r
anything further. Must beg of you to be less particular in your
addresses to me. Ladies all, with this piece of advice, of Bath and
you

Your ever grateful servant takes his leave.
Lay your plans surer when you plot to grieve;
See, while you kindly mean to mortify
Another, the wild arrow do not fly,
And gall yourself. For once you've been mistaken;
Your shafts have miss'd their aim--Hogsflesh has
saved his Bacon.

POEMS.

DEDICATION[1]

[Footnote 1: Prefixed to the Author's works published in 1818.]

* * * * *

TO S. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.

My Dear Coleridge,

You will smile to see the slender labors of your friend designated by
the title of _Works;_ but such was the wish of the gentlemen who have
kindly undertaken the trouble of collecting them, and from their
judgment could be no appeal.

It would be a kind of disloyalty to offer to any one but yourself a
volume containing the _early pieces,_ which were first published
among your poems, and were fairly derivatives from you and them. My
friend Lloyd and myself came into our first battle (authorship is a
sort of warfare) under cover of the greater Ajax. How this
association, which shall always be a dear and proud recollection to
me, came to be broken,--who snapped the threefold cord,--whether
yourself (but I know that was not the case) grew ashamed of your
former companions,--or whether (which is by much the more probable)
some ungracious bookseller was author of the separation,--I cannot
tell;--but wanting the support of your friendly elm, (I speak for
myself,) my vine has, since that time, put forth few or no fruits;
the sap (if ever it had any) has become, in a manner, dried up and
extinct; and you will find your old associate, in his second volume,
dwindled into prose and _criticism._

Am I right in assuming this as the cause? or is it that, as years
come upon us, (except with some more healthy-happy spirits,) Life
itself loses much of its Poetry for us? we transcribe but what we
read in the great volume of Nature; and, as the characters grow dim,
we turn off, and look another way. You yourself write no Christabels,
nor Ancient Mariners, now.

Some of the Sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the
general reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances, which I
should be sorry should be ever totally extinct--the memory

"Of summer days and of delightful years--"

even so far