Thursday.—­I will first notice what is new to me.  Thirteenth page:  “The thrilling tones that concentrate the soul” is a nervous line, and the six first lines of page 14 are very pretty, the twenty-first effusion a perfect thing.  That in the manner of Spenser is very sweet, particularly at the close; the thirty-fifth effusion is most exquisite,—­that line in particular, “And, tranquil, muse upon tranquillity.”  It is the very reflex pleasure that distinguishes the tranquillity of a thinking being from that of a shepherd,—­a modern one I would be understood to mean,—­a Damoetas; one that keeps other people’s sheep.  Certainly, Coleridge, your letter from Shurton Bars has less merit than most things in your volume; personally it may chime in best with your own feelings, and therefore you love it best.  It has, however, great merit.  In your fourth epistle that is an exquisite paragraph, and fancy-full, of “A stream there is which rolls in lazy flow,” etc.  “Murmurs sweet undersong ’mid jasmin bowers” is a sweet line, and so are the three next.  The concluding simile is far-fetched; “tempest-honored” is a quaintish phrase.

Yours is a poetical family.  I was much surprised and pleased to see the signature of Sara to that elegant composition, the fifth epistle.  I dare not criticise the “Religious Musings;” I like not to select any part, where all is excellent.  I can only admire, and thank you for it in the name of a Christian, as well as a lover of good poetry; only let me ask, is not that thought and those words in Young, “stands in the sun,”—­or is it only such as Young, in one of his better moments, might have writ?

        “Believe thou, O my soul,
  Life is a vision shadowy of Truth;
  And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,
  Shapes of a dream!”

I thank you for these lines in the name of a necessarian, and for what follows in next paragraph, in the name of a child of fancy.  After all, you cannot nor ever will write anything with which I shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat.  You came to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding with recent wounds.  Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed hope; you had

                           “Many an holy lay
  That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way.”

I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant on the sense.  When I read in your little volume your nineteenth effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the “Sigh,” I think I hear you again.  I image to myself the little smoky room at the “Salutation and Cat,” where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy.  When you left London, I felt a dismal void in my heart.  I found myself cut off, at one and the same time, from two most dear to me, “How blest with ye the path could I have trod of quiet life!” In your conversation you