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LETTERS OF WILLIAM BLAKE.
169

immediately because you wish I should do so, to satisfy you that I have received your kind favour.

I take the extreme pleasure of expressing my joy at our good Lady of Lavant's[1] continued recovery: but with a mixture of sincere sorrow on account of the beloved Counsellor.[2] My wife returns her heartfelt thanks for your kind inquiry concerning her health. She is surprisingly recovered. Electricity is the wonderful cause; the swelling of her legs and knees is entirely reduced. She is very near as free from rheumatism as she was five years ago, and we have the greatest confidence in her perfect recovery.

The pleasure of seeing another poem from your hands has truly set me longing (my wife says I ought to have said us) with desire and curiosity; but, however, "Christmas is a-coming."

Our good and kind friend Hawkins[3] is not yet in town—hope soon to have the pleasure of seeing him, with the courage of conscious industry, worthy of his former kindness to me. For now! O Glory! and O Delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend[4] to his station, whose annoy-

  1. Miss Poole.
  2. Samuel Rose (see note 2, p. 140).
  3. See p. 52.
  4. The Spectre, in Blake's writings, is the reasoning power in man, which, if not kept in proper subjection, is continually restraining his imagination and assailing it with doubts and fears; it is the author