The biographer has invited a few of the poet’s friends to furnish their impressions of him. These could not fail to be interesting; it is pleasant to know what impression Tennyson made upon men of such diverse characters as the Duke of Argyll, Jowett, Tyndall, Froude, and others. But so far as a vital portrait of the man is concerned they were not needed, so vigorously does the man live in the portrait painted by him who knew the poet best of all. “For my own part,” says the biographer, “I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. There is also the impossibility of fathoming a great man’s mind; his deeper thoughts are hardly ever revealed. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography, for None can truly write his single day, And none can write it for him upon earth. “However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment, but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies. “For those who cared to know about his literary history he wrote ‘Merlin and the Gleam.’ From his boyhood he had felt the magic of Merlin—that spirit of poetry—which bade him know his power and follow throughout his work a pure and high ideal, with a simple and single devotedness and a desire to ennoble the life of the world, and which helped him through doubts and difficulties to ‘endure as seeing Him who is invisible.’ Great the Master, And sweet the Magic, When over the valley, In early summers, Over the mountain, On human faces, And all around me, Moving to melody, Floated the Gleam. “In his youth he sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, of the ‘ridged wolds’ that rose above his home, of the mountain-glen and snowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies, with which his imaginary world was peopled. Then was heard the ‘croak of the raven,’ the harsh voice of those who were unsympathetic— The light retreated, The Landskip darken’d, The melody deaden’d, The Master whisper’d, ‘Follow the Gleam.’ “Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to follow his ideal. And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by the harmonies of nature, ‘the warble of water,’ and ‘cataract music of falling torrents,’ the inspiration of the poet was renewed. His Eclogues and English Idyls followed, when he sang the songs of country life and the joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through, Innocent maidens, Garrulous children, Homestead and harvest, Reaper and gleaner, And rough-ruddy faces Of lowly labour.