I loved and honoured more; that, though I had not seen him for more than twenty years, I was always thinking of him all the while: always feeling that I could apply to him for a wise word I needed for myself; always knowing that I might light upon some wiser word than any one else’s in some Review, etc., and now always thinking I have lost all that. I say that I have not known, no, nor heard of, any mortal so prepared to step unchanged into the better world we are promised—Intellect, and Heart, and such an outer Man to them as I remember.
Woodbridge: July 31, [1881].
. . . I rejoice to hear of a Collection, or Reprint, of his stray works. . . . I used to say he wrote ‘Virgilian Prose.’ One only of his I did not care for; but that, I doubt not, was because of the subject, not of the treatment: his own printed Report of a Speech he made in what was called the ‘Quinquaginta Club’ Debating Society (not the Union) at Cambridge about the year 1831. This Speech his Father got him to recall and recompose in Print; wishing always that his Son should turn his faculties to such public Topics rather than to the Poets, of whom he had seen enough in Cumberland not to have much regard for: Shelley, for one, at one time stalking about the mountains, with Pistols, and other such Vagaries.
I do not think he was much an Admirer of Wordsworth (I don’t know about Southey), and I well remember that when I was at Merehouse (as Miss Bristowe would have us call it) with A. Tennyson in 1835, Mr. Spedding grudged his Son’s giving up much time and thought to consultations about Morte d’Arthur’s, Lords of Burleigh, etc., which were then in MS. He more than once questioned me, who was sometimes present at the meetings: ‘Well, Mr. F., and what is it? Mr. Tennyson reads, and Jem criticizes:—is that it?’ etc. This, while I might be playing Chess with dear Mrs. Spedding, in May, while the Daffodils were dancing outside the Hall door.
To C. E. Norton.
Woodbridge. August 5/81.
My dear Norton,
I am sorry that you felt bound to write me so fully about the Play when, as you tell me, you had so much other work on your hands. Any how, do not trouble yourself to write more. If you think my Version does as well, or better, without any introduction, why, tear that out; all, except (if you like the Verse well enough to adopt it) the first sentence of Dedication to yourself: adding your full name and Collegiate Honours whenever you care so to do.
Your account of your Harvard original in the Atlantic Monthly was quite well fitted for its purpose: a general account of it for the general reader, without going into particulars which only the Scholar would appreciate.
I believe I told you that thirty years ago at least I advised our Trinity’s Master, then only Greek Professor, to do the like with one of the Greek Tragedies, in what they call their Senate-house, well fitted for such a purpose. But our Cambridge is too well fed, and slow to stir; and I not important enough to set it a-going.