'Perhaps not, but my intention was particularly so.'
'Explain !'

'Well, the fact is, I heard you were showing Tennyson the sights; and knowing how shy he is of strangers, I thought the most friendly thing I could do was to steer clear of your party.' 'My dear fellow, I'll make that all right.'

And he did within a few hours; for that afternoon I got a note from him saying, 'Tennyson hopes you will spend the evening with us. Don't bother about dressing. Come just as you are, if not exactly just as you were when last we met.'

The writer was my old friend John George Butcher, now a well-known figure at the English Bar and in the House of Commons.

On the outbreak of the storm he and his two sisters had run over from Mount Trenchard, their brother-in-law Lord Monteagle's country seat, in company with Tennyson and his son Hallam, and I found this party awaiting me at Moore's Hotel. Tennyson received me beaming, evidently thoroughly amused at my marine encounter with Butcher that morning. He offered me a long pipe, pressed me into a chair at his right hand, and plunged into animated conversation.

His personality more than satisfied me, though I had been led to anticipate much from Mrs. Cameron's and Rejlander's artistic photographs.

'The large dark eyes, generally dreamy, but with an occasional gleam of imaginative alertness,' as de Vere describes them, still varied between haunting softness and eager brightness; the great shock of rough dusky dark hair' that Carlyle wrote of in 1842 had been somewhat subdued, but far from subjugated by time; it revealed more of the poet's 'high-built brow,' but its raven hue was unimpaired. The massive aquiline face' was still most massive, yet most delicate,' and still of a healthy bronze. His gestures were free and spontaneous, his voice full and musical. It was impossible to believe he was in his seven

tieth year.

His accent and speech both surprised me. I was quite prepared for the fastidious articulation and premeditated hesitation in the choice of words to which so many distinguished English University men are prone. There was a rich burr in his accent, Lincolnshire, I suppose, and a pungent directness in his utterance which were as refreshing as they were unlooked for,

6

Then he evidently possessed the rare knack of getting the very best out of his fellow talkers at the same time that he gave them much more than he got for it. At this interval of time I cannot, of course, do more than record the general drift of our conversation and the opinions he expressed; his exact words have escaped me, except in an occasional instance. First we talked of the sea, and here he spoke notably. He said that a great storm, such as we had witnessed, was a wonderful and terrible sight of impotent passion, and he quoted St. Jude's words, Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame.' But he had once seen roll in out of the Atlantic, suddenly, over a still sea and under a still sky, a succession of stupendous billows, earthquake waves perhaps, which completely engulfed the shore, and whose awful serenity impressed his imagination far more deeply than any tempest he had ever experienced. It is easy for all who have heard him thus discourse to believe, as we are now told by his son, that he claimed a Norse ancestry, 'that he loved the sea for its own sake, and also because English heroism has ever been conspicuous on shipboard,' and that he 'gloried,' therefore, in having made these lines in 'Boadicea: '

Fear not, isle of blowing woodland, isle of silvery parapets!
Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be celebrated,
Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable;

and

Roared as when the roaring breakers boom and blanch on the precipices.

When thus talking of the storm to me he rolled out a lire from Homer, and challenged Butcher, a fine Greek scholar, to say where it came from. I could imagine that it was

ἐξ ἀκαλαρρείταο βαθυρρόου ὠκεανοιο,

a favourite example to him of sounding lines, according to his This line and the well-known

son.

βῆ δ' ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης,

he would say, are grander in our modern Northern pronunciation than in the soft Southern talk of the Greeks, with a difference as between the roar of the Northern sea and the hissing of the Mediterranean.

The rugged, open-throated, deep-chested vocalisation of his own north-eastern folk, which he himself so finely illustrated by his chanting of verse, when gathered into the grandly rolling

Yorkshire choruses, affords a similar contrast to the smoother and softer but thinner and sharper concerted singing of southern England.

In this connection his son's recently published biography of Tennyson may well be quoted:

'He never cared greatly for the sea on the south coast of England; not a grand sea,' he would say, 'only an angry curt sea. It seems to shriek as it recoils with the pebbles along the shore; the finest seas I have ever seen are at Valencia, Mablethorpe, and in West Cornwall. At Valencia the sea was grand, without any wind blowing and seemingly without a wave; but with the momentum of the Atlantic behind, it dashes up into foam, blue diamonds it looks like, all along the rocks, like ghosts playing at hide and seek. When I was in Cornwall it had blown a storm of wind and rain for days, and all of a sudden fell into perfect calm; I was a little inland of the cliffs; when after a space of perfect silence, a long roll of thunder, from some wave rushing into a cavern I suppose, came up from the distance, and died away. I never felt silence like that.'

He talked a good deal of that visit to Kerry, of the scenery and of the people.

It was in 1848, the year of revolutions, and the political electricity had even penetrated to Valencia; and Tennyson, while studying the Atlantic breakers from the mountain, was cautiously followed up by a conspirator, attracted no doubt by his distinctly un-English dress and appearance. The man finally closed upon Tennyson and whispered in his ear, 'Be you from France?' I could narrate a similar experience. When in Fenian times my father (now the Bishop of Limerick) and I were belated during an archæological ramble in an Irish-speaking part of Kerry, our nocturnal appearance at a remote homestead led to a guarded inquiry whether the French fleet were in the Bay, as reported-so expressed as to convey the belief that our coming was in some way connected with it.

Tennyson was evidently greatly interested in the Irish play of character, and in its dramatic as well as its humorous side. He told us of his drive to see a waterfall on Hungry Hill, and of an amusing conversation he had with the carman, a Celt of the type of Daniel O'Connell, or to take an instance from to-day-of Denis O'Sullivan, the Shamus O'Brien' of Stanford's opera, so distinguished-looking indeed that when he claimed the closest

connection with the great old families of McCarthy More and The O'Sullivan Bear, and emphasised the statement by the production of a ponderous old seal containing their arms quartered together, Tennyson felt quite inclined to believe his final contention that if he had his rights he should be reigning in these parts. He looked an Irish chief,' said Tennyson; and though the poet did not tell me so at the time, his driver, it appears, on being rallied by the waiter after returning to the inn from which they had driven, for talking to the gentleman of his 'great blood,' drew himself up, answering, 'The gentleman is a gentleman, every inch of him.' Noblesse oblige, and on that drive in search of one waterfall it had rained such cataracts that they were fain to take shelter in a wretched little roadside shealing occupied by a poor woman and her little son Johnny. To use Tennyson's own words as given by his son:

"The "King of Connaught" dried my stockings and went to sleep on a bench. The woman drew me up a stool to the turf fire with the courtly air of a queen. While he was asleep, I heard the mother say to the boy "Johnny," several times (she didn't speak a word of English). The King awoke, and, as we were going out, I said "Johnny," and the little boy with a protuberant paunch (protuberant, I suppose, from eating potatoes) ran forward and I gave him a sixpence. The woman, with her black hair over her shoulders, and her eyes streaming with tears, passionately closed her hands over the boy's hand in which was the sixpence. When the King and I climbed into the car, I, in my stupid Saxon way, thinking it was the beggarly sixpence that had made the woman grateful, expressed my astonishment at such gratitude. "It was not the sixpence, your honour, it was the stranger's gift." My recollection of the story as told to me is a slight variant upon this version. According to it the woman cried out something in Irish, and Tennyson asked the driver for its meaning when they got outside, on which he replied, 'She was blessing God, your honour, that the child's hand had been crossed with silver by the dark-haired stranger.' And certainly I don't remember in Tennyson's version of the story as told me that claim to the kingdom of Connaught was made by the driver. Even in fun a McCarthy or an O'Sullivan would never have advanced such a claim. Tennyson saw I was much affected by his story, which was very strikingly told, and said, 'There! you must make a poem out of "The Stranger's Gift."

He went on

to

say that he much desired to write an Irish poem, and was on the look-out for a suitable subject. Could I make a suggestion?

I ran over in my mind the themes with which I was familiar, and suddenly bethought me of my friend Dr. Joyce's Old Celtic Romances,' some of which he had shown me in manuscript and which were to be published in a few months' time.

I told him of these, and undertook that he should have an early copy of the book. When it appeared I took care to fulfil my promise. Tennyson's Voyage of Maeldune' was the outcome. In his notes quoted by his son he writes, 'I read the legend in Joyce's "Celtic Legends "Celtic Legends "' (it should be Joyce's 'Old Celtic Romances'), 'but most of the details are mine.' biographer adds, 'By this story he intended to represent in his own original way the Celtic genius, and he wrote the poem with a genuine love of the peculiar exuberance of the Irish imagina

tion.'

His

When telling Tennyson of Joyce's book, several of the tales in which relate to Finn and his heroic companions, I had hoped he would have treated one of them, by choice 'Oisin (Ossian) in Tirnanoge' (The Land of Youth) rather than 'The Voyage of Maeldune.' For the mention of Ossian had started him off into an expression of admiration for some passages in Macpherson's work for which I was not prepared.

'Listen to this,' he said:

666

"O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art for ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. dark with tempest, when thunder rolls and lookest in thy beauty from the clouds, storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more; whether thy yellow hair flows in the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. . . .'

When the world is lightning flies, thou and laughest at the

Is it not fine?' he said. I owned it was, but have never ceased to regret that the much finer, older, and truer Irish Ossianic gold, such as that for example which glitters in the