Mull, a beautiful place endeared to him who now writes by the
earliest associations. It chanced to him to pass his holidays there
just when Tennyson and Mr Palgrave had left--"Mr Tinsmith and Mr
Pancake," as Robert the boatman, a very black Celt, called them.
Being then nine years of age, I heard of a poet's visit, and asked,
"A real poet, like Sir Walter Scott?" with whom I then supposed that
"the Muse had gone away." "Oh, not like Sir Walter Scott, of
course," my mother told me, with loyalty unashamed. One can think of
the poet as Mrs Sellar, his hostess, describes him, beneath the limes
of the avenue at Acharn, planted, Mrs Sellar says, by a cousin of
Flora Macdonald. I have been told that the lady who planted the
lilies, if not the limes, was the famed Jacobite, Miss Jennie
Cameron, mentioned in Tom Jones. An English engraving of 1746 shows
the Prince between these two beauties, Flora and Jennie.

"No one," says Mrs Sellar, "could have been more easy, simple, and
delightful," and indeed it is no marvel that in her society and that
of her husband, the Greek professor, and her cousin, Miss Cross, and
in such scenes, "he blossomed out in the most genial manner, making
us all feel as if he were an old friend."

In November Tennyson took a house at Farringford, "as it was
beautiful and far from the haunts of men." There he settled to a
country existence in the society of his wife, his two children (the
second, Lionel, being in 1854 the baby), and there he composed Maud,
while the sound of the guns, in practice for the war of the Crimea,
boomed from the coast. In May Tennyson saw the artists, of schools
oddly various, who illustrated his poems. Millais, Rossetti, and
Holman Hunt gave the tone to the art, but Mr Horsley, Creswick, and
Mulgrave were also engaged. While Maud was being composed Tennyson