The following is in acknowledgment of Mr. Gosse's volume called _New
Poems_:--
_Monterey, Dec. 8, 1879._
MY DEAR WEG,--I received your book last night as I lay abed with a
pleurisy, the result, I fear, of overwork, gradual decline of appetite,
etc. You know what a wooden-hearted curmudgeon I am about contemporary
verse. I like none of it, except some of my own. (I look back on that
sentence with pleasure; it comes from an honest heart.) Hence you will
be kind enough to take this from me in a kindly spirit; the piece "To my
daughter" is delicious. And yet even here I am going to pick holes. I am
a _beastly_ curmudgeon. It is the last verse. "Newly budded" is off the
venue; and haven't you gone ahead to make a poetry daybreak instead of
sticking to your muttons, and comparing with the mysterious light of
stars the plain, friendly, perspicuous, human day? But this is to be a
beast. The little poem is eminently pleasant, human, and original.
I have read nearly the whole volume, and shall read it nearly all over
again; you have no rivals!
Bancroft's _History of the United States_, even in a centenary edition,
is essentially heavy fare; a little goes a long way; I respect Bancroft,
but I do not love him; he has moments when he feels himself inspired to
open up his improvisations upon universal history and the designs of
God; but I flatter myself I am more nearly acquainted with the latter
than Mr. Bancroft. A man, in the words of my Plymouth Brother, "who
knows the Lord," must needs, from time to time, write less emphatically.
It is a fetter dance to the music of minute guns--not at sea, but in a
region not a thousand miles from the Sahara. Still, I am half-way
through volume three, and shall count myself unworthy of the name of an
Englishman if I do not see the back of volume six. The countryman of
Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Drake, Cook, etc.!
I have been sweated not only out of my pleuritic fever, but out of all
my eating cares, and the better part of my brains (strange
coincidence!), by aconite. I have that peculiar and delicious sense of
being born again in an expurgated edition which belongs to
convalescence. It will not be for long; I hear the breakers roar; I
shall be steering head first for another rapid before many days; _nitor
aquis_, said a certain Eton boy, translating for his sins a part of the
_Inland Voyage_ into Latin elegiacs; and from the hour I saw it, or
rather a friend of mine, the admirable Jenkin, saw and recognised its
absurd appropriateness, I took it for my device in life. I am going for
thirty now; and unless I can snatch a little rest before long, I have, I
may tell you in confidence, no hope of seeing thirty-one. My health
began to break last winter, and has given me but fitful times since
then. This pleurisy, though but a slight affair in itself, was a huge
disappointment to me, and marked an epoch. To start a pleurisy about
nothing, while leading a dull, regular life in a mild climate, was not
my habit in past days; and it is six years, all but a few months, since
I was obliged to spend twenty-four hours in bed. I may be wrong, but if
the niting is to continue, I believe I must go. It is a pity in one
sense, for I believe the class of work I _might_ yet give out is better
and more real and solid than people fancy. But death is no bad friend; a
few aches and gasps, and we are done; like the truant child, I am
beginning to grow weary and timid in this big jostling city, and could
run to my nurse, even although she should have to whip me before putting
me to bed.
Will you kiss your little daughter from me, and tell her that her father
has written a delightful poem about her? Remember me, please, to Mrs.
Gosse, to Middlemore, to whom some of these days I will write, to ----,
to ----, yes, to ----, and to ----. I know you will gnash your teeth at
some of these; wicked, grim, catlike old poet. If I were God, I would
sort you--as we say in Scotland.--Your sincere friend,