The Words, you know, are so delightful (stanzas one, two, and the last), and the old Tune of 'Troll, troll, the bonny brown Bowl' so pretty, and (with some addition) so appropriate, I think, that I fancied others beside Friends might like to have them together. But, if you don't approve, the whole thing shall be quashed. Which I ought to have asked before: but I thought your Publishers' sanction might include yours. Please, I say, to say Yes or No as soon as you can. I have been reading the two Series of 'Hours in a Library' with real delight. Some of them I had read before in Cornhill, but all together now: delighted, I say, to find all I can so heartily concur and believe in put into a shape that I could not have wrought out for myself. I think I could have suggested a very little about Crabbe, in whom I am very much up: and one word about Clarissa. {208} But God send me many more Hours in a Library in which I may shut myself up from this accursed East among other things. _To C. E. Norton_. LITTLE GRANGE, WOODBRIDGE. _Dec._ 22/76. [Post mark _Dec._ 21.] MY DEAR SIR, . . . In the last Atlantic Monthly was, as you know, an Ode by Mr. Lowell; lofty in Thought and Expression: too uniformly lofty, I think, for Ode. Do you, would Mr. Lowell, agree? I should not say so, did I not admire the work very much. You are very good to speak of sending me his new Volume: but why should you? My old Athenaeum will tell me of it here, and I will be sure to get it. You see --- has come out with another Heroic Poem! And the Athenaeum talks of it as a Great Work, etc., with (it seems to me) the false Gallop in all the Quotations. It seems to me strange that ---, ---, and ---, should go on pouring out Poem after Poem, as if such haste could prosper with any but First-rate Men: and I suppose they hardly reckon themselves with the very First. I feel sure that Gray's Elegy, pieced and patched together so laboriously, by a Man of almost as little Genius as abundant Taste, will outlive all these hasty Abortions. And yet there are plenty of faults in that Elegy too, resulting from the very Elaboration which yet makes it live. So I think. I have been reading with real satisfaction, and delight, Mr. L. Stephen's Hours in a Library: only, as I have told his Sister in law, I should have liked to put in a word or two for Crabbe. I think I could furnish L. S. with many Epigrams, of a very subtle sort, from Crabbe: and several paragraphs, if not pages, of comic humour as light as Moliere. Both which L. S. seems to doubt in what he calls 'our excellent Crabbe,' who was not so 'excellent' (in the goody sense) as L. S. seems to intimate. But then Crabbe is my Great Gun. He will outlive ---, --- and Co. in spite of his Carelessness. So think I again.