m
that I think you must read them once again with your critical
spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years
ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury
called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper
than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and
am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic
date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry,
and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any
verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these
juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses,
that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up
old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely
as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to
music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe
I have in April or May an annual poetic _conatus_ rather than
_afflatus_, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I
may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my
MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of
a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily
treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a
year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard
to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I
remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it;
but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall
have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself
of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the "Carlyle
Miscellanies," so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent
spirits of his American friends and readers.... A new book, he
writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring
lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind
enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done
by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to
betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any
line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the
universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the
old m