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Rh if not, will certainly keep a Novalis-journal for you some favorable season, when I live regularly for a fortnight.”

‘June, 1833. — I return Lessing. I could hardly get through Miss Sampson. E. Galeotti is good in the same way as Minna. Well-conceived and sustained characters, interesting situations, but never that profound knowledge of human nature, those minute beauties, and delicate vivifying traits, which lead on so in the writings of some authors, who may be nameless. I think him easily followed; strong, but not deep.’

‘May, 1833. — Groton. — I think you are wrong in applying your artistical ideas to occasional poetry. An epic, a drama, must have a fixed form in the mind of the poet from the first; and copious draughts of ambrosia quaffed in the heaven of thought, soft fanning gates and bright light from the outward world, give muscle and bloom, — that is, give life, — to this skeleton. But all occasional poems must be moods, and can a mood have a form fixed and perfect, more than a wave of the sea?’

‘Three or four afternoons I have passed very happily at my beloved haunt in the wood, reading Goethe’s “Second Residence in Rome.” Your pencil-marks show that you have been before me. I shut the book each time with an earnest desire to live as he did, — always to have some engrossing object of pursuit. I sympathize deeply with a mind in that state. While mine is being used up by ounces, I wish