LETTER IX.

REV. H. F. CARY.

Lichfield, March 4, 1798.

LISTER has given me your Epitaph on Mason*. The leading thought is ingenious, and expressed with clearness, brevity, and classic elegance; but forgive me if I acknowledge that, while it appears happy as an epigram, I think the Muses, being a part of Pagan mythology, should not be introduced on a tombstone ;-that no authority can sanction their admittance-that our machinery,

Epitaph on the Reverend WILLIAM MASON, by the Reverend H. F. CARY.

O'er the sad shrine, to Mason's relics dear,
Pure love, and faithful friendship, shed the tear;
Meanwhile the sacred Sisters, who inspire

The lofty song, the pencil, and the lyre,
At awful distance keep celestial guard,

And mourn their lost musician, painter, bard;
Thus, in dumb eloquence, the pensive host

Contend which lov'd him best, which charm'd him most.

in that line of composition, should be confined to personifying the talents and the virtues.

I return your Coleridge, and have purchased one myself. It would disgrace a poetic reader not to have him on their shelves. His ideas are bold, beautiful, and original. He is no cold copyist-Nature is the exhaustless volume he uuclasps. In his style, perhaps, simplicity some times degenerates into a too studied homeliness of phrase; and he does not, in his blank verse, float the pause so gracefully as he might. From the latitude I have heard attributed to his morals, it surprised me to find his writings so deeply tinged with religious enthusiasm. Either he is a methodist, or an hypocrite. I hope it is the former His poem, entitled Religious Musings, thrilled me with horror. I tremble lest his prognostics there should be all in all accomplished. Good God! how that poem makes one shudder at the blasphemy of sheltering the exterminating spirit with which we have pursued this desperate war, under the pretence of defending Christianity!— Christianity was not attacked in these realms. If atheism and deism might blot it from the continent, nothing but war, whose events are always uncertain, could endanger it in these dominions, whose situation is insular, and whose navy is so powerful.

Coleridge's Ode on the departing Year, which, reading in the newspapers, I had disliked as turgid and obscure, is so much changed in this volume, as to impress me with a conviction of its being one of the grandest odes in our language. Such odes are the proudest, noblest boast of poetry, after the epics of Homer and Milton, and the dramas of Shakespeare. But, to return to the Ode on the departing Year. In this edition, its ideas are become luminous, as they were bold, and it has received very fine additions. So will it ever be, when true genius devotes it powers to correcting at leisure its hasty and crude essays.

in

Some four years since, Mr Coleridge's friend, Kennedy, gave me C.'s Monody on Chatterton in manuscript. On comparing it with that poem in this collection, I have there also found great extension and improvement. In this monody, there is a picturesque half-line taken from my Elegy on Captain Cook,

"Loud she laments, and long the nymph shall stray,
With wild unequal step, round Cook's * morait."

* Morai, the monument for the dead in Otaheite.-S.

+ Cook's Elegy.-S.

« With wild unequal step he pass'd along,

Oft pouring on the winds a broken song "."

The second line is verbatim from Ossian. I believe inequality of step, as symptomatic of an agonized mind, will not be found in any poet antecedent to my Elegy on Cook.

Charles Lloyd has fine poetic talents-his style is of the same school, and he may be considered as forming a poetic triumvirate with his friends Coleridge and Southey, much to the classic glory of England at this period; and confuting afresh the idiot assertion, made from time to time, concerning the paucity of Aonian inspiration in the seventeenth century, and the exhausted state of poetic fancy. Poetic fancy is exhaustless. Whoever possesses it from nature, and looks at her scenes, and all their endless varieties, with his own eyes, rather than applying to them the recollected descriptions of other poets; whoever moralizes and philosophizes life, and its events, from lynx-eyed observation and sensitive feeling, and, while he is writing, banishes all recollection of the writings of his predecessors, will always produce poetry interesting, nervous, and original.

* Coleridge's Ode to the departing Year.-S.

C. Lloyd is a very sweet sonnet-writer indeedsuperior in that line of composition to Coleridge, and nearly equalling Southey.

Coleridge seems aware, in his Dissertation on Sonnets, in this volume, that the composition of them is not his forte. I have an idea, that what he there says of Petrarch's sonnets, is not very far from the truth. Judging of them by the translations and imitations of them, which I have seen, they want that pathetic simplicity which is the chief grace of love-verses, whatever form they assume. As sonnets, where the thought should be single, the ideas in Petrarch's are too complicated, too metaphysic.

It is curious that, overlooking Milton's, he should consider those of Bowles and C.. Smith as models. Their construction of each set is so dissimilar, that the sonnet laws cannot be deduced from both. Bowles's are Miltonic, if not so strictly regular as are Milton's. All I have seen of C. Smith's, which are her first set, are merely short elegies closing with a couplet, and without any of those breaks in the lines, which are so very impressive.

You, at the tender age of fourteen, found the strict rules, as to rhyme and measure of the legitimate sonnet, no impediment to the effusions of