leep, nor
knew 'twas death," Indeed, there is scarce a line I do not like,
"_Turbid_ ecstasy" is surely not so good as what you had
written,--"troublous." "Turbid" rather suits the muddy kind of
inspiration which London porter confers. The versification is
throughout, to my ears, unexceptionable, with no disparagement to the
measure of the "Religious Musings," which is exactly fitted to
the thoughts.

You were building your house on a rock when you rested your fame on that
poem. I can scarce bring myself to believe that I am admitted to a
familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man
who writes blank verse like Milton. Now, this is delicate flattery,
_indirect_ flattery. Go on with your "Maid of Orleans," and be content
to be second to yourself. I shall become a convert to it, when
'tis finished.

This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on
Thursday. I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her
days of suffering and infirmity. She was to me the "cherisher of
infancy;" and one must fall on these occasions into reflections, which
it would be commonplace to enumerate, concerning death, "of chance and
change, and fate in human life." Good God, who could have foreseen all
this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt's
living many years; she was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere
skeleton before she died; looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks
in the grave, than one fresh dead. "Truly the light is sweet, and a
pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun: but let a man live
many days, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of
darkness, for they shall be many." Coleridge, why are we to live on
after all the strength and beauty of existence are gone, when all the
life of life is fled, as poor Burns expresses it? Tell Lloyd I have had
thoughts of turning Quaker, and have been reading, or am rather just
beginning to read, a most capital book, good thoughts in good language,
William Penn's "No Cross, no Crown;" I like it immensely. Unluckily I
went to one of his meetings, tell hire, in St. John Street, yesterday,
and saw a man under all the agitations and workings of a fanatic, who
believed himself under the influence of some "inevitable presence." This
cured me of Quakerism: I love it in the books of Penn and Woolman, but I
detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit, when what
he say