_Tuesday night_.--Of your "Watchman," the review of Burke was the best
prose. I augured great things from the first number. There is some
exquisite poetry interspersed. I have re-read the extract from the
"Religious Musings," and retract whatever invidious there was in my
censure of it as elaborate. There are times when one is not in a
disposition thoroughly to relish good writing. I have re-read it in a
more favorable moment, and hesitate not to pronounce it sublime. If
there be anything in it approaching to tumidity (which I meant not to
infer; by "elaborate" I meant simply "labored"), it is the gigantic
hyperbole by which you describe the evils of existing society: "snakes,
lions, hyenas, and behemoths," is carrying your resentment beyond
bounds. The pictures of "The Simoom," of "Frenzy and Ruin," of "The
Whore of Babylon," and "The Cry of Foul Spirits disinherited of Earth,"
and "The Strange Beatitude" which the good man shall recognize in
heaven, as well as the particularizing of the children of wretchedness
(I have unconsciously included every part of it), form a variety of
uniform excellence. I hunger and thirst to read the poem complete. That
is a capital line in your sixth number,--

"This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth-chattering month."

They are exactly such epithets as Burns would have stumbled on, whose
poem on the ploughed-up daisy you seem to have had in mind. Your
complaint that of your readers some thought there was too much, some too
little, original matter in your numbers, reminds me of poor dead Parsons
in the "Critic." "Too little incident! Give me leave to tell you, sir,
there is too much incident." I had like to have forgot thanking you for
that exquisite little morsel, the first Sclavonian Song. The expression
in the second, "more happy to be unhappy in hell," is it not very