SD1897. Nathaniel Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 267 (in part).

Liverpool,

Jany 3d ’56.

Dear Ticknor,

Many Happy New Years to you, and to the firm, and all the friends at the Old Corner store. …

I thank you for Mrs Mowatt’s novel, and for Browning’s Poems. I have tried to read the latter, but without much success. I wish the poets now-a-days would not sing in such devilish queer measures. It bothers me horribly; and as regards these poems, I cannot understand a tenth part of them. There is something in the English atmosphere and diet that unfits a man for the comprehension and enjoyment of all transcendentalisms, and of whatever passes a certain limit of common sense. In America, very probably, I might have admired these poems.

Publication: The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus, Ohio, 1962–97), 17, 425–427.

Manuscript: Berg Collection.

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