ailway van, seemed to take a real delight
in building up his sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to
make each deliverance a work of art....

And what a beautiful mind his was, and what lessons of beauty he has
taught us all. At the same time, he could not bear anything
unbeautiful, and anything low or ignoble in men revolted him and made
him thoroughly unhappy. I remember once taking Emerson to lunch with
him, in his rooms in Corpus Christi College. Emerson was an old friend
of his, and in many respects a cognate soul. But some quite
indifferent subject turned up, a heated discussion ensued, and Ruskin
was so upset that he had to quit the room and leave us alone. Emerson
was most unhappy, and did all he could to make peace, but he had to
leave without a reconciliation....

Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first
visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in
High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment
was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a poet
laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford
was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked
him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time
almost all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o'clock.
My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our unexpected guest.
He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out
by finding the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He
was pleased, however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the
only advantage he got from being a poet laureate, that he generally
received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast,
we had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of
cutlets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived, to
see him whip off the cover of a hot dish, and to hear the exclamation,
"Mutton chops! the staple of every bad inn in England." However, these
were but minor matters, though not without importance in the eyes of a
young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the immortals. He was
full of interest and inquiries about the East, more particularly about
Indian poetry, and I believe it was then that I told him that there
was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask him why there
should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel Johnson seems