I am almost sorry that you printed extracts from those first poems, or that you did not print them at length.  They do not read to me as they do altogether.  Besides, they have diminished the value of the original (which I possess) as a curiosity.  I have hitherto kept them distinct in my mind, as referring to a particular period of your life.  All the rest of your poems are so much of a piece they might have been written in the same week; these decidedly speak of an earlier period.  They tell more of what you had been reading.  We were glad to see the poems “by a female friend.” [3] The one on the Wind is masterly, but not new to us.  Being only three, perhaps you might have clapped a D. at the corner, and let it have past as a printer’s mark to the uninitiated, as a delightful hint to the better instructed.  As it is, expect a formal criticism on the poems of your female friend, and she must expect it.  I should have written before, but I am cruelly engaged, and like to be.  On Friday I was at office from ten in the morning (two hours dinner excepted) to eleven at night, last night till nine; my business and office business in general have increased so; I don’t mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great deal of it.  I never leave till four, and do not keep a holiday now once in ten times, where I used to keep all red-letter days, and some few days besides, which I used to dub Nature’s holidays.  I have had my day.  I had formerly little to do.  So of the little that is left of life I may reckon two thirds as dead, for time that a man may call his own is his life; and hard work and thinking about it taint even the leisure hours,—­stain Sunday with work-day contemplations.  This is Sunday; and the headache I have is part late hours at work the two preceding nights, and part later hours over a consoling pipe afterwards.  But I find stupid acquiescence coming over me.  I bend to the yoke, and it is almost with me and my household as with the man and his consort,—­

“To them each evening had its glittering star, And every sabbath-day its golden sun!” [4] to such straits am I driven for the life of life, Time!  Oh that from that superfluity of holiday-leisure my youth wasted, “Age might but take some hours youth wanted not”!  N.B.—­I have left off spirituous liquors for four or more months, with a moral certainty of its lasting.  Farewell, dear Wordsworth!

O happy Paris, seat of idleness and pleasure!  From some returned English I hear that not such a thing as a counting-house is to be seen in her streets,—­scarce a desk.  Earthquakes swallow up this mercantile city and its “gripple merchants,” as Drayton hath it, “born to be the curse of this brave isle”!  I invoke this, not on account of any parsimonious habits the mercantile interest may have, but, to confess truth, because I am not fit for an office.

Farewell, in haste, from a head that is too ill to methodize, a stomach to digest, and all out of tune.  Better harmonies await you!