so greatly increased are the uses of advertisement. But The Princess
moved slowly from edition to revised and improved edition, bringing
neither money nor much increase of fame. The poet was living with
his family at Cheltenham, where among his new acquaintances were
Sydney Dobell, the poet of a few exquisite pieces, and F. W.
Robertson, later so popular as a preacher at Brighton. Meeting him
for the first time, and knowing Robertson's "wish to pluck the heart
from my mystery, from pure nervousness I would only talk of beer."
This kind of shyness beset Tennyson. A lady tells me that as a girl
(and a very beautiful girl) she and her sister, and a third, nec
diversa, met the poet, and expected high discourse. But his speech
was all of that wingless insect which "gets there, all the same,"
according to an American lyrist; the insect which fills Mrs Carlyle's
letters with bulletins of her success or failure in domestic
campaigns.

Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair
of Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too modest to be introduced to
the great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so nobly. Oddly enough
Douglas Jerrold enthusiastically assured Tennyson, at a dinner of a
Society of Authors, that "you are the one who will live." To that
end, humanly speaking, he placed himself under the celebrated Dr
Gully and his "water-cure," a foible of that period. In 1848 he made
a tour to King Arthur's Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland,
where the Pass of Brander disappointed him: perhaps he saw it on a
fine day, and, like Glencoe, it needs tempest and mist lit up by the
white fires of many waterfalls. By bonny Doon he "fell into a
passion of tears," for he had all of Keats's sentiment for Burns:
"There never was immortal poet if he be not one." Of all English
poets, the warmest in the praise of Burns have been the two most