ere he could not
find, in his own character, fit subjects for his pencil.

It was about the time when he was thus bitterly feeling and expressing
the blight which his heart had suffered from a _real_ object of
affection, that his poems on the death of an _imaginary_ one, "Thyrza,"
were written;--nor is it any wonder, when we consider the peculiar
circumstances under which these beautiful effusions flowed from his
fancy, that of all his strains of pathos, they should be the most
touching and most pure. They were, indeed, the essence, the abstract
spirit, as it were, of many griefs;--a confluence of sad thoughts from
many sources of sorrow, refined and warmed in their passage through his
fancy, and forming thus one deep reservoir of mournful feeling. In
retracing the happy hours he had known with the friends now lost, all
the ardent tenderness of his youth came back upon him. His school-sports
with the favourites of his boyhood, Wingfield and Tattersall,--his
summer days with Long[28], and those evenings of music and romance which
he had dreamed away in the society of his adopted brother,
Eddlestone,--all these recollections of the young and dead now came to
mingle themselves in his mind with the image of her who, though living,
was, for him, as much lost as they, and diffused that general feeling of
sadness and fondness through his soul, which found a vent in these
poems. No friendship, however warm, could have inspired sorrow so
passionate; as no love, however pure, could have kept passion so
chastened. It was the blending of the two affections, in his memory and
imagination, that thus gave birth to an ideal object combining the best
features of both, and drew from him these saddest and tenderest of
love-poems, in which we find all the depth and intensity of real feeling
touched over with such a light as no reality ever wore.

The following letter gives some further account of the course of his
thoughts and pursuits at this period:--

LETTER 72. TO MR. HODGSON.

"Newstead Abbey, Oct. 13. 1811.

"You will begin to deem me a most liberal correspondent; but as my
letters are free, you will overlook their frequency. I have sent
you answers in prose and verse[29] to all your late communications,
and though I am invading your ease again, I don't know why, or what
to put down that you are not acquainted with already. I am growing
nervous (how you will laugh!)--but it is true,--really, wr