to Edmund Gosse

Hotel Belvedere, Davos Platz [Dec. 6, 1880].

MY DEAR WEG,—I have many letters that I ought to write in preference to this; but a duty to letters and to you prevails over any private consideration.  You are going to collect odes; I could not wish a better man to do so; but I tremble lest you should commit two sins of omission.  You will not, I am sure, be so far left to yourself as to give us no more of Dryden than the hackneyed St. Cecilia; I know you will give us some others of those surprising masterpieces where there is more sustained eloquence and harmony of English numbers than in all that has been written since; there is a machine about a poetical young lady, and another about either Charles or James, I know not which; and they are both indescribably fine.  (Is Marvell’s Horatian Ode good enough?  I half think so.)  But my great point is a fear that you are one of those who are unjust to our old Tennyson’s Duke of Wellington.  I have just been talking it over with Symonds; and we agreed that whether for its metrical effects, for its brief, plain, stirring words of portraiture, as—he ‘that never lost an English gun,’ or—the soldier salute; or for the heroic apostrophe to Nelson; that ode has never been surpassed in any tongue or time.  Grant me the Duke, O Weg!  I suppose you must not put in yours about the warship; you will have to admit worse ones, however.—Ever yours,

R. L. S.