Little Grange, Woodbridge.
Decr. 12, 1876.
Dear Annie Thackeray,
Messrs. Smith and Elder very politely gave me leave to print, and may be publish, three Stanzas of your Father’s ‘Ho, pretty Page,’ adapted (under proper direction) to an old Cambridge Tune, which he and I have sung together, tho’ not to these fine Words, as you may guess. I asked this of Messrs. Smith and Elder, because I thought they had the Copyright. But I did not mean to publish them unless with your Approval: only to print a few Copies for friends. And I will stop even that, if you don’t choose. Please to tell me in half a dozen words as directly as you can.
The Words, you know, are so delightful (stanzas one, two, and the last), and the old Tune of ‘Troll, troll, the bonny brown Bowl’ so pretty, and (with
some addition) so appropriate, I think, that I fancied others beside Friends might like to have them together. But, if you don’t approve, the whole thing shall be quashed. Which I ought to have asked before: but I thought your Publishers’ sanction might include yours. Please, I say, to say Yes or No as soon as you can.
I have been reading the two Series of ‘Hours in a Library’ with real delight. Some of them I had read before in Cornhill, but all together now: delighted, I say, to find all I can so heartily concur and believe in put into a shape that I could not have wrought out for myself. I think I could have suggested a very little about Crabbe, in whom I am very much up: and one word about Clarissa. [208] But God send me many more Hours in a Library in which I may shut myself up from this accursed East among other things.
To C. E. Norton.
Little Grange, Woodbridge.
Dec. 22/76.
[Post mark Dec. 21.]
My dear Sir,
. . . In the last Atlantic Monthly was, as you know, an Ode by Mr. Lowell; lofty in Thought and