Such or something like this was the plan I had supposed that you were engaged on. Your own words will therefore explain my feelings, viz., that your object "was not to convey recondite, or refined truths, but to place commonplace truths in an interesting point of view." Now this I suppose to have been in your two volumes of poems, as far as was desirable or possible, without an insight into the whole truth. How can common truths be made permanently interesting but by being _bottomed_ on our common nature? It is only by the profoundest insight into numbers and quantity that a sublimity and even religious wonder become attached to the simplest operations of arithmetic, the most evident properties of the circle or triangle. I have only to finish a preface, which I shall have done in two, or, at farthest, three days; and I will then, dismissing all comparison either with the poem on the growth of your own support, or with the imagined plan of "The Recluse," state fairly my main objections to "The Excursion" as it is. But it would have been alike unjust both to you and to myself, if I had led you to suppose that any disappointment I may have felt arose wholly or chiefly from the passages I do not like, or from the poem considered irrelatively.
Allston lives at 8, Buckingham Place, Fitzroy Square. He has lost his wife, and been most unkindly treated and most unfortunate. I hope you will call on him. Good God! to think of such a grub as _Dawe_ with more than he can do, and such a genius as Allston without a single patron!
God bless you! I am, and never have been other than your most affectionate
Mr. and Mrs. Morgan desire to be affectionately remembered to you, and they would be highly gratified if you could make a little tour and spend a short time at Calne. There is an admirable collection of pictures at Corsham. Bowles left Bremhill (two miles from us, where he has a perfect paradise of a place) for town yesterday morning.
DEAR SIR,--I have seldom made a greater sacrifice and gratification to prudence than in the determination most reluctantly formed, that the state of my health, which requires hourly regimen, joined with the uncertain state of the weather and the perilous consequences of my taking cold in the existing weakness of the viscera, renders it improper for me to hazard a night away from my home. No pleasure, however intellectual (and to all but intellectual _pleasures_ I have long been dead, for surely the staving off of pain is no pleasure), could repay me even for the chance of being again unwell in any house but my own. I have a great, a gigantic effort to make, and I will go through with it or die. Gross have been the calumnies concerning me; but enough remains of truth to enforce the necessity of considering all other things as unimportant compared with the necessity of _living them down_. This letter is, of course, sacred to yourself, and a pledge of the high respect I entertain for your moral being; for you need not the feelings of friendship to feel as a friend toward every fellow Christian.