At present I have not leisure to make
verses, nor anything approaching to a fondness for the exercise. In the
ignorant present time, who can answer for the future man? "At lovers'
perjuries Jove laughs,"--and poets have sometimes a disingenuous way of
forswearing their occupation. This, though, is not my case. The tender
cast of soul, sombred with melancholy and subsiding recollections, is
favorable to the Sonnet or the Elegy; but from--
"The sainted growing woof
The teasing troubles keep aloof."
The music of poesy may charm for a while the importunate, teasing cares
of life; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make
that music.
You sent me some very sweet lines relative to Burns; but it was at a
time when, in my highly agitated and perhaps distorted state of mind, I
thought it a duty to read 'em hastily and burn 'em. I burned all my own
verses, all my book of extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher and a
thousand sources; I burned a little journal of my foolish passion which
I had a long time kept,--
"Noting, ere they past away,
The little lines of yesterday."
I almost burned all your letters; I did as bad,--I lent 'em to a friend
to keep out of my brother's sight, should he come and make inquisition
into our papers; for much as he dwelt upon your conversation while you
were among us, and delighted to be with you, it has been, his fashion,
ever since to depreciate and cry you down,--you were the cause of my
madness, you and your damned foolish sensibility and melancholy; and he
lamented with a true brotherly feeling that we ever met,--even as the
sober citizen, when his son went astray upon the mountains of Parnassus,
is said to have cursed wit, and poetry, and Pope.
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