June 14, 1796,

I am not quite satisfied now with the Chatterton, and with your leave will try my hand at it again.  A master-joiner, you know, may leave a cabinet to be finished, when his own hands are full.  To your list of illustrative personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I will take leave to add the following from Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Wife for a Month;” ’tis the conclusion of a description of a sea-fight:  “The game of death was never played so nobly; the meagre thief grew wanton in his mischiefs, and his shrunk, hollow eyes smiled on his ruins.”  There is fancy in these of a lower order from “Bonduca”:  “Then did I see these valiant men of Britain, like boding owls creep into tods of ivy, and hoot their fears to one another nightly.”  Not that it is a personification, only it just caught my eye in a little extract-book I keep, which is full of quotations from B. and F. in particular, in which authors I can’t help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any one, Shakspeare excepted.  Are you acquainted with Massinger?  At a hazard I will trouble you with a passage from a play of his called “A Very Woman.”  The lines are spoken by a lover (disguised) to his faithless mistress.  You will remark the fine effect of the double endings.

You will by your ear distinguish the lines, for I write ’em as prose.  “Not far from where my father lives, a lady, a neighbor by, blest with as great a beauty as Nature durst bestow without undoing, dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, and blest the house a thousand times she dwelt in.  This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, when my first fire knew no adulterate incense, nor I no way to flatter but my fondness; in all the bravery my friends could show me, in all the faith my innocence could give me, in the best language my true tongue could tell me, and all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, I sued and served; long did I serve this lady, long was my travail, long my trade to win her; with all the duty of my soul I SERVED HER.”  “Then she must love.”  “She did, but never me:  she could not love me; she would not love, she hated, ­more, she scorned me; and in so a poor and base a way abused me for all my services, for all my bounties, so bold neglects flung on me.”  “What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her (shame to her most unworthy mind!), to fools, to girls, to fiddlers and her boys she flung, all in disdain of me.”  One more passage strikes my eye from B. and F.’s “Palamon and Arcite.”  One of ’em complains in prison:  “This is all our world; we shall know nothing here but one another, hear nothing but the clock that tells us our woes; the vine shall grow, but we shall never see it,” etc.  Is not the last circumstance exquisite?  I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins in sublimity.  But don’t you conceive all poets after Shakspeare yield to ’em in variety of genius?  Massinger treads close on their heels; but you are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your humble servant.  My quotations, in that case, will only serve to expose my barrenness of matter.  Southey in simplicity and tenderness is excelled decidedly only, I think, by Beaumont and F. in his “Maid’s Tragedy,” and some parts of “Philaster” in particular, and elsewhere occasionally; and perhaps by Cowper in his “Crazy Kate,” and in parts of his translation, such as the speeches of Hecuba and Andromache.  I long to know your opinion of that translation.  The Odyssey especially is surely very Homeric.  What nobler than the appearance of Phoebus at the beginning of the Iliad, ­the lines ending with “Dread sounding, bounding on the silver bow!”

I beg you will give me your opinion of the translation; it afforded me high pleasure.  As curious a specimen of translation as ever fell into my hands, is a young man’s in our office, of a French novel.  What in the original was literally “amiable delusions of the fancy,” he proposed, to render “the fair frauds of the imagination.”  I had much trouble in licking the book into any meaning at all.  Yet did the knave clear fifty or sixty pounds by subscription and selling the copyright.  The book itself not a week’s work!  To-day’s portion of my journalizing epistle has been very dull and poverty-stricken.  I will here end.

Tuesday night,

I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking Oronooko (associated circumstances, which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and nights at the “Salutation").  My eyes and brain are heavy and asleep, but my heart is awake; and if words came as ready as ideas, and ideas as feelings, I could say ten hundred kind things.  Coleridge, you know not my supreme happiness at having one on earth (though counties separate us) whom I can call a friend.  Remember you those tender lines of Logan? ­

  “Our broken friendships we deplore,
  And loves of youth that are no more;
  No after friendships e’er can raise
  Th’ endearments of our early days,
  And ne’er the heart such fondness prove,
  As when we first began to love.”

I am writing at random, and half-tipsy, what you may not equally understand, as you will be sober when you read it; but my sober and my half-tipsy hours you are alike a sharer in.  Good night.

  “Then up rose our bard, like a prophet in drink,
  Craigdoroch, thou’lt soar when creation shall sink.”

BURNS.