‘The evening I received your criticisms I wrote you three sides of a letter, and did not send it, only because I thought time would produce things better worth writing: and now I am so changed in position and circumstances I think I may as well begin again. So all I will retain of my former letter is a criticism on _The Christian Year_, suggested by a very tempestuous night, in which all our party were crossing the Channel in a pilot-boat. You must not say “the wild wind rustles in the _piping_ shrouds”:[68] shrouds never “pipe” when trees or rustling can be presented to the fancy, but only on occasions when it is more sublime than comfortable to be a listener. This, in my letter, I endeavoured to enforce by a description of the scene I witnessed, and the night I spent on deck: but I doubt not you will willingly take all this for granted…. I left Devonshire more than a fortnight since for Cumberland. [Dornford?][69] made me stay some time in Dublin, which was my first stage, and is, in point of time, much the nearest way: and also sent me into the north of Ireland after Captain Mudge, who is surveying the coast. In my hunt for him, I saw the Giants’ Causeway, every stone of which is beset by some fellow who claims a fee for describing it. It is certainly well worth seeing; but you can conceive nothing so perfectly unlike any of the pretended representations of it. I made two bad drawings there, which will serve to keep it in my own mind, but will do little to illuminate mankind at large. I am forgetting all this while to tell you that, while at Dublin, I found I was within twenty-five miles of ‘“The Lake whose gloomy shore Skylark never warbles o’er”: