your doing, or Dyer's to whom I sent him? Or rather do you not write in
the Critical? for I observed, in an Article of this Month's a line
quoted out of _that_ sonnet on Mrs. Siddons "with eager wond'ring and
perturb'd delight"--and a line from _that_ sonnet would not readily have
occurred to a stranger. That sonnet, Coleridge, brings afresh to my mind
the time when you wrote those on Bowles, Priestly, Burke--'twas 2
Christmases ago, and in that nice little smoky room at the Salutation,
which is even now continually presenting itself to my recollection, with
all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, Egghot, welch Rabbits,
metaphysics and Poetry.

Are we NEVER to meet again? How differently I am circumstanced now--I
have never met with any one, never shall meet with any one, who could or
can compensate me for the loss of your society--I have no one to talk
all these matters about to--I lack friends, I lack books to supply their
absence. But these complaints ill become me: let me compare my present
situation, prospects, and state of mind, with what they were but 2
months back--_but_ 2 months. O my friend, I am in danger of forgetting
the awful lessons then presented to me--remind me of them; remind me of
my Duty. Talk seriously with me when you do write. I thank you, from my
heart I thank you, for your sollicitude about my Sister. She is quite
well,--but must not, I fear, come to live with us yet a good while. In
the first place, because at present it would hurt her, and hurt my
father, for them to be together: secondly from a regard to the world's
good report, for I fear, I fear, tongues will be busy _whenever_ that
event takes place. Some have hinted, one man has prest it on me, that
she should be in perpetual confinement--what she hath done to deserve,
or the necessity of such an hardship, I see not; do you? I am starving
at the India house, near 7 o'clock without my dinner, and so it has been
and will be almost all the week. I get home at night o'erwearied, quite