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 six lines in an epic poem (I should have no objection to borrow
five hundred, and without acknowledging), still, in a sonnet, a personal