flourish!
Two things staggered me in the poem (and one of them staggered both of
as): I cannot away with a beautiful series of verses, as I protest they
are, commencing "Jenner," 'Tis like a choice banquet opened with a pill
or an electuary,--physic stuff. T'other is, we cannot make out how Edith
should be no more than ten years old. By 'r Lady, we had taken her to be
some sixteen or upwards. We suppose you have only chosen the round
number for the metre. Or poem and dedication may be both older than they
pretend to,--but then some hint might have been given; for, as it
stands, it may only serve some day to puzzle the parish reckoning. But
without inquiring further (for 'tis ungracious to look into a lady's
years), the dedication is eminently pleasing and tender, and we wish
Edith May Southey joy of it. Something, too, struck us as if we had
heard of the death of John May. A John May's death was a few years since
in the papers. We think the tale one of the quietest, prettiest things
we have seen. You have been temperate in the use of localities, which
generally spoil poems laid in exotic regions. You mostly cannot stir out
(in such things) for humming-birds and fireflies. A tree is a Magnolia,
etc.--Can I but like the truly Catholic spirit? "Blame as thou mayest
the Papist's erring creed,"--which and other passages brought me back to
the old Anthology days and the admonitory lesson to "Dear George" on
"The Vesper Bell," a little poem which retains its first hold upon me
strangely.

The compliment to the translatress is daintily conceived. Nothing is
choicer in that sort of writing than to bring in some remote, impossible
parallel,--as between a great empress and the inobtrusive, quiet soul
who digged her noiseless way so perseveringly through that rugged
Paraguay mine. How she Dobrizhoffered it all out, it puzzles my slender
Latinity to conjecture. Why do you seem to sanction Landor's unfeeling
allegorizing away of honest Quixote? He may as well say Strap is meant
to symbolize the Scottish nation before the Union, and Random since that
Act of dubious issue; or that Partridge means the Mystical Man, and Lady
Bellaston typifies the Woman upon Many Waters. Gebir, indeed, may mean
the state of the hop markets last month, for anything I know to the
contrary. That all Spain overflowed with romancical books (as Madge
Newcastle calls them) was no reason that Cervantes should not smile at
the matter of them; nor even a reason th