as I think I told you, I always shiver involuntarily when I look—­no, glance—­at this First Poem of mine to be. ‘Now,’ I call it, what, upon my soul,—­for a solemn matter it is,—­what is to be done now, believed now, so far as it has been revealed to me—­solemn words, truly—­and to find myself writing them to any one else!  Enough now.

I know Tennyson ’face to face,’—­no more than that.  I know Carlyle and love him—­know him so well, that I would have told you he had shaken that grand head of his at ‘singing,’ so thoroughly does he love and live by it.  When I last saw him, a fortnight ago, he turned, from I don’t know what other talk, quite abruptly on me with, ’Did you never try to write a Song?  Of all things in the world, that I should be proudest to do.’  Then came his definition of a song—­then, with an appealing look to Mrs. C., ’I always say that some day in spite of nature and my stars, I shall burst into a song’ (he is not mechanically ‘musical,’ he meant, and the music is the poetry, he holds, and should enwrap the thought as Donne says ’an amber-drop enwraps a bee’), and then he began to recite an old Scotch song, stopping at the first rude couplet, ’The beginning words are merely to set the tune, they tell me’—­and then again at the couplet about—­or, to the effect that—­’give me’ (but in broad Scotch) ’give me but my lass, I care not for my cogie.’ ‘He says,’ quoth Carlyle magisterially, ’that if you allow him the love of his lass, you may take away all else, even his cogie, his cup or can, and he cares not,’ just as a professor expounds Lycophron.  And just before I left England, six months ago, did not I hear him croon, if not certainly sing, ‘Charlie is my darling’ (’my darling’ with an adoring emphasis), and then he stood back, as it were, from the song, to look at it better, and said ’How must that notion of ideal wondrous perfection have impressed itself in this old Jacobite’s “young Cavalier”—­("They go to save their land, and the young Cavalier!!")—­when I who care nothing about such a rag of a man, cannot but feel as he felt, in speaking his words after him!’ After saying which, he would be sure to counsel everybody to get their heads clear of all singing!  Don’t let me forget to clap hands, we got the letter, dearly bought as it was by the ‘Dear Sirs,’ &c., and insignificant scrap as it proved, but still it is got, to my encouragement in diplomacy.

Who told you of my sculls and spider webs—­Horne?  Last year I petted extraordinarily a fine fellow, (a garden spider—­there was the singularity,—­the thin clever-even-for-a-spider-sort, and they are so ‘spirited and sly,’ all of them—­this kind makes a long cone of web, with a square chamber of vantage at the end, and there he sits loosely and looks about), a great fellow that housed himself, with real gusto, in the jaws of a great scull, whence he watched me as I wrote, and I remember speaking to