e, since
the era of the commencing predominance of the mechanical system at
the restoration of our second Charles, and with this the present
fashionable views, not only of religion, morals, and politics but
even of the modern physics and physiology. You will not blame the
earnestness of my expressions, nor the high importance which I attach
to this work: for how, with less noble objects, and less faith in
their attainment, could I stand acquitted of folly, and abuse of time,
talents, and learning in a labour of three-fourths of my intellectual
life? Of this work, something more than a volume has been dictated
by me, so as to exist fit for the press, to my friend and enlightened
pupil, Mr. Green; and more than as much again would have been evolved
and delivered to paper, but that, for the last six or eight months,
I have been compelled to break off our weekly meeting, from the
necessity of writing (alas! alas! of attempting to write) for
purposes, and on the subjects, of the passing day. Of my poetic works
I would fain finish the _Christabel_! Alas! for the proud time when I
planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as
the scheme, of the Hymns entitled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_,
_Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears
to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem--Jerusalem
besieged and destroyed by Titus.

TO THE SAME

_Reminiscences_

4 March, 1822.

My Dearest Friend,

I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week
past--my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;

--The night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day;

but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my
dreams through any of Swedenborg's Hells _moderes_; but arose this
morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_....

I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you
sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from
my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or
inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases
of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to
worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated,
nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my
superiors--a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those
whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most o