close by the church door, helping in one end of the coffin, is a very
typical military face.

Yours, J.H.E.

TO A.E.

July 30, 1880.

* * * * *

Oh, with what sympathy I hear you talk of Shakespeare. Nay! not Dante
and not Homer--not Chaucer--and not Goethe--"not Lancelot nor another"
are really his peers.

Here blossom sonnets that one puts on a par with his--there, _in
another man's_ work the illimitable panorama of varied and life-like
men and women "merely players," may draw laughter and tears (Crabbe,
and much of Dickens and other men, and Don Quixote). His coarse wit
and satire and shrewdness, when he is least pure, may I suppose find
rivals in some of the eighteenth or seventeenth century English
writers, and in the marvellous brilliancy of French ones. When he is
purest and highest I cannot think of a Love Poet to touch him.
Tennyson perhaps nearest. But _he_ seems quite unable to fathom the
heart of a noble woman with any _strength_ of her own, or any
knowledge of the world. "Enid" is to me intolerable as well as the
degraded legend it was founded on. Perhaps the brief thing of Lady
Godiva is the nearest approach, and Elaine faultless as the picture of
a maiden-heart brought up in "the innocence of ignorance." But he can
write fairly of "fair women." Scott runs closer, but his are paintings
from without. "Jeanie Deans" is bad to beat!!

Shelley comes to his side when _weirdness_ is concerned.

"Five fathom deep thy father lies," etc.,

is run hard by--

"Its passions will rock thee
As the storms rock the ravens on high:
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.

From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
_Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come._"

But I will not bore you with comparisons. My upshot is that no one of
the many who may rival him in SOME of his perfections, COMBINE them all
in ONE genius. In all these philosophizing days--who touches him in
philosophy? From the simplest griefs and pleasures and humanity at its
simplest--Macduff over the massacre of his wife and children--to all
that the most delicate brain may search into and suffer, as Hamlet--or
the ten thousand exquisite womanish thoughts of Portia, a creature of
brain power and feminine fragility--

"By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world."

*