THE DRIVE TO FARRINGFORD, SHOWING TREE ON THE LEFT PLANTED BY GARIBALDI. IN TENNYSON'S HOMES AT ALDWORTH AND FARRINGFORD.1 BY GRANT ALLEN. With Illustrations by W. N spite of the new-fangled railway which has burst rudely in upon its seclusion to disturb its charms, Freshwater is still the prettiest and most unsophisticated corner of the island. I say "the island" advisedly, for (as readers of Miss Austen know) to the men of Wight, even to this very day, no other island worth mentioning appears to exist in any known quarter of the sidereal universe. And I say prettiest, not grandest, advisedly again, because the Isle of Wight at best is nothing more than pretty never for a moment does it rise to sublimity or grandeur. "Close to the ridge of a noble down," says the poet himself of his home at Farringford and noble is quite as far, I venture to think, as anybody with an eye for scenery and a keen sense of the proprieties of language could go in describing it. Regarded in this light, as smiling English rural scenery, the Isle of Freshwater-so the extreme western end of Wight is called by old-fashioned inhabitants-has a charm of its own of the true simple and chalky character. Green BISCOMBE GARDNER. slopes of grass, close sward just starred with purple stemless thistles, high white cliffs, the pretty and fantastic worn pinnacles of the Needles-these unite to make this last subsiding wave of the great undulating chalky plain of south-eastern England into a perfect epitome of the whole downlands of Britain. It is charming in its daintiness. But nobody can really appreciate its distinctive claims to admiration who talks about it as grand, or who regards the sun-smitten white pillars of the Needles, those alabaster toys, as "gigantic precipices." That sort of obsolete misapprehension, still common in guide-books, belongs to the age in which good Gilbert White described the South Downs of Sussex as "that magnificent 1 This article was in proof before the great poet's death, I have left it exactly as it stood, in spite of that event, because I believe it contains nothing that could have hurt his sensitiveness while living, and nothing that need be withheld from publication now he is dead. When a great man dies peacefully and beautifully in extreme old age, with his life-work done, and a noble record behind him, I see no reason to mourn rather cause for the gentlest regret, not unmixed with sympathetic congratulation. range of mountains." To a generation which has seen the Matterhorn and the Djurjura, the Selkirks and the Caucasus, language of such a sort is only likely to provoke the placid smile of contemptuous amusement. I called Freshwater just now the last the southern peninsula of England. It rises first in the Chilterns, north of Thames; sweeps in a long curve beneath the river at London; crops up once more in the scarped heights of the North Downs at Boxhill and the Hog's Back; is denuded in the Weald of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex; sinks from the South TENNYSON, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN MAYALL, 224, REGENT STREET, W. subsiding wave of the chalk plain of England. But that was only rhetorically, to round off my sentence; for, like Théophile Gautier, I would say that Cæsar murdered Brutus "pour arrondir la phrase." As a matter of plain geographical fact it is not the last, but the penultimate undulation. The huge sheet of chalk which forms the ground-floor of the home counties bends up and down in well-defined waves several times over all Downs in a second great sweep under the Solent sea; rears itself high yet again at Freshwater and in the long line of central downs from the Needles to the Culver Cliffs; subsides a third time into the lowlands of Sandown and Brixton Bays: and finally raises its head in one last faint protest at Boniface Down near Ventnor, before sinking altogether under the waves of the Channel. But at the west end of the island the sea has long since entirely worn awaythese last two undulations, so that at Freshwater itself the chalk cliffs of the Main Bench topple over abruptly into the sea without further parley. Freshwater Isle thus consists of a slow and contorted slope, rising from under the shallow bed of the Solent, and shelving gently upward to the summit of the chalk downs at the Nodes Beacon. These downs themselves form the backbone of the Isle of Wight-beginning at the Needies, continuing on through Afton, Mottestone, and Cheverton Downs, to Carisbrooke and Newport; interrupted there for a while by the basin of the Medina River, but rising again beyond it in the Arreton and Brading range, till they fall sheer into the sea at the other end in the White Horse and the Culver. But what gives Freshwater its special note of sea-front is the fact that here alone do the central downs abut directly on the Channel in all their full height, the waves having eaten into the downs for half their extent from Freshwater Gate to the base of the Needles. The tall cliffs thus formed are always pretty, and from their whiteness and abruptness often remarkable, though never high enough to be more than simply bright The water in fact into what it already calls is extremely picturesque. Gulls and This is the best nook in Wight. A continuous town now stretches from Ryde, by Brading and Sandown, to Shanklin, Bonchurch, Ventnor, and the Undercliff. But beyond Blackgang there is still something like country. Intrusive cockneydom has hardly spread to Freshwater. Noble ranges of chalk still guard that coast unsullied; fine stretches of sward still front the Channel. Farringford House itself stands on the side of the first of these downs as one walks out from Freshwater Gate in the direction of the Needles. Its situation in the midst of such typical quiet English scenery seems admirably suited to the most typically English of great English poets, the singer of Maud, of Dora, of Enoch Arden; the lover and admirer of all that is most British in field and hillside. If Shakespeare ought to have lived (as he did) among the quaintly-gabled streets of Elizabethan London, and Shelley (in dejection) on the Bay of Naples, or among the blue shadowy Euganeans, then surely Tennyson ought to live, as he has lived, among English downs, with close-cropped sward and yellow rock-roses, where THE STUDY WINDOW AT FARRINGFORD; CHILDREN'S and pleasing. They do not beetle-what- Originally, of course, the unbroken range of downs from Freshwater Gate to Scratchell's Bay must have formed a high central dividing ridge, as is still the case further on about Shalcombe and Mottestone. But the sea has long since washed away the southern slope of this western extension, as well as half the chalk-down itself, so that now it has all but reached the head of the little river Yar; indeed, a good storm might at any time break down the remaining barrier, and turn Fresh "Groves of pine on either hand To break the blast of winter stand; And, further on, the hoary Channel Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand." Here the greatest poet of our age spent in congenial work the best part of his manhood; for, in spite of cliques and affectations which would exalt this or that minor favourite to a high place on Parnassus at our bard's expense, he is, and for sane and healthy criticism he |