he declares he can go
nowhere without being known. Of the mischievous fidelity of the picture
I am myself a witness, for having driven up one day to the Victoria
station of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, by which
Tennyson's new home is reached, and being busied with extricating from
my purse the cabman's fare, my companion suddenly caught my arm, crying
out, "Oh, S----, there's Tennyson!" The purse dropped in my lap: he was
so near the cab I could have touched him, and of course he had heard the
exclamation and knew why two ladies had so utterly forgotten their
manners; but if he had also known that one of us had a certain
shabby-through-use edition of all his earlier poems, which during a
space of a dozen years had never been separated from her, traveling in a
crowded trunk for even the shortest absences from home--that for months
of that time she had been used to read therefrom to a precocious child
who came every night in her night-gown to nestle in the reader's lap and
listen to the music without which she declined to undertake the business
of sleep,--I think the look bestowed upon the absorbed twain might well
have been more amiable than the one which really fell upon them and
blighted their innocent delight. It was all the photograph's fault, and,
enthusiastic American sisters, be content with beholding the
representation, for the original looks neither more patient, more
gracious, nor more hopeful. So sensitive is he to looks which have in
them any recognition, any stress, that a visitor at Farringford relates
that, wandering about the cliffs and shores with his host, the latter
would every now and then nervously cry out, "Come! let's walk on--I hear
tourists!" and his companion, delaying a little, would be able to answer
reassuringly, "Oh no: see! there's nothing in sight but a flock of
sheep."

Perhaps I ought to confess that finding in one of the Farringford lanes
a lovely little green gate opening into one of the "groves of pine," I
_did_ just try the latch. The door opened, and it looked all so still
and shaded, whispery and ferny, so exactly as if Tennyson might any
minute come pacing down between the tall trees, as if the "Talking Oak"
was sure to stand just round a sun-lighted corner of the wood, that,
incited thereto by a countrywoman of the poet's, who, herself a member
of the guild, should know how poets' possessions may worthily be
approached, I let my sacrilegious feet carry me a littl