Direct to Boulge, Woodbridge.
March 7/50.
My dear old Frederic,
. . . I saw Alfred in London—pretty well, I thought. He has written songs to be stuck between the cantos of the Princess, none of them of the old champagne flavour, as I think. But I am in a minority about the Princess, I believe. If you print any poems, I especially desire you will transmit them to me. I wish I was with you to consider about these: for though I cannot write poems, you know I consider that I have the old woman’s faculty of judging of them: yes, much better than much
cleverer and wiser men; I pretend to no Genius, but to Taste: which, according to my aphorism, is the feminine of Genius. . . .
. . . Please to answer me directly. I constantly think of you: and, as I have often sincerely told you, with a kind of love which I feel towards but two or three friends. Are you coming to England? How goes on Grimsby! Doesn’t the state of Europe sicken you? Above all, let me have any poems you print: you are now the only man I expect verse from; such gloomy grand stuff as you write. Thackeray, to be sure, can write good ballads, half serious. His Pendennis is very stupid, I think: Dickens’ Copperfield on the whole, very good. He always lights one up somehow. There is a new volume of posthumous poems by Ebenezer Elliott: with fine things in it. I don’t find myself growing old about Poetry; on the contrary. I wish I could take twenty years off Alfred’s shoulders, and set him up in his youthful glory: . . . He is the same magnanimous, kindly, delightful fellow as ever; uttering by far the finest prose sayings of any one.
To John Allen.
Boulge: March 9/50.
My dear Allen,
. . . I have now been home about three weeks, and, as you say, one sees indications of lovely spring
about. I have read but very little of late; indeed my eyes have not been in superfine order. I caught a glimpse of the second volume of Southey’s Life and Letters; interesting enough. I have also bought Emerson’s ‘Representative Men,’ a shilling book of Bohn’s: with very good scattered thoughts in it: but scarcely leaving any large impression with one, or establishing a theory. So at least it has seemed to me: but I have not read very carefully. I have also bought a little posthumous volume of Ebenezer Elliott: which is sure to have fine things in it.