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You will be sorry to hear that I have lost my health, and am oppressed with symptoms of an hereditary and dangerous disease.

Litchfield has been my home since I was seven years old this house since I was thirteen; for I am still in the palace, and do not think of moving at present. It is certainly much too large for my wants, and for my income; yet is my attachment so strong to the scene, that I am tempted to try, if I recover, what strict economy, in other respects, will do towards enabling me to remain in a mansion, endeared to me as the tablet on which the pleasures of my youth are impressed, and the image of those that are everlastingly absent. Adieu. Yours, ANNA SEWARD,

Anna Seward to Walter Scott, Esq.

Litchfield, April 29, 1802.

ACCEPT my warmest thanks for the so far overpaying bounty of your literary present. In speaking of its contents, I shall demonstrate that my sincerity may be trusted, whatever cause I may give you to distrust my judgment. In saying that you dare not hope your works will entertain me, you evince the existence of a deep preconceived distrust of the latter faculty in my mind. That distrust is not, I flatter myself, entirely founded, at least if I may so gather from the delight with which I peruse all that is yours, whether prose or verse, in these volumes.

Your dissertations place us in Scotland, in the midst of the feudal period. They throw the strongest light on a part of history indistinctly sketched, and partially mentioned by the English historians, and which, till now, has not been suf

ficiently clucidated, and rescued by those of your country from the imputed guilt of unprovoked depredation on the part of the Scots.

The old border ballads of your first volume are so far interesting as they corroborate your historic essays; so far valuable as that they form the basis of them. Poctically considered, little surely is their worth; and I must think it more to the credit of Mrs. Brown's memory than of her taste, that she could take pains to commit to remembrance, and to retain there, such a quantity of uncouth rhymes, almost totally destitute of all which gives metre a right to the name of poetry.

Poetry is like personal beauty; the homeliest and roughest language cannot conceal the first, any more than coarse and mean apparel the second. But grovelling colloquial phrase, in numbers inharmonious; verse that gives no picture to the reader's eye, no light to his understanding, no magnet to his affections, is, as composition, no more deserving his praise, than coarse forms and features in a beggar's raiment are worth his attention. Yet are these critics who seem to mistake the squalid dress of language for poetic excellence, provided the verse and its mean garb be

ancient.

Of that number seems Mr. Pinkerton, in some of his notes to those old Scottish ballads which he published in 1781; and the late Mr. Headley more than so seems in that collection of ancient English ballads, which he soon after gave to the press. We find there an idiot preference of the rude, and, in itself, valueless, foundation on which Prior raised one of the loveliest poetic edifices in our language, the Henry and Emma. With equal insolence and stupidity, Mr. Headley terms it "Matt's versifica

tion Piece," extolling the imputed superiority of the worthless model. It is preferring a barber's block to the head of Antinous.

Mr. Pinkerton, in his note to the eldest Flowers of the Forest, calls it, very justly, an exquisite poetic dirge; but, unfortunately for his decisions in praise of ancient above modern Scottish verse, he adds, "The inimitable beauty of the original induced a variety of versifiers to mingle stanzas of their own composition; but it is the painful, though necessary duty of an editor, by the touch stone of truth, to discriminate such dross from the gold of antiquity;" and, in the note to that pathe. tic and truly beautiful elegy, Lady Bothwell's Lament, he says the four stanzas he has given ap pear to be all that are genuine. It has since, as you observe, been proved, that both the Flodden Dirges, even as he has given them, are modern, Their beauty was a touchstone, as he expresses it, which might have shown their younger birth to any critic, whose taste had not received the broad impression of that torpedo, antiquarianism.

You, with all your strength, originality, and richness of imagination, had a slight touch of that torpedo, when you observed, that the manner of the ancient minstrels is so happily imitated in the first Flowers of the Forest, that it required the strongest positive evidence to convince you that the song was of modern date. The phraseology, indeed, is of their texture; but, comparing it with the border ballads, in your first volume, I should have pronounced it modern, from its so much more lively pictures.

Permit me, too, to confess, that I can discover very little of all which constitutes poetry in the first old tale, which you call beautiful, excepting the

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second stanza, which gives the unicorns at the gate, and the portraits, "with holly aboon their brie." To give them, no great reach of fancy was requisite; but still they are pictured, and, as such, poetry.

Lord Maxwell's Good Night is but a sort of inventory in rhyme of his property, interspersed with some portion of tenderness for his wife, and some expressions of regard for his friends; but the first has no picture, and the latter little pathós. That ballad induced me, by what appeared its deficiencies, to attempt a somewhat more poetic leave-taking of house, land, and live-stock. My ballad does not attempt the pathetic, and you will smile at my glossary Scotch.

Mr. Erskine's supplemental stanzas to the poem, asserted to have been written by Collins, on the Highland superstitions, have great merit, and no inferiority to those whose manner they assume.

In the border ballads, the first strong rays from the Delphic orb illuminate Jellom Grame, in the 4th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 20th stanzas. There is a good corpse-picture in Clerk Saunders, the rude original, as you observe, of a ballad in Percy, which I have thought furnished Burger with the hint for his Leonore. How little delicate touches have improved this verse in Percy's imitation!

"O! if I come within thy bower

I am no mortal man!

And if I kiss thy rosy lip

Thy days will not be long."

And now, in these border ballads, the dawn of poesy, which broke over Jellom Grame, strengthens on its progress. Lord Thomas and fair Annie has more beauty than Percy's ballad of that title. It seems injudiciously altered from this in your collection; but the Binnorie, of endless repetition,

has nothing truly pathetic; and the ludicrous use made of the drowned sister's body, by the harper making a harp of it, to which he sung her dirge in her father's hall, is contemptible.

Your dissertation preceding Tam Lane, in the second volume, is a little mine of mythologic information and ingenious conjecture, however melancholy the proofs it gives of dark and cruel superstition. Always partial to the fairies, I am charmed to learn that Shakspeare civilized the elfins, and, so doing, endeared their memory on English ground. It is curious to find the Grecian Orpheus metamorposed into a king of Winchelsea.

The Terrible Graces look through a couple of stanzas in the first part of Thomas the Rhymer, "O they rade on," &c.; also, " It was mirk, mirk, night;" and potent are the poetic charms of the second part of this oracular ballad, which you confess to have been modernized; yet more potent is the third. Both of them exhibit tender touches of sentiment, vivid pictures, landscapes from na ture, not from books, and all of them worthy the author of Glenfinlas.

"O tell me how to woo thee," is a pretty ballad of those times, in which it was the fashion for lovers to warship their mistresses, and when ballads, as you beautifully observe, reflected the setting rays of chivalry. Mr. Leyden's Cout Keelder pleases me much. The first is a sublime stanza, and sweet are the landscape-touches in the third, tenth, and eleventh, and striking the winter simile in the ninth. The picture of the fern is new in poetry, and to the eye, thus,

"The next blast that young Keelder blew,
The wind grew deadly still:

Yet the sleek fern, with fingery leaves,
Wav'd wildly o'er the hill."

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