,
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

You will let me keep your beautiful ballad and the gods[67] a little
longer.

[Footnote 66: This refers to the recent publication of Tennyson's
_Poems_, in two volumes, the first containing a re-issue of poems
previously published, while the second was wholly new, and included
such poems as the 'Morte d'Arthur,' 'Ulysses,' and 'Locksley Hall.']

[Footnote 67: No doubt Mr. Kenyon's translation of Schiller's 'Gods
of Greece,' which was the occasion of Miss Barrett's poem 'The Dead
Pan.']

_To H.S. Boyd_
September 14, 1842.

My very dear Friend,--I have made you wait a long time for the 'North
American Review,' because when your request came it was no longer
within my reach, and because since then I have not been so well
as usual from a sweep of the wing of the prevailing epidemic. Now,
however, I am _better_ than I was even before the attack, only wishing
that it were possible to hook-and-eye on another summer to the hem
of the garment of this last sunny one. At the end of such a double
summer, to measure things humanly, I might be able to go to see you at
Hampstead. Nevertheless, winters and adversities are more fit for us
than a constant sun.

I suppose, dear Mr. Boyd, you want only to have this review read to
you, and not _written_. Because it isn't out of laziness that I send
the book to you; and Arabel would copy whatever you please willingly,
provided you wished it. Keep the book as long as you please. I have
put a paper mark and a pencil mark at the page and paragraph where I
am taken up. It seems to me that the condemnation of 'The Seraphim' is
not too hard. The poem wants _unity_.

As to your 'words of fire' about Wordsworth, if I had but a cataract
at command I would try to quench them. His powers should not be judged
of by my extracts or by anybody's extracts from his last-published
volume.[68] Do you remember his grand ode upon Childhood--worth, to my
apprehension, just twenty of Dryden's 'St. Cecilia's Day'--his sonnet
upon Westminster Bridge, his lyric on a lark, in which the lark's
music swells and exults, and the many noble and glorious passages
of his 'Excursion'? You must not indeed blame me for estimating
Wordsworth at _his height_, and on the other side I readily confess to
you that he is occasionally, and not unfrequently, heavy and dull, and
that Coleridge had an intenser genius. Tell me if you know anything of
Tennyson. He has just published two volumes of poetr