think I perceive, between these
lines and the former ones. I had an end in view,--I wished to make you
reject the poem, only as being discordant with the other; and, in
subservience to that end, it was politically done in me to over-pass,
and make no mention of, merit which, could you think me capable of
_overlooking_, might reasonably damn forever in your judgment all
pretensions in me to be critical. There, I will be judged by Lloyd
whether I have not made a very handsome recantation. I was in the case
of a man whose friend has asked him his opinion of a certain young lady;
the deluded wight gives judgment against her _in toto_,--don't like her
face, her walk, her manners; finds fault with her eyebrows; can see no
wit in her. His friend looks blank; he begins to smell a rat; wind veers
about; he acknowledges her good sense, her judgment in dress, a certain
simplicity of manners and honesty of heart, something too in her manners
which gains upon you after a short acquaintance;--and then her accurate
pronunciation of the French language, and a pretty, uncultivated taste
in drawing. The reconciled gentleman smiles applause, squeezes him by
the hand, and hopes he will do him the honor of taking a bit of dinner
with Mrs. ---- and him--a plain family dinner--some day next week; "for,
I suppose, you never heard we were married. I'm glad to see you like my
wife, however; you 'll come and see her, ha?" Now am I too proud to
retract entirely? Yet I do perceive I am in some sort straitened; you
are manifestly wedded, to this poem, and what fancy has joined, let no
man separate, I turn me to the "Joan of Arc," second book.

The solemn openings of it are with sounds which, Lloyd would say, "are
silence to the mind." The deep preluding strains are fitted to initiate
the mind, with a pleasing awe, into the sublimest mysteries of theory
concerning man's nature and his noblest destination,--the philosophy of
a first cause; of subordinate agents in creation superior to man; the
subserviency of pagan worship and pagan faith to the introduction of a
purer and more perfect religion, which you so elegantly describe as
winning, with gradual steps, her difficult way northward from Bethabara.
After all this cometh Joan, a _publican's_ daughter, sitting on an
ale-house _bench_, and marking the _swingings_ of the _signboard_,
finding a poor man, his wife and six children, starved to death with
cold, and thence roused into a state of mind proper