observes on the blasts "that blow the poplars white"; and, to make a long story short--for the list of instances might be multiplied to hundreds--in his latest published "Idylls of the King," he thus dates an early hour in the night: Nigh upon that hour When the lone hern forgets his melancholy, _Lets down his other leg_, and, stretching, dreams Of goodly supper in the distant pool. When Tennyson and W. G. Ward walked together there was then a most curious contrast in their attitude towards the Nature that surrounded them,--Tennyson noting every bird, every flower, every tree, as he passed it, Ward buried in the conversation, and alive only to the great, broad effects in the surrounding country. W. G. Ward was himself not only no poet, but almost barbarously indifferent to poetry, with some few exceptions. He was exceedingly frank with Tennyson, and plainly intimated to him that there was very little in his poetry that he understood or cared for. But this fact never impaired their friendship. Indeed, I think Tennyson enjoyed his almost eccentric candour in this and in other matters, and he used, in later years, to tell me stories which illustrated it. Once when the question of persecution had been debated at the Metaphysical Society he remarked to my father, "You know you would try to get me put into prison if the Pope told you to." "Your father would not say 'No,'" Tennyson said to me. "He only replied, 'The Pope would never tell me to do anything so foolish.'" I think his intercourse with my father did a good deal to diminish a certain prejudice against Roman Catholicism; and his intimacy with my father's chaplain--Father Haythornthwaite, a man as opposed to the popular conception of a Jesuit as could well be imagined--told in the same direction. "When Haythornthwaite dies," Tennyson once said, "I shall write as his epitaph: 'Here lies Peter Haythornthwaite, Human by nature, Roman by fate!'" W. G. Ward's own extreme frankness led Tennyson to remark to a friend: "The popular idea of Roman Catholics as Jesuitical and untruthful is contrary to my own experience. The most truthful man I ever met was an Ultramontane. He was grotesquely truthful." Tennyson would sometimes retort in kind to my father's frank criticisms, and once, after vainly trying to decipher one of his letters, observed that the handwriting was "like walking-sticks gone mad," a curiously true description of my father's very peculiar characters.[64] As with scenery, so with poetry; my father only took in broad effects and simple pathos, and would single out for special admiration such a poem as the "Children's Hospital," over which he shed many tears.