Land of the earlier morn, the later night,
        Of distance beyond distance; broader skies
Where the lark sings, and where the swallow flies,
This unperplexed, and that with clearer sight;
Here swirl no streams, no prattle of delight
Comes from the brook, no bubbling springs arise;
Deep channelled waters, where the bulrush sighs,
Slope, ladder-like, to Heaven, silver bright.
Here pale-faced prisoned labour never comes,
No furnace roar the shepherd’s sleep alarms,
Only at times the steamy thresher hums
Among the poplars whisp’ring round the farms;
And all the year, to urge the ploughman’s hand,
The great sea-sickle gleams about the land.

(Sonnets Round the Coast, p. 217)

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Had we been standing, in October of that year, 1850, at Miss Robson the milliner’s humble little door in Keswick, just where Greenhow’s shop stands out so conspicuously beside the Queen’s Hotel, I think we should have seen a very remarkable looking pair of lovers issuing from the house.  What did they look like?  Thomas Carlyle, a friend and for the past eight years a keen critic, who, in 1842, wrote, “Alfred Tennyson alone of this time has proved singing in our curt English language to be possible in some measure,” was climbing our Cumbrian hills in that same autumn.  “Mrs. Tennyson,” says Carlyle, “lights up bright glittering blue eyes when you speak to her, has wit; has sense:” (those blue-grey eyes she got from the Franklin stock down in Lincolnshire); she seems frail and delicate, but her carriage is that of a queen. (pp. 176-177)

The fine gipsy-looking man at her side, half-hidden by his great sombrero hat and the clouds of tobacco rolling from his pipe, has, so Carlyle tells us, “a great shock of rough dusty hair, bright laughing hazel eyes, massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate, of sallow brown complexion almost Indian-looking, clothes cynically loose, free and easy.  His voice musically metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail and all that may lie between.” (p. 177)

Up comes an open carriage, and while the lady is having a talk in the little gossip-shop of that day, the handsome gipsy-looking man hears that this is the Mirehouse carriage.  The lady, who is Miss Spedding, returns, and at once the shaggy stranger bows, and makes tender inquiry after his bosom friend, James Spedding, and evidently knows and loves Mirehouse so well, that in a trice it is arranged for him and his wife to take seats in the carriage, and go out to Mirehouse to pay a call.  This, too, not without relief to Miss Robson, who, as I have been told, “thought the poet rather a formidable person for her little lodgings, but was charmed with Mrs. Tennyson, she was so sweet and gentle.” (pp. 177-178)

Much talk have they on the way, but never once does the stranger lend a clue as to his connections with the Mirehouse friends he seems to know so intimately, and for nigh upon four miles the lady of the carriage is kept in wonder as to who this “fine featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is; dusty, smoking, free and easy.” (p. 178)

It is not till the gates are reached, that he says with a grim humour, “I am Alfred Tennyson, James’ friend, and this, Madam, is my wife.”  There was no little flutter at Mirehouse that day, for, as I have heard from one who was then a little girl, Mr. Tom Spedding, the elder, was in delicate health, and it was a rare event for sudden visitors to come to the house. (p. 178)

But the visit of that afternoon meant a stay.  Nothing would serve but that the chance callers should be guests.  I have been told how those mild days of softest autumn sunshine went happily and memorably by; how in the morning Tennyson swam, as Carlyle would say, outwardly and inwardly with great composure, in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; how John Spedding, then in his eightieth year, would take the happy lovers on the lake in the “all-golden afternoons”; and how the young children would go off to bed not willingly, knowing that when they had retired the poet would read aloud in his sonorous chant, some of his latest published poem, In Memoriam. (p. 178)

This was the last visit that Tennyson paid to Keswick, for though he came again to Westmoreland four or five years later, and saw the long lights shake across the Coniston Lake from Trent Lodge, and heard far up the Tilberthwaite Gorge “the quarry thunders flap from left to right,” he never more saw our Cumbrian cataracts at “the Dash,” or “at Lodore,” “leap in glory,” never so far as can be ascertained, crossed Dunmail Raise again. (p. 179)

(Literary Associations of the English Lakes, Vol. I, pp. 176-9)

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For now the people began to come swarming up from the plains beneath, and from tower and town and hamlet, till in truth the night “was busy as the day.”  And it was worthwhile to have witnessed that sunset.  A light veil of cloud was over the sea to the west, and the sun shone upon the veil, and made it as though it had been a tissue of fleecy gold.  Then suddenly the great gold-red ball disappeared, but still its light fell in patches upon the waving, heaving, filmy carpet of lilac vapour above the silent sea.  But there, dark against the sky, stood the great dusky-brown stack,—motionless, and dull, and meaningless.  At 9.30 p.m., the master architect called upon the stalwart son of the fire-god to broach the second barrel of paraffin and besprinkle the top of the pile.  A great wind arose, and the air was heard to sing through the flues.

The parson who seemed to be a leading spirit was now called on to give an account of that 19th July in 1588, and this he did; and as his words died away, a cheer broke the temporary silence.  Then a detachment was told off to go to the point of Skiddaw, in view of Keswick Town; and at 10 p.m. sharp red light seemed to break from underground at that far point, and in a moment the rosy glow was seen to irradiate the crowd by the beacon on the summit, and make the place a very mountain-height of phantasy or demon glory, as dreamed of in some wizard’s tale.  Rockets whizzed up to heaven, and fell in stars and golden rain.  Another moment, and a lady was seen to touch the summit of the pyre with a long wand of fire,—a peat, saturated with paraffin, at the end of a long pole.  And in a second the whole mass, with a roar, leapt into flame, and flung a banner of glorious golden light far off to the westward over the vale, in the direction of Bassenthwaite and the Wythop Woods,—a flame with at least three hundred square feet of fire in it, as I heard.  Then “Rule, Britannia!” and cheers for Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins and Raleigh and Howard, were heard, and the Bonfire Committee must needs have been glad.  “The red glare of Skiddaw” had indeed “roused the burghers of Carlisle.”

Rockets went upward from either point.  At about 10.45 silence was called for, and Macaulay’s “Ballad of the Armada” was given by a schoolmaster, as I learned afterwards, of the neighbouring parish of Brigham.  Three cheers were called for and given.  The Chairman of the Bonfire Committee was lifted and carried enthusiastically round the beacon-fire on the shoulders of his fire-making comrades.  At 11, red lights were again displayed, and bouquets of rockers sailed up and broke in beauty.  The National Anthem was sung, and leaving the Armada beacon to burn to its heart content for another two days or more, the crowd gradually began to disperse, and “down the hill, down the hill,” the hundreds of spectators went with shout and song, or with silence and in thought of the Spanish Armada, and the eventful beacon-night three hundred years ago.        

(Spectator, 61 (28 July 1888), 1028-9)

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Twixt Cursmastide and glad New Year,
    Yah daay oor Kessick sticks tea;
Eh barn! that daay fra far and near
    We’re parlish glad we’re sixty!

For than aw drest in Sunday best
    We coom to t’ oald fwoks’ dinner;
And while we crack we tak a snack,
    And nin on us grows thinner.

For fawin’ ill theer’s nea excuse,
    The cock is terble clivver;
Theer’s beef and pies and roasted geuse,
    And tarts and things for ivver.

And than oor tables! loavin’s daay
    Sec flooers, sec decorations!
The King and Queen might sup awaay
    And think it Coronation.

We meet as friends aw maks of fwok,
    High, low, nea airs nor graces;
It’s good to crack and hear a jwoke,
    And see each udder’s faeces.

And if a laal bit gloom is cast,
    To think that deeth is watchin’,
To think hoo manny he hes fast,
    And who he’ll next be catchin’.

At least we’ll hev a pleasant brek,
    As lang as we are yable,
And larn that human lives can mek
    Heaven roond t’ oald fwoks’ table. 

(Carlisle Journal, 1 January 1904, p. 3)

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