Then follows an account, by Mrs. Bradley, of a visit to Farringford, with "its careless ordered garden close to the ridge of a noble down"; and at the end of the _Memoir_ is an appendix containing, among other things, Arthur Hallam's striking critical appreciation of "Mariana in the South," a poem which must be ranked as a masterpiece by all exiled Englishmen who have dreamt of their native breezes and verdure, under the blinding glare and intolerable heat of a tropical summer. Mr. Aubrey de Vere has contributed a reminiscence describing the effect produced upon himself and others by the poems of 1832-45, with a dissertation upon their style and philosophic significance. And in this manner the course and circumstances of the Poet's life are set out, with much taste and regard for proportionate value of the materials for those singularly untroubled years through which he rose steadily from straitened means in youth to comparative affluence in middle age, and from distinction among a group of choice spirits to enduring fame as the greatest of poets born in the nineteenth century. When, in 1864, Tennyson returned with "Enoch Arden" to the romance of real life among his own people, the poem was heartily welcomed, and sixty thousand copies were speedily sold. Spedding declared it to be the finest story he had ever heard, and added (in our opinion quite rightly) that it was "more especially adapted for Alfred than for any other poet." Yet the plot, so to speak, of this pathetic narrative is as ancient as the _Odyssey_, for it rests upon a situation that must have been common in all times of long and distant voyaging, when men disappeared across the seas, were not heard of for years, and their wives were counted as widows. A well-known sailor's ditty tells in rude popular rhymes the same story of the wandering mariner's return home, to find himself forsaken and forgotten; and it frequently occurs in the folklore of the crusades. The first title in the proof-sheets of the "Enoch Arden" volume was "Idylls of the Hearth," and here, says his biographer, he writes with as intimate a knowledge, but with greater power (than in 1842), on subjects from English life, the sailor, the farmer, the parson, the city lawyer, the squire, the country maiden, and the old woman who dreams of her past life in a restful old age. No great poet, in fact, has travelled for his subjects so little beyond his native land; and so his best descriptive work shows the painter's eye on the object, with the impressions drawn fresh and at first hand from Nature, as in the poetry of primitive bards who saw things for themselves. His letters and notes teem with observations of wild flowers and wild creatures, of wide prospects over sea and land; and even when he followed Enoch Arden into the world that was to himself untravelled, he could surprise those who knew it by his rendering of tropical scenery.