I have, as usual, nothing to tell of myself: boating all the summer and reading Clarissa Harlowe since. You and I used to talk of the Book more than twenty years ago. I believe I am better read in it than almost any one in existence now--No wonder: for it is almost intolerably tedious and absurd--But I can't read the "Adam Bedes," "Daisy Chains," etc., at all. I look at my row of Sir Walter Scott and think with comfort that I can always go to him of a winter evening, when no other book comes to hand. _To Frederick Tennyson._ _November 15th, 1874._ I wrote my yearly letter to Mrs. Alfred a fortnight ago, I think; but as yet have had no answer. Some Newspaper people make fun of a Poem of Alfred's, the "Voice and the Peak," I think: giving morsels of which of course one could not judge. But I think he had better have done singing: he has sung well--_tempus silere_, etc. But his love for the man and his underlying belief in his opinion and genius never varied. "I don't think of you so little, my dear old Alfred," he wrote one day in the middle of their friendship, "but rejoice in the old poems and in yourself, young or old, and worship you (I may say) as I do no other man, and am glad I can worship one man still." His delight when he found that Alfred had really liked _Omar_ was unusually _naïf_ and keen. He forgot his grumbling, and wrote to Mrs. Tennyson: _To Mrs. Tennyson._ _November 4/67._ To think of Alfred's approving my old Omar! I never should have thought he even knew of it. Certainly _I_ should never have sent it to him, always supposing that he would not approve anything but a literal Prose translation--unless from such hands as can do original work and therefore do _not_ translate other People's! Well: now I have got Nicolas and sent a copy to Cowell, and when he is at liberty again we shall beat up old Omar's Quarters once more. I'll tell you a very pretty Book. Alfred Tennyson's Pastoral Poems, or rather Rural Idylls (only I must hate the latter word) bound up in a volume, Gardener's, Miller's, Daughters; Oak; Dora; Audley Court, etc. Oh the dear old 1842 days and editions! Spedding thinks I've shut up my mind since. Not to "Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud." When I ask People what Bird says that of an evening, they say "The Thrush." I wish you would make one of your Boys write out the "Property" Farmer Idyll. Do now, pray. E. F. G. When he had first "discovered" Omar, and was beginning to work upon him, Tennyson (who was then finishing the early "Idylls of the King") had been one of the first to whom he wrote. It is worth remembering that FitzGerald was then in deep depression. It was the middle of the sad period of his brief, unhappy married life. This had proved a failure in London. It was proving a failure now in the country. He wrote: GORLESTONE, GREAT YARMOUTH, _July 1857_.