My dear Sir,—How could I tell you of my Pastoral-to-be when it had not been thought of? It was only begun in September, and when I left you in July on the deck of your steamer, I had no thought of that or any other new poem. I hope ere this a little volume, half belonging to me, half to an old school-friend, will have reached you: this does contain old things, the casualties of at least ten years.
You may fancy how truly welcome all your kind praise of the first of them has been to me; so far as praise goes I hardly venture to accept it, but as recognition I heartily feed on it. Meantime, in England I shall not be troubled with a very onerous weight of celebrity. Mr. Kingsley, a chief writer in ‘Fraser,’ devoted the whole of a cordial eulogistic article to the ‘Pastoral,’ and has made it tolerably known; but the ‘Spectator’ was contemptuous; and in Oxford, though there has been a fair sale and much talk of it, the verdict is, that it is ‘indecent and profane, immoral and (!) communistic.’
Will you convey to Mr. Longfellow the fact that it was a reading of his ‘Evangeline’ aloud to my mother and sister, which, coming after a reperusal of the ‘Iliad,’ occasioned this outbreak of hexameters?
LETTERS.
FROM 1849 TO 1852.
LONDON.
To the Rev. ——[10]
January 4, 1849.
My Dear Sir,—After a good deal of thinking and some advising, I find that I have only to repeat what I stated at your house.
I do not feel myself competent to undertake the conduct or superintendence of any prayers, nor can I in any way pledge myself to be present. Any attendance I might give would simply be that of a private person—no way official; it would be as that of a junior member of a family at domestic worship; it would be a matter of conformity, not of individual choice; my own feeling, meantime, being to leave it, as I understand the Quakers do, to spontaneous emotion; and so I confess I should prefer any arrangement which would make my absence not unnatural, as might for instance be the case if prayers were combined with a Greek Testament lesson not given by me.
Meantime, I am sure I should have every disposition to facilitate devotional arrangements. In fact, I should not unwillingly concede that it might be better that your Principal should be one who could officially join in them, as indeed it might be best could all your students be expected to attend. But, whether better or worse, I had conceived your institution was to be one on which this maturer form would not be fixed, one which would offer a locus standi and a home for Theology and other subjects excluded from the College, and would aspire to encourage moral and religious sympathy, but would nevertheless leave all this to free, quiet and spontaneous development.
I confess I see great advantages in this system, but whether greater or less than those of the other, it is the only one in which I myself can co-operate. Not that I entertain any reluctance to attend the worship of others than those with whom I have hitherto been connected. Far from it. In Scotland I have always gone by preference to the Presbyterian churches; I have continually been to Mr. Martineau’s chapel at Liverpool; I have joined in the prayers of Unitarian families. If obliged to do one or other, I should probably go to Westminster Abbey rather than to any either Scotch or English Presbyterian chapel. But I have expressly testified my dislike to the Thirty-nine Articles, and you yourselves are quite as likely to attach to me such names as heretic, as I to apply that word to you.