"Mr. Leland," pursued Tennyson, as gravely as ever, grasping all the absurdity of the thing with evident enjoyment, "you have no idea how tourists trespass here to get at me. They climb over my gate and look in at my windows. It is a fact--one did so only last week. But I declare that you are the very first poet and man of letters who ever came here--to steal blackberries!" Here he paused, and then added forcibly-- "I _do_ believe you are a gypsy, after all." Then we talked of the old manor-houses in the neighbourhood, and of the famous Mortstone, a supposed Saxon rude monolith near by. I thought it prehistoric, because I had dug out from the pile of earth supporting and coeval with it (and indeed only with a lead-pencil) a flint flake chipped by hand and a bit of cannel coal, which indicate dedication. My host listened with great interest, and then told me a sad tale: how certain workmen employed by him to dig on his land had found a great number of old Roman bronze coins, but, instead of taking them to him, had kept them, though they cared so little for them that they gave a handful to a boy whom they met. "I told them," said Tennyson, "that they had been guilty of malappropriation, and though I was not quite sure whether the coins belonged to me or to the Crown, that they certainly had no right to them. Whereupon their leader said that if I was not satisfied they would not work any longer for me, and so they went away." I had on this occasion a long and interesting discussion with Mr. Tennyson relative to Walt Whitman, and involving the principles or nature of poetry. According to the poet-laureate, poetry, as he understood it, consisted of elevated or refined, or at least superior thought, expressed in melodious form, and in this latter it seemed to him (for it was very modestly expressed) that Whitman was wanting. Wherein he came nearer to the truth than does Symonds, who overrates, as it seems to me, the value, as regards art and poetry, of simply _equalising_ all human intelligences. Though I never met Symonds, there was mutual knowledge between us, and when I published my "Etrusco-Roman Remains in Popular Traditions," which contains the results of six years' intimacy with witches and fortune-tellers, he wrote a letter expressing enthusiastic admiration of it to Mr. T. Fisher Unwin. Now all three of these great men are dead. I shall speak of Whitman anon, for in later years for a long time I met him almost daily. I can remember that during the conversation Tennyson expressed himself, rather to my amazement, with some slight indignation at a paltry review abusing his latest work; to which I replied--