Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809-1892 -- Friends and associates
the grave; and his brother Henry,[17] whose brilliant poetic gifts had
been fully proved in the volume of poems entitled _Points of War_, which
he wrote in conjunction with his brother Franklin, died at Paris in the
fulness of his powers. He learned, as he writes in one of his letters to
Tennyson, that "the roots of love and sorrow are verily twined together
abysmally deep." But never once, in all his letters, or in any of his
views of his fellow-men, did grief or sorrow drive him into bitterness or
cynicism, or make him bate a jot of his calm and reverent fortitude or of
his deep and generous charity to his fellow-men.
Throughout that long life, sustained by great thoughts, enriched by wide
and varied learning, and blessed by ties of closest affection, Lushington
preserved consistently the ideals of the early days, and remained to the
last the same strong yet gentle friend, at once generous in admiration and
judicial in criticism, that he had been when Tennyson drew his portrait in
those immortal lines. We know what were the interests and tastes of these
early days. Dean Bradley, in his reminiscences of visits to Park House in
1841 and 1842, tells us how the brothers, and especially the
Professor--"Uncle Edmund"--seemed as much at home in the language of the
Greek dramatists as if it was their native tongue; and the present writer
remembers how, fifty years later, he heard Lord Tennyson recall the
quotation from the _Ecclesiazousae_, by which one or other of the
brothers, on an occasion at Park House which must have been almost
contemporaneous with the Dean's reminiscences, marked the propensity of
the ladies of the party to assiduous attendance at Church. Dean Bradley
remarks how remote was their outlook on the world from that of the Oxford
of his time, dominated by the Tractarian movement. Tolerance, breadth of
view, balanced judgment, and deep reverence for all that was noblest in
human thought and achievement--these gave the keynote to their minds and
energies. Partisanship, sectarian controversy, ecclesiastical disputes,
seemed to belong to an alien world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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