To Thomas Archer Hirst   Nov. 15 / 51¹

Queenwood Nov. 15/ 51

My Dear Tom.

It is excessively cold this morning and I have no fire. My finger ends are cold and, what is worse, sore, being blistered by citric acid which I contracted a few nights ago in Romsey.² I lectured there on light to a full house and attentive audience, and illustrated the lecture by the electric light from 50 of Bunsen’s cells.³ I saw Kossuth⁴ yesterday, he appeared a wearied man; bowed down either by the officious hospitality of the English nation which scarcely permits him time to sleep, or else by cares and sorrows of another kind. I received your bundle of translations.⁵ I am glad you did not send them to Clayton⁶ for they are very defective in many respects! now dont bristle up – I tell thee the plain truth. I read your letter first as a matter of course; there you were, free, fresh, and vigorous; I turned then to your translations and could see you through them – you were a machine, a stone mason miserably hacking up your solid material, and rounding off their corners to make them fit. They had undergone no smelting process, they were as I have said solid – you wrought with words not with the ideas to which words owe their symmetry and life, and consequently the poetic edifice instead of having its beams ‘laid in music’⁷ was a defective earthly production. Through some of the pieces however I can discern the soul of Schiller shining – a beautiful soul, warm with celestial radiances and such pieces shall receive all due attention. That fine piece of the Diver⁸ you have not rendered with half the force which it is capable of and the last verse if I mistake not you have absolutely misunderstood, and thus deprived it of all its cadence of woe. I speak from memory, having no Schiller by me. I began to think; this boy is turning clod over his mathematics, but then I recollected your letter, and then again luckily came your letter to Debus, which fell like a shower of Eau de Cologne upon my hot and angry temples, cooling me and soothing me by the assurance that the gold of Ophir⁹ had not yet become dim. To drop figures Tom, you must take care, great care, of your spelling – any thing you have doubt of refer to your dictionary about; this is perhaps dry work but it is essential, and now is the best time to look to it. You will find it 10 times as dry by and by. Again with regard to the poetry either make your rhyme good or make no rhyme at all, that is confine yourself to blank verse; you appear to have no ear for rhyme, you are worse than Emerson, which makes me believe that your proficiency at the bass fiddle &c was all a sham and that if the gods had put a fiddle in my hands when I was young I should have beaten you hollow. I just lay my hands by utter chance and without choice on the first bit of your translation that I meet – what is it – those beautiful ‘words of faith’; by the way, not your words for if one could not see through these there would be little beauty in the affair. ‘they echo’ does not rhyme with ‘they grow’, ‘terror’ does not rhyme with ‘ever’, ‘short’ by no means rhymes with ‘thought’, and so of many others – What is worth doing at all is worth doing well and therefore I say if you rhyme see that you do it properly, if not give it up altogether, and turn to blank verse, or better to good fresh vigorous prose for here you are untrammeled. I will not imply by the latter sentence that rhyme is a trammel, I hardly believe it to be the case with some, the words come more freely with a [jingle] than otherwise, as sheep follow a bell.

Poor A.S.¹⁰ I have given you a terrible thrashing – oh that I could see you rolling your great eyes over the above – an active fancy must be a substitute for the reality. Now and then however I picture a smile rippling across those broad features which proves that the feeling [evoked] by John with his pale face & cold fingers blistered by acid is not all of anger.

I have many things to say to you Tom regarding my doings and prospects, some of which you will not like to hear, and which I therefore hardly like to communicate. We must look bravely at destiny however although she does threaten our warm hopes and early visions – There is a prospect of my going to Australia; indeed I have become a candidate for the professorship of Experimental Philosophy in the new University which is about to be established at Sidney.¹¹ The choice of Professors rest with Sir John Herschell, Professor Airy and two others. The salary is £300 per annum three fourths of the students’ fees which amount to £6 each per year £100 a year for the house and £160 for passage money – They also place £500 at the disposal of the physicist for the purchase of apparatus. The affair is liberally conceived; all sectarian distinctions are rigidly banished from it.¹² The University is to open her arms to all without reference to creeds. This is the last [move] Tom; what do you think of it?

This matter will soon be decided, perhaps before Christmas. If so I will take a scrip¹³ in my hand and face the road to Marburg, purposing to see thee before I go.

This is Sunday morning; today at half-past ten I meet my friend D^r Fox¹⁴ get astride a horse and ride through the country for 3 hours. –

The ride is over and a magnificent one it was. On starting poured down a glass of warm sherry the sun shone clearly but there was a keen cutting wind; for a mile slowly then at it – you would have [passed] your eyes in admiration boy could you behold my horsemanship. Once in passing at full gallop under a beech tree a branch caught me and almost took the crown of my head away – my hat went! – At intervals the D^r dropped in to see his patients and I drew into a sunny corner and there enjoyed the literal Sabbath stillness of the landscape. In one place a splendid old English Mansion stood before me, with its spreading lawns and lowering woods – the last beauty of autumn appeared to have been reserved for the especial glorification of the day. The beech was not all dismantled but reared its hills of red foliage over the surface of the wood; the taper birch yellow as gold peeped through here and there, while the naked twigs and branches mingled like a softening mist with the scene. I blessed the gods that England has such homes, but alas the other pole of the magnet stood hardly by – a squalid village, filled with an ignorant toil-ground peasantry – I have never seen a more decrepid¹⁵ peasantry than that of Hampshire. We [have] got a parson here who receives £900 a year and for this he preaches an occasional Sunday and spends his weekdays seeking partridges in the Queenwood turnips.¹⁶ I have seen him at it, and were I near him I should have most assuredly told him he might be better employed. And I have heard that fellow imprudently open his mouth in the pulpit and preach to the crushed wretches beneath him of the manifold mercies of god and of the necessity of gratitude for the blessings which he pours on the children of men. However the ride ended, through turnips, over bad stubble, along smooth pastures, through winding wood walks over hills, down slopes back again to Broughton at 3 where a plentiful leg of choice mutton and a generous glass of sherry awaited us; talked two hours ‘across the walnuts and the wine’¹⁷ – and then home. Had you seen me after the ride Tom you would have pronounced me positively handsome, the lilly and the rose so struggled for mastery upon my cheek – I’m afraid however my nose shared in the general blush, which some people might deem a detraction from my beauty. Many a time during the day; especially during [these] dreamy quarters of an hour which I enjoyed in the sun alone while the D^r. was visiting, did you mingle with my thoughts – I thought of the English Kränzchen¹⁸ too and of other things connected therewith. You speak of a certain fair girl;¹⁹ as far as I know [here] she is all you describe her to be; In fact I once felt the sunny side of my own heart turning towards her; and [it] required a trifle of philosophy backed by that never failing remedy, honest work, to keep me from feeling towards her more tenderly than was prudent. Her mother is a proud woman, it has sometimes been a problem with me how she managed to educate such a girl. It is perhaps well that she was so, as a counter-pride on my part gave me a kind of purchase which enabled me to shake the entire matter away from me like dew drops from the Lion’s mane. I have no advice to offer; if she were younger I might even encourage a thought of the kind on your part. All I know and can testify is that should you be ‘crossed’ your work will prove a perennial source of recovery to you. I would balance myself by means of it; preserve my soul from waste and foolish hazard; – in a word Tom I would not have you stake too much upon such a cast.²⁰

Now then, love, tenderness, poetry, and all such bottled moonshine avaunt!²¹ and welcome the cold heights of science, twinkled over by the everlasting stars! – I must say that the reception which my labours have met in England is sufficient to satisfy a vainer fellow than I am. I receive a note from Col. Sabine, Treasurer of the Royal Society, a few days ago of which the following is a copy.

[…]²²

I must now shake you off; but not without a word about your last letter.²³ It reached me since the commencement of this; the allusion to Fraulein V.B. will have apprized you that it has come to hand. It tells me a good deal about Sterling which I could never learn through the brains of that muddy reviewer. I did not send you the next number²⁴ because it was flat, stale, and unprofitable. The fellow began²⁵

I wont write anymore but merely say that the letter was manna to my hungry soul.²⁶

Tyndall

RI MS JT/1/T/546