energy, and activity of mind
might perhaps have been made more and more quickly available for
good purposes in that than in any other career.

I am not familiar with all that Burns has written; I have read his
letters, and know most of his songs by heart. His passions were so
violent that he seems to me in that respect to have been rather a
subject for poetry than a poet; for though a poet should perhaps
have a strongly passionate nature, he should also have power enough
over it to be able to observe, describe, and, if I may so say,
experimentalize with it, as he would with the passions of others. I
think it would better qualify a man to be a poet to be able to
perceive rather than liable to feel violent passion or emotion. May
not such things be known of without absolute experience? What is
the use of the poetical imagination, that lower inspiration, which,
like the higher one of faith, is the "evidence of things not seen"?
Troubled and billowy waters reflect nothing distinctly on their
surface; it is the still, deep, placid element that gives back the
images by which it is surrounded or that pass over its surface. I
do not of course believe that a good man is necessarily a poet, but
I think a devout man is almost always a man with a poetical
imagination; he is familiar with ideas which are essentially
sublime, and in the act of adoration he springs to the source of
all beauty through the channel by which our spirits escape most
effectually from their chain, the flesh, and their prison-house,
the world, and rise into communion with that supreme excellence
from which they originally emanated and into whose bosom they will
return. I cannot now go into all I think about this, for I have so
many other things to talk about. Since I began this letter I have
heard a report that John is a prisoner, that he has been arrested
and sent to Madrid. Luckily I do not believe a word of this; if he
has rendered himself obnoxious to the British authorities in
Gibraltar they may have locked him up for a week or two there, and
I see no great harm in that; but that he should have been delivered
to the Spaniards and sent to Madrid I do not believe, because I
know that the whole revolutionary party is going to pieces, and
that they have neither the power nor the means to