MY DEAR SIR WILLIAM,

From a hope of something starting up in my mind which might prevent my letter being an utter disappointment, I have not answered yours, as I wished to do, by return of post.  But I am really still as much at a loss how to make my letter worth reading as if I had replied immediately.  Allow me, however, to thank you for your last, which has completely done away with the vagueness of the former; I now distinctly understand you, and as to one of your leading points, viz. availing myself of publication through your Society, I may say that if there had been among my papers anything of the kind you wish for, I should have gladly forwarded it to you.  But it is not so, nor dare I undertake to promise anything of the kind for the future.  Though prevailed upon by Mr. Coleridge to write the first Preface to my Poems, which tempted, or rather forced, me to add a supplement to it, and induced by my friendship for him to write the Essay upon Epitaphs now appended to ’The Excursion,’ but first composed for ‘The Friend,’ I have never felt inclined to write criticism, though I have talked, and am daily talking, a great deal.  If I were several years younger, out of friendship to you mainly, I would sit down to the task of giving a body to my notions upon the essentials of Poetry; a subject which could not be properly treated, without adverting to the other branches of fine art.  But at present, with so much before me that I could wish to do in verse, and the melancholy fact brought daily more and more home to my conviction, that intellectual labour, by its action on the brain and nervous system, is injurious to the bodily powers, and especially to my eyesight, I should only be deceiving myself and misleading you, were I to encourage a hope that, much as I could wish to be your fellow-labourer, however humbly, I shall ever become so.

Having disposed of this rather painful part of the subject of your letter, let me say, that though it is principally matters of science in which publication through your Society would be serviceable, and indeed in that department eminently so, I concur with you in thinking, that the same vehicle would be useful for bringing under the notice of the thinking part of the community critical essays of too abstract a character to be fit for popularity.  There are obviously, even in criticism, two ways of affecting the minds of men—­the one by treating the matter so as to carry it immediately to the sympathies of the many; and the other, by aiming at a few select and superior minds, that might each become a centre for illustrating it in a popular way.  Mr. Coleridge, whom you allude to, acted upon the world to a great extent thro’ the latter of these processes; and there cannot be a doubt that your Society might serve the cause of just thinking and pure taste should you, as president of it, hold up to view the desirableness of first conveying to a few, thro’ that channel, reflections upon literature and art, which, if well meditated, would be sure of winning their way directly, or in their indirect results to a gradually widening circle.