These words, with Tennyson's poetic picture already quoted, with Carlyle's epithets, "innocent, _far niente_, ultra-modest," with his own writings taken as a whole and not _Omar_ alone, especially his Letters, may be left to speak for him in life and in death,--these and the epitaph which he asked to have placed upon his gravestone: "It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves." SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF TENNYSON'S TALK FROM 1835 TO 1853 [Many more were in a Notebook, which I have now lost.--E. F. G.] By EDWARD FITZGERALD (Given to Hallam Lord Tennyson[24]) 1835 (Resting on our oars one calm day on Windermere, whither we had gone for a week from dear Spedding's Mirehouse at the end of May 1835,--resting on our oars, and looking into the lake quite unruffled and clear, he quoted from the lines he had lately read us from the MS. of "Morte d'Arthur" about the lonely lady of the Lake and Excalibur.) Nine days she wrought it, sitting all alone Upon the hidden bases of the Hills. "Not bad that, Fitz, is it?" (One summer day looking from Richmond Star and Garter.) "I love those woods that go triumphing down to the river." "Somehow water is the element which I love best of all the four." (He was passionately fond of the sea and of babbling brooks.--ED.) "Some one says that nothing strikes one more on returning from the Continent than the look of our English country towns. Houses not so big, nor such rows of them as abroad; but each house, little or big, distinct from one another, each man's castle, built according to his own means and fancy, and so indicating the Englishman's individual humour. "I have been two days abroad--no further than Boulogne this time, but I am struck as always on returning from France with the look of good sense in the London people." (Standing before a Madonna, by Murillo, at the Dulwich Gallery--her eyes fixed on you.) "Yes--but they seem to look at something beyond--beyond the Actual into Abstraction. I have seen that in a human face." (I, E. F. G., have seen it in _his_. Some American spoke of the same in Wordsworth. I suppose it may be so with all _Poets_.) 1850 "When I was sitting by the banks of Doon--I don't know why--I wasn't in the least spoony--not thinking of Burns (but of the lapsing of the Ages)--when all of a sudden I gave way to a passion of tears." "I one day hurled a great iron bar over a haystack. Two bumpkins who stood by said there was no one in the two parishes who could do it. I was then about twenty-five." (He could carry his mother's pony round the dinner-table.--E. F. G.) "The Sea at Mablethorpe is the grandest I know, except perhaps at Land's End." (That is as he afterwards explained to me in a letter.)