ogether and 'conferred,' as they
say of manuscripts, before my face--I should not shrink and be
ashamed. Not that I always tell the truth as I see it--_but_ I _never
do_ speak falsely with intention and consciousness--never--and I do
not find that people of letters are sooner offended than others are,
by the truth told in gentleness;--I do not remember to have offended
anyone in this relation, and by these means. Well!--but _from me to
you_; it is all different, you know--you must know how different it
is. I can tell you truly what I think of this thing and of that thing
in your 'Duchess'--but I must of a necessity hesitate and fall into
misgiving of the adequacy of my truth, so called. To judge at all of a
work of yours, I must _look up to it_, and _far up_--because whatever
faculty _I_ have is included in your faculty, and with a great rim all
round it besides! And thus, it is not at all from an over-pleasure in
pleasing _you_, not at all from an inclination to depreciate myself,
that I speak and feel as I do and must on some occasions; it is simply
the consequence of a true comprehension of you and of me--and apart
from it, I should not be abler, I think, but less able, to assist you
in anything. I do wish you would consider all this reasonably, and
understand it as a third person would in a moment, and consent not to
spoil the real pleasure I have and am about to have in your poetry, by
nailing me up into a false position with your gold-headed nails of
chivalry, which won't hold to the wall through this summer. Now you
will not answer this?--you will only understand it and me--and that I
am not servile but sincere, but earnest, but meaning what I say--and
when I say I am afraid, you will believe that I am afraid; and when I
say I have misgivings, you will believe that I have misgivings--you
will _trust_ me so far, and give me liberty to breathe and feel
naturally ... according to my own nature. Probably, or certainly
rather, I have one advantage over you, ... one, of which women are not
fond of boasting--that of _being older by years_--for the 'Essay on
Mind,' which was the first poem published by me (and rather more
printed than published after all), the work of my earliest youth, half
childhood, half womanhood, was published in 1826 I see. And if I told
Mr. Kenyon not to let you see that book, it was not for the date, but
because Coleridge's daughter was right in calling it a mere 'girl's
exercise'; because it is j