ABSTRACT
You have made me very proud with your successive book presents. 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 Antithet. 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 in stead of it) ‘the stone-chat and the glancing sand-piper,’ which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand.1 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 stript 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 &c. 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.2 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 –’ [‘Yew-Trees’, PW, II, p. 10, 1. 27-8] 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 year 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 . . .
