Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
Mr. Edwin Arnold has given in a recent number of The Forum a very pleasant account of a day spent at Farringford in the company of the venerable poet and his only surviving son Hallam, named after the friend of his father's early years.
Farringford was at that time almost the same beautiful solitude the lovers had found it years before, when it was first their home.
Despite the almost unanimous condemnation by public critics, the success of Maud enabled Tennyson to buy Farringford, so he must have been better appreciated and understood by the world than by the reviewers. In February 1850 Tennyson returned to his old Arthurian themes, "the only big thing not done," for Milton had merely glanced at Arthur, Dryden did not
The main facts of Tennyson’s life have been matter of familiar knowledge for so many years that we do not propose to run over them here once more. Nor shall we fill the space at our command with the biographer’s interesting personal anecdotes. So fierce a light had been beating upon Aldworth and Farringford that the relations of the present Lord Tennyson to his father were pretty generally known.
There were many guests the Dowager of Farringford, a lady of quality, Apollonia's great lady, who exercised under this roof much social tyranny; in short, was rather fine; but who, on this occasion, was somewhat cowed by the undreamt-of presence of Lothair. She had not yet met him, and probably never would have met him, had she not had the good fortune of dining at his lawyer's.
Lionel Tennyson had married, that the poet would be pleased to see me at his place, Farringford; and by the kind intervention of Mr. Locker-Lampson, better known to the literary world as Frederick Locker, arrangements were made for my daughter and myself to visit him.
As Lady Farringford was at present a high ritualist and had even been talked of as "going to Rome," this intelligence was stunning, and it was observed that her ladyship was unusually subdued during the whole of the second course.
On the receipt of your request, I looked up the account of my first visit to Farringford, and there, to my profound astonishment, I found described that experience of your father's which, in the mouth of the Ancient Sage, was made the ground of an important argument against materialism and in favour of personal immortality eight-and-twenty years afterwards.
From "Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by His Son," with the permission of The Macmillan Company, New York and London, publishers. Before leaving for Aldworth we spent some delightful sunny days in the Farringford gardens. In the afternoons my father sat in his summerhouse and talked to us and his friends.
They were no longer centuries apart from the slender fair-haired lady who now lay on a couch by our side, they were a portion of her own existence, of a nature obedient to tradition, obedient to home, obedient to love. The world has made large advance, and the sound of the wheels of progress were not unheard in the lady's room at Farringford.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking