"Now for the poems, which are sonnets: one composed the evening I received your letter; the other the next day; and the third the day following. I shall not transcribe them in the order in which they were written, but inversely.
"The last you will find was occasioned, I might say inspired, by your last letter, if there be any inspiration in it; the second records a feeling excited in me by the object it describes in the month of October last; and the first by a still earlier sensation, which the revolution of the year impressed me with last autumn."
(Then follow the three sonnets transcribed in the following order—
"While not a leaf seems faded; while the fields."
"How clear, how keen, how marvellously bright."
"High is our calling, Friend!—Creative Art.")
* * * * * *
"With high respect, I am, my dear sir, most faithfully yours.
"William Wordsworth."
(See the Autobiography of B. R. Haydon, vol. i. chap. xvi. p. 325.)
Haydon replied to Wordsworth, December 29 (see his Correspondence, vol. ii. pp. 20-23): "I must say that I have felt melancholy ever since receiving your sonnets, as if I was elevated so exceedingly, with such a drunken humming in my brain, that my nature took refuge in quiet humbleness and gratitude to God."