Shortly after Tennyson had been buried in Westminster {127} Abbey, on an October day in 1892, a committee of his neighbours in Freshwater was formed for the purpose of erecting some memorial in the rural region where half his life had been passed. The memorial was meant to be a local and neighbourly undertaking, and it was thought, naturally enough, that it might be carried out in the form of a monument, tablet, or window, in the village church. But a more fitting idea was adopted. There stood on the summit of the High Down, "Tennyson's Down" as it is more generally known, a great beacon of heavy, blackened timber surmounted by a cresset, in which, on old nights, long ago, fire had blazed when alarms were signalled from hill to hill along the coast. This beacon had been taken over by the Lighthouse Board and had served through decades as a mark for navigation for the endless processions of ships passing up and down the English Channel and through the Solent by the Needles. Six or seven hundred feet above the sea, and near the edge of a long white cliff, it was easily seen by navigators bound inward or outward. For forty years Tennyson had made it a point of call in his almost daily walks. The committee believed that in the place of the old wooden structure a granite shaft could be erected, serving at once as a memorial to Tennyson and a beacon to seamen. The Reverend Doctor Merriman, Rector of Freshwater, Colonel Crozier, Doctor Hollis, and others, invited me to join the committee, and I did so, suggesting that Americans would wish to share in {128} erecting the proposed memorial, but that it would be scarcely possible for them to participate were the object undertaken purely as a village or neighbourhood tribute. The broader suggestion was adopted. A Celtic cross in Cornish granite was designed by Mr. J. L. Pearson, of the Royal Academy, and the Brethren of Trinity House (the Lighthouse Board) consented to preserve it in perpetuity if the committee would provide for its erection. I communicated with my old friend, Mrs. James T. Fields of Boston, the widow of Tennyson's American publisher, and she brought together an American committee for the purpose of coöperating with the one in Freshwater. Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes became her first associate and the first American subscriber. The daughters of Longfellow and Lowell were members of the American committee, and so were Mrs. Agassiz, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Margaret Deland, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mr. H. O. Houghton, Mr. George H. Mifflin, and others. Several American newspapers courteously drew attention to the proposed memorial, and Mr. George W. Smalley made an appeal through the New York Tribune, as I did through other papers. Subscriptions were purposely confined to small amounts so that the humblest lover of Tennyson could contribute his mite. I remember that among the first to come were