Item 103 - Letter from Henry Taylor

8 pp.

HT is pleased WW likes his play: 'I am glad of all the praise I can get and especially of yours'. He has not seen WW's book of Hexameters: 'I remember well the pleasure I had in Hermann and Dorothea [WW's translation of 'Goethe's Herman and Dorothea', Fraser's Magazine, 1850]'. However 'it is not a measure which I should wish to see much of in any poetry'. He has just been reading John Herschel's translation of the first book of the Iliad - 'skillful and beautiful as the versification is I would rather have had it in decasyllabic blank verse of the same quality - not indeed in Cowper's blank verse, for if the hexameter movement is too marked, Cowper's verse on the other hand is almost motionless. But if Homer could be rendered into such blank verse as was written in the Elizabethan age or by Milton...that being a kind of melody in which almost all other melodies and movements are contained'.