the earth.

Before I offer, what alone I have to offer, a few obvious remarks on the
poems you sent me, I can[not] but notice the odd coincidence of two
young men, in one age, carolling their grandmothers. Love--what L[loyd]
calls "the feverish and romantic tye"--hath too long domineerd over all
the charities of home: the dear domestic tyes of father, brother,
husband. The amiable and benevolent Cowper has a beautiful passage in
his "Task,"--some natural and painful reflections on his deceased
parents: and Hayley's sweet lines to his mother are notoriously the best
things he ever wrote. Cowper's lines, some of them, are--

"How gladly would the man recall to life
The boy's neglected sire; a mother, too.
That softer name, perhaps more gladly still,
Might he demand them at the gates of death."

I cannot but smile to see my Granny so gayly deck'd forth: tho', I
think, whoever altered "thy" praises to "her" praises, "thy" honoured
memory to "her" honoured memory, did wrong--they best exprest my
feelings. There is a pensive state of recollection, in which the mind is
disposed to apostrophise the departed objects of its attachment, and,
breaking loose from grammatical precision, changes from the 1st to the
3rd, and from the 3rd to the 1st person, just as the random fancy or the
feeling directs. Among Lloyd's sonnets, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th,
are eminently beautiful. I think him too lavish of his expletives; the
_do's_ and _did's_, when they occur too often, bring a quaintness with
them along with their simplicity, or rather air of antiquity which the
patrons of them seem desirous of conveying.