in celebration of
the peace between France and England, it was two or three years before
they recovered their usual verdure.

LIV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

(1815)

Dear Wordsworth,--You have made me very proud with your successive book
presents. [1] I have been carefully through the two volumes to see that
nothing was omitted which used to be there. I think I miss nothing but a
character in the antithetic manner, which I do not know why you left
out,--the moral to the boys building the giant, the omission whereof
leaves it, in my mind, less complete,--and one admirable line gone (or
something come instead of it), "the stone-chat, and the glancing
sandpiper," which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand. I
am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I
would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the
stripped shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their
malice; I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls. I am
afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the
history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind
of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub
was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said
against it. You say you made the alteration for the "friendly reader;"
but the "malicious" will take it to himself. Damn 'em! if you give 'em
an inch, etc. The Preface is noble, and such as you should write. I wish
I could set my name to it, _Imprimatur_; but you have set it there
yourself, and I thank you. I had rather be a doorkeeper in your margin
than have their proudest text swelling with my eulogies. The poems in
the volumes which are new to me are so much in the old tone that I
hardly received them as novelties. Of those of which I had no previous
knowledge, the "Four Yew-Trees" and the mysterious company which you
have assembled there most struck me,--"Death the Skeleton, and Time the
Shadow." It is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of; it is
one of the last results he must have gone thinking on for years for,
"Laodamia" is a very original poem,--I mean original with reference to
your own manner. You have nothing like it, I should have seen it in a
strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation.

Let me in this place, for I have writ you several letters naming it,
mention that my brother, who is a picture-colle