January, 1821.
My dear young Friend,
The only impression left by you on my mind is an increased desire to see you again, and at shorter intervals. Were you my son by nature, I could not hold you dearer, or more earnestly desire to retain you the adopted of whatever within me will remain, when the dross and alloy of infirmity shall have been purged away. I feel the most entire confidence that no prosperous change of my outward circumstances would add to your faith in the sincerity of this assurance; still, however, the average of men being what it is, and it being neither possible nor desirable to be fully conscious in our understanding of the habits of thinking and judging in the world around us, and yet to be wholly impassive and unaffected by them in our feelings, it would endear and give a new value to an honourable competence, that I should be able to evince the true nature and degree of my esteem and attachment beyond the suspicion even of the sordid, and separate from all that is accidental or adventitious. But yet the friendship I feel for you is so genial a warmth, and blends so undistinguishably with my affections, is so perfectly one of the family in the household of love, that I would not be otherwise than obliged to you; and God is my witness, that my wish for an easier and less embarrassed lot is chiefly (I think I might have said exclusively) grounded on the deep conviction, that exposed to a less bleak aspect I should bring forth flowers and fruits both more abundant and more worthy of the unexampled kindness of your faith in me. Interpreting the “wine” and the “ivy garland” as figures of poetry signifying competence, and the removal of the petty needs of the body that plug up the pipes of the playing fountain (and such it is too well known was the intent and meaning of the hardly used poet), and oh! how often, when my heart has begun to swell from the genial warmth of thought, as our northern lakes from the (so called) bottom winds, when all above and around is stillness and sunshine—how often have I repeated in my own name the sweet stanza of Edmund Spenser:
Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage.
O! if my temples were bedewed with wine,
And girt in garlands of wild ivy twine;
How I could rear the muse on stately stage,
And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine
With queint Bellona in her equipage.[112]
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