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Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Not previously published.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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Your letter of Feby. 21st ought not to have been so long unacknowledged. The
truth is that my time is very much occupied, & I have but little leisure for correspondence, – nevertheless I ought to have replied
to your last, on account of the xxxxxxx bill which it contained, because my silence may perhaps have led you to suppose that
I was in some degree offended. Certainly it was by no means my intention in sending you a copy of Madocxx a displeasure which I did not feel, – as however you have overpaid by seven shillings that
which was intended as a mark of respect to a man of genius, – you must allow me to send you the poem which I have in the press &
which will appear in the course of two or three months.
& I have not, I fear, made myself quite intelligible as to what I consider the laws of blank verse. It is of no
consequence whatever be the number of syllables they must not be more than ten to the ear, or x eleven if the line
ends with a trochee, xx which is very frequent in our dramatic blank verse, & makes its main difference from that of the
epic. Thus in the often quoted instance
there are fourteen syllables, but they run into each other so as not to take up more time than ten. A line with fewer than ten
xxxxxxx is inadmissable, – your
That which foll
is defective, that which follows it is redundant
remove the two syllables which begin the line – to the end of the former & both are then legitimate. Some of your lines in this specimen are not reducible to any laws of metre, nor is it possible so to read them as to make them harmonious.
The first of <Both> these is <lines are> so unmusical that I should not venture them to
But there need no rules upon this subject, – your own ear & the study of good poets must lead you right. Read them for yourself,
& never take the opinion of a critic, whether dead or living, x upon their merits, as valid, till you xxx
xxxx see that the passage to which he refers when examined in its place will bear him out.
I shall be glad to hear that you are thinking seriously of the American poem,forc
striking, & there is a worthier interest excited. Its metre seems to me less happy, – the regularity seems to have tempted him to
throw off many incorrect expressions & feeble lines. There is one lesson xxx which you should especially learn from our
great poets, – that of purity of style, – & the charm of giving not only a meaning, but its own mean peculiar meaning to
every word, – in which almost all your contemporaries are grievously, most grievously deficient. Campbell’s Gertrude
I have begun a poem in blank verse upon Pelayo,