a single common-place line of comfort, which bears no proportion in
weight or number to the many lines which describe suffering. This is to
convert religion into mediocre feelings, which should burn, and glow,
and tremble. A moral should be wrought into the body and soul, the
matter and tendency, of a poem, not tagged to the end, like a "God send
the good ship into harbour," at the conclusion of our bills of lading.
The finishing of the "Sailor" is also imperfect. Any dissenting minister
may say and do as much.

These remarks, I know, are crude and unwrought; but I do not lay claim
to much accurate thinking. I never judge system-wise of things, but
fasten upon particulars. After all, there is a great deal in the book
that I must, for time, leave _unmentioned_, to deserve my thanks for its
own sake, as well as for the friendly remembrances implied in the gift.
I again return you my thanks.

Pray present my love to Edith. C. L.

[Southey's little volume was Vol. II. of the second edition of his
_Poems_, published in 1799. The last of the English Eclogues included in
it was "The Ruined Cottage," slightly altered from the version referred
to in letter 38. The "Hymn to the Penates" brought the first volume of
this edition to a close. The first Eclogue was "The Old Mansion House."
"The Old Woman of Berkeley" was called "A Ballad showing how an Old
Woman rode double and who rode before her." It was preceded by a long
quotation in Latin from Matthew of Westminster. Matthew of Westminster
is the imaginary name given to the unknown authors of a chronicle called
_Flares Historiarum_, belonging probably to the fifteenth century. The
Parody was "The Surgeon's Warning," which begins with the two lines that