My dear Pollock,
If you come here, come some very fine weather, when we look at our best inland, and you may take charge of my Boat on the River. I doubt I did my Eyes damage this Summer by steering in the Sun, and peering out for the Beacons that mark the Channel; but your Eyes are proof against this, and I shall resign the command to you, as you wrote that you liked it at Clovelly. . . .
I had thought Beauty was the main object of the Arts: but these people, not having Genius, I suppose, to create any new forms of that, have recourse to the Ugly, and find their Worshippers in plenty. In Poetry, Music, and Painting, it seems to me the same. And people think all this finer than Mozart, Raffaelle, and Tennyson—as he was—but he never ceases to be noble and pure. There was a fine passage quoted from his Last Idyll: about a Wave spending itself away on a long sandy Shore: that was Lincolnshire, I know.
Carlyle has written to remind me of putting up a Stone on the spot in Naseby field where I dug up the Dead for him thirty years ago. I will gladly have the Stone cut, and the Inscription he made for it engraved: but will I go again to Northamptonshire to see it set up? And perhaps the people there have forgotten all about the place, now that a whole
Generation has passed away, and improved Farming has passed the Plough over the Ground. But we shall see.
To W. A. Wright.
Woodbridge, Jan. 20/72.
By way of flourishing my Eyes, I have been looking into Andrew Marvell, an old favourite of mine, who led the way for Dryden in Verse, and Swift in Prose, and was a much better fellow than the last, at any rate.
Two of his lines in the Poem on ‘Appleton House,’ with its Gardens, Grounds, etc., run:
But most the Hewel’s wonders are,
Who here has the Holtseltster’s care.