[471]To Sir Edmund Head.
Boston, September 20, 1865.my dear Head,—. . . . Tell me what you think about Lord Derby's Iliad. Sometimes he is not up to the German critics, among whom, if I follow him at all, it is only by accident. But his Miltonic blank-verse, I think, shows that he has a true feeling about his work. It is a great while since I have seen old Potter's Aeschylus, but Lord Derby has sometimes reminded me of that fierce Greek dogmatist. I kept Pope, Chapman, and Cowper on the table, as well as the original; but the English triumvirate seemed to me as pale before Lord Derby, while I was reading him, as he did before the Greek. On looking again at your Spanish proverb I am a little uncertain —notwithstanding your ever clear and fair chirography—whether you wrote mear el vado, or mear al vado. . . . . Mear el vado may signify, knocking away the very foundations on which you build. But quien sabe? The context, if there is one, might show. Agassiz is having his own way in Brazil as much as he ever had here. The Emperor does everything for him that he wants, gives him a steamer to go up the Amazon free of every possible charge, puts two engineers aboard who have surveyed the river, etc. I am sorry to see the death of Hamilton, the Irish mathematician. A great light is put out. I saw him knighted in 1835, and he gave Anna a few days afterwards a grand sonnet, which he wrote on the occasion, and which I now have . . . . It is certainly fine as few sonnets are.
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