Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Hudson, Henry Norman (1814-86)" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1845 - 1854. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9462eaa0-69fc-0133-794f-00505686a51c
Boston, March 27, 1847
My dear Sir;
I am altogether delighted with your paper. It has made Saturday quite a favorite day with me. I watch for its coming somewhat as a lover does for his appointed interview. I hope you will not make it necessary to me, and then withdraw it from me. It was my intention to have written something for its columns before this. Two weeks ago, indeed, I undertook to get up a few paragraphs with that view, but before I got through, I found my paper quite too long for your purpose. Besides, the matter was not exactly of the right stamp to appear in such a quarter; so I have sent it to Colton [George H. Colton, editor of the American Whig Review where Hudson's essay on the "Religious Union of Associationists" eventually did appear in the May 1847 issue]. It is on Mr. W. H. Channing and his "Church of Humanity." You will readily understand how, when I got engaged on such a theme, I found it difficult to stop. Whether Colton will publish the thing I do not know. The article is not very velvet-footed, though considerably milder than the one on "Festus." Our incontinent reformers are so conceited, that they can hardly be reached by any weapons but satire and ridicule. Their fanaticism of innovation seems proof against everything but the arrows of scorn. My article on the Philanthropists is not begun yet; though I have for some time kept up a thinking on the subject.
Many thanks for the civil things you have said of me. Much as these are calculated to make me like your paper, I think they have not produced so powerful an impression that way, as your notices of Somebody's Life of Taylor, of Griswold's late Sham [The Prose Writers of America, reviewed in the Literary World on March 20, 1847] and of Hazlitt's Napoleon [reviewed on March 27, 1847]. If with such papers as these the Literary World cannot go ahead, then the public is not worth writing for; that's all I have to say. It is high time Griswold's quackeries were exposed. I have long thought there was nothing too mean for him to do, provided he could make anything by it.
Have you seen the piece of softly, slobbering criticism on Emerson's Poems in the last Christian Examiner? If you want an example of precisely what criticism ought not to be, I advise you to read it. One would think the writer were made to die of a rose in aromatic pain. If criticism cannot speak out plainly, and call things by their right names, for heaven's sake let criticism hold its tongue. To be fit for the office of critic, and, indeed, for almost any office, it seems to me one must be a good hater; then his hatreds will serve to accredit his loves. These Boston authorlets, pretending to love everything and hate nothing, do not appear to have energy enough to do either. Always trying how finely and elegantly they can write, they seem alike affected in their censure and their praise. We are now having a very long drizzle of such criticisms in Mr. [George Stillman] Hillard's Lectures on Milton. Last evening I heard him on Paradise Lost. The first half of the lecture was taken up in puerile fault-finding, and the rest in straining after fine figures. It was very much as if a milliner should go to work, with lace, scissors and needle, to adorn the Falls of Niagara. Amid the sweet austerities of Milton's domestic scenes Mr. Hillard went whining along like some love-sick stripling. He has neither strength to feel Milton's delicacies, nor delicacy to feel his sublimities. He can cut very pretty ruffles out of the lace that others have woven; and that is about all he can do. Mr. Whipple seems to think people will be drawn to the study of Milton by these lectures. How any one that is weak enough to be moved by them is to stand up under Milton is beyond my comprehension.
However, the mutual admirers appear to think them very beautiful; and so I suppose the rest of us must submit. As for myself, I own it vexes me to see such a subject fall into such hands. I do not want people should be encouraged to suppose there is anything in Milton to countenance their amiable dulness and refined insipidity. I know not whether Mr. Hillard overrates him more as a man, or underrates more as a poet. Milton rebelled like a hero, and wrote poetry like a hero; in both he was more like his own Satan, than like his commentator. He was a good hater; as is evident from the fact, that "he hated everything that he was required to obey" [paraphrasing Samuel Johnson on Milton in Johnson's Lives of the Poets]. Whatever he did, there was a strength and vigor about him, which it strikes me these petty spinners of literary gossamer had better let alone. And yet it is rather amusing to see a spider weaving a web to catch a lion.
As soon as anything appears to me, worth printing, I shall try to indite you some paragraphs. I am told an edition of Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs of her husband is coming out soon. It is a very delightful book; and perhaps I will get you up a notice of it when it appears. Wiffen's Tasso is another book that I am meditating a notice of. You know I have not much facility in occasional writing. Generally I have to think long before I can write anything, and write long after I have got to thinking.
Please give my regards to Headley [Joel Tyler Headley] and Matthews [Cornelius Mathews]; read them this letter (if, indeed, you ever read it at all;) then hurry it into deepest night; and believe me
Sincerely your friend &c ;
H. N. Hudson
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| Boston Evening Transcript - March 25, 1847 via genealogybank.com |
Related post
- "The Fiddler" ascribed to Melville in the CHURCHMAN, edited by Henry Norman Hudson
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-fiddler-ascribed-to-melville-in.html
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