1880 G. F. WATTS bad looks, asking him if he felt no strange sensation, and entreating him to take care of himself, and he owned that a few friends could in the same way persuade him that anything he wrote was worthless. The popularity of his poems sometimes seemed to bewilder him, and I have heard him gravely express his belief that it was largely due to his official position as Laureate. As is always the case with great writers, resemblances to something he had written were often found in books which he had never read, and in languages which he did not know, and he complained with much reason that there were critics who imagined that the same idea could never occur independently to two men looking on the same aspects of Nature. "Tennyson suspected of plagiarism!" I once heard Browning say, when this subject was mentioned: "Why, you might as well suspect the Rothschilds of picking pockets." He had, however, the skill which most great writers possess, of drawing knowledge and thought from all about him. Among his friends was Mr. G. F. Watts, and though your father, I think, had little real technical knowledge of art he fully felt the charm of that great imaginative painter. He once asked Mr. Watts to describe his ideal of what a true portrait-painter should be, and he embalmed the substance of Mr. Watts's reply in some of the noblest lines in the " Idylls." 1 As when a painter, poring on a face, 1 My father had thought of writing for his last volume a poem to Watts on his great imaginative pictures, and on their common love of the golden spring crocus. Freshwater society, in the days of which I am writing, had a singular charm. Among the permanent residents in the neighbourhood were Mr. Watts, Mr. Ward the well-known Catholic metaphysician and reviewer, and that true artist and most gifted woman Mrs. Cameron. Miss Thackeray made many long visits. Sir John Simeon ("the prince of courtesy" of a very beautiful poem) sometimes came over from Swainston, and Farringford received many illustrious visitors from London, Oxford and Cambridge. Among the strangers who stayed there was Longfellow, for whom your father conceived a deep affection, and whom he described as one of the most enchanting of men. There was a delightful flavour in the house of the best intellectual society mingling with the tastes and habits of the most genuine country life. The country, however, always seemed to predominate, and some of us were made duly conscious of our town ignorance by the searching questions that were put to us about the flowers and trees which your father knew so well and loved so much. I remember myself once falling into some disgrace when having judiciously confessed my ignorance in many cases, I too confidently pronounced a flower to be a cowslip which was in truth an oxlip; and your father declared that he had persuaded one charming town-bred lady, to whom he was much attached, that a common daisy was a peculiar kind of rhododendron only found in the Isle of Wight. Apart from poetry there were several subjects on which he had read widely. He followed with keen and intelligent interest the great scientific discoveries of the day, and he delighted in travels and natural history. His later works were largely historical, and he read for them very conscientiously. Your father thought much about religious matters, 1880 "LUCRETIUS" and often dwelt with great force on his intuitive conviction of immortality, with its corollaries of Theism and Providence. These beliefs he held very strongly, but they were, I think, wholly detached in his mind from the dogmas of particular creeds. He had a decided leaning to some kinds of metaphysics, and the writings of James Hinton especially came home to him in a way which I could not share, or indeed understand. As all attentive readers of his poetry will have perceived, he was much occupied with, and disturbed by, the subversive theories that were abroad, but chiefly I think on account of their bearing on the great primal beliefs which I have mentioned, which he believed to be the main pillars on which the goodness, happiness and dignity of man must ultimately rest. Among his poems relating to these subjects the one which fascinated me the most was "Lucretius," in which he described with wonderful skill and subtlety the feelings of a convinced Materialist, who, having drunk the lovepotion which his wife had given him, sees palpable visions of what seemed spirit-forms around him, and at last cuts the knot of his perplexity by suicide; and who when his wife confessed what she had done, died without a word of anger or reproach in his firm belief that all human actions are linked together in a chain of inexorable necessity. I do not think, however, that your father altogether approved of my preference, and when I quoted with admiration the lines: Poor little life that toddles half an hour Crown'd with a flower or two, and there an endhe said that my liking for them only showed the morbidness of my nature. My memory of your father goes back to many different scenes, to the garden and downs of Farringford, to the lovely terrace at Aldworth, to great uninteresting London crowds, in which I think he was much out of his element, to small dinners with Browning and a few other congenial spirits. I was once with him at the Lyceum at a representation of "The Cup," to which he had just added a new passage, and when between the acts Ellen Terry came into the box where we were sitting, I was much struck with the skill and judgment of his criticism of the acting. Perhaps, however, the most pleasing recollection of all is our journey together to Salisbury. I had been staying at Farringford, and was going thence to visit Stonehenge, which I had never seen, when about a quarter of an hour before the time of starting your father very unexpectedly declared that he would accompany me. You will remember the two lovely May-days (in 1879) we spent in visiting Stonehenge, and Salisbury Cathedral, and Amesbury, the last home of Guinevere, and George Herbert's church, and the great Vandykes at Wilton. Carlyle and Emerson once made the same excursion, and Emerson has described it in his English Traits. We knew or visited no one, and the gardens of Wilton, where we long sat together, were a perfect dream of beauty. It is one of those recollections which abide with one for a life, and it never rose more vividly before me than when twelve years later I stood by your father's coffin in Westminster Abbey. CHAPTER X ALDWORTH AND LONDON 1874-1879 Farringford he never forsook, though he added another home to it; and assuredly no poet has ever before called two such residences his own. Both of them were sweetened by the presence there, so graciously prolonged, of her to whom the lovers of Song owe so deep a debt of gratitude. The second home was as well chosen as the first. It lifted England's great poet to a height from which he could gaze on a large portion of that English land which he loved so well, see it basking in its most affluent summer beauty, and only bounded by "the inviolate sea." Year after year he trod its two stately terraces with men the most noted of their time, statesmen, warriors, men of letters, science and art, some of royal race, some famous in far lands, but none more welcome to him than the friends of his youth. Nearly all of those were taken from him by degrees; but many of them stand successively recorded in his verse. The days which I passed there yearly with him and his were the happiest days of each year. They will retain a happy place in my memory during whatever short period my life may last and the sea-murmurs of Freshwater will blend with the sighing of the woods around Aldworth, for me, as for many more worthy, a music, if mournful, yet full of consolation. MS. Note, Aubrey de Vere. IN April 1874 the regular journal, giving the bare facts of our daily life, which my father had |