The four last lines are beautiful, but they have no particular meaning which "that thought is _vain_" does not convey. And I cannot write without a _body_ of _thought_. Hence my poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burden of ideas and imagery! It has seldom ease. The little song ending with "I heav'd the painless sigh for thee!" is an exception, and, accordingly, I like it the best of all I ever wrote. My sonnets to eminent contemporaries are among the better things I have written. That to Erskine is a bad specimen. I have written ten, and mean to write six more. In "Fayette" I unwittingly (for I did not know it at the time) borrowed a thought from you.
I will conclude with a little song of mine,[90] which has no other merit than a pretty simplicity of silliness.
If while my passion I impart, You deem my words untrue, O place your hand upon my heart-- Feel how it throbs for _you_!
Ah no! reject the thoughtless claim In pity to your Lover! That thrilling touch would aid the flame It wishes to discover!
I am a complete necessitarian, and understand the subject as well almost as Hartley himself, but I go farther than Hartley, and believe the corporeality of _thought_, namely, that it is motion. Boyer thrashed Favell most cruelly the day before yesterday, and I sent him the following note of consolation: "I condole with you on the unpleasant motions, to which a certain uncouth automaton has been mechanized; and am anxious to know the motives that impinged on its optic or auditory nerves so as to be communicated in such rude vibrations through the medullary substance of its brain, thence rolling their stormy surges into the capillaments of its tongue, and the muscles of its arm. The diseased violence of its thinking corporealities will, depend upon it, cure itself by exhaustion. In the mean time I trust that you have not been assimilated in degradation by losing the ataxy of your temper, and that necessity which dignified you by a sentience of the pain has not lowered you by the accession of anger or resentment."
God love you, Southey! My love to your mother!
When I am unhappy a sigh or a groan does not feel sufficient to relieve the oppression of my heart. I give a long _whistle_. This by way of a detached truth.