though they bear no comparison with your exquisite lines

"On rose-leaf'd beds, amid your faery bowers," &c.

I love my Sonnets because they are reflected images of my own feelings at different times. To instance, in the thirteenth

"How reason reel'd," &c.,

are good lines, but must spoil the whole with me, who know it is only a fiction of yours, and that the "rude dashings" did in fact not "rock me to repose." I grant the same objection applies not to the former Sonnet; but still I love my own feelings: they are dear to memory, though they now and then wake a sigh or a tear. "Thinking on divers things foredone," I charge you, Coleridge, spare my ewe lambs; and though a gentleman may borrow six lines in an epic poem, (I should have no objection to borrow five hundred, and without acknowledging,) still, in a sonnet, a personal poem, I do not ask my friend the aiding verse." I would not wrong your feelings, by proposing any improvements (did I think myself capable of suggesting 'em) in such personal poems as "Thou bleedest, my poor heart!"-'od so,-I am caught-I have already done it; but that simile I propose abridging, would not change the feeling or introduce any alien ones. Do you understand me? In the twenty-eight, however, and in the "Sigh," and that composed at Clevedon, things that come from the heart direct, not by the medium of the fancy, I would not suggest an alteration. When my blank verse is finished, or any long fancy poems, propino tibi alterandum, cut-up-andum, abridgandum, just what you will with it; but spare my ewe lambs! That to 66 Mrs Siddons," now, you were welcome to improve, if it had been worth it: but I say unto you again, Coleridge, spare my ewe lambs! I must con

fess were they mine, I should omit, in editione secundâ, Effusions two and three, because satiric, and below the dignity of the poet of Religious Musings, fifth, seventh, half of the eighth, that "Written in early youth," as far as "thousand eyes," though I part not unreluctantly with that lively line

"Chaste joyance dancing in her bright blue eyes,"

and one or two more just thereabouts. But I would substitute for it that sweet poem called "Recollection," in the fifth Number of the Watchman; better, I think, than the remainder of this poem, though not differing materially as the poem now stands it looks altogether confused. And do not omit those lines upon the "Early Blossom," in your sixth Number of the Watchman: and I would omit the tenth Effusion or, what would do better, alter and improve the last four lines. In fact, I suppose, if they were mine, I should not omit 'em; but your verse is, for the most part, so exquisite, that I like not to see aught of meaner matter mixed with it. Forgive my petulance, and often, I fear, ill-founded criticisms; and forgive me that I have, by this time, made your eyes and head ache with my long letter; but I cannot forego hastily the pleasure and pride of thus conversing with you. You did not tell me whether I was to include the Conciones ad Populum in my remarks on your poems. They are not unfrequently sublime; and I think you could not do better than to turn 'em into verse, if you have nothing else to do. Allen, I am sorry to say, is a confirmed Atheist. Stoddart, a cold-hearted, wellbred, conceited disciple of Godwin, does him no good. His wife has several daughters, (one of 'em as old as himself). Surely there is something unnatural in such a marriage.

How I sympathize with you on the dull duty of a reviewer, and heartily damn with you Ned Evans and the Prosodist. I shall, however, wait impatiently for

the articles in the Critical Review, next month, because they are yours. Young Evans (W. Evans, a branch of a family you were once so intimate with) is come into our office, and sends his love to you! Coleridge, I devoutly wish that Fortune, who has made sport with you so long, may play one freak more,-throw you into London, or some spot near it, and there snug-ify you for life. 'Tis a selfish, but natural wish for me, cast as I am, "on life's wide plain, friendless." Are you acquainted with Bowles? I see, by his last Elegy, (written at Bath,) you are near neighbours.— Thursday.

"And I can think I can see the groves again-was it the voice of thee-turns not the voice of thee, my buried friend-who dries with her dark locks the tender tear," are touches as true to Nature as any in his other Elegy, written at the Hot Wells, about poor Kassell, &c. You are doubtless acquainted with it.

I do not know that I entirely agree with you in your stricture upon my Sonnet "To Innocence." To men whose hearts are not quite deadened by their commerce with the world, innocence (no longer familiar) becomes an awful idea. So I felt when I wrote it. Your other censures (qualified and sweetened, though, with praises somewhat extravagant) I perfectly coincide with; yet I choose to retain the word "lunar." Indulge a "lunatic" in his loyalty to his mistress the Moon! I have just been reading a most pathetic copy of verses on Sophia Pringle, who was hanged and burnt for coining. One of the strokes of pathos (which are very many, all somewhat obscure,) is "She lifted up her guilty forger to heaven." A note explains, by "forger," her right hand, with which she forged or coined the base metal. For "pathos" read bathos. You have put me out of conceit with my blank verse by your Religious Musings. I think it will come to nothing. I do not like 'em enough to send 'em. I have just been reading a book

which I may be too partial to, as it was the delight of my childhood; but I will recommend it to you: it is Izaak Walton's Complete Angler. All the scientific part you may omit in reading. The dialogue is very simple, full of pastoral beauties, and will charm you. Many pretty old verses are interspersed. This letter, which would be a week's work reading only, I do not wish you to answer it in less than a month. I shall be richly content with a letter from you some day early in July; though if you get any how settled before then, pray let me know it immediately; 'twould give me so much satisfaction. Concerning the Unitarian chapel, the salary is the only scruple that the most rigid moralist would admit as valid. Concerning the tutorage, is not the salary low, and absence from your family unavoidable? London is the only fostering soil for genius. Nothing more occurs just now; so I will leave you, in mercy, one small white spot empty below, to repose your eyes upon, fatigued as they must be with the wilderness of words they have by this time painfully travelled through. God love you, Coleridge, and prosper you through life; though mine will be loss if your lot is to be cast at Bristol, or at Nottingham, or anywhere but London. Our loves to Mrs C-. C. L.

IV.

TO THE SAME

Monday Night, June 13, 1796.

Unfurnished at present with any sheet-filling subject, I shall continue my letter gradually and journal-wise. My second thoughts entirely coincide with your comments on Joan of Arc and I can only wonder at my childish judgment which overlooked the Ist book, and could prefer the 9th: not that I was insensible to the soberer beauties of the former; but the latter caught me with its glare of magic: the former, however, left a more pleasing general recol

lection in my mind. Let me add, the 1st book was the favourite of my sister; and I now, with Joan, often "think on Domremi and the fields of Arc." I must not pass over without acknowledging my obligations to your full and satisfactory account of personifications. I have read it again and again, and it will be a guide to my future taste. Perhaps I had estimated Southey's merits too much by number, weight, and measure. I now agree completely and entirely in your opinion of the genius of Southey. Your own image of Melancholy is illustrative of what you teach, and in itself masterly. I conjecture it is "disbranched" from one of your embryo "hymns." When they are mature of birth (were I you) I should print 'em, in one separate volume, with Religious Musings, and your part of the Joan of Arc. Birds of the same soaring wing should hold on their flight in company. Once for all, (and by renewing the subject you will only renew in me the condemnation of Tantalus,) I hope to be able to pay you a visit (if you are then at Bristol) some time in the latter end of August or beginning of September, for a week or fortnight before that time office business puts an absolute veto on my coming.

"And if a sigh that speaks regret of happier times appear,

A glimpse of joy that we have met shall shine and dry the tear."

Of the blank verses I spoke of, the following lines are the only tolerably complete ones I have writ out of not more than one hundred and fifty. That I get on so slowly you may fairly impute to want of practice in composition, when I declare to you that (the few verses which you have seen excepted) I have not writ fifty lines since I left school. It may not be amiss to remark that my grandmother (on whom the verses are written) lived housekeeper in a family the fifty or sixty last years of her life-that she was a woman of exemplary piety and goodness-and for many years