But to your letter. First, I had never determined to print the lines addressed to you. I lent them to Lady Beaumont on her promise that they should be copied, and returned; and not knowing of any copy in my own possession, I sent for them, because I was making a MS. collection of _all_ my poems--publishable and unpublishable--and still more perhaps for the handwriting of the only perfect copy, that entrusted to her ladyship. Most assuredly, I never once thought of printing them without having consulted you, and since I lit on the first rude draught, and corrected it as well as I could, I wanted no additional reason for its not being published in my lifetime than its _personality_ respecting myself. After the opinions I had given publicly, in the preference of "Lycidas" (moral no less than poetical) to Cowley's Monody, I could not have printed it consistently. It is for the biographer, not the poet, to give the _accidents_ of _individual_ life. Whatever is not representative, generic, may be indeed most poetically expressed, but is not poetry. Otherwise, I confess, your prudential reasons would not have weighed with me, except as far as my name might haply injure your reputation, for there is nothing in the lines, as far as your powers are concerned, which I have not as fully expressed elsewhere; and I hold it a miserable cowardice to withhold a deliberate opinion only because the man is alive.
Secondly, for "The Excursion," I feared that had I been silent concerning "The Excursion," Lady Beaumont would have drawn some strange inference; and yet I had scarcely sent off the letter before I repented that I had not run that risk rather than have approach to dispraise communicated to you by a third person. But what did my criticism amount to, reduced to its full and naked sense? This, that _comparatively_ with the _former_ poem, "The Excursion," as far as it was new to me, had disappointed my expectations; that the excellencies were so many and of so high a class that it was impossible to attribute the inferiority, if any such really existed, to any flagging of the writer's own genius--and that I conjectured that it might have been occasioned by the influence of self-established convictions having given to certain thoughts and expressions a depth and force which they had not for readers in general. In order, therefore, to explain the _disappointment_, I must recall to your mind what my _expectations_ were: and, as these again were founded on the supposition that (in whatever order it might be published) the poem on the growth of your own mind was as the ground plot and the roots, out of which "The Recluse" was to have sprung up as the tree, as far as [there was] the same sap in both, I expected them, doubtless, to have formed one complete whole; but in matter, form, and product to be different, each not only a distinct but a different work. In the first I had found "themes by thee first sung aright,"