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CHAPTER XX.

THE RETURN.

1879-1882. AGE 51-54.

Durham, 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

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"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, lookHe never will entirely recover from his lame

ing well.

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. .

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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 Shotter mill 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

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REPRODUCTION

OF THE MAP UPON WHICH WALT WHITMAN HAD TRACED HIS JOURNEY TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

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