said:
meant to write a whole great poem on
it, and began it in the Morte d'Ar-
thur.' I said I should do it in twenty
years; but the review stopped me.
By King Arthur I always meant the
soul, and by the Round Table the pas-
sions and capacities of a man. There
is no grander subject in the world than
King Arthur."

"When I was twenty-four I must be fought out to the end. It was:
more written with the feeling of his
loss upon me than many poems in' In
Memoriam.' . . . It's too hopeful, this
poem, more than I am myself.
The general way of its being written
was so queer that if there were a blank
space I would put in a poem. '. ..‘I
think of adding another to it, a specula-
tive one, bringing out the thoughts of
the 'Higher Pantheism,' and showing
that all the arguments are about as good
on one side as the other, and thus throw
man back more on the primitive im-
pulses and feelings."

When reading "In Memoriam " he said: "It is rather the cry of the whole human race than mine. In the poem altogether private grief swells out into thought of, and hope for, the whole world. It begins with a funeral and He explained that there were nine ends with a marriage- begins with natural groups or divisions in the poem, death and ends in promise of a new as follows: from Stanza I. to Stanza life -a sort of divine comedy, cheerful | VIII.; from IX. to XX. ; from XX. to at the close. It is a very impersonal XXVII.; from XXVIII. to XLIX. ; poem as well as personal. There is from L. to LVIII.; from LIX. to more about myself in Ulysses,' which LXXI.; from LXXII. to XCVIII. ; was written under the sense of loss and from XCIX. to CIII.; from CIV: to that all had gone by, but that still life CXXXI.

6

letter to the Spectator is the best, and indeed might | it so much that I sent it by the Dean of West-be called the only true, critique of the Idylls. It minster" (Stanley)," who was here the other day,. is very succinctly and cleanly written, and liked to the queen with the Idylls."

The dead man touch'd me from the past, The first reading was His living soul was

When reading "Maud," he said: of existence and bear it on her own, "It should be called 'Maud, or the but she was, besides, his continual counMadness.' It is slightly akin to 'Ham-sellor, critic, sympathizer, and friend in let.' No other poem (a monotone with all his art and work. No marvel that plenty of change and no weariness) has he constantly exclaimed, "My wife is been made into a drama where suc- the most wonderful woman in the cessive phases of passion in one person world." take the place of successive persons.

The whole of the stanzas where he is mad in Bedlam, from 'Dead, long dead,' to 'Deeper, ever so little deeper,' were written in twenty minutes, and some mad doctor wrote to me that nothing since Shakespeare has been so good for madness as this."

At the end of "Maud" he declared, "I've always said that 'Maud' and 'Guinevere,' were the finest things I've written." But want of space compels me to forego further quotations.

It is impossible to attempt, however slightly, any sketch of Tennyson "in his habit as he lived," without one brief and reverent word of reference to his domestic life and to her who was in every sense and way the half of it.

Not only did she take from off his shoulders all the burden of the details LIVING AGE. VOL. LXXXI. 4190

His gratitude was profound, though mixed sometimes with pain at the devotion and laborious self-sacrifice which he vainly tried to moderate, and which undermined her strength and health.

"She has overwrought herself,” he wrote to me, "with the multifarious correspondence of many years, and is now suffering for it. I trust that with perfect quiet she will recover; but it will never again do for her to insist upon answering every idle fellow who writes to me. I always prayed her not to do so, but she did not like the unanswered (she used to say) to feel wroth and unsatisfied with me."

To his wife's perpetual and brooding love and care of him, and afterwards to his son's equal and measureless devotion, the world owes, under Providence, many years of Tennyson's prolonged life and many of his immortal poems. JAMES KNOWLES.

From The Contemporary Review. THE MEDIEVAL COUNTRY-HOUSE.

I.

Who knows? Yet we who wish to visit the medieval country-house, we will take a humbler way. We will

66

dear to Master Eustace, where there
are gardens sweet with rose, gladiolus,
and mint-where there are meadows,
vineyards, and 66 a noble willow wood,"
""
with baths of all kinds to refresh the
weary traveller: "bains et estuves et
le ruissel courant."

ONE of my friends, by race a Per-mount pillion behind some solid, clerky sian, a native of the Russian Caucasus, person: Maistre Jehan Froissart or calls on me sometimes on his homesick Maistre Eustache Deschamps, sure of days, and talks about the castle he has his road and garrulous about his masleft at home. It is a great, strong cas-ters. Thus we will jog along, gossiping, tle, with stone towers and wooden bal- from place to place, alighting here and conies, and a vast hall within where there at some stately castle, where the the lord sits in state by the cavernous lord, like that Count of Foix who sent hearth and listens to the wandering for Froissart from his inn, est le minstrels who sing long ballads to their seigneur du monde qui plus volontiers instruments. Not only singers come voit estrangers pour ouyr nouvelles there, but itinerant pedlars, the acro- or we will turn in at some pleasant bats of the fair, pilgrims to some dis- manor, such as that manor of Cachant, tant shrine, travellers of many sorts who bring to the high-perched castle views of the outer world. If the lord should wish to see that world at closer quarters, in the nearest city he has his "hostel" in some wealthy burgher's house, and thither sometimes he repairs during the dead weeks of the winter. If the countryside afford a good granBut with the first bud or sprout on the ite rock surmounting a hill or mound of topmost sprig, he is back in the castle. any height, that situation has generally For now the real life of the noble be-been chosen for the castle, encircled by gins the season of the chase! My its protecting precipice. But in central lord is more or less of a scholar, and in France at all events, such sites are few; the winter time he fingers amorously and, contrasted with the German or his rare collection of illuminated manu- Italian fortress on the hill, we find scripts (we possess one, for which his more frequently the manor emmy nephew offers us a village in Kara- estangs," so often sung of old poets— bag!), brought together at an infinite the castle built like Rochester, or Meexpense and trouble. But how far he lun on the brink or island of a river, prefers the summer morning, when, isolated by moats and defended by enhawk in hand, the noble hunters troop circling towers. Such was, for examforth on their gay caparisoned horses to ple, the Castle of Bièvre, commended chase eagle or heron on the mountain by Deschamps in his 454th ballad. heights! Deep down in the dungeon underground perchance some penitent wonders if the spring will ever come for there are dungeons still in the castles of Karabag, though the lords have no longer right of life and death. Here the nobles live a merry life, united among themselves and seeing few who are not of their order, save the em-century, the castles were no longer peror's hated tax-collector or the Jew doctor who comes upon his rounds, an infinite number of little powders sewn into the sash about his waist. Who knows, if we could be spirited to Karabag, but we should find there the Middle Ages, in flesh and blood alive !

66

La place est forte et de noble cloison.
Emmy l'estang où le donjon se lance
Trois tours y a de pierre et de moellon.

Each tower is three stories high, and
each stands well in advance of the cas-
tle wall, the entry defended by a pu-
issant pont-levis." By the fourteenth

built with a sole view to refuge and defence; the nobles no longer dwelt there as a last resort in war time, living in the guard-room with their garrison, and directing the defence amid the treasure. The castles of that time of transition were very habitable palaces;