TENNYSON'S TRAVELS

Bruce Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 1933, 17 February 1888, Page 6

TENNYSON'S TRAVELS

When the poet's mother moved to Hampstead, near London, not far from 1840, that became his home. At this time he also had rooms in London, but he was obliged to live vary economically, and he spent much of his time wandering about the country. We hear much of him in the Isle of Wight, in Cornwall, in Surrey, or elsewhere; semetimes stopping at country hotels, sometimes living with the fanners along his way, sometimes conversing with the common people* and sometimes sitting by himself reading one of the Greek poets or an old English auther. We know little of the3e twenty years from 1830 to 1850, almost no account of them having been given to the public. For the most part he kept aloof from society, and he avoided public notice. When he was in London he had rooms at fLincola's Inn Fields, and he he was on intimate terms with Thackeray, Carlyle, and other literary men He is said to have spent much of his time at a farm-house near Maidstone, and he lived in Twickenham for a period of several years. In 1847 William Howitt, in his book on the ways and homes of the English poets, gives this account of him-" It is very possible you may come across him in a country inn, with a foot on each hob of the fireplace, a volume of Greek in one hand, his meesrchaum in the other." — Poets and Problems, by George Willis Cooke.