To J.S.

Published 1832. T. noted: ‘Addressed to James Spedding, the biographer of Bacon. His brother was Edward Spedding, a friend of mine, who died in his youth.’ Edward died 24 Aug. 1832. Hallam wrote to T., 4 Sept. 1832: ‘E[mily] has probably told you of the death of Edward Spedding, cut off in the prime of life & the freshness of ardent feelings. He was more sensitive than his brother, but tempered that susceptibility with something of James’ calmness. He looked to a future life, I should think, as calmly as to a future day. His epitaph is “Peace”’ (AHH, p. 638; cp. l. 69below). Hallam wrote to T. in Oct.: ‘The lines to J.S. are perfect. James, I am sure, will be most grateful’ (31 Oct.–3 Nov.; AHH, p. 678; Mem. i 88). T. may have remembered Hallam’s praise when he came to write In Memoriam, which is comparable in style and gravity. The belief that the dead ‘sleep sweetly’ is discussed in In Memoriam xliii (p. 386): ‘If Sleep and Death be truly one’. For the opening of To J.S. T. adapted the opening (all he had written) of part ii of a poem which he had already sent to James Spedding; Dear friend (III 614) was quoted by Spedding in a letter to his brother Edward, 9 March 1831 (copy at Lincoln), and so will have been particularly appropriate. P. Allen shows ‘how distasteful Spedding found the traditional modes of Christian consolation’; a month after his brother died, his uncle died, and Spedding wrote, 8 Sept. 1832: ‘I suppose the first thing the good Garden [Francis Garden] would have done would have been to administer religious consolation after his own fashion — and I have already had some religious consolation from Blakesley, — which would have been amusing enough to any one not the object of it’ (The Cambridge Apostles, 1978, p. 167).