You will let me keep your beautiful ballad and the gods[67] a little longer.

[Footnote 66:  This refers to the recent publication of Tennyson’s Poems, in two volumes, the first containing a re-issue of poems previously published, while the second was wholly new, and included such poems as the ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘Ulysses,’ and ‘Locksley Hall.’]

[Footnote 67:  No doubt Mr. Kenyon’s translation of Schiller’s ’Gods of Greece,’ which was the occasion of Miss Barrett’s poem ’The Dead Pan.’]

To H.S.  Boyd September 14, 1842.

My very dear Friend,—­I have made you wait a long time for the ’North American Review,’ because when your request came it was no longer within my reach, and because since then I have not been so well as usual from a sweep of the wing of the prevailing epidemic.  Now, however, I am better than I was even before the attack, only wishing that it were possible to hook-and-eye on another summer to the hem of the garment of this last sunny one.  At the end of such a double summer, to measure things humanly, I might be able to go to see you at Hampstead.  Nevertheless, winters and adversities are more fit for us than a constant sun.

I suppose, dear Mr. Boyd, you want only to have this review read to you, and not written.  Because it isn’t out of laziness that I send the book to you; and Arabel would copy whatever you please willingly, provided you wished it.  Keep the book as long as you please.  I have put a paper mark and a pencil mark at the page and paragraph where I am taken up.  It seems to me that the condemnation of ‘The Seraphim’ is not too hard.  The poem wants unity.

As to your ‘words of fire’ about Wordsworth, if I had but a cataract at command I would try to quench them.  His powers should not be judged of by my extracts or by anybody’s extracts from his last-published volume.[68] Do you remember his grand ode upon Childhood—­worth, to my apprehension, just twenty of Dryden’s ’St. Cecilia’s Day’—­his sonnet upon Westminster Bridge, his lyric on a lark, in which the lark’s music swells and exults, and the many noble and glorious passages of his ‘Excursion’?  You must not indeed blame me for estimating Wordsworth at his height, and on the other side I readily confess to you that he is occasionally, and not unfrequently, heavy and dull, and that Coleridge had an intenser genius.  Tell me if you know anything of Tennyson.  He has just published two volumes of poetry, one of which is a republication, but both full of inspiration.

Ever my very dear friend’s affectionate and grateful
E.B.B.

[Footnote 68:  Poems, chiefly of early and late years, including The Borderers, a Tragedy (1842).]

To Mrs. Martin 50 Wimpole Street:  October 22, 1842.