22 OCTOBER 1892, Page 3

A correspondent of the Athenwum repeats the old and rather

absurd story that in the allusion to his "Pilot" in Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar," the poet referred either to his deceased son, Lionel, or to his deceased friend, Arthur Hallam. We have the present Lord Tennyson's authority for saying that the story is old, and that his father constantly repudiated it ; and once, when too much plagued, asked "what they thought he used a capital 'P' for ? " The idea, too, that the word "dark," in "after that the dark," is agnostic, is absurd. The allusion is to "the valley of the shadow of death." "Crossing the Bar" appears to have caught a fresh hold on the sym- pathies of Londoners, a leaflet with it, under a rough portrait of Tennyson, being sold in the streets in thousands for a penny.