ngue in its strength and poetry will go, because here for years was
Tennyson's home--the home wherein most of his poems have been
written--Farringford,

Where, far from noise of smoke and town,
I watch the twilight falling brown
All round a careless-ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down.

You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine,
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous, under a roof of pine.

For groves of pine on either hand.
To break the blasts of winter, stand,
And farther on, the hoary Channel
Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.

The house is by no means beautiful, but it is in the midst of such a
network of peacefulest leafy lanes, the near-by surroundings are so
grand, the "groves of pine" and the "careless-ordered garden" look so
utterly fitted to be haunted by a poet's step and musings, the whole
place must be so associated, so saturated with his reveries and fancies,
so peopled with his creations, that it seems impossible any other spot
_could_ be home to him; and one feels a great pang of sadness that the
only true master of Farringford should have felt himself driven to leave
it, and to set up his household gods where he would be comparatively
unknown and unhunted.

An un-famous person finds it however, a little difficult to sympathize
with Tennyson's overpowering horror of the troublesomely affectionate
curiosity of which he is the object. Even such extreme cases of
hero-worship as that of the American who climbed the tree at Farringford
to survey its master at his leisure, and that of the bevy of ladies at a
London exhibition who, occupying a lounge before one of the special
pictures of the season, and beholding Tennyson approach for a look,
overwhelmed him with discomfiture by impressively ceding to him the
entire sofa,--even these, and others of their kind, have a humorous side
that might serve to qualify their impertinence and ill-breeding.

Neither Browning nor George Eliot is unknown by sight to the reading
world of London: neither was Thackeray nor Dickens. Did either of these
ever make outcry at the friendly if vulgar glances? Yet it is true that
no one of them, save Dickens, has been so widely read, and it is
probable that Browning, who looks like nothing so much as a hale, hearty
business-man, oftenest escapes detection, while Tennyson's late
photograph reproduces him so faithfully that