in the house for more than a hundred years were much
annoyed by it, and determined to quit the dwelling.
They had placed their goods on a waggon, and were
just on the point of starting when a neighbour asked
the farmer whether he was leaving. On this the
hobthrush put his head out of the splash-churn, which
was amongst the household stuff, and said, ‘Ay,
we’re flitting’. Whereupon the farmer
decided to give up the attempt to escape from it and
remain where he was.” The same story is
told of a Cluricaune in Croker’s ‘Fairy
Legends and Traditions’ in the South of Ireland.
See ‘The Haunted Cellar’ in p. 81 of the
edition of 1862, and as Tennyson has elsewhere in
‘Guinevere’ borrowed a passage from the
same story (see ‘Illustrations of Tennyson’,
p. 152) it is probable that that was the source of
the story here, though there the Cluricaune uses the
expression, “Here we go altogether".]
[Footnote 6: 1842 and 1843. I that am.
Now, I that am.]
[Footnote 7: 1842.
scored upon the part
Which cherubs want.]
EDWIN MORRIS;
This poem first appeared in the seventh edition of
the Poems, 1851. It was written at Llanberis.
Several alterations were made in the eighth edition
of 1853, since then none, with the exception of “breath”
for “breaths” in line 66.
O Me, my pleasant rambles by the lake,
My sweet, wild, fresh three-quarters of
a year,
My one Oasis in the dust and drouth
Of city life! I was a sketcher then:
See here, my doing: curves of mountain,
bridge,
Boat, island, ruins of a castle, built
When men knew how to build, upon a rock,
With turrets lichen-gilded like a rock:
And here, new-comers in an ancient hold,
New-comers from the Mersey, millionaires,
Here lived the Hills—a Tudor-chimnied
bulk
Of mellow brickwork on an isle of bowers.
O me, my pleasant rambles by the lake
With Edwin Morris and with Edward Bull
The curate; he was fatter than his cure.
But Edwin Morris, he that knew the names,
Long-learned names of agaric, moss and
fern, [1]
Who forged a thousand theories of the
rocks,
Who taught me how to skate, to row, to
swim,
Who read me rhymes elaborately good,
His own—I call’d him
Crichton, for he seem’d
All-perfect, finish’d to the finger
nail.[2]
And once I ask’d him of his early
life,
And his first passion; and he answer’d
me;
And well his words became him: was
he not
A full-cell’d honeycomb of eloquence
Stored from all flowers? Poet-like
he spoke.
