find you, with your blue and crimson Cushions [197] in Queen Anne’s Mansions, as a year ago. Mrs. Edwards is always in town: not at all forgetful of her husband; and there will be our Donne also of whom I hear nothing, and so conclude there is nothing to be told, and with him my Visits will be summed up.

Now, lose not a Day in providing yourself with Charles Tennyson Turner’s Sonnets, published by Kegan Paul. There is a Book for you to keep on your table, at your elbow. Very many of the Sonnets I do not care for: mostly because of the Subject: but there is pretty sure to be some beautiful line or expression in all; and all pure, tender, noble, and—original. Old Spedding supplies a beautiful Prose Overture to this delightful Volume: never was Critic more one with his Subject—or, Object, is it? Frederick Tennyson, my old friend, ought to have done something to live along with his Brothers: all who will live, I believe, of their Generation: and he perhaps would, if he could, have confined himself to limits not quite so narrow as the Sonnet. But he is a Poet, and cannot be harnessed.

I have still a few flowers surviving in my Garden; and I certainly never remember the foliage of trees so little changed in October’s third week. A little flight of Snow however: whose first flight used to

quicken my old Crabbe’s fancy: Sir Eustace Grey written under such circumstances. [198]

And I am always yours
Littlegrange

(not ‘Markethill’ as you persist in addressing me.)

LXXXII.

Woodbridge, Novr. 17/80.

My dear Lady,

Here is the Moon very near her Full: so I send you a Letter. I have it in my head you are not in London: and may not be when I go up there for a few days next week—for this reason I think so: viz., that you have not acknowledged a Copy of Charles Tennyson’s Sonnets, which I desired Kegan Paul to send you, as from me—with my illustrious Initials on the Fly Leaf: and, he or one of his men, wrote that so it should be, or had been done. It may nevertheless not have been: or, if in part done, the illustrious Initials forgotten. But I rather think the Book was sent: and that you would have guessed at the Sender, Initials or not. And as I know you are even over-scrupulous in acknowledging any such things, I gather that the Book came when you had left London—for Leamington, very likely: and that there you are now. The Book, and your Acknowledgment