Readers of Coleridge
know in what estimation he held the qualities and the friendship of
Mr. Allston. Beside Coleridge and West, he numbered among his friends
in England, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Sir George Beaumont, Reynolds,
and Fuseli.

In 1809, Mr. Allston returned to America, and remained two years
in Boston, his adopted home, and there married the sister of Dr.
Channing. In 1811, he went again to England, where his reputation as
an artist had been completely established. Before his departure, he
delivered a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge.
During a severe illness, he removed from London to Clifton, at which
place he wrote "The Sylphs of the Seasons." In 1813, he made his
first, and, with the exception of "Monaldi," twenty-eight years
afterwards, his only publication. This was a small volume, entitled
"The Sylphs of the Seasons, and other Poems," published in London;
and, during the same year, republished in Boston under the direction
of his friends, Professor Willard of Cambridge and Mr. Edmund T. Dana.
This volume was well received, and gave him a place among the first
poets of his country. The smaller poems in that edition extend as far
as page 289 of the present volume.

Beside the long and serious illness through which he passed, his
spirit was destined to suffer a deeper wound by the death of Mrs.
Allston, in London, during the same year. These events gave to his
mind a more earnest and undivided interest in his spiritual relations,
and drew him more closely than ever before to his religious duties.
He received the rite of confirmation, and through life was a devout
adherent to the Christian doctrine and discipline.

The character of Mr. Allston's religious feelings may be gathered,
incidentally, from many of his writings. It is a subject to be treated
with the reserve and delicacy with which he himself would have had it
invested. Few minds have been more thoroughly imbued with belief in
the reality of the unseen world; few have given more full assent to
the truth, that "the things which are seen are temporal, the things
which are not seen are eternal." This was not merely an adopted
opinion, a conviction imposed upon his understanding; it was of the
essence of his spiritual constitution, one of the conditions of his
rational existence. To him, the Supreme Being was no vague, mystical
source of light and truth, or an impersonation of goodness and truth
themselves; nor, on the other