And lo! creation widen'd on his view.
Who could have thought what darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun? Or who could find,
Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood reveal'd,
That to such endless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
Weak man! Why to shun death this anxious strife?
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"
In a letter from Coleridge to White, dated Nov. 28, 1827, he thus speaks of it:
"I have now before me two fragments of letters begun, the one in acknowledgment of the finest and most graceful sonnet in our language (at least it is only in Milton's and Wordsworth's sonnets that I recollect any rival, and this is not my judgment alone, but that of the man κατ' ἐξοχὴν φιλόκαλον, John Hookham Frere), the second on the receipt of your 'Letter to Charles Butler,'" &c.
In a subsequent letter, without date, Coleridge thus again reverts to the circumstance of its having been published without his or White's sanction: