I could not have wrought out for myself. I
think I could have suggested a very little about Crabbe, in whom I am
very much up: and one word about Clarissa. {208} But God send me many
more Hours in a Library in which I may shut myself up from this accursed
East among other things.

_To C. E. Norton_.

LITTLE GRANGE, WOODBRIDGE.
_Dec._ 22/76.
[Post mark _Dec._ 21.]

MY DEAR SIR,

. . . In the last Atlantic Monthly was, as you know, an Ode by Mr.
Lowell; lofty in Thought and Expression: too uniformly lofty, I think,
for Ode. Do you, would Mr. Lowell, agree? I should not say so, did I
not admire the work very much. You are very good to speak of sending me
his new Volume: but why should you? My old Athenaeum will tell me of it
here, and I will be sure to get it.

You see --- has come out with another Heroic Poem! And the Athenaeum
talks of it as a Great Work, etc., with (it seems to me) the false Gallop
in all the Quotations. It seems to me strange that ---, ---, and ---,
should go on pouring out Poem after Poem, as if such haste could prosper
with any but First-rate Men: and I suppose they hardly reckon themselves
with the very First. I feel sure that Gray's Elegy, pieced and patched
together so laboriously, by a Man of almost as little Genius as abundant
Taste, will outlive all these hasty Abortions. And yet there are plenty
of faults in that Elegy too, resulting from the very Elaboration which
yet makes it live. So I think.

I have been reading with real satisfaction, and delight, Mr. L. Stephen's
Hours in a Library: only, as I have told his Sister in law, I should have
liked to put in a word or two for Crabbe. I think I could furnish L. S.
with many Epigrams, of a very subtle sort, from Crabbe: and several
paragraphs, if not pages, of comic humour as light as Moliere. Both
which L. S. seems to doubt in what he calls 'our excellent Crabbe,' who
was not so 'excellent' (in the goody sense) as L. S. seems to intimate.
But then Crabbe is my Great Gun. He will outlive ---, --- and Co. in
spite of his Carelessness. So think I again.

His Son, Vicar of a Parish near here, and very like the Father in face,
was a great Friend of mine. He detested Poetry (sc. verse), and I
believe had never read his Father through till some twenty years ago when
I lent him the Book. Yet I used to tell him he threw out sparks now and
then. As one day when we were talking of some Squires who cut down Trees
(which all magn