Reference
X955/1/111
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Date free text
7 May 1899
Production date
From: 1899 To: 1899
Scope and Content
5 High Wickham, Hastings
My very dear friend
I never dreamed you would copy the poem for me, but I am glad, as you may suppose, to have it in your handwriting. It is a noble piece of work. It is so refreshing to come into contact with such whole-hearted admiration. I cannot endure the critical measuring attitude towards great men. I see in Literature that Tennyson and Wordsworth are to be picked over and that a little thin volume in each case is to be excerpted containing all that is supposed to deserve preservation.
I need hardly tell toy I did not ask myself to Swinburne’s. I was invited. I have not read as much
of his poetry as perhaps I ought to have read, but his prose I know well. Next to Coleridge and Lamb I place Swinburne, most unhesitatingly, for delicacy and sureness of discrimination. He lives at Putney with Mr. Watts-Dunton (1) in a smallish house which contains, however, some remarkable drawings by Rossetti. He is lightly built and has a curiously nervous manner, twitching his feet and twining one foot around the other when he sits down. He now wears a long beard which conceals the chin, the weak part of the face. The eyes are the strong feature, grey and full of light. Unhappily he is so deaf that it is difficult to keep up a conversation with him. He read to us some comical descriptions of animals in an old book he had picked up, enjoying them as if he were a big schoolboy. There is a magnificent collection of Shakespearean quartos on his shelves which are evidently considered a treasure.
Molly and I propose to go to Alfoxden this week for a few days. It is in the Quantocks, and the birth-place, as you remember, of many of the Lyrical Ballads . I have intended for years to pay it a visit, and perhaps the pilgrimage thither just now will relieve some of my ailments, although mainly it is a real pilgrimage of pious purposes.
Ever affectionately
W. Hale White
(1) Dunton, (Walter) Theodore Watts- (1832–1914), writer and poet – He looked after Swinburne see ODNB for further details.
Level of description
item