disclosure of all the most hidden and delicate affections of the mind:
they make me proud to be thus esteemed worthy of the place of
friend-confessor, brother-confessor, to a man like Coleridge. This last
is, I acknowledge, language too high for friendship; but it is also, I
declare, too sincere for flattery. Now, to put on stilts, and talk
magnificently about trifles--I condescend, then, to your counsel,
Coleridge, and allow my first Sonnet (sick to death am I to make mention
of my sonnets, and I blush to be so taken up with them, indeed I do)--I
allow it to run thus, "_Fairy Land_" &c. &c., as I [? you] last wrote
it.

The Fragments I now send you I want printed to get rid of 'em; for,
while they stick burr-like to my memory, they tempt me to go on with the
idle trade of versifying, which I long--most sincerely I speak it--I
long to leave off, for it is unprofitable to my soul; I feel it is; and
these questions about words, and debates about alterations, take me off,
I am conscious, from the properer business of _my_ life. Take my sonnets
once for all, and do not propose any re-amendments, or mention them
again in any shape to me, I charge you. I blush that my mind can
consider them as things of any worth. And pray admit or reject these
fragments, as you like or dislike them, without ceremony. Call 'em
Sketches, Fragments, or what you will, but do not entitle any of my
_things_ Love Sonnets, as I told you to call 'em; 'twill only make me
look little in my own eyes; for it is a passion of which I retain
_nothing_; 'twas a weakness, concerning which I may say, in the words of
Petrarch (whose life is now open before me), "if it drew me out of some
vices, it also prevented the growth of many virtues, filling me with the
love of the creature rather than the Creator, which is the death of the
soul." Thank God, the folly has left me for ever; not even a review of
my love verses renews one wayward wish in me; and if I am at all