confidence. I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my
own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed. And in this
have I long believed that my power consists; in sympathy, and that part
of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am
formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to
apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to
external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to
communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the
moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these
faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist
very imperfectly in my own mind. But, when you advert to my
Chancery-paper, a cold, forced, unimpassioned, insignificant piece of
cramped and cautious argument, and to the little scrap about
"Mandeville", which expressed my feelings indeed, but cost scarcely two
minutes' thought to express, as specimens of my powers more favourable
than that which grew as it were from "the agony and bloody sweat" of
intellectual travail; surely I must feel that, in some manner, either I
am mistaken in believing that I have any talent at all, or you in the
selection of the specimens of it. Yet, after all, I cannot but be
conscious, in much of what I write, of an absence of that tranquillity
which is the attribute and accompaniment of power. This feeling alone
would make your most kind and wise admonitions, on the subject of the
economy of intellectual force, valuable to me. And, if I live, or if I
see any trust in coming years, doubt not but that I shall do something,
whatever it may be, which a serious and earnest estimate of my powers
will suggest to me, and which will be in every respect accommodated to
their utmost limits.

[Shelley to Godwin.]