Dear Lord Houghton,
I think I have sent you a yearly letter of some sort or other for several years, so it has come upon
me once again. I have nothing to ask of you except how you are. I should just like to know that, including ‘yours’ in you. Just a very few words will suffice, and I daresay you have no time for more. I have so much time that it is evident I have nothing to tell, except that I have just entered upon a military career in so far as having become much interested in the battle of Waterloo, which I just remember a year after it was fought, when a solemn anniversary took place in a neighbouring parish where I was born, and the village carpenter came to my father to borrow a pair of Wellington boots for the lower limbs of a stuffed effigy of Buonaparte, which was hung on a gibbet, and guns and pistols were discharged at him, while we and the parson of the parish sat in a tent where we had beef and plum pudding and loyal toasts. To this hour I remember the smell of the new-cut hay in the meadow as we went in our best summer clothes to the ceremony. But now I am trying to understand whether the Guards or the 52nd Regiment deserved most credit for écraséing the Imperial Guard. [286] Here is a fine subject to address you on in the year 1880! Let it go for nothing; but just tell me how you are, and believe me, with some feeling of old, if not very close intimacy,
Yours sincerely,
Edward FitzGerald.
Woodbridge. May 18/80.
My dear Lord,
I should have sent a line before now to thank you for your Calderon, had I not waited for some tidings of Donne from Mowbray, to whom I wrote some days ago. Not hearing from him, I suppose that he is out holyday-making somewhere; and therefore I will delay no longer.
You gave me your Calderon when it first came out, now some five and twenty years ago! I am always glad to know that it, or any of your writings, Prose or Verse, still flourish—which I think not many others of the kind will do after the Generation they are born in. I remember that you regretted having tried the asonante, and you now decide that Prose is best for English Translation. It may be so; in a great degree it must be so; but I think the experiment might yet be tried; namely, the short trochaic line, regardless of an assonant that will not speak in our thin vowels, but looped up at intervals with a strong monosyllabic rhyme, without which the English trochaic, assonant or not, is apt to fray out, or run away too watery-like without some such interruption; I mean when running to any considerable length, as I should think would be the case in Longfellow’s Hiawatha; which I have not however seen since it appeared. Were I a dozen years younger I might try this with Calderon which I think I have found to
succeed in some much shorter flights: but it is too late now, and you may think it well that it is so, with one who takes such great liberties with great Poets, himself pretending to be little more than a Versifier. I know not how it is with you who are really a Poet; and perhaps you may think I am as wrong about my trochee as about my iambic.