Memories of the Tennysons . y of 1876,I found myself at Grasby Vicarage, gone thitherto see the poet in his pastoral home, and to talkof that which was of poetry dearest to his heart,the structure of the sonnet. I shall never forgetthe first impression made upon my mind, as Ijogged up with a kind of farm-boy and cowboyand gardeners boy in one, through the freezingsnow-bound flats of dreariest Lincolnshire, and cameto the poets home. Anything more unlike a poetsserving-man could not have been imagined, but, asthe crows rose up from a potato-mound, where theywere pilfering, he suddenly said, Our
Memories of the Tennysons . y of 1876,I found myself at Grasby Vicarage, gone thitherto see the poet in his pastoral home, and to talkof that which was of poetry dearest to his heart,the structure of the sonnet. I shall never forgetthe first impression made upon my mind, as Ijogged up with a kind of farm-boy and cowboyand gardeners boy in one, through the freezingsnow-bound flats of dreariest Lincolnshire, and cameto the poets home. Anything more unlike a poetsserving-man could not have been imagined, but, asthe crows rose up from a potato-mound, where theywere pilfering, he suddenly said, Our Maisterweant nivver let them burds be shot ten, they maygoa wi all the taates for ivver, from ony bit of glebetheyve a mind to. I dursnt take a gun to them,it ud be more nor my plaace was worth. Now bedalled to it, them thieving divils theyll faairlyremble the whoal heap thruff. Hes strangengone upon burds and things, is the owd said nothing, but I seemed to realize that the ?> ?> ?> y i J > J J. ClIAKLKS TKNXYSON TURNER. CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER 225 spirit of the man who wrote that beautiful sonnet, On Shooting a Swallow in Early Youth, must havemade its impression on the Lincolnshire village, andthat, in very unlikely ground, Charles Turners carefor all gentle life was already beginning to takeroot and bear fruit upward. I do not suppose theparsons man had ever heard, as I heard that sameday, a lately-written sonnet, To a starved hare inthe garden in winter ( Collected Sonnets, ccxciv.),or he would have felt how deeply in his masters heartlay the charter to feed boldly, for all creatures Godhad made, in that Grasby parish. Those rooks rembhng the parsons taates were as free to enjoytheir banquet this bitter winter-tide, as the Soft-footed stroller from the herbless wood,Stealing so mutely through my garden ground in eager quest of food, was welcome to the Vicaragecabbages. Arrived at Grasby, one was struck by the homeli-ness, the extreme plainness of all
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookpublisherglasg, bookyear1912
