Let me here say a few words of this Poem, by way of criticism.  The subject being taken from feudal times has led to its being compared to some of Walter Scott’s poems that belong to the same age and state of society.  The comparison is inconsiderate.  Sir Walter pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting an action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe.  The course I attempted to pursue is entirely different.  Everything that is attempted by the principal personages in the ‘White Doe’ fails, so far as its object is external and substantial:  so far as it is moral and spiritual, it succeeds.  The heroine of the poem knows that her duty is not to interfere with the current of events, either to forward or delay them; but—­

          ’To abide
    The shock, and finally secure
    O’er pain and grief a triumph pure.’

This she does in obedience to her brother’s injunction, as most suitable to a mind and character that, under previous trials, had been proved to accord with his.  She achieves this, not without aid from the communication with the inferior creature, which often leads her thoughts to revolve upon the past with a tender and humanising influence that exalts rather than depresses her.  The anticipated beatification, if I may so say, of her mind, and the apotheosis of the companion of her solitude, are the points at which the poem aims, and constitute its legitimate catastrophe; far too spiritual a one for instant or widely-spread sympathy, but not therefore the less fitted to make a deep and permanent impression upon that class of minds who think and feel more independently than the many do of the surfaces of things, and interests transitory because belonging more to the outward and social forms of life than to its internal spirit.

How insignificant a thing, for example, does personal prowess appear, compared with the fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom; in other words, with struggles for the sake of principle, in preference to victory gloried in for its own sake!

[To these remarks may be added the following, in a letter from the writer to his friend Archdeacon Wrangham: 

’Thanksgiving Day, Jan. 1816. 
Rydal Mount.

’MY DEAR WRANGHAM,

’You have given me an additional mark of that friendly disposition, and those affectionate feelings which I have long known you to possess, by writing to me after my long and unjustifiable silence.

* * * * *

’Of the “White Doe” I have little to say, but that I hope it will be acceptable to the intelligent, for whom alone it is written.  It starts from a high point of imagination, and comes round, through various wanderings of that faculty, to a still higher—­nothing less than the apotheosis of the animal who gives the first of the two titles to the poem.  And as the poem thus