l
was Cowper, who could be simple without being trivial, was never prosy
and often pathetic, and who possessed the rare art of stamping on his
reader's mind an enduring impression of quiet and somewhat commonplace
society in the English midlands. That poets should usually have been
good letter-writers is probably no more than might have been expected,
for imagination and word-power must tell everywhere; yet the list is
so long as to be worth noticing. Swift, Pope, Gray, and Cowper in the
last century, and in the present century Scott, Byron, Shelley,
Coleridge, and Southey, have all left us distinctive and copious
correspondence. Wordsworth may, perhaps, be classed as a notable
exception; for Wordsworth's letters are dull, being at their best more
like essays or literary dissertations than the free outpouring of
intimate thought. They have none of the charm which comes from the
revelation of private doubt or passionate affection that is
ordinarily stifled by convention; they are, on the contrary, eminently
respectable, deliberate, and carefully expressed. 'It has ever been
the habit of my mind,' he writes, 'to trust that expediency will come
out of fidelity to principles, rather than to seek my principles of
action in calculations of expediency.' This is what the Americans call
'high toned'; but the metal is too heavy for the light calibre of a
letter.

Whether Tennyson had the gift of letter-writing we shall be able to
judge when his biography appears; though we may anticipate that it
will contain some things worthy of a great master in the art of
language. The publication of letters deriving their sole or principal
interest from the general reputation of the writer is indeed quite
legitimate and intelligible. They are often biographical documents of
considerable value, apart from all questions of style and intellectual
quality; they can be handled and arranged to exhibit a man's
character; they may be used as negative proofs of reserve and
reticence, as showing his mental attitude toward various subjects, his
domestic habits and virtues, or merely as annals of where he went and
what he did. They may be carefully selected and revised for occasional
insertion at different stages of a long biography, where the editor
sees fit to let the dead man speak for himself; they may be employed
as an advocate chooses the papers in his brief, for attack or defence.
Or they may be produced without commentary, sifting, or omissions,