with its hands and is silent.  If your piece were printed, I have no doubt it would be popular, for people like to fancy that they feel much better than the trouble of feeling.  I would put all poets on oath whether they have striven to say everything they possibly could think of, or to leave out all they could not help saying.  In your own case, my worthy young friend, what you have written is merely a deliberate exercise, the gymnastic of sentiment.  For your excellent maternal relative is still alive, and is to take tea with me this evening, D.V.  Beware of simulated feeling; it is hypocrisy’s first cousin; it is especially dangerous to a preacher; for he who says one day, “Go to, let me seem to be pathetic,” may be nearer than he thinks to saying, “Go to, let me seem to be virtuous, or earnest, or under sorrow for sin.”  Depend upon it, Sappho loved her verses more sincerely than she did Phaon, and Petrarch his sonnets better than Laura, who was indeed but his poetical stalking-horse.  After you shall have once heard that muffled rattle of clods on the coffin-lid of an irreparable loss, you will grow acquainted with a pathos that will make all elegies hateful.  When I was of your age, I also for a time mistook my desire to write verses for an authentic call of my nature in that direction.  But one day as I was going forth for a walk, with my head full of an “Elegy on the Death of Flirtilla,” and vainly groping after a rhyme for lily that should not be silly or chilly, I saw my eldest boy Homer busy over the rain-water hogshead, in that childish experiment at parthenogenesis, the changing a horse-hair into a water-snake.  All immersion of six weeks showed no change in the obstinate filament.  Here was a stroke of unintended sarcasm.  Had I not been doing in my study precisely what my boy was doing out of doors?  Had my thoughts any more chance of coming to life by being submerged in rhyme than his hair by soaking in water?  I burned my elegy and took a course of Edwards on the Will.  People do not make poetry; it is made out of them by a process for which I do not find myself fitted.  Nevertheless, the writing of verses is a good rhetorical exercitation, as teaching us what to shun most carefully in prose.  For prose bewitched is like window-glass with bubbles in it, distorting what it should show with pellucid veracity.’

It is unwise to insist on doctrinal points as vital to religion.  The Bread of Life is wholesome and sufficing in itself, but gulped down with these kickshaws cooked up by theologians, it is apt to produce an indigestion, nay, eyen at last an incurable dyspepsia of scepticism.