o out of doors. After a
short stroll on the lawn under the cedars, we went into the 'careless
ordered garden,' walked round it, and then sat down in the small
summer-house. It is a quaint rectangular garden, sloping to the west,
where nature and art blend happily,--orchard trees, and old-fashioned
flower-beds, with stately pines around, giving to it a sense of
perfect rest. This garden is truly a 'haunt of ancient peace.' Left
there alone with the bard for some time, I felt that I sat in the
presence of one of the Kings of Men. His aged look impressed me. There
was the keen eagle eye, and, although the glow of youth was gone, the
strength of age was in its place. The lines in his face were like the
furrows in the stem of a wrinkled oak-tree, but his whole bearing
disclosed a latent strength and nobility, a reserve of power, combined
with a most courteous grace of manner. I was also struck by the
neglige air of the man, so different from that of Browning or Arnold
or Lowell....

"We talked much of the sonnet. He thought the best in the language
were Milton's, Shakspere's, and Wordsworth's; after these three those
by his own brother Charles. He said, 'I at least like my brother's
next to those by the "three immortals."' ...

"He had no great liking, he said, for arranging the poets in a
hierarchy. He found so much that surpassed him in different ways in
all the great ones; but he thought that Homer, AEschylus, Sophocles,
Virgil, Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe,--these seven,--were the
greatest of the great, up to the year 1800. They are not all equal in
rank, and even in the work of that heptarchy of genius, there were
trivial things to be found....

"Just at this stage of our talk Mrs. Hallam Tennyson, Mrs. Douglas
Freshfield, and her daughter came up the garden-walk to the
summer-house. Miss Freshfield wore a hat on which was an artificial
flower, a lilac-branch. It at once caught Tennyson's eye. There was a
lilac-tree in bloom close at hand, and he said, 'What is that you are
wearing? It's a flowery lie, it's a speaking mendacity.' He asked how
she could wear such a thing in the month of May! We rose from the
bower, and all went down the garden-walk to see the fig-tree at the
foot of it, and sundry other things at the western entrance-door,
where Miss Kate Greenaway was painting. We returned along a twisting
alley under the rich green foliage of elms and ilexes....

"Listening to the wind in the trees and the sound o