Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/10

 December 1894, his noble commemoration of Stevenson, and although unhappily he had given up his occupation as Chief Guide before I was sworn in as one of the Sunday Tramps, yet my name is there in the list, and it will be a pleasure, I hope, to one or two others, as it is to myself, to find that one of the Sunday Tramps, though the latest and the least worthy, has been asked to give this lecture. But apart from these personal and private matters—which still I am bold to think are not irrelevant nor unworthy of this audience—the name of Stephen brings with it the thought of everything that is honest and sincere; it gives the best encouragement that anyone could wish, though it does not make the task, in itself, less difficult.

In the Lives of the Poets, as of other men, we have all our favourite passages to which we turn by preference, and which we make into symbols or examples, standing for all the rest; or which perhaps we remember for some trivial reason or unreason, because they touch on some associations of our own. Out