is like killing
you. John Mill said, "I forgive him freely for interpreting the
Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the _h's!_" Really
this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of Heraud in
your days. I mentioned to him once that Novalis had said, "The
highest problem of Authorship is the writing of a Bible."--
"That is precisely what I am doing!" answered the aspiring,
unaspirating.*--Of Landor I have not got much benefit either. We
met first, some four years ago, on Cheyne Walk here: a tall,
broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes;
of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by
the most perfect breeding,--expressing itself in high-colored
superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a
dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no
extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual
faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of
temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be
wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or
the other of the object; and _sides_ of an object are all that
he sees. He is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs
over the spectacle of common place torn to rags. I find him
painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing
into the Aether, yet never doing it, ever splashing webfooted in
the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he
strives! Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the
fatalest stuff I have seen for long: not an ingot; ah no, a
distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market. Poor
Landor has left his Wife (who is said to be a fool) in Italy,
with his children, who would not quit her; but it seems he has
honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity
for furnished lodgings; and now lives at Bath, a solitary
sexagenarian, in that manner. He visits London in May; but says
always it would kill him soon: alas, I can well believe that!
They say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely: a
perfectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such
hallucinations, excitations, tempestuous confusions, I can see he
has. Enough of him! Me he likes well enough, more thanks to
him; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and
undone. I have seen some other Lions, and Lion's-_providers;_
but consider them a worthless species.--When