190 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



Alfred Tennyson: 



A correspondent in The Academy for October 23, 1897, has 

 observed the relation between Wordsworth's " Ruth " and a 

 story about Tennyson and Wordsworth told by Aubrey de Vera. 

 Tennyson had called on Wordsworth and found him rather 

 " cold." To stimulate " some latent ardours " in the older poet, 

 Tennyson told him " of a tropical island where the trees, when 

 they first come into leaf, were a vivid scarlet, every one of them 

 . . . one flush . . . the colour of blood." It seems that Words- 

 worth failed to be stimulated by this colorful story, and the 

 correspondent in The Academy explains why. He recalls that, 

 more than forty years before the two poets had this conversa- 

 tion, Wordsworth had written in " Ruth ": 



He told of the Magnolia, spread 

 High as a cloud, high over head! 

 The cypress and her spire; 

 — Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam 

 Cover a hundred leagues, and seem 

 To set the hills on fire. 



" The Old Poet," concludes the correspondent, " may have con- 

 sidered that there was no need to glow twice." " The problem 

 that this story poses is: Had Tennyson come upon the same book 

 which had inspired Word worth's stanza close to a half-century 

 before ? It is probable. Tennyson's interest in plants and animals 

 is well-known and Bartram was not only a botanist, an orni- 

 thologist and zoologist, but also an interesting describer of the 

 life and behavior of plants and animals. 

 In In Memoriam appear the lines 



Like birds the charming serpent draws. 



To drop head-foremost in the jaws 



Of vacant darkness and to cease (XXXIV, 14-16). 



Of course Tennyson could have found this popular belief in 

 numerous places. Yet Bartram's version is so strikingly similar 

 as to suggest itself as a probable source: 



""Tennyson and Wordsworth," The Academy, October 2, 1897, p. 331. 



