shadow of death, to
views from which he believed the permanent happiness of mankind must
eventually spring.

'Marlowe, December 11, 1817.

'I have read and considered all that you say about my general powers,
and the particular instance of the poem in which I have attempted to
develop them. Nothing can be more satisfactory to me than the interest
which your admonitions express. But I think you are mistaken in some
points with regard to the peculiar nature of my powers, whatever be
their amount. I listened with deference and self-suspicion to your
censures of "The Revolt of Islam"; but the productions of mine which you
commend hold a very low place in my own esteem; and this reassures me,
in some degree at least. The poem was produced by a series of thoughts
which filled my mind with unbounded and sustained enthusiasm. I felt the
precariousness of my life, and I engaged in this task, resolved to leave
some record of myself. Much of what the volume contains was written with
the same feeling--as real, though not so prophetic--as the
communications of a dying man. I never presumed indeed to consider it
anything approaching to faultless; but, when I consider contemporary
productions of the same apparent pretensions, I own I was filled with
confidence. I felt that it was in many respects a genuine picture of my
own mind. I felt that the sentiments were true, not assumed. And in this
have I long believed that my power consists; in sympathy, and that part
of the imagination which relates to sentiment and contemplation. I am
formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to
apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to
external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to
communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the
moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these
faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist
very imperfectly in my own mind. But, when you advert to my
Chancery-paper, a cold, forced, unimpassioned, insignificant piece of
cramped and cautious argument, and to the little scrap about
"Mandeville", which expressed my feelings indeed, but cost scarcely two
minutes' thought to express, as specimens of my powers more favourable
than that which grew as it were from "the agony and bloody sweat" of
intellectual travail; surely I must feel that, in some manner, either I
am mistaken in believing th