To the Same

Olney, February 9, 1786.  Let me tell you that your kindness in promising to visit us has charmed us both.  I shall see you again.  I shall hear your voice.  We shall take walks together.  I will show you my prospects, the hovel, the alcove, the banks of the Ouse, everything I have described.  My dear, I will not let you come till the end of May, or the beginning of June, because, before that time my greenhouse will not be ready to receive us, and it is the only pleasant room belonging to us.  When the plants go out, we go in.

I will tell you what you shall find at your first entrance. Imprimis, as soon as you have entered the vestibule, if you cast a look on either side of you, you shall see on the right hand a box of my making.  It is the box in which have been lodged all my hares, and in which lodges Puss at present.  But he, poor fellow, is worn out with age, and promises to die before you can see him.

My dear, I have told Homer what you say about casks and urns, and have asked him whether he is sure that it is a cask in which Jupiter keeps his wine.  He swears that it is a cask, and that it will never be anything better than a cask to all eternity.  So if the god is content with it, we must even wonder at his taste and be so too.

To the Same

Olney, March 6, 1786.  Your opinion has more weight with me than that of all the critics in the world.  To give you a proof of it, I make you a concession that I would hardly have made to them all united.  I do not indeed absolutely covenant that I will discard all my elisions, but I hereby bind myself to discard as many of them as, without sacrificing energy to sound, I can.  It is incumbent on me, in the meantime, to say something in justification of the few I shall retain, that I may not seem a poet mounted on a mule rather than on Parnassus.  In the first place, “the” is a barbarism.  We are indebted for it to the Celts, or the Goths, or the Saxons, or perhaps to them all.  In the two best languages that ever were spoken, the Greek and the Latin, there is no similar encumbrance of expression to be found.  Secondly, the perpetual use of it in our language is, to us miserable poets, attended with two great inconveniences.

Our verse consisting of only ten syllables, it not infrequently happens that the fifth part of a line is to be engrossed, and necessarily too, unless elision prevents it, by this abominable intruder; and, which is worse in my account, open vowels are continually the consequence—­the element—­the air, etc.  Thirdly, the French, who are equally chargeable with the English with barbarism in this particular, dispose of their le and their la without ceremony, and always take care that they shall be absorbed, both in verse and in prose, in the vowel that immediately follows them.  Fourthly, and I believe lastly, the practice of cutting short “the” is warranted by Milton, who of all English poets that ever lived, had certainly the finest ear.