A glimpse of joy that we have met shall shine and dry the tear."

Of the blank verses I spoke of, the following lines are the only
tolerably complete ones I have writ out of not more than one hundred and
fifty. That I get on so slowly you may fairly impute to want of practice
in composition, when I declare to you that (the few verses which you
have seen excepted) I have not writ fifty lines since I left school. It
may not be amiss to remark that my grandmother (on whom the verses are
written) lived housekeeper in a family the fifty or sixty last years of
her life--that she was a woman of exemplary piety and goodness--and for
many years before her death was terribly afflicted with a cancer in her
breast which she bore with true Christian patience. You may think that I
have not kept enough apart the ideas of her heavenly and her earthly
master but recollect I have designedly given in to her own way of
feeling--and if she had a failing, 'twas that she respected her master's
family too much, not reverenced her Maker too little. The lines begin
imperfectly, as I may probably connect 'em if I finish at all,--and if I
do, Biggs shall print 'em in a more economical way than you yours, for
(Sonnets and all) they won't make a thousand lines as I propose
completing 'em, and the substance must be wire-drawn.

Tuesday Evening, June 14, 1796.

I am not quite satisfied now with the Chatterton, and with your leave
will try my hand at it again. A master joiner, you know, may leave a
cabinet to be finished, when his own hands are full. To your list of
illustrative personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I
will take leave to add the following from Beaumont and Fletcher's "Wife
for a Month;" 'tis the conclusion of a description of a sea-fight;--"The
game of _death_ was never played so nobly; the meagre thief grew wanton