I will not look on the Book you have sent me as any Return for the Booklet I sent you, but as a free and kindly Gift. I really don’t know that you could have sent me a better. I have read it with more continuous attention and gratification than I now usually feel, and always (as Lamb suggested) well disposed to say Grace after reading.
Seeing what Mr. Lowell has done for Dante, Rousseau, etc., one does not wish him to be limited in his Subjects: but I do wish he would do for English Writers what Ste. Beuve has done for French. Mr. Lowell so far goes along with him as to give so much of each Writer’s Life as may illustrate his Writings; he has more Humour (in which alone I fancy S. B. somewhat wanting), more extensive Reading, I suppose; and a power of metaphorical Illustration which (if I may say so) seems to me to want only a little reserve in its use: as was the case perhaps with Hazlitt. But Mr. Lowell is not biassed by Hazlitt’s—(by anybody’s, so far as I see)—party or personal prejudices; and altogether seems to me the man most fitted to do this Good Work, where it has not (as with Carlyle’s Johnson) been done, for good and all, before. Of course, one only wants the
Great Men, in their kind: Chaucer, Pope (Dryden being done [193]), and perhaps some of the ‘minora sidera’ clustered together, as Hazlitt has done them. Perhaps all this will come forth in some future Series even now gathering in Mr. Lowell’s Head. However that may be, this present Series will make me return to some whom I have not lately looked up. Dante’s face I have not seen these ten years: only his Back on my Book Shelf. What Mr. Lowell says of him recalled to me what Tennyson said to me some thirty-five or forty years ago. We were stopping before a shop in Regent Street where were two Figures of Dante and Goethe. I (I suppose) said, ‘What is there in old Dante’s Face that is missing in Goethe’s?’ And Tennyson (whose Profile then had certainly a remarkable likeness to Dante’s) said: ‘The Divine.’ Then Milton; I don’t think I’ve read him these forty years; the whole Scheme of the Poem, and certain Parts of it, looming as grand as anything in my Memory; but I never could read ten lines together without stumbling at some Pedantry that tipped me at once out of Paradise, or even Hell, into the Schoolroom, worse than either. Tennyson again used to say that the two grandest of all Similes were those of the Ships hanging in the Air, and ‘the Gunpowder one,’ which he used slowly and grimly to enact, in the Days that are no more. He certainly then thought Milton the sublimest of all the Gang; his Diction modelled on Virgil, as perhaps Dante’s.
Spenser I never could get on with, and (spite of Mr. Lowell’s good word) shall still content myself with such delightful Quotations from him as one lights upon here and there: the last from Mr. Lowell.
Then, old ‘Daddy Wordsworth,’ as he was sometimes called, I am afraid, from my Christening, he is now, I suppose, passing under the Eclipse consequent on the Glory which followed his obscure Rise. I remember fifty years ago at our Cambridge, when the Battle was fighting for him by the Few against the Many of us who only laughed at ‘Louisa in the Shade,’ etc. His Brother was then Master of Trinity College; like all Wordsworths (unless the drowned Sailor) pompous and priggish. He used to drawl out the Chapel responses so that we called him the ‘Mēēserable Sinner’ and his brother the ‘Meeserable Poet.’ Poor fun enough: but I never can forgive the Lakers all who first despised, and then patronized ‘Walter Scott,’ as they loftily called him: and He, dear, noble, Fellow, thought they were quite justified. Well, your Emerson has done him far more Justice than his own Countryman Carlyle, who won’t allow him to be a Hero in any way, but sets up such a cantankerous narrow-minded Bigot as John Knox in his stead. I did go to worship at Abbotsford, as to Stratford on Avon: and saw that it was good to have so done. If you, if Mr. Lowell, have not lately read it, pray read Lockhart’s account of his Journey to Douglas Dale on (I think) July 18 or 19, 1831. It is a piece of Tragedy, even to the muttering Thunder,
like the Lammermuir, which does not look very small beside Peter Bell and Co.
My dear Sir, this is a desperate Letter; and that last Sentence will lead to another dirty little Story about my Daddy: to which you must listen or I should feel like the Fine Lady in one of Vanbrugh’s Plays, ‘Oh my God, that you won’t listen to a Woman of Quality when her Heart is bursting with Malice!’ And perhaps you on the other Side of the Great Water may be amused with a little of your old Granny’s Gossip.
Well then: about 1826, or 7, Professor Airy (now our Astronomer Royal) and his Brother William called on the Daddy at Rydal. In the course of Conversation Daddy mentioned that sometimes when genteel Parties came to visit him, he contrived to slip out of the room, and down the garden walk to where ‘The Party’s’ travelling Carriage stood. This Carriage he would look into to see what Books they carried with them: and he observed it was generally ‘Walter Scott’s.’ It was Airy’s Brother (a very veracious man, and an Admirer of Wordsworth, but, to be sure, more of Sir Walter) who told me this. It is this conceit that diminishes Wordsworth’s stature among us, in spite of the mountain Mists he lived among. Also, a little stinginess; not like Sir Walter in that! I remember Hartley Coleridge telling us at Ambleside how Professor Wilson and some one else (H. C. himself perhaps) stole a Leg of Mutton from Wordsworth’s Larder for the fun of the Thing.
Here then is a long Letter of old world Gossip from the old Home. I hope it won’t tire you out: it need not, you know.
P.S. By way of something better from the old World, I post you Hazlitt’s own Copy of his English Poets, with a few of his marks for another Edition in it. If you like to keep it, pray do: if you like better to give it to Hazlitt’s successor, Mr. Lowell, do that from yourself.