God bless you, my dear and excellent friend! I seem to have a thousand things to say to you, but the post is going, and a whole sheet of paper would not hold my thanks.
Ever yours, M.R.M.
Swallowfield, November 25, 1852.
My Dear Friend: Your most kind and welcome letter arrived to-day, two days after the papers, for which I thank you much. Still more do I thank you for that kind and charming letter, and for its enclosures. The anonymous poem [it was by Dr. T.W. Parsons] is far finer than anything that has been written on the death of the Duke of Wellington, as indeed it was a far finer subject. May I inquire the name of the writer? Mr. Everett's speech also is superb, and how very much I prefer the Marshfield funeral in its sublime simplicity to the tawdry pageantry here! I have had fifty letters from persons who saw the funeral in St. Paul's, and seen as many who saw that or the procession, and it is strange that the papers have omitted alike the great successes and the great failures. My young neighbor, a captain in the Grenadier Guards (the Duke's regiment), saw the uncovering the car which had been hidden by the drapery, and was to have been a great effect, and he says it was exactly what is sometimes seen in a theatre when one scene is drawn up too soon and the other is not ready. Carpenters and undertaker's men were on all parts of the car, and the draperies and ornaments were everywhere but in their places. Again, the procession waited upwards of an hour at the cathedral door, because the same people had made no provision for taking the coffin from the car; again, the sunlight was let into St. Paul's, mingling most discordantly with the gas, and the naked wood of screens and benches and board beams disfigured the grand entrance. In three months' interval they had not time! On the other hand, the strong points were the music, the effect of which is said to have been unrivalled; the actual performance of the service,—my friend Dean Milman is renowned for his manner of reading the funeral service, he officiated at the burial of Mrs. Lockhart (Sir Walter's favorite daughter),—and none who were present could speak of it without tears; the clerical part of the procession, which was a real and visible mourning pageant in its flowing robes of white with black bands and sashes; the living branches of laurel and cypress amongst the mere finery; and, above all, the hushed silence of the people, always most and best impressed by anything that appeals to the imagination or the heart.
I suppose you will have seen how England is flooded, and you will like to hear that this tiny speck has escaped. The Lodden is over the park, and turns the beautiful water meadows down to Strathfieldsaye into a no less beautiful lake, two or three times a week; but then it subsides as quickly as it rises, so there is none of the lying under water which results in all sorts of pestilential exhalations, and this cottage is lifted out of every bad influence, nay, a kind neighbor having had my lane scraped, I walk dry-shod every afternoon a mile and a half, which is more than I ever expected to compass again, and for which I am most thankful. But we have had our own troubles. K—— has lost her father. He was seized with paralysis and knew nobody, so they desired her not to come, and Sam went alone to the funeral. After all, this is her home, and she has pretty well got over her affliction, and the pony is well again, and strong enough to draw you and me in the spring,—for I am looking forward to good and happy days again when you shall return to England.
Your magnificent present for Mr. Dillon's book was quite in time, dear friend. I had warned them to leave room, and Mr. Holloway and the binders contrived it admirably. They are most grateful for your kindness, and most gratefully shall I receive the promised volumes. I have not yet got "the pamphlet," and am much afraid it is buried in what Miss De Quincey calls her "father's chaos"; but I have charming letters from her, and am heartily glad that I wrote. You have the way (like Mr. Bennoch) of making friends still better friends, and bringing together those who, without you, would have had no intercourse. It is the very finest of all the fine arts. Tell dear Dr. Holmes that the more I hear of him, the more I feel how inadequate has been all that I have said to express my own feelings; and tell President Sparks that his charming wife ought to have received a long letter from me at the same moment with yourself. Mr. Hawthorne's new work will be a real treat. Tell me if Mr. Bennoch has sent you some stanzas on Ireland, which have more of the very highest qualities of Beranger than I have ever seen in English verse. We who love him shall have to be very proud of dear Mr. Bennoch. Tell me, too, if our solution of the line, "A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind," was the first; and why the new President is at once called General and talked of as a civilian. The other President goes on nobly, does he not?
Say everything for me to dear Mr. and Mrs. W—— and all friends.
Ever yours, M.R.M.
Swallowfield, December 14, 1852.
O my very dear friend, how much too kind you are to me, who have nothing to give you in return but affection and gratitude! Mr. Bennett brought me your beautiful book on Saturday, and you may think how heartily we wished that you had been here also. But you will come this spring, will you not? I earnestly hope nothing will come in the way of that happiness. Before leaving the subject of our good little friend, let me say that, talking over our own best authors and your De Quincey (N.B. The pamphlet has not arrived yet, I fear it is forever buried in De Quincey's "chaos"),—talking of these things, we both agreed that there was another author, probably little known in America, who would be quite worthy of a reprint, William Hazlitt. Is there any complete edition of his Lectures and Essays? I should think they would come out well, now that Thackeray is giving his Lectures. I know that Charles Lamb and Talfourd thought Hazlitt not only the most brilliant, but the soundest of all critics. Then his Life of Napoleon is capital, that is, capital for an English life; the only way really to know the great man is to read him in the mémoires of his own ministers, lieutenants, and servants; for he was a hero to his valet de chambre, the greatness was so real that it would bear close looking into. And our Emperor, I have just had a letter from Osborne, from Marianne Skerrett, describing the arrival of Count Walewski under a royal salute to receive the Queen's recognition of Napoleon III. She, Marianne, says, "How great a man that, is, and how like a fairy tale the whole story!" She adds, that, seeing much of Louis Philippe, she never could abide him, he was so cunning and so false, not cunning enough to hide the falseness! Were not you charmed with the bits of sentiment and feeling that come out all through our hero's Southern progress? Always one finds in him traits of a gracious and graceful nature, far too frequent and too spontaneous to be the effect of calculation. It is a comfort to find, in spite of our delectable press, ministers are wise enough to understand that our policy is peace, and not only peace but cordiality. To quarrel with France would be almost as great a sin as to quarrel with America. What a set of fools our great ladies are! I had hoped better things of Lord Carlisle, but to find that long list at Stafford House in female parliament assembled, echoing the absurdities of Exeter Hall, leaving their own duties and the reserve which is the happy privilege of our sex to dictate to a great nation on a point which all the world knows to be its chief difficulty, is enough to make one ashamed of the title of Englishwoman. I know a great many of these committee ladies, and in most of them I trace that desire to follow the fashion, and concert with duchesses, which is one of the besetting sins of the literary circles in London. One name did surprise me, ——, considering that one of her husband's happiest bits, in the book of his that will live, was the subscription for sending flannel waistcoats to the negroes in the West Indies; and that in this present book a certain Mrs. Jellyby is doing just what his wife is doing at Stafford House!