I wish I had some prose subject attractive enough to tempt me to write. Most people are more vain of their dance than their walk, their song than their speech, their verse than their prose. I prefer my own prose to my rhymes; because the want of that precision, command of language, and harmony, gained by a classical education and the study of the poetry of Greece and Rome, is more apparent in verse than prose.
Shall I petition you not to call yourself old when you write to me? I cannot bear my friends should resign themselves too soon. Lady Williams Wynne, with whom I passed some days at her sister’s, is sixty-eight, eats green apples, kneels down through our long church service, walks out in October without hat or cloak in a muslin gown, and takes long walks alone many miles through roads, and villages, and fields, wears artificial flowers and three flounces, never speaks of time with reference to his effects on herself; yet never appears to make herself the least young, and is a model of propriety, and of the English matron. The flowers and flounces I know you despise at any season, but I only throw them in to swell the heap.
Now I must have you make this sort of running fight against time, and not talk of yourself as old. Mind and heart like yours are never so. Excuse this ebullition of affectionate regard.
SONNET WRITTEN AT NIGHT AFTER RETURNING FROM A DANCE AT MRS. BATHURST’S.
March, 1817.
I am not envious; yet the sudden glance
Of transport beaming from a mother’s eye,
When light her daughter’s airy footsteps fly,