an opportunity of seeing in your company your own collection of pictures and some others in town, Mr. Angerstein’s, for instance, to have pointed out to me some of those finer and peculiar beauties of painting which I am afraid I shall never have an occasion of becoming sufficiently familiar with pictures to discover of myself.  There is not a day in my life when I am at home in which that exquisite little drawing of yours of Applethwaite does not affect me with a sense of harmony and grace, which I cannot describe.  Mr. Edridge, an artist whom you know, saw this drawing along with a Mr. Duppa, another artist, who published Hints from Raphael and Michael Angelo; and they were both most enthusiastic in their praise of it, to my great delight.  By the bye, I thought Mr. Edridge a man of very mild and pleasing manners, and as far as I could judge, of delicate feelings, in the province of his Art.  Duppa is publishing a life of Michael Angelo, and I received from him a few days ago two proof-sheets of an Appendix which contains the poems of M.A., which I shall read, and translate one or two of them, if I can do it with decent success.  I have peeped into the Sonnets, and they do not appear at all unworthy of their great Author.

You will be pleased to hear that I have been advancing with my work:  I have written upwards of 2000 verses during the last ten weeks.  I do not know if you are exactly acquainted with the plan of my poetical labour:  it is twofold; first, a Poem, to be called ‘The Recluse;’ in which it will be my object to express in verse my most interesting feelings concerning man, nature, and society; and next, a poem (in which I am at present chiefly engaged) on my earlier life, or the growth of my own mind, taken up upon a large scale.  This latter work I expect to have finished before the month of May; and then I purpose to fall with all my might on the former, which is the chief object upon which my thoughts have been fixed these many years.  Of this poem, that of ’The Pedlar,’[25] which Coleridge read you, is part, and I may have written of it altogether about 2000 lines.  It will consist, I hope, of about ten or twelve thousand.

[25] ‘The Excursion.’  ‘The Pedlar’ was the title once proposed, from the character of the Wanderer, but abandoned. (Memoirs, vol. i. p.304.)

May we not hope for the pleasure of seeing you and Lady Beaumont down here next Summer?  I flatter myself that Coleridge will then be return’d, and though we would not [on] any account that he should fix himself in this rainy part of England, yet perhaps we may have the happiness of meeting all together for a few weeks.  We have lately built in our little rocky orchard, a little circular Hut, lined with moss, like a wren’s nest, and coated on the outside with heath, that stands most charmingly, with several views from the different sides of it, of the Lake, the Valley, and the Church—­sadly spoiled, however, lately by being white-washed.  The little retreat is most delightful, and I am sure you and Lady Beaumont would be highly pleased with it.  Coleridge has never seen it.  What a happiness would it be to us to see him there, and entertain you all next Summer in our homely way under its shady thatch.  I will copy a dwarf inscription which I wrote for it the other day, before the building was entirely finished, which indeed it is not yet.