me so forcibly as the “Ancient Mariner,” “The Mad Mother,” or the “Lines at Tintern Abbey.”  The Post did not sleep a moment.  I received almost instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-Writer, the purport of which was that he was sorry his second volume had not given me more pleasure (Devil a hint did I give that it had not pleased me), and “was compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy thoughts” (I suppose from the L. B.),—­with a deal of stuff about a certain Union of Tenderness and Imagination, which, in the sense he used Imagination, was not the characteristic of Shakspeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree far exceeding other Poets; which union, as the highest species of poetry, and chiefly deserving that name, “he was most proud to aspire to;” then illustrating the said union by two quotations from his own second volume (which I had been so unfortunate as to miss.) First specimen; A father addresses his son:—­

                                     “When thou
  First camest into the World, as it befalls
  To new-born infants, thou didst sleep away
  Two days; and blessings from thy father’s tongue
  Then fell upon thee.”

The lines were thus undermarked, and then followed, “This passage, as combining in an extraordinary degree that union of tenderness and imagination which I am speaking of, I consider as one of the best I ever wrote.”

Second specimen:  A youth, after years of absence, revisits his native place, and thinks (as most people do) that there has been strange alteration in his absence,—­

                              “And that the rocks
  And everlasting hills themselves were changed.”

You see both these are good poetry; but after one has been reading Shakspeare twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up and prate about some unknown quality which Shakspeare possessed in a degree inferior to Milton and somebody else!  This was not to be all my castigation.  Coleridge, who had not written to me for some months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my tardy presumption; four long pages, equally sweaty and more tedious, came from him, assuring me that when the works of a man of true genius, such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should expect the fault to lie “in me, and not in them,” etc.  What am I to do with such people?  I certainly shall write them a very merry letter.  Writing to you, I may say that the second volume has no such pieces as the three I enumerated.  It is full of original thinking and an observing mind; but it does not often make you laugh or cry.  It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression.  And you sometimes doubt if simplicity be not a cover for poverty.  The best piece in it I will send you, being short.  I have grievously offended my friends in the North by declaring my undue preference; but I need not fear you.