Dear Hodgson,—I must allow the justice of the complaints of your third letter against me for not having sooner thanked you for the pleasure which I received from your two first, poetical as they were; and for so long omitting to acknowledge the receipt of the enclosed unpoetical scraps of paper, which by reunion to one another have been sometime restored to that consequence in the world of which their separation deprived them. But I hope that you will not suffer your anger to proceed so far against me as to forbid your muse to address any more of her effusions to me: still less am I disposed to think that, when you say that you ‘must not sing again at all,’ your declaration is any other than merely poetical.
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Oh, never check thy flowing strain,
Nor say, ‘I must not sing again.’
Whate’er the tenour of thy lay,
Serenely sad, or wildly gay;
Whether ’tis Love that wakes to fire
The slumb’ring raptures of thy lyre;
Or Reason bids the moral song
In sober cadence roll along;
Believe me, still to Friendship’s ear
Thy strain is sweet, thy muse is dear.
Oh! better far one verse of thine,
One artless bold, impassion’d line,
Than all the frigid rant, that e’er
Fitzgerald bawls or Tories hear,
What time to Bigotry’s blest pow’r
They dedicate the festal hour
And raise their heads in triumph high
O’er baffled Liberality;
Who weeps the while at Fox’s
tomb,
And thinks on happier days to come.
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You see how I, albeit unused to the rhyming mood, have been
infected by the contagion of your example. But ‘ohe jam satis
est’—‘neque enim concludere
versum Dixeris esse satis.’—You ask me what I
am doing here. Truth compels me to answer next to nothing; for the fact is that
I find that unless I am actually tied down to some employment it is impossible
to prefer dry reading to social pleasure. When I return to town after the
summer,
| 264 | MEMOIR OF REV. F. HODGSON. |
Believe me, dear Hodgson, very sincerely yours,
