and looked at them with an inexpressible feeling of envy. A beautiful girl, of eight or nine years, the "golden-tressed Adelaide," delicate, gentle and pensive, as if she was born on the lip of Castaly, and knew she was a poet's child, completed the picture of happiness.
The conversation ran upon various authors, whom Procter had known intimately—Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Keats, Shelley, and others, and of all he gave me interesting particulars, which I could not well repeat in a public letter. The account of Hazlitt's death-bed, which appeared in one of the magazines, he said was wholly untrue. This extraordinary writer was the most reckless of men in money matters, but he had a host of admiring friends who knew his character, and were always ready to assist him. He was a great admirer of the picturesque in women. He was one evening at the theatre with Procter, and pointed out to him an Amazonian female, strangely dressed in black velvet and lace, but with no beauty that would please an ordinary eye. "Look at her!" said Hazlitt, "isn't she fine!—isn't she magnificent? Did you ever see anything more Titianesque?"[12]
After breakfast, Procter took me into a small closet adjoining his library, in which he usually writes. There was just room enough in it for a desk and two chairs, and around were piled in true poetical confusion, his favorite books, miniature likenesses of authors, manuscripts, and all the interesting lumber of a true poet's corner. From a drawer, very much thrust out of the way, he drew a volume of his own, into which he proceeded to write my name—a collection of songs, published since I have been in Europe, which I had never seen. I seized upon a worn copy of the Dramatic Sketches, which I found crossed and interlined in every direction. "Don't look at them," said Procter, "they are wretched things, which should never have been printed, or at least with a world of correction. You see how I have mended them; and, some day, perhaps, I will publish a corrected edition, since I can not get them back." He took the book from my hand, and opened to "The Broken Heart," certainly the most highly-finished and exquisite piece of pathos in the language, and read it to me with his alterations. It was to "gild refined gold, and paint the lily." I would recommend to the lovers of Barry Cornwall, to keep their original copy, beautifully as he has polished his lines anew.
On a blank leaf of the same copy of the Dramatic Sketches, I found some indistinct writing in pencil, "Oh! don't read that," said Procter, "the book was given me some years ago, by a friend at whose house Coleridge had been staying, for the sake of the criticisms that great man did me the honor to write at the end." I insisted on reading them, however, and his wife calling him out presently, I succeeded in copying them in his absence. He seemed a little annoyed, but on my promising to make no use of them in England, he allowed me to retain them. They are as follows:
"Barry Cornwall is a poet, me saltem judice, and in that sense of the word, in which I apply it to Charles Lamb and W. Wordsworth. There are poems of great merit, the authors of which, I should not yet feel impelled so to designate.
"The faults of these poems are no less things of hope than the beauties. Both are just what they ought to be: i. e. now.
"If B. C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn him that as poetry is the identity of all other knowledge, so a poet can not be a great poet, but as being likewise and inclusively an historian and a naturalist in the light as well as the life of philosophy. All other men's worlds are his chaos.
"Hints—Not to permit delicacy and exquisiteness to seduce into effeminacy.
"Not to permit beauties by repetition to become mannerism.
"To be jealous of fragmentary composition as epicurism of genius—apple-pie made all of quinces.