passion to it, and I shall be bound up with you in the shadows of Mind, as we are in our matters of human life. Perhaps a stanza or two will not be too foreign to your Sickness.

Were they unhappy then?—It cannot be—
Too many tears for lovers have been shed,
Too many sighs give we to them in fee,
Too much of pity after they are dead,
Too many doleful stories do we see,

Whose matter in bright gold were best be read;
Except in such a page where Theseus' spouse
Over the pathless waves towards him bows.

But, for the general award of love,

The little sweet doth kill much bitterness;
Though Dido silent is in under-grove,
And Isabella's was a great distress,
Though young Lorenzo in warm Indian clove
Was not embalm'd, this truth is not the less-
Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers,
Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.

She wept alone for pleasures not to be;
Sorely she wept until the night came on,
And then, instead of love, O misery!
She brooded o'er the luxury alone:
What might have been too plainly did she see,
And to the silence made a gentle moan,
Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,

And on her couch low murmuring "Where? O where?"

I heard from Rice this morning-very witty-and have just written to Bailey-Don't you think I am brushing up in the letter way? and being in for it you

shall hear again from me very shortly :—if you will promise not to put hand to paper for me until you can do it with a tolerable ease of health-except it be a line or two. Give my love to your Mother and Sister. Remember me to the Butlers-not forgetting Sarah.

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 humour to give you a good groat's worth-for Tom, after a Night without a Wink of sleep, and overburthened with fever, has got up after a refreshing day-sleep 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 favour. 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 climatecurse, and you know what a delicate satisfaction there is in having a vexation anathematized one would think 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 thundrous clouds.
From Serraliona."

1

I shall breathe worsted stockings 1 sooner than I thought for-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 say you to a blackletter Chaucer, printed in 1596: aye, I've got one, huzza! I shall have it bound en 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 harbouring 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

1

Under the same roof with the children of the Postman Bentley, at whose house the Keatses lodged.

understand a little, and which weighed upon you in the most gloomy and true sentence in your letter. The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this: in the latter case we are falling continually 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 ill "that flesh is heir to." With respect to the affections and Poetry you must know by a sympathy my thoughts that way, and I dare say these few lines will be but a ratification: I wrote them on Mayday—and intend to finish the ode all in good time

Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia!
May I sing to thee

As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiæ ?
Or may I woo thee

In earlier Sicilian? or thy smiles

Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles,
By bards who died content on pleasant sward,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan ?
O, give me their old vigour, and unheard
Save of the quiet Primrose, and the span
Of heaven and few ears,

Rounded by thee, my song should die away
Content as theirs,

Rich in the simple worship of a day.—

You may perhaps be anxious to know for fact to what sentence in your Letter I allude. You say, I fear there is little chance of anything else in this life"-you seem by that to have been going through with a more painful and acute zest the same labyrinth that I haveI 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 are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone 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 say that "Sorrow is wisdom"-and further for aught we can know for certainty "Wisdom is folly."-So you see how Thave 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, and other some orbicular, others