would scarcely bear repetition, but were told with such lifelike
reality, that they convulsed his hearers with laughter. Like most
story-tellers, he often repeated his favourites; but, like children,
his audience liked hearing them again and again, and he enjoyed
telling them. It might be said of him that he told more stories than
any one, but was by no means the regular story-teller. In the
commonest conversation he showed himself a man of genius.


To this description may be added another by Mr F. T. Palgrave:-


Every one will have seen men, distinguished in some line of work,
whose conversation (to take the old figure) either "smelt too
strongly of the lamp," or lay quite apart from their art or craft.
What, through all these years, struck me about Tennyson, was that
whilst he never deviated into poetical language as such, whether in
rhetoric or highly coloured phrase, yet throughout the substance of
his talk the same mode of thought, the same imaginative grasp of
nature, the same fineness and gentleness in his view of character,
the same forbearance and toleration, the aurea mediocritas despised
by fools and fanatics, which are stamped on his poetry, were
constantly perceptible: whilst in the easy and as it were unsought
choiceness, the conscientious and truth-loving precision of his
words, the same personal identity revealed itself. What a strange
charm lay here, how deeply illuminating the whole character, as in
prolonged intercourse it gradually revealed itself! Artist and man,
Tennyson was invariably true to himself, or rather, in Wordsworth's
phrase, he "moved altogether"; his nature and his poetry being
harmonious aspects of the same soul; as botanists tell us that flower