uneasiness from your mind which the disappointments you
sometimes meet with, in this labour of love, may occasion. I see that
you have many battles to fight for me,--more than, in the ardour and
confidence of your pure and elevated mind, you had ever thought of being
summoned to; but be assured that this opposition is nothing more than
what I distinctly foresaw that you and my other friends would have to
encounter. I say this, not to give myself credit for an eye of prophecy,
but to allay any vexatious thoughts on my account which this opposition
may have produced in you.

It is impossible that any expectations can be lower than mine
concerning the immediate effect of this little work upon what is called
the public. I do not here take into consideration the envy and
malevolence, and all the bad passions which always stand in the way of a
work of any merit from a living poet; but merely think of the pure,
absolute, honest ignorance in which all worldlings of every rank and
situation must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings, and
images, on which the life of my poems depends. The things which I have
taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do with routs,
dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street,
on foot or in carriage; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir
Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the borough of Honiton? In
a word--for I cannot stop to make my way through the hurry of images
that present themselves to me--what have they to do with endless talking
about things nobody cares any thing for except as far as their own
vanity is concerned, and this with persons they care nothing for but as
their vanity or _selfishness_ is concerned?--what have they to do (to
say all at once) with a life without love? In such a life there can be
no thought; for we have no thought (save thoughts of pain) but as far as
we have love and admiration.

It is an awful truth, that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine
enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who
live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world--among those who
either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration
in society. This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable
of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love
of human nature and reverence for God.

Upon this I shall insist elsewhere; at present let me conf