and that I have sighed one or two secret wishes towards its extirpation, but other writers besides yourself have singled it out for praise in private letters to me.  There has been no printed review yet, I believe; and when I think of them, I try to think of something else, for with no private friends among the critical body (not that I should desire to owe security in such a matter to private friendship) it is awful enough, this looking forward to be reviewed.  Never mind, the ultimate prosperity of the book lies far above the critics, and can neither be mended nor made nor unmade by them.

To John Kenyan Wednesday morning [August 1844].

I return Mr. Chorley’s[106] note, my dear cousin, with thankful thoughts of him—­as of you.  I wish I could persuade you of the rightness of my view about ‘Essays on Mind’ and such things, and how the difference between them and my present poems is not merely the difference between two schools, as you seemed to intimate yesterday, nor even the difference between immaturity and maturity; but that it is the difference between the dead and the living, between a copy and an individuality, between what is myself and what is not myself.  To you who have a personal interest and—­may I say? affection for me, the girl’s exercise assumes a factitious value, but to the public the matter is otherwise and ought to be otherwise.  And for the ‘psychological’ side of the question, do observe that I have not reputation enough to suggest a curiosity about my legends.  Instead of your ‘legendary lore,’ it would be just a legendary bore.  Now you understand what I mean.  I do not underrate Pope nor his school, but I do disesteem everything which, bearing the shape of a book, is not the true expression of a mind, and I know and feel (and so do you) that a girl’s exercise written when all the experience lay in books, and the mind was suited rather for intelligence than production, lying like an infant’s face with an undeveloped expression, must be valueless in itself, and if offered to the public directly or indirectly as a work of mine, highly injurious to me.  Why, of the ‘Prometheus’ volume, even, you know what I think and desire.  ’The Seraphim,’ with all its feebleness and shortcomings and obscurities, yet is the first utterance of my own individuality, and therefore the only volume except the last which is not a disadvantage to me to have thought of, and happily for me, the early books, never having been advertised, nor reviewed, except by accident, once or twice, are as safe from the public as manuscript.

Oh, I shudder to think of the lines which might have been ‘nicked in,’ and all through Mr. Chorley’s good nature.  As if I had not sins enough to ruin me in the new poems, without reviving juvenile ones, sinned when I knew no better.  Perhaps you would like to have the series of epic poems which I wrote from nine years old to eleven.  They might illustrate some doctrine of innate ideas, and enrich (to that end) the myths of metaphysicians.