Ben tetragono ai colpi della Ventura?”
“No, it was not in my mind.” Again, I quoted his expression, “hollow shapes enclosing hearts of flame,” thinking it had arisen from Beckford’s Vathek. The answer was “No, merely spectral visions.”
T. “Some of my poems depend on single sayings, single lines which have served me for a theme. My poem of ‘The Brigand’ is founded on a story told in the Autobiography of that great and gallant gentleman, Walter Scott.”
T. “Edward FitzGerald and I used to weary of the hopelessly prosaic lines in some books of ‘The Excursion,’ and we had a contest, the prize for which was to be for the weakest line by mutual consent that we could either of us invent. FitzGerald declared the line was his—it really was mine—‘A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.’” I wish I could have told him of Jem Stephen’s commentary on “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” “That is no reason why we should lie about Heaven in our old age.” Among other passages he quotes with admiration Wordsworth’s lines on the “Simplon Pass.”
T. “I am sorry that I am turned into a school-book at Harrow; the boys will say of me, ‘That horrible Tennyson.’ The cheapness of English classics makes the plan acceptable to schoolmasters and parents.”
He quoted with approval Byron’s line—
Then farewell, Horace, whom I hated so.
“He was quite right. I, too, was so overdosed with Horace as a boy, that I don’t do him justice now I am old. I suppose Horace was the most popular poet that ever lived?”