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'We are reading in the evenings now, Sydney Smith's letters, Boswell, Whewell's History of Inductive Sciences, the Odyssey and occasionally Heine's Reisebilder. I began the second Book of the Iliad in Greek this morning'.
'Give Mr Whewell my best thanks for sending me his tide paper: all on board are much interested by it.'
'Thank you for the Atlas. The Guardian (Puseyite) has been very busy praising M[oorland] C[ottage] too. I hope the Times will be so kind as to leave it alone; for I think it would be a disgrace to be praised by the man who wrote that review of Mr Thackeray. Dr Whewell wrote that review in Fraser I believe; and I have received a very complimentary note from him as well'.
'Throughout the autumn and winter evenings [of 1854] he [Alfred Tennyson] translated aloud to my mother the sixth Aeneid of Virgil and Homer's description of Hades, and they read Dante's Inferno together. Whewell's Plurality of Worlds he also carefully studied. "It is to me anything," he writes, "but a satisfactory book. It is inconceivable that the whole Universe was created merely for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate sun."'