way. Besides, one must have labourers of different kinds in
the vineyard of morality, which I certainly look up to as the chief
object of our cultivation: Wordsworth is first in the craft: but Tennyson
does no little by raising and filling the brain with noble images and
thoughts, which, if they do not direct us to our duty, purify and cleanse
us from mean and vicious objects, and so prepare and fit us for the
reception of the higher philosophy. A man might forsake a drunken party
to read Byron's Corsair: and Byron's Corsair for Shelley's Alastor: and
the Alastor for the Dream of Fair Women or the Palace of Art: and then I
won't say that he would forsake these two last for anything of
Wordsworth's, but his mind would be sufficiently refined and
spiritualised to admit Wordsworth, and profit by him: and he might keep
all the former imaginations as so many pictures, or pieces of music, in
his mind. But I think that you will see Tennyson acquire all that at
present you miss: when he has _felt_ life, he will not die fruitless of
instruction to man as he is. But I dislike this kind of criticism,
especially in a letter. I don't know any one who has thought out any
thing so little as I have. I don't see to any end, and should keep
silent till I have got a little more, and that little better arranged.

I am sorry that all this page is filled with this botheration, when I
have a thousand truer and better things that I want to talk to you about.
I will write to you again soon. If you please to write (but consider it
no call upon you, for the letter I have just got from you is a stock that
will last me in comfort this long while) I shall be at Wherstead all
July--after that I know not where, but probably in Suffolk. Farewell, my
best of fellows: there is no use saying how much I wish that all your
sorrow will be turned to hope, and all your hope to joy. As far as we
men can judge, you are worthy of all earthly happiness.

* * * * *

At the end of July, 1835, FitzGerald writes from Wherstead to Thackeray,
who was then in Paris studying art:

'My Father is determined to inhabit an empty house of his about
fourteen miles off: {38} and we are very sorry to leave this really
beautiful place. The other house has no great merit. So there is
nothing now but packing up sofas, and pictures, and so on. I rather
think that I shall be hanging about this part of the world all the
winter: for my two sisters are a