“MY DEAR DAVY,--Work hard, and if success do not dance up like the bubbles in the salt (with the spirit lamp under it[C]) may the Devil and his dam take success! My dear fellow! from the window before me there is a great _camp_ of mountains. Giants seem to have pitched their tents there. Each mountain is a giant’s tent, and how the light streams from them! Davy! I _ache_ for you to be with us. “W. Wordsworth is such a lazy fellow, that I bemire myself by making promises for him: the moment I received your letter, I wrote to him. He will, I hope, write immediately to Biggs and Cottle. At all events, these poems must not as yet be delivered up to them, because that beautiful poem, ‘The Brothers,’ which I read to you in Paul Street, I neglected to deliver to you, and that must begin the volume. I trust, however, that I have invoked the sleeping bard with a spell so potent, that he will awake and deliver up that Sword of Argantyr, which is to rive the enchanter _Gaudyverse_ from his crown to his feet. “What did you think of that case I translated for you from the German? That I was a well-meaning sutor who had ultra-crepidated with more zeal than wisdom!! I give myself credit for that word ‘ultra-crepidated,’ it started up in my brain like a creation.... “We drank tea the night before I left Grasmere, on the island in that lovely lake; our kettle swung over the fire, hanging from the branch of a fir-tree, and I lay and saw the woods, and mountains, and lake all trembling, and as it were idealized through the subtle smoke, which rose up from the clear red embers of the fir-apples which we had collected; afterwards we made a glorious bonfire on the margin, by some elder bushes, whose twigs heaved and sobbed in the uprushing column of smoke, and the image of the bonfire, and of us that danced round it, ruddy, laughing faces in the twilight; the image of this in a lake, smooth as that sea, to whose waves the Son of God had said, _Peace!_ May God, and all his sons, love you as I do. “S. T. COLERIDGE. “Sara desires her kind remembrances. Hartley is a spirit that dances on an aspen leaf: the air that yonder sallow-faced and yawning tourist is breathing, is to my babe a perpetual nitrous oxide....” [C] Doubtless an allusion to the decomposition of ammonium nitrate, which Coleridge had frequently seen Davy effect. * * * * * “Thursday night, _Oct. 9, 1800_.