From Hallam Tennyson's account of 'My Father's Illness [1888]': 'He read or had read to him at this time the following books or essays: Leaf's edition of the Iliad; the Iphigenia of Aulis, expressing "wonder at its modernness"; Matthew Arnold on Tolstoi; Fiske's Destiny of Man; Gibbon's History, especially praising the Fall of Constantinople; Keats [sic] poems; Wordsworth's "Recluse." Of this last he said: "I like the passages which have been published before, such as that about the dance of a flock of birds, driven by a thoughtless impulse [...]" 'He often looked at his Virgil, more than ever delighting in what he called "that splendid end of the second Georgic."'