Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at
Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks
that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent
very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now,
and don't bite any one. But mad I was and many a vagary my imagination
played with me,--enough to make a volume, if all were told. My sonnets I
have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day
communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which, if I
finish, I publish. White [2] is on the eve of publishing (he took the
hint from Vortigern) "Original Letters of Falstaff, Shallow," etc.; a
copy you shall have when it comes out. They are without exception the
best imitations I ever saw. Coleridge, it may convince you of my regards
for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness as much almost
as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate
cause of my temporary frenzy.

The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry; but you will be curious
to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of
my lucid intervals.

TO MY SISTER.

If from my lips some angry accents fell,
Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,
'T was but the error of a sickly mind
And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well
And waters clear of Reason; and for me
Let this my verse the poor atonement be,--
My verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined