TO MR. JOHN GISBORNE. _Pisa, April 10, 1822._ My dear Gisborne, I have received Hellas, which is prettily printed, and with fewer mistakes than any poem I ever published. Am I to thank you for the revision of the press? or who acted as midwife to this last of my orphans, introducing it to oblivion, and me to my accustomed failure? May the cause it celebrates be more fortunate than either! Tell me how you like _Hellas_, and give me your opinion freely. It was written without much care, and in one of those few moments of enthusiasm which now seldom visit me, and which make me pay dear for their visits. I know what to think of _Adonais_, but what to think of those who confound it with the many bad poems of the day, I know not. I have been reading over and over again Faust, and always with sensations which no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom and augments the rapidity of ideas, and would therefore seem to me an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, and the delusions of an imagination not to be restrained. And yet the pleasure of sympathising with emotions known only to few, although they derive their sole charm from despair, and the scorn of the narrow good we can attain in our present state, seems more than to ease the pain which belongs to them. Perhaps all discontent with the _less_ (to use a Platonic sophism) supposes the sense of a just claim to the _greater_, and that we admirers of Faust are on the right road to Paradise. Such a supposition is not more absurd, and is certainly less demoniacal than that of Wordsworth, where he says-- “This earth, Which is the world of all of us, and where _We find our happiness, or not at all_.” As if, after sixty years’ suffering here, we were to be roasted alive for sixty million more in hell, or charitably annihilated by a _coup-de-grâce_ of the bungler who brought us into existence at first! Have you read Calderon’s _Magico Prodigioso_? I find a striking similarity between Faust and this drama, and if I were to acknowledge Coleridge’s distinction, should say Goethe was the _greatest_ philosopher, and Calderon the _greatest_ poet. _Cyprian_ evidently furnished the _germ_ of Faust, as Faust may furnish the germ of other poems; although it is as different from it in structure and plan as the acorn from the oak. I have--imagine my presumption--translated several scenes from both, as the basis of a paper for our journal. I am well content with those from Calderon, which in fact gave me very little trouble; but those from Faust--I feel how imperfect a representation, even with all the licence I assume to figure to myself how Goethe would have written in English, my words convey. No one but Coleridge is capable of this work.