ars,
though she is but one. You must have seen her at her father's. Try and
remember her. Coleridge is bringing out a paper in weekly numbers, called
the "Friend," which I would send, if I could; but the difficulty I had in
getting the packets of books out to you before deters me; and you'll
want something new to read when you come home. Except Kate, I have had
no vision of excellence this year, and she passed by like the queen on
her coronation day; you don't know whether you saw her or not. Kate is
fifteen; I go about moping, and sing the old, pathetic ballad I used to
like in my youth,--

"She's sweet fifteen,
I'm _one year more._

Mrs. Bland sang it in boy's clothes the first time I heard it. I
sometimes think the lower notes in my voice are like Mrs. Bland's. That
glorious singer, Braham, one of my lights, is fled. He was for a season.
He was a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel, yet
all these elements mixed up so kindly in him that you could not tell
which predominated; but he is gone, and one Phillips is engaged instead.
Kate is vanished, but Miss Burrell is always to be met with!

"Queens drop away, while blue-legged Maukin thrives,
And courtly Mildred dies, while country Madge survives."

That is not my poetry, but Quarles's; but haven't you observed that the
rarest things are the least obvious? Don't show anybody the names in
this letter. I write confidentially, and wish this letter to be
considered as _private,_ Hazlitt has written a _grammar_ for Godwin;
Godwin sells it bound up with a treatise of his own on language; but the
_gray mare is the better horse._ I don't allude to Mrs. Godwin, but to
the word _grammar_, which comes near to _gray mare_, if you observe, in
sound. That figure is called paranomasia in Greek, I am sometimes happy
in it. An old woman begged of me for charity. "Ah, sir," said she, "I
have seen better days!" "So have I, good woman," I replied; but I meant
literally, days not so rainy and overcast as that on which begged,--she
meant more prosperous days.

LI.

TO MISS WORDSWORTH.

_August_, 1810.

Mary has left a little space for me to fill up with nonsense, as the
geographers used to cram monsters in the voids of the maps, and call it
_Terra Incognita_. She has told you how she has taken to water like a
hungry otter. I too limp after her in lame imitation, [1] but it goes
against me a little at first. I have been acquaintance with it now fo