I return my thanks to the recommender, whoever he be, and no less to you for your flattering faith in the recommendation; and thinking, as I do, that among many volumes of praiseworthy German poems, the "Louisa" of Voss, and the "Faust" of Goethe, are the two, if not the only ones, that are emphatically _original_ in their conception, and characteristic of a new and peculiar sort of thinking and imagining, I should not be averse from exerting my best efforts in an attempt to import whatever is importable of either or of both into our own language.
But let me not be suspected of a presumption of which I am not consciously guilty, if I say that I feel two difficulties; one arising from long disuse of versification, added to what I know, better than the most hostile critic could inform me, of my comparative weakness; and the other, that _any_ work in Poetry strikes me with more than common awe, as proposed for realization by myself, because from long habits of meditation on language, as the symbolic medium of the connection of Thought with Thought, and of Thoughts as affected and modified by Passion and Emotion, I should spend days in avoiding what I deemed faults, though with the full preknowledge that their admission would not have offended perhaps three of all my readers, and might be deemed Beauties by 300--if so many there were; and this not out of any respect for the Public (_i.e._ the persons who might happen to purchase and look over the Book), but from a hobby-horsical, superstitious regard to my own feelings and sense of Duty.

Language is the sacred Fire in this Temple of Humanity, and the Muses are its especial and vestal Priestesses.

Though I cannot prevent the vile drugs and counterfeit Frankincense, which render its flame at once pitchy, glowing, and unsteady, I would yet be no voluntary accomplice in the Sacrilege.

With the commencement of a PUBLIC, commences the degradation of the GOOD and the BEAUTIFUL--both fade and retire before the accidentally AGREEABLE.
"Othello" becomes a hollow lip-worship; and the "CASTLE SPECTRE," or any more recent thing of Froth, Noise, and Impermanence, that may have overbillowed it on the restless sea of curiosity, is the _true_ Prayer of Praise and Admiration.
I thought it right to state to you these opinions of mine, that you might know that I think the Translation of the "Faust" a task demanding (from _me_, I mean), no ordinary efforts--and why?
This--that it is painful, very painful, and even odious to me, to attempt anything of a literary nature, with any motive of _pecuniary_ advantage; but that I bow to the all-wise Providence, which has made me a _poor_ man, and therefore compelled me by other duties inspiring feelings, to bring _even my Intellect to the Market_.

And the finale is this.