THE RANDALL FAMILY 57
to one who could sympathize with them, and your ideas and images to one on whom they never fell without excit- ing the liveliest interest, and furnishing food for medita- tion during the many solitary and unemployed hours that for the last three years I have been condemned to spend. The ties of our early friendship, I do fully believe, will never be broken, howsoever distant and dissimilar from each other may be the lines which Destiny shall trace out for us ; and, after long years of evil and vexation shall have passed over us, the present will still become a mirror of the past, reflecting back our schoolday and college asso- ciations unalloyed by any bitterness.
I am glad you have not given up literature, it is such an ever-increasing source of delight and instruction. I wish you would compose more often yourself. It is unjust for you, who have the power of drawing such beautiful pictures, so seldom to put pen to paper. I long to read once more myself the " Song of the Two Friends " and " The Water Spirit." Some circumstance or some feeling brings to my mind almost every day lines and images which they contain. The first I remember with the greatest pleasure, but I never see a beautiful and still sheet of water without
hearing —
" The sea-cave is my dwelling-place, But sunset makes me free."
I am glad you like Rebecca's hymn in Ivanhoe, as it is one that I particularly admire. It is the most chaste and classical poem Scott has ever written. As for Cowper, I dare say you may be right ; he is one of the many authors we damned without having read them. Wordsworth has written a volume of new poems. One of them I have seen, " Yarrow Revisited ; " it is the most exquisite thing he has ever written. It is an outpouring of his heart to
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