My dear James—Send the box, please, not without your new volume hither. I shall be grateful for both. I am glad that you find anything to approve of in the “H. G.” I have not yet finished the Arthurian legends, otherwise I might consider your Job theme. Strange that I quite forgot our conversation thereupon. Where is Westbourne Terrace? If I had ever clearly made out I should assuredly have called. I have often when in town past by the old 60, the “vedovo sito,” with a groan, thinking of you as no longer the comeatable, runupableto, smokeablewith J. S. of old, but as a family man, far in the west, sitting cigarless among many nieces, clean and forlorn, but I hope to see you somewhere in ’70, for I have taken chambers in Victoria Street for three years, though they are not yet furnished.
Where is the difficulty of that line in the “Flower”? It is rather rough certainly, but, had you followed the clue of “little flower” in the preceding line, you would not have stumbled over this, which is accentual anapaest,
What you are, root and all:
rough—doubtless.—Believe me yours ever,
A. Tennyson.
[108] [The Holy Grail and other Poems. It was Spedding chiefly who urged my father about this time to write his plays, because he thought that he had the true dramatic instinct. He criticized them in proof, and gave them his warm commendation.—Ed.]
[109] Life and Letters, vol. v.
[110] The passage from Shakespeare prefixed to this paper contains probably as much as can be said of the mental, not less than the affectionate conditions, under which such a report as “In Memoriam” is produced, and may give us more insight into the imaginative faculty’s mode of working, than all our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child—“Fancy’s Child”—the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakespeare. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children say, it has a germ of universal meaning, which it is quite lawful to bring out of it, and which may be enjoyed to the full without any wrong to its own original beauty and fitness. A dewdrop is not the less beautiful that it illustrates in its structure the law of gravitation which holds the world together, and by which “the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong.” This is the passage. The Friar speaking of Claudio, hearing that Hero “died upon his words,” says:
The idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination;
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparelled in more precious habit—
More moving delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul,
Than when she lived indeed.
We have here expressed in plain language the imaginative memory of the beloved dead, rising upon the past, like moonlight upon midnight: