that (to my mind) it wants drawing together and fortifying in
the connections and associations ... which hang as loosely every here
and there, as those in a dream, and confound the reader who persists
in thinking himself awake.

How do you mean that I am 'lenient'? Do you not believe that I tell
you what I think, and as I think it? I may _think wrong_, to be
sure--but _that_ is not my fault:--and so there is no use reproaching
me generally, unless you can convict me definitely at the same
time:--is there, now?

And I have been reading and admiring these letters of Mr. Carlyle, and
receiving the greatest pleasure from them in every way. He is greatly
_himself always_--which is the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps.
And what his appreciation of you is, it is easy to see--and what he
expects from you--notwithstanding that prodigious advice of his, to
write your next work in prose! Also Mrs. Carlyle's letter--thank you
for letting me see it. I admire _that_ too! It is as ingenious 'a
case' against poor Keats, as could well be drawn--but nobody who knew
very deeply what poetry _is_, _could_, you know, draw any case against
him. A poet of the senses, he may be and is, just as she says--but
then it is of the senses idealized; and no dream in a 'store-room'
would ever be like the 'Eve of St. Agnes,' unless dreamed by some
'animosus infans,' like Keats himself. Still it is all true ... isn't
it?... what she observes of the want of thought as thought. He was a
_seer_ strictly speaking. And what noble oppositions--(to go back to
Carlyle's letters) ... he writes to the things you were speaking of
yesterday! These letters are as good as Milton's picture for
convicting and putting to shame. Is not the difference between the men
of our day and 'the giants which were on the earth,' less ... far less
... in the faculty ... in the gift, ... or in the general intellect,
... than in the stature of the soul itself? Our inferiority is not in
what we can do, but in what we are. We should write poems like Milton
if [we] lived them like Milton.

I write all this just to show, I suppose, that I am not industrious as
you did me the honour of apprehending that I was going to be ...
packing trunks perhaps ... or what else in the way of 'active
usefulness.'

Say how you are--will you? And do take care, and walk and do what is
good for you. I shall be able to see you twice before I go. And oh,
this going! Pray for me, dearest friend. May Go