from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I
so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been
seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such
a manner. Poor fellow! though with such inordinate self-love he
would probably have not been very happy. I read the review of
'Endymion' in the Quarterly. It was severe,--but surely not so
severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.

"I recollect the effect on me of the Edinburgh on my first poem; it
was rage, and resistance, and redress--but not despondency nor
despair. I grant that those are not amiable feelings; but, in this
world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing,
a man should calculate upon his powers of _resistance_ before he
goes into the arena.

"'Expect not life from pain nor danger free,
Nor deem the doom of man reversed for thee.'

"You know my opinion of that _second-hand_ school of poetry. You
also know my high opinion of your own poetry,--because it is of
_no_ school. I read Cenci--but, besides that I think the _subject_
essentially _un_dramatic, I am not an admirer of our old
dramatists, _as models_. I deny that the English have hitherto had
a drama at all. Your Cenci, however, was a work of power, and
poetry. As to _my_ drama, pray revenge yourself upon it, by being
as free as I have been with yours.

"I have not yet got your Prometheus, which I long to see. I have
heard nothing of mine, and do not know that it is yet published. I
have published a pamphlet on the Pope controversy, which you will
not like. Had I known that Keats was dead--or that he was alive and
so sensitive--I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry,
to which I was provoked by his _attack_ upon _Pope_, and my
disapprobation of _his own_ style of writing.

"You want me to undertake a great poem--I have not the inclination
nor the power. As I grow older, the indifference--_not_ to life,
for we love it by instinct--but to the stimuli of life, increases.
Besides, this late failure of the Italians has latterly
disappointed me for many reasons,--some public, some personal. My
respects to Mrs. S.

"Yours ever.

"P.S. Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer? Could not
you take a run here