ABSTRACT
By this Time, you have doubtless seen my Brother William’s Poems, and they have already suffered the Lash of your Criticisms. I should be very glad if you would give me your opinion of them with the same Frankness with which I am going to give you mine. The Scenes which he describes have been viewed with a Poet’s eye and are pourtrayed with a Poet’s pencil; and the Poems contain many passages exquisitely beautiful, but they also contain many Faults, the chief of which are Obscurity, and a too frequent use of some particular expressions and uncommon words, for instance moveless, which he applies in a sense if not new, at least different from its ordinary one; by moveless when applied to the Swan he means that sort of motion which is smooth without agitation; it is a very beautiful epithet but ought to have been cautiously used, he ought at any rate only to have hazarded it once, instead of which it occurs three or four times.1 The word viewless, also, is introduced far too often, this, though not so uncommon a word as the former ought not to have been made use of more than once or twice – I regret exceedingly that he did not submit the works to the inspection of some Friend before their Publication, and he also joins with me in this Regret. Their Faults are such as a young Poet was most likely to fall into and least likely to discover, and what the Suggestions of a Friend would easily have made him see and at once correct. It is however an error he will never fall into again, as he is well aware that he would have gained considerably more credit if the Blemishes of which I speak had been corrected. My Brother Kitt and I, while he was at Forncett, amused ourselves by analysing every line and prepared a very bulky Criticism, which he was to transmit to William as soon as he should have [ad]ded to it the [remarks] of his Cambridge Friends. At the conclusion of the [E]vening Walk, I think you would be pleased with those lines, ‘Thus hope first pouring from her blessed Horn’ &c.&c.2 You would espy the little gilded Cottage in the Horizon, but perhaps your less gloomy Imagination and your anxiety to see your Friend placed in that happy Habitation might make you
overlook the dark and broad Gulph between. If you have not yet seen the Poems pray do not make known my opinion of them – let them pass the fiery ordeal.
