climax of Shakspeare's, "King, Hamlet, Royal Dane, Father" ; "yet memory turns from little men to thee," "And sported careless round their fellow child." The whole, I repeat, is immensely good.

Yours is a poetical family. I was much surprised and pleased to see the signature of Sara to that elegant composition, the fifth epistle. I dare not criticise the Religious Musings: I like not to select any part, where all is excellent. I can only admire, and thank you for it in the name of a Christian, as well as a lover of good poetry: only let me ask, Is not that thought and those words in Young, "stands in the sun," or is it only such as Young, in one of his better moments, might have writ?

"Believe thou, O my soul,

Life is a vision, shadowy of Truth;

And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,
Shapes of a dream!"

I thank you for these lines in the name of a necessarian, and for what follows in the next paragraph, in the name of a child of fancy. After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write any thing with which I shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed hope. You had

many an holy lay

That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way."

I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant on the sense. When I read in your little volume, your nineteenth effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the "Sigh," I think I hear you again. I image to myself the little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When

you left London I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off, at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. "How blest with ye the path could I have trod of quiet life!" In your conversation you had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief. But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind; but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined, alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will not be very troublesome. At some future time I will amuse you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so. Excuse this selfish digression. Your Monody" is so superlatively excellent, that I can only wish it perfect, which I can't help feeling it is not quite. Indulge me in a few conjectures. What I am going to propose would make it more compressed, and, I think, more energetic, though I am sensible at the expense of many beautiful lines. Let it begin "Is this the land of song-ennobled line?" and proceed to "Otway's famish'd form"; then, "Thee, Chatterton," to "harps of Seraphim"; then, "clad in Nature's rich array," to "orient day"; then "but soon the scathing lightning," to "blighted land"; then, "sublime of thought," to "his bosom glows"; then

"But soon upon his poor unshelter'd head

Did Penury her sickly mildew shed,

Ah! where are fled the charms of early Grace,

And Joy's wild gleams that lighten'd o'er his face?"

Then "youth of tumultuous soul" to "sigh," as before. The rest may all stand down to gaze upon the waves below." What follows now may come next as detached verses, suggested by the Monody, rather than a part of it. They are indeed, in themselves, very sweet:

"And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng,
Would hang, enraptured, on thy stately song.'

in particular, perhaps. If I am obscure, you may understand me by counting lines. I have proposed omitting twenty-four lines. I feel that thus compressed it would gain energy, but think it most likely you will not agree with me: for who shall go about to bring opinions to the bed of Procrustes, and introduce among the sons of men a monotony of identical feelings? I only propose with diffidence. Reject, if you please, with as little remorse as you would the colour of a coat or the pattern of a buckle, where our fancies differed. The lines "Friend to the Friendless," &c., which you may think rudely disbranched from the Chatterton, will patch in with the Man of Ross, where they were at once at home, with two more which I recollect,

"And o'er the dowried virgin's snowy cheek
Bade bridal Love suffuse his blushes meek,"

very beautiful.

The "Pixies" is a perfect thing; and so are the "Lines on the Spring," page 28. The " The "Epitaph on an Infant," like a Jack-o'-lantern, has danced about (or like Dr Forster's scholars) out of the Morning Chronicle into the Watchman, and thence back into your Collection. It is very pretty, and you seem to

66

think so; but, may be, have o'erlooked its chief merit, that of filling up a whole page. I had once deemed Sonnets of unrivalled use that way; but your Epitaphs, I find, are the more diffuse. "Edmund" still holds its place among your best verses. "Ah! fair delights' to roses round," in your Poem called "Absence," recall (none more forcibly) to my mind the tones in which you recited it. recited it. I will not notice, in this tedious (to you) manner, verses which have been so long delightful to me, and which you already know my opinion of. Of this kind are Bowles, Priestley, and that most exquisite and most Bowles-like of all, the nineteenth effusion. It would have better ended with "agony of care": the last two lines are obvious and unnecessary, and you need not now make fourteen lines of it now it is rechristened from a Sonnet to an Effusion. Schiller might have written the twentieth Effusion: 'tis worthy of him in any sense. I was glad to meet with those lines you sent me, when my sister was so ill: I had lost the copy, and I felt not a little proud of seeing my name in your verse. The "Complaint of Ninathoma" (first stanza in particular) is the best, or only good imitation, of Ossian I ever saw, your "Restless Gale" excepted. "To an Infant is most sweet. Is not "foodful," though, very harsh? Would not "dulcet" fruit be less harsh, or some other friendly bi-syllable ? In "Edmund," "Frenzy, fierce-eyed child," is not so well as frantic," though that is an epithet adding nothing to the meaning. Slander couching was better than squatting." In the "Man of Ross" it was a better line thus:

"If 'neath this roof thy wine-cheer'd moments pass," than as it stands now. Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the concluding five lines of "Kosciusko call it any thing you will but sublime. In In my twelfth effusion I would rather have seen what I wrote myself,

: