I would have made it mostly all plain by commentary:—­so I had to read for myself; and can say, in spite of my hard-heartedness, I did gain, though under impediments, a real satisfaction and some tone of the Eternal Melodies sounding, afar off, ever and anon, in my ear!  This is fact; a truth in Natural History; from which you are welcome to draw inferences.  A grand View of the Universe, everywhere the sound (unhappily far of, as it were) of a valiant, genuine Human Soul:  this, even under rhyme, is a satisfaction worth some struggling for.  But indeed you are very perverse; and through this perplexed undiaphanous element, you do not fall on me like radiant summer rainbows, like floods of sunlight, but with thin piercing radiances which affect me like the light of the stars. It is so:  I wish you would become concrete, and write in prose the straightest way; but under any form I must put up with you; that is my lot.—­Chapman’s edition, as you probably know, is very beautiful.  I believe there are enough of ardent silent seekers in England to buy up this edition from him, and resolutely study the same:  as for the review multitude, they dare not exactly call it “unintelligible moonshine,” and so will probably hold their tongue.  It is my fixed opinion that we are all at sea as to what is called Poetry, Art, &c., in these times; laboring under a dreadful incubus of Tradition, and mere “Cant heaped balefully on us up to the very Zenith,” as men, in nearly all other provinces of their Life, except perhaps the railway province, do now labor and stagger;—­in a word, that Goethe-and-Schiller’s "Kunst" has far more brotherhood with Pusey-and-Newman’s Shovelhattery, and other the like deplorable phenomena, than it is in the least aware of!  I beg you take warning:  I am more serious in this than you suppose.  But no, you will not; you whistle lightly over my prophecies, and go your own stiff-necked road.  Unfortunate man!—­

I had read in the Newspapers, and even heard in speech from Manchester people, that you were certainly coming this very summer to lecture among us:  but now it seems, in your Letter, all postponed into the vague again.  I do not personally know your Manchester negotiators, but I know in general that they are men of respectability, insight, and activity; much connected with the lecturing department, which is a very growing one, especially in Lancashire, at present;—­men likely, for the rest, to fulfil whatsoever they may become engaged for to you.  My own ignorant though confident guess, moreover, is, that you would, in all senses of the word, succeed there; I think, also rather confidently, we could promise you an audience of British aristocracy in London here,—­and of British commonalty all manner of audiences that you liked to stoop to.  I heard an ignorant blockhead (or mainly so) called —–­ bow-wowing here, some months ago, to an audience of several thousands,