Emma I., Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The months passed quietly at
home or in town. The poet had written his Lucretius, and, to please
Sir George Grove, wrote The Song of the Wrens, for music. Tennyson
had not that positive aversion to music which marked Dr Johnson,
Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and some other poets. Nay, he liked
Beethoven, which places him higher in the musical scale than Scott,
who did not rise above a Border lilt or a Jacobite ditty. The Wren
songs, entitled The Window, were privately printed by Sir Ivor Guest
in 1867, were set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and published by
Strahan in December 1870. "A puppet," Tennyson called the song-book,
"whose only merit is, perhaps, that it can dance to Mr Sullivan's
instrument. I am sorry that my puppet should have to dance at all in
the dark shadow of these days" (the siege of Paris), "but the music
is now completed, and I am bound by my promise." The verses are
described as "partly in the old style," but the true old style of the
Elizabethan and cavalier days is lost.

In the summer of 1867 the Tennysons moved to a farmhouse near
Haslemere, at that time not a centre of literary Londoners. "Sandy
soil and heather-scented air" allured them, and the result was the
purchase of land, and the building of Aldworth, Mr Knowles being the
architect. In autumn Tennyson visited Lyme Regis, and, like all
other travellers thither, made a pilgrimage to the Cobb, sacred to
Louisa Musgrove. The poet now began the study of Hebrew, having a
mind to translate the Book of Job, a vision unfulfilled. In 1868 he
thought of publishing his boyish piece, The Lover's Tale, but
delayed. An anonymously edited piracy of this and other poems was
perpetrated in 1875, limited, at least nominally, to fifty copies.

In July Longfellow visited Tennyson. "The Longfellows and he talked