Make mine and all our cordial remembrances to Mrs. Cary, and believe me, dear friend, with perfect esteem and most affectionate regard, yours,
P. S. Both Mrs. G. and myself have returned much benefited by our sea-sojourn. Mr. Rossetti has, I find, an additional merit in good men's thoughts. He is a poet who has been driven into exile for the high morale of his writings. For even general sentiments breathing the spirit of nobler times are treasons in the present Neapolitan and Holy Alliance Codes! Wretches!! I dare even _pray_ against them, even with Davidian bitterness. Do not forget to let me have an answer to this, if possible, by next day's post.
DEAR WORDSWORTH,--Three whole days the going through the first book cost me, though only to find fault. But I cannot find fault, in pen and ink, without thinking over and over again, and without some sort of an attempt to suggest the alteration; and, in so doing, how soon an hour is gone! so many half seconds up to half minutes are lost in leaning back in one's chair, and looking up, in the bodily act of contracting the muscles of the brow and forehead, and unconsciously attending to the sensation. Had I the MS. with me for five or six months, so as to amuse myself off and on, without any solicitude as to a given day, and, could I be persuaded that if as well done as the nature of the thing (viz., _a translation of Virgil_,[194] in English) renders possible, it would not raise but simply sustain your well-merited fame for pure diction, where what is not idiom is never other than logically correct, I doubt not that the irregularities could be removed. But I am haunted by the apprehension that I am not feeling or thinking in the same spirit with you, at one time, and at another _too much_ in the spirit of your writings. Since Milton, I know of no poet with so many _felicities_ and unforgettable lines and stanzas as you. And to read, therefore, page after page without a single _brilliant_ note, depresses me, and I grow peevish with you for having wasted your time on a work _so_ much below you, that you cannot _stoop_ and _take_. Finally, my conviction is, that you undertake an _impossibility_, and that there is no medium between a prose version and one on the avowed principle of _compensation_ in the widest sense, that is, manner, genius, total effect. I confine myself to _Virgil_ when I say this.