r letter with it. Was
I not glad, do you think?

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 pass