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TENNYSON, ALFRED. 



" Proclaim the faults he would not show ; 

 Break lock and seal : Betray the trust : 

 Keep nothing sacred, 'tis but just 



The many-headed beast should know." 



He gave the people of his best : 



His worst he kept, his best he gave. 



My Shakespeare's curse on clown and knave 



Who will not let his ashes rest ! 



Who make it seem more sweet to be 

 The little life of bank and brier, 

 The bird that pipes his lone desire 



And dies unheard within his tree, 



turn of James Russell Lowell, " Style is the man." 

 And to learn what Tennyson was, as well as what 

 he said, we must go to his life-work of poetry. 



The difference between prying, or even idle 

 curiosity, and a desire for knowledge of the out- 

 ward ways and looks of those who are gifted 

 above their fellows, is world-wide. Browning, 

 who wrote : 



Friends, the good man of the house at least 

 Kept house to himself till an earthquake came : 



'Tisthe fall of its frontage permits you to feast 

 On the inside arrangement you praise or blame. 



Than he that warbles long and loud 

 And drops at Glory's temple-gates, 

 For whom the carrion vulture waits 



To tear his heart before the crowd ! 



SOMERSET RECTORY : TENNYSON'S BIRTHPLACE. 



Outside should suffice for evidence : 

 And whoso desires to penetrate 



Deeper, must dive by the spirit-sense 

 No optics like yours, at any rate ! 



The English press was flooded, after his death, 

 with anecdotes of the man of whose daily life 

 during eighty-three years most of his country- 

 men had known little more than had the world 

 outside his native land ; but these anecdotes, 

 even if they could be repeated as authentic, are 

 nearly all insignificant and unsatisfactory. The 

 famous saying of Novalis, "Every Englishman 

 is an island," is truer of him than of any famous 

 Englishman that ever lived. 



In judging of him we must recall, not the 

 epitaph of Ben Jonson on Sir Charles Cavendish, 

 " I made my life my monument," but the die- 



was the most genial of men. He loved them, and 

 trusted to their memories his daily acts and 

 words, without a thought that they looked to- 

 criticise or listened to betray ; and the Robert 

 Browning of biography is the complement of the 

 Robert Browning of 'literature. To Tennyson 

 the social instincts of Browning were incompre- 

 hensible. To Carlyle's letters to Ralph Waldo 

 Emerson we are indebted for a description of 

 Tennyson's appearance in 1844 : 



One of the finest-looking men in the world. A 

 great shock of rough, dusty-dark hair : bright, 

 laughing, hazel eyes ; massive aquiline face most 

 massive, yet most delicate : of sallow-brown com- 

 plexion, almost Indian-looking : clothes cynically 

 loose, free and easy smokes infinite tobacco. His 



