In November Tennyson took a house at Farringford, “as it was beautiful and far from the haunts of men.” There he settled to a country existence in the society of his wife, his two children (the second, Lionel, being in 1854 the baby), and there he composed _Maud_, while the sound of the guns, in practice for the war of the Crimea, boomed from the coast. In May Tennyson saw the artists, of schools oddly various, who illustrated his poems. Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt gave the tone to the art, but Mr Horsley, Creswick, and Mulgrave were also engaged. While _Maud_ was being composed Tennyson wrote _The Charge of the Light Brigade_; a famous poem, not in a manner in which he was born to excel—at least in my poor opinion. “Some one _had_ blundered,” and that line was the first fashioned and the keynote of the poem; but, after all, “blundered” is not an exquisite rhyme to “hundred.” The poem, in any case, was most welcome to our army in the Crimea, and is a spirited piece for recitation. In January 1855 _Maud_ was finished; in April the poet copied it out for the press, and refreshed himself by reading a very different poem, _The Lady of the Lake_. The author, Sir Walter, had suffered, like the hero of _Maud_, by an unhappy love affair, which just faintly colours _The Lady of the Lake_ by a single allusion, in the description of Fitz-James’s dreams:— “Then,—from my couch may heavenly might Chase that worst phantom of the night!— Again returned the scenes of youth, Of confident undoubting truth; Again his soul he interchanged With friends whose hearts were long estranged. They come, in dim procession led, The cold, the faithless, and the dead; As warm each hand, each brow as gay, As if they parted yesterday. And doubt distracts him at the view— Oh, were his senses false or true? Dreamed he of death, or broken vow, Or is it all a vision now?” We learn from Lady Louisa Stuart, to whom Scott read these lines, that they referred to his lost love. I cite the passage because the extreme reticence of Scott, in his undying sorrow, is in contrast with what Tennyson, after reading _The Lady of the Lake_, was putting into the mouth of his complaining lover in _Maud_. We have no reason to suppose that Tennyson himself had ever to bewail a faithless love. To be sure, the hero of _Locksley Hall_ is in this attitude, but then _Locksley Hall_ is not autobiographical. Less dramatic and impersonal in appearance are the stanzas— “Come not, when I am dead, To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave;” and “Child, if it were thine error or thy crime I care no longer, being all unblest.”