The lines were thus undermarked, and then followed "This Passage, as combining in an extraordinary degree that Union of Imagination and Tenderness which I am speaking of, I consider as one of the Best I ever wrote!"
2d Specimen.—A youth, after years of absence, revisits his native place, and thinks (as most people do) that there has been strange alteration in his absence:—
"And that the rocks
And everlasting Hills themselves were changed."
You see both these are good Poetry: but after one has been reading Shakspeare twenty of the best years of one's life, to have a fellow start up, and prate about some unknown quality, which Shakspeare possessed in a degree inferior to Milton and somebody else!! This was not to be all my castigation. Coleridge, who had not written to me some months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my hardy presumption: four long pages, equally sweaty and more tedious, came from him; assuring me that, when the works of a man of true genius such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should suspect the fault to lie "in me and not in them," etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. What am I to do with such people? I certainly shall write them a very merry Letter. Writing to you, I may say that the 2d vol. has no such pieces as the three I enumerated. It is full of original thinking and an observing mind, but it does not often make you laugh or cry.—It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression. And you sometimes doubt if Simplicity be not a cover for Poverty. The best Piece in it I will send you, being short. I have grievously offended my friends in the North by declaring my undue preference; but I need not fear you:—
"She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the Springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were few [none] to praise
And very few to love.
"A violet, by a mossy stone,
Half hidden from the eye.
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.
"She lived unknown; and few could know,
When Lucy ceased to be.
But she is in the grave, and oh!
The difference to me."
This is choice and genuine, and so are many, many more. But one does not like to have 'em rammed down one's throat. "Pray, take it—it's very good—let me help you—eat faster."
[It cannot be too much regretted that Lamb's "very merry Letter" in answer to Wordsworth and Coleridge's remonstrances has not been preserved.
At the end of the letter is a passage which can be read only in the Boston Bibliophile edition, referring to Dyer's Poems, to John Woodvil and to Godwin.]