_Ne cherchez point, Iris, à percer les ténèbres[22] Dont les Dieux sagement ont voilé l'Avenir; Et ne consultez point tant de Devins célèbres Pour chercher le moment qui doit nous désunir. Livrez-vous au plaisir; tout le reste est frivole; Et songez que, trop court pour de plus longs projets, Tandis que nous parlons le Temps jaloux s'envole, Et que ce Temps, hélas! est perdu pour jamais._ But wait--before I finish I must ask why you assure Clark of Trinity that it is the _rooks_ who call "Maud, Maud, etc." Indeed it is the _Thrush_, as I have heard a hundred times in a summer's evening, when scared in the evergreens of a garden. Therefore: Rooks in a classroom quarrel up in the tall trees caw'd; But 'twas the thrush in the laurel, that kept crying, Maud, Maud, Maud. Keats he put very high indeed. "I have been again reading Lord Houghton's _Life of Keats_" he wrote, "whose hastiest doggrel should show Browning, Morris & Co., that they are not what the newspapers tell them they are." "What a fuss the cockneys make about Shelley just now, surely not worth Keats' little finger," he wrote on another occasion. And again, "Is Mr. Rossetti a Great Poet like Browning and Morris? So the _Athenæum_ tells me. Dear me, how thick Great Poets _do_ grow nowadays." And yet again, "I can't read G. Eliot as I presume you can; I really conclude that the fault lies in me, not in her; so with Goethe (except in his letters, Table-Talk,[23] etc.), whom I try in vain to admire." His real love was for Crabbe, the poet, not of "realism" but of reality. Life's sternest painter and its best-- the poet of disillusionment. This love, which has been felt in different generations by Byron, Cardinal Newman, and Bishop Gore, he could get few of his friends to share with him. Tennyson himself was one of the few. "I keep reading Crabbe from time to time," he writes to Tennyson; "nobody else does unless it be another 'paltry Poet' whom I know. The edition only sells at a shilling a volume--second-hand. I don't wonder at young people and women (I mean no disparagement at all) not relishing even the good parts: and certainly there is plenty of bad for all readers."