TENNYSON'S HABITS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 8360, 13 September 1890, Page 2 (Supplement)

TENNYSON'S HABITS.

THE DAILY LIFE OF ENGLAND'S AGED POET-LAUREATE.

Like almost all authors, Tennyson does the greater part of his literary work in the morning hours, between breakfast and luncheon, says a writer in Frank Leslie's Monthly, and sometimes breaks the back of his work before breakfast. His invariable habit is to take a long stroll before luncheon, accompanied often by a friend, and always by two of his dogs. The afternoon and evening are given up to rest and social recreations.

The poet is seldom, as we have said, seen on the streets of the metropolis; but occasionally his tall, sturdy form, his broad soft hat and inevitable cloak, his shaggy, grizzled shocks of hair, his deep, dark eyes beneath heavy brows, and heavy grey beard, may be seen threading the region round about St. Paul's. Although shunning the "madding crowd," it must not be inferred that Tennyson is in a social sense grim and gloomy. When with a few devoted friends he delights in conversation, and often takes up himself the throad of talk in fascinating monologue, the days of his own youth and sometimes talking feelingly of the eminent people he has seen and known throughout his long life. Especially fond is Tennyson of reading extracts from his own poems to appreciative listeners. "Reading, is it?" says Miss Thackeray. " One can hardly describe it. It is a sort of mystical incantation, a chat in which every note lises and falls and reverberates again. As we sit around the twilight room at Farringford, with its great oriel window looking to the garden, across fields of hyacinth and self-sowed daffodils toward the sea, where the waves wash against the rocks, we seemed carried by a tide not unlike the ocean's sound ; i 1; fills the room, it ebbs and flows away ; and when we leave, it is with a strange music in the ears, feeling that we have for the first time, perhaps, heard what wo may have read a hundred times before."