Markethill, Woodbridge,
November 20th, 1861.
My dear old Alfred—It gives me a strange glow of pleasure when I come upon your verses, as I now do in every other book I take up, with no name of author, as every other person knows whose they are. I love to light on the verses for their own sake, and to remember having heard nearly all I care for—and what a lot that is!—from your own lips.
Markethill, Woodbridge,
December 14th, 1862.
My dear old Alfred—Christmas coming reminds me of my half-yearly call on you.
I have, as usual, nothing to tell of myself: boating all the summer and reading Clarissa Harlowe since. You and I used to talk of the Book more than twenty years ago. I believe I am better read in it than almost any one in existence now—No wonder: for it is almost intolerably tedious and absurd—But I can’t read the “Adam Bedes,” “Daisy Chains,” etc., at all. I look at my row of Sir Walter Scott and think with comfort that I can always go to him of a winter evening, when no other book comes to hand.
To Frederick Tennyson.
November 15th, 1874.
I wrote my yearly letter to Mrs. Alfred a fortnight ago, I think; but as yet have had no answer. Some Newspaper people make fun of a Poem of Alfred’s, the “Voice and the Peak,” I think: giving morsels of which of course one could not judge. But I think he had better have done singing: he has sung well—tempus silere, etc.
But his love for the man and his underlying belief in his opinion and genius never varied. “I don’t think of you so little, my dear old Alfred,” he wrote one day in the middle of their friendship, “but rejoice in the old poems and in yourself, young or old, and worship you (I may say) as I do no other man, and am glad I can worship one man still.”
His delight when he found that Alfred had really liked Omar was unusually naïf and keen. He forgot his grumbling, and wrote to Mrs. Tennyson: