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Netherhampton House, Salisbury.
7 March 30
My dear Susie
I don't imagine that any book of mine is worth your keeping for the purposes of the Sale Room. But there is one infinitesimal volume which is really rare: and it is this. I wrote it in a very unprofessional way, after reading in William Morris's Earthly Paradise - which I thought rather lacking in motive & character - at any rate not strenuous enough for my taste - at 16. The first half got
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rather stuck, so I plunged on ahead and ran from "Yet amid all this in his languid heart" (on p.13) to the end. This was in the winter of 1878-9: the earlier stanzas were completed later: and I think it was in 1883 or 1885 that at my mother's request I had it privately printed: 100 copies. I gave away a certain number - not half the edition, probably about 30. The remainder I laid by, & they are now lost or destroyed: but I have today come across three copies in an envelope in my
cupboard in "Mr Noah's Ark". I do not advise you to read, or even to cut, the book. It is obviously the natural child of Morris and my juvenile Muse, and I should call it "a copy of verses" only that it was written, I remember, under a genuine impulse - my father, who died before I was 4, was a legend to his children. Very real and very much loved. So it comes under the definition of poetry, or in a scholarly Index - "Poetry - derivative". I can only hope that no critic or pressmen will ever see it.
This letter has been waiting to be
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written, ever since our delightful visit. What a time we had! The Simons & their house, the Vivian Smiths & theirs, your new rooms, your fallen kings on the lawn, and your inimitable Comedy Butler. Of your daughter, her beauty and her indefinable face - "I say no more because I love her".
Yours ever
Henry Newbolt.
