YOUR poem is altogether admirable—parts of it are
even exquisite—in particular your personal account of the Maid far surpasses
any thing of the sort in Southey. I
perceived all its excellences, on a first reading, as readily as now you have
been removing a supposed film from my eyes. I was only struck with [a] certain
faulty disproportion in the matter and the style, which I still think I
perceive, between these lines and the former ones. I had an end in view; I
wished to make you reject the poem, only as being discordant with the other;
and, in subservience to that end, it was politically done in me to over-pass,
and make no mention of merit which, could you think me capable of overlooking,
might reasonably damn for ever in your judgment all pretensions in me to be
critical. There, I will be judged by Lloyd, whether I have not made a very handsome recantation. I
was in the case of a man whose friend has asked him his opinion of a certain
young lady; the deluded wight gives judgment against her in
toto—don’t like her face, her walk, her manners—finds fault with
her eyebrows—can see no wit in her. His friend looks blank; he begins to smell
a rat; wind veers about; he acknowledges her good sense, her judgment in dress,
a certain simplicity of manners and honesty of heart, something too in her
manners which gains upon you after a short acquaintance,—and then her accurate
pronunciation of the French language and a pretty uncultivated taste in
drawing. The reconciled gentleman smiles applause, squeezes him by the hand,
and hopes he will do him the honour of taking a bit of dinner with Mrs.
—— and him—a plain family dinner—some day next week. “For,
I suppose, you never heard we were married! I’m glad to see you like
my wife, however; you’ll come and see her, ha?” Now am I
too proud to retract entirely. Yet I do perceive I am in some sort straitened;
you are manifestly wedded to this poem,
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The solemn openings of it are with sounds which, Lloyd would say, “are silence to the mind.” The deep preluding strains are fitted to initiate the mind, with a pleasing awe, into the sublimest mysteries of theory concerning man’s nature and his noblest destination—the philosophy of a first cause—of subordinate agents in creation superior to man—the subserviency of Pagan worship and Pagan faith to the introduction of a purer and more perfect religion, which you so elegantly describe as winning with gradual steps her difficult way northward from Bethabra. After all this cometh Joan, a publican’s daughter, sitting on an ale-house bench, and marking the swingings of the signboard, finding a poor man, his wife and six children, starved to death with cold, and thence roused into a state of mind proper to receive visions emblematical of equality; which what the devil Joan had to do with, I don’t know, or indeed with the French and American revolutions; though that needs no pardon, it is executed so nobly. After all, if you perceive no disproportion, all argument is vain: I do not so much object to parts. Again, when you talk of building your fame on these lines in preference to the “Religious Musings,” I cannot help conceiving of you and of the author of that as two different persons, and I think you a very vain man.
I have been re-reading your letter. Much of it I could dispute; but with the latter part of it, in which
you compare the two Joans with respect to their
predispositions for fanaticism, I toto
corde coincide; only I think that Southey’s strength rather lies in the
description of the emotions of the Maid under the weight of inspiration,—these
(I see no mighty difference between her describing them
or you describing them), these if you only equal, the previous admirers of his
poem, as is natural, will prefer his; if you surpass, prejudice will scarcely
allow it, and I scarce think you will surpass, though your specimen at the
conclusion (I am in earnest) I think very nigh equals them. And in an account
of a fanatic or of a prophet the description of her emotions is expected to be most highly finished. By the way, I spoke
far too disparagingly of your lines, and, I am ashamed to say, purposely. I
should like you to specify or particularise; the story of the
“Tottering Eld,” of “his eventful years all
come and gone,” is too general; why not make him a soldier, or
some character, however, in which he has been witness to frequency of
“cruel wrong and strange distress!” I think I should.
When I laughed at the “miserable man crawling from beneath the
coverture,” I wonder I [?you] did not perceive it was a laugh of
horror—such as I have laughed at Dante’s picture of the famished Ugolino. Without falsehood, I
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You were building your house on a rock, when you rested your fame on that poem. I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the licence of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton. Now, this is delicate flattery, indirect flattery. Go on with your “Maid of Orleans,” and be content to be second to yourself. I shall become a convert to it, when ’tis finished.
This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I am thankful
that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity. She
was to me the “cherisher of infancy,” and one must fall on
these occasions into reflections which it would be common-place to enumerate,
concerning death, “of chance and change, and fate in human
life.” Good God, who could have foreseen all this but four months
back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt’s living many years; she
was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere skeleton before she died,
looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave, than one fresh
dead. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the
eyes to behold the sun; but let a man live many days and rejoice in them
all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be
many.” Coleridge, why are we to live on after all the strength and
beauty of existence are gone, when all the life of life is fled, as poor Burns
expresses it? Tell Lloyd I have had
thoughts of turning Quaker, and have been reading, or am rather just beginning
to read, a most capital book, good thoughts in good language, William Penn’s “No Cross, no
Crown;” I like it immensely. Unluckily I went to one of his
meetings, tell him, in St. John Street, yesterday, and saw a man under all the
agitations and workings of a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence
of some “inevitable presence.” This cured me of Quakerism; I
love it in the books of Penn and Woolman, but I
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