children.  A man must have done this habitually before his judgment upon the ‘Idiot Boy’ would be in any way decisive with me.  I know I have done this myself habitually; I wrote the poem with exceeding delight and pleasure, and whenever I read it I read it with pleasure.  You have given me praise for having reflected faithfully in my Poems the feelings of human nature.  I would fain hope that I have done so.  But a great Poet ought to do more than this; he ought, to a certain degree, to rectify men’s feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane, pure, and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature, that is, to eternal Nature, and the great moving Spirit of things.  He ought to travel before men occasionally as well as at their sides.  I may illustrate this by a reference to natural objects.  What false notions have prevailed from generation to generation of the true character of the Nightingale.  As far as my Friend’s Poem, in the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ is read, it will contribute greatly to rectify these.  You will recollect a passage in Cowper, where, speaking of rural sounds, he says,

          And even the boding Owl
    That hails the rising moon has charms for me.

Cowper was passionately fond of natural objects, yet you see he mentions it as a marvellous thing that he could connect pleasure with the cry of the owl.  In the same poem he speaks in the same manner of that beautiful plant, the gorse; making in some degree an amiable boast of his loving it ’unsightly’ and unsmooth as it is.  There are many aversions of this kind, which, though they have some foundation in nature, have yet so slight a one, that, though they may have prevailed hundreds of years, a philosopher will look upon them as accidents.  So with respect to many moral feelings, either of love or dislike.  What excessive admiration was paid in former times to personal prowess and military success; it is so with the latter even at the present day, but surely not nearly so much as heretofore.  So with regard to birth, and innumerable other modes of sentiment, civil and religious.  But you will be inclined to ask by this time how all this applies to the ‘Idiot Boy.’  To this I can only say that the loathing and disgust which many people have at the sight of an idiot, is a feeling which, though having some foundation in human nature, is not necessarily attached to it in any virtuous degree, but is owing in a great measure to a false delicacy, and, if I may say it without rudeness, a certain want of comprehensiveness of thinking and feeling.  Persons in the lower classes of society have little or nothing of this:  if an idiot is born in a poor man’s house, it must be taken care of, and cannot be boarded out, as it would be by gentlefolks, or sent to a public or private receptacle for such unfortunate beings. [Poor people] seeing frequently among their neighbours such objects, easily [forget] whatever there is of natural disgust about them, and have [therefore] a sane state, so that without pain or suffering they [perform] their duties towards them.  I could with pleasure pursue this subject, but I must now strictly adopt the plan which I proposed to myself when I began to write this letter, namely, that of setting down a few hints or memorandums, which you will think of for my sake.