I admire Tennyson with the most worshipping
part of the multitude, as you are aware, but I do _not_ perceive much
in this lyric, which strikes me, and Robert also (who goes with me
throughout), as quite inferior to the other lyrical snatches in the
'Princess.' By the way, if he introduces it in the 'Princess,' it
will be the only _rhymed_ verse in the work. Robert thinks that he was
thinking of the Rhine echoes in writing it, and not of any heard in
his Irish travels. I hear that Tennyson has taken rooms above Mr.
Forster's in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is going to try a London life.
So says Mr. Kenyon.... I am writing with an easier mind than when
I wrote last, for I was for a little time rendered very unhappy (so
unhappy that I couldn't touch on the subject, which is always the way
with me when pain passes a certain point), by hearing accidentally
that papa was unwell and looking altered. My sister persisted in
replying to my anxieties that they were unfounded, that I was quite
absurd, indeed, in being anxious at all; only people are not generally
reformed from their absurdities through being scolded for them. Now,
however, it really appears that the evil has passed. He left his
doctor who had given him lowering medicines, and, coincidently with
the leaving, he has recovered looks and health altogether. Arabel says
that I should think he was looking as well as ever, if I saw him, and
that appetite and spirits are even redundant. Thank God.... To
have this good news has made me very happy, and I overflow to you
accordingly. Oh, there is pain enough from that quarter, without
hearing of his being out of health. I write to him continually and
he does not now return my letters, which is a melancholy something
gained. Now enough of such a subject.

I certainly don't think that the qualities, half savage and half
freethinking, expressed in 'Jane Eyre' are likely to suit a model
governess or schoolmistress; and it amuses me to consider them in
that particular relation. Your account falls like dew upon the parched
curiosity of some of our friends here, to whom (as mere gossip, which
did not leave you responsible) I couldn't resist the temptation
of communicating it. People _are_ so curious--even here among the
Raffaels--about this particular authorship, yet nobody seems to have
read 'Shirley'; we are too slow in getting new books. First Galignani
has to pirate them himself, and then to hand us over the spoils.
By the way, the