life went wavering down;
IX
But ere he left your fatal shore,
And lay on that funereal boat,
Dying, "Unspeakable" he wrote
"Their kindness," and he wrote no more;
X
And sacred is the latest word;
And now the Was, the Might-have-been,
And those lone rites I have not seen,
And one drear sound I have not heard,
XI
Are dreams that scarce will let me be,
Not there to bid my boy farewell,
When That within the coffin fell,
Fell--and flash'd into the Red Sea,
XII
Beneath a hard Arabian moon
And alien stars. To question, why
The sons before the fathers die,
Not mine! and I may meet him soon;
XIII
But while my life's late eve endures,
Nor settles into hueless gray,
My memories of his briefer day
Will mix with love for you and yours.
TO W. E. GLADSTONE
We move, the wheel must always move,
Nor always on the plain,
And if we move to such a goal
As Wisdom hopes to gain,
Then you that drive, and know your Craft,
Will firmly hold the rein,
Nor lend an ear to random cries,
Or you may drive in vain,
For some cry "Quick" and some cry "Slow,"
But, while the hills remain,
Up hill "Too-slow" will need the whip,
Down hill "Too-quick," the chain.
TO MARY BOYLE
(Dedicating "The Progress of Spring.")
I
"Spring-flowers"! While you still delay to take
Your leave of Town,
Our elmtree's ruddy-hearted blossom-flake
Is fluttering down.
II
Be truer to your promise. There! I heard
Our cuckoo call.
Be needle to the magnet of your word,
Nor wait, till all
III
Our vernal bloom from every vale and plain
And garden pass,
And all the gold from each laburnum chain
Drop to the grass.
IV
Is memory with your Marian gone to rest,
Dead with the dead?
For ere she left us, when we met, you prest
My hand, and said
V
"I come with your spring-flowers." You came not, friend;
My birds would sing,
You heard not. Take then this spring-flower I send,
This song of spring,
VI
Found yesterday--forgotten mine own rhyme
By mine old self,
As I shall be forgotten by old Time,
Laid on the shelf--
VII
A rhyme that flower'd betwixt the whitening sloe
And kingcup blaze,
And more than half a hundred years ago,
In rick-fire days,
VIII
When Dives loathed the times, and paced his land
In fear of worse,
And sanguine Lazarus felt a vacant hand
Fill with _his_ purse.
IX
For lowly minds were madden'd to the height
By tonguester tricks,
And once--I well remember that red night
When thirty ricks,
X
All flaming, made an English homestead Hell--
These hands of mine
Have helpt to pass a bucket from the well
Along the line,
XI
When this bare dome had not begun to gleam
Thro' youthful curls,
And you were then a lover's fairy dream,
His girl of girls;
XII
And you, that now are lonely, and with Grief
Sit face to face,
Might find a flickering glimmer of relief
In change of place.
XIII
What use to brood? this life of mingled pains
And joys to me,
Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains
The Mystery.
XIV
Let golden youth bewail the friend, the wife,
For ever gone.
He dreams of that long walk thro' desert life
Without the one.
XV
The silver year should cease to mourn and sigh--
Not long to wait--
So close are we, dear Mary, you and I
To that dim gate.
XVI
Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes
Or many or few,
He rests content, if his young music wakes
A wish in you
XVII
To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke,
For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm
And whispering oak.
TO W. G. WARD
IN MEMORIAM
Farewell, whose living like I shall not find,
Whose Faith and Work were bells of full accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,
Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward,
How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with mind,
How loyal in the following of thy Lord!
TO SIR RICHARD JEBB
Fair things are slow to fade away,
Bear witness you, that yesterday[43]
From out the Ghost of Pindar in you
Roll'd an Olympian; and they say[44]
That here the torpid mummy wheat
Of Egypt bore a grain as sweet
As that which gilds the glebe of England,
Sunn'd with a summer of milder heat.
So may this legend[45] for awhile,
If greeted by your classic smile,
Tho' dead in its Trinacrian Enna,
Blossom again on a colder isle.
TO GENERAL HAMLEY
(Prologue of "The Charge of the Heavy Brigade.")
Our birches yellowing and from each
The light leaf falling fast,
While squirrels from our fiery beech
Were bearing off the mast,
You came, and look'd and loved the view
Long-known and loved by me,
Green Sussex fading into blue
With one gray glimpse of sea;
And, gazing from this height alone,
We spoke of what had been
Most marvellous in the wars your own
Crimean eyes had seen;
And now--like old-world inns that take
Some warrior for a sign
That therewithin a guest may make
True cheer with honest wine--
Because you heard the lines I read
Nor utter'd word of blame,
I dare without your leave to head
These rhymings with your name,
Who know you but as one of those
I fain would meet again,
Yet know you, as your England knows
That you and all your men
Were soldiers to her heart's desire,
When, in the vanish'd year,
You saw the league-long rampart-fire
Flare from Tel-el-Kebir
Thro' darkness, and the foe was driven,
And Wolseley overthrew
Arâbi, and the stars in heaven
Paled, and the glory grew.
EPITAPH ON LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE
IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY
Thou third great Canning, stand among our best
And noblest, now thy long day's work hath ceased,
Here silent in our Minster of the West
Who wert the voice of England in the East.
EPITAPH ON GENERAL GORDON
IN THE GORDON BOYS' NATIONAL MEMORIAL HOME NEAR WOKING[46]
Warrior of God, man's friend, and tyrant's foe,
Now somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan,
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know
This earth has never borne a nobler man.
G. F. WATTS, R.A.
As when a painter, poring on a face,
Divinely, thro' all hindrance, finds the man
Behind it, and so paints him that his face,
The shape and colour of a mind and life,
Lives for his children, ever at its best.
TENNYSON AND BRADLEY (DEAN OF WESTMINSTER)
By MARGARET L. WOODS
Alum Bay, near Farringford, is now greatly changed. A big hotel stands up
dwarfing its cliffs, from which the famous layers of various-coloured sand
are being continually scooped into bottles, and on many a cottage
mantelpiece in the island there is a glass bottle showing a picture of a
lighthouse, or something else curiously wrought in Alum Bay sand. The
jagged white Needles still tip the westward point of its crescent, still
seeming to salute with greeting or farewell the majestic procession of
great ocean-going ships, and to smile on the frolic wings of yachts, that
all the summer long flirt and dance over the blue waters of the Solent,
like a flight of white butterflies. Formerly the rough track to the Bay
led over a lonely bit of common called the Warren, where furze grew, and
short brown-tasselled rushes marked the course of a hardly visible stream.
The Warren Farm lies on the landward edge of the Warren, and there on a
sunny 6th of August 1855, a third birthday was being solemnized with tea
and a tent. It was a blue tent on the top of a haystack, and under it
between her baby boy and girl, sat a blue-eyed mother, with the bloom of
youth and the freshness of the sea on her beauty. The mother and the two
children, lovely, too, with more than the usual loveliness of childhood,
were keeping their tiny festival with a gay simplicity, and I do not
doubt that on that as on other birthdays, Edith, the birthday queen, was
wearing on her golden curls a garland of rosebuds and mignonette. The
wheels of a carriage were heard driving up to the farm gate, and in a
minute a tall dark man, like a Spanish señor in his long cloak and
sombrero, appeared under the haystack. The young woman noted the tall
figure, the hat and cloak, the long, dark, clear-cut face, with the
beardless and finely modelled mouth and chin, the splendid eyes under the
high forehead, and the deep furrows running from nose to chin. She
perceived at once it was Alfred Tennyson, whose poems she knew and loved
so well. Meantime the Poet, sensitive as all artists must be to human
loveliness, looked surely with delight on the pretty picture, the haystack
and the blue tent, the young mother and her babes: a picture which was to
form as it were a gracious frontispiece to a whole volume of friendship.
He bade her "throw the little maid into his arms," caught the child and
asked her how old she was. "Three to-day," answered little Edith proudly.
"Then you and I," said he, "have the same birthday."
The friendship thus preluded was to last until death closed it. The record
of it lies here in old diaries and in sheaves of letters, faithfully
treasured; a chronicle of some forty years with all the little troubles,
the joys and sorrows of the two households, intimately shared. It was a
four-cornered friendship, one of husband and wife with husband and wife,
but the correspondence passed almost entirely between the wives. Men had
already for the most part abandoned the practice of letter-writing outside
their business and families, but at the little rosewood drawing-room
escritoires at which we of the many documents are tempted to smile,
Victorian women fed the flame of friendship with--here the metaphor
becomes a little mixed--a constant flow of ink. Not that the two women
who kept up this correspondence were idle. All that Emily Tennyson on her
invalid sofa did for her Poet, is it not written in the book of his
Biography? Her friend, Marian Bradley, was yet busier than she, having the
cares and duties of a mother of a large family, besides those incident to
the wife of a man who was successively Head Master of a great school, Head
of an Oxford College, and Dean of Westminster.
Granville Bradley was twelve years younger than Alfred Tennyson; an
interval in age which permits at once of veneration and of intimacy. It
was at the Lushingtons' house that my father, as an undergraduate of
one-and-twenty, first met the young Poet, and became his admirer; but it
was not until twelve years later that the admirer became also the friend.
My mother tells in her diary how in that summer of the birthday meeting,
the two men roamed the country together, poetizing, botanizing,
geologizing. The enthusiasm of science had begun to seize on all thinking
humanity, and if botany was considered the only suitable science for
ladies, geology had something like a boom among the privileged males. I
can see my father now, a slight, active little figure, armed with a hammer
and girt with a capacious knapsack, setting forth joyous as a
chamois-hunter, for a day's sport among the fossils of the Isle of Wight
cliffs. But above all it was the communion of spirit, the play of ideas
which interested the two and drew them together. "They talked from 12 noon
to 10 P.M., almost incessantly, this day," writes my mother, "Tennyson
walking back with him (some three miles) to the Warren farm, still
talking."
One pictures the tall, long-cloaked Bard and the vivacious little scholar
pacing side by side, inconscient of time and distance, down the shingly
drive of Farringford, through the warm and dusky night of the deep-hedged
lanes, overhung with the heavy darkness of August trees, until they came
out on the clear pale spaces of the open seaward land, and the whisper and
scent of the sea. And one would guess this to be a picture of two very
young men, absorbed in the first joy of one of the romantic friendships of
youth, did one not know that the Poet was a man of middle age and the
scholar in the maturing thirties. But the artists know their way to the
Fountain of youth and meet there. Tennyson, the great creative artist,
retained all his life the simplicity of a child. My father was no creator,
but he, too, was in his way an artist; he was the artist as scholar and
teacher. Language and Style were to him things almost as splendid and
sacred as they were wont to be to a Renaissance scholar, and sins against
them roused the only bad passions of an otherwise sweet nature. History to
him was not history, it was real life; the rhythm and harmony of poetry
were what music is to the ardent music-lover. From childhood to old age he
was for ever crooning some favourite fragment of verse. With what delight,
then, he found himself crossing the threshold of a great poet's mind; the
mind of one who did not, so to speak, keep his friends waiting in the
vestibule, but opened to them freely the palace chambers, rich with the
treasures of his knowledge, thought, and imagination.
Those passages in my mother's diary in which she speaks of the happiness
it gave my father and herself to make acquaintance with the Poet, and to
find him just what they would have wished him to be, have already appeared
in the Biography. Also her description of those evenings in the
Farringford drawing-room, so often recurring and through so many years,
when he would "talk of what was in his heart," or read aloud some poem,
often yet unpublished, while they listened, looking out on the lovely
landscape and the glimpse of sea which, "framed in the dark-arched
bow-window," seemed, like some beautiful picture, almost to form part of
the room.
My father now bought a small estate between Yarmouth and Freshwater, and
built a house--Heathfield--upon it, in which to spend his holidays. The
Freshwater side of the Isle of Wight was not at that time a fashionable
neighbourhood. The lovely, lonely bays on the blue Solent, innocent of
lodging-house or bathing-machine, succeeded each other from Yarmouth to
the Needles. They were approached over open land, or by little stony
chines, deep in gorse and bracken, down which tiny streams trickled, to
spread themselves out shiningly on the sands and melt into the sea. I
remember my young mother killing a red adder in our chine with a
well-aimed stone, as we came up from our morning dip in the waves. There
was room for wild creatures and open country and for poetry then on the
little island. The islanders, smugglers from generation to generation, had
in them more of the wild creature than of poetry. Droll stories used to be
told of their inability to appreciate the honour done to Freshwater by the
Poet's residence there. But perhaps the days when his "greatness" was
measured by the man-servant test[47] were more comfortable days for the
Bard than those when his movements were marked and followed through
telescopes.
There was a constant coming and going between Heathfield and Farringford,
the children of each house being equally at home in the other. I see now
the long Farringford drawing-room, full of the green shade of a cedar tree
which grew near the great window, and the slight figure of Lady Tennyson
rising from the red sofa--it was a red room--and gliding towards my mother
with a smile upon her lips. She always wore a soft gray cashmere gown, and
it was always made in the same simple fashion; much as dresses were worn
in the days of Cruikshank, only that the gathered skirt was longer and
less full than the skirts of Cruikshank's ladies. Her silky auburn-brown
hair, partly hidden by lace lappets, was untouched with gray, and her
complexion kept its rose-leaf delicacy, just as her strong and cultivated
intellect kept its alertness, to the last days of her life. No sooner were
the greetings over than ten to one the door would open, and the Poet would
come slowly, softly, silently, into the room, dressed in an old-fashioned
black tail-coat, and fixing my mother with his distant short-sighted gaze.
One day, she being seated with her back to the cedar-green window, he
approached her with such extreme deference, and so solemn a courtesy, as
made her all amazed; until in a minute, with a flash of amusement, both
discovered that he had mistaken her for--the Queen. Still more surely one
or both of the long-haired, gray-tunicked boys would appear, less
silently; and away the children scampered to their endless play about the
rambling house and grounds. But even the children's play was informed with
the vital interest of the two houses: the story of King Arthur and his
knights. The first "Idylls of the King" had appeared, and others were
appearing. It was a red-letter evening indeed when Poet and new poem were
ready for a reading, either in the little upstairs study, or in the
drawing-room, where dessert was always laid after dinner, and he sat at
the head of the round table in a high carved chair. Country life was in
those days very simple and dinners early, so that even young children
appeared with the dessert, and my mother's description of those evenings
recalls very clearly some of the earliest of the pictures in memory's
picture-book, as well as some later ones. I remember now a story of
Tennyson's which tickled my childish sense of humour exceedingly, the
point of it lying in a bit of bad French, the badness of which I could
appreciate. My father had a vein of dry humour, which being akin to that
of the Poet, doubtless assisted to knit the bonds of friendship, since to
find the same thing humorous is almost essential to real intimacy. There
was between the two the natural give-and-take of friendship, and to the
warm appreciation given as well as received, Emily Tennyson's letters bear
constant witness. "Mr. Bradley's intellectual activity, so warmed by the
heart, is very good for my Ally," she writes; and again: "I know you would
be pleased if you could hear Ally recur to his talks with Mr. Bradley, and
one particular talk about the Resurrection and [illegible]. It is
difficult to express admiration, so I won't say any more, except God bless
you both."
My father was now in the full stress of his great work at Marlborough, and
spent his summer holidays for the most part in Switzerland, but Christmas
and Easter still often found us at Freshwater. In 1866 Tennyson's eldest
son, Hallam, was sent to school at Marlborough. "I am not sending my son
to Marlborough--I am sending him to Bradley," he said in reply to the
Queen's question. On another occasion he said: "I am sending him to
Marlborough because Bradley is a friend of mine, and Stanley tells me that
Marlborough is the best school in England." There followed three visits to
Marlborough during the four years longer that my father remained there.
The second one, when Lady Tennyson came with her husband, was brought
about by the severe illness of the cherished son, and lasted seven weeks.
At first the anxiety about the boy was too great to admit of pleasure
either to them or to my parents, to whom--especially to my mother--Hallam
was almost as a son of their own. But later, and during the Poet's other
visits, there were walks and drives in Savernake forest, beautiful at all
seasons of the year, and over the windy spaces of the gray silent
downland, where "the chronicles of wasted Time" are written in worn and
mysterious hieroglyphs of stone, and fosse, and hillock. During the first
visit "The Victim" was written by him in the room called the green
dressing-room, looking out on the clipped yews and tall lime-circle of
Lady Hertford's old garden. In summer-time he had great pleasure in the
peaceful beauty of Marlborough and its landscape, and also in the wealth
of flowers with which my mother surrounded herself in her house and
garden; for she was a great gardener before it became fashionable to be
so. In the drawing-room at the Lodge, masters and their wives--then all
young--and Sixth Form boys gathered around the Poet. At that time he had
for years been living a life apart from the crowd, and it must have been
an effort to him to project himself into this young and wholly strange
school society. But he did it gallantly and seemed happy among the young
people. There were science evenings and poetry evenings. That is, there
were evenings when masters interested in science exhibited the wonders of
the microscope, and evenings when Tennyson read aloud his own poetry or
Hood's comic verses. I remember well being allowed to stay up to hear him
read "Guinevere" to the Upper Sixth Form. He had a great deep voice like
the booming of waves in a sea-cave, and although the situation in the poem
was not one to appeal to a child, yet his reading of the farewell of
Arthur to Guinevere affected me so much that I crawled into a corner and
wept two pocket-handkerchiefs full of tears.
During this visit Tennyson, who suffered sometimes from nervous
depression, said more than once that he envied my father's life of active
and incessant goodness. In the man who at the height of his fame could
experience and express such a feeling, there was still something of the
heart of a good child--its simplicity, its humility, its "wanting to be
good."
In June 1867, Aldworth--called at first Greenhill--appears in the letters.
Emily Tennyson writes to my mother: "We have agreed to buy thirty-five[48]
acres of beautifully situated land. It is a ledge on a hill nearly 1000
feet high, all copse and foxgloves almost, and a steep descent of wood and
field below; the ledge looking over an immense plain, and backed by a hill
slightly higher than itself." I quote what follows because it shows how
simple had been the Freshwater life. "The order is gone for a small
sociable landau. This seems so luxurious that I am afraid I am perversely
more ready to cry than to laugh over it."
Aldworth was meant to be a small house, but somehow it grew to be a large
one. The Tennysons' own design for it was followed in the main by Mr.
(afterwards Sir James) Knowles. The winds and rains of the great height
have weathered stone and slate until the house and the balustrade of its
wide terrace seem to have stood there two centuries, rather than not yet
half of one. The planting of the Italian cypresses along the edge of the
terrace was the Poet's own particular fancy. It is strange that they
should have grown so grandly on this exposed English hill-side. The
darkness of their foliage, the severity of their lines, put an accent on
the visionary beauty of the immense view which lies spread below and
beyond them. There is the Sussex Weald, so far down that its hills and
dales appear one plain, the range of the South Downs, rising yonder to
Chanctonbury Ring, dropping nearer to a chalky gap which lets in the
distant glitter of the sea. Hindhead, the Surrey ranges, Windsor
Forest--the list grows too long of all that may be seen from Aldworth
terrace, and from the heathy height above, whence seven counties are said
to be visible. For my part, when looking from such heights, over the great
everlasting marriage festivals of Earth and Sky, it is with difficulty,
almost with reluctance, that I bring myself to connect them with the map.
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.