I wrote to you some little while before Christmas, praying you, among other things, not to put yourself to the trouble of sending me your Emerson-Carlyle Correspondence, inasmuch as I could easily get it over here; and, by way of answer, your two Volumes reached me yesterday, safe and sound from over the Atlantic. I had not time (a strange accident with me) to acknowledge the receipt of them yesterday: but make all speed to do so, with all gratitude, to-day. As you are simply the Editor of the Book, I may tell you something of my thoughts on it by and by. I doubt not that I shall find Emerson’s Letters the more interesting, because the newer, to me.
The Portrait at the head of Vol. II. assures me that one will find only what is good in them.
. . . I was glad to find from Mozley’s Oriel Reminiscences that Newman had been an admirer of my old Crabbe; and Mr. L. Stephen has very kindly written out for me a passage from some late work, or Lecture, of Newman’s own, in which he says that, after fifty years, he read ‘Richard’s Story of his Boyhood,’ in the Tales of the Hall, with the same delight as on its first appearance, and he considers that a Poem which thus pleases in Age as it pleased in Youth must be called (in the ‘accidental’ sense of the word, logically speaking) ‘Classical.’
I owe this Courtesy on Mr. Stephen’s part to my having sent him a little Preface to my Crabbe, in which I contested Mr. Stephen’s judgment as to Crabbe’s Humour: and I did not choose to publish this without apprizing him, whom I know so far as he is connected with the Thackerays. He replied very kindly, and sent me the Newman quotation I tell you of. The Crabbe is the same I sent you some years ago: left in sheets, except the few Copies I sent to friends. And now I have tacked to it a little Introduction, and sent forty copies to lie on Quaritch’s counter: for I do not suppose they will get further. And no great harm done if they stay where they are. . . .
One day you must write, and tell me how you and yours have fared through this winter. It has been a very mild, even, a warm, one over here; and I for
my part have not yet had much to complain of in point of health thus far; no, not even though winter has come at last in Snow and Storm for the last three days. I do not know if we are yet come to the worst, so terrible a Gale has been predicted, I am told, for the middle of March. Yesterday morning I distinctly heard the sea moaning some dozen miles away; and to-day, why, the enclosed little scrap, [342] enclosed to me, will tell you what it was about, on my very old Crabbe’s shore. It (the Sea) will assuredly cut off his old Borough from the Slaughden River-quay where he went to work, and whence he sailed in the ‘Unity’ Smack (one of whose Crew is still alive) on his first adventure to London. But all this can but little interest you, considering that we in England (except some few in this Eastern corner of it) scarce know more of Crabbe and his where about than by name.
To W. F. Pollock.
[Easter, 1883].
My dear Pollock,
. . . Professor Norton sent me his Carlyle-Emerson—all to the credit of all parties, I think. I must tell the Professor that in my opinion he