On the whole, we cannot help closing this book with kindly feelings towards the editor, inasmuch as it aids in the good work of restoring the true portrait of the man who has suffered more than any other from the mischievous malignity of foes and the more mischievous indiscretion of certain of his friends. III. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON. 1809–1892. I. Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridge’s death, that for weeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself, “Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead.” In such a mental condition at this moment is an entire country, I think. “Tennyson is dead! Tennyson is dead!” It will be some time before England’s loss can really be expressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these. And if this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those few who knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love him—must needs love him above all others?—those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used to talk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote it—those who now are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:— There was none like him—none. [Picture: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, æt. 80. From a photography reproduced by the kind permission of Lord Tennyson] To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is mostly difficult. Especially is it so with regard to a man of poetic genius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an immense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define that charm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes, indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his own most affectionate and noble-tempered family, including that old friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti so deeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blind poet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love and to be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind. And yet I should find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossetti’s chameleon-like personality. So with other men and women I could name. This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth. Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson.