holy tone--
Ay: when I have lit my lamp at night
She shall be present with my sprite:
And I will say, whate'er it be,
Every word she telleth me!

Now, is that taken from your book? No--but from _my_ book, which holds
my verses as I write them; and as I open it, I read that.

And speaking of verse--somebody gave me a few days ago that Mr.
Lowell's book you once mentioned to me. Anyone who 'admires' _you_
shall have my sympathy at once--even though he _do_ change the
laughing wine-_mark_ into a 'stain' in that perfectly beautiful
triplet--nor am I to be indifferent to his good word for myself
(though not very happily connected with the criticism on the epithet
in that 'Yorkshire Tragedy'--which has better things, by the
way--seeing that 'white boy,' in old language, meant just 'good boy,'
a general epithet, as Johnson notices in the life of Dryden, whom the
schoolmaster Busby was used to class with his 'white boys'--this is
hypercriticism, however). But these American books should not be
reprinted here--one asks, what and where is the class to which they
address themselves? for, no doubt, we have our congregations of
ignoramuses that enjoy the profoundest ignorance imaginable on the
subjects treated of; but _these_ are evidently not the audience Mr.
Lowell reckons on; rather, if one may trust the manner of his setting
to work, he would propound his doctrine to the class. Always to be
found, of spirits instructed up to a certain height and there
resting--vines that run up a prop and there tangle and grow to a
knot--which want supplying with fresh poles; so the provident man
brings his bundle into the grounds, and sticks them in laterally or
a-top of the others, as the case requires, and all the old stocks go
on growing again--but here, with us, whoever _wanted_ Chaucer, or
Chapman, or Ford, got him long ago--what else have Lamb, and
Coleridge, and Hazlitt and Hunt and so on to the end of their
generations ... what else been doing this many a year? What one
passage of all these, cited with the very air of a Columbus, but has
been known to all who know anything of poetry this many, many a year?
The others, who don't know anything, are the stocks that have got to
_shoot_, not climb higher--_compost_, they want in the first place!
Ford's and Crashaw's rival Nightingales--why they have been
dissertated on by Wordsworth and Coleridge, then by Lamb and Hazlitt,
then worked to death by Hunt, who printed them en