Lord Tennyson

Lurgashall - Almost unknown, it is for ever famous, for here a most famous poet took his last farewell of mother earth. Tennyson died on Blackdown.

For more than twenty years Tennyson walked about this famous place. He laid the foundation stone of Aldworth in 1868 on Shakespeare's birthday; he walked about its stately terraces with many famous men; and it was of this great scene the poet was thinking when he dedicated a group of his poems to his wife and wrote June Bracken and Heather:

 

 

'There on the top of the down, The wild heather round me and over me June's high blue,

When I looked at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown,

I thought to myself I would offer this book to you,

This, and my love together, To you that are seventy-seven,

With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,

And a fancy as summer-new As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather.'

 

 

He took his last look at our English countryside on this great height, and here he died. They brought him from the highest point in Sussex to lay him in the Abbey. It is a majestic piece of our matchless countryside, with hundreds of acres of heather growing out of the sand and hundreds of miles of England opened out below.

We cannot look on this great scene without a thrill, for here is half the Weald of Sussex, with its towers and spires and hamlets, its green meadows and dark woods, its thousand miles of little lanes and streets and great highways, its timbered cottages and country houses, its murmuring streams meandering past, the very fields where Shelley heard the skylark sing; all western Sussex, from Leith Hill in Surrey to the noble height of Chanctonbury Ring, where our fathers camped before English poetry was born.

The poet would miss the river, and often he wished for one, but he caught sight of the sea to his great delight, just where the Arun joins by Arundel, and he wrote to a friend who saw it often with him:

 

'You came, and looked, and loved the view Long known and loved by me, Green Sussex fading into blue, With one grey glimpse of sea.'

It is pathetic, remembering that this was the last of England Tennyson saw, to read the next two lines:

 

'And gazing from this height alone, We spoke of what had been.'

 

 

"They be going to carry him away," said a bent old man when he died: "he'd a great deal better ha' bided here." We may all feel that.

Never has Blackdown known a more moving spectacle than the little procession that left it on that October night. It had left his old house, looking out on all this glory, with his bust in the hall and the fine portrait by Watts looking down from the wall.

His great hound walked like a stricken thing in the deep silence of the lonely hills on which they had so often walked together. The sun was setting on the Temple of the Winds, now darkening and still. This is the memory of that Last Ride by his friend Canon Rawnsley.

The Last Ride of Lord Tennyson while a lonely hound bayed loud, they bore the body of the poet forth and laid it upon the quiet moss-lined car, fit for some arch-Druid singer borne to burial, and over this was spread the rose-embroidered pall, and over it white wreaths.

Then was the master's horse brought quietly from the neighbouring stall, the lamps were lit each side the car, for the darkness was falling fast; and so, without sound, save of quiet wheels and soft feet upon the ground, and sighing (as of souls in sorrow from the leaves crushed underfoot), they left one bravest heart behind them that must beat on still, and bore him whose heart should beat no more from the quiet home of his life and labour and love to the roaring city of his tomb.

As one writes one sees the gentle horse, new-harnessed, turn his head, wistfully wondering at the unaccustomed silence, and gaze upon the burden that he is to bear; sees the sad faces of the servants he called friends pale in the paling light, and one asks oneself, while the solemn procession moves up the laurelled grove toward the Aldworth gates, if it has ever been given to a bard thus fittingly and in all solemn simplicity and grace to leave his home at the ending of an all-golden day, and go towards his rest, by dewfall, beneath the gathering stars.

The Aldworth groves were left behind, and we gained the moor; very dark and black, the Down sloped up towards the lingering sunset light. Villagers here and villagers there, in groups, were waiting with bared heads to watch the dumb procession pass in the purple twilight. Then, while the bats flew overhead, and the pheasants called, and an owl booted from a far wood, and a beetle hummed across our path, we entered the long oak-canopied hollow way that led us by its two miles of autumn-scented leafy darkness down toward the village in the vale.

So, by the village street, with here and there an added few to bear us company and swell with their trampling feet the sound of our going, we passed along from the Lights and lamps to the almost lampless dark. High on our left, upon the causeway, pattered the children, close by us walked the elders, man and wife, none speaking, all hushed and reverent of mien, till the engine whistle was heard and the signal lights flashed into red and green. The station had been reached.

The solemn Journey was ended, and the swift train, iron of will and heedless of heart, bore us fast away.

 

So the poet was carried from the land of his life and love and labour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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