[On his way home from the funeral in Westminster Abbey, Huxley passed the time in the train by shaping out some lines on the dead poet, the form of them suggested partly by some verses of his wife's, partly by Schiller's
Gib diesen Todten mir heraus,
Ich muss ihn wieder haben [Don Carlos, scene 9.],
which came back to his mind in the Abbey. The lines were published in the "Nineteenth Century" for November 1892. He declared that he deserved no credit for the verses; they merely came to him in the train.
His own comparison of them with the sheaf of professed poets' odes which also appeared in the same magazine, comes in a letter to his wife, to whom he sent the poem as soon as it appeared in print.]
I know you want to see the poem, so I have cut it and the rest out of the "Nineteenth" just arrived, and sent it.
If I wore to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the others, I should say, that as to style it is hammered, and as to feeling human.
They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly poetico-classical educated-class sentiment. I do not think there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience would have boggled over. I would give a penny for John Burns' thoughts about it. (N.B.—Highly impartial and valuable criticism.)
[He also wrote to Professor Romanes, who had been moved by this new departure to send him a volume of his own poems:—]
Hodeslea, November 3, 1892.
My dear Romanes,