Item 114 - Letter from Julius Charles Hare

Herstmonceux - They are all looking forward to WW's visit. JCH gives instructions on how best to reach them in Hurstmonceux. 'What a beautiful poem Evangeline is. It seems to me to have definitively naturalized the metre: at least it will do so in America. The story is evidently suggested by Hermann & Dorothea; yet the poem is thoroughly original, very like, yet totally different'. JCH longs to hear how the new system is working at the University - 'The new Professors, I suppose, have not downed their harness yet'. What does Sir James Stephen mean by Hazlitt's Life of Luther? Is the article on 'Faith and Reason' in the Edinburgh Review by Stephen? - 'the style has not the same ponderous Gibbonian rhetoric; and though parts are well & forcibly put, I think I wd hardly confound faith so entirely with belief, or join so entirely the thaumalurgie school of reasoners on the evidences'. JCH has read WW's piece on Hegel [On Hegel's Criticism of Newton's "Principia", 1849]: 'Hegel has never been one of my favorites, but the contrary. Still it seems to me that you treat him somewhat over-scurvily, as if he were a mere ass; whereas, with all my repugnance to many of his notions, I have never read twenty pages of him, without feeling that he was a very great thinker and writer'. Hegel is difficult to read in German let alone after he has been translated, and WW seems to have missed the sense of a couple of the sentences JCH checked with the original text.