Storied windows richly dight Casting a dim religious light, and its measureless roof, it seems fitted for the organ’s pealing sound, for the delight of anthem, and the joy of praise and prayer, and for reading of great and good Poems. I did once persuade them to reading in that Hall. I read your Ode on the Duke, and it sounded solemn and sweet there. You know how dear Henry Taylor valued it, and I treasured in my heart your answer to his praise of it. I enclose you his little note to me about “Maud” because you said you would like to see it. I read also your lines to James Spedding. I read “St. Agnes,” too, in that Hall. _Those_ chants are worthy of that edifice. ‘The Hall and staircase are both as beautiful in their way as anything I have ever seen anywhere. The whole was built by Sir Charles Barry, the architect. ‘The house has immense capacities. Last Sunday we slept ninety people here, Lady Charlotte told me, tho’ nothing extraordinary was going on. ‘We dine every evening twenty-six in number. Conversation is not fertile, but the young hearts don’t need it.’ This was the year in which ‘Maud’ was published. Poets always feel criticism, and the reviews of the poem stung Tennyson cruelly, with their misunderstanding of his personal attitude towards war. ‘Is it not well,’ writes his wife, ‘that he should speak anger against the base things of the world, against that war which calls itself peace slandering the war whence there is the truer peace? Surely it was well, for he has not spoken in anger only; if he has spoken against baseness and evil in the world he has also sung what every loving and noble heart can understand of its love and blessedness. But you are right, I do hope that in more unmixed and fuller tones, he will one day sing his song....’ Mrs. Cameron’s daughter Julia was engaged to Charles Norman in 1858. ‘It is like a book,’ says Emily Tennyson, ‘all so perfectly happy and yet I feel ungrateful when I say so, for so long as one believes in truth and love, so long must one believe in the possibility of happiness, and I myself, having so much of the reality, should most of all dare to believe in the possibility for others. Let them be married soon—I may be pardoned for a horror of long engagements.’ In 1859 the Camerons were still on Putney Heath, but Mr. Cameron was preparing to visit his estates in Ceylon, of which disquieting news had reached him. ‘Charles speaks to me of the flower of the coffee plant. I tell him that the eyes of the first grandchild should be more beautiful than any flower could ever seem,’ so Mrs. Cameron used to exclaim pathetically, and she wrote to her friend: