My dear Lady,
I have let the Full Moon pass because I thought you had written to me so lately, and so kindly, about our lost Spedding, that I would not call on you so soon again. Of him I will say nothing except that his Death has made me recall very many passages in his Life in which I was partly concerned. In particular, staying at his Cumberland Home along with Tennyson in the May of 1835. ‘Voilà bien longtemps de ça!’ His Father
and Mother were both alive: he, a wise man, who mounted his Cob after Breakfast and was at his Farm till Dinner at two; then away again till Tea: after which he sat reading by a shaded lamp: saying very little, but always courteous and quite content with any company his Son might bring to the house, so long as they let him go his way: which indeed he would have gone whether they let him or no. But he had seen enough of Poets not to like them or their Trade: Shelley, for a time living among the Lakes: Coleridge at Southey’s (whom perhaps he had a respect for—Southey I mean); and Wordsworth whom I do not think he valued. He was rather jealous of ‘Jem,’ who might have done available service in the world, he thought, giving himself up to such Dreamers; and sitting up with Tennyson conning over the Morte d’Arthur, Lord of Burleigh, and other things which helped to make up the two volumes of 1842. So I always associate that Arthur Idyll with Basanthwaite Lake, under Skiddaw. Mrs. Spedding was a sensible, motherly Lady, with whom I used to play Chess of a Night. And there was an old Friend of hers, Miss Bristowe, who always reminded me of Miss La Creevy if you know of such a Person in Nickleby.
At the end of May we went to lodge for a week at Windermere, where Wordsworth’s new volume of Yarrow Revisited reached us. W. was then at his home: but Tennyson would not go
to visit him: and of course I did not: nor even saw him.
You have, I suppose, the Carlyle Reminiscences: of which I will say nothing except that much as we outsiders gain by them, I think that, on the whole, they had better have been kept unpublished, for some while at least.
To W. F. Pollock.
[1881.]
My dear Pollock,
Thank you for your kind Letter; which I forwarded, with its enclosure, to Thompson, as you desired.