Cranch has just painted a scene from the "Lady of Shalott," the scene--

"In among the bearded barley,
The reaping late and early," etc.--

represents two reapers standing with sickles among the grain, and turning
intently towards the four "gray walls and four gray towers which overlook
a space of flowers" in an island covered with foliage to the water, and
lying in the midst of the stream. The criticism upon the picture is
obvious; if Cranch is as painter what Tennyson is as poet, it is good--if
not, it is bad. What do you think? When a man illustrates a poem he is
pledged by the poem, hence the absurdity of Martyn's drawings from the
"Paradise Lost," and the various pictures of Belshazzar's feast. Only the
Madonnas of the greatest painters are satisfactory. But I shall not
abandon myself to the tracking of these mysteries of art.

I have been reading Goethe's "Tasso." Now I am at the "Sorrows of
Werther." I am wonderfully impressed with his dramatic power. The
"Egmont," "Iphigenia," and "Tasso" are grander than anything I know in
modern literature, than anything else of his which I have read. The serene
simplicity of the "Iphigenia" is like a keen blast of ocean air. It stands
like a Grecian temple, but in the moonlight. Is not that because, as Fanny
Kemble says, and so many have thought, he was a Heathen? He did not enter
into the state called the Christian. He served gods, not a God; and had it
been otherwise this tragedy had been full-bathed in sunlight. And yet I
hardly dare to say anything decidedly of such a man. I shall condemn
myself a little while hence if I do.

Let me hear from you before I leave New York, which will be in two or