And in an account of a fanatic or of a prophet the description of her emotions is expected to be most highly finished.  By the way, I spoke far too disparagingly of your lines, and, I am ashamed to say. purposely, I should like you to specify or particularize; the story of the “Tottering Eld,” of “his eventful years all come and gone,” is too general; why not make him a soldier, or some character, however, in which he has been witness to frequency of “cruel wrong and strange distress”?  I think I should, When I laughed at the “miserable man crawling from beneath the coverture,” I wonder I did not perceive it was a laugh of horror,—­such as I have laughed at Dante’s picture of the famished Ugolino.  Without falsehood, I perceive an hundred, beauties in your narrative.  Yet I wonder you do not perceive something out-of-the-way, something unsimple and artificial, in the expression, “voiced a sad tale.”  I hate made-dishes at the muses’ banquet, I believe I was wrong in most of my other objections.  But surely “hailed him immortal” adds nothing to the terror of the man’s death, which it was your business to heighten, not diminish by a phrase which takes away all terror from it, I like that line, “They closed their eyes in sleep, nor knew ’twas death,” Indeed, there is scarce a line I do not like, “Turbid ecstasy” is surely not so good as what you had written,—­“troublous.”  “Turbid” rather suits the muddy kind of inspiration which London porter confers.  The versification is throughout, to my ears, unexceptionable, with no disparagement to the measure of the “Religious Musings,” which is exactly fitted to the thoughts.

You were building your house on a rock when you rested your fame on that poem.  I can scarce bring myself to believe that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.  Now, this is delicate flattery, indirect flattery.  Go on with your “Maid of Orleans,” and be content to be second to yourself.  I shall become a convert to it, when ’tis finished.

This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday.  I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity.  She was to me the “cherisher of infancy;” and one must fall on these occasions into reflections, which it would be commonplace to enumerate, concerning death, “of chance and change, and fate in human life.”  Good God, who could have foreseen all this but four months back!  I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt’s living many years; she was a very hearty old woman.  But she was a mere skeleton before she died; looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave, than one fresh dead.  “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun:  but let a man live many days, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many.”  Coleridge,