No, you never sent me back Miss Martineau’s letter, my dear cousin; but you will be sure, or rather Mr. Crabb Robinson will, to find it in some too safe a place; and then I shall have it.  In the meantime here are the other letters back again.  You will think that I was keeping them for a deposit, a security, till I ‘had my ain again,’ but I have only been idle and busy together.  They are the most interesting that can be, and have quite delighted me.  By the way, I, who saw nothing to object to in the ‘Life in the Sick Room,’ object very much to her argument in behalf of it—­an argument certainly founded on a miserable misapprehension of the special doctrine referred to in her letter.  There is nothing so elevating and ennobling to the nature and mind of man as the view which represents it raised into communion with God Himself, by the justification and purification of God Himself.  Plato’s dream brushed by the gate of this doctrine when it walked highest, and won for him the title of ‘Divine.’  That it is vulgarised sometimes by narrow-minded teachers in theory, and by hypocrites in action, might be an argument (if admitted at all) against all truth, poetry, and music!

On the other hand, I was glad to see the leaning on the Education question; in which all my friends the Dissenters did appear to me so painfully wrong and so unworthily wrong at once.

And Southey’s letters!  I did quite delight in them!  They are more personal than any I ever saw of his; and have more warm every-day life in them.

The particular Paul Pry in question (to come down to my life) never ‘intrudes.’  It is his peculiarity.  And I put the stop exactly where I was bid; and was going to put Gabriel’s speech,[93] only—­with the pen in my hand to do it—­I found that the angel was a little too exclamatory altogether, and that he had cried out, ‘O ruined earth!’ and ‘O miserable angel!’ just before, approaching to the habit of a mere caller of names.  So I altered the passage otherwise; taking care of your full stop after ‘despair.’  Thank you, my dear Mr. Kenyon.

Also I sent enough manuscript for the first sheet, and a note to Moxon yesterday, last night, thanking him for his courtesy about Leigh Hunt’s poems; and following your counsel in every point.  ’Only last night,’ you will say!  But I have had such a headache—­and some very painful vexation in the prospect of my maid’s leaving me, who has been with me throughout my illness; so that I am much attached to her, with the best reasons for being so, while the idea of a stranger is scarcely tolerable to me under my actual circumstances.

The ’Palm Leaves’[94] are full of strong thought and good thought—­thought expressed excellently well; but of poetry, in the true sense, and of imagination in any, I think them bare and cold—­somewhat wintry leaves to come from the East, surely, surely!

May the change of air be rapid in doing you good—­the weather seems to be softening on purpose for you.  May God bless you, dear Mr. Kenyon; I never can thank you enough.  When you return I shall be rustling my ‘proofs’ about you, to prove my faith in your kindness.