abruptly cut short, as the sense of what is deepest in the human heart promptly gives the lie to what it cannot solve in detail: Peace, let it be! for I loved him and love him for ever. The dead are not dead but alive. [Illustration: THE SOUTH SIDE OF ENTRANCE FROM BELOW THE TERRACE, ALDWORTH. Drawn by W. Biscombe Gardner.] TENNYSON AND ALDWORTH By SIR JAMES KNOWLES, K.C.V.O. Farringford he never forsook, though he added another home to it; and assuredly no poet has ever before called two such residences his own. Both of them were sweetened by the presence there, so graciously prolonged, of her to whom the lovers of song owe so deep a debt of gratitude. The second home was as well chosen as the first. It lifted England's great poet to a height from which he could gaze on a large portion of that English land which he loved so well, see it basking in its most affluent summer beauty, and only bounded by "the inviolate sea." Year after year he trod its two stately terraces with men the most noted of their time; statesmen, warriors, men of letters, science, and art, some of royal race, some famous in far lands, but none more welcome to him than the friends of his youth. Nearly all of those were taken from him by degrees; but many of them stand successively recorded in his verse. The days which I passed there yearly with him and his were the happiest days of each year. They will retain a happy place in my memory during whatever short period my life may last; and the sea-murmurs of Freshwater will blend with the sighing of the woods around Aldworth, for me, as for many more worthy, a music, if mournful, yet full of consolation. _MS. Note, Aubrey de Vere._ When I was "little more than a boy" I made, accidentally, my first acquaintance with Tennyson as a poet, long before I knew him as a man. I came by chance upon a copy of "In Memoriam," then just published anonymously. I was quite entirely ignorant and indifferent in those days about all poetry, and did not in the least know or guess who had written it, but, opening it haphazard at the Geological Stanzas, was so impressed and riveted by them,--for I was a student of Geology at the time,--that I could not put the book down until I had read it all through and from end to end. I was caught up and enthralled by its spirit, and my eyes seemed suddenly opened on a whole new world. It made an epoch in my life and an ineffaceable impression. I soon came to know my Tennyson almost by heart, and was taunted by my friends for my worship of the "divine Alfred," as I reverently called him. In this frame of mind it was that I made the bold venture of asking his leave to dedicate to him my little book on King Arthur and his Knights, his kind acceptance of which homage I have already mentioned in my former article.[66]