ll had my hair down.

It was easy enough to me to believe that Tennyson was a poet. He showed
it in everything, although he was entirely free from any assumption of
the poetical role. That Browning, with his carefully brushed hat, smart
coat, and fine society manners was a poet, always seemed to me far more
incomprehensible than his poetry, which I think most people would have
taken straightforwardly and read with a fair amount of ease, if certain
enthusiasts had not founded societies for making his crooked places
plain, and (to me) his plain places very crooked. These societies have
terrorized the ordinary reader into leaving Browning alone. The same
thing has been tried with Shakespeare, but fortunately the experiment in
this case has proved less successful. Coroners' inquests by learned
societies can't make Shakespeare a dead man.

At the time of my first marriage, when I met these great men, I had
never had the advantage--I assume that it _is_ an advantage!--of a
single day's schooling in a _real school_. What I have learned outside
my own profession I have learned from my environment. Perhaps it is this
which makes me think environment more valuable than a set education, and
a stronger agent in forming character even than heredity. I should have
written the _externals_ of character, for primal, inner feelings are, I
suppose, always inherited.

Still, my want of education may be partly responsible for the
unsatisfactory blankness of my early impressions. As it takes two to
make a good talker, so it takes two to make a good hero--in print, at
any rate. I was meeting distinguished people at every turn, and taking
no notice of them. At Freshwater I was still so young that I preferred
playing Indians and Knights of the Round Table with Tennyson's sons,
Hallam and Lionel, and the young Camerons, to sitting indoors noticing
what the poet did and said. I was mighty proud when I learned how to
prepare his daily pipe for him. It was a long churchwarden, and he liked
the stem to be steeped in a solution of sal volatile, or something of
that kind, so that it did not stick to his lips. But he and all the
others seemed to me very old. There were my young knights waiting for
me; and jumping gates, climbing trees, and running paper-chases are
pleasant when one is young.

It was not to inattentive ears that Tennyson read his poems. His reading
was most impressive, but I think he read Browning's "Ride from Ghent to
Aix" better t