LETTER X.

MY VERY DEAR FRIEND,

August 8th, 1820.

Neither indolence nor procrastination has had any place among the causes of my silence, least of all either yourself, or the subject of your letter, or the purpose of answering it, having been absent from my thoughts. You may with almost literal truth attribute it to want of time, from the number, quantity, and quality of my engagements, the necessity of several journeys to and (still worse) in town being the largest waster of time and spirits. At length I have settled J. for the next six or eight weeks with Mr. Montague, where he is engaged on an Essay on the Principles of Taste in relation to Metre and Rhythm, containing, first, a new scheme of prosody, as applied to the choral and lyrical stanzas of the Greek drama; secondly, the possibility of improving and enriching our English versification by digging in the original mines, viz.—the tunes of nature and impassioned conversation, both of which may be illustrated from Mr. Frere's* Aristo

* As these poems, the precursors of "Beppo" and "Don Juan,” are not now in general circulation, I subjoin two short extracts, one a sketch of a gallant knight; the second showing the advantage of being well victualled.

On every point, in earnest and in jest,

His judgment, and his prudence, and his wit
Were deemed the very touchstone and the text
Of what was proper, graceful, just, and fit.
A word from him set every thing at rest,
His short decisions never failed to hit;
His silence, his reserve, his inattention,
Were felt as the severest reprehension.

His memory was the magazine and hoard

Where claims and grievances, from year to year,
And confidences and complaints were stored,

From dame and knight, from damsel, boor, and peer;
Loved by his friends, and trusted by his lord,
A generous courtier, secret and sincere,
Adviser-general to the whole community,
He served his friend, but watched his opportunity.

phanic Poems. I have been working hard to bring together for him the notes, &c., that I had prepared on this subject. E. has been ill, and even now is far from well. There are some persons-I have known several --who, when they find themselves uncomfortable, take up the pen and transfer as much discomfort as they can to their absent friends. But I know only one of this sort, who, as soon as they take up the pen, instantly become dolorous, however smug, snug, and cheerful the minute before and the minute after.

I at

Now just such is Mrs. D., God bless her! and she has been writing letter after letter to E. about J., and every discomfortable recollection and anticipation that she could conjure up, that she has completely overset him. This must not be. Mr. Gillman, too, has been out of sorts, but at this present we are all better. least am as well as I ever am, and my regular employment, in which Mr. Green is weekly my amanuensis, the work on the books of the Old and New Testaments, introduced by the assumptions and postulates required as the pre-conditions of a fair examination of Christianity as a scheme of doctrines, precepts, and histories, drawn, or at least deducible, from these books. And now, in the narrative line, I have only to add that Mrs. Gillman desires to be affectionately remembered to you, and bids me entreat you to stay away as long as you possibly can, provided it be from London as well as from Highgate.

For, in the garrison where he presided,

Neither distress, nor famine, nor disease
Was felt, nor accident nor harm betided

The happy monk; but plenteous, and with ease,
All needful monkish viands were provided;

Bacon and pickled herring, pork and peas;

And, when the table-beer began to fail,

They found resources in the bottled ale.

Dinner and supper kept their usual hours,

Breakfast and luncheon never were delayed,
While to the sentries on the walls and towers,
Between two hot plates, messes were conveyed.
At the departure of the invading power,

It was a boast the noble abbot made,
None of his monks were weaker, paler, thinner,
Or, during all the siege, had lost a dinner.

Would to Heaven I were with you! In a few days you should see that the spirit of the mountaineer is not yet utterly extinct in me. Wordsworth has remarked

(in the Brothers, I believe),

"The thought of death sits light upon the man

That has been bred and dies among the mountains."

But I fear that this, like some other few of Wordsworth's many striking passages, means less than it seems, or rather promises, to mean. Poets (especially if philosophers too) are apt to represent the effect made upon themselves as general; the geese of Phoebus are all swans; and Wordsworth's shepherds and estatesmen are Wordsworth's, even (as in old Michael) in the unpoetic traits of character. Whether mountains have any particular effect on the native inhabitants by virtue of being mountains exclusively, and what that effect is, would be a difficult problem. If independent tribes, mountaineers are robbers of the lowlanders; brave, active, and with all the usual warlike good and bad qualities that result from habits of adventurous robbery. Add clanship, and the superstitions that are the surviving precipitate of an established religion, both which are common to the uncivilized Celtic tribes, in plain no less than in mountain, and you have the Scottish Highlanders. But where the inhabitants exist as states, or civilized parts of civilized states, they appear to be in mind and character just what their condition and employments would render them in level plain, the same as amid Alpine heights. At least, the influence acts indirectly only, as far as the mountains are the causa cause, or occasion of a pastoral life instead of an agricultural; thus combining a láx and common property, possessed by a whole district, with small hereditary estates sacred to each, while the properties in sheep seem to partake of both characters. And truly, to this circumstance, aided by the favourable action of a necessarily scanty population (for man is an oak that wants room, not a plantation tree), we must attribute whatever superiority the mountaineers of Cumberland and Westmoreland and of the Swiss and

Tyrolese Alps possess, as the shocking contrast of the Welsh mountaineers too clearly evinces. But this subject I have discussed, and (if I do not flatter myself) satisfactorily, in the Literary Life, and I will not conceal from you that this inferred dependance of the human soul on accidents of birthplace and abode, together with the vague, misty, rather than mystić, confusion of God with the world, and the accompanying nature-worship, of which the asserted dependance forms a part, is the trait in Wordsworth's poetic works that I most dislike as unhealthful, and denounce as contagious; while the odd introduction of the popular, almost the vulgar, religion in his later publications (the popping in, as Hartley says, of the old man with a beard), suggests the painful suspicion of worldly prudence at best a justification of masking truth (which, in fact, is a falsehood substituted for a truth withheld) on plea of expediency-carried into religion. At least it conjures up to my fancy a sort of Janus head of Spinoza and Dr. Watts, or "I and my brother the dean."

Permit me, then, in the place of the two lines,

"The thought of death sits easy on the man

Who hath been bred and dies among the mountains,"

to say,

"The thought of death sits easy on the man

Whose earnest will hath lived among the deathless."

And I can perhaps build upon this foundation an answer to the question, which would deeply interest me, by whomever put, and pained me only because it was put by you; i. e., because I feared it might be the inspiration of ill health, and am jealous of any consenting of that inward will which, with some mysterious germination, moves in the Bethesda pool of our animal life, to withdraw its resistance. For the soul, among its other regalia, has an energetic veto against all undermining of the constitution, and among these, as not the least insidious, I consider the thoughts and hauntings that tamper with the love of life.

Do not so! you would not, if I could transfer into

you, in all its depth and liveliness, the sense what a hope, promise, impulse, you are to me in my present efforts to realize my past labours; and by building up the temple, the shaped stones, beams, pillars, yea, the graven ornaments and the connecting clamps of which have been piled up by me, only in too great abundance,--to enable you and my two (may I not say other) sons to affirm,- Vivit, quia non frustra vixit.

In reading an extract in the German Encyclopædia from Dobrizhoffer's most interesting account of the Abiponenses, a tribe in Paraguay, houseless, yet in person and in morals the noblest of savage tribes, who, when first known by Europeans, amounted to 100,000 warriors, yet have a tradition that they were but the relic of a far more numerous community, and who by wars with other savage tribes, and by intestine feuds among themselves, are now dwindled to a thousand (men, women, and children, do not exceed five thousand), it struck me with distinct remembrancefirst, that this is the history of all savage tribes; and, second, that all tribes are savage that have not a positive religion defecated from witchcraft, and an established priesthood contra-distinguished from individual conjurers. Nay, the islands of the Pacific (the Polynesia, which sooner or later the swift and silent masonry of the coral worms will compact into a rival continent, into a fifth quarter of the world), blest with all the plenties of nature, and enjoying an immunity from all the ordinary dangers of savage life, were many of them utterly dispeopled since their first discovery, and wholly by their own feuds and vices; nay, that their bread-fruit-tree and their delicious and healthful climate had only made the process of mutual destruction and self-destruction more hateful, more basely sensual. This, therefore, I assume as an undoubted fact of history; and from this, as a portion of the history of men, I draw a new (to my knowledge, at least, a new) series of proofs of several, I might say of all, the positions of pre-eminent importance and interest more than vital; a series which, taken in har