Letter to Miss Lewis, 1st Oct. 1840.
My dear Veronica—which, being interpreted, is "fidelity in friendship"—Last week I was absent from home from Wednesday to Saturday, in quest of the "coy maiden," Pleasure—at least, nominally so, the real motive being rather to gratify another's feeling.[15] I heard the "Messiah" on Thursday morning at Birmingham, and some beautiful selections from other oratories of Handel and Haydn on Friday. With a stupid, drowsy sensation, produced by standing sentinel over damson cheese and a warm stove, I cannot do better than ask you to read, if accessible, Wordsworth's short poem on the "Power of Sound," with which I have just been delighted. I have made an alteration in my plans with Mr. Brezzi, and shall henceforward take Italian and German alternately, so that I shall not be liable to the consciousness of having imperative employment for every interstice of time. There seems a greater affinity between German and my mind than Italian, though less new to me, possesses.
I am reading Schiller's "Maria Stuart," and Tasso.
I was pleased with a little poem I learned a week or two ago in German; and, as I want you to like it, I have just put the idea it contains into English doggerel, which quite fails to represent the beautiful simplicity and nature of the original, but yet, I hope, will give you sufficiently its sense to screen the odiousness of the translation. Eccola:
QUESTION AND ANSWER.
"'Where blooms, O my father, a thornless rose?'
'That can I not tell thee, my child;
Not one on the bosom of earth e'er grows
But wounds whom its charms have beguiled.'
"'Would I'd a rose on my bosom to lie,
But I shrink from the piercing thorn:
I long, but I dare not its point defy;
I long, and I gaze forlorn.'
"'Not so, O my child—round the stem again
Thy resolute fingers entwine;
Forego not the joy for its sister, pain—
Let the rose, the sweet rose, be thine.'"
Would not a parcel reach you by railway?
This is the first allusion to the new means of locomotion, which would, no doubt, be attracting much interest in the Griff household, as valuation was a large part of Mr. Evans's business. Long years after, George Eliot wrote: