I took the opportunity of the letter to Mr. Mathews (talking of vanity ... mine!) to send Landor’s verses to America ... yours—­so they will be in the American papers....  I know Mr. Mathews.  I was speaking to him of your last number of ‘Bells and Pomegranates,’ and the verses came in naturally; just as my speaking did, for it is not the first time nor the second nor the third even that I have written to him of you, though I admire how in all those previous times I did it in pure disinterestedness, ... purely because your name belonged to my country and to her literature, ... and how I have a sort of reward at this present, in being able to write what I please without anyone’s saying ‘it is a new fancy.’  As for the Americans, they have ’a zeal without knowledge’ for poetry.  There is more love for verse among them than among the English.  But they suffer themselves to be led in their choice of poets by English critics of average discernment; this is said of them by their own men of letters.  Tennyson is idolized deep down in the bush woods (to their honour be it said), but to understand you sufficiently, they wait for the explanations of the critics.  So I wanted them to see what Landor says of you.  The comfort in these questions is, that there can be no question, except between the sooner and the later—­a little sooner, and a little later:  but when there is real love and zeal it becomes worth while to try to ripen the knowledge.  They love Tennyson so much that the colour of his waistcoats is a sort of minor Oregon question ... and I like that—­do not you?

Monday.—­Now I have your letter:  and you will observe, without a finger post from me, how busily we have both been preoccupied in disavowing our own letters of old on ’Ion’—­Mr. Talfourd’s collection goes to prove too much, I think—­and you, a little too much, when you draw inferences of no-changes, from changes like these.  Oh yes—­I perfectly understand that every sort of inconstancy of purpose regards a ‘presumably better’ thing—­but I do not so well understand how any presumable doubt is to be set to rest by that fact, ...  I do not indeed.  Have you seen all the birds and beasts in the world? have you seen the ’unicorns’?—­Which is only a pebble thrown down into your smooth logic; and we need not stand by to watch the bubbles born of it.  And as to the ‘Ion’ letters, I am delighted that you have anything to repent, as I have everything.  Certainly it is a noble play—­there is the moral sublime in it:  but it is not the work of a poet, ... and if he had never written another to show what was not in him, this might have been ‘predicated’ of it as surely, I hold.  Still, it is a noble work—­and even if you over-praised it, (I did not read your letter, though you read mine, alas!) you, under the circumstances, would have been less noble yourself not to have done so—­only, how I agree with you in what you say against the hanging up of these dry roots, the soil shaken off!  Such abominable taste—­now isn’t it? ... though you do not use that word.