ast play is 'The Daughter,' not 'The Wreckers,' although
I believe it was acted as the last. I am very anxious to read 'Otto,'
not to _see_ it. I am not going to see it, notwithstanding an offered
temptation to sit in the authoress's own box. With regard to 'Ion,'
I think it is a beautiful work, but beautiful _rather_ morally than
intellectually. Is this right or not? Its moral tone is very noble,
and sends a grand and touching harmony into the midst of the full
discord of this utilitarian age. As dramatic _poetry_, it seems to me
to want, not beauty, but power, passion, and condensation. This is my
_doxy_ about 'Ion.' Its author[32] made me very proud by sending it to
me, although we do not know him personally. I have _heard_ that he is
a most amiable man (who else could have written 'Ion'?), but that he
was a little _elevated_ by his popularity last year!...

I have read Combe's 'Phrenology,' but not the 'Constitution of Man.'
The 'Phrenology' is very clever, and amusing; but I do not think it
logical or satisfactory. I forget whether 'slowness of the pulse' _is_
mentioned in it as a symptom of the poetical aestus. I am afraid, if
it be a symptom, I dare not take my place even in the 'forlorn hope of
poets' in this age so forlorn as to its poetry; for my pulse is in a
continual flutter and my feet not half cold enough for a pedestal--so
I must make my honours over to poor papa straightway. He has been
shivering and shuddering through the cold weather; and partaking our
influenza in the warmer. I am very sorry that you should have been a
sufferer too. It seems to have been a universal pestilence, even down
in Devonshire, where dear Bummy and the whole colony have had their
share of 'groans.' And one of my doves shook its pretty head and
ruffled its feathers and shut its eyes, and became subject to pap and
nursing and other infirmities for two or three days, until I was in
great consternation for the result. But it is well again--cooing as
usual; and so indeed we all are. But indeed, I can't write a
sentence more without saying some of the evil it deserves--of the
utilitarianisms of this corrupt age--among some of the chief of which
are steel pens!

I am so glad that you liked my 'Romaunt,' and so resigned that you did
not understand some of my 'Poet's Vow,' and so obliged that you should
care to go on reading what I write. They vouchsafed to publish in the
first number of the new series of the 'New Monthly' a little p