60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
June 15th, 1854.
My dear Alfred—I called at Quaritch’s to look for another Persian Dictionary. I see he has a copy of Eastwick’s Gulistan for ten shillings: a translation (not Eastwick’s, however, but one quite sufficient for the purpose) can be had for five shillings. Would you like me to buy them and send them down to you by the next friend who travels your way: or will you wait till some good day I can lend you my Eastwick (which is now at Oxford)? I could mark some of the pieces which I think it might not offend you to read: though you will not care greatly for anything in it.
Oh, such an atmosphere as I am writing in!—Yours,
E. F. G.
I left my little Swedenborg at Farringford. Please keep it for me, as it was a gift from my sister.
The note of the letters is always the same—warm affection, deep underlying admiration and regard, superficial banter and play of humour, and humorous, half-grumbling criticism. When they met face to face, after being parted for twenty years, they fell at once into exactly the old vein. FitzGerald was surprised at this, but he need not have been. Both were the sincerest and most natural of men, and nothing but distance and absence had occurred to sever them.
From the first he had conceived an intense and almost humble-minded admiration for Alfred. One of his earliest utterances describes his feelings, and strikes, with his keen critical perception, the true note. “I will say no more of Tennyson,” he wrote, “than that the more I have seen of him, the more cause I have to think him great. His little humours and grumpinesses were so droll that I was always laughing,—I must, however say further, that I felt, what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of depression at times from the over-shadowing of a so much more lofty intellect than my own—I could not be mistaken in the universality of his mind.”
His descriptions in Euphranor, published some sixteen years later, of “the only living and like to live poet he had known,” tell the same tale. They speak of Tennyson’s union of passion and strength. “As King Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin he, though as a great Poet comprehending all the softer stops of human Emotion in that Register where the Intellectual, no less than what is called the Poetical, faculty predominated. As all who knew him know, a Man at all points, Euphranor—like your Digby, of grand proportion and feature....”
There was no one for whose opinion he had so much regard, grumble though he might, and criticize as he would. He had a special preference for the poems at whose production he had assisted, which he had seen in MS., or heard rehearsed orally. Toward the later poems his feeling was not the same. The following extracts are all equally characteristic: