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ALFRED TENNYSON, AGE 22

temporaries declared him to have been "near perfection as mortal man could be," and we must believe that even the gods loved him, since they wrought his death in his youth. "The apostles" were not wholly given over to religion and radicalism, as some one said; on the contrary, many of their evenings were devoted to merrymaking. However, the regulation feature of the meetings was an essay read by one of the body. Alfred was one evening pledged to hold forth on "Ghosts," but when his turn came a spasm of timidity possessed him and he tore up his essay on the spot. One wonders at this as he was already famous for his recitations of his own and other's poems. A favorite diversion of " the apostles " was amateur theatricals, especially in Shakespearean selections. What fun there must have been when Hallam played Verges, Kemble, Dogberry, and the future Lord Houghton, Beatrice! It is interesting to know that Fanny and Adelaide Kemble were sometimes among their audiences. Tennyson's poems were handed about in the apostolic brotherhood like sacred fire: when copies of new things could not be obtained, remembered stanzas were quoted orally and in letters. Spedding wrote at this time,

"We talk out of the Palace of Art' and 'The Legend of Fair Women.' The great Alfred is here smoking all day. We went on a pilgrimage to see him and found him and Arthur Hallam and Kemble."

Of Arthur Hallam's connection with the Tennysons one can scarcely speak without pain. Everyone must feel for the pitiful circumstances of his premature death a personal sorrow like that which laments the death of the youthful Keats and Chatterton. One fancies how attractive to the Tennysons was Hallam, just returned, when they first knew him, from Switzerland and Italy, brimming over with the delights of his travels; and how charming to him must have been their classic culture, which was so like his own. He forthwith became an adopted and well-beloved member of the family. His letters to Mrs. Tennyson breathe a filial devotion scarcely inferior to that of her sons. He was the sworn champion and entertainer of the smaller children, the chosen comrade and friend of all the older boys-of Charles and Frederick as well as Alfred. Many a morning he and the sisters and brothers went trooping together over the old Lincolnshire hills. In the evenings the great bard usually slipped into his attic den, whence he might occasionally be lured for a musicale, his sisters playing and singing, he sometimes contributing a flute number. On other evenings Hallam was the

"Central warmth-diffusing bliss,
When all in circle drawn
About him heart and ear were fed,
To hear him as he lay and read
The Tuscan poets on the lawn.
"Or in the all-golden afternoon
A guest or happy sister sung,

Or here she brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the brightening moon."
One of the sisters must have hung on
Hallam's words-one with an Italian pro-
file, eyes like "deep on deep "-his be-

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trothed. The "remorseless hour that made cypress of her orange flower" prevented a marriage of perfect mind, for Emily Tennyson's intellectuality was of of an order rare as her physical beauty. The wooing days at Somersby were not all spent in light converse and loitering in the trivial ways of love. Hallam himself taught Emily Italian, in which he was conspicuously proficient, giving her a lyric diploma significant of their poetic tastes and kindred natures:

"Lady, I bid thee to a summer dome,
Ringing with echoes of Italian song;
Old Dante's strain encircles all the air.
Hark! again like flute tones mingling rare
Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarch's moan.
Pass thou the lintel freely-without fear
Feast on the music."

As Hallam was bound by this and so many other links to the house of Tennyson, small wonder that his sudden and tragic death at Vienna, so far from the bosom of his friends, should have sealed Alfred's lips of song for ten years. And it was most natural that when they did speak, their utterance should be the noble poem Doctor Van Dyke so aptly calls "a dead march, but a march into immortality." Alfred Tennyson's capacity for great grief, of which "In Memoriam " was the fruit, was an inheritance from his father, who despite his genial moods was such a victim of sorrow's cruel fellowship that often his lugubriousness hung a gloom for days over the family. Even as a child Alfred was very sensitive to this; in a thrill of sympathy he once rushed from the house at midnight, ran to a churchyard and flung himself upon a grave, weeping bitterly. So he could truthfully unite the memory of a father whose heartaches were his own, with that of the friend he held as half divine:

"As down the garden walks I move
Two spirits of a diverse love
Contend for loving masterdom."

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"The well-beloved place

Where first we gazed upon the sky,

The roofs that heard our earliest cry."

Just before this, Charles by taking orders and settling in his vicarage at Grasby, did his share to gratify the grandfather's desire to make parsons of them all; and Frederick manifested the strain of the warm south in his veins by going to live in Italy. This exodus of the two elder brothers left Alfred as the master of the house, a position he assumed with complacency and capability. Moving into new quarters demanded a large amount of the latter quality in which he was not found wanting. Mrs. Proctor praised his

talent for domestic administration, saying: "I have known three poets, Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson, and on some occasions they could be about the most practical men on earth." Carlyle meeting him about this time was surprised to find that he preferred "clubbing with his mother and sisters and writing poetry" to mixing in the stir of London life. It was this very domestic disposition which made Tennyson the distinct poet of ideal English home life. The universal oracle Shakespere of course gave glimpses of it; but Shelley and Bryon and Browning lived too much away from the motherland in spirit and in flesh to represent it; Wordsworth who perhaps approached nearest to depicting it, yielded homage to the superior touch which wrought " Dora," "Audley Court," "The Talking Oak" and that inimitable pastoral "The Gardener's Daughter."

A few years after the Tennysons left Somersby, they moved to Boxley, in order to be near the Lushingtons, whose family was welded to theirs by the marriage of Edward Lushington and Miss Cecilia Tennyson. There have rarely been such congenial neighbors as were these two clans. The talents of one complemented those of the other. Edward Lushington, whom Alfred specially cherished, was a famous scholar, and so, too, his brother Franklin. In the stanzas, "Nightingales Warbled Without," Tennyson immortalized Henry Lushington, one of the three dead men he "loved with a love that will ever be." three brothers were poets-notably of the Crimean war. Their estate-Park House-described in "The Princess," was the scene of the young folks' revelries; they banquetted on its spacious summer lawns, sitting beneath the stars many balmy evenings, far into the night.

The

If the brilliant minds of the Cambridge days turned towards the Tennysons, no

less did the famous friends of maturer years gravitate towards them. It seems indecorous and useless to speak bibliographically of the late laureate when there is yet in the memory of men or in their list of books to be read next, that exhaustive" Memoir," which makes for the son's as well as for the father's famewherein are gathered the many flowers of homage strewn along the poet's pathway by such kindred gods as Wordsworth, Gladstone, Carlyle, Newman, Thackeray, the Rossettis, Fitzgerald and the generation's last great singer, Swinburne. But the temptation is irresistible to refer to the fellowship of Alfred Tennyson and his brother-in-the-muses, Browning. They stand out as a reproach to the jealousies of the professional folk who desecrate art with despicable envy and selfishness. How amusing must have been that tête-à-tête Hallam Tennyson tells about, when Browning, boasting his rhyming facility, was given the word, " rhinoceros" as unrhymable, and proceeded to achieve the following:

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'Oh, if you should see a rhinoceros,
And a tree be in sight,

Climb quick-for his might

Is a match for the gods-he can toss Eros."

The Brownings were closely associated with another poet of the clan-Frederick Tennyson. In fact, his household and theirs made an English colony in the land of the bright orange flowers-Mrs. Browning called it the "family party." The classic lands and letters had always held Frederick Tennyson thralled from the Cambridge schooldays when he wrote his prize poem-a Greek ode. His villa with its lemon groves growing down to the sea, had once been a home of Cicero-does it not seem that the place was dedicated to the muse? The fountain clearer than crystal which babbled midst the lemon trees Frederic lauded to his brother as "fresh as when its silver sounds mingled with

the deep voice of the orator as he sat there in the stillness of noonday devoting his siesta hours to study. "Fitzgerald visited him there, sat with a book of verse underneath his bough, and afterwards wrote: "I am glad to have seen you, and have gotten the idea of a noble fellow always in my head."

The shade of Cicero and the other classics influenced Frederick Tennyson's work perhaps more than did that of his illustrious brother. His verse swings with an old Roman stateliness. Though not fraught with so much of the Greek spirit it suggests a kinship with the young bard whose soul Greece charmed, whose body Rome holds; for instance, does not one hear Keats in "Venus' Birth on Lesbos"?

"Her tall immortal limbs

Cast off the gleaming freshness of the deep
Like scales of silver armor: with one foot
She prest the prow of her enchanted pearl,
One hand thrown back amidst her golden hair
She dashed the salt drops from her."

When one hears some of Alfred Tennyson's platitudes and veritable juvenilia perpetually mouthed to the neglect of Frederick Tennyson's many noble lines, the fate of having a famous brother seems indeed a misfortune devoutly to be deplored. Charles Tennyson Turner has not been such a victim of this overshadowing. The world seems to unite in the Laureate's preference for him. Charles and Alfred were bound by more than one tie. Resembling each other physically they were alike also in tastes, which made their perfect comradeship from babyhood till "the joyless June" when Alfred wrote:

"Thou hast vanished from thine own
To that which looks like rest,
True brother only to be known,
By those who know thee best."

The great singer may be said to have served his poetic apprenticeship under his brother, who set him his first lyrical task when master and apprentice were respectively nine and eight years old. Master Alfred was making two-sides-of-a-slate of verse to the satisfaction of the elder brother, who forthwith settled him in his vocation with the anxiously awaited dictum: "Yes, you can write." One of the strongest links that united the two was their wedding sisters, Louisa and Emily Sellwood.

Those who idealize the poetic life will surely find glamour enough in the first meeting of Alfred Tennyson and Emily Sellwood. Let such romanticists think first of the place where this meeting occurred-Faery Wood-and then picture Arthur Hallam coming down through the meadows and woodlands, on his arm a girl with an exquisite face. At a turn in the path they find the gentle poet, who, thrilled by the "light of her youth and her grace," addresses her: "Are you Dryad or Oread wandering here?" Faust and Marguerite, Dante and Beatrice, what more idyllic? Yet their meeting was no more so than the life that " ran in golden sequence" forty-two years for the Laureate and Lady Tennyson. It was a particularly happy circumstance that Lady Tennyson had the gift of music, for surely her sensitiveness to concords of sweet sounds was a source of joy to the poet whose final critic she was the poet who strove in his own cadences for effects

legato as those "of petals from blown roses on the grass." Nor is it strange that she, after hearing his resonant voice intone these cadences, should fit them to melody, as she did.

Anna Blanche McGill.

FOR

OUR LITERARY DIPLOMATS

PART III

FROM THE FORTIES TO THE SEVENTIES

GEORGE BANCROFT

OR about one year George Bancroft was Secretary of the Navy under Polk, and his record during that time was so brilliant that his transfer to the Court of St. James in 1846 formed a proper sequence of events. The first three volumes of his "History of the United States " had already appeared, and he found himself received with double honors in London, where he remained until 1849, working hard for a mitigation of the severe navigation laws. Access to all such state papers as bore upon his History was afforded him in England; and, having taken his fill, he came home to allow the process of digestion full sway.

From 1867 to 1874 he was successively accredited by this country to Prussia, to the North German Confederation and to Germany, as these political divisions were respectively evolved. In 1870 a remarkable experience befell him, when the University of Göttingen, remembering the fiftieth anniversary of his doctorate, which she had given him as a boy of twenty, conferred upon him an honorary Ph.D.

Bancroft must always be gratefully remembered for establishing in Prussia a principle which was generally adopted later that of allowing the citizens of one country to become naturalized citizens in the country of their adoption. Great Britain had long refused this privilege to Englishmen, but necessarily followed. Bismarck's lead. A man of much learning and cultivation, Bancroft's extreme dependence upon rigid methods of work and recreation enabled posterity to chronicle a long list of achievements after his

name; but not every man will write good history because he always takes a horseback ride at precisely three in the afternoon, though he may live to be ninetyone, as did Bancroft.

GEORGE PERKINS MARSH

Of the more than a quarter century's diplomatic service of George Perkins Marsh, it can with safety be said that no other reflected greater honor upon the country. The declaration of his eulogist, Dr. Samuel G. Brown, before the University of Vermont, that "no foreign minister was more respected for learning, weight of character, and familiarity of affairs," only stated the common judgment of unprejudiced observers of his career in the two important posts which he held so long, and through such important periods.

As minister resident in Turkey during the five years from 1849, he had to deal with a variety of perplexing matters which required delicate handling, the exercise of tact, and the parrying sometimes with the arts of the most accomplished diplomats of other nations. These duties he met with an intelligence and will which brought him at once into respectful relations with his contemporaries. Indeed, his reputation for learning and capacity had preceded him, and from the first, though holding as a representative of our yet unregarded government, an inferior actual rank in the diplomatic corps, he was treated with marked consideration. His efforts on behalf of the throngs of unhappy and often wretched Hungarian and other refugees who flocked for shelter to Turkey after the abortive revolutions of

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