I sat through one Concert and one Oratorio; {198} and on Thursday went to Yarmouth, which I took a great fancy to. The sands were very good, I assure you; and then when one is weary of the sea, there is the good old town to fall back on. There is Mr. Gooch the Bookseller too; he and his books a great acquisition. I called on Dawson Turner, and in an incredibly short space of time saw several books of coats of Arms, Churches, Refectories, pyxes, cerements, etc. Manage to read De Quincey's Article on Wordsworth in the last number of Tail's Magazine. It is very incomplete, like all De Quincey's things, but has grand things in it; grand sounds of sense if nothing else. I am glad to see he sets up Daddy's early Ballads against the Excursion and other Sermons. I intend to leave this place the end of this week; and go, I suppose, to Boulge; though I have yet a hankering to get a week by the sea, either at Yarmouth or Southwold. . . . Don't you think 3 pounds very cheap for a fine copy of Rushworth's Collections, eight volumes folio? I was tempted to buy it if only for the bargain; for I only want to look through it once. _To F. Tennyson_. BOULGE, WOODBRIDGE. [After _Sept_. 1845.] MY DEAR FREDERIC, I do beg and desire that when you next begin a letter to me you will not tear it up (as you say you have done some) because of its exhibiting a joviality insulting to any dumps of mine. What was I complaining of so? I forget all about it. It seems to me to be two years since I heard from you. If you had said that my answers to your letters were so barren as to dishearten you from deserving any more I should understand that very well. But if you really did accomplish any letters and not send them, I say, a fico for thy friendship! Do so no more. . . . The finale of C minor is very noble. I heard it twice at Jullien's. On the whole I like to hear Mozart better; Beethoven is gloomy. Besides incontestably Mozart is the purest _musician_; Beethoven would have been Poet or Painter as well, for he had a great deep Soul and Imagination. I do not think it is reported that he showed any very early predilection for Music; Mozart, we know, did. They say Holmes has published a very good life of M. Only think of the poor fellow not being able to sell his music latterly, getting out of fashion, so taking to drink . . . and enact Harlequin at Masquerades! When I heard Handel's Alexander's Feast at Norwich this Autumn I wondered; but when directly afterward they played Mozart's G minor Symphony, it seemed as if I had passed out of a land of savages into sweet civilized Life. BOULGE, WOODBRIDGE. [? _March_ 1846.] DEAR FREDERIC,