cation than as a triumph of contented power. Never was less presumption exhibited-never the sharp stroke of contemptuous censure less required. His own Preface was the more deprecatory, in that it did not deny that he was himself disappointed, and that he looked to future efforts to justify his claims to others, and himself to himself. This dissatisfaction with his book, and his brother's ill-health, cast over his mind the gloom which he hardly conceals in the letters of this period, though it is remarkable how free they are, at all times, from any merely querulous expressions, and from the vague sentimentality attributed to some of his literary associates. MY DEAR REYNOLDS, TEIGNMOUTH, May 3, [1818.] What I complain of is, that I have been in so uneasy a state of mind as not to be fit to write to an invalid. I cannot write to any length under a disguised feeling. I should have loaded you with an addition of gloom, which I am sure you do not want. I am now, thank God, in a humor to give you a good groat's worth; for Tom, after a night without a wink of sleep, and over-burthened with fever, has got up, after a refreshing daysleep, and is better than he has been for a long time. And you, I trust, have been again round the Common without any effect but refreshment. As to the matter, I hope I can say, with Sir Andrew, "I have matter enough in my head," in your favor. And now, in the second place, for I reckon that I have finished my Imprimis, I am glad you blow up the weather. All through your letter there is a leaning towards a climate-curse; and you know what a delicate satisfaction there is in having a vexation anathematized. One would think that there has been growing up, for these last four thousand years, a grand-child scion of the old forbidden tree, and that some modern Eve had just violated it; and that there was come, with double charge, "Notus and Afer black with thunderous clouds from Serraliona." Tom wants to be in town: we will have some such days upon the heath like that of last summer-and why not with the same book? or what do you say to a black-letter Chaucer, printed in 1596? Aye, I have got one, huzza! I shall have it bound in Gothique-a nice sombre binding; it will go a little way to unmodernize. And, also, I see no reason, because I have been away this last month, why I should not have a peep at your Spenserian-notwithstanding you speak of your office, in my thought, a little too early; for I do not see why a mind like yours is not capable of harboring and digesting the whole mystery of Law as easily as Parson Hugh does pippins, which did not hinder him from his poetic canary. Were I to study Physic, or rather Medicine again, I feel it would not make the least difference in my poetry; when the mind is in its infancy a bias is in reality a bias, but when we have acquired more strength, a bias becomes no bias. Every department of knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this that I am glad at not having given away my medical books, which I shall again look over, to keep alive the little I know thitherwards; and moreover intend, through you and Rice, to become a sort of pip-civilian. An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people; it takes away the heat and fever, and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the Mystery, a thing which I begin to understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your letters. The difference of high sensations, with and without knowledge, appears to me this: in the latter case we are continually falling ten thousand fathoms deep, and being blown up again, without wings, and with all [the] horror of a bare-shouldered creature; in the former case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear. This is running one's rigs on the score of abstracted benefit; when we come to human life and the affections, it is impossible to know how a parallel of breast and head can be drawn ; (you will forgive me for thus privately treading out [of] my depth, and take it for treading as school-boys tread the water ;) it is impossible to know how far knowledge will console us for the death of a friend, and the "ills that flesh is heir to." With respect to the affections and poetry, you must know by sympathy my thoughts that way, and I dare say these few lines will be but a ratification. I wrote them on May-day, and intend to finish the ode all in good time. Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia ! As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiæ ? In earlier Sicilian? or thy smiles Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles, O, give me their old vigor, and unheard Rounded by thee, my song should die away Rich in the simple worship of a day. 66 I fear there is little You seem by that to have You may perhaps be anxious to know for fact to what sentence in your letter I allude. You say, chance of any thing else in this life." been going through, with a more painful and acute zest, the same labyrinth that I have-I have come to the same conclusion thus far. My branchings-out therefrom have been numerous: one of them is the consideration of Wordsworth's genius, and as a help, in the manner of gold being the meridian line of worldly wealth, how he differs from Milton. And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Milton's apparently less anxiety for humanity proceeds from his seeing further or not than Wordsworth, and whether Wordsworth has, in truth, epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song. In regard to his genius alone, we find what he says true, as far as we have experienced, and we can judge no further but by larger experience; for axioms in philosophy are not axioms till they have been proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone [over] the same steps as the author. I know this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when I say that now I shall relish "Hamlet" more than I ever have done-or better. You are sensible no man can set down venery as a bestial or joyless thing until he is sick of it, and therefore all philosophizing on it would be mere wording. Until we are sick, we understand not; in fine, as Byron says, Knowledge is sorrow ;" and I go on to 66 say that "Sorrow is wisdom;" and further, for aught we can know for certainty, "Wisdom is folly." So you see how I have run away from Wordsworth and Milton, and shall still run away from what was in my head to observe, that some kind of letters are good squares, others handsome ovals, others orbicular, others spheroid-and why should not there be another species with two rough edges, like a rat-trap? I hope you will find all my long letters of that species, and all will be well; for by merely touching the spring delicately and ethereally, the rough-edged will fly immediately into a proper compactness; and thus you may make a good wholesome loaf, with your own leaven in it, of my fragments. If you cannot find this said rat-trap sufficiently tractable, alas! for me, it being an impossibility in grain for my ink to stain otherwise. If I scribble long letters, I must play my vagaries. I must be too heavy, or too light, for whole pages; I must be quaint, and free of tropes and figures; I must play my draughts as I please, and for my advantage and your erudition, crown a white with a black, or a black with a white, and move into black or white, far and near as I please; I must go from Hazlitt to Patmore, and make Wordsworth and Coleman play at leap-frog, or keep one of them down a whole half-holiday at flythe-garter; "from Gray to Gay, from Little to Shakspeare." I shall resume after dinner. This crossing a letter is not without its association-for chequer-work leads us naturally to a milkmaid, a milkmaid to Hogarth, Hogarth to Shakspeare; Shakspeare to Hazlitt, Hazlitt back to Shakspeare; and thus by merely pulling an apron-string we set a pretty peal of chimes at work. Let them chime on, while, with your patience, I will return to Wordsworth-whether or no he has an extended vision or a circumscribed grandeurwhether he is an eagle in his nest or on the wing; and, to be more explicit, and to show you how tall I stand by the giant, I will put down a simile of human life as far as I now perceive it; that is, to the point to which I say we both have arrived at. Well, I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me. The first we step into we call the Infant, or Thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think. We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it, but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle within us. We no sooner get into the second chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere. We see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight. However, among the effects this breathing is father of, is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of man, of convincing one's nerves that the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and oppression; whereby this Chamber of Maiden-thought becomes gradually darkened, and at the same time, on all sides of it, many doors are set open —but all dark—all leading to dark passages. We see not the balance of good and evil; we are in a mist, we are in that state, we feel the "Burden of the Mystery." To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive, when he wrote "Tintern Abbey," and it seems to me that his genius is explorative of those dark passages. Now if we live, and go on thinking, we too shall explore them. He is a genius and superior [to] us, in so far as he can, more than we, make discoveries and shed a light in them. Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though I think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect than individual greatness of mind. From the "Paradise Lost," and the other works of Milton, I hope it is not too presuming, even between ourselves, to say, that his philosophy, human and divine, may be tolerably understood by one not much advanced in years. In his time, Englishmen were just emancipated from a great superstition, and men had got hold of certain points and resting-places in reasoning which were too newly born to be doubted, and too much opposed by the rest of Europe, not to be thought ethereal and authentically divine. Who could gainsay his ideas on virtue, vice, and chastity, in "Comus," just at the time of the dismissal of a hundred social disgraces ? Who would not rest satisfied with his hintings at good and evil in the "Paradise Lost," when just free from the Inquisition and ہے |