CHAPTER XX. THE RETURN. 1879-1882. AGE 51-54. "Durbam, August 1. "DE EAR MR. ROSSETTI: I do not know whether you have heard from any of our common friends that we reached old England again a few weeks ago. "Our little red tiled village, Lower Shincliffe, lies among wooded hills, fine corn fields and tall colliery chimneys, within sight of Durham Cathedral-noblest sample of Normanesque we have in England. Eight and twenty years ago, just after our marriage, my husband and I spent a week in this most picturesque of English cities. And now here I am again after all my wanderings, spending my evenings with my son and his wife and their beautiful little boy just ten months old. . . "You will be glad to hear that Macmillan is at last willing to undertake a new edition of the Blake.. "Mr. Whitman was still staying in New York when we left. He came down to see us the day before, looking well. He never will entirely recover from his lame ness. I need not tell you we felt the parting from him very much as he did, I think, from us. "We saw some grand scenery the last three days of our voyage; sailing close under the Giants' Causeway up the Firth of Clyde to Greenock-the sun set, the summer night with its lingering weird kind of daylight in the sky, and a magnificent sunrise lit up all these wild grand scenes gloriously.. " Walt Whitman writes from America:-" Thank you, dear friend, for your letter; how I should indeed like to see that Cathedral [Durham], I don't know which I should go for first, the Cathedral or that baby [Anne Gilchrist's grandson]. I write in haste, but I am determined you shall have a word at least promptly in response." Shottermill was again visited; though not the primitive little Shottermill of 1862. October the twelfth, Anne Gilchrist wrote to Emma Holland, a friend gained in Concord :-" Mr. Tennyson has been to see us and we have been to lunch with him, and have seen his beautiful little grandson. He is now just starting for Italy. I send you a leaf of Irish ivy gathered in his garden in case you have any fancy for such relics." We remember the visit: Tennyson called at a cottage on Lion Green. As he sat in the cottage arm-chair in that small wainscotted room, with flowers near the little casement window, we felt these to be the surroundings which threw into relief the impressive personality of the bard. That which is most characteristic of Tennyson, is his bass voice-deep and resonant—a voice a little like that of Millais's, only stronger. Upon this occasion Tenny LETTER FROM WALT WHITMAN. 253 son talked of Walt Whitman. He mentioned Niagara Falls as being to him an inducement to cross the ocean. Through a friend's suggestion (Mrs. Williams, a lady who has executed some charming pictures), the Gilchrists visited Hampstead, and finally bought a house there. To William Rossetti, November 25, Anne Gilchrist writes:-"The very morning after I saw you, I had a very interesting letter from Walt Whitman, and what I think (and you will too) very precious, a little map on which he has traced in blue ink all the wanderings of his youth, and in red his recent journey to the Rocky Mountains." The Poet says:-" Wonders, revelations I would not have missed for my life, the great central area 2,000 miles square, the Prairie States the real America, I find-and I find that I was not realizing it before." In the postscript of this letter Walt Whitman says: "Lived a couple of weeks on the Great Plains -800 miles wide, flat, the greatest curiosity of all. Fifty years from now this region will have a hundred millions of people, the most comfortable, advanced and democratic on the globe; indeed, it is all this and here that America is for." December the tenth Anne Gilchrist writes to Frederick Holland, of Concord:-"How does England seem to me after my long absence and fresh experience? A land of strange contrasts and paradoxes so great and so small, so old and so young, so sunless and misty, often murky. Yet rich in beauty and depth of tone; so stuffed and crammed with swarms of rude, ignorant, I |