GREAT RUSSELL STREET, February 7, 1831. 
MY DEAR H——­,

I found your lecture waiting for me on my return from Brighton; I call it thus because if your two last were less than letters your yesterday’s one is more; but I shall not attempt at present to follow you to the misty heights whither our nature tends, or dive with you into the muddy depths whence it springs.  I have heard from my brother John, and now expect almost hourly to see him.  The Spanish revolution, as he now sees and as many foresaw, is a mere vision.  The people are unready, unripe, unfit, and therefore unwilling; had it not been so they would have done their work themselves; it is as impossible to urge on the completion of such a change before the time as to oppose it when the time is come.  John now writes that, all hope of rousing the Spaniards being over, and their party consequently dispersing, he is thinking of bending his steps homeward, and talks of once more turning his attention to the study of the law.  I know not what to say or think.  My cousin, Horace Twiss, was put into Parliament by Lord Clarendon, but the days of such parliamentary patronage are numbered, and I do not much deplore it, though I sometimes fancy that the House of Commons, could it by any means have been opened to him, might perhaps have been the best sphere for John.  His natural abilities are brilliant, and his eloquence, energy, and activity of mind might perhaps have been made more and more quickly available for good purposes in that than in any other career.

I am not familiar with all that Burns has written; I have read his letters, and know most of his songs by heart.  His passions were so violent that he seems to me in that respect to have been rather a subject for poetry than a poet; for though a poet should perhaps have a strongly passionate nature, he should also have power enough over it to be able to observe, describe, and, if I may so say, experimentalize with it, as he would with the passions of others.  I think it would better qualify a man to be a poet to be able to perceive rather than liable to feel violent passion or emotion.  May not such things be known of without absolute experience?  What is the use of the poetical imagination, that lower inspiration, which, like the higher one of faith, is the “evidence of things not seen”?  Troubled and billowy waters reflect nothing distinctly on their surface; it is the still, deep, placid element that gives back the images by which it is surrounded or that pass over its surface.  I do not of course believe that a good man is necessarily a poet, but I think a devout man is almost always a man with a poetical imagination; he is familiar with ideas which are essentially sublime, and in the act of adoration he springs to the source of all beauty through the channel by which our spirits escape most effectually from their chain, the flesh, and their prison-house, the world, and rise into communion with that supreme excellence from