"
Second specimen: A youth, after years of absence, revisits his native
place, and thinks (as most people do) that there has been strange
alteration in his absence,--
"And that the rocks
And everlasting hills themselves were changed."
You see both these are good poetry; but after one has been reading
Shakspeare twenty of the best years of one's life, to have a fellow
start up and prate about some unknown quality which Shakspeare possessed
in a degree inferior to Milton and _somebody else_! This was not to be
_all_ my castigation. Coleridge, who had not written to me for some
months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my
tardy presumption; four long pages, equally sweaty and more tedious,
came from him, assuring me that when the works of a man of true genius,
such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should
expect the fault to lie "in me, and not in them," etc. What am I to do
with such people? I certainly shall write them a very merry letter.
Writing to _you_, I may say that the second volume has no such pieces as
the three I enumerated. It is full of original thinking and an observing
mind; but it does not often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims
at simplicity of expression. And you sometimes doubt if simplicity be
not a cover for poverty.
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