TO WILLIAM HAYLEY, ESQ.
Weston, Dec. 26, 1792.
That I may not be silent, till my silence alarms you, I snatch a moment to tell you, that although toujours triste I am not worse than usual, but my opportunities of writing are paucified, as, perhaps, Dr. Johnson would have dared to say, and the few that I have are shortened by company.
Give my love to dear Tom, and thank him for his very apposite extract, which I should be happy indeed to turn to any account. How often do I wish, in the course of every day, that I could be employed once more in poetry, and how often, of course, that this Miltonic trap had never caught me! The year ninety-two shall stand chronicled in my remembrance as the most melancholy that I have ever known, except the few weeks that I spent at Eartham; and such it has been principally because, being engaged to Milton, I felt myself no longer free for any other engagement. That ill-fated work, impracticable in itself, has made every thing else impracticable.
... I am very Pindaric, and obliged to be so by the hurry of the hour. My friends are come down to breakfast.
Adieu!
W. C.