hours
yourself, and who made you so proud? But I submit, to show my humility,
most implicitly to your dogmas, I reject entirely the copy of verses you
reject. With regard to my leaving off versifying [1] you have said so
many pretty things, so many fine compliments, Ingeniously decked out in
the garb of sincerity, and undoubtedly springing from a present feeling
somewhat like sincerity, that you might melt the most un-muse-ical soul,
did you not (now for a Rowland compliment for your profusion of
Olivers),--did you not in your very epistle, by the many pretty fancies
and profusion of heart displayed in it, dissuade and discourage me from
attempting anything after you. At present I have not leisure to make
verses, nor anything approaching to a fondness for the exercise. In the
ignorant present time, who can answer for the future man? "At lovers'
perjuries Jove laughs,"--and poets have sometimes a disingenuous way of
forswearing their occupation. This, though, is not my case. The tender
cast of soul, sombred with melancholy and subsiding recollections, is
favorable to the Sonnet or the Elegy; but from--

"The sainted growing woof
The teasing troubles keep aloof."

The music of poesy may charm for a while the importunate, teasing cares
of life; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make
that music.

You sent me some very sweet lines relative to Burns; but it was at a
time when, in my highly agitated and perhaps distorted state of mind, I
thought it a duty to read 'em hastily and burn 'em. I burned all my own
verses, all my book of extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher and a
thousand sources; I burned a little journal of my foolish passion which
I had a long time kept,--

"Noting, ere they past away,
The little lines of yesterday."

I almost burned all your letters; I did as bad,--I lent 'em to a friend
to keep out of my brother's sight, should he come and make inquisition
into our papers; for much as he dwelt upon your conversation while you
were among us, and delighted to be with you, it has been, his fashion,
ever since to depreciate and cry you down,--you were the cause of my
madness, you and your damned foolish sensibility and melancholy; and he
lamented with a true brotherly feeling that we ever met,--even as the
sober citizen, when his son went astray upon the mountains of Parnassus,
is said to have cursed wit, and poetry, and Pope. [2] I quote wrong, but
no matter. These letters I