To E. B. Cowell.
Market hill, Woodbridge.
Aug. 5/63.
My dear Cowell,
I don’t hear from you: I rather think you are deterred by those Birds which I asked you to print (in my last Letter) with some Correction, etc., of your own: and which you have not found Time or Inclination to get done. But don’t let anything of this sort prevent your writing to me now and then: no one can be more utterly indifferent than I am whether these Birds are printed or not: and I suppose I distinctly told you not to put yourself to any Trouble. Indeed I dare say I should only be bored with the Copies when they were printed: for I don’t know a Soul here who would care for the Thing if it were ten times as well done as I have done it: nor do I care for Translation or Original, myself. Oh dear, when I do look into Homer, Dante, and Virgil, Æschylus, Shakespeare, etc., those Orientals
look—silly! Don’t resent my saying so. Don’t they? I am now a good [deal] about in a new Boat I have built, and thought (as Johnson took Cocker’s Arithmetic with him on travel, because he shouldn’t exhaust it) so I would take Dante and Homer with me, instead of Mudie’s Books, which I read through directly. I took Dante by way of slow Digestion: not having looked at him for some years: but I am glad to find I relish him as much as ever: he atones with the Sea; as you know does the Odyssey—these are the Men!
I am just returned in my Ship from Holland—where I stayed—two days!—and was so glad to rush away home after being imprisoned in a sluggish un-sweet Canal in Rotterdam: and after tearing about to Amsterdam, the Hague, etc., to see things which were neither new nor remarkable to me though I had never seen them before—except in Pictures, which represent to you the Places as well as if you went there, without the trouble of going. I am sure wiser men, with keener outsight and insight would see what no Pictures could give: but this I know is always the case with me: this is my last Voyage abroad, I believe: unless I go to see Raffaelle’s Madonna at Dresden, which no other Picture can represent than itself: unless Dante’s Beatrice.
I don’t think you ever told me if you had got, or read, Spedding’s two first volumes of Bacon. My opinion is not the least altered of the Case: and (as I anticipated) Spedding has brooded over his Egg so
long he has rather addled it. Thompson told me that the very Papers he adduces to clear Bacon in Essex’s Business, rather go against him: I haven’t seen any Notice of the Book in any Review but Fraser: where Donne (of course) was convinced, etc., and I hear that even the wise old Spedding is mortified that he has awakened so little Interest for his Hero. You know his Mortification would not be on his own score. His last Letter to me (some months ago) seemed to indicate that he could scarce lift up his Pen to go on—he had as yet, he said, written nothing of volumes 3 and 4. But I suppose he will in time. I say this Life of his wasted on a vain work is a Tragedy pathetic as Antigone or Iphigenia. Of Tennyson I hear but little: and I have ceased to look forward to any future Work of his. Thackeray seems dumb as a gorged Blackbird too: all growing old!
I have lost my sister Kerrich, the only one of my family I much cared for, or who much cared for me.
But (not to dwell on what cannot be helped, and to which my talking of all growing old led me) I see in last week’s Athenæum great Praise of a new Volume of Poems by Jean Ingelow. The Reviewer talks of a ‘new Poet,’ etc., quite unaware that some dozen years ago the ‘new Poet’ published a Volume (as you may remember) with as distinct Indications of sweet, fresh, and original Genius as anything he adduces from this second Volume. I remember writing a sort of Review, when about you at Bramford,