Worcester Webster, into which I looked a day or two after your letter came, agrees as to tenebrious and ruth; I forgot to look in it for sombrous. But as to ruth, I used it in the common sense of pity, not that of sadness and sorrow. When I wrote—
In jest and laugh to parry hateful ruth,'
I meant to parry the pity of others, not to parry my own sadness, which, indeed, jest and laugh must intensify instead of parrying. My thought was much like that of Beatrice, 'The Cenci,' Act v., Sc. 3:—
Fling at their choice curses or faded pity,
Sad funeral flowers to deck a living corpse
Upon us as we pass, to pass away?'
And from the light indifferent multitude, as you must know, curses are even less unwelcome than pity when we are profoundly suffering. I looked into the Dictionaries not knowing whether their authority would sustain or condemn me, as I am used to trust in careful writing to my own sense of what is right; this, naturally, having been modified and formed by reading of good authors. Even had the Dictionaries condemned me, I should in these cases have been apt to assert my own correctness; in many others I should be ready to yield without contest. In the 'City of Dreadful Night' I used tenebrous instead of tenebrious; just as good writers use, as it happens to suit them, either funeral or funereal, sulphurous or sulphureous (Shelley often in 'Hellas'), &c. You will think that I have troubled you with many words on a very little matter. . . . As it is now just
