. . . I am only got half way in the third book of Thucydides: but I go on
with pleasure; with as much pleasure as I used to read a novel. I have
also again taken up my Homer. That is a noble and affecting passage
where Diomed and Glaucus, being about to fight, recognize each other as
old family friends, exchange arms, and vow to avoid each other henceforth
in the fray. (N.B. and this in the tenth year of the war!) After this
comes, you know, the meeting of Hector and Andromache, which we read
together; altogether a truly Epic canto indeed.
Yet, as I often think, it is not the poetical imagination, but bare
Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the
Iliad; the history of the World, the infinitudes of Space and Time! I
never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me. And
when we think that Man must go on to discover in the same plodding way,
one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or turn
them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of discovery will
distance all his imaginations, [and] dissolve the language in which they
are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now, after two thousand years; a
space that seems long to us whose lives are so brief; but a moment, the
twinkling of an eye, if compared (not to Eternity alone) but to the ages
which it is now known the world must have existed, and (unless for some
external violence) must continue to exist. Lyell in his book about
America, says that the falls of Niagara, if (as seems certain) they have
worked their way back southwards for seven miles, must have taken over
35,000 years to do so, at the rate of something over a foot a year!
Sometimes they fall back on a stratum that crumbles away from behind them
more easily: but then again they have to roll over rock that yields to
them scarcely more perceptibly than the anvil to the serpent. And those
very soft strata which the Cataract now erodes contain evidences of a
race of animals, and of the action of seas washing over them, long before
Niagara came to have a distinct current; and the rocks were compounded
ages and ages before those strata! So that, as Lyell says, the Geologist
looking at Niagara forgets even the roar of its waters in the
contemplation of the awful processes of time that it suggests. It is not
only that this vision of Time must wither the Poet's hope of immortality;
but it is in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and
Milton.
As to your friend Pliny, I don't think that Time can use his usual irony
on that saying about Martial. {230a} Pliny evidently only suggests that
'at non erunt aeterna quae scripsit' as a question of his correspondent;
to which he himself replies 'Non erunt _fortasse_.' Your Greek
quotations are very graceful. I should like to read Busbequius. {230b}
Do _you_ think Tacitus _affected_ in style, as people now say he is?
* * * * *
In the Notes to his edition of Selden's Table Talk, published in 1847,
Mr. Singer says, 'Part of the following Illustrations were kindly
communicated to the Editor by a gentleman to whom his best thanks are
due, and whom it would have afforded him great pleasure to be allowed to
name.' It might have been said with truth that the 'greater part' of the
illustrations were contributed by the same anonymous benefactor, who was,
I have very little doubt, FitzGerald himself. I have in my possession a
copy of the Table Talk which he gave me about 1871 or 1872, with
annotations in his own handwriting, and these are almost literally
reproduced in the Notes to Singer's Edition. Of this copy FitzGerald
wrote to me, 'What notes I have appended are worth nothing, I suspect;
though I remember that the advice of the present Chancellor {231} was
asked in some cases.'
_To E. B. Cowell_.
GELDESTONE, _Jan_. 13/48.