My mother writes of Tennyson in 1888, after thirty-three years of friendship, "he grows more and more unselfish and thoughtful for others." She noted how the self-absorption and melancholy of his earlier years passed away in the calm sunshine of his old age. The passing years had brought changes to others. The brilliant little scholar with the tongue which had once held in check the boldest offender against the laws of God or the Latin Grammar--although it never smote to defend or advance himself--had ripened into the constant peacemaker; one of the gentlest and humblest of that little band, who really walk in the footsteps of their Master Christ, and make those footsteps clearer for ever to all whose privilege it has been to live in their intimacy. At length the day came when, full of years and honours, the famous singer, the Great Voice of Victorian England, lay silenced in the solemn shade of Westminster Abbey, with the clamour of London about him instead of the roar of his sea. It was his old friend, he who had walked and talked with him those long hours of the summer day and night thirty-seven years before, who pronounced the last blessing above his grave. And now that friend also sleeps, as it were, in the next room. NOTES ON CHARACTERISTICS OF TENNYSON By the late MASTER OF BALLIOL (PROFESSOR JOWETT) Absolute truthfulness, absolutely himself, never played tricks. Never got himself puffed in the newspapers. A friend of liberty and truth. Extraordinary vitality. Great common sense and a strong will. The instinct of common sense at the bottom of all he did. Not a man of the world (in the ordinary sense) but a man who had the greatest insight into the world, and often in a word or a sentence would flash a light. Intensely needed sympathy. A great and deep strength. He mastered circumstances, but he was also partly mastered by them, _e.g._ the old calamity of the disinheritance of his father and his treatment by rogues in the days of his youth. Very fair towards other poets, including those who were not popular, such as Crabbe. He had the high-bred manners not only of a gentleman but of a great man. He would have wished that, like Shakespeare, his life might be unknown to posterity. _Conversation._ In the commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius. He had abundance of fire, never talked poorly, never for effect. As Socrates described Plato, "Like no one whom I ever knew before." The three subjects of which he most often spoke were "God," "Free-Will," and "Immortality," yet always seeming to find an (apparent) contradiction between the "imperfect world," and "the perfect attributes of God." Great charm of his ordinary conversation, sitting by a very ordinary person and telling stories with the most high-bred courtesy, endless stories, not too high or too low for ordinary conversation. The persons and incidents of his childhood very vivid to him, and the Lincolnshire dialect and the ways of life.