usiness_ with the _action_ of the tale. But after my receipt of
your letter, concerning Lamb's censures, I felt my courage fail,
and that what I deemed a harmonizing would disgust you as a
_materialization_ of the plan, and appear to you like
insensibility to the power of the history in the mind. Not that I
should have shrunk back from the mere fear of giving transient
pain, and a temporary offence, from the want of sympathy of
feeling and coincidence of opinions. I rather envy than blame that
deep interest in a production, which is inevitable perhaps, and
certainly not dishonourable to such as feel poetry their calling
and their duty, and which no man would find much fault with if the
object, instead of a poem, were a large estate or a title. It
appears to me to become a foible only when the poet denies, or is
unconscious of its existence, but I did not deem myself in such a
state of mind as to entitle me to rely on my own opinion when
opposed to yours, from the heat and bustle of these disgusting
lectures."

. . . . .

"From most of these causes I was suffering, so as not to allow me
any rational confidence in my opinions when contrary to yours,
which had been formed in calmness and on long reflection. Then I
received your sister's letter, stating the wish that I would give
up the thought of proposing the means of correction, and merely
point out the things to be corrected, which--as they could be of
no great consequence--you might do in a day or two, and the
publication of the poem--for the immediacy of which she expressed
great anxiety--be no longer retarded. The merely verbal
_alteranda_ did appear to me very few and trifling. From your
letter on L----, I concluded that you would not have the incidents
and action interfered with, and therefore I sent it off; but soon
retracted it, in order to note down the single words and phrases
that I disliked in the books, after the two first, as there would
be time to receive your opinion of them during the printing of the
two first, in which I saw nothing amiss, except the one passage we
altered together, and the two lines which I scratched out, because
you yourself were doubtful. Mrs. Shepherd told me that she had
felt them exactly as I did--namely, as interrupting the spirit of
the continuous tranquil motion of _The White Doe_."

It will be seen from this letter that W