My dear Brothers;

　　I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this.

　　I have had two very pleasant evenings with Dilke yesterday &

　　today; and I am at this moment just come from him and feel in the humour to go on with this, began in the morning. I spent Friday evening with Wells and went the next morning to see Death on the Pale horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West’s age is considered. But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth-Examine King Lear and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness.

　　Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries , doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

　　Write soon to your most sincere friend and affectionate brother.