The “Pixies” is a perfect thing, and so are the “Lines on the Spring.” page 28.  The “Epitaph on an Infant,” like a Jack-o’-lantern, has danced about (or like Dr. Forster’s [4] scholars) out of the “Morning Chronicle” into the “Watchman,” and thence back into your collection.  It is very pretty, and you seem to think so, but, may be, overlooked its chief merit, that of filling up a whole page, I had once deemed sonnets of unrivalled use that way, but your Epitaphs, I find, are the more diffuse.  “Edmund” still holds its place among your best verses, “Ah! fair delights” to “roses round,” in your poem called “Absence,” recall (none more forcibly) to my mind the tones in which you recited it, I will not notice, in this tedious (to you) manner, verses which have been so long delighful to me, and which you already know my opinion of.  Of this kind are Bowles, Priestley, and that most exquisite and most Bowles-like of all, the nineteenth effusion.  It would have better ended with “agony of care;” the last two lines are obvious and unnecessary; and you need not now make fourteen lines of it, now it is rechristened from a Sonnet to an Effusion.

Schiller might have written the twentieth effusion; ’t is worthy of him in any sense, I was glad to meet with those lines you sent me when my sister was so ill; I had lost the copy, and I felt not a little proud at seeing my name in your verse.  The “Complaint of Ninathoma” (first stanza in particular) is the best, or only good, imitation of Ossian I ever saw, your “Restless Gale” excepted.  “To an Infant” is most sweet; is not “foodful,” though, very harsh?  Would not “dulcet” fruit be less harsh, or some other friendly bi-syllable?  In “Edmund,” “Frenzy! fierce-eyed child” is not so well as “frantic,” though that is an epithet adding nothing to the meaning.  Slander couching was better than “squatting.”  In the “Man of Ross” it was a better line thus,—­

  “If ’neath this roof thy wine-cheered moments pass,”

than as it stands now.  Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the concluding five lines of “Kosciusko;” call it anything you will but sublime.  In my twelfth effusion I had rather have seen what I wrote myself, though they bear no comparison with your exquisite lines,—­

  “On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers,” etc.

I love my sonnets because they are the reflected images of my own feelings at different times.  To instance, in the thirteenth,—­

  “How reason reeled,” etc.,

are good lines, but must spoil the whole with me, who know it is only a fiction of yours, and that the “rude dashings” did in fact not “rock me to repose.”  I grant the same objection applies not to the former sonnet; but still I love my own feelings,—­they are dear to memory, though they now and then wake a sigh or a tear, “Thinking on divers things fordone,” I charge you, Coleridge, spare my ewe-lambs; and though a gentleman may borrow