and fruit are but transformations of root and stem and leafage. We
read how, in mediaeval days, conduits were made to flow with claret.
But this was on great occasions only. Tennyson's fountain always ran
wine.

Once more: In Mme. Recamier's salon, I have read, at the time when
conversation was yet a fine art in Paris, guests famous for esprit
would sit in the twilight round the stove, whilst each in turn let
fly some sparkling anecdote or bon-mot, which rose and shone and died
out into silence, till the next of the elect pyrotechnists was ready.
Good things of this kind, as I have said, were plentiful in
Tennyson's repertory. But what, to pass from the materials to the
method of his conversation, eminently marked it was the continuity of
the electric current. He spoke, and was silent, and spoke again:
but the circuit was unbroken; there was no effort in taking up the
thread, no sense of disjunction. Often I thought, had he never
written a line of the poems so dear to us, his conversation alone
would have made him the most interesting companion known to me. From
this great and gracious student of humanity, what less, indeed, could
be expected? And if, as a converser, I were to compare him with
Socrates, as figured for us in the dialogues of his great disciple, I
think that I should have the assent of that eminently valued friend
of Tennyson's, whose long labour of love has conferred English
citizenship upon Plato.


We have called him shy and sensitive in daily intercourse with
strangers, and as to criticism, he freely confessed that a midge of
dispraise could sting, while applause gave him little pleasure. Yet
no poet altered his verses so much in obedience to censure unjustly