ing "coals of fire," etc., in the true gospel manner, and I can
assure you that they have burned down to my very heart.

I am glad you accepted the Inscription.[33] I meant to have inscribed
"The Foscarini" to you instead; but, first, I heard that "Cain" was
thought the least bad of the two as a composition; and, secondly, I
have abused Southey like a pickpocket, in a note to "The Foscarini,"
and I recollected that he is a friend of yours (tho not of mine), and
that it would not be the handsome thing to dedicate to one friend
anything containing such matters about another. However, I'll work the
Laureate before I have done therefor. I like a row, and always did
from a boy, in the course of which propensity, I must needs say, that
I have found it the most easy of all to be gratified, personally and
poetically. You disclaim "jealousies"; but I would ask, as Boswell did
of Johnson, "of whom could you be jealous?"--of none of the living
certainly, and (taking all and all into consideration) of which of the
dead? I don't like to bore you about the Scotch novels (as they call
them, tho two of them are wholly English, and the rest half so), but
nothing can or could ever persuade me, since I was the first ten
minutes in your company, that you are not the man. To me those novels
have so much of "Auld lang syne" (I was bred a canny Scot till ten
years old), that I never move without them; and when I removed from
Ravenna to Pisa the other day, and sent on my library before, they
were the only books that I kept by me, altho I already have them by
heart.

IV

OF ART AND NATURE AS POETICAL SUBJECTS[34]

The beautiful but barren Hymettus--the whole coast of Attica, her
hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, etc.,
etc.--are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of
Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth.
But am I to be told that the "nature" of Attica would be more poetical
without the "art" of the Acropolis? of the temple of Theseus? and of
the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely
artificial genius? Ask the traveler what strikes him as most
poetical--the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The columns
of Cape Colonna,[35] or the cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it,
or the recollection that Falconer's ship[36] was bulged upon them?
There are a thousand rocks and capes far more picturesque than those
of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium