The friendship thus preluded was to last until death closed it. The record of it lies here in old diaries and in sheaves of letters, faithfully treasured; a chronicle of some forty years with all the little troubles, the joys and sorrows of the two households, intimately shared. It was a four-cornered friendship, one of husband and wife with husband and wife, but the correspondence passed almost entirely between the wives. Men had already for the most part abandoned the practice of letter-writing outside their business and families, but at the little rosewood drawing-room escritoires at which we of the many documents are tempted to smile, Victorian women fed the flame of friendship with--here the metaphor becomes a little mixed--a constant flow of ink. Not that the two women who kept up this correspondence were idle. All that Emily Tennyson on her invalid sofa did for her Poet, is it not written in the book of his Biography? Her friend, Marian Bradley, was yet busier than she, having the cares and duties of a mother of a large family, besides those incident to the wife of a man who was successively Head Master of a great school, Head of an Oxford College, and Dean of Westminster. Granville Bradley was twelve years younger than Alfred Tennyson; an interval in age which permits at once of veneration and of intimacy. It was at the Lushingtons' house that my father, as an undergraduate of one-and-twenty, first met the young Poet, and became his admirer; but it was not until twelve years later that the admirer became also the friend. My mother tells in her diary how in that summer of the birthday meeting, the two men roamed the country together, poetizing, botanizing, geologizing. The enthusiasm of science had begun to seize on all thinking humanity, and if botany was considered the only suitable science for ladies, geology had something like a boom among the privileged males. I can see my father now, a slight, active little figure, armed with a hammer and girt with a capacious knapsack, setting forth joyous as a chamois-hunter, for a day's sport among the fossils of the Isle of Wight cliffs. But above all it was the communion of spirit, the play of ideas which interested the two and drew them together. "They talked from 12 noon to 10 P.M., almost incessantly, this day," writes my mother, "Tennyson walking back with him (some three miles) to the Warren farm, still talking."