Chapter II: Part 2

And it was at Halton that Mr. Hoff, a large tenant farmer, lived of whom Dr. Tennyson heard many a story from the Rector. He was quite a character, and the Lord Chancellor Brougham was brought over by Mr. Eden from Harrington to see and talk with him. I knew Mr. Hoff, and have heard the Rector describe the lively afternoon they had. Farming was one of Lord Brougham's hobbies, and he talked of farming to his heart's content, and was delighted with the old fellow's shrewdness and independence, and his racy sayings in the Lincolnshire dialect, the kind of sayings which Tennyson has preserved in his "Northern Farmer." The farmer, too, was pleased with his visitor, but he said to the Rector afterwards, "He is straänge cliver mon is Lord Brougham, and he knaws a vast, noä doubt, but he knaws nowt about ploughing." It was the same farmer who was introduced by the Rector to the leading Barrister at the Spilsby sessions, where both the Rector and Dr. Tennyson were always in request to dine with the bar, when the Judge was at Spilsby, for the charm of their presence and the brightness of their conversation. Mr. Hoff had seen "Councillor Flowers" in Court in his wig and gown, but meeting him now in plain clothes, and finding him a very small man, he said to him straight out, "Why, you're nobbut a meän-looking little mon after all." These tenant farmers, whether in the Marsh, wold, or fen, were very considerable people in days when agriculture was at its best. In the Marsh, one in particular, Marshal Heanley, was always termed the Marsh King. He it was who at the Ram-show dinner at Halton, when Ed. Stanhope, the Minister for War, had spoken of the future which was opening for the great agriculturists, and, after alluding to Lord Brougham's visit to the Shire and the sending of some farmers' sons to the Bar, had suggested the possibility of one of them arriving at the top of the tree and sitting some day on the Woolsack. The "Marsh King" got up and said, "I allus telled yer yer must graw wool; but when you've grawed it, yer mustn't sit on it, yer must sell it."

There was a good deal of humour and also of characteristic independence about both the farmers and their men in those days; the Doctor's own man, when found fault with, had flung the harness in a heap on the drawing-room floor, saying, "Cleän it yersen then." And at Halton Rectory an old Waterloo cavalryman was coachman, who kept in the saddle-room the sword he had drawn at Quatre-Bras, a delight to us boys to see and hear about. He had a way of thinking aloud, and when, driving once at Skegness, he saw the Halton schoolmaster, his particular aversion, Mrs. Rawnsley heard him say, "If there ain't that conceäted aäpe of ourn." On a later occasion, when, at a rent-day dinner, he was handing round the beer, and the schoolmaster asked, "Is it ale or porter?" in a voice heard by all the table he replied, "It's näyther aäle nor poörter, but very good beer, much too good for the likes o' you, so taäke it and be thankful." Perhaps his most famous saying was addressed to my younger brother who, when attempting to copy his elders who always jumped the quickset hedge opposite the saddle-room as a short cut to the house, had stuck in the thorns and cried, "Grayson, Grayson, come and help me out!" The old man slowly wiped his hands, and with his usual deliberation said, "Yis, I'm a-coming." "But look sharp, confound you, it's pricking me." "Oh, if you're going to sweër you may stay theër, and be damned to you."

From Halton the way is short to Spilsby, the market town where the Franklins had lived, and the statue of Sir John resting his hand on an anchor looks down every Monday on the chaffering Market folk at one end of the Market Place, whilst the women still crowd round the old Butter-cross at the other end. In the Church is the Willoughby chapel, full of interesting monuments.

Many of the Franklin family lie in the Churchyard, and on the Church wall are three tablets to the three most distinguished brothers,--James, the soldier, who made the first ordnance survey of India; Sir Willingham, the Judge of the Supreme Court of Madras; and Sir John, the discoverer of the North-West Passage. Hundleby adjoins Spilsby where Mr. John Hollway lived, of whom the Poet wrote: "People say and I feel that you are the man with the finest taste and knowledge in literary matters here." Next to Hundleby comes Raithby, the home of the Edward Rawnsleys, where the Poet was a frequent visitor, and thence passing Mavis-Enderby on the left, the road runs on the Ridge of the Wold through Hagworthingham to Horncastle, the home of the Sellwoods. Mavis-Enderby is referred to in Jean Ingelow's poem, "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571":

Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!

* * * * *

The brides of Mavis Enderby.

After a visit to Raithby in 1874 Alfred wrote to Mrs. Edward Rawnsley:

MY DEAR MARY--I stretch out arms of love to you all across the
distance,--all the Rawnsleys are dear to me, and you, though not an
indigenous one, have become a Rawnsley, and I invoke you in the same
embrace of the affection, tho' memory has not so much to say about
you.

At Keal, east of Mavis-Enderby, the Cracrofts, whom the Doctor knew well, were living; and below the far-famed Keal Hill, in the flat fen, lay Hagnaby Priory, the home of Thomas Coltman, whose nephews Tom and George were often there. George, a genial giant of the heartiest kind, became Rector of Stickney, half-way between Keal and Boston; he was one of the Poet's closest friends. In a letter to the Rector of Halton he says, "Remember me to all old friends, particularly to George Coltman"; and in after years he seldom met a Lincolnshire man without asking, "How is George Coltman? He was a good fellow." Agricultural depression has altered things in Lincolnshire. Among the farmers the larger holders have disappeared in many places, and in the pleasant homes of Halton and Somersby, such men as the Rectors in those Georgian and early Victorian days, Nature does not repeat.

The departure of the Tennyson family made a blank which could never be filled. The villagers whom they left behind never forgot them, and even in extreme old age they were still full of memories of the family, and talked of the learning and cleverness of "the owd Doctor," the fondness of the children for their mother and, most noticeable of all, their "book-larning,"

And boöks, what's boöks? thou knaws thebbe naither 'ere nor theer.

The old folk all seemed to think that "to hev owt to do wi boöks" was a sign of a weak intellect. "The boys, _poor things!_ they would allus hev a book i' their hands as they went along." A few years ago there was still one old woman in Somersby who remembered going, seventy-one years back, when she was eleven years old, for her first place to the Tennysons. What she thought most of was "the young laädies." She was blind, but she said, "I can see 'em all now plaän as plaän; and I would have liked to hear Mr. Halfred's voice ageän--sich a voice it wer."

TENNYSON AND HIS BROTHERS FREDERICK AND CHARLES

By CHARLES TENNYSON[11]

My uncle Frederick lived near St. Heliers, and my father and I visited
him (1887) in his house, overlooking the town and harbour of St.
Heliers, Elizabeth Castle, and St. Aubyn's Bay. The two old brothers
talked much of bygone days; of the "red honey gooseberry," and the
"golden apples" in Somersby garden, and of the tilts and tourneys they
held in the fields; of the old farmers and "swains"; of their college
friends; and of the waste shore at Mablethorpe: and then turned to
later days, and to the feelings of old age. My father said of
Frederick's poems that "they were organ-tones echoing among the
mountains." Frederick told Alfred as they parted that "not for twenty
years had he spent such a happy day."--_Tennyson: a Memoir, by his
Son._

To C. T.

True poet, surely to be found
When Truth is found again.

Of all the brothers of Alfred Tennyson the closest akin to him were Frederick and Charles. The three were born in successive years, Frederick in 1807, Charles in 1808, and Alfred in 1809. They slept together in a little attic under the roof of the old white Rectory at Somersby, they played together, read together, studied together under the guidance of their father, and all three left home to go together to the school at Louth, which Alfred and Charles at least held in detestation until their latest years. Frederick was the first to break up the brotherhood, for, in 1817, he left Louth for Eton, but to the end of his long life--he outlived all his brothers--he seems to have looked back on the days of his childhood through the medium of this fraternal trinity. Years afterwards he wrote of their common submission to the influence of Byron, who "lorded it over them, with an immitigable tyranny," and a fire at Farringford in 1876 brings to his mind the destruction of their Aunt Mary's house at Louth, in the gardens of which he wrote: "I, and Charles, and Alfred, enthusiastic children, used to play at being Emperors of China, each appropriating a portion of the old echoing garden as our domain, and making them reverberate our tones of authority."

At school the brothers seem to have kept much to themselves; they took little interest in the school sports, in which their great size and strength would have well qualified them to excel, and passed their time chiefly in reading and wandering over the rolling wold and flat shores of their native Lincolnshire. They began at an early age their apprenticeship to poetry. Alfred, at least, had written a considerable volume of verse by the time he was fourteen, and all three contributed to the _Poems by Two Brothers_, which were published at Louth in 1827, when Frederick, the author of four of the poems, had just entered St. John's, Cambridge (his father's old College). Charles used to tell how, when the tiny volume was published, he and Alfred hired a conveyance out of the £10 which the publisher had given them, and drove off for the day to their favourite Mablethorpe, where they shouted themselves hoarse on the shore as they rolled out poem by poem in one another's ears. The notes and headings to the poems give some idea of the breadth and variety of reading for which the brothers had found opportunity in their quiet country life, for the volume contains twenty quotations from Horace, eight from Virgil, six from Byron, five from Isaiah, four from Ossian, three from Cicero, two apiece from Moore, Xenophon, Milton, Claudian, and the Book of Jeremiah, with others from Addison, John Clare, Juvenal, Ulloa's _Voyages_, Beattie, Rennel's _Herodotus_, Savary's _Letters_, Tacitus' _Annals_, Pliny, Suetonius' _Lives of the Caesars_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, Racine, the _Mysteries of Udolpho_, _La Auruncana_, the _Songs of Jayadeva_, Sir William Jones (_History of Nadir Shah_, _Eastern Plants_, and _Works_, vol. vi.), Cowper, Ovid, _Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful_, Dr. Langhorne's _Collins_, Mason's _Caractacus_, Rollin, Contino's _Epitaph on Camoens_, Hume, Scott, the Books of Joel and Judges, Berquin, Young, Sale's Koran, Apollonius of Rhodes, Disraeli's _Curiosities of Literature_, Sallust, Terence, Lucretius, Coxe's _Switzerland_, Rousseau, the _Ranz des Vaches_, _Baker on Animalculae_, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman and various old English ballads, while many notes give odd scraps of scientific, geographical, and historical learning.

Alfred and Charles followed Frederick to Cambridge in 1828 and entered Trinity, whither their elder brother had just migrated from John's. All the three brothers attained a certain amount of rather unconventional distinction at the University; Frederick, who had taken a high place on his entrance into Eton and subsequently became Captain of the Oppidans, obtained the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode (in Sapphic metre) on the Pyramids, the last cadence of which, "[Greek: ollumenôn gar achthôn exapoleitai]," is the only fragment which tradition has preserved. Charles obtained a Bell Scholarship in 1829, chiefly through the beauty of his translations into English (one line, "And the ruddy grape shall droop from the desert thorn," was always remembered by Alfred), and the youngest brother secured, as is well known, the University Prize for English Verse with his "Timbuctoo." None of the brothers, however, attained great distinction in the schools, though Frederick and Charles graduated B.A. in 1832. With the end of their Cambridge careers the brotherhood finally dissolved. It was at first proposed that all three should (in deference to the wish of their grandfather), become clergymen. Frederick had always shown a certain independence and intractability of character. At Eton, though a skilful and ardent cricketer, he acquired a reputation for eccentricity, and Sir Francis Doyle describes him as "rather a silent, solitary boy, not always in perfect harmony with Keate,"--a gentleman with whom most spirits, however ardent, generally found it convenient to agree.

Sir Francis recounts one typical incident: Frederick, then in the sixth form, had returned to school four days late after the Long Vacation. Keate sent for him and demanded an explanation. None was forthcoming. Keate stormed in his best manner, his prominent eyebrows shooting out, and his Punch-like features working with fury, Frederick remaining all the while cynically calm. Finally the fiery doctor insists with many objurgations on a written apology from the boy's father, whereupon the culprit leisurely produces a crumpled letter from his pocket and hands it coolly to the head-master. A fresh tirade follows, accusing Frederick of every defect of character and principle known to ethics, and concluding, "_and showing such a temper too_"!

How little Frederick regarded himself as fitted for Holy Orders may be judged from a letter he wrote in 1832 to his friend John Frere: "I expect," he says, "to be ordained in June, without much reason, for hitherto I have made no kind of preparation, and a pretty parson I shall make, I'm thinking." The grandfather came apparently to share this conclusion, for the ordination never took place.

It must have been about this time that Frederick made the acquaintance of Edward FitzGerald, who was two years his junior. The pair maintained a close correspondence for many years, and "Fitz" became godfather to one of his friend's sons and left a legacy to be divided among his three daughters.

Frederick's fine presence and frank, tempestuous, independent nature seem to have made a powerful appeal to the younger man, for he had the great height, noble proportions, and dome-like forehead of the Tennyson family, and was so robustly built that it is said that in later years, when he lived in Florence, a new servant girl, on seeing him for the first time speeding up his broad Italian staircase in British knee-breeches, fell back against the wall in astonishment, exclaiming, "Santissima Madonna, che gambe!" Unlike his brothers, however, his hair (which he wore rather longer than was common even at that time) was fair and his eyes blue.

"I remember," wrote Fitz in 1843, "the days of the summer when you and
I were together quarrelling and laughing.... Our trip to Gravesend has
left a perfume with me. I can get up with you on that everlastingly
stopping coach on which we tried to travel from Gravesend to Maidstone
that Sunday morning: worn out with it we got down at an Inn and then
got up on another coach, and an old smiling fellow passed us holding
out his hat--and you said, "That old fellow must go about as Homer
did," and numberless other turns of road and humour, which sometimes
pass before me as I lie in bed."

And in the next year he writes:

How we pulled against each other at Gravesend! You would stay--I
wouldn't--then I would--then we did. Do you remember that girl at the
bazaar ... then the gentleman who sang at Ivy Green?

And seven years later Gravesend and its [Greek: anêrithmoi] shrimps are still in his memory.

Very soon, however, after leaving Cambridge, Frederick, who had inherited a comfortable property at Grimsby, set out for Italy, and in Italy and near the Mediterranean he remained, with the exception of an occasional visit to England, until 1859.

He was passionately fond of travel, which, as he used to say, "makes pleasure solemn and pain sweet," and even his marriage in 1839 to Maria Giuliotti, daughter of the chief magistrate of Siena, could not induce him to make a settled home. In 1841 we hear of him (through "Fitz") in Sicily, playing a cricket match against the crew of the _Bellerophon_ on the Parthenopaean Hills, and "_sacking_ the sailors by ninety runs." "I like that such men as Frederick should be abroad," adds the writer, "so strong, haughty, and passionate," and in 1842 "Fitz" pictures him "laughing and singing, and riding into Naples with huge self-supplying beakers full of the warm South." All the while he continued to write to FitzGerald "accounts of Italy, finer" (says the latter) "than any I ever heard."

Once he describes himself coming suddenly upon Cicero's Formian villa, with its mosaic pavement leading through lemon gardens down to the sea, and a little fountain bubbling up "as fresh as when its silver sounds mixed with the deep voice of the orator sitting there in the stillness of the noonday, devoting the siesta hours to study." FitzGerald replies with letters full of affection; he sighs for Frederick's "Englishman's humours"--for their old quarrels: "I mean quarrel in the sense of a good, strenuous difference of opinion, supported on either side by occasional outbursts of spleen. Come and let us try," he adds, "you used to irritate my vegetable blood." "I constantly think of you," he writes, "and as I have often sincerely told you, with a kind of love I feel towards but two or three friends ... you, Spedding, Thackeray, and only one or two more." And again: "It is because there are so few F. Tennysons in the world that I do not like to be wholly out of hearing of the one I know.... I see so many little natures that I must draw to the large."

All this time Frederick was writing verse and Fitz constantly urges him to publish. "You are now the only man I expect verse from," he writes in 1850, after he had given Alfred up as almost wholly fallen from grace. "Such gloomy, grand stuff as you write." Again: "We want some bits of strong, genuine imagination.... There are heaps of single lines, couplets, and stanzas that would consume the ----s and ----s like stubble."

Much of their correspondence is taken up with the discussion of music. They both agree in placing Mozart above all other composers. Beethoven they find too analytical and erudite. Original, majestic, and profound, they acknowledge him, but at times bizarre and morbid.

"We all raved about Byron, Shelley, and Keats," wrote Frederick long after, in 1885, "but none of them have retained their hold on me with the same power as that little tone poet with the long nose, knee-breeches, and pigtail." Indeed he was at different times told by two mediums that the spirit of Mozart in these same knee-breeches and pigtail accompanied him, invisibly to the eye of sense, as a familiar. Music was the passion of Frederick Tennyson's life. It was said among his friends that when he settled in Florence (as he did soon after 1850), he lived in a vast Hall designed by Michael Angelo, surrounded by forty fiddlers, and he used to improvise on a small organ until he was over eighty years of age.

"After all," he wrote in 1874, "Music is the Queen of the Arts. What
are all the miserable concrete forms into which we endeavour to throw
'thoughts too deep for tears' or too rapturous for mortal mirth,
compared with the divine, abstract, oceanic utterances of that voice
which can multiply a thousandfold and exhaust in infinite echoes the
passions that on canvas, in marble, or even in poesy (the composite
style in aesthetics), so often leave us cold and emotionless! I
believe Music to be as far above the other Arts as the affections of
the soul above the rarest ingenuity of the perfect orator! Perhaps you
are far from agreeing with me. Indeed the common charge brought
against her by her sisters among the Pierides--and by the
transcendentalists and philosophical Critics--is that She has no type
like the other Arts on which to model her creations and to regulate
her inspirations. I say her inexhaustible spring is the soul itself,
and its fiery inmost--the chamber illuminated from the centre of
Being--as the finest and most subtle ethers are begotten of, and flow
nearest to the Sun."

Frederick lived at Florence till 1857 and found there, after years of wandering, his first settled home. The idea of settling tickled his humour, and in 1853 he writes: "I am a regular family man now with four children (the last of whom promises to be the most eccentric of a humorous set) and an Umbrella." In Florence he came in contact with Caroline Norton and her son Brinsley, of the latter of whom he writes an amusing account:

Young Norton has married a peasant girl of Capri, who, not a year ago,
was scampering bare-footed and bare-headed over the rocks and shingles
of that island. He has turned Roman Catholic among other
accomplishments--being in search, he said, of a "graceful faith."...
Parker has just published a volume of his which he entitled "Pinocchi:
or Seeds of the Pine," meaning that out of this small beginning he,
Brin, would emerge, like the pine, which is to be "the mast of some
great Admiral," from its seedling. He is quite unable to show the
applicability of this title, and, seeing that the book has been very
severely handled in one of the periodicals under the head of "Poetical
Nuisances," some are of opinion that "Pedocchi" would have been a more
fitting name for it. However, to do him no injustice, he has sparks of
genius, plenty of fancy and improvable stuff in him, and is, moreover,
a young gentleman of that irrepressible buoyancy which, to use the
language of the _Edinburgh Review_, "rises by its own rottenness...."
As I said, he is not more than three-and-twenty, but is very much in
the habit of commencing narrative in this manner: "In my young days
when I used to eat off gold plate!" to which I reply, "Really a fine
old gentleman like you should have more philosophy than to indulge in
vain regrets."

While we were located at Villa Brichieri, up drove one fine day the
famous Caroline, his mother, who, not to speak of her personal
attractions, is really, I should say, a woman of genius, if only
judged by her novel, _Stuart of Dunleath_, which is full of deep
pathos to me. I asked Brin one day what his mother thought of me. He
stammers very much, and he said, "She th-th-th-thinks very well of
you, but I d-d-don't think she likes your family." "Good heavens!
here's news," I said. Well, afterwards she told me of having met
Alfred at Rogers', and of having heard that he had taken a dislike to
her. "Why, Mrs. Norton," I said, "that must be nearly thirty years
ago, and do you harbour vindictive feelings so long?" "Oh!" she said,
"why, I'm not thirty!"

Again, one day we met her in a country house where we were invited to
meet her, and soon after she had shaken hands with me she said, with a
dubious kind of jocosity, "I should like to see all the Tennysons hung
up in a row before the Villa Brichieri." Upon the whole, I thought her
a strange creature, and she has not yet lost her beauty--a grand
Zenobian style certainly, but, like many celebrated beauties, she
seems to have won the whole world. Among other things she said in
allusion to some incident, "What mattered it to me whether it was an
old or a young man--I who all my life have made conquests?" It seemed
to me that to dazzle in the great world was her principal ambition,
and literary glory her second.[12]

But Frederick was too much of a man of moods to care for society. He used to describe himself as a "person of gloomy insignificance and unsocial monomania." Society he dismissed contemptuously as "Snookdom," and would liken it gruffly to a street row. The "high-jinks of the high-nosed" (to use another phrase of his) angered him, as did all persons "who go about with well-cut trousers and ill-arranged ideas." The consequence was that his acquaintance in Florence long remained narrow. In 1854, shortly after the birth of his second son, he wrote:

Sponsors I have succeeded in hooking, one in this manner: A friend of
mine called yesterday and introduced a Mr. Jones. "Sir," said I,
"happy to see you. Like to be a godfather?" "Really," he said, not
quite prepared for the honour, "do my best." "Thank you, then I'll
call for you on my way to the church"; so Mr. Jones was booked.

One hears, however, of a visit of Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide Kemble) in 1854. "I had not seen her for twenty years," writes Frederick; "she is grown colossal, but all her folds of fat have not extinguished the love of music in her." But one friendship which Frederick made in Florence was destined to be a lifelong pleasure to him. In 1853 he writes:

The Brownings I have but recently become acquainted with. They really
are the very best people in the world, and a real treasure to that
Hermit, a Poet. Browning is a wonderful man with inexhaustible memory,
animal spirits, and bonhomie. He is always ready with the most apropos
anecdote, and the happiest bon mot, and his vast acquaintance with
out-of-the-way knowledge and the quaint Curiosity Shops of Literature
make him a walking encyclopaedia of marvels. Mrs. B., who never goes
out--being troubled like other inspired ladies with a chest--is a
little unpretending woman, yet full of power, and, what is far better,
loving-kindness; and never so happy as when she can get into the thick
of mysterious Clairvoyants, Rappists, Ecstatics, and Swedenborgians.
Only think of their having lived full five years at Florence with all
these virtues hidden in a bushel to me!

In 1854 he published his first volume of verse, _Days and Hours_. The book was, on the whole, well received. Charles Kingsley (whose early and discriminating recognition of the merits of George Meredith places him high among the critics of his day) wrote: "The poems are the work of a finished scholar, of a man who knows all schools, who has profited more or less by all, and who often can express himself, while revelling in luxurious fancies, with a grace and terseness which Pope himself might have envied." There was, however, a good deal of adverse criticism, and it was probably mainly owing to his irritation at many of the strictures (often futile enough) which were passed upon him at this time that he kept silence for the next thirty-six years. At any rate, he was always ready to the end of his life for a growl or a thunder at the critics.

In 1857 Frederick Tennyson left Florence and after spending some time in Pisa and Genoa finally settled in Jersey, where he made his home for nearly forty years. During all this period he maintained a regular and detailed correspondence with Mrs. Brotherton, the wife of his friend Augustus Brotherton, the artist, with whom he had begun to exchange letters while still at Florence. His life was now a very quiet one, for, except for an occasional visit to England, he never left home. His children with their families visited him from time to time. His brother Charles came with his wife to see him in 1867, as did the Brownings on their way to Italy, and Alfred also paid him visits, the last of which was in 1892. On the whole, however, his days, for one who had been so passionately fond of travel and of a life of colour, warmth, and excitement, were singularly peaceful. But he retained to the last his astonishing vitality. His health remained tolerably good in spite of the nervous irritability and reactions of melancholy which were inseparable from the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his temperament. "Poor Savile Morton used to stare at me with wonder," he writes. "'I cannot conceive,' he said, 'how a man with such a stomach can be subject to hypochondria.'" In 1867, at the age of sixty, he batted for an hour to his nephew Lionel's bowling, hoping thereby to be able "to revive the cricket habit," and his mind continued extraordinarily active; not a movement in world politics or thought escaped him; he read voraciously and continued to write verse in a rather desultory fashion. His appetite for beauty, too, remained as keen as ever and even developed. "The longer I live," he wrote in 1885, "the more delicate become my perceptions of beautiful nature." And that appetite found ample food in the scenery of the bowery island, the whole ambit of which, with its curling tree-tops and distant lawny spaces dappled with sunshine and surrounded, as it seemed, by the whole immensity of the globe, could be seen from a point near his house.

In his isolation, however, his active mind tended to become more and more possessed by certain ideas, with which everything he read and heard was brought into relation. While still at Florence he had (possibly under the influence of Mrs. Browning) become greatly interested in the teachings of Swedenborg and the phenomena of spiritualism which seemed to him a natural development of Swedenborg's theories. At first he was apt to speak rather lightly of spirit revelations. In 1852 he wrote to Alfred:

"Powers the sculptor here, who is a Swedenborgian, says he once had a
vision of two interwoven angels upon a ground of celestial azure
clearly revealed to him by supernatural light after he had put out his
candle and was lying awake in bed, and believes that these are only
the beginning of wonders; the spirits themselves announce the dawn of
a new time and the coming of the Millennium, and he firmly believes
that all we now do by costly material processes will in the returning
Golden Age of the world be accomplished for us by ministering spirits.
'Thou shalt see the angels of heaven ascending and descending on the
Son of man.' I go with him as far as to believe that these are
spiritual revelations, but I confess I cannot accompany him in his
belief in their beneficent intentions. God speaks to the heart of man
by His Spirit, not thro' table legs; the miracles of Christ were of
inestimable worth, but these unfortunate ghosts either drivel like
schoolgirls or bounce out at once into the most shameful falsehoods,
and by their actual presence, pretending to be in their final state,
they seem to have for their object, tho' they carefully avoid touching
on those subjects, to undermine in the hearts of Christians the
spiritual doctrines of the Resurrection of the spiritual body and of
the judgment to come. And the more effectually to unsettle the old
Theology, the cant of these spirits is that God is a God of Love,
Love, Love, continually repeated _ad nauseam_. So He is, but 'My
thoughts are not your thoughts, nor My ways your ways,' 'He scourgeth
every son that He receiveth,' 'He loveth those whom He chasteneth,'
'it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,' 'the
pitiful God trieth the hearts and the reins.' But these spirits, by
for ever harping upon the Love of God in their insipid language, seem
to me to be anxious to persuade us that He is a 'fine old country
gentleman with large estate,' or something of that kind, seated in a
deeply-cushioned armchair, and patting the heads of His rebellious
children when they come whimpering to Him, yielding to anything in the
shape of intercession, and, rather than that St. Joseph or any other
saint should be offended, ready to admit a brigand into Heaven. So
that I thoroughly distrust your spirits and expect no virtue will come
out of them. They only seem to me last links in the chain of modern
witchcrafts which will probably end with the Devil."[13] And a little
later he writes: "Owen the Socialist and a host of infidels by a
peculiar logical process of their own, after seeing a table in motion,
instantly believe in the immortality of the Soul. To me it is
astounding and even awful, that in this nineteenth century after
Christ--whose resurrection of the body rests on as strong a ground of
proof as many of the best attested historical events--men should be
beginning again with that vague and unsatisfactory phantom of a creed
which must have been old in the time of Homer."

It was not long before he became a complete convert to Swedenborgianism and firmly convinced of the reality of the Spiritualistic phenomena with which the press and literature of the day began to be flooded. Indeed at one time he believed that spirits communicated with himself by a kind of electrical ticking, which he was constantly hearing in his room at night, and used at their dictation to do a certain amount of automatic writing. The results, however, were so unsatisfactory that he was forced to conclude the spirits to be of an evil and untrustworthy nature, and he therefore abandoned the practice of spiritualism altogether. He remained, however, convinced of the fact that living men were able to communicate with the spirits of the departed, who had been able, since the end (in 1757) of the second dispensation (according to Swedenborg) and the abolition of the intermediate state of purgatory which accompanied it, to establish direct intercourse with our world, and he believed that this rapid increase of communication was a sign of the approach of the kingdom of heaven, that is to say, of the total abolition of all barriers between the material and spiritual worlds, and the actual physical regeneration of man in the Millennium predicted by Christ and the prophets. The natural and political tumults of which the nineteenth century was so prolific seemed to him to point in the same direction, and to fall in with the prophecy of Daniel which he was never tired of quoting.

Frederick abandoned these views at the end of his life, but it is not difficult to see how they came to acquire such a hold on him. He was essentially a mystic and clung most fervently to the belief in a future life, where all good things should be taken up into the spiritual life and glorified.

"My daylight," he wrote in 1853, "is sombered by a natural instinct of
unearthliness, a looking backwards and forwards for that sunny land
which Imagination robes in unfailing Summer where no tears dim the
Light, and no graves lie underneath our feet, by the side of which
Riches, honors, even Health the first of blessings, all, in short,
that is commonly called Happiness, looks cold and imperfect--while
the great Shadow of Death fills up the distance, and the steps to it
lie over withered garlands and dry bones." And again: "For an
illustration of the bliss and delight of that higher state of being
which under the influence of that Spirit-Sun shall hereafter rise
daily to its appointed task, whatever that may be, with full heart and
mind--I go back to 'the days that are no more,' when I used to dive
into the sunny morn, rejoicing in my strength, refreshed with
dreamless sleep 'like a giant with wine,' carrying my whole soul with
me without fears or regrets, with a joy focussed like sunlight through
a lens, on the infinite present moment! Such memories, tho' mournful,
are blessed if they bring with them analogies of the 'Higher State to
Be.' For the angel is but the infant sublimated--the rapture and the
innocence, with the Wisdom and the Power adjoined, and crowned with
Immortality! That is to say his will being in all things conformable
to the Divine--he receives the divine influences which are heaven! And
surely my unshakable belief is that all created beings--even those who
have chosen the lowest Hell--will be eventually redeemed, exalted, and
glorified--or there would be an Infinite Power of Good unable or
unwilling to subdue Finite Evil."

His mind, however, was too independent to accept any of the creeds of orthodoxy. He is perpetually thundering against the "frowzy diatribes of black men with white ties--too often the only white thing about them" (one can hear him rap out the parenthesis), and the "little papacies" that dominate a country town or village. Rome he regarded with an excessive hatred, and Oxford and Cambridge, twin homes of orthodoxy, did not escape his wrath.

Indeed, he regarded most modern Christianity as a perversion of the original truth, and Atheism in all its guises he hated with an even greater bitterness, as the following letter shows:

This, as you truly say, is the age of Atheism--both practical and
professional. But it is not only Bradlaugh and Mrs. ---- who
distinguish it as such--multitudes of most worthy and respectable
people (in their own estimation) are classifiable under this
category. Indeed all worldly people whose religion consists in saving
appearances, all self-interested folk whose lives are passed in
struggles with their neighbour for their own advantage--all such as
wear down heart and mind and even physical well-being in the feverish
ambition to pile up riches, not knowing who shall gather them or
purely for the renown of possessing them. All ritualists who think
they get to heaven by peculiar haberdashery, and intoning the prayers,
which makes a farce of them by depriving them of articulate meaning.
All believers in the vicarious atonement of faith alone, which creed
signifies that all _has been done_ instead of all has _to be done_ for
them. All who hurry to conventicles on Sunday with gilt-edged
prayer-books, and begin on Monday morning to slander, ill-treat, or
cheat their neighbours. In short all that excludes the spiritual from
_this_ life--which generally indicates unbelief in any other and
virtually denies the _necessity_, and therefore the existence, of a
Divine Governor. All Professors ---- and ---- in Physical science, all
Herbert Spencers, etc. in metaphysical--who arrive by different
courses at the same conclusion, viz. that God is _unknowable_ [_sic_]
and that therefore they need not take the trouble to know Him. All
this is but Atheism virtual and avowed.

And materialism he considered little better than rank Atheism.

It was not unnatural, therefore, that he should have come to regard the phenomena of spiritualism as the strongest evidence of those beliefs which were to him more important than life itself, and, this conviction once established, submission to the strange genius of Swedenborg followed almost as a matter of course, for by his "science of correspondencies," the new phenomena seemed to fall naturally and inevitably into their proper place in that strange dual scheme of spirit and matter into which Swedenborg had resolved the Universe. When he had once embarked upon Occultism, other curious beliefs followed in the train of these main convictions. He became greatly impressed with the work of a certain Mr. Melville who believed that he had rediscovered an ancient and long forgotten method of reading the stars which was in fact the original mystery of Freemasonry. Frederick took eagerly to this idea which seemed to fall naturally into place with the Swedenborgian science of correspondencies, and in 1872 he actually came to England with Mr. Melville in the hope of being able to convince the Freemasons that all modern Masonry with its boasted mysteries was futile and meaningless without the key of Mr. Melville's discovery in which lay the true explanation of all the masonic signs and symbols. Unfortunately an interview with the Duke of Leinster, the then Grand Master, gave the two apostles little satisfaction. It was on this visit that Frederick saw FitzGerald for the last time, and the latter described him to Mrs. Kemble as being "quite grand and sincere in this as in all else; with the Faith of a gigantic child--pathetic and yet humorous to consider and consort with."

The influence of these ideas gradually coloured Frederick's view on all current subjects. His years in Florence had been spent in the "hubbub of imminent war," and he writes indignantly of "the rottenness of these pitiable petty States and the incredible fantastic tricks of their abominable rulers." None the less, though he hated and despised most existing monarchies, he was too much imbued with the romance and dignity of the past to look with a very favourable eye on revolution. At first he dismissed Mazzini as "deserving a hempen collar with Nana Sahib and the King of Delhi," an opinion which the experience of later years compelled him to reverse. The story of nineteenth-century Europe seemed to him chaos, but it was the chaos which was to precede the new spiritual dispensation, and political prejudice never hindered him from the true appreciation of progress. Thus he writes in 1869:

It is certain that Evil has never been more rampant than during the
last century--witness the great French Revolution, subsequent wars,
minor revolutions, and minor wars throughout the globe, the hundreds
of millions wasted on warlike machinery, the countless numbers of
young men sacrificed to the fiends of ambition and racial jealousy,
society honeycombed with frauds, conspiracies, and class animosities,
etc. etc. On the other hand, never has knowledge of all kinds been
more progressive, never have the Arts and Sciences and Literature been
so rapidly multiplied and so various. Never were charitable
institutions more widely extended or practically beneficent. Never, in
short, were the researches into all kinds of truths, especially those
which concern the relations of man to God and his neighbour, more
earnest, and if this seems to contradict the notorious fact that we
are living at present in a world of Atheism and Materialism--which is
the same thing--it does not really do so, for the two movements,
though separate, are parallel and simultaneous. In short, "The Time of
the End" is a transitional state--which will eventually issue in the
triumph of Good over Evil once and for ever.

France he always hated as the leader of materialism, and he would repeat with a snort of disgust the remark of M. Bert, who, during the debate in the Chamber on the secularization of Education, observed that it was superfluous to exclude what did not exist. The debacle of 1870 seemed a just if tragic retribution.

"One cannot help, however," he wrote on October 19, 1870, "feeling for
beautiful Paris as one would for a Marie Antoinette passing on her way
to execution. There she is in her solitude and in her beauty. Around
her a circle of iron and fire--within her a restless seething of
tumultuous passions embittering the present--her future a prospect of
burning and famine. Such a downfall is unparalleled in history, and
the agonies of her expiration--if things are carried to their bitter
end--promise to equal those of the terrible siege of Jerusalem."

As might be expected, he tended to Conservatism in politics; Home Rule was anathema, and Disraeli, endeared to him as the possible leader of a United Israel, he regarded as a sincerer statesman than Gladstone. None the less he was able to applaud Gladstone's action on the occasion of the Bulgarian atrocities, though "even he" seemed to have yielded so much

... to the delicacies and squeamish sensibility, and fluttering nerves
of a lolling generation--an age of sofas and carpets--the rousing of
which even in the justest of causes, the vindication of the rights of
unoffending humanity outraged by savages in comparison with whom
niggers and Red Indians are angels, is not to be attempted without
careful thought--and though a great cry has gone through the land I
fear there will be little wool. There is, however, one
consolation--neither Turkey, nor Egypt, nor any ruffian with a bundle
of dirty clothes upon his head instead of a hat, will ever get another
farthing of _our_ money.

None the less he hated a bigoted Toryism, and thought that "a proper democratic spirit which aims at a reconstruction of society on the principle of 'each for all and all for each,' the correlation of privileges and duties, worth and honour, wealth and charity (in its best sense), the substitution of altruism for egoism, ought to find its echo in every loyal heart--and would in fact be the very 'end of Sin, and bringing in of the Everlasting Righteousness' foretold."

In literature, too, his mind--in spite of an occasional failure to recognize individual genius--was remarkably alive to the progressive movements of the day. Indeed, for a man so steeped in classicism, his freedom from prejudice was remarkable. Browning's poetry, however, in spite of his affection for the author, he could never appreciate. He wrote to Mrs. Brotherton:

"What you say of Browning's _Ring and the Book_," he says, soon after
the publication of that work, "I have no doubt is strictly applicable,
however slashing.... I confess, however, that I have never had the
courage to read the book. He is a great friend of mine.... But it
does not follow that I should put up with obsolete horrors, and
unrhythmical composition. What has come upon the world that it should
take any metrical (?) arrangement of facts for holy Poesy? It has been
my weakness to believe that the Fine Arts and Imaginative Literature
should do something more than astonish us by _tours de force_, black
and white contrasts, outrageous inhumanities, or anything criminally
sensational, or merely intellectually potent. As you say a good heart
is better than a clever head, so I say better a page of feeling than a
volume of spasms. Spasms, I fear, is the order of the day. The late
Lord Robertson, a legal celebrity at Edinburgh, pleading on behalf of
some one, said, with his serious face, which was more tickling than
the happiest efforts of Pantaloon: 'We are bound to respect his
feelings as a man and a butcher.' Here the man and the butcher are
bound up in one. Now, in Browning's case, I separate the man from the
butcher. I have nothing to say to him in his blue apron and steel by
his side, but if I meet him in plain clothes I honour him as a
gentleman." And in 1885 he writes: "The Public, it would seem, is
beginning to rouse itself to a perception of the unreliability of the
Browningian school--I have seen several articles on that subject. How
is it that it has never struck his partisans that the probability of
one man being so infinitely superior to his contemporaries as to be
totally unintelligible to them--is infinitely small?

"One thing appears to me certain in Browning, that all his
performances are pure _brain-work_--whatever that may be worth--but as
for the 'divine heat of temperament,' where is it? I can find nothing
but the inextricably hard and the extravagantly fantastical. On such
diet I cannot live."

Nevertheless, it was always the future of Art, not its past, which stirred his interest, and a letter of his written in 1885, when he was seventy-eight, shows a youth and vitality of mind truly remarkable in one whose life had been so cloistered.

"There can never," he says, "be a second Shakespeare, that is to say,
given a man of equal Genius he cannot in this complex and analytical
age of Literature embody himself in the metrical and dramatic form if
his purpose is to 'hold up the mirror to Nature, and to give the Time
its form and pressure.' The form of prose fiction is a vastly greater
one, indeed it may be termed all-comprehensive, and admits of the
introduction of lyric or epic verse, in all varieties, as well as the
profoundest analysis of character and motive, and is susceptible of
the highest range of eloquence and unrhythmical poetry, and whatever
it may lose in metrical melody (which, however, is not greatly
regarded in dramatic dialogue) it gains immeasurably in its other
elements. All things considered, I am of opinion that if a man were
endowed with such faculties as Shakespeare's, they would be more
freely and effectively exercised in prose fiction with its wider
capabilities than when 'cribbed, cabined, and confined' in the
trammels of verse."

It may be that the very remoteness of his life was in part the cause of this lasting freshness and freedom of his mind. He lived so far from the world as to be almost entirely removed from any bias of self-interest--the most fruitful source of prejudice. Ambition played no part in his life.

"Once," he wrote in 1888, "I used to have some ambition--that is when
I was a boy at school--I verily believe that at that early age I
exhausted the demoniacal passion which chains you to fixed purposes
like a Prometheus and preys upon you like a Vulture. Though many great
works have been accomplished under the spur of this (so-called) noble
passion, think how much chaotic rubbish has been projected into Space
and Time which ought to have been imprisoned to Eternity--how many
heart-burnings, jealousies, and disappointments--how often the love of
the Beautiful and True is entirely subordinated to that of mere
distinction to be won at any cost. How seldom do we hear writers of
the same school speak well of one another. Especially poisonous are
poets, I think, wherever they apprehend a rival--Honey-suckers like
the Bee, they know how to use their stings even while sipping the
flowers. The unambitious man is at any rate free to use his eyes, to
walk up to and contemplate in the pure clear air and solitude of his
mountain-top the face and form of Nature, and like Turner a-fishing,
see wonderful effects never to be come at by the hosts of those who
get on (or off) by copying one another. I daresay you will disapprove
all this and attribute it to indolent epicurism.

"Latterly since the supernatural and the Future Life, and its
conditions 'such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it
entered into the heart of man to conceive,' have occupied and absorbed
my whole soul to the exclusion of almost every subject which the
Gorillas of this world most delight in, whether scientific, political,
or literary--I have been led to see what men in general consider a
proper use of their stewardship, _i.e._ ruin of body and soul by
inordinate superhuman struggles for supremacy--Samson-like heavings to
upset the neighbour, or supplant him--carbonic acid-breathing
creepings along the dark floors of stifling caverns such as may enable
them to scrape together a preponderance of a certain mineral, etc.
etc.--as the most lamentable examples of Phrenitis--arising simply
from the ineradicable instinct--of Immortality it is true, but
misplaced Immortality--Immortality in this life."

The death of his wife in 1880 was a severe blow to him.

"In answer to your kind letters of sympathy," he wrote to Mr. and Mrs.
Brotherton, "I can say but little. Sorrow such as mine when it falls
upon the aged is virtual paralysis, mental and bodily. I know not what
I may do for the brief period remaining to me in this world. At
present my daughter-in-law attends to household matters, and I still
have the presence of children and grandchildren to remind me that I am
not left entirely desolate. But my chief consolation is that the
beloved of my youth and the friend of my age is already risen, and has
cast off the burthen of her mortal cares and pains, and my only hope
that, God willing, I may follow quickly."

A great but less tremendous shock to him was the death in 1887 of his sister Emily, once the betrothed of Arthur Hallam. On this occasion he sent the following lines to his friend:

Farewell, dear sister, thou and I
Will meet no more beneath the sky:
But in the high world where thou art
Mind speaks to Mind, and Heart to Heart,
Not in faint wavering tones, but heard
As twin sweet notes that sound accord.
Thy dwelling in the Angel sphere
Looks forth on a sublimer whole,
Where all that thou dost see and hear
Is in true concord with thy soul--
A great harp of unnumbered strings
Answering to one voice that sings:
Where thousand blisses spring and fade
Swiftly, as in diviner dream,
And inward motions are portrayed
In outward shows that move with them:
After the midnight and dark river
No more to be o'erpast for ever.
Behold the lover of thy youth,
That spirit strong as Love and Truth,
Many a long year gone before,
Awaits thee on the sunny shore:
In that high world of endless wonder
Nor Space, nor Time can hold asunder
Twin souls--as Space and Time have done--
Whom kindest instincts orb in One.