A Conversation with Tennyson (1870)

Abstract

… Tennyson entered, and almost at once proposed that we should go out of doors. After a short stroll on the lawn under the cedars, we went into the ‘careless ordered garden’, walked round it, and then sat down in the small summer-house. It is a quaint rectangular garden, sloping to the west, where Nature and Art blend happily,—orchard trees, and old-fashioned flower-beds, with stately pines around, giving to it a sense of perfect rest. This garden is truly ‘a haunt of ancient peace’. Left there alone with the bard for some time, I felt that I sat in the presence of one of the Kings of Men. His aged look impressed me. There was the keen eagle eye; and, although the glow of youth was gone, the strength of age was in its place. The lines of his face were like the furrows in the stem of a wrinkled oak-tree; but his whole bearing disclosed a latent strength and nobility, a reserve of power, combined with a most courteous grace of manner I was also struck by the négligé air of the man, so different from that of Browning or Arnold or Lowell.

‘A Reminiscence of Tennyson’, Blackwood’s Magazine, clxii (1897) 264–70.