CHAPTER XXXI

SOMERSBY AND THE TENNYSONS

Tennyson’s Poetry descriptive of his home—Bronze Bust of the Poet—Dedication Festival—A Long-lived Family—Dialect poems.

This little quiet village, tucked away in a fold of the hills, with the eastern ridge of the Wolds at its back and the broad meadow valley stretching away in front of it and disappearing eastwards in the direction of the sea, had no history till now. It was only in 1808 that Dr. George Clayton Tennyson came to Somersby as rector of Somersby and Bag Enderby, incumbent of Beniworth and Vicar of Great Grimsby. He came as a disappointed man, for his father, not approving, it is said, of his marriage with Miss ffytche of Louth (a reason most unreasonable if it was so) had disinherited him in favour of his younger brother Charles, who became accordingly Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt of Bayons Manor near Tealby.

Dr. Tennyson’s eldest son George was born in the parsonage at Tealby, in 1806, but died an infant. Frederick was born at Louth in 1807, and the other ten children at Somersby. Of these, the first two were Charles (1808) and Alfred (1809).

They were a family of poets; their father wrote good verse, and their grandmother, once Mary Turner of Caister, always claimed that Alfred got all his poetry through her. Her husband George was a member of Parliament and lived in the _old_ house at Bayons Manor.

[Sidenote: THE TENNYSONS]

From the fourteenth century the Tennysons, like their neighbours the Rawnsleys, had lived in Yorkshire; but Dr. Tennyson’s great-grandfather, Ralph, had come south of the Humber about 1700 to Barton and Wrawby near Brigg, and each succeeding generation moved south again. Thus, Michael, who married Elizabeth Clayton, lived at Lincoln, and was the father of George, the first Tennyson occupant of Bayons Manor. He had four children: George Clayton, the poet’s father; Charles, who took the name of Tennyson d’Eyncourt; Elizabeth, the “Aunt Russell” that the poet and his brothers and sisters were so fond of; and Mary, the wife of John Bourne of Dalby, of whom, though she lived so near to them, the Somersby children were content to see very little, for she was a rigid Calvinist, and once said to her nephew, “Alfred, when I look at you I think of the words of Holy Scripture, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.’” At Somersby, then, the poet and all the children after Frederick were born in this order: Charles, Alfred, Mary, Emilia, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, Matilda, Cecilia, Horatio. They were a singularly fine family, tall and handsome, taking after their father in stature (he was six feet two inches) and after their mother (a small and gentle person, whose good looks had secured her no less than twenty-five offers of marriage) in their dark eyes and Spanish colouring. She was idolised by her eight tall sons and her three handsome daughters, of whom Mary, who became Mrs. Ker, was a wonderfully beautiful woman. Frederick, who outlived all his brothers, dying at the age of ninety-one after publishing a volume of poems in his ninetieth year, alone of the family had fair hair and blue eyes. Matilda is alive still at the age of ninety-eight.

[Sidenote: DR. KEATE AND WELLINGTON]

The three elder sons all went to the Grammar School at Louth in 1813, when Alfred was but seven. Frederick went thence to Eton in 1817, and to St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1826; Charles and Alfred stayed at Louth till 1820, and they left it with pleasure for home teaching. Few could have been better qualified to teach than the Doctor. He had a good library and he was a classical scholar; could read Hebrew and was not without a knowledge of mathematics, natural science and modern languages; also he was a rigid disciplinarian, and, like all good schoolmasters, was held in considerable awe by his pupils. I should like to have heard him had anyone in his day outlined to him as the method of the future the Montessori system. This power of terrifying a whole class and causing each one of a set of ordinarily plucky English lads to feel for the space of half an hour that his heart was either in his mouth or in his shoes, would be incredible, were it not that there are so many English gentlemen now living who have experience of it. How well I remember the terrible, if irrational, state of funk which the whole of any class below the upper sixth was always in, when going up for their weekly lesson to that really most genial of men, Edward Thring, and it was the same elsewhere, and given the same sort of circumstances, the grown-up man could feel as frightened as the boy; witness this delightful story of the Iron Duke. No one could call him a coward, but on his return from Waterloo he went down on the fourth of June to Eton, and first told some one in his club that he meant to confess to Keate that he was the boy who had painted the Founder’s Statue or some such iniquity, the perpetrator of which Keate had been unable to discover. His friend extracted a promise that after his interview he would come and report at the club. He came, and being questioned by a group of deeply interested old Etonians, he said, “Well, it was all different, not at all like what I expected. I seized the opportunity when Keate came to speak with me by the window and said, “You remember the Founder’s Statue being defaced, sir?” “Certainly. Do you know anything about it?” he said sharply. “_No, sir._” “You don’t mean to say you said that?” “Certainly I do, and what is more, every one of you would, in the circumstances, have said just the same,” and then and there they all admitted it; so difficult is it to shake off the feelings of earlier days. And yet he was not naturally terrible, and I who write this, never having been under him, have, as a small boy, spoken to Keate without a shadow of fear.

This reminds me of a remark of Gladstone’s, who was giving us some delightful reminiscences of his days at Eton, and, speaking enthusiastically of Alfred Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam, when on my saying that I had spoken with Keate, he turned half round in his chair and said, “Well, if you say you have seen Keate I must believe you, but I should not have thought it possible.” He had forgotten for the moment that Keate, after retiring from Eton, lived thirteen years at Hartley Westpall (near Strathfieldsaye), where my father was curate.

To return to Somersby. We read in the memoir of the poet an amusing account, by Arthur Tennyson, of how the Doctor’s approach when they were skylarking would make the boys scatter.

[Sidenote: EARLY VOLUMES]

In 1828 Charles and Alfred went up to Trinity, Cambridge. Frederick was already a University prize-winner, having got the gold medal for the Greek ode, and Charles subsequently got the Bell Scholarship, and Alfred the English Verse prize. The boys’ first poetical venture was the volume “Poems by Two Brothers,” published in 1826 by Jackson of Louth, who gave them £20, more than half to be taken out in books. To this volume Frederick contributed four pieces, the rest were by Charles and Alfred. The latter used very properly to speak with impatience of it in later years as his “early rot.” And it is quite remarkable how comparatively superior is the work done by Alfred as a boy of fourteen, and how little one can trace in the two brothers’ volume of that lyrical ability which in 1830 produced _Mariana_ and _The Arabian Nights_, _The Merman_, _The Dying Swan_ and the _Ode to Memory_. The majority of these poems were written at Cambridge, but there is much reference to Somersby in at least two of them, and the song, “A Spirit haunts the year’s last hours,” was, we know, written in the garden there with its border of hollyhocks and tiger-lilies. In the _Ode to Memory_ he invokes her to arise and come, not from vineyards, waterfalls, or purple cliffs, but to

“Come from the Woods that belt the grey hill side, The seven elms, the poplars four That stand beside my father’s door, And chiefly from the brook that loves To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand. ... O! hither lead thy feet! Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds, Upon the ridgèd wolds.”

This is reminiscent of Somersby.

Then again, Memory calls up the pictures of “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea” at Mablethorpe, and the view over “the waste enormous marsh.”

In 1831 Dr. Tennyson died, aged fifty-two, and his sons left Cambridge. His widow lived on for thirty-four years, dying at the age of eighty-four, in 1865. They stayed on in the Somersby home till 1837, and a new volume came out in 1832, with a whole array of poems of rare merit, showing how much the poet’s mind had matured in that last year at Cambridge. This volume, like the Louth volume, is dated for the year after that in which it was really published. It carried Alfred to the front rank at once, for in it was _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Miller’s Daughter_, _Œnone_, _The May Queen_, _New Year’s Eve_, _The Lotus Eaters_, _A Dream of Fair Women_, and the _Lines to James Spedding_, on the death of his brother Edward. Only think of all these wonderful poems in a thin book of 162 pages written before he was twenty-three.

[Sidenote: THE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST]

To Mablethorpe and Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast we find frequent allusions in many poems, _e.g._, he speaks in _The Last Tournament_ of “the wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh,” and when the Red Knight in drunken passion, trying to strike the King overbalances himself, he falls—

“As the crest of some slow arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table shore, Drops flat, and after, the great waters break Whitening for half-a-league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing.”

A most accurate picture of that flat Lincolnshire coast with its “league-long rollers,” and hard, wet sands shining in the moonlight. In another place he speaks of “The long low dune and lazy-plunging sea.”

In his volume of 1832 there are many pictures drawn from this familiar coast, _e.g._, in _The Lotus Eaters_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Dream of Fair Women_; and in his 1842 volumes he speaks of

“Locksley Hall that in the distance overlooks the sandy flats And the hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts.”

A relative of mine was once reading this poem to the family of one of those Marsh farmers who had known “Mr. Alfred” when a youth, and who lived in the remotest part of that coast near the sandy dunes and far-spread flats between Skegness and “Gibraltar Point”; but she had not got far when at the line—

“Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime, With the fairy tales of science——”

she was stopped by the farmer’s wife. “Don’t you believe him, Miss, there’s nothing hereabouts to nourish onybody, ’cepting it be an owd rabbit, and it ain’t oftens you can get howd of them.”

[Sidenote: IN MEMORIAM]

_In Memoriam_ has many cantos descriptive of Somersby, both of the happy summer evenings on the lawn, when Mary

“brought the harp and flung A ballad to the bright’ning moon,”

or of the walks about home with Arthur Hallam—

by “Gray old grange or lonely fold, Or low morass and whispering reed, Or simple stile from mead to mead, Or sheepwalk up the windy wold.”

Or the winter nights when

“The Christmas bells from hill to hill Answer each other in the mist.”

And nothing could be more full of tender feeling than this farewell to the old home in Canto CI., beginning—

“Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway, The tender blossom flutter down, Unloved, that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away.”

And in Canto CII.—

“We leave the well-beloved place Where first we gazed upon the sky; The roofs that heard our earliest cry Will shelter one of stranger race.

We go, but ere we go from home As down the garden walks I move, Two spirits of a diverse love Contend for loving masterdom.

One whispers ‘here thy boyhood sung Long since its matin song, and heard The low love-language of the bird In native hazels tassel-hung.’

The other answers, ‘yea, but here Thy feet have strayed in after hours With thy lost friend among the bowers, And this hath made them trebly dear.’

These two have striven half the day, And each prefers his separate claim, Poor rivals in a loving game, That will not yield each other way.

I turn to go: my feet are set To leave the pleasant fields and farms; They mix in one another’s arms To one pure image of regret.”

[Sidenote: ARTHUR HALLAM]

Other sections speak of Arthur Hallam, and as each Christmas comes round, or each birthday of his friend, the poet’s feelings are voiced in such a way that, if we read it with care, the poem gives us a good deal of the author’s own life history.

Arthur Hallam died on September 15, 1833, at Vienna, and his remains were brought home at the end of the year and interred at Clevedon in Somersetshire on January 4, 1834.

“The Danube to the Severn gave The darken’d heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore And in the hearing of the wave.”

Immediately after his death Tennyson had turned to work as the one solace in his overwhelming grief, although, but for those dependent on his aid, such as his sister Emily who was betrothed to Hallam, he said that he himself would have gladly died. He wrote the fine classic poem _Ulysses_, in which he voiced the need he felt of going forward and braving the struggle of life, and then, before it had reached England, he wrote the first section of _In Memoriam_ No. 9 addressed to the ship with its sad burden.

“Fair ship that from the Italian shore Sailest the placid ocean plains With my lost Arthur’s loved remains, Spread thy full wings and waft him o’er.”

At some later time, possibly many years later, for _In Memoriam_ was sixteen years in the making, he added section 10—“I hear the noise about thy keel”—which carries on the subject, and also alludes to Somersby church

“where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God.”

For the time he wrote no more sections, but busied himself with _The Two Voices_, only towards the end of 1834 he wrote section 30, which he afterwards prefaced by sections 28 and 29, all describing the sad first Christmas of 1833, the first since Arthur’s death. In 28 he hears the bells of four village steeples near Somersby rising and sinking on the wind. He had more than once wished that he might never hear the Christmas bells again, but the sound of church bells had always touched him from boyhood, just as the words “far, far away” which always set him dreaming. In section 29 he bids his sisters, after decorating the church, make one more wreath for old sake’s sake, to hang within the house.

Then section 30 tells how they wove it.

“With trembling fingers did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth;”

After this we hear how they made a “vain pretence”

“Of gladness with an awful sense Of one mute Shadow watching all.”

They attempt the usual Christmas games, but they have no heart for them, and all pause and listen to the wind in the tree-tops and the rain beating on the window panes. Afterwards they sit in a circle and think of Arthur, they try to sing, but the carols only bring tears to their eyes, for only last year he, too, was singing with them. After this Alfred sits alone and watches for the dawn which rises, bringing light and hope.

[Sidenote: LEAVING SOMERSBY]

Section 104 brings us to another Christmas. Four years have elapsed since that last described. The Tennysons have left Somersby, with what regret they did so is beautifully told in the four sections immediately preceding this. And now, listening as of old for the Christmas bells, he hears not “four voices of four hamlets round,” but only

“A single peal of bells below, That wakens at this hour of rest A single murmur in the breast, That these are not the bells I know.”

The following section continues the subject. They are living at High Beech in Essex “within the stranger’s land.” He thinks of the old home and garden and his father’s grave. The flowers will bloom as usual, but there, too, are strangers,

“And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills.”

The change of place

“Has broke the bond of dying use.”

They put up no Christmas evergreens, they attempt no games and no charades. His sister Mary does not touch the harp and they indulge in no dancing, though it was a pastime of which they were extremely fond. But as of old Alfred looks out into the night and sees the stars rise, “The rising worlds by yonder wood,” and receives comfort. All this points to the sad year 1837, when they left the well-beloved place of his birth. And now in section 106 we have a New Year’s hymn of a very different character. It has a jubilant sound, and was certainly written some years after its predecessors. In 1837 he was in no mood to say “Ring happy bells across the snow.” But there is no allusion in this splendid hymn to Arthur Hallam at all, and in the following section they keep Arthur’s birthday, not any more in sadness, but

“We keep the day, with festal cheer, With books and music, surely we Will drink to him, whate’er he be And sing the songs he loved to hear.”

But to return to Somersby.

[Illustration: _Tennyson’s Home, Somersby._]

[Sidenote: THE OLD HOME]

The quaint house with its narrow passages and many tiny rooms, the brothers’ own particular little western attic with its small window from which they could see the ‘golden globes’ in the dewy grass which had “dropped in the silent autumn night,” the dining-room and its tall gothic windows with carved heads and graceful gables, the low grey tower patched with brick, just across the road, (for the “noble tall towered churches” spoken of in _The Memoir_ are not in this part of the county,) and the pre-Reformation (not “Norman”) cross near the porch, all these may still be seen much as they were one hundred years ago.

[Sidenote: THE CHURCH RE-OPENED]

True, the church has been lately put in good repair, and a fine bronze bust of the poet placed in the chancel. This was unveiled, and the church re-opened on Sunday, April 6, 1911, being the fulfilment of the plan projected on the occasion of the centenary celebration two years previously. On that Sunday the little church was more than filled with neighbours and relatives who listened to sermons from the Bishop of Lincoln and the Rev. Canon Rawnsley. Next day was Bank Holiday, and in a field near the rectory hundreds of Lincolnshire folk of every kind—farmers, tradespeople, gentry, holiday makers—assembled to do honour to their own Lincolnshire poet, and for a couple of hours listened intently to speeches about him and laughed with a will at the humours of the “Northern Farmer” read in their own native dialect, just as the poet intended; whilst the relatives of the poet and those who were familiar with his works looked with glad interest upon a scene of rural beauty which brought to the mind the descriptions in _The Lady of Shalott_, seeing on the slopes before them the promise of crops soon to “clothe the wold and meet the sky,” while far away to the left stretched the valley which pointed to Horncastle, the home of the poet’s bride, and on the right was the churchyard where the stern “owd Doctor” rests, and the church where for five and twenty years he ministered. The whole was a remarkable assemblage and a remarkable tribute, and the setting was a picture of quiet English rural life, one which the poet himself must often have actually looked out upon, and such as he has himself beautifully described in _The Palace of Art_:—

“And one an English home—gray twilight pour’d On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep—all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace.”

[Sidenote: A LONG-LIVED FAMILY]

The spirit of the poet seemed still to be a haunting presence in the place, and as then, so now and for all time his works speak to us. But three-quarters of a century have passed since a Tennyson has had his home in Somersby. They left in 1837, and though Mary went back at times to see the “beloved place,” Alfred never set eyes on it again. Charles married in that year Louisa Sellwood, whose mother was a sister of Sir John Franklin, and thirteen years later Alfred married her sister Emily. They left Somersby; but Lincolnshire still kept possession of Charles, who took the name of Turner in addition to his own, and ministered happily at Grasby near Caistor, being both vicar and patron of the living; and he and his wife both died there in the spring of 1879, at the comparatively early age, for a Tennyson, of seventy-one, for the family have been a remarkably long-lived one.

The Mother died in 1865, aged 84 Charles ” ” 1879 ” 71 Mary ” ” 1884 ” 74 Emilia ” ” 1889 ” 78 Alfred died on October 6, 1892 ” 83 Emily Lady Tennyson died in 1896 ” 83 Frederick ” ” 1898 ” 91 Arthur died in June, 1899 ” 85 Horatio died in October, 1899 ” 80 Cecilia died in 1909 ” 92

Matilda, who was born before Cecilia and Horatio, still survives. I went to see her in the summer of 1913. I found her well and full of early memories. She was a girl in the schoolroom when she first saw Arthur Hallam, an event of which she had a vivid recollection. I said, “I suppose you get out every fine day for a drive.” “Oh,” she said, “I go out for a walk every day and take the dog.” I thought that rather wonderful at her age. “Yes, I am ninety-seven,” she said, “and I mean to live to be 105.” I told her how Queen Victoria, who was always looking forward to reunion with the dear departed—but ever a ceaseless worker—used to say, “my dear, you should always act as if you were going to live for ever.”

[Sidenote: THE MASTER’S OPINION]

Alfred, who succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850, was raised to the Upper House in 1884. He is buried in Westminster Abbey side by side with his great contemporary, Robert Browning, and on his grave was laid a wreath of bay-leaves from a tree derived from the bay which flourishes over Virgil’s tomb near Naples, and on the wreath were Tennyson’s own magnificent lines, written at the request of the Mantuans for the nineteenth centenary of their poet’s death (1881).

“I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure Ever moulded by the lips of man.”

[Sidenote: THE POET’S RANGE OF KNOWLEDGE]

The recent appearance (October, 1913) of a notable volume of Tennyson’s poems, introduced by a Memoir and concluding with the poet’s own notes, may well serve as the text for some remarks on his poems generally. The volume bound in green cloth is priced at 10_s._ 6_d._ The Memoir is somewhat abbreviated from the two interesting volumes published by his son in 1897, which appeared again as the first four volumes of Messrs. Macmillan’s fine twelve-volume edition of 1898. There are, however, a few additions, notably a letter from the Master of Trinity, Cambridge, telling how he once, years ago, asked Dr. Thompson, the Master, whether he could say, not from later evidence, but from his recollection of what he thought at the time, which of the two friends had the greater intellect, Hallam or Tennyson. “Oh, Tennyson,” he said at once, with strong emphasis, as if the matter was not open to doubt. This is very high praise indeed, for Gladstone said that Hallam was far ahead of anyone at Eton in his day, and Monckton Milnes thought him the only man at Cambridge to whom he “bowed in conscious inferiority in all things.” The Notes first appeared in the very pleasant “Annotated Edition” edited also by Hallam Lord Tennyson within the last five years. The present generation can never know the delight of getting each of those little green volumes which came out between ’32 and ’55, and sequels to which kept following till ’92. But for general purposes it is far more convenient to have a one-volume edition, such as we have had for some time now. This new edition, however, with its Memoir, gives us what, as the years go by, is more and more valuable, enabling us to read the poet in his verses and to know what manner of man he was, and how his environment affected him at the different stages of his life. The Notes add an interest, and though it is seldom that in any but the _In Memoriam_ Cantos any explanation is needed to poems that are so clear and so easily intelligible, one gains information and finds oneself here and there let into the author’s secrets, which is always pleasant. The book runs to over a thousand pages, and is so beautifully bound that it lies open at any page you choose. There is an interesting appendix to the Notes, giving the music to “The Silent Voices,” composed by Lady Tennyson and arranged for four voices by Dr. Bridge for Lord Tennyson’s funeral at the Abbey, October 12, 1892. Also a previously unpublished poem of his later years, entitled “Reticence.” She is called the half-sister of Silence, and is thus beautifully described:—

“Not like Silence shall she stand, Finger-lipt, but with right hand Moving toward her lip, and there Hovering, thoughtful, poised in air.”

Then comes a facsimile of the poet’s MS. of “Crossing the Bar,” finally, besides the usual index of first lines, the book ends with an index to _In Memoriam_, and, what we have always wanted, an index to the songs.

Undoubtedly in the future this new edition will be the Tennyson for the library shelf, and a very complete and compact volume it is. Personally, I like the little old green volumes, but if I were now recommending an edition not in one volume, I would say, “Have the Eversley or Annotated Edition in nine volumes, which exactly reproduces the page and type of those old original volumes with the added advantage of the Notes.” It is hardly to be expected that the spell with which Tennyson bound all English-speaking people for three generations should not in a measure be relaxed, but though we have a fuller chorus of singers than ever before, and an unusually appreciative public, the attempt so constantly made to decry Tennyson has no effect on those who have for years found in him a charm which no poet has surpassed, and, indeed, it will be long before a poet arises who has, as Sir Norman Lockyer observes, “such a wide range of knowledge and so unceasing an interest in the causes of things and the working out of Nature’s laws, combined with such accuracy of observation and exquisite felicity of language.” Let me give one more criticism, and this time by a noted scholar, Mr. A. Sidgwick, who speaks of his “inborn instinct for the subtle power of language and for musical sound; that feeling for beauty in phrase and thought, and that perfection of form which, taken all together, we call poetry.” That perfection was the result of labour as well as of instinct. He had an ear which never played him false, hence he was a master of melody and metre, and he was never in a hurry to publish until he had got each line and each word right. “I think it wisest,” he wrote to one of his American admirers, “for a man to do his work in the world as quietly and as well as he can, without much heeding the praise or dispraise.” He was a lover of the classics, and in addressing Virgil on the nineteenth centenary of his death, as quoted above, he himself alludes to this. Without being what we call a great scholar, in his classic poems he is hard to beat, while in his translations of Homer he certainly has no equal. Then in his experiments in classic metres, whether in the “Metre of Catullus” or in the Alcaics in praise of Milton, his perfect accuracy is best understood if we turn to the similar experiments by living poets, who never go far without a blunder, at least none that I have ever read do.

[Sidenote: THE DIALECT POEMS]

To the Lincolnshire folk, his dialect poems, written in the dialect which was current in his youth at Spilsby and in the country about it (and still used there, I am glad to say, though not so universally or so markedly as of yore), give genuine pleasure, and are full of humour and of character, and it is a tribute to his accurate ear and memory that, after an absence of some twenty-seven years, he should have got the Lincolnshire so correct. He did it all right, but for fear he might have forgotten and got wrong, he asked a friend to look at it and criticise; unfortunately the friend lived in the north of the county and knew not the dialect of “Spilsbyshire,” so he altered it all to that which was spoken about Brigg, which is more like Yorkshire, and it had to be put back again. But some of the northern dialect has stuck, and in “The Northern Farmer Old Style” the ‘o’ is seen in ‘moind,’ ‘doy,’ ‘almoighty,’ etc., where the Spilsby sound would be better rendered by using an ‘a.’ This ‘o’ is never found in any of his subsequent dialect poems, and in a note to the text in the “Northern Cobbler” the poet points out that the proper sound is given by ‘ai.’

[Sidenote: FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS]

One sign of the remarkable way in which our Lincolnshire poet has made himself the poet of the English-speaking race is the extraordinary number of familiar quotations which he has given us. For the last fifty years in book and newspaper, in speech and sermon, some line or some phrase of his has constantly occurred which the user felt certain that his hearer or readers would recognise, until our literature has become tessellated with Tennysonian expressions, and they have always given that satisfaction which results from feeling that in using his words we have said the thing we wished to say in a form which could not be improved upon. In this respect of “daily popularity and application,” I think Shakespeare alone excels him, though Pope and Wordsworth may run him close.

[Illustration: _Little Steeping._]

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