de nor unmade
by _them_.

_To John Kenyan_
Wednesday morning [August 1844].

I return Mr. Chorley's[106] note, my dear cousin, with thankful
thoughts of him--as of you. I wish I could persuade you of the
rightness of my view about 'Essays on Mind' and such things, and how
the difference between them and my present poems is not merely the
difference between two schools, as you seemed to intimate yesterday,
nor even the difference between immaturity and maturity; but that it
is the difference between the dead and the living, between a copy and
an individuality, between what is myself and what is not myself. To
you who have a personal interest and--may I say? affection for me,
the girl's exercise assumes a factitious value, but to the public
the matter is otherwise and ought to be otherwise. And for the
'psychological' side of the question, _do_ observe that I have not
reputation enough to suggest a curiosity about _my legends_. Instead
of your 'legendary lore,' it would be just a legendary bore. Now you
understand what I mean. I do not underrate Pope nor his school, but I
_do_ disesteem everything which, bearing the shape of a book, is not
the true expression of a mind, and I know and feel (and so do _you_)
that a girl's exercise written when all the experience lay in books,
and the mind was suited rather for intelligence than production,
lying like an infant's face with an undeveloped expression, must
be valueless in itself, and if offered to the public directly or
indirectly as a work of mine, highly injurious to me. Why, of the
'Prometheus' volume, even, you know what I think and desire. 'The
Seraphim,' with all its feebleness and shortcomings and obscurities,
yet is the first utterance of my own individuality, and therefore the
only volume except the last which is not a disadvantage to me to have
thought of, and happily for me, the early books, never having been
advertised, nor reviewed, except by accident, once or twice, are as
safe from the public as manuscript.

Oh, I shudder to think of the lines which might have been 'nicked in,'
and all through Mr. Chorley's good nature. As if I had not sins enough
to ruin me in the new poems, without reviving juvenile ones, sinned
when I knew no better. Perhaps you would like to have the series of
epic poems which I wrote from nine years old to eleven. They might
illustrate some doctrine of innate ideas, and enrich (to that end) the
myths of metaphysicians.

And also a