it_. I will not notice in this tedious (to you) manner verses which have
been so long delightful to me, and which you already know my opinion of.
Of this kind are Bowles, Priestly, and that most exquisite and most
Bowles-like of all, the 19th Effusion. It would have better ended with
"agony of care." The last 2 lines are obvious and unnecessary and you
need not now make 14 lines of it, now it is rechristend from a Sonnet to
an Effusion. Schiller might have written the 20 Effusion. 'Tis worthy of
him in any sense. I was glad to meet with those lines you sent me, when
my Sister was so ill. I had lost the Copy, and I felt not a little proud
at seeing my name in your verse. The complaint of Ninathoma (1st stanza
in particular) is the best, or only good imitation, of Ossian I ever
saw--your restless gale excepted. "To an infant" is most sweet--is not
"foodful," tho', very harsh! would not "dulcet" fruit be less harsh, or
some other friendly bi-syllable? In Edmund, "Frenzy fierce-eyed child,"
is not so well as frantic--tho' that is an epithet adding nothing to the
meaning. Slander _couching_ was better than squatting. In the Man of
Ross it _was_ a better line thus "If 'neath this roof thy wine-chear'd
moments pass" than as it stands now. Time nor nothing can reconcile me
to the concluding 5 lines of Kosciusko: call it any thing you will but
sublime. In my 12th Effusion I had rather have seen what I wrote myself,
tho' they bear no comparison with your exquisite lines "On rose-leaf'd
beds amid your faery bowers," &c.--I love my sonnets because they are
the reflected images of my own feelings at different times. To instance,
in the 13th "How reason reel'd," &c.--are good lines but must spoil the
whole with ME who know it is only a fiction of yours and that the rude
dashings did in fact NOT ROCK me to REPOSE, I grant the same objection
applies not to the former sonnet, but still I love my own feelings. They
are dear to memory, tho' they now and then wake a sigh or a tear.
"Thinking on divers things foredone," I charge you, Col., spare my ewe
lambs, and tho' a Gentleman may borrow six lines in an epic poem (I