In 1854 he published his first volume of verse, _Days and Hours_. The book was, on the whole, well received. Charles Kingsley (whose early and discriminating recognition of the merits of George Meredith places him high among the critics of his day) wrote: "The poems are the work of a finished scholar, of a man who knows all schools, who has profited more or less by all, and who often can express himself, while revelling in luxurious fancies, with a grace and terseness which Pope himself might have envied." There was, however, a good deal of adverse criticism, and it was probably mainly owing to his irritation at many of the strictures (often futile enough) which were passed upon him at this time that he kept silence for the next thirty-six years. At any rate, he was always ready to the end of his life for a growl or a thunder at the critics. In 1857 Frederick Tennyson left Florence and after spending some time in Pisa and Genoa finally settled in Jersey, where he made his home for nearly forty years. During all this period he maintained a regular and detailed correspondence with Mrs. Brotherton, the wife of his friend Augustus Brotherton, the artist, with whom he had begun to exchange letters while still at Florence. His life was now a very quiet one, for, except for an occasional visit to England, he never left home. His children with their families visited him from time to time. His brother Charles came with his wife to see him in 1867, as did the Brownings on their way to Italy, and Alfred also paid him visits, the last of which was in 1892. On the whole, however, his days, for one who had been so passionately fond of travel and of a life of colour, warmth, and excitement, were singularly peaceful. But he retained to the last his astonishing vitality. His health remained tolerably good in spite of the nervous irritability and reactions of melancholy which were inseparable from the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his temperament. "Poor Savile Morton used to stare at me with wonder," he writes. "'I cannot conceive,' he said, 'how a man with such a stomach can be subject to hypochondria.'" In 1867, at the age of sixty, he batted for an hour to his nephew Lionel's bowling, hoping thereby to be able "to revive the cricket habit," and his mind continued extraordinarily active; not a movement in world politics or thought escaped him; he read voraciously and continued to write verse in a rather desultory fashion. His appetite for beauty, too, remained as keen as ever and even developed. "The longer I live," he wrote in 1885, "the more delicate become my perceptions of beautiful nature." And that appetite found ample food in the scenery of the bowery island, the whole ambit of which, with its curling tree-tops and distant lawny spaces dappled with sunshine and surrounded, as it seemed, by the whole immensity of the globe, could be seen from a point near his house.