to thank you for your last, which has completely done
away with the vagueness of the former; I now distinctly understand you,
and as to one of your leading points, viz. availing myself of
publication through your Society, I may say that if there had been among
my papers anything of the kind you wish for, I should have gladly
forwarded it to you. But it is not so, nor dare I undertake to promise
anything of the kind for the future. Though prevailed upon by Mr.
Coleridge to write the first Preface to my Poems, which tempted, or
rather forced, me to add a supplement to it, and induced by my
friendship for him to write the Essay upon Epitaphs now appended to 'The
Excursion,' but first composed for 'The Friend,' I have never felt
inclined to write criticism, though I have talked, and am daily talking,
a great deal. If I were several years younger, out of friendship to you
mainly, I would sit down to the task of giving a body to my notions
upon the essentials of Poetry; a subject which could not be properly
treated, without adverting to the other branches of fine art. But at
present, with so much before me that I could wish to do in verse, and
the melancholy fact brought daily more and more home to my conviction,
that intellectual labour, by its action on the brain and nervous system,
is injurious to the bodily powers, and especially to my eyesight, I
should only be deceiving myself and misleading you, were I to encourage
a hope that, much as I could wish to be your fellow-labourer, however
humbly, I shall ever become so.

Having disposed of this rather painful part of the subject of your
letter, let me say, that though it is principally matters of science in
which publication through your Society would be serviceable, and indeed
in that department eminently so, I concur with you in thinking, that the
same vehicle would be useful for bringing under the notice of the
thinking part of the community critical essays of too abstract a
character to be fit for popularity. There are obviously, even in
criticism, two ways of affecting the minds of men--the one by treating
the matter so as to carry it immediately to the sympathies of the many;
and the other, by aiming at a few select and superior minds, that might
each become a centre for illustrating it in a popular way. Mr.
Coleridge, whom you allude to, acted upon the world to a great extent
thro' the latter of these processes; and there cannot be a doubt that
your Society might se