I believe you will be thus just, thus true, for we are both servants of Truth.’
‘August, 1842, Cambridge. — Few have eyes for the
pretty little features of a scene. In this, men are not
so good as boys. Artists are always thus young; poets
are; but the pilgrim does not lay aside his belt of steel,
nor the merchant his pack, to worship the flowers on
the fountain’s brink. I feel, like Herbert, the weight
of “business to be done,” but the bird-like particle
would skim and sing at these sweet places. It seems
strange to leave them; and that we do so, while so
fitted to live deeply in them, shows that beauty is the
end but not the means.
‘I have just been reading the new poems of Tennyson. Much has he thought, much suffered, since the first ecstasy of so fine an organization clothed all the world with rosy light. He has not suffered himself to become a mere intellectual voluptuary, nor the songster of fancy and passion, but has earnestly revolved the problems of life, and his conclusions are calmly noble. In these later verses is a still, deep sweetness; how different from the intoxicating, sensuous melody of his earlier cadence! I have loved him much this time, and taken him to heart as a brother. One of his themes has long been my favorite, — the last expedition of Ulysses, — and his, like mine, is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, with his deep romance of wisdom, and not the worldling of the Iliad. How finely marked his slight description of himself and of Telemachus. In Dora, Locksley Hall, the Two Voices, Morte D’Arthur, I find my own life, much of it, written truly out.’
