Take away the last stanzas, which should be applied more definitely to the body, or cut away altogether as a lie against eternal verity, and the poem stands as one of the finest of monodies.  The nature of human grief never surely was more tenderly intimated or touched—­it brought tears to my eyes.  Do read it.  He is not a Christian poet, up to this time, but let us listen and hear his next songs.  He is one of God’s singers, whether he knows it or does not know it.

I am thinking, lifting up my pen, what I can write to you which is likely to be interesting to you.  After all I come to chaos and silence, and even old night—­it is growing so dark.  I live in London, to be sure, and except for the glory of it I might live in a desert, so profound is my solitude and so complete my isolation from things and persons without.  I lie all day, and day after day, on the sofa, and my windows do not even look into the street.  To abuse myself with a vain deceit of rural life I have had ivy planted in a box, and it has flourished and spread over one window, and strikes against the glass with a little stroke from the thicker leaves when the wind blows at all briskly. Then I think of forests and groves; it is my triumph when the leaves strike the window pane, and this is not a sound like a lament.  Books and thoughts and dreams (almost too consciously dreamed, however, for me—­the illusion of them has almost passed) and domestic tenderness can and ought to leave nobody lamenting.  Also God’s wisdom, deeply steeped in His love, is as far as we can stretch out our hands.

[Footnote 86:  The lines ‘To J.S.,’ which begin: 

  ’The wind that beats the mountain blows
  More softly round the open wold.’

To Mr. Westwood 50 Wimpole Street:  December 26, 1843.

Dear Mr. Westwood,—­You think me, perhaps, and not without apparent reason, ungrateful and insensible to your letter, but indeed I am neither one nor the other, and I am writing now to try and prove it to you.  I was much touched by some tones of kindness in the letter, and it was welcome altogether, and I did not need the ‘owl’ which came after to waken me, because I was wide awake enough from the first moment; and now I see that you have been telling your beads, while I seemed to be telling nothing, in that dread silence of mine.  May all true saints of poetry be propitious to the wearer of the ‘Rosary.’

In answer to a question which you put to me long ago on the subject of books of theology, I will confess to you that, although I have read rather widely the divinity of the Greek Fathers, Gregory, Chrysostom, and so forth, and have of course informed myself in the works generally of our old English divines, Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and so forth, I am not by any means a frequent reader of books of theology as such, and as the men of our times have made them.  I have looked into the ‘Tracts’ from curiosity