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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of P.’s Correspondence, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: P.’s Correspondence
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9230]
+[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK P.’S CORRESPONDENCE ***
+
+
+
+
+P.’s Correspondence
+
+by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+
+
+My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the
+interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The
+past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often
+productive of curious results, and which will be better understood
+after the perusal of the following letter than from any description
+that I could give. The poor fellow, without once stirring from the
+little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his first
+paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
+wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible
+to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a
+delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the
+imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that
+he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less
+distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of
+illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based
+upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not
+a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of
+correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend
+from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious
+pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after
+literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful effort to
+achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after missing his object
+while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to have
+stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
+
+LONDON, February 29, 1845.
+
+
+MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing
+tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and
+consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind’s
+strongest architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me
+whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with all
+the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in my
+hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of
+Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the world’s
+metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which,
+whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,—with all this
+positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you
+think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why,—would you believe it?—that
+all this time I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little
+chamber,—that whitewashed little chamber,—that little chamber with its
+one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste
+or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars,—that same
+little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought
+you to visit me! Will no length of time or breadth of space enfranchise
+me from that unlovely abode? I travel; but it seems to be like the
+snail, with my house upon my head. Ah, well! I am verging, I suppose,
+on that period of life when present scenes and events make but feeble
+impressions in comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile
+myself to be more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me
+hop about a little with her chain around my leg.
+
+My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me
+to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who, until
+now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse
+as the wits of Queen Anne’s time or Ben Jenson’s compotators at the
+Mermaid. One of the first of which I availed myself was the letter to
+Lord Byron. I found his lordship looking much older than I had
+anticipated, although, considering his former irregularities of life
+and the various wear and tear of his constitution, not older than a man
+on the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his
+earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet’s spiritual
+immortality. He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and
+extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is
+concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having
+increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat,—so fat as to give the
+impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and without
+sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the great mass of
+corporeal substance which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the
+mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to be
+Byron, you murmur within yourself, “For Heaven’s sake, where is he?”
+Were I disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly
+matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and
+carnal vices which unspiritualize man’s nature and clog up his avenues
+of communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh;
+and, besides, Lord Byron’s morals have been improving while his outward
+man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he
+were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet
+it was so puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel as if I
+had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
+
+On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me, on
+the sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had taken up
+its constant residence in his right foot, which accordingly was swathed
+in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion. The other foot
+was hidden in the drapery of his chair. Do you recollect whether
+Byron’s right or left foot was the deformed one.
+
+The noble poet’s reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are
+aware, of ten years’ standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured, any
+symptom of breach or fracture. They are said to be, if not a happy, at
+least a contented, or at all events a quiet couple, descending the
+slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual support which will
+enable them to come easily and comfortably to the bottom. It is
+pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has redeemed his youthful
+errors in this particular. Her ladyship’s influence, it rejoices me to
+add, has been productive of the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a
+religious point of view. He now combines the most rigid tenets of
+Methodism with the ultra doctrines of the Puseyites; the former being
+perhaps due to the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble
+consort, while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque
+illumination demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever
+expenditure his increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is
+bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of worship; and
+this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonyme of the foul
+fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the
+metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising
+conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of Lords
+or in private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the mischievous
+and anarchical notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit
+similar sins in other people with the sincerest vengeance which his
+somewhat blunted pen is capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on
+the most intimate terms. You are aware that, some little time before
+the death of Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but reprehensible man
+to be evicted from his house. Moore took the insult so much to heart
+that, it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of illness
+which brought him to the grave. Others pretend that the lyrist died in
+a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred melodies, and
+expressing his belief that it would be heard within the gate of
+paradise, and gain him instant and honorable admittance. I wish he may
+have found it so.
+
+I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with
+Lord Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by
+allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan,
+which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My words,
+whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the enthusiasm of one
+worthy to discourse of immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that
+they did not go precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that
+there was some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with
+myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own
+heart to the gifted author’s ear, the echo of those strains that have
+resounded throughout the world. But by and by the secret peeped quietly
+out. Byron,—I have the information from his own lips, so that you need
+not hesitate to repeat it in literary circles,—Byron is preparing a new
+edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and
+amended, in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals,
+politics, and religion. It so happened that the very passages of
+highest inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and
+rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of
+oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his passions
+having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and riotous flame has
+deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which he not merely wrote,
+but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written. Positively
+he no longer understands his own poetry.
+
+This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few
+specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious,
+whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever
+morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails
+settled constitutions of government or systems of society, whatever
+could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a
+republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its
+place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his lordship’s later style.
+You may judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto published. The
+result is not so good as might be wished; in plain terms, it is a very
+sad affair indeed; for, though the torches kindled in Tophet have been
+extinguished, they leave an abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by
+no glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that
+this attempt on Lord Byron’s part to atone for his youthful errors will
+at length induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
+concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen’s statue of the poet its due niche in
+the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when brought from Greece,
+were denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.
+
+What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to talk about
+burying the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and incased in
+a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the truth, a prodigiously fat
+man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in the very
+extravagance of his mortal system I find something akin to the
+immateriality of a ghost. And then that ridiculous old story darted
+into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty
+years ago. More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of
+shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to
+attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of
+it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more
+substantial.
+
+Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns—now, if I
+mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year—happens to be making a visit to
+London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of grasping him by
+the hand. For upwards of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet
+cottage in Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither
+now by the irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in
+England. They wish to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday by a festival.
+It will be the greatest literary triumph on record. Pray Heaven the
+little spirit of life within the aged bard’s bosom may not be
+extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have already had the honor
+of an introduction to him at the British Museum, where he was examining
+a collection of his own unpublished letters, interspersed with songs,
+which have escaped the notice of all his biographers.
+
+Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of? How should Burns have been
+embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man?
+
+The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend, nor
+the less so that it is much bent by the burden of time. His white hair
+floats like a snowdrift around his face, in which are seen the furrows
+of intellect and passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that
+have foamed themselves away. The old gentleman is in excellent
+preservation, considering his time of life. He has that crickety sort
+of liveliness,—I mean the cricket’s humor of chirping for any cause or
+none,—which is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme
+old age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we
+perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was
+surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart and
+brilliant imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving
+only a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing
+upward and laughing all by itself. He is no longer capable of pathos.
+At the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song
+to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those verses,
+so profoundly true and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the
+scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch of it did
+partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes and
+his voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly
+knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah, he must not think again of Mary in
+Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of time and ascend to
+meet her there.
+
+Burns then began to repeat Tan O’Shanter; but was so tickled with its
+wit and humor—of which, however, I suspect he had but a traditionary
+sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded
+by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a
+close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a
+satisfactory idea, however, that the last forty years of the peasant
+poet’s life have been passed in competence and perfect comfort. Having
+been cured of his bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as
+attentive to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now
+considered to be quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I
+suppose, is worth having lived so long for.
+
+I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in regard
+to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say,
+remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless
+paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler attributes of
+which the body is the instrument. And thus he vegetates from day to day
+and from year to year at that splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which
+grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the great romancer’s
+tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether
+in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing,
+although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in
+his library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating
+tales to an amanuensis,—to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not
+deemed worth any one’s trouble now to take down what flows from that
+once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and
+capable of being coined. Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him,
+assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,—a striking
+combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of character, such as
+no other man alive could have bit off,—a glimmer from that ruined mind,
+as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom
+of an ancient ball. But the plots of these romances become inextricably
+confused; the characters melt into one another; and the tale loses
+itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and marshy
+ground.
+
+For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his
+consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It
+was good that he should forget his fame rather than that fame should
+first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a
+one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same
+position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest
+purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he was
+qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present generation
+even what Scott has been to the past? I had expectations from a young
+man,—one Dickens,—who published a few magazine articles, very rich in
+humor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow
+died shortly after commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I
+think, the Pickwick Papers. Not impossibly the world has lost more than
+it dreams of by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.
+
+Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other day? You would not hit
+it in ten guesses. Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte, or all
+that is now left of him,—that is to say, the skin, bones, and corporeal
+substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white breeches, and small
+sword, which are still known by his redoubtable name. He was attended
+only by two policemen, who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the
+old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty in regard to him except to
+see that none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of
+thee star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody save myself so much as turned
+to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive
+to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike
+spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought
+upon our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating the magic
+influence of a great renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in
+the decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers,—buried
+beneath his own mortality,—and lacking even the qualities of sense that
+enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eye of
+the world. This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long
+endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age,—for he is now
+above seventy,—has reduced Bonaparte. The British government has acted
+shrewdly in retransporting him from St. Helena to England. They should
+now restore him to Paris, and there let him once again review the
+relics of his armies. His eye is dull and rheumy; his nether lip hung
+down upon his chin. While I was observing him there chanced to be a
+little extra bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Caesar and
+Hannibal,—the great captain who had veiled the world in battle-smoke
+and tracked it round with bloody footsteps,—was seized with a nervous
+trembling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked
+and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside,
+and, patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him away.
+
+Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt! or I fling my
+inkstand at your head. Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake. Pray, my dear
+friend, pardon this little outbreak. The fact is, the mention of those
+two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte, had called up the idea
+of that odious wretch—you remember him well—who was pleased to take
+such gratuitous and impertinent care of my person before I quitted New
+England. Forthwith up rose before my mind’s eye that same little
+whitewashed room, with the iron-grated window,—strange that it should
+have been iron-grated!—where, in too easy compliance with the absurd
+wishes of my relatives, I have wasted several good years of my life.
+Positively it seemed to me that I was still sitting there, and that the
+keeper—not that he ever was my keeper neither, but only a kind of
+intrusive devil of a body-servant—had just peeped in at the door. The
+rascal! I owe him an old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet.
+Fie! fie! The mere thought of him has exceedingly discomposed me. Even
+now that hateful chamber—the iron-grated window, which blasted the
+blessed sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes and made it poison
+to my soul-looks more distinct to my view than does this my comfortable
+apartment in the heart of London. The reality—that which I know to be
+such—hangs like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably
+prominent illusion. Let us think of it no more.
+
+You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what is known
+to all the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years past
+been reconciled to the Church of England. In his more recent works he
+has applied his fine powers to the vindication of the Christian faith,
+with an especial view to that particular development. Latterly, as you
+may not have heard, he has taken orders, and been inducted to a small
+country living in the gift of the Lord Chancellor. Just now, luckily
+for me, he has come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of
+a volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of
+Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles. On my first
+introduction I felt no little embarrassment as to the manner of
+combining what I had to say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt
+of Islam_, and _Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might
+be acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
+Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my ease. Standing
+where he now does, and reviewing all his successive productions from a
+higher point, he assures me that there is a harmony, an order, a
+regular procession, which enables him to lay his hand upon any one of
+the earlier poems and say, “This is my work,” with precisely the same
+complacency of conscience wherewithal he contemplates the volume of
+discourses above mentioned. They are like the successive steps of a
+staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential
+to the support of the whole as the highest and final one resting upon
+the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask him what
+would have been his fate had he perished on the lower steps of his
+staircase, instead of building his way aloft into the celestial
+brightness.
+
+How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly care,
+so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has, from a lower
+region to a loftier one. Without touching upon their religious merits,
+I consider the productions of his maturity superior, as poems, to those
+of his youth. They are warmer with human love, which has served as an
+interpreter between his mind and the multitude. The author has learned
+to dip his pen oftener into his heart, and has thereby avoided the
+faults into which a too exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont
+to betray him. Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete
+arrangement of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they
+were brilliant. Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
+heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character Shelley
+can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate than his
+friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous night when
+he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,—sheer nonsense!
+What, am I babbling about? I was thinking of that old figment of his
+being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed ashore near Via Reggio,
+and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and
+frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a flame of
+marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet’s heart, and that
+his fire-purified relics were finally buried near his child in Roman
+earth. If all this happened three-and-twenty years ago, how could I
+have met the drowned and burned and buried man here in London only
+yesterday?
+
+Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber,
+heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in
+England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They appeared to be on
+terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint poem in
+contemplation. What a strange, incongruous dream is the life of man!
+
+Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel. It will be
+issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present
+publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
+affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser stop,
+to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from his
+lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his accumulation of
+ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth died only a week or
+two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and grant that he may not have completed
+_The Excursion_! Methinks I am sick of everything he wrote, except his
+_Laodamia_. It is very sad, this inconstancy of the mind to the poets
+whom it once worshipped. Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with
+his usual diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of
+age, and with most pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow
+intellect the Devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such a
+man the privilege of growing old and infirm. It takes away our
+speculative license of kicking him.
+
+Keats? No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with
+coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and divers
+other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and slender
+figure and my eager glance. I would fain have met him on the sea-shore,
+or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the Gothic arch of an old
+cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a glimmering fireside on the
+verge of evening, or at the twilight entrance of a cave, into the
+dreamy depths of which he would have led me by the hand; anywhere, in
+short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted out by the
+porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I stood and watched him
+fading away, fading away along the pavement, and could hardly tell
+whether he were an actual man or a thought that had slipped out of my
+mind and clothed itself in human form and habiliments merely to beguile
+me. At one moment he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it,
+I am almost certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything so
+fragile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the
+effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on
+his Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him
+to the grave. Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
+sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
+never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly
+think him a great poet. The burden of a mighty genius would never have
+been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so
+infirmly sensitive. Great poets should have iron sinews.
+
+Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the world,
+is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of an epic
+poem. Some passages of it have been communicated to the inner circle of
+his admirers, and impressed them as the loftiest strains that have been
+audible on earth since Milton’s days. If I can obtain copies of these
+specimens, I will ask you to present them to James Russell Lowell, who
+seems to be one of the poet’s most fervent and worthiest worshippers.
+The information took me by surprise. I had supposed that all Keats’s
+poetic incense, without being embodied in human language, floated up to
+heaven and mingled with the songs of the immortal choristers, who
+perhaps were conscious of an unknown voice among them, and thought
+their melody the sweeter for it. But it is not so; he has positively
+written a poem on the subject of _Paradise Regained_, though in another
+sense than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton. In
+compliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend
+that all epic possibilities in the past history of the world are
+exhausted, Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely
+remote futurity. He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances of
+the time-long warfare between good and evil. Our race is on the eve of
+its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of perfection; Woman,
+redeemed from the thraldom against which our sibyl uplifts so powerful
+and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his side or communes for
+herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing with her children’s
+happier state, has clothed herself in such luxuriant and loving beauty
+as no eye ever witnessed since our first parents saw the sun rise over
+dewy Eden. Nor then indeed; for this is the fulfilment of what was then
+but a golden promise. But the picture has its shadows. There remains to
+mankind another peril,—a last encounter with the evil principle. Should
+the battle go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of
+ages. If we triumph—But it demands a poet’s eye to contemplate the
+splendor of such a consummation and not to be dazzled.
+
+To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender a
+spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm interest of
+a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so high a theme.
+Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation of his friends;
+for I have not read or heard even a single line of the performance in
+question. Keats, I am told, withholds it from the press, under an idea
+that the age has not enough of spiritual insight to receive it
+worthily. I do not like this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet.
+The universe is waiting to respond to the highest word that the best
+child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is
+because he mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and
+foreign to the purpose.
+
+I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you
+know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me. Time
+blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order
+of intellect. Then I stepped into the lower House and listened to a few
+words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or
+rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods. The men whom
+I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are
+not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the long
+grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who
+made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter, clatter,
+clatter, when the sexton’s spade disturbs them. Were it only possible
+to find out who are alive and who dead, it would contribute infinitely
+to my peace of mind. Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me
+in the face whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men,
+and trusted nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him.
+For instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose
+before me, in the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the bodily presence of the
+elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken fit or
+other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary now. His
+powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the
+ghost of the Danish king.
+
+In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among
+them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
+profile—for I did not see her front face—that stamped itself into my
+brain as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with which she
+took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother,
+John Kemble, sat behind,—a broken-down figure, but still with a kingly
+majesty about him. In lieu of all former achievements, Nature enables
+him to look the part of Lear far better than in the meridian of his
+genius. Charles Matthews was likewise there; but a paralytic affection
+has distorted his once mobile countenance into a most disagreeable
+one-sidedness, from which he could no more wrench it into proper form
+than he could rearrange the face of the great globe itself. It looks as
+if, for the joke’s sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
+expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could
+contrive, and at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself so
+hideous, an avenging Providence had seen fit to petrify him. Since it
+is out of his own power, I would gladly assist him to change
+countenance, for his ugly visage haunts me both at noontide and
+night-time. Some other players of the past generation were present, but
+none that greatly interested me. It behooves actors, more than all
+other men of publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes. Being at best
+but painted shadows flickering on the wall and empty sounds that echo
+anther’s thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin to
+fade and the voice to croak with age.
+
+What is there new in the literary way on your side of the water?
+Nothing of the kind has come under any inspection, except a volume of
+poems published above a year ago by Dr. Channing. I did not before know
+that this eminent writer is a poet; nor does the volume alluded to
+exhibit any of the characteristics of the author’s mind as displayed in
+his prose works; although some of the poems have a richness that is not
+merely of the surface, but glows still the brighter the deeper and more
+faithfully you look into then. They seem carelessly wrought, however,
+like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude,
+native manufacture, which are found among the gold-dust from Africa. I
+doubt whether the American public will accept them; it looks less to
+the assay of metal than to the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly
+our literature grows up! Most of our writers of promise have come to
+untimely ends. There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned
+my boyish brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else
+he never could keep himself so quiet. Bryant has gone to his last
+sleep, with the _Thanatopsis_ gleaming over him like a sculptured
+marble sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer verses
+in the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called _Fanny_, is
+defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the metempsychosis
+as a man of business. Somewhat later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker
+youth, to whom the muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and
+who got himself lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I
+remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who
+scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and
+perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of
+Gottingen. Willis—what a pity!—was lost, if I recollect rightly, in
+1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going to give us sketches
+of the world’s sunny face. If these had lived, they might, one or all
+of them, have grown to be famous men.
+
+And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died. I
+was myself a young man of promise. O shattered brain, O broken spirit,
+where is the fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is, that, when
+fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest
+mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world’s hopes to scorn,
+it lets them live. Let me die upon this apothegm, for I shall never
+make a truer one.
+
+What a strange substance is the human brain! Or rather,—for there is no
+need of generalizing the remark,—what an odd brain is mine! Would you
+believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry humming in my
+intellectual ear—some as airy as birdnotes, and some as delicately neat
+as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-peals—that seem just such
+verses as those departed poets would have written had not an inexorable
+destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit,
+perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis of their
+posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown that they
+have forfeited by going hence too early. But I have my own business to
+attend to; and besides, a medical gentleman, who interests himself in
+some little ailments of mine, advises me not to make too free use of
+pen and ink. There are clerks enough out of employment who would be
+glad of such a job.
+
+Good by! Are you alive or dead? and what are you about? Still
+scribbling for the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and
+proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever?
+It is too bad. Let every man manufacture his own nonsense, say I.
+Expect me home soon, and—to whisper you a secret—in company with the
+poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming and enjoy the shadow of
+the laurels that he planted there. Campbell is now an old man. He calls
+himself well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale,
+and so shadow-like that one might almost poke a finger through his
+densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim and
+forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.
+
+Your true friend, P.
+
+
+P. S.—Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and
+revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
+
+It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a
+double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press at
+Philadelphia. Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic
+reputation on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?
+Unconscionable man! Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his century. And
+does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas with
+machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-engine, as being the
+nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can boast? How can he expect
+ever to rise again, if, while just sinking into his grave, he persists
+in burdening himself with such a ponderosity of leaden verses?
+
+
+
+
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of P.’s Correspondence, by Nathaniel Hawthorne</div>
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+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: P.’s Correspondence</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9230]<br />
+[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
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+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK P.’S CORRESPONDENCE ***</div>
+
+<h1>P.’s Correspondence</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Nathaniel Hawthorne</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p>
+My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the interposition
+of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The past and present are
+jumbled together in his mind in a manner often productive of curious results,
+and which will be better understood after the perusal of the following letter
+than from any description that I could give. The poor fellow, without once
+stirring from the little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in
+his first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
+wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible to any
+eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a delusion as a partly
+wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease
+has imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and
+characters with no less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with
+somewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession,
+some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses
+not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence,
+which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a world
+of moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye.
+P. had always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more than one
+unsuccessful effort to achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after
+missing his object while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to
+have stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+LONDON, February 29, 1845.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing tenacity.
+Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and consolidates itself into
+almost as material an entity as mankind’s strongest architecture. It is
+sometimes a serious question with me whether ideas be not really visible and
+tangible, and endowed with all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do
+at this moment in my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which
+hangs a print of Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the world’s
+metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which,
+whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,&mdash;with all this
+positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you think, is
+just now perplexing my brain? Why,&mdash;would you believe it?&mdash;that all
+this time I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber,&mdash;that
+whitewashed little chamber,&mdash;that little chamber with its one small
+window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, my
+landlord had placed a row of iron bars,&mdash;that same little chamber, in
+short, whither your kindness has so often brought you to visit me! Will no
+length of time or breadth of space enfranchise me from that unlovely abode? I
+travel; but it seems to be like the snail, with my house upon my head. Ah,
+well! I am verging, I suppose, on that period of life when present scenes and
+events make but feeble impressions in comparison with those of yore; so that I
+must reconcile myself to be more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely
+lets me hop about a little with her chain around my leg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me to make
+the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who, until now, have
+seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse as the wits of
+Queen Anne’s time or Ben Jenson’s compotators at the Mermaid. One of the first
+of which I availed myself was the letter to Lord Byron. I found his lordship
+looking much older than I had anticipated, although, considering his former
+irregularities of life and the various wear and tear of his constitution, not
+older than a man on the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested
+his earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet’s spiritual immortality. He
+wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and extending down over his
+forehead. The expression of his eyes is concealed by spectacles. His early
+tendency to obesity having increased, Lord Byron is now enormously
+fat,&mdash;so fat as to give the impression of a person quite overladen with
+his own flesh, and without sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life
+through the great mass of corporeal substance which weighs upon him so cruelly.
+You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to
+be Byron, you murmur within yourself, “For Heaven’s sake, where is he?” Were I
+disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the
+symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices which
+unspiritualize man’s nature and clog up his avenues of communication with the
+better life. But this would be too harsh; and, besides, Lord Byron’s morals
+have been improving while his outward man has swollen to such unconscionable
+circumference. Would that he were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to
+present his hand, yet it was so puffed out with alien substance that I could
+not feel as if I had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me, on the
+sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had taken up its constant
+residence in his right foot, which accordingly was swathed in many rolls of
+flannel and deposited upon a cushion. The other foot was hidden in the drapery
+of his chair. Do you recollect whether Byron’s right or left foot was the
+deformed one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The noble poet’s reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are aware, of
+ten years’ standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured, any symptom of breach
+or fracture. They are said to be, if not a happy, at least a contented, or at
+all events a quiet couple, descending the slope of life with that tolerable
+degree of mutual support which will enable them to come easily and comfortably
+to the bottom. It is pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has redeemed his
+youthful errors in this particular. Her ladyship’s influence, it rejoices me to
+add, has been productive of the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a religious
+point of view. He now combines the most rigid tenets of Methodism with the
+ultra doctrines of the Puseyites; the former being perhaps due to the
+convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble consort, while the latter are
+the embroidery and picturesque illumination demanded by his imaginative
+character. Much of whatever expenditure his increasing habits of thrift
+continue to allow him is bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of
+worship; and this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonyme of the
+foul fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the
+metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising
+conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of Lords or in
+private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the mischievous and anarchical
+notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit similar sins in other
+people with the sincerest vengeance which his somewhat blunted pen is capable
+of inflicting. Southey and he are on the most intimate terms. You are aware
+that, some little time before the death of Moore, Byron caused that brilliant
+but reprehensible man to be evicted from his house. Moore took the insult so
+much to heart that, it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of
+illness which brought him to the grave. Others pretend that the lyrist died in
+a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred melodies, and
+expressing his belief that it would be heard within the gate of paradise, and
+gain him instant and honorable admittance. I wish he may have found it so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with Lord
+Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by allusions to passages
+in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan, which have made so large a portion
+of the music of my life. My words, whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm
+with the enthusiasm of one worthy to discourse of immortal poesy. It was
+evident, however, that they did not go precisely to the right spot. I could
+perceive that there was some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with
+myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own heart to
+the gifted author’s ear, the echo of those strains that have resounded
+throughout the world. But by and by the secret peeped quietly out.
+Byron,&mdash;I have the information from his own lips, so that you need not
+hesitate to repeat it in literary circles,&mdash;Byron is preparing a new
+edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and amended, in
+accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics, and religion. It
+so happened that the very passages of highest inspiration to which I had
+alluded were among the condemned and rejected rubbish which it is his purpose
+to cast into the gulf of oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me
+that his passions having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and riotous
+flame has deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which he not merely wrote,
+but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written. Positively he no
+longer understands his own poetry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few specimens
+of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious, whatever
+disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever morbidly
+melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails settled constitutions
+of government or systems of society, whatever could wound the sensibility of
+any mortal, except a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter, has been
+unrelentingly blotted out, and its place supplied by unexceptionable verses in
+his lordship’s later style. You may judge how much of the poem remains as
+hitherto published. The result is not so good as might be wished; in plain
+terms, it is a very sad affair indeed; for, though the torches kindled in
+Tophet have been extinguished, they leave an abominably ill odor, and are
+succeeded by no glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless,
+that this attempt on Lord Byron’s part to atone for his youthful errors will at
+length induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is concerned, to
+allow Thorwaldsen’s statue of the poet its due niche in the grand old Abbey.
+His bones, you know, when brought from Greece, were denied sepulture among
+those of his tuneful brethren there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to talk about burying
+the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and incased in a big, round
+bulk of flesh! But, to say the truth, a prodigiously fat man always impresses
+me as a kind of hobgoblin; in the very extravagance of his mortal system I find
+something akin to the immateriality of a ghost. And then that ridiculous old
+story darted into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, above
+twenty years ago. More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of
+shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to attempt a
+distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of it. If there be any
+difference, the former are rather the more substantial.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns&mdash;now, if I
+mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year&mdash;happens to be making a visit to
+London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of grasping him by the
+hand. For upwards of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet cottage in
+Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither now by the
+irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in England. They wish to
+celebrate the patriarch’s birthday by a festival. It will be the greatest
+literary triumph on record. Pray Heaven the little spirit of life within the
+aged bard’s bosom may not be extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have
+already had the honor of an introduction to him at the British Museum, where he
+was examining a collection of his own unpublished letters, interspersed with
+songs, which have escaped the notice of all his biographers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of? How should Burns have been embalmed in
+biography when he is still a hearty old man?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend, nor the less
+so that it is much bent by the burden of time. His white hair floats like a
+snowdrift around his face, in which are seen the furrows of intellect and
+passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that have foamed themselves
+away. The old gentleman is in excellent preservation, considering his time of
+life. He has that crickety sort of liveliness,&mdash;I mean the cricket’s humor
+of chirping for any cause or none,&mdash;which is perhaps the most favorable
+mood that can befall extreme old age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for
+ourselves, although we perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of
+others. I was surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart
+and brilliant imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving only
+a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing upward and
+laughing all by itself. He is no longer capable of pathos. At the request of
+Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song to Mary in Heaven; but it
+was evident that the feeling of those verses, so profoundly true and so simply
+expressed, was entirely beyond the scope of his present sensibilities; and,
+when a touch of it did partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into
+his eyes and his voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but
+indistinctly knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah, he must not think again of Mary
+in Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of time and ascend to meet her
+there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Burns then began to repeat Tan O’Shanter; but was so tickled with its wit and
+humor&mdash;of which, however, I suspect he had but a traditionary
+sense&mdash;that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded by
+a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a close. On the
+whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a satisfactory idea,
+however, that the last forty years of the peasant poet’s life have been passed
+in competence and perfect comfort. Having been cured of his bardic improvidence
+for many a day past, and grown as attentive to the main chance as a canny
+Scotsman should be, he is now considered to be quite well off as to pecuniary
+circumstances. This, I suppose, is worth having lived so long for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in regard to the
+health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say, remains the same
+as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless paralytic, palsied not more in
+body than in those nobler attributes of which the body is the instrument. And
+thus he vegetates from day to day and from year to year at that splendid
+fantasy of Abbotsford, which grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the
+great romancer’s tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect.
+Whether in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing,
+although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in his
+library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales to an
+amanuensis,&mdash;to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not deemed worth any
+one’s trouble now to take down what flows from that once brilliant fancy, every
+image of which was formerly worth gold and capable of being coined. Yet
+Cunningham, who has lately seen him, assures me that there is now and then a
+touch of the genius,&mdash;a striking combination of incident, or a picturesque
+trait of character, such as no other man alive could have bit off,&mdash;a
+glimmer from that ruined mind, as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a
+half-rusted helmet in the gloom of an ancient ball. But the plots of these
+romances become inextricably confused; the characters melt into one another;
+and the tale loses itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and
+marshy ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his
+consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It was good
+that he should forget his fame rather than that fame should first have
+forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a one as ever, he could
+no longer maintain anything like the same position in literature. The world,
+nowadays, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and
+homelier truth than he was qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the
+present generation even what Scott has been to the past? I had expectations
+from a young man,&mdash;one Dickens,&mdash;who published a few magazine
+articles, very rich in humor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos; but
+the poor fellow died shortly after commencing an odd series of sketches,
+entitled, I think, the Pickwick Papers. Not impossibly the world has lost more
+than it dreams of by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other day? You would not hit it in ten
+guesses. Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte, or all that is now left of
+him,&mdash;that is to say, the skin, bones, and corporeal substance, little
+cocked hat, green coat, white breeches, and small sword, which are still known
+by his redoubtable name. He was attended only by two policemen, who walked
+quietly behind the phantasm of the old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty in
+regard to him except to see that none of the light-fingered gentry should
+possess themselves of thee star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody save myself so
+much as turned to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even I
+contrive to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike
+spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought upon
+our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating the magic influence of a
+great renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in the decline, the
+overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers,&mdash;buried beneath his own
+mortality,&mdash;and lacking even the qualities of sense that enable the most
+ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eye of the world. This is the
+state to which disease, aggravated by long endurance of a tropical climate, and
+assisted by old age,&mdash;for he is now above seventy,&mdash;has reduced
+Bonaparte. The British government has acted shrewdly in retransporting him from
+St. Helena to England. They should now restore him to Paris, and there let him
+once again review the relics of his armies. His eye is dull and rheumy; his
+nether lip hung down upon his chin. While I was observing him there chanced to
+be a little extra bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Caesar and
+Hannibal,&mdash;the great captain who had veiled the world in battle-smoke and
+tracked it round with bloody footsteps,&mdash;was seized with a nervous
+trembling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked and
+dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside, and, patting
+Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt! or I fling my
+inkstand at your head. Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake. Pray, my dear friend,
+pardon this little outbreak. The fact is, the mention of those two policemen,
+and their custody of Bonaparte, had called up the idea of that odious
+wretch&mdash;you remember him well&mdash;who was pleased to take such
+gratuitous and impertinent care of my person before I quitted New England.
+Forthwith up rose before my mind’s eye that same little whitewashed room, with
+the iron-grated window,&mdash;strange that it should have been
+iron-grated!&mdash;where, in too easy compliance with the absurd wishes of my
+relatives, I have wasted several good years of my life. Positively it seemed to
+me that I was still sitting there, and that the keeper&mdash;not that he ever
+was my keeper neither, but only a kind of intrusive devil of a
+body-servant&mdash;had just peeped in at the door. The rascal! I owe him an old
+grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet. Fie! fie! The mere thought of him
+has exceedingly discomposed me. Even now that hateful chamber&mdash;the
+iron-grated window, which blasted the blessed sunshine as it fell through the
+dusty panes and made it poison to my soul-looks more distinct to my view than
+does this my comfortable apartment in the heart of London. The
+reality&mdash;that which I know to be such&mdash;hangs like remnants of
+tattered scenery over the intolerably prominent illusion. Let us think of it no
+more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what is known to all
+the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years past been reconciled to
+the Church of England. In his more recent works he has applied his fine powers
+to the vindication of the Christian faith, with an especial view to that
+particular development. Latterly, as you may not have heard, he has taken
+orders, and been inducted to a small country living in the gift of the Lord
+Chancellor. Just now, luckily for me, he has come to the metropolis to
+superintend the publication of a volume of discourses treating of the
+poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine
+Articles. On my first introduction I felt no little embarrassment as to the
+manner of combining what I had to say to the author of <i>Queen Mali</i>, the
+<i>Revolt of Islam</i>, and <i>Prometheus Unbound</i> with such acknowledgments
+as might be acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
+Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my ease. Standing where he
+now does, and reviewing all his successive productions from a higher point, he
+assures me that there is a harmony, an order, a regular procession, which
+enables him to lay his hand upon any one of the earlier poems and say, “This is
+my work,” with precisely the same complacency of conscience wherewithal he
+contemplates the volume of discourses above mentioned. They are like the
+successive steps of a staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is
+as essential to the support of the whole as the highest and final one resting
+upon the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask him what would
+have been his fate had he perished on the lower steps of his staircase, instead
+of building his way aloft into the celestial brightness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly care, so long
+as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has, from a lower region to a
+loftier one. Without touching upon their religious merits, I consider the
+productions of his maturity superior, as poems, to those of his youth. They are
+warmer with human love, which has served as an interpreter between his mind and
+the multitude. The author has learned to dip his pen oftener into his heart,
+and has thereby avoided the faults into which a too exclusive use of fancy and
+intellect are wont to betray him. Formerly his page was often little other than
+a concrete arrangement of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they
+were brilliant. Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
+heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character Shelley can
+hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate than his friends always
+represented him to be up to that disastrous night when he was drowned in the
+Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,&mdash;sheer nonsense! What, am I babbling
+about? I was thinking of that old figment of his being lost in the Bay of
+Spezzia, and washed ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a funeral
+pyre, with wine, and spices, and frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach
+and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet’s
+heart, and that his fire-purified relics were finally buried near his child in
+Roman earth. If all this happened three-and-twenty years ago, how could I have
+met the drowned and burned and buried man here in London only yesterday?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber, heretofore
+Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in England, called on
+Shelley while I was with him. They appeared to be on terms of very cordial
+intimacy, and are said to have a joint poem in contemplation. What a strange,
+incongruous dream is the life of man!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel. It will be issued entire
+by old John Murray in the course of the present publishing season. The poet, I
+hear, is visited with a troublesome affection of the tongue, which has put a
+period, or some lesser stop, to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been
+flowing from his lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his
+accumulation of ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth died only a
+week or two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and grant that he may not have completed
+<i>The Excursion</i>! Methinks I am sick of everything he wrote, except his
+<i>Laodamia</i>. It is very sad, this inconstancy of the mind to the poets whom
+it once worshipped. Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with his usual
+diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of age, and with most
+pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow intellect the Devil had gifted
+him withal. One hates to allow such a man the privilege of growing old and
+infirm. It takes away our speculative license of kicking him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Keats? No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with coaches,
+drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and divers other sensual
+obstructions intervening betwixt his small and slender figure and my eager
+glance. I would fain have met him on the sea-shore, or beneath a natural arch
+of forest trees, or the Gothic arch of an old cathedral, or among Grecian
+ruins, or at a glimmering fireside on the verge of evening, or at the twilight
+entrance of a cave, into the dreamy depths of which he would have led me by the
+hand; anywhere, in short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted
+out by the porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I stood and watched
+him fading away, fading away along the pavement, and could hardly tell whether
+he were an actual man or a thought that had slipped out of my mind and clothed
+itself in human form and habiliments merely to beguile me. At one moment he put
+his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it, I am almost certain, stained
+with blood. You never saw anything so fragile as his person. The truth is,
+Keats has all his life felt the effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs
+caused by the article on his Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so
+nearly brought him to the grave. Ever since he has glided about the world like
+a ghost, sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
+never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly think him a
+great poet. The burden of a mighty genius would never have been imposed upon
+shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so infirmly sensitive. Great poets
+should have iron sinews.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the world, is
+understood to have devoted himself to the composition of an epic poem. Some
+passages of it have been communicated to the inner circle of his admirers, and
+impressed them as the loftiest strains that have been audible on earth since
+Milton’s days. If I can obtain copies of these specimens, I will ask you to
+present them to James Russell Lowell, who seems to be one of the poet’s most
+fervent and worthiest worshippers. The information took me by surprise. I had
+supposed that all Keats’s poetic incense, without being embodied in human
+language, floated up to heaven and mingled with the songs of the immortal
+choristers, who perhaps were conscious of an unknown voice among them, and
+thought their melody the sweeter for it. But it is not so; he has positively
+written a poem on the subject of <i>Paradise Regained</i>, though in another
+sense than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton. In compliance, it
+may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend that all epic
+possibilities in the past history of the world are exhausted, Keats has thrown
+his poem forward into an indefinitely remote futurity. He pictures mankind amid
+the closing circumstances of the time-long warfare between good and evil. Our
+race is on the eve of its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of
+perfection; Woman, redeemed from the thraldom against which our sibyl uplifts
+so powerful and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his side or communes for
+herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing with her children’s happier state,
+has clothed herself in such luxuriant and loving beauty as no eye ever
+witnessed since our first parents saw the sun rise over dewy Eden. Nor then
+indeed; for this is the fulfilment of what was then but a golden promise. But
+the picture has its shadows. There remains to mankind another peril,&mdash;a
+last encounter with the evil principle. Should the battle go against us, we
+sink back into the slime and misery of ages. If we triumph&mdash;But it demands
+a poet’s eye to contemplate the splendor of such a consummation and not to be
+dazzled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender a spirit of
+humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm interest of a village tale no
+less than the grandeur which befits so high a theme. Such, at least, is the
+perhaps partial representation of his friends; for I have not read or heard
+even a single line of the performance in question. Keats, I am told, withholds
+it from the press, under an idea that the age has not enough of spiritual
+insight to receive it worthily. I do not like this distrust; it makes me
+distrust the poet. The universe is waiting to respond to the highest word that
+the best child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is
+because he mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and foreign
+to the purpose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you know, is
+now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me. Time blunts both
+point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order of intellect. Then
+I stepped into the lower House and listened to a few words from Cobbett, who
+looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or rather as if he had lain a dozen
+years beneath the clods. The men whom I meet nowadays often impress me thus;
+probably because my spirits are not very good, and lead me to think much about
+graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones
+of people who made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter,
+clatter, clatter, when the sexton’s spade disturbs them. Were it only possible
+to find out who are alive and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my
+peace of mind. Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me in the face
+whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted
+nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him. For instance, going to
+Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose before me, in the ghost of
+Hamlet’s father, the bodily presence of the elder Kean, who did die, or ought
+to have died, in some drunken fit or other, so long ago that his fame is
+scarcely traditionary now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost
+of himself than the ghost of the Danish king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among them a
+stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a profile&mdash;for I did
+not see her front face&mdash;that stamped itself into my brain as a seal
+impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with which she took a pinch of snuff,
+I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother, John Kemble, sat
+behind,&mdash;a broken-down figure, but still with a kingly majesty about him.
+In lieu of all former achievements, Nature enables him to look the part of Lear
+far better than in the meridian of his genius. Charles Matthews was likewise
+there; but a paralytic affection has distorted his once mobile countenance into
+a most disagreeable one-sidedness, from which he could no more wrench it into
+proper form than he could rearrange the face of the great globe itself. It
+looks as if, for the joke’s sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
+expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could contrive, and
+at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself so hideous, an avenging
+Providence had seen fit to petrify him. Since it is out of his own power, I
+would gladly assist him to change countenance, for his ugly visage haunts me
+both at noontide and night-time. Some other players of the past generation were
+present, but none that greatly interested me. It behooves actors, more than all
+other men of publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes. Being at best but
+painted shadows flickering on the wall and empty sounds that echo anther’s
+thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin to fade and the voice
+to croak with age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What is there new in the literary way on your side of the water? Nothing of the
+kind has come under any inspection, except a volume of poems published above a
+year ago by Dr. Channing. I did not before know that this eminent writer is a
+poet; nor does the volume alluded to exhibit any of the characteristics of the
+author’s mind as displayed in his prose works; although some of the poems have
+a richness that is not merely of the surface, but glows still the brighter the
+deeper and more faithfully you look into then. They seem carelessly wrought,
+however, like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude,
+native manufacture, which are found among the gold-dust from Africa. I doubt
+whether the American public will accept them; it looks less to the assay of
+metal than to the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly our literature grows
+up! Most of our writers of promise have come to untimely ends. There was that
+wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish brain with his romances; he
+surely has long been dead, else he never could keep himself so quiet. Bryant
+has gone to his last sleep, with the <i>Thanatopsis</i> gleaming over him like
+a sculptured marble sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer
+verses in the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called <i>Fanny</i>,
+is defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the metempsychosis as a
+man of business. Somewhat later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker youth, to
+whom the muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and who got himself
+lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I remember, too, a lad just from
+college, Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds,
+and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense application, at the
+University of Gottingen. Willis&mdash;what a pity!&mdash;was lost, if I
+recollect rightly, in 1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going to
+give us sketches of the world’s sunny face. If these had lived, they might, one
+or all of them, have grown to be famous men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died. I was
+myself a young man of promise. O shattered brain, O broken spirit, where is the
+fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is, that, when fate would gently
+disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest mortals in their youth; when
+it would laugh the world’s hopes to scorn, it lets them live. Let me die upon
+this apothegm, for I shall never make a truer one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What a strange substance is the human brain! Or rather,&mdash;for there is no
+need of generalizing the remark,&mdash;what an odd brain is mine! Would you
+believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry humming in my
+intellectual ear&mdash;some as airy as birdnotes, and some as delicately neat
+as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-peals&mdash;that seem just such
+verses as those departed poets would have written had not an inexorable destiny
+snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit, perhaps desiring
+to engage my services as the amanuensis of their posthumous productions, and
+thus secure the endless renown that they have forfeited by going hence too
+early. But I have my own business to attend to; and besides, a medical
+gentleman, who interests himself in some little ailments of mine, advises me
+not to make too free use of pen and ink. There are clerks enough out of
+employment who would be glad of such a job.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Good by! Are you alive or dead? and what are you about? Still scribbling for
+the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and proof-readers misprint
+your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever? It is too bad. Let every man
+manufacture his own nonsense, say I. Expect me home soon, and&mdash;to whisper
+you a secret&mdash;in company with the poet Campbell, who purposes to visit
+Wyoming and enjoy the shadow of the laurels that he planted there. Campbell is
+now an old man. He calls himself well, better than ever in his life, but looks
+strangely pale, and so shadow-like that one might almost poke a finger through
+his densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim and forlorn
+as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+Your true friend, P.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+P. S.&mdash;Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and
+revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a
+double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press at
+Philadelphia. Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic reputation
+on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive? Unconscionable man!
+Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his century. And does he meditate an epic on
+the war between Mexico and Texas with machinery contrived on the principle of
+the steam-engine, as being the nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can
+boast? How can he expect ever to rise again, if, while just sinking into his
+grave, he persists in burdening himself with such a ponderosity of leaden
+verses?
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An
+Old Manse"), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse")
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Posting Date: December 8, 2010 [EBook #9230]
+Release Date: November, 2005
+First Posted: September 6, 2003
+Last Updated: February 6, 2007
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK P.'S CORRESPONDENCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
+
+                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+                       P.'S CORRESPONDENCE
+
+
+
+My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the
+interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The
+past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often
+productive of curious results, and which will be better understood
+after the perusal of the following letter than from any description
+that I could give.  The poor fellow, without once stirring from the
+little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his
+first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
+wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be
+visible to any eye save his own.  In my opinion, all this is not so
+much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of
+the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid
+energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no
+less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more
+of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some
+based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon
+hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity.  The whole form a
+series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my
+poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise
+myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye.  P. had
+always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more than
+one unsuccessful effort to achieve it.  It would not be a little
+odd, if, after missing his object while seeking it by the light of
+reason, he should prove to have stumbled upon it in his misty
+excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
+
+
+LONDON, February 29, 1845.
+
+MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing
+tenacity.  Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and
+consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind's
+strongest architecture.  It is sometimes a serious question with me
+whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with
+all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in
+my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a
+print of Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the
+world's metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant,
+through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,--with
+all this positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of
+notion, do you think, is just now perplexing my brain?  Why,--would
+you believe it?--that all this time I am still an inhabitant of that
+wearisome little chamber,--that whitewashed little chamber,--that
+little chamber with its one small window, across which, from some
+inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, my landlord had placed a
+row of iron bars,--that same little chamber, in short, whither your
+kindness has so often brought you to visit me!  Will no length of
+time or breadth of space enfranchise me from that unlovely abode?  I
+travel; but it seems to be like the snail, with my house upon my
+head.  Ah, well!  I am verging, I suppose, on that period of life
+when present scenes and events make but feeble impressions in
+comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile myself to be
+more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me hop about a
+little with her chain around my leg.
+
+My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling
+me to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who,
+until now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal
+intercourse as the wits of Queen Anne's time or Ben Jenson's
+compotators at the Mermaid.  One of the first of which I availed
+myself was the letter to Lord Byron.  I found his lordship looking
+much older than I had anticipated, although, considering his former
+irregularities of life and the various wear and tear of his
+constitution, not older than a man on the verge of sixty reasonably
+may look.  But I had invested his earthly frame, in my imagination,
+with the poet's spiritual immortality.  He wears a brown wig, very
+luxuriantly curled, and extending down over his forehead.  The
+expression of his eyes is concealed by spectacles.  His early
+tendency to obesity having increased, Lord Byron is now enormously
+fat,--so fat as to give the impression of a person quite overladen
+with his own flesh, and without sufficient vigor to diffuse his
+personal life through the great mass of corporeal substance which
+weighs upon him so cruelly.  You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while
+it fills your eye with what purports to be Byron, you murmur within
+yourself, "For Heaven's sake, where is he?"  Were I disposed to be
+caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol,
+in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices which
+unspiritualize man's nature and clog up his avenues of communication
+with the better life.  But this would be too harsh; and, besides,
+Lord Byron's morals have been improving while his outward man has
+swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he were
+leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet it
+was so puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel as if I
+had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
+
+On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me,
+on the sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had
+taken up its constant residence in his right foot, which accordingly
+was swathed in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion.
+The other foot was hidden in the drapery of his chair.  Do you
+recollect whether Byron's right or left foot was the deformed one.
+
+The noble poet's reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are
+aware, of ten years' standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured,
+any symptom of breach or fracture.  They are said to be, if not a
+happy, at least a contented, or at all events a quiet couple,
+descending the slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual
+support which will enable them to come easily and comfortably to the
+bottom.  It is pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has
+redeemed his youthful errors in this particular.  Her ladyship's
+influence, it rejoices me to add, has been productive of the
+happiest results upon Lord Byron in a religious point of view.  He
+now combines the most rigid tenets of Methodism with the ultra
+doctrines of the Puseyites; the former being perhaps due to the
+convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble consort, while the
+latter are the embroidery and picturesque illumination demanded by
+his imaginative character. Much of whatever expenditure his
+increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is bestowed in the
+reparation or beautifying of places of worship; and this nobleman,
+whose name was once considered a synonyme of the foul fiend, is now
+all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the metropolis and
+elsewhere.  In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising
+conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of
+Lords or in private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the
+mischievous and anarchical notions of his earlier day.  Nor does he
+fail to visit similar sins in other people with the sincerest
+vengeance which his somewhat blunted pen is capable of inflicting.
+Southey and he are on the most intimate terms.  You are aware that,
+some little time before the death of Moore, Byron caused that
+brilliant but reprehensible man to be evicted from his house.  Moore
+took the insult so much to heart that, it is said to have been one
+great cause of the fit of illness which brought him to the grave.
+Others pretend that the lyrist died in a very happy state of mind,
+singing one of his own sacred melodies, and expressing his belief
+that it would be heard within the gate of paradise, and gain him
+instant and honorable admittance.  I wish he may have found it so.
+
+I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with
+Lord Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by
+allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan,
+which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My
+words, whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the
+enthusiasm of one worthy to discourse of immortal poesy.  It was
+evident, however, that they did not go precisely to the right spot.
+I could perceive that there was some mistake or other, and was not a
+little angry with myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to
+throw back, from my own heart to the gifted author's ear, the echo
+of those strains that have resounded throughout the world.  But by
+and by the secret peeped quietly out.  Byron,--I have the
+information from his own lips, so that you need not hesitate to
+repeat it in literary circles,--Byron is preparing a new edition of
+his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and amended, in
+accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics, and
+religion.  It so happened that the very passages of highest
+inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and
+rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of
+oblivion.  To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his
+passions having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and
+riotous flame has deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which
+he not merely wrote, but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he
+had written.  Positively he no longer understands his own poetry.
+
+This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few
+specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version.  Whatever is
+licentious, whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our
+faith, whatever morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive,
+whatever assails settled constitutions of government or systems of
+society, whatever could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except
+a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly
+blotted out, and its place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his
+lordship's later style.  You may judge how much of the poem remains
+as hitherto published.  The result is not so good as might be
+wished; in plain terms, it is a very sad affair indeed; for, though
+the torches kindled in Tophet have been extinguished, they leave an
+abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by no glimpses of hallowed
+fire.  It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that this attempt on Lord
+Byron's part to atone for his youthful errors will at length induce
+the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is concerned, to
+allow Thorwaldsen's statue of the poet its due niche in the grand
+old Abbey.  His bones, you know, when brought from Greece, were
+denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.
+
+What a vile slip of the pen was that!  How absurd in me to talk
+about burying the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and
+incased in a big, round bulk of flesh!  But, to say the truth, a
+prodigiously fat man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in
+the very extravagance of his mortal system I find something akin to
+the immateriality of a ghost.  And then that ridiculous old story
+darted into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi,
+above twenty years ago.  More and more I recognize that we dwell in
+a world of shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the
+trouble to attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and
+shadows out of it.  If there be any difference, the former are
+rather the more substantial.
+
+Only think of my good fortune!  The venerable Robert Burns--now, if
+I mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year--happens to be making a
+visit to London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of
+grasping him by the hand.  For upwards of twenty years past he has
+hardly left his quiet cottage in Ayrshire for a single night, and
+has only been drawn hither now by the irresistible persuasions of
+all the distinguished men in England. They wish to celebrate the
+patriarch's birthday by a festival. It will be the greatest literary
+triumph on record.  Pray Heaven the little spirit of life within the
+aged bard's bosom may not be extinguished in the lustre of that
+hour!  I have already had the honor of an introduction to him at the
+British Museum, where he was examining a collection of his own
+unpublished letters, interspersed with songs, which have escaped the
+notice of all his biographers.
+
+Poh!  Nonsense!  What am I thinking of?  How should Burns have been
+embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man?
+
+The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend,
+nor the less so that it is much bent by the burden of time.  His
+white hair floats like a snowdrift around his face, in which are
+seen the furrows of intellect and passion, like the channels of
+headlong torrents that have foamed themselves away. The old
+gentleman is in excellent preservation, considering his time of
+life.  He has that crickety sort of liveliness,--I mean the
+cricket's humor of chirping for any cause or none,--which is perhaps
+the most favorable mood that can befall extreme old age. Our pride
+forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we perceive it to be
+a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was surprised to
+find it in Burns.  It seems as if his ardent heart and brilliant
+imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving only a
+little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing upward
+and laughing all by itself.  He is no longer capable of pathos.  At
+the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song
+to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those
+verses, so profoundly true and so simply expressed, was entirely
+beyond the scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch of
+it did partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his
+eyes and his voice broke into a tremulous cackle.  And yet he but
+indistinctly knew wherefore he was weeping.  Ah, he must not think
+again of Mary in Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of
+time and ascend to meet her there.
+
+Burns then began to repeat Tan O'Shanter; but was so tickled with
+its wit and humor--of which, however, I suspect he had but a
+traditionary sense--that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping
+laughter, succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very
+agreeable exhibition to a close.  On the whole, I would rather not
+have witnessed it.  It is a satisfactory idea, however, that the
+last forty years of the peasant poet's life have been passed in
+competence and perfect comfort.  Having been cured of his bardic
+improvidence for many a day past, and grown as attentive to the main
+chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now considered to be
+quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I suppose, is
+worth having lived so long for.
+
+I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in
+regard to the health of Sir Walter Scott.  His condition, I am sorry
+to say, remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a
+hopeless paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler
+attributes of which the body is the instrument.  And thus he
+vegetates from day to day and from year to year at that splendid
+fantasy of Abbotsford, which grew out of his brain, and became a
+symbol of the great romancer's tastes, feelings, studies,
+prejudices, and modes of intellect.  Whether in verse, prose, or
+architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in
+infinite variety.  There he reclines, on a couch in his library, and
+is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales to an
+amanuensis,--to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not deemed worth
+any one's trouble now to take down what flows from that once
+brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and
+capable of being coined.  Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him,
+assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,--a
+striking combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of
+character, such as no other man alive could have bit off,--a glimmer
+from that ruined mind, as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a
+half-rusted helmet in the gloom of an ancient ball.  But the plots of
+these romances become inextricably confused; the characters melt
+into one another; and the tale loses itself like the course of a
+stream flowing through muddy and marshy ground.
+
+For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his
+consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue.
+It was good that he should forget his fame rather than that fame
+should first have forgotten him.  Were he still a writer, and as
+brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like
+the same position in literature.  The world, nowadays, requires a
+more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier
+truth than he was qualified to supply it with.  Yet who can be to
+the present generation even what Scott has been to the past?  I had
+expectations from a young man,--one Dickens,--who published a few
+magazine articles, very rich in humor, and not without symptoms of
+genuine pathos; but the poor fellow died shortly after commencing an
+odd series of sketches, entitled, I think, the Pickwick Papers.  Not
+impossibly the world has lost more than it dreams of by the untimely
+death of this Mr. Dickens.
+
+Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other day?  You would not
+hit it in ten guesses.  Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte,
+or all that is now left of him,--that is to say, the skin, bones,
+and corporeal substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white
+breeches, and small sword, which are still known by his redoubtable
+name.  He was attended only by two policemen, who walked quietly
+behind the phantasm of the old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty
+in regard to him except to see that none of the light-fingered
+gentry should possess themselves of thee star of the Legion of
+Honor.  Nobody save myself so much as turned to look after him; nor,
+it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive to muster up any
+tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike spirit, formerly
+manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought upon our
+globe.  There is no surer method of annihilating the magic influence
+of a great renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in the
+decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers,--buried
+beneath his own mortality,--and lacking even the qualities of sense
+that enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the
+eye of the world.  This is the state to which disease, aggravated by
+long endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age,--for
+he is now above seventy,--has reduced Bonaparte.  The British
+government has acted shrewdly in retransporting him from St. Helena
+to England.  They should now restore him to Paris, and there let him
+once again review the relics of his armies.  His eye is dull and
+rheumy; his nether lip hung down upon his chin. While I was
+observing him there chanced to be a little extra bustle in the
+street; and he, the brother of Caesar and Hannibal,--the great
+captain who had veiled the world in battle-smoke and tracked it
+round with bloody footsteps,--was seized with a nervous trembling,
+and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked and
+dolorous cry.  The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside,
+and, patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him
+away.
+
+Death and fury!  Ha, villain, how came you hither?  Avaunt! or I
+fling my inkstand at your head.  Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake.
+Pray, my dear friend, pardon this little outbreak.  The fact is, the
+mention of those two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte, had
+called up the idea of that odious wretch--you remember him well--who
+was pleased to take such gratuitous and impertinent care of my
+person before I quitted New England. Forthwith up rose before my
+mind's eye that same little whitewashed room, with the iron-grated
+window,--strange that it should have been iron-grated!--where, in
+too easy compliance with the absurd wishes of my relatives, I have
+wasted several good years of my life.  Positively it seemed to me
+that I was still sitting there, and that the keeper--not that he
+ever was my keeper neither, but only a kind of intrusive devil of a
+body-servant--had just peeped in at the door.  The rascal!  I owe
+him an old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet.  Fie! fie!
+The mere thought of him has exceedingly discomposed me.  Even now
+that hateful chamber--the iron-grated window, which blasted the
+blessed sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes and made it
+poison to my soul-looks more distinct to my view than does this my
+comfortable apartment in the heart of London.  The reality--that
+which I know to be such--hangs like remnants of tattered scenery
+over the intolerably prominent illusion.  Let us think of it no
+more.
+
+You will be anxious to hear of Shelley.  I need not say, what is
+known to all the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years
+past been reconciled to the Church of England.  In his more recent
+works he has applied his fine powers to the vindication of the
+Christian faith, with an especial view to that particular
+development.  Latterly, as you may not have heard, he has taken
+orders, and been inducted to a small country living in the gift of
+the Lord Chancellor.  Just now, luckily for me, he has come to the
+metropolis to superintend the publication of a volume of discourses
+treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity on the
+basis of the Thirty-nine Articles.  On my first introduction I felt
+no little embarrassment as to the manner of combining what I had to
+say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt of Islam_, and
+_Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might be
+acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
+Established Church.  But Shelley soon placed me at my ease.
+Standing where he now does, and reviewing all his successive
+productions from a higher point, he assures me that there is a
+harmony, an order, a regular procession, which enables him to lay
+his hand upon any one of the earlier poems and say, "This is my
+work," with precisely the same complacency of conscience wherewithal
+he contemplates the volume of discourses above mentioned.  They are
+like the successive steps of a staircase, the lowest of which, in
+the depth of chaos, is as essential to the support of the whole as
+the highest and final one resting upon the threshold of the heavens.
+I felt half inclined to ask him what would have been his fate had he
+perished on the lower steps of his staircase, instead of building
+his way aloft into the celestial brightness.
+
+How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly
+care, so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has,
+from a lower region to a loftier one.  Without touching upon their
+religious merits, I consider the productions of his maturity
+superior, as poems, to those of his youth.  They are warmer with
+human love, which has served as an interpreter between his mind and
+the multitude.  The author has learned to dip his pen oftener into
+his heart, and has thereby avoided the faults into which a too
+exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont to betray him.
+Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete arrangement
+of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they were
+brilliant.  Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
+heart-warmth responsive to your own.  In his private character
+Shelley can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate
+than his friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous
+night when he was drowned in the Mediterranean.  Nonsense, again,--sheer
+nonsense! What, am I babbling about?  I was thinking of that
+old figment of his being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed
+ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with
+wine, and spices, and frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach
+and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the
+dead poet's heart, and that his fire-purified relics were finally
+buried near his child in Roman earth.  If all this happened
+three-and-twenty years ago, how could I have met the drowned and burned
+and buried man here in London only yesterday?
+
+Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber,
+heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in
+England, called on Shelley while I was with him.  They appeared to
+be on terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint
+poem in contemplation.  What a strange, incongruous dream is the
+life of man!
+
+Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel.  It will be
+issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present
+publishing season.  The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
+affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser
+stop, to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from
+his lips.  He will not survive it above a month, unless his
+accumulation of ideas be sluiced off in some other way.  Wordsworth
+died only a week or two ago.  Heaven rest his soul, and grant that
+he may not have completed _The Excursion_!  Methinks I am sick of
+everything he wrote, except his _Laodamia_.  It is very sad, this
+inconstancy of the mind to the poets whom it once worshipped.
+Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with his usual diligence.
+Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of age, and with most
+pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow intellect the Devil
+had gifted him withal.  One hates to allow such a man the privilege
+of growing old and infirm.  It takes away our speculative license of
+kicking him.
+
+Keats?  No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with
+coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and
+divers other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and
+slender figure and my eager glance.  I would fain have met him on
+the sea-shore, or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the
+Gothic arch of an old cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a
+glimmering fireside on the verge of evening, or at the twilight
+entrance of a cave, into the dreamy depths of which he would have
+led me by the hand; anywhere, in short, save at Temple Bar, where
+his presence was blotted out by the porter-swollen bulks of these
+gross Englishmen.  I stood and watched him fading away, fading away
+along the pavement, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual
+man or a thought that had slipped out of my mind and clothed itself
+in human form and habiliments merely to beguile me.  At one moment
+he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it, I am almost
+certain, stained with blood.  You never saw anything so fragile as
+his person.  The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the effects
+of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on his
+Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him to
+the grave.  Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
+sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
+never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly
+think him a great poet.  The burden of a mighty genius would never
+have been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so
+infirmly sensitive.  Great poets should have iron sinews.
+
+Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the
+world, is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of
+an epic poem.  Some passages of it have been communicated to the
+inner circle of his admirers, and impressed them as the loftiest
+strains that have been audible on earth since Milton's days.  If I
+can obtain copies of these specimens, I will ask you to present them
+to James Russell Lowell, who seems to be one of the poet's most
+fervent and worthiest worshippers.  The information took me by
+surprise.  I had supposed that all Keats's poetic incense, without
+being embodied in human language, floated up to heaven and mingled
+with the songs of the immortal choristers, who perhaps were
+conscious of an unknown voice among them, and thought their melody
+the sweeter for it.  But it is not so; he has positively written a
+poem on the subject of _Paradise Regained_, though in another sense
+than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton.  In
+compliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend
+that all epic possibilities in the past history of the world are
+exhausted, Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely
+remote futurity.  He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances
+of the time-long warfare between good and evil.  Our race is on the
+eve of its final triumph.  Man is within the last stride of
+perfection; Woman, redeemed from the thraldom against which our
+sibyl uplifts so powerful and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by
+his side or communes for herself with angels; the Earth,
+sympathizing with her children's happier state, has clothed herself
+in such luxuriant and loving beauty as no eye ever witnessed since
+our first parents saw the sun rise over dewy Eden.  Nor then indeed;
+for this is the fulfilment of what was then but a golden promise.
+But the picture has its shadows.  There remains to mankind another
+peril,--a last encounter with the evil principle.  Should the battle
+go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of ages.  If
+we triumph--But it demands a poet's eye to contemplate the splendor
+of such a consummation and not to be dazzled.
+
+To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender
+a spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm
+interest of a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so
+high a theme.  Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation
+of his friends; for I have not read or heard even a single line of
+the performance in question.  Keats, I am told, withholds it from
+the press, under an idea that the age has not enough of spiritual
+insight to receive it worthily.  I do not like this distrust; it
+makes me distrust the poet.  The universe is waiting to respond to
+the highest word that the best child of time and immortality can
+utter.  If it refuse to listen, it is because he mumbles and
+stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and foreign to the
+purpose.
+
+I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you
+know, is now a peer, with I forget what title.  He disappointed me.
+Time blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of
+his order of intellect.  Then I stepped into the lower House and
+listened to a few words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real
+clodhopper, or rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the
+clods.  The men whom I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably
+because my spirits are not very good, and lead me to think much
+about graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn
+epitaphs, and dry bones of people who made noise enough in their
+day, but now can only clatter, clatter, clatter, when the sexton's
+spade disturbs them. Were it only possible to find out who are alive
+and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind.
+Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me in the face whom I
+had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted
+nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him.  For
+instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose
+before me, in the ghost of Hamlet's father, the bodily presence of
+the elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken
+fit or other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary
+now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself
+than the ghost of the Danish king.
+
+In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among
+them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
+profile--for I did not see her front face--that stamped itself into
+my brain as a seal impresses hot wax.  By the tragic gesture with
+which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons.
+Her brother, John Kemble, sat behind,--a broken-down figure, but
+still with a kingly majesty about him.  In lieu of all former
+achievements, Nature enables him to look the part of Lear far better
+than in the meridian of his genius.  Charles Matthews was likewise
+there; but a paralytic affection has distorted his once mobile
+countenance into a most disagreeable one-sidedness, from which he
+could no more wrench it into proper form than he could rearrange the
+face of the great globe itself. It looks as if, for the joke's sake,
+the poor man had twisted his features into an expression at once the
+most ludicrous and horrible that he could contrive, and at that very
+moment, as a judgment for making himself so hideous, an avenging
+Providence had seen fit to petrify him.  Since it is out of his own
+power, I would gladly assist him to change countenance, for his ugly
+visage haunts me both at noontide and night-time.  Some other
+players of the past generation were present, but none that greatly
+interested me.  It behooves actors, more than all other men of
+publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes.  Being at best but
+painted shadows flickering on the wall and empty sounds that echo
+anther's thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin
+to fade and the voice to croak with age.
+
+What is there new in the literary way on your side of the water?
+Nothing of the kind has come under any inspection, except a volume
+of poems published above a year ago by Dr. Channing.  I did not
+before know that this eminent writer is a poet; nor does the volume
+alluded to exhibit any of the characteristics of the author's mind
+as displayed in his prose works; although some of the poems have a
+richness that is not merely of the surface, but glows still the
+brighter the deeper and more faithfully you look into then.  They
+seem carelessly wrought, however, like those rings and ornaments of
+the very purest gold, but of rude, native manufacture, which are
+found among the gold-dust from Africa.  I doubt whether the American
+public will accept them; it looks less to the assay of metal than to
+the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly our literature grows
+up!  Most of our writers of promise have come to untimely ends.
+There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish
+brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else he never
+could keep himself so quiet.  Bryant has gone to his last sleep,
+with the _Thanatopsis_ gleaming over him like a sculptured marble
+sepulchre by moonlight.  Halleck, who used to write queer verses in
+the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called _Fanny_, is
+defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the
+metempsychosis as a man of business.  Somewhat later there was
+Whittier, a fiery Quaker youth, to whom the muse had perversely
+assigned a battle-trumpet, and who got himself lynched, ten years
+agone, in South Carolina.  I remember, too, a lad just from college,
+Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds,
+and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense application,
+at the University of Gottingen.  Willis--what a pity!--was lost, if
+I recollect rightly, in 1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he
+was going to give us sketches of the world's sunny face.  If these
+had lived, they might, one or all of them, have grown to be famous
+men.
+
+And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died.
+I was myself a young man of promise.  O shattered brain, O broken
+spirit, where is the fulfilment of that promise?  The sad truth is,
+that, when fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the
+hopefulest mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world's
+hopes to scorn, it lets them live.  Let me die upon this apothegm,
+for I shall never make a truer one.
+
+What a strange substance is the human brain!  Or rather,--for there
+is no need of generalizing the remark,--what an odd brain is mine!
+Would you believe it?  Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry
+humming in my intellectual ear--some as airy as birdnotes, and some
+as delicately neat as parlor-music, and a few as grand as
+organ-peals--that seem just such verses as those departed poets would
+have written had not an inexorable destiny snatched them from their
+inkstands.  They visit me in spirit, perhaps desiring to engage my
+services as the amanuensis of their posthumous productions, and thus
+secure the endless renown that they have forfeited by going hence
+too early.  But I have my own business to attend to; and besides, a
+medical gentleman, who interests himself in some little ailments of
+mine, advises me not to make too free use of pen and ink.  There are
+clerks enough out of employment who would be glad of such a job.
+
+Good by!  Are you alive or dead? and what are you about?  Still
+scribbling for the Democratic?  And do those infernal compositors
+and proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as
+ever? It is too bad.  Let every man manufacture his own nonsense,
+say I.  Expect me home soon, and--to whisper you a secret--in
+company with the poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming and
+enjoy the shadow of the laurels that he planted there.  Campbell is
+now an old man.  He calls himself well, better than ever in his
+life, but looks strangely pale, and so shadow-like that one might
+almost poke a finger through his densest material.  I tell him, by
+way of joke, that he is as dim and forlorn as Memory, though as
+unsubstantial as Hope.
+
+
+Your true friend,  P.
+
+P. S.--Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and
+revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
+
+
+It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a
+double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press at
+Philadelphia.  Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more
+classic reputation on this side of the water.  Is old Joel Barlow
+yet alive?  Unconscionable man!  Why, he must have nearly fulfilled
+his century.  And does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico
+and Texas with machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-engine,
+as being the nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can
+boast?  How can he expect ever to rise again, if, while just sinking
+into his grave, he persists in burdening himself with such a
+ponderosity of leaden verses?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From
+An Old Manse"), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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+Project Gutenberg EBook, P.'s Correspondence, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+From "Mosses From An Old Manse"
+#57 in our series by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
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+Title: P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse")
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: Nov, 2005  [EBook #9230]
+[This file was first posted on September 6, 2003]
+[Last updated on February 6, 2007]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
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+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, P.'S CORRESPONDENCE ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
+
+                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+                       P.'S CORRESPONDENCE
+
+
+
+My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the
+interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The
+past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often
+productive of curious results, and which will be better understood
+after the perusal of the following letter than from any description
+that I could give.  The poor fellow, without once stirring from the
+little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his
+first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
+wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be
+visible to any eye save his own.  In my opinion, all this is not so
+much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of
+the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid
+energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no
+less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more
+of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some
+based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon
+hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity.  The whole form a
+series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my
+poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise
+myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye.  P. had
+always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more than
+one unsuccessful effort to achieve it.  It would not be a little
+odd, if, after missing his object while seeking it by the light of
+reason, he should prove to have stumbled upon it in his misty
+excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
+
+
+LONDON, February 29, 1845.
+
+MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing
+tenacity.  Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and
+consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind's
+strongest architecture.  It is sometimes a serious question with me
+whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with
+all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in
+my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a
+print of Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the
+world's metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant,
+through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,--
+with all this positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of
+notion, do you think, is just now perplexing my brain?  Why,--would
+you believe it?--that all this time I am still an inhabitant of that
+wearisome little chamber,--that whitewashed little chamber,--that
+little chamber with its one small window, across which, from some
+inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, my landlord had placed a
+row of iron bars,--that same little chamber, in short, whither your
+kindness has so often brought you to visit me!  Will no length of
+time or breadth of space enfranchise me from that unlovely abode?  I
+travel; but it seems to be like the snail, with my house upon my
+head.  Ah, well!  I am verging, I suppose, on that period of life
+when present scenes and events make but feeble impressions in
+comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile myself to be
+more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me hop about a
+little with her chain around my leg.
+
+My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling
+me to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who,
+until now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal
+intercourse as the wits of Queen Anne's time or Ben Jenson's
+compotators at the Mermaid.  One of the first of which I availed
+myself was the letter to Lord Byron.  I found his lordship looking
+much older than I had anticipated, although, considering his former
+irregularities of life and the various wear and tear of his
+constitution, not older than a man on the verge of sixty reasonably
+may look.  But I had invested his earthly frame, in my imagination,
+with the poet's spiritual immortality.  He wears a brown wig, very
+luxuriantly curled, and extending down over his forehead.  The
+expression of his eyes is concealed by spectacles.  His early
+tendency to obesity having increased, Lord Byron is now enormously
+fat,--so fat as to give the impression of a person quite overladen
+with his own flesh, and without sufficient vigor to diffuse his
+personal life through the great mass of corporeal substance which
+weighs upon him so cruelly.  You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while
+it fills your eye with what purports to be Byron, you murmur within
+yourself, "For Heaven's sake, where is he?"  Were I disposed to be
+caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol,
+in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices which
+unspiritualize man's nature and clog up his avenues of communication
+with the better life.  But this would be too harsh; and, besides,
+Lord Byron's morals have been improving while his outward man has
+swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he were
+leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet it
+was so puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel as if I
+had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
+
+On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me,
+on the sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had
+taken up its constant residence in his right foot, which accordingly
+was swathed in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion.
+The other foot was hidden in the drapery of his chair.  Do you
+recollect whether Byron's right or left foot was the deformed one.
+
+The noble poet's reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are
+aware, of ten years' standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured,
+any symptom of breach or fracture.  They are said to be, if not a
+happy, at least a contented, or at all events a quiet couple,
+descending the slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual
+support which will enable them to come easily and comfortably to the
+bottom.  It is pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has
+redeemed his youthful errors in this particular.  Her ladyship's
+influence, it rejoices me to add, has been productive of the
+happiest results upon Lord Byron in a religious point of view.  He
+now combines the most rigid tenets of Methodism with the ultra
+doctrines of the Puseyites; the former being perhaps due to the
+convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble consort, while the
+latter are the embroidery and picturesque illumination demanded by
+his imaginative character. Much of whatever expenditure his
+increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is bestowed in the
+reparation or beautifying of places of worship; and this nobleman,
+whose name was once considered a synonyme of the foul fiend, is now
+all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the metropolis and
+elsewhere.  In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising
+conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of
+Lords or in private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the
+mischievous and anarchical notions of his earlier day.  Nor does he
+fail to visit similar sins in other people with the sincerest
+vengeance which his somewhat blunted pen is capable of inflicting.
+Southey and he are on the most intimate terms.  You are aware that,
+some little time before the death of Moore, Byron caused that
+brilliant but reprehensible man to be evicted from his house.  Moore
+took the insult so much to heart that, it is said to have been one
+great cause of the fit of illness which brought him to the grave.
+Others pretend that the lyrist died in a very happy state of mind,
+singing one of his own sacred melodies, and expressing his belief
+that it would be heard within the gate of paradise, and gain him
+instant and honorable admittance.  I wish he may have found it so.
+
+I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with
+Lord Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by
+allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan,
+which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My
+words, whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the
+enthusiasm of one worthy to discourse of immortal poesy.  It was
+evident, however, that they did not go precisely to the right spot.
+I could perceive that there was some mistake or other, and was not a
+little angry with myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to
+throw back, from my own heart to the gifted author's ear, the echo
+of those strains that have resounded throughout the world.  But by
+and by the secret peeped quietly out.  Byron,--I have the
+information from his own lips, so that you need not hesitate to
+repeat it in literary circles,--Byron is preparing a new edition of
+his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and amended, in
+accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics, and
+religion.  It so happened that the very passages of highest
+inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and
+rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of
+oblivion.  To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his
+passions having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and
+riotous flame has deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which
+he not merely wrote, but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he
+had written.  Positively he no longer understands his own poetry.
+
+This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few
+specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version.  Whatever is
+licentious, whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our
+faith, whatever morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive,
+whatever assails settled constitutions of government or systems of
+society, whatever could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except
+a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly
+blotted out, and its place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his
+lordship's later style.  You may judge how much of the poem remains
+as hitherto published.  The result is not so good as might be
+wished; in plain terms, it is a very sad affair indeed; for, though
+the torches kindled in Tophet have been extinguished, they leave an
+abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by no glimpses of hallowed
+fire.  It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that this attempt on Lord
+Byron's part to atone for his youthful errors will at length induce
+the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is concerned, to
+allow Thorwaldsen's statue of the poet its due niche in the grand
+old Abbey.  His bones, you know, when brought from Greece, were
+denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.
+
+What a vile slip of the pen was that!  How absurd in me to talk
+about burying the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and
+incased in a big, round bulk of flesh!  But, to say the truth, a
+prodigiously fat man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in
+the very extravagance of his mortal system I find something akin to
+the immateriality of a ghost.  And then that ridiculous old story
+darted into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi,
+above twenty years ago.  More and more I recognize that we dwell in
+a world of shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the
+trouble to attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and
+shadows out of it.  If there be any difference, the former are
+rather the more substantial.
+
+Only think of my good fortune!  The venerable Robert Burns--now, if
+I mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year--happens to be making a
+visit to London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of
+grasping him by the hand.  For upwards of twenty years past he has
+hardly left his quiet cottage in Ayrshire for a single night, and
+has only been drawn hither now by the irresistible persuasions of
+all the distinguished men in England. They wish to celebrate the
+patriarch's birthday by a festival. It will be the greatest literary
+triumph on record.  Pray Heaven the little spirit of life within the
+aged bard's bosom may not be extinguished in the lustre of that
+hour!  I have already had the honor of an introduction to him at the
+British Museum, where he was examining a collection of his own
+unpublished letters, interspersed with songs, which have escaped the
+notice of all his biographers.
+
+Poh!  Nonsense!  What am I thinking of?  How should Burns have been
+embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man?
+
+The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend,
+nor the less so that it is much bent by the burden of time.  His
+white hair floats like a snowdrift around his face, in which are
+seen the furrows of intellect and passion, like the channels of
+headlong torrents that have foamed themselves away. The old
+gentleman is in excellent preservation, considering his time of
+life.  He has that crickety sort of liveliness,--I mean the
+cricket's humor of chirping for any cause or none,--which is perhaps
+the most favorable mood that can befall extreme old age. Our pride
+forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we perceive it to be
+a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was surprised to
+find it in Burns.  It seems as if his ardent heart and brilliant
+imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving only a
+little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing upward
+and laughing all by itself.  He is no longer capable of pathos.  At
+the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song
+to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those
+verses, so profoundly true and so simply expressed, was entirely
+beyond the scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch of
+it did partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his
+eyes and his voice broke into a tremulous cackle.  And yet he but
+indistinctly knew wherefore he was weeping.  Ah, he must not think
+again of Mary in Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of
+time and ascend to meet her there.
+
+Burns then began to repeat Tan O'Shanter; but was so tickled with
+its wit and humor--of which, however, I suspect he had but a
+traditionary sense--that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping
+laughter, succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very
+agreeable exhibition to a close.  On the whole, I would rather not
+have witnessed it.  It is a satisfactory idea, however, that the
+last forty years of the peasant poet's life have been passed in
+competence and perfect comfort.  Having been cured of his bardic
+improvidence for many a day past, and grown as attentive to the main
+chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now considered to be
+quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I suppose, is
+worth having lived so long for.
+
+I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in
+regard to the health of Sir Walter Scott.  His condition, I am sorry
+to say, remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a
+hopeless paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler
+attributes of which the body is the instrument.  And thus he
+vegetates from day to day and from year to year at that splendid
+fantasy of Abbotsford, which grew out of his brain, and became a
+symbol of the great romancer's tastes, feelings, studies,
+prejudices, and modes of intellect.  Whether in verse, prose, or
+architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in
+infinite variety.  There he reclines, on a couch in his library, and
+is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales to an
+amanuensis,--to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not deemed worth
+any one's trouble now to take down what flows from that once
+brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and
+capable of being coined.  Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him,
+assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,--a
+striking combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of
+character, such as no other man alive could have bit off,--a glimmer
+from that ruined mind, as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-
+rusted helmet in the gloom of an ancient ball.  But the plots of
+these romances become inextricably confused; the characters melt
+into one another; and the tale loses itself like the course of a
+stream flowing through muddy and marshy ground.
+
+For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his
+consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue.
+It was good that he should forget his fame rather than that fame
+should first have forgotten him.  Were he still a writer, and as
+brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like
+the same position in literature.  The world, nowadays, requires a
+more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier
+truth than he was qualified to supply it with.  Yet who can be to
+the present generation even what Scott has been to the past?  I had
+expectations from a young man,--one Dickens,--who published a few
+magazine articles, very rich in humor, and not without symptoms of
+genuine pathos; but the poor fellow died shortly after commencing an
+odd series of sketches, entitled, I think, the Pickwick Papers.  Not
+impossibly the world has lost more than it dreams of by the untimely
+death of this Mr. Dickens.
+
+Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other day?  You would not
+hit it in ten guesses.  Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte,
+or all that is now left of him,--that is to say, the skin, bones,
+and corporeal substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white
+breeches, and small sword, which are still known by his redoubtable
+name.  He was attended only by two policemen, who walked quietly
+behind the phantasm of the old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty
+in regard to him except to see that none of the light-fingered
+gentry should possess themselves of thee star of the Legion of
+Honor.  Nobody save myself so much as turned to look after him; nor,
+it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive to muster up any
+tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike spirit, formerly
+manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought upon our
+globe.  There is no surer method of annihilating the magic influence
+of a great renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in the
+decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers,--buried
+beneath his own mortality,--and lacking even the qualities of sense
+that enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the
+eye of the world.  This is the state to which disease, aggravated by
+long endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age,--for
+he is now above seventy,--has reduced Bonaparte.  The British
+government has acted shrewdly in retransporting him from St. Helena
+to England.  They should now restore him to Paris, and there let him
+once again review the relics of his armies.  His eye is dull and
+rheumy; his nether lip hung down upon his chin. While I was
+observing him there chanced to be a little extra bustle in the
+street; and he, the brother of Caesar and Hannibal,--the great
+captain who had veiled the world in battle-smoke and tracked it
+round with bloody footsteps,--was seized with a nervous trembling,
+and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked and
+dolorous cry.  The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside,
+and, patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him
+away.
+
+Death and fury!  Ha, villain, how came you hither?  Avaunt! or I
+fling my inkstand at your head.  Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake.
+Pray, my dear friend, pardon this little outbreak.  The fact is, the
+mention of those two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte, had
+called up the idea of that odious wretch--you remember him well--who
+was pleased to take such gratuitous and impertinent care of my
+person before I quitted New England. Forthwith up rose before my
+mind's eye that same little whitewashed room, with the iron-grated
+window,--strange that it should have been iron-grated!--where, in
+too easy compliance with the absurd wishes of my relatives, I have
+wasted several good years of my life.  Positively it seemed to me
+that I was still sitting there, and that the keeper--not that he
+ever was my keeper neither, but only a kind of intrusive devil of a
+body-servant--had just peeped in at the door.  The rascal!  I owe
+him an old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet.  Fie! fie!
+The mere thought of him has exceedingly discomposed me.  Even now
+that hateful chamber--the iron-grated window, which blasted the
+blessed sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes and made it
+poison to my soul-looks more distinct to my view than does this my
+comfortable apartment in the heart of London.  The reality--that
+which I know to be such--hangs like remnants of tattered scenery
+over the intolerably prominent illusion.  Let us think of it no
+more.
+
+You will be anxious to hear of Shelley.  I need not say, what is
+known to all the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years
+past been reconciled to the Church of England.  In his more recent
+works he has applied his fine powers to the vindication of the
+Christian faith, with an especial view to that particular
+development.  Latterly, as you may not have heard, he has taken
+orders, and been inducted to a small country living in the gift of
+the Lord Chancellor.  Just now, luckily for me, he has come to the
+metropolis to superintend the publication of a volume of discourses
+treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity on the
+basis of the Thirty-nine Articles.  On my first introduction I felt
+no little embarrassment as to the manner of combining what I had to
+say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt of Islam_, and
+_Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might be
+acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
+Established Church.  But Shelley soon placed me at my ease.
+Standing where he now does, and reviewing all his successive
+productions from a higher point, he assures me that there is a
+harmony, an order, a regular procession, which enables him to lay
+his hand upon any one of the earlier poems and say, "This is my
+work," with precisely the same complacency of conscience wherewithal
+he contemplates the volume of discourses above mentioned.  They are
+like the successive steps of a staircase, the lowest of which, in
+the depth of chaos, is as essential to the support of the whole as
+the highest and final one resting upon the threshold of the heavens.
+I felt half inclined to ask him what would have been his fate had he
+perished on the lower steps of his staircase, instead of building
+his way aloft into the celestial brightness.
+
+How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly
+care, so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has,
+from a lower region to a loftier one.  Without touching upon their
+religious merits, I consider the productions of his maturity
+superior, as poems, to those of his youth.  They are warmer with
+human love, which has served as an interpreter between his mind and
+the multitude.  The author has learned to dip his pen oftener into
+his heart, and has thereby avoided the faults into which a too
+exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont to betray him.
+Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete arrangement
+of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they were
+brilliant.  Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
+heart-warmth responsive to your own.  In his private character
+Shelley can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate
+than his friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous
+night when he was drowned in the Mediterranean.  Nonsense, again,--
+sheer nonsense! What, am I babbling about?  I was thinking of that
+old figment of his being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed
+ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with
+wine, and spices, and frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach
+and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the
+dead poet's heart, and that his fire-purified relics were finally
+buried near his child in Roman earth.  If all this happened three-
+and-twenty years ago, how could I have met the drowned and burned
+and buried man here in London only yesterday?
+
+Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber,
+heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in
+England, called on Shelley while I was with him.  They appeared to
+be on terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint
+poem in contemplation.  What a strange, incongruous dream is the
+life of man!
+
+Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel.  It will be
+issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present
+publishing season.  The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
+affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser
+stop, to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from
+his lips.  He will not survive it above a month, unless his
+accumulation of ideas be sluiced off in some other way.  Wordsworth
+died only a week or two ago.  Heaven rest his soul, and grant that
+he may not have completed _The Excursion_!  Methinks I am sick of
+everything he wrote, except his _Laodamia_.  It is very sad, this
+inconstancy of the mind to the poets whom it once worshipped.
+Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with his usual diligence.
+Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of age, and with most
+pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow intellect the Devil
+had gifted him withal.  One hates to allow such a man the privilege
+of growing old and infirm.  It takes away our speculative license of
+kicking him.
+
+Keats?  No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with
+coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and
+divers other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and
+slender figure and my eager glance.  I would fain have met him on
+the sea-shore, or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the
+Gothic arch of an old cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a
+glimmering fireside on the verge of evening, or at the twilight
+entrance of a cave, into the dreamy depths of which he would have
+led me by the hand; anywhere, in short, save at Temple Bar, where
+his presence was blotted out by the porter-swollen bulks of these
+gross Englishmen.  I stood and watched him fading away, fading away
+along the pavement, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual
+man or a thought that had slipped out of my mind and clothed itself
+in human form and habiliments merely to beguile me.  At one moment
+he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it, I am almost
+certain, stained with blood.  You never saw anything so fragile as
+his person.  The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the effects
+of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on his
+Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him to
+the grave.  Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
+sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
+never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly
+think him a great poet.  The burden of a mighty genius would never
+have been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so
+infirmly sensitive.  Great poets should have iron sinews.
+
+Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the
+world, is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of
+an epic poem.  Some passages of it have been communicated to the
+inner circle of his admirers, and impressed them as the loftiest
+strains that have been audible on earth since Milton's days.  If I
+can obtain copies of these specimens, I will ask you to present them
+to James Russell Lowell, who seems to be one of the poet's most
+fervent and worthiest worshippers.  The information took me by
+surprise.  I had supposed that all Keats's poetic incense, without
+being embodied in human language, floated up to heaven and mingled
+with the songs of the immortal choristers, who perhaps were
+conscious of an unknown voice among them, and thought their melody
+the sweeter for it.  But it is not so; he has positively written a
+poem on the subject of _Paradise Regained_, though in another sense
+than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton.  In
+compliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend
+that all epic possibilities in the past history of the world are
+exhausted, Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely
+remote futurity.  He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances
+of the time-long warfare between good and evil.  Our race is on the
+eve of its final triumph.  Man is within the last stride of
+perfection; Woman, redeemed from the thraldom against which our
+sibyl uplifts so powerful and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by
+his side or communes for herself with angels; the Earth,
+sympathizing with her children's happier state, has clothed herself
+in such luxuriant and loving beauty as no eye ever witnessed since
+our first parents saw the sun rise over dewy Eden.  Nor then indeed;
+for this is the fulfilment of what was then but a golden promise.
+But the picture has its shadows.  There remains to mankind another
+peril,--a last encounter with the evil principle.  Should the battle
+go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of ages.  If
+we triumph--But it demands a poet's eye to contemplate the splendor
+of such a consummation and not to be dazzled.
+
+To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender
+a spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm
+interest of a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so
+high a theme.  Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation
+of his friends; for I have not read or heard even a single line of
+the performance in question.  Keats, I am told, withholds it from
+the press, under an idea that the age has not enough of spiritual
+insight to receive it worthily.  I do not like this distrust; it
+makes me distrust the poet.  The universe is waiting to respond to
+the highest word that the best child of time and immortality can
+utter.  If it refuse to listen, it is because he mumbles and
+stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and foreign to the
+purpose.
+
+I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you
+know, is now a peer, with I forget what title.  He disappointed me.
+Time blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of
+his order of intellect.  Then I stepped into the lower House and
+listened to a few words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real
+clodhopper, or rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the
+clods.  The men whom I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably
+because my spirits are not very good, and lead me to think much
+about graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn
+epitaphs, and dry bones of people who made noise enough in their
+day, but now can only clatter, clatter, clatter, when the sexton's
+spade disturbs them. Were it only possible to find out who are alive
+and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind.
+Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me in the face whom I
+had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted
+nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him.  For
+instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose
+before me, in the ghost of Hamlet's father, the bodily presence of
+the elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken
+fit or other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary
+now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself
+than the ghost of the Danish king.
+
+In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among
+them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
+profile--for I did not see her front face--that stamped itself into
+my brain as a seal impresses hot wax.  By the tragic gesture with
+which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons.
+Her brother, John Kemble, sat behind,--a broken-down figure, but
+still with a kingly majesty about him.  In lieu of all former
+achievements, Nature enables him to look the part of Lear far better
+than in the meridian of his genius.  Charles Matthews was likewise
+there; but a paralytic affection has distorted his once mobile
+countenance into a most disagreeable one-sidedness, from which he
+could no more wrench it into proper form than he could rearrange the
+face of the great globe itself. It looks as if, for the joke's sake,
+the poor man had twisted his features into an expression at once the
+most ludicrous and horrible that he could contrive, and at that very
+moment, as a judgment for making himself so hideous, an avenging
+Providence had seen fit to petrify him.  Since it is out of his own
+power, I would gladly assist him to change countenance, for his ugly
+visage haunts me both at noontide and night-time.  Some other
+players of the past generation were present, but none that greatly
+interested me.  It behooves actors, more than all other men of
+publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes.  Being at best but
+painted shadows flickering on the wall and empty sounds that echo
+anther's thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin
+to fade and the voice to croak with age.
+
+What is there new in the literary way on your side of the water?
+Nothing of the kind has come under any inspection, except a volume
+of poems published above a year ago by Dr. Channing.  I did not
+before know that this eminent writer is a poet; nor does the volume
+alluded to exhibit any of the characteristics of the author's mind
+as displayed in his prose works; although some of the poems have a
+richness that is not merely of the surface, but glows still the
+brighter the deeper and more faithfully you look into then.  They
+seem carelessly wrought, however, like those rings and ornaments of
+the very purest gold, but of rude, native manufacture, which are
+found among the gold-dust from Africa.  I doubt whether the American
+public will accept them; it looks less to the assay of metal than to
+the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly our literature grows
+up!  Most of our writers of promise have come to untimely ends.
+There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish
+brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else he never
+could keep himself so quiet.  Bryant has gone to his last sleep,
+with the _Thanatopsis_ gleaming over him like a sculptured marble
+sepulchre by moonlight.  Halleck, who used to write queer verses in
+the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called _Fanny_, is
+defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the
+metempsychosis as a man of business.  Somewhat later there was
+Whittier, a fiery Quaker youth, to whom the muse had perversely
+assigned a battle-trumpet, and who got himself lynched, ten years
+agone, in South Carolina.  I remember, too, a lad just from college,
+Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds,
+and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense application,
+at the University of Gottingen.  Willis--what a pity!--was lost, if
+I recollect rightly, in 1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he
+was going to give us sketches of the world's sunny face.  If these
+had lived, they might, one or all of them, have grown to be famous
+men.
+
+And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died.
+I was myself a young man of promise.  O shattered brain, O broken
+spirit, where is the fulfilment of that promise?  The sad truth is,
+that, when fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the
+hopefulest mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world's
+hopes to scorn, it lets them live.  Let me die upon this apothegm,
+for I shall never make a truer one.
+
+What a strange substance is the human brain!  Or rather,--for there
+is no need of generalizing the remark,--what an odd brain is mine!
+Would you believe it?  Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry
+humming in my intellectual ear--some as airy as birdnotes, and some
+as delicately neat as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-
+peals--that seem just such verses as those departed poets would have
+written had not an inexorable destiny snatched them from their
+inkstands.  They visit me in spirit, perhaps desiring to engage my
+services as the amanuensis of their posthumous productions, and thus
+secure the endless renown that they have forfeited by going hence
+too early.  But I have my own business to attend to; and besides, a
+medical gentleman, who interests himself in some little ailments of
+mine, advises me not to make too free use of pen and ink.  There are
+clerks enough out of employment who would be glad of such a job.
+
+Good by!  Are you alive or dead? and what are you about?  Still
+scribbling for the Democratic?  And do those infernal compositors
+and proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as
+ever? It is too bad.  Let every man manufacture his own nonsense,
+say I.  Expect me home soon, and--to whisper you a secret--in
+company with the poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming and
+enjoy the shadow of the laurels that he planted there.  Campbell is
+now an old man.  He calls himself well, better than ever in his
+life, but looks strangely pale, and so shadow-like that one might
+almost poke a finger through his densest material.  I tell him, by
+way of joke, that he is as dim and forlorn as Memory, though as
+unsubstantial as Hope.
+
+
+Your true friend,  P.
+
+P. S.--Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and
+revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
+
+
+It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a
+double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press at
+Philadelphia.  Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more
+classic reputation on this side of the water.  Is old Joel Barlow
+yet alive?  Unconscionable man!  Why, he must have nearly fulfilled
+his century.  And does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico
+and Texas with machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-
+engine, as being the nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can
+boast?  How can he expect ever to rise again, if, while just sinking
+into his grave, he persists in burdening himself with such a
+ponderosity of leaden verses?
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, P.'S CORRESPONDENCE ***
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