Perhaps it is the worse for being a repetition; “Susan” stood for the representative of poor Rus in Urbe.  There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten,—­“bright volumes of vapor,” etc.  The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events.  It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan’s moral conduct.  Susan is a servant-maid.  I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her “a poor outcast” seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be,—­which I trust was not what you meant to express.  Robin Goodfellow supports himself without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away; but how I can be brought in felo de omittendo for that ending to the Boy-builders [2] is a mystery.  I can’t say positively now, I only know that no line oftener or readier occurs than that “Light-hearted boys, I will build up a Giant with you.”  It comes naturally with a warm holiday and the freshness of the blood.  It is a perfect summer amulet, that I tie round my legs to quicken their motion when I go out a-maying. (N.  B.) I don’t often go out a-maying; must is the tense with me now.  Do you take the pun? Young Romilly is divine, the reasons of his mother’s grief being remediless,—­I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering above the other loves,—­Shakspeare had done something for the filial in Cordelia, and, by implication, for the fatherly too in Lear’s resentment; he left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal heart.

I get stupid and flat, and flattering; what’s the use of telling you what good things you have written, or—­I hope I may add—­that I know them to be good? A propos, when I first opened upon the just-mentioned poem, in a careless tone I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, “What is good for a bootless bene?” [3] To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it) she answered, “A shoeless pea.”  It was the first joke she ever made.  Joke the second I make.  You distinguish well, in your old preface, between the verses of Dr. Johnson, of the “Man in the Strand,” and that from “The Babes in the Wood,” I was thinking whether, taking your own glorious lines,—­

  “And from the love which was in her soul
     For her youthful Romilly,”

which, by the love I bear my own soul, I think have no parallel in any of the best old ballads, and just altering it to,—­

  “And from the great respect she felt
     For Sir Samuel Romilly,”

would not nave explained the boundaries of prose expression and poetic feeling nearly as well.  Excuse my levity on such an occasion.  I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me, both lately, and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a spiritual taste of that “White Doe” you promise.  I am sure it is superlative, or will be when dressed,