It lay in a great veracity of soul—in a simple-mindedness so childlike that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of his exquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even the subtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all subtlety as his. “Homer,” you would have said, “might have been such a man as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetry’s very voice. But Tennyson works in a language which has to be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art. How can this great inspired child, who yet has the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus, be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’ ‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of Fair Women’?” As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguise their thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to _him_ to declare his thoughts without disguise. He knew of but one justification for the thing he said, viz., that it was the thing he thought. _Arrière pensée_ was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a man carries out-speaking to such a pass as this, is he not apt to become a somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern society? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. But the honest ring in the voice—which, by-the-by, was strengthened and deepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accent—softened and, to a great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behind this uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthright English gentleman. As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guest or bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall, far beyond the height of average men, his naturally fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind—as he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but a great gentleman, who was also much more. Up to the last a man of extraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen. A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thus standing at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearance in words which are literally accurate at least:— A poet should be limned in youth, they say, Or else in prime, with eyes and forehead beaming Of manhood’s noon—the very body seeming To lend the spirit wings to win the bay; But here stands he whose noontide blooms for aye, Whose eyes, where past and future both are gleaming With lore beyond all youthful poets’ dreaming, Seem lit from shores of some far-glittering day.