To return to one’s first impression of the poet.  I had expected much.  I knew the stately presence of his brother Charles and the fine head of his younger brother Arthur, but the Laureate was grander in build, it seemed to me, and more impressive than either. (p. 97)

Nor was it possible not to feel that one was talking to something more than common mortality.  The sound of the seer was in his voice.  The air of a prophet was round about him.  This may seem exaggeration, but there was something about his look that was more than distinction.  It seemed as if one was suddenly brought into the presence of one who lived in another world, and could make one feel the atmosphere of other worldliness in which he lived and moved and had his being.  I had seen many great men.  I had not felt one before.  The tone of his voice was to my ears fuller than the tone of his brother Charles’s, was richer than the full-chested voice of Arthur, but it was not only in tone that his voice struck one.  It was in the exquisite nicety of speech which, with all its simpleness, seemed to have just the added subtleties that you would expect from a man who had spent all his life in word selection and in the phrasing of language with exquisite delicacy. (pp. 97-98)

There was about his face that same foreign look which the old peasants at Somersby had remembered, and of all the softest hands I ever shook his seemed the softest.  And last, one noticed just that picturesqueness of attire one had associated with him.  The loose collar, the loosely tied cravat, the loosely fitting alpaca coat—all this seeming not careless, but rather with care and thoughtfulness for use and effect. (p. 98)

(Memories of the Tennysons, pp. 92-118)