If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you, and believe me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own.
MY DEAR POOLE,--For the neglect in the transmission of "The Watchman," you must blame George Burnett, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication (on the Slave Trade in No. V.); it appears in this number, and I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you _dislike_ in "The Watchman," and what you like; but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of "The Plot Discovered."[108]
Since last you saw me I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out-of-doors, and Mrs. Coleridge's increasing danger at home, added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way--but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted, that it can answer no one's purpose to export it. _Alas! Alas! oh! ah! oh! oh!_ etc.
I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. There, indeed, I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept _bread_. "The Watchman" succeeds so as to yield a _bread-and-cheesish_ profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of seeing [you]. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with me.
Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolary ingratitude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me because you had previously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply.
My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published. In the third number of "The Watchman" there are a few lines entitled "The Hour when we shall meet again," "_Dim hour that sleeps on pillowy clouds afar_," which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different _anonymi_, requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes:--