Tennyson has always shunned publicity, living in a world apart--removed from the gaze of the profane crowd. He rarely goes into society, preferring rural retirement to social converse. As poet and man, he has gained by this voluntary seclusion. His delight is to mingle with the world of nature. The woods and skies, the streams and billows have been his comrades. How much they have contributed to his poetic greatness cannot be estimated. He is, however, a recluse with his eyes open. He has watched the progress of mankind and observed the trend of the times. Realizing the needs of the age, he grandly rose to the occasion--either to lift up his voice in protest against its faults, or to sing its achievements. For many years no strangers have been admitted to Farringford Park. Visitors, while welcome at Aldworth in the afternoon, have not been allowed to interrupt the accustomed occupations of the master of the house, who is very methodical in his habits. It has long been his custom to rise early and spend the morning hours in his study--writing and dreaming in an atmosphere laden with smoke and the odor of tobacco. He now uses the pen but little, owing to failing eyesight. The Honorable Hallam Tennyson is his secretary and constant companion. Personally, his lordship is a man who would attract attention anywhere, with his stalwart form slightly stooping, his noble face, his long flowing hair and bushy beard. He dresses carelessly, and when out of doors wears a shocking bad hat; with his cloak and walking-stick, he makes a picturesque figure. He is a confirmed pedestrian. "Every morning," says a newspaper correspondent, "in hail, rain or snow, the poet dons his frouzy cap and his frouzier slouch hat, and promenades for an hour or so, none daring to disturb him." Tennyson is taciturn and brusque before strangers, whose presence annoys him, but he is delightfully easy and spontaneous with friends. Edward Fitzgerald, in his letters to Frederick Tennyson and others, alludes again and again, in terms of enthusiastic appreciation, to Alfred's wise and pointed conversation. One of his original "sayings, which strike the nail on the head," was about Dante. It is well worth quoting in Fitzgerald's concise language, taken from a letter written in 1876: "What Mr. Lowell says of him recalled to me what Tennyson said to me some thirty-five or forty years ago. We were stopping before a shop in Regent street where were two figures of Dante and Goethe. I (I suppose) said, 'What is there in old Dante's face that is missing in Goethe's?' And Tennyson (whose profile then had certainly a remarkable likeness to Dante's) said: 'The divine.'"