I wrote it I was rather puffed up and elated in spirit, and looked at it naturally in far too favorable a light, I assure you I have long since come to a much soberer frame of mind respecting it.  I think it is quite unfit for the stage, where the little poetical merit it possesses would necessarily be lost; besides, its construction is wholly undramatic.  The only satisfaction I now take in it is entirely one of hope; I am very young, and I cannot help feeling that it offers some promise for the future, which I trust may be fulfilled.  Now even, already, I am sure I could do infinitely better; nor will it be long, I think, before I try my strength again.  If you could see the multiplicity of subjects drawn up in my book under the head of “projected works,” how you would shake your wise head, and perhaps your lean sides.  I wish I could write a good prose work, but that, I take it, is really difficult, as good, concise, powerful, clear prose must be much less easy to write than even tolerable poetry.  I have been reading a quantity of German plays (translations, of course, but literal ones), and I have been reveling in that divine devildom, “Faust.”  Suppose it does send one to bed with a side-ache, a headache, and a heartache, isn’t it worth while?  Did you ever read Goethe’s “Tasso”?  Certainly he makes the mad poet a mighty disagreeable person; but in describing him it seemed to me as if Goethe was literally transcribing my thoughts and feelings, my mind and being.

Now, dearest H——­, don’t bear malice, and, because I have not written for so long, wait still longer before you answer.  My mother has been in the country for a few days, and has returned with a terrible cough and cold, with which pleasant maladies she finds the house full here to welcome her, so that we all croak in unison most harmoniously.  I was at the Siddonses’ the other evening.  My aunt was suffering, I am sorry to say, with one of her terrible headaches; Cecilia was pretty well, but as it was a soiree chantante, I had little opportunity of talking to either of them.  Did you mention my notion about going on the stage in any of your letters to Cecy?

The skies are brightening and the trees are budding; it will soon be the time of year when we first met.  Pray remember me when the hawthorn blossoms; hail, snow, or sunshine, I remember you, and am ever your affectionate

FANNY.

The want of a settled place of residence compelled me, many years after writing this letter, to destroy the letters of my friend, which I had preserved until they amounted to many hundreds; my friend kept, in the house that was her home from her fourteenth to her sixtieth year, all mine to her—­several thousands, the history of a whole human life—­and gave them back to me when she was upwards of seventy and I of sixty years old; they are the principal aid to my memory in my present task of retrospection.

My life at home at this time became difficult and troublesome, and unsatisfactory to myself and others; my mind and character were in a chaotic state of fermentation that required the wisest, firmest, and gentlest guidance.  I was vehement and excitable, violently impulsive, and with a wild, ill-regulated imagination.