Dear Cowell,
. . . I am only got half way in the third book of Thucydides: but I go on with pleasure; with as much pleasure as I used to read a novel. I have also again taken up my Homer. That is a noble and affecting passage where Diomed and Glaucus, being about to fight, recognize each other as old family friends,
exchange arms, and vow to avoid each other henceforth in the fray. (N.B. and this in the tenth year of the war!) After this comes, you know, the meeting of Hector and Andromache, which we read together; altogether a truly Epic canto indeed.
Yet, as I often think, it is not the poetical imagination, but bare Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the Iliad; the history of the World, the infinitudes of Space and Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me. And when we think that Man must go on to discover in the same plodding way, one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of discovery will distance all his imaginations, [and] dissolve the language in which they are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now, after two thousand years; a space that seems long to us whose lives are so brief; but a moment, the twinkling of an eye, if compared (not to Eternity alone) but to the ages which it is now known the world must have existed, and (unless for some external violence) must continue to exist. Lyell in his book about America, says that the falls of Niagara, if (as seems certain) they have worked their way back southwards for seven miles, must have taken over 35,000 years to do so, at the rate of something over a foot a year! Sometimes they fall back on a stratum that crumbles away from behind them more easily: but then again
they have to roll over rock that yields to them scarcely more perceptibly than the anvil to the serpent. And those very soft strata which the Cataract now erodes contain evidences of a race of animals, and of the action of seas washing over them, long before Niagara came to have a distinct current; and the rocks were compounded ages and ages before those strata! So that, as Lyell says, the Geologist looking at Niagara forgets even the roar of its waters in the contemplation of the awful processes of time that it suggests. It is not only that this vision of Time must wither the Poet’s hope of immortality; but it is in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.
As to your friend Pliny, I don’t think that Time can use his usual irony on that saying about Martial. [230a] Pliny evidently only suggests that ‘at non erunt æterna quæ scripsit’ as a question of his correspondent; to which he himself replies ‘Non erunt fortasse.’ Your Greek quotations are very graceful. I should like to read Busbequius. [230b] Do you think Tacitus affected in style, as people now say he is?
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In the Notes to his edition of Selden’s Table Talk, published in 1847, Mr. Singer says, ‘Part of the following Illustrations were kindly communicated to the
Editor by a gentleman to whom his best thanks are due, and whom it would have afforded him great pleasure to be allowed to name.’ It might have been said with truth that the ‘greater part’ of the illustrations were contributed by the same anonymous benefactor, who was, I have very little doubt, FitzGerald himself. I have in my possession a copy of the Table Talk which he gave me about 1871 or 1872, with annotations in his own handwriting, and these are almost literally reproduced in the Notes to Singer’s Edition. Of this copy FitzGerald wrote to me, ‘What notes I have appended are worth nothing, I suspect; though I remember that the advice of the present Chancellor [231] was asked in some cases.’
To E. B. Cowell.