succeeds, enable me to use meters in short poems which seem proper to
myself; whether they suit the habits of readers at first sight or
not. But all this is rather vague at present.... I think I am
getting quite indifferent about the book. I have given away the
only copy I had, and now never look at them. The most enthusiastic
people about them are young men of course; but I have heard of one
or two people who found pleasure in 'Resignation,' and poems of
that stamp, which is what I like."

"The most enthusiastic people about them are young men, of course." The
sentence might stand as the motto of all poetic beginnings. The young
poet writes first of all for the young of his own day. They make his
bodyguard. They open to him the gates of the House of Fame. But if the
divine power is really his, it soon frees itself from the shackles of
Time and Circumstance. The true poet becomes, in the language of the
Greek epigram on Homer, "the ageless mouth of all the world." And if,
"The Strayed Reveller," and the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," and
"Resignation," delighted those who were young in 1849, that same
generation, as the years passed over it, instead of outgrowing their
poet, took him all the more closely to their hearts. Only so can we
explain the steady spread and deepening of his poetic reputation which
befell my uncle up to the very end of his life, and had assured him by
then--leaving out of count the later development of his influence both
in the field of poetry and elsewhere--his place in the history of
English literature.

But his entry as a poet was gradual, and but little heralded, compared
to the debuts of our own time. Here is an interesting appreciation from
his sister Mary, about whom I shall have more to say presently. At the
time this letter was written, in 1849, she was twenty-three, and already