And you call the Athenaeum ‘kind and satisfactory’?  Well—­I was angry instead.  To make us wait so long for an ‘article’ like that, was not over-kind certainly, nor was it ‘satisfactory’ to class your peculiar qualities with other contemporary ones, as if they were not peculiar.  It seemed to me cold and cautious, from the causes perhaps which you mention, but the extracts will work their own way with everybody who knows what poetry is, and for others, let the critic do his worst with them.  For what is said of ‘mist’ I have no patience because I who know when you are obscure and never think of denying it in some of your former works, do hold that this last number is as clear and self-sufficing to a common understanding, as far as the expression and medium goes, as any book in the world, and that Mr. Chorley was bound in verity to say so.  If I except that one stanza, you know, it is to make the general observation stronger.  And then ‘mist’ is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity.  You never are misty, not even in ’Sordello’—­never vague.  Your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always—­and there is an extra-distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape.  So that to talk of a ‘mist,’ when you are obscurest, is an impotent thing to do.  Indeed it makes me angry.

But the suggested virtue of ‘self-renunciation’ only made me smile, because it is simply nonsense ... nonsense which proves itself to be nonsense at a glance.  So genius is to renounce itself—­that is the new critical doctrine, is it?  Now is it not foolish?  To recognize the poetical faculty of a man, and then to instruct him in ‘self-renunciation’ in that very relation—­or rather, to hint the virtue of it, and hesitate the dislike of his doing otherwise?  What atheists these critics are after all—­and how the old heathens understood the divinity of gifts better, beyond any comparison.  We may take shame to ourselves, looking back.

Now, shall I tell you what I did yesterday?  It was so warm, so warm, the thermometer at 68 in this room, that I took it into my head to call it April instead of January, and put on a cloak and walked down-stairs into the drawing-room—­walked, mind!  Before, I was carried by one of my brothers,—­even to the last autumn-day when I went out—­I never walked a step for fear of the cold in the passages.  But yesterday it was so wonderfully warm, and I so strong besides—­it was a feat worthy of the day—­and I surprised them all as much as if I had walked out of the window instead.  That kind dear Stormie, who with all his shyness and awkwardness has the most loving of hearts in him, said that he was ‘so glad to see me’!

Well!—­setting aside the glory of it, it would have been as wise perhaps if I had abstained; our damp detestable climate reaches us otherwise than by cold, and I am not quite as well as usual this morning after an uncomfortable feverish night—­not very unwell, mind, nor unwell at all in the least degree of consequence—­and I tell you, only to show how susceptible I really am still, though ’scarcely an invalid,’ say the complimenters.