big and swelling, but only to a hasty judgment is it hollow.

Tennyson was more to me than a magic-lantern shape, flitting across the
blank of my young experience, never to return. The first time I saw him
he was sitting at the table in his library, and Mrs. Tennyson, her very
slender hands hidden by thick gloves, was standing on a step-ladder
handing him down some heavy books. She was very frail, and looked like a
faint tea-rose. After that one time I only remember her lying on a sofa.

In the evenings I went walking with Tennyson over the fields, and he
would point out to me the differences in the flight of different birds,
and tell me to watch their solid phalanxes turning against the sunset,
the compact wedge suddenly narrowing sharply into a thin line. He taught
me to recognize the barks of trees and to call wild flowers by their
names. He picked me the first bit of pimpernel I ever noticed. Always I
was quite at ease with him. He was so wonderfully simple.

A hat that I wore at Freshwater suddenly comes to my remembrance. It was
a brown straw mushroom with a dull red feather round it. It was tied
under my chin, and I still had my hair down.

It was easy enough to me to believe that Tennyson was a poet. He showed
it in everything, although he was entirely free from any assumption of
the poetical rôle. That Browning, with his carefully brushed hat, smart
coat, and fine society manners was a poet, always seemed to me far more
incomprehensible than his poetry, which I think most people would have
taken straightforwardly and read with a fair amount of ease, if certain
enthusiasts had not founded societies for making his crooked places
plain, and (to me) his plain places very crooked. These societies have
terrorized the ordinary reader into leaving Browning alone. The same