next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs'? Yes, and a
little about the 'Olympian Horses,' and God-charioteers as well!

What 'struck me as faults,' were not matters on the removal of which,
one was to have--poetry, or high poetry,--but the very highest poetry,
so I thought, and that, to universal recognition. For myself, or any
artist, in many of the cases there would be a positive loss of time,
peculiar artist's pleasure--for an instructed eye loves to see where
the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly
along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow; for these
'too muches' for the everybody's picture are so many helps to the
making out the real painter's picture as he had it in his brain. And
all of the Titian's Naples Magdalen must have once been golden in its
degree to justify that heap of hair in her hands--the _only_ gold
effected now!

But about this soon--for night is drawing on and I go out, yet cannot,
quiet at conscience, till I report (to _myself_, for I never said it
to you, I think) that your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely
more to me than mine to you--for you _do_ what I always wanted, hoped
to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. You speak
out, _you_,--I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken
into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in
me, but I am going to try; so it will be no small comfort to have your
company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women
aforesaid, you are busied with them, whereas it seems bleak,
melancholy work, this talking to the wind (for I have begun)--yet I
don't think I shall let _you_ hear, after all, the savage things about
Popes and imaginative religions that I must say.