he begins to smell a rat; wind veers about; he acknowledges her good sense, her judgment in dress, a certain simplicity of manners and honesty of heart, something too in her manners which gains upon you after a short acquaintance;—­and then her accurate pronunciation of the French language, and a pretty, uncultivated taste in drawing.  The reconciled gentleman smiles applause, squeezes him by the hand, and hopes he will do him the honor of taking a bit of dinner with Mrs. ——­ and him—­a plain family dinner—­some day next week; “for, I suppose, you never heard we were married.  I’m glad to see you like my wife, however; you ’ll come and see her, ha?” Now am I too proud to retract entirely?  Yet I do perceive I am in some sort straitened; you are manifestly wedded, to this poem, and what fancy has joined, let no man separate, I turn me to the “Joan of Arc,” second book.

The solemn openings of it are with sounds which, Lloyd would say, “are silence to the mind.”  The deep preluding strains are fitted to initiate the mind, with a pleasing awe, into the sublimest mysteries of theory concerning man’s nature and his noblest destination,—­the philosophy of a first cause; of subordinate agents in creation superior to man; the subserviency of pagan worship and pagan faith to the introduction of a purer and more perfect religion, which you so elegantly describe as winning, with gradual steps, her difficult way northward from Bethabara.  After all this cometh Joan, a publican’s daughter, sitting on an ale-house bench, and marking the swingings of the signboard, finding a poor man, his wife and six children, starved to death with cold, and thence roused into a state of mind proper to receive visions emblematical of equality,—­which, what the devil Joan had to do with, I don’t know, or indeed with the French and American revolutions; though that needs no pardon, it is executed so nobly.  After all, if you perceive no disproportion, all argument is vain; I do not so much object to parts.  Again, when you talk of building your fame on these lines in preference to the “Religious Musings,” I cannot help conceiving of you and of the author of that as two different persons, and I think you a very vain man.

I have been re-reading your letter.  Much of it I could dispute; but with the latter part of it, in which you compare the two Joans with respect to their predispositions for fanaticism, I toto corde coincide; only I think that Southey’s strength rather lies in the description of the emotions of the Maid under the weight of inspiration.  These (I see no mighty difference between her describing them or you describing them),—­these if you only equal, the previous admirers of his poem, as is natural, will prefer his; if you surpass, prejudice will scarcely allow it, and I scarce think you will surpass, though your specimen at the conclusion (I am in earnest) I think very nigh equals them.