CCXXXVIII. TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
Monday Night, ? 1824 ? 1829.
Dear Wordsworth,—Three whole days the going through the first book cost me, though only to find fault. But I cannot find fault, in pen and ink, without thinking over and over again, and without some sort of an attempt to suggest the alteration; and, in so doing, how soon an hour is gone! so many half seconds up to half minutes are lost in leaning back in one’s chair, and looking up, in the bodily act of contracting the muscles of the brow and forehead, and unconsciously attending to the sensation. Had I the MS. with me for five or six months, so as to amuse myself off and on, without any solicitude as to a given day, and, could I be persuaded that if as well done as the nature of the thing (viz., a translation of Virgil,[194] in English) renders possible, it would not raise but simply sustain your well-merited fame for pure diction, where what is not idiom is never other than logically correct, I doubt not that the irregularities could be removed. But I am haunted by the apprehension that I am not feeling or thinking in the same spirit with you, at one time, and at another too much in the spirit of your writings. Since Milton, I know of no poet with so many felicities and unforgettable lines and stanzas as you. And to read, therefore, page after page without a single brilliant note, depresses me, and I grow peevish with you for having wasted your time on a work so much below you, that you cannot stoop and take. Finally, my conviction is, that you undertake an impossibility, and that there is no medium between a prose version and one on the avowed principle of compensation in the widest sense, that is, manner, genius, total effect. I confine myself to Virgil when I say this.
I must now set to work with all my powers and thoughts to my Leighton,[195] and then to my logic, and then to my opus maximum! if indeed it shall please God to spare me so long, which I have had too many warnings of late (more than my nearest friends know of) not to doubt. My kind love to Dorothy.
S. T. Coleridge.