I rejoyce that you forgive my long silence. I continue to estimate my own-roof comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My garden thrives (I am told) tho' I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny sallad, and withered carrots. But a garden's a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.
Somehow I cannot relish that word Horkey. Cannot you supply it by circumlocution, and direct the reader by a note to explain that it means the Horkey. But Horkey choaks me in the Text. It raises crowds of mean associations, Hawking and sp——-g, Gauky, Stalky, Maukin. The sound is every thing, in such dulcet modulations 'specially. I like
Gilbert Meldrum's sterner tones,
without knowing who Gilbert Meldrum is. You have slipt in your rhymes as if they grew there, so natural-artificially, or artificial-naturally. There's a vile phrase.
Do you go on with your Quaker Sonnets—[to] have 'em ready with Southey's Book of the Church? I meditate a letter to S. in the London, which perhaps will meet the fate of the Sonnet.
Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to 100 callings off. And I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere. I read or walk. If you return this letter to the Post Office, I think they will return 4d, seeing it is but half a one. Believe me tho' entirely yours C.L.
[Barton's "Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield, the Suffolk Poet" (who died in August, 1823), were printed in book form in his Poetic Vigils, 1824. This is the stanza that Lamb most liked:—
It is not quaint and local terms
Besprinkled o'er thy rustic lay,
Though well such dialect confirms
Its power unletter'd minds to sway,
It is not these that most display
Thy sweetest charms, thy gentlest thrall,—
Words, phrases, fashions, pass away,
But TRUTH and NATURE live through all.
The stanza referring to Byron was not reprinted, nor was the word Horkey, which means Harvest Home in Suffolk. Gilbert Meldrum is a character in one of Bloomfield's Rural Tales.
"Quaker Sonnets." Barton did not carry out this project. Southey's Book of the Church was published in 1824.