complex as it is, is beyond the scope of this sketch; but to give
only the mere facts of his life is to do an injustice to the vivid
personality of the man as it is revealed in his letters. All his human
interest in people and things--pets, and flowers, and family--brightens
many pages of the two ponderous volumes. Now one reads of his grief over
some backward-going plant, or over some garden tragedy, as "A lovely
clematis in full flower, which I had spent hours in nailing up, has just
died suddenly. I am more inconsolable than Jonah!" Now one is amused
with a nonsense letter to one of his children, and again with an
account of a pet. "I wish you would write seriously to M----. She is
not behaving well to Oliver. I have seen handsomer kittens, but few more
lively, and energetically destructive. Just now he scratched away at
something M---- says cost 13s. 6d. a yard and reduced more or less of it
to combings. M---- therefore excludes him from the dining-room and
all those opportunities of higher education which he would have in MY
house." Frequently one finds a description of some event, so vividly
done that the mere reading of it seems like a real experience. An
account of Tennyson's burial in Westminster is a typical bit of
description:--

Bright sunshine streamed through the windows of the nave, while the
choir was in half gloom, and as each shaft of light illuminated the
flower-covered bier as it slowly travelled on, one thought of the bright
succession of his works between the darkness before and the darkness
after. I am glad to say that the Royal Society was represented by four
of its chief officers, and nine of the commonalty, including myself.
Tennyson has a right to that, as the first poet since Lucretius who has
understood the drift of science.