Thursday Morning, 20th. I am quite tired of this place, the weather has been very bad, and after the Galleries close, which is at twelve o'clock and one, I have nothing to do; and, as I cannot speak German, time moves very heavily. The Ticknors are here, and I have passed a couple of hours every evening with them. God bless you again! - - . . . · TO B. R. HAYDON RYDAL MOUNT, 28th February, 1832. There are some opinions in your " Essay "1 about which I should like to talk with you, as, for example, when you say Raphael learned nothing from Perugino but what he had to unlearn. Surely this is far from the truth; undoubtedly there is in him as in all the elder masters a hardness, and a stiffness, and a want of skill in composition, but in simplicity and in depth of expression, he deserves to be looked up to by Raphael to the last of days. The "Transfiguration" would have been a much finer picture than it is if Raphael had not at that period of his life lost sight of Perugino and others, his predecessors. Whoever goes into Italy, if pictures be much of an object, ought to begin where I ended, at Venice. Not as I did with the pure and admirable productions of Fra Bartolomeo at Lucca, and with Raphael at Rome, so on to 1 Haydon's Essay on "Painting" in Encyclopædia Britannica. Haydon replied, admitting that Wordsworth was right, saying, "I fear it was thoughtless to speak of Perugino as I did, which I will correct, for you are certainly right." Florence, Bologna, Pavia, and Milan, and Florence by way of conclusion. Italian pictures ought to be taken in order, or as nearly as may be so, Milan, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Pavia, Florence, and Rome. Your "Essay" does you great credit. I had a sad account of the French Academy at Rome. The students appear to be doing little or nothing, and spend their time in dissipation. FROM WORDSWORTH'S CONVERSATION August 28, 1841. At the time I resolved to dedicate myself to poetry, and separate myself from the ordinary lucrative professions, it would certainly have been a great object to me to have reaped the profits I should have done from my writings, but for the stupidity of Mr Gifford and the impertinence of Mr Jeffrey. It would have enabled me to purchase many books which I could not obtain, and I should have gone to Italy earlier, which I never could afford to do until I was sixty-five, when Moxon gave me a thousand pounds for my writings. This was the only kind of injury Mr Jeffrey did me, for I immediately perceived that his mind was of that kind that his individual opinion on poetry was of no consequence to me whatever, that it was only by the influence his periodical exercised at the time, in preventing my poems being read and sold, that he could injure me; for, feeling that my writings were founded on what was true and spiritual in human nature, I knew the time would come when they must be known, and I never therefore felt his opinion of the slightest value, except in preventing the young of that generation from receiving impressions which might have been of use to them through life. I say this, I hope, not in a boasting spirit, but I am now daily surprised by receiving letters from various places at home and abroad expressive of gratitude to me, from persons I never saw or heard of. As this occurs now, I may fairly conclude that it might have been so when the poems appeared, but for the tyranny exercised over public opinion by the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. TO PROFESSOR HENRY REED1 RYDAL MOUNT, July 18, 1842. MY DEAR SIR,-. . . I have just resigned the office which to my own great convenience and advantage I have held for nearly 30 years, in favour of my younger son, who had acted under me for more than 11 years. By this step my small income has been reduced more than onehalf, for there is no truth in what you may have seen in the newspapers that "I had retired upon a pension." I lately received from Mr Dickens a printed circular letter, in which he states that, having presented through Mr Clay a petition to Congress, signed by the whole body of American authors, praying for the establishment of an international law of Copyright to counteract this petition, as the circular states, a meeting was held at Boston, 1 Editor of the first American edition of Wordsworth's Poems. at which a memorial against any change in the existing state of things was agreed to, with but one dissentient voice. This document, which was received, deliberately stated that if English authors were invested with any control over the republication of their own books, it would be no longer possible for American editors to alter and adapt them (as they do now) to the American taste. Thus far the circular. And I ask you if it be possible that any person of the lowest degree of respectability in Boston could sign a document in its spirit so monstrous, and so injurious in its tendency? .. I returned to Rydal a month ago, after having been nearly six weeks in London. . . . The book trade is in a most depressed state-nothing but such books as have a connection with Theology, and the religious ferment that originated in Oxford, seeming to have the power of inducing people to part with their money for literature's sake. Nor is this much to be wondered at, for all ranks and classes are compelled by difficulties in the state of things to reduce their expenditure. . . . Your much obliged friend, WM. WORDSWORTH. TO PROFESSOR HENRY REED RYDAL MOUNT, March 23, 1843. You give me pleasure by the interest you take in the various pages in which I speak of the poets, my contemporaries, who are no more. Dear Southey, one of the most eminent, is just added to the list a few days ago. I |