‘Clerke Sanders’ has been familiar to me these fifty years almost; since Tennyson used to repeat it, and ‘Helen of Kirkconnel,’ at some Cambridge gathering. At that time he looked something like the Hyperion shorn of his Beams in Keats’ Poem: with a Pipe in his mouth. Afterwards he got a touch, I used to say, of Haydon’s Lazarus. Talking of Keats, do not forget to read Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters of him: in which you will find what you may not have guessed from his Poetry (though almost unfathomably deep in that also) the strong, masculine, Sense and Humour, etc., of the man more akin to Shakespeare, I am tempted to think, in a perfect circle of Poetic Faculties, than any Poet since.
Well: the Leaves which hung on more bravely than ever I remember are at last whirling away in a Cromwell Hurricane—(not quite that, neither)—and my old Man says he thinks Winter has set in at last. We cannot complain hitherto. Many summer flowers held out in my Garden till a week ago, when we dug up the Beds in order for next year. So now little but the orange Marigold, which I love for its colour (Irish and Spanish) and Courage, in living all Winter through. Within doors, I am again at my everlasting Crabbe! doctoring his Posthumous Tales à la mode of those of ‘The Hall,’ to finish a Volume of simple
‘Selections’ from his other works: all which I will leave to be used, or not, whenever old Crabbe rises up again: which will not be in the Lifetime of yours ever
E. F.G.
I dared not decypher all that Mrs. Wister wrote in my behalf—because I knew it must be sincere! Would she care for my Eternal Crabbe?
LXVI.
[Nov. 1879.]
My dear Lady,
I must say a word upon a word in your last which really pains me—about yours and Mrs. Wister’s sincerity, etc. Why, I do most thoroughly believe in both; all I meant was that, partly from your own old personal regard for me, and hers, perhaps inherited from you, you may both very sincerely over-rate my little dealings with other great men’s thoughts. For you know full well that the best Head may be warped by as good a Heart beating under it; and one loves the Head and Heart all the more for it. Now all this is all so known to you that I am vexed you will not at once apply it to what I may have said. I do think that I have had to say something of the same sort before now; and I do declare I will not say it
again, for it is simply odious, all this talking of oneself.