Of Miss Hayes' intellect I do not think so highly as you, or rather, to speak sincerely, I think not _contemptuously_ but certainly _despectively_ thereof. Yet I think you likely in this case to have judged better than I; for to hear a thing, ugly and petticoated, ex-syllogize a God with cold-blooded precision, and attempt to run religion through the body with an icicle, an icicle from a Scotch Hog-trough! _I_ do not endure it; my eye beholds phantoms, and "nothing is, but what is not."
By your last I could not find whether or no you still are willing to execute the "History of the Levelling Principle." Let me hear. Tom Wedgwood is going to the Isle of St. Nevis. As to myself, Lessing out of the question; I must stay in England.... Dear Hartley is well, and in high force; he sported of his own accord a theologico-astronomical hypothesis. Having so perpetually heard of good boys being put up into the sky when they are dead, and being now beyond measure enamoured of the lamps in the streets, he said one night coming through the streets, "Stars are dead lamps, they be'nt naughty, they are put up in the sky." Two or three weeks ago he was talking to himself while I was writing, and I took down his soliloquy. It would make a most original poem.
You say, I illuminize. I think that property will some time or other be modified by the predominance of intellect, even as rank and superstition are now modified by and subordinated to property, that much is to be hoped of the future; but first those particular modes of property which more particularly stop the diffusion must be done away, as injurious to property itself; these are priesthood and the too great patronage of Government. Therefore, if to act on the belief that all things are the process, and that inapplicable truths are moral falsehoods, be to illuminize, why then I illuminize! I know that I have been obliged to _illuminize_ so late at night, or rather mornings, that eyes have smarted as if I had _allum in eyes_! I believe I have misspelt the word, and ought to have written Alum; that aside, 'tis a _humorous pun_!
Tell Davy that I will soon write. God love him! You and I, Southey! know a good and great man or two in this world of ours.