Page:A Voice from the Nile, and Other Poems. (Thomson, Dobell).djvu/47

 "Mrs. Holmes Gray' I want to read carefully before returning. If he wrote that in 1849 when he must have been very young, I can't understand how he came to abandon poetry for criticism. It is quite mature in firm grip of the subject, and has no youthful faults of redundancy, rhetoric, exaggeration, ornament for ornament's sake, affectation, and so forth."

In a letter dated June 24, 1874, after referring to the notice in the Academy of the "City of Dreadful Night," he adds, "I have just written to the editor thanking him and his critic, and saying that it seems to me a very brave act on the part of a respectable English periodical, to spontaneously call attention to an atheistical writing (less remote than, say, Lucretius), treating it simply and fairly on its literary merits, without obloquy or protesting cant."

I quote the following passage from a letter dated January 9, 1876, because it gives his answer to some censures that have been passed upon his use of certain words in his poems:—

"With regard to Mr. Bullen's criticisms on 'Our Ladies of Death,'—criticisms which really flatter me, as any man's work is really praised by such examination,—I must hold myself right. The only English Dictionary I have by me is a school one, but as such little likely to venture on neologisms; moreover, it is very good of its kind, being Reid's of Edinburgh. This gives Sombre, Sombrous, dark, gloomy; Tenēbrous, Tenēbrious, dark, gloomy, obscure (and, of course, Tenebrious implies Tenebriously); Ruth, pity, sorrow; Ruthful, merciful, sorrowful; Ruthfully, sadly, sorrowfully. The huge