Prayer," "The Farmer of
Tilsbury Vale," "Laodamia," "Yew-Trees," "A Night Piece," etc., and it
was chiefly on these that Lamb made his comments.

[2] John Lamb afterwards gave the picture to Charles, who made it a
wedding present to Mrs. Moxon (Emma Isola), It is now in the National
Portrait Gallery.

[3] Dorothy Wordsworth.

[4] Excursion, book v.

LV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

Excuse this maddish letter; I am too tired to write _in forma_.

1815.

Dear Wordsworth,--The more I read of your two last volumes, the more I
feel it necessary to make my acknowledgments for them in more than one
short letter. The "Night Piece," to which you refer me, I meant fully to
have noticed; but the fact is, I come so fluttering and languid from
business, tired with thoughts of it, frightened with fears of it, that
when I get a few minutes to sit down and scribble (an action of the hand
now seldom natural to me,--I mean voluntary pen-work), I lose all
presential memory of what I had intended to say, and say what I can,
talk about Vincent Bourne or any casual image, instead of that which I
had meditated (by the way, I mast look out V. B. for you). So I had
meant to have mentioned "Yarrow Visited," with that stanza, "But thou
that didst appear so fair:" [1] than which I think no lovelier stanza can
be found in the wide world of poetry. Yet the poem, on the whole, seems
condemned to leave behind it a melancholy of imperfect satisfaction, as
if you had wronged the feeling with which, in what preceded it, you had
resolved never to visit it, and as if the Muse had determined, in the
most delicate manner, to make you, and _scarce make you_, feel it. Else,
it is far superior to the other, which has but one exquisite verse in
it,--the last but one, or the last two: this is all fine, except,
perhaps, that _that_ of "studious ease and generous cares" has a little
tinge of the _less romantic_ about it. "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale" is
a charming counterpart to "Poor Susan," with the addition, of that
delicacy towards aberrations from the strict path which is so fine in
the "Old Thief and the Boy by his side," which always brings water
into my eyes.

Perhaps it is the worse for being a repetition; "Susan" stood for the
representative of poor _Rus in Urbe_. There was quite enough to stamp
the moral of the thing never to be forgotten,--"bright volumes of
vapor," etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all
events. It threw a kind