Mother of Hermes! and still youthful Maia! May I sing to thee As thou wast hymned on the shores of Baiae? Or may I woo thee In earlier Sicilian? or thy smiles Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles, By Bards who died content on pleasant sward, Leaving great verse unto a little clan? O, give me their old vigour, and unheard Save of the quiet Primrose, and the span Of heaven and few ears, Rounded by thee, my song should die away Content as theirs, Rich in the simple worship of a day.-- You may perhaps be anxious to know for fact to what sentence in your Letter I allude. You say, "I fear there is little chance of anything else in this life"--you seem by that to have been going through with a more painful and acute zest the same labyrinth that I have--I have come to the same conclusion thus far. My Branchings out therefrom have been numerous: one of them is the consideration of Wordsworth's genius and as a help, in the manner of gold being the meridian Line of worldly wealth, how he differs from Milton. And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Milton's apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or not than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song. In regard to his genius alone--we find what he says true as far as we have experienced, and we can judge no further but by larger experience--for axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.--I know this is not plain; you will know exactly my meaning when I say that now I shall relish Hamlet more than I ever have done--Or, better--you are sensible no man can set down Venery as a bestial or joyless thing until he is sick of it, and therefore all philosophising on it would be mere wording. Until we are sick, we understand not; in fine, as Byron says, "Knowledge is sorrow"; and I go on to say that "Sorrow is wisdom"--and further for aught we can know for certainty "Wisdom is folly"--So you see how I have run away from Wordsworth and Milton, and shall still run away from what was in my head, to observe, that some kind of letters are good squares, others handsome ovals, and other some orbicular, others spheroid--and why should not there be another species with two rough edges like a Rat-trap? I hope you will find all my long letters of that species, and all will be well; for by merely touching the spring delicately and ethereally, the rough-edged will fly immediately into a proper compactness; and thus you may make a good wholesome loaf, with your own leaven in it, of my fragments--If you cannot find this said Rat-trap sufficiently tractable, alas for me, it being an impossibility in grain for my ink to stain