M. P.

William, my teacher, my friend! dear William and dear Dorothea!

Smooth out the folds of my letter, and place it on desk or on table;

Place it on table or desk; and your right hands loosely half-closing,

Gently sustain them in air, and extending the digit didactic,

Rest it a moment on each of the forks of the five-forkéd left hand,

Twice on the breadth of the thumb, and once on the tip of each finger;

Read with a nod of the head in a humouring recitativo;

And, as I live, you will see my hexameters hopping before you.

This is a galloping measure; a hop, and a trot, and a gallop!

All my hexameters fly, like stags pursued by the stag-hounds,

Breathless and panting, and ready to drop, yet flying still onwards,

I would full fain pull in my hard-mouthed runaway hunter;

But our English Spondeans are clumsy yet impotent curb-reins;

And so to make him go slowly, no way left have I but to lame him.

William, my head and my heart! dear Poet that feelest and thinkest!

Dorothy, eager of soul, my most affectionate sister!

Many a mile, O! many a wearisome mile are ye distant,

Long, long comfortless roads, with no one eye that doth know us.

O! it is all too far to send you mockeries idle:

Yea, and I feel it not right! But O! my friends, my beloved!

Feverish and wakeful I lie,— I am weary of feeling and thinking.

Every thought is worn down, I am weary yet cannot be vacant.

Five long hours have I tossed, rheumatic heats, dry and flushing,

Gnawing behind in my head, and wandering and throbbing about me,

Busy and tiresome, my friends, as the beat of the boding night-spider.

I forget the beginning of the line:

... my eyes are a burthen,

Now unwillingly closed, now open and aching with darkness.

O! what a life is the eye! what a strange and inscrutable essence!

Him that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms him;

Him that never beheld the swelling breast of his mother;

Him that smiled in his gladness as a babe that smiles in its slumber;

Even for him it exists, it moves and stirs in its prison;

Lives with a separate life, and‘ Is it a Spirit?’ he murmurs:

‘ Sure it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only a language.’