harsh,
or some other friendly bi-syllable? In "Edmund," "Frenzy! fierce-eyed
child" is not so well as "frantic," though that is an epithet adding
nothing to the meaning. Slander _couching_ was better than "squatting."
In the "Man of Ross" it _was_ a better line thus,--

"If 'neath this roof thy wine-cheered moments pass,"

than as it stands now. Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the
concluding five lines of "Kosciusko;" call it anything you will but
sublime. In my twelfth effusion I had rather have seen what I wrote
myself, though they bear no comparison with your exquisite lines,--

"On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers," etc.

I love my sonnets because they are the reflected images of my own
feelings at different times. To instance, in the thirteenth,--

"How reason reeled," etc.,

are good lines, but must spoil the whole with me, who know it is only a
fiction of yours, and that the "rude dashings" did in fact not "rock me
to repose." I grant the same objection applies not to the former sonnet;
but still I love my own feelings,--they are dear to memory, though they
now and then wake a sigh or a tear, "Thinking on divers things fordone,"
I charge you, Coleridge, spare my ewe-lambs; and though a gentleman may
borrow six lines in an epic poem (I should have no objection to borrow
five hundred, and without acknowledging), still, in a sonnet, a personal
poem, I do not ask my friend the aiding verse; I would not wrong your
feelings by proposing any improvements (did I think myself capable of
suggesting 'era) in such personal poems as "Thou bleedest, my poor
heart,"--'od so,--I am caught,--I have already done it; but that simile
I propose abridging would not change the feeling or introduce any alien
ones. Do you understand me? In the twenty-eighth, however, and in the
"Sigh," and that composed at Clevedon, things that come from the heart
direct, not by the medium of the fancy, I would not suggest an
alteration.

When my blank verse is finished, or any long fancy poem, "propino tibi
alterandum, cut-up-andum, abridgeandum," just what you will with, it:
but spare my ewe-lambs! That to "Mrs. Siddons' now, you were welcome to
improve, if it had been worth it; but I say unto you again, Coleridge,
spare my ewe-lambs! I must confess, were the mine, I should omit, _in
editione secunda_, effusions two and three, because satiric and below
the dignity of the poet of "Religious Musings," fifth, seventh, half of
the