269 I appreciate your reference to his kinship with Rudel, and I find something of Petrarch, and some affinity with Drummond. But I would not wish to seem by these comparisons to lessen his entire originality. I thought the sonnets of the Nawab Xizamat Jung very fine indeed. It seems almost incredible that they are not written in the poet's mother-tongue. I find on re-reading them a limpidity and simplicity which attract me extremely and in many ways remind me ofPetrarch." Two ENGLISH FRIENDS " I remonstrate chiefly because I feel so strongly that you were created for some special purpose of God. Perhaps we all were; but you, with your glimpses of the other world, and the power (shown in your sonnets) to voice the exalted kind of truth so few men feel strongly enough to express with such conviction,—you who were surely meant to be a human channel through which inspirations might come to more earthly souls,— cannot, without a kind of treason against Heaven, resign yourself to allow your poetic gifts and talents to atrophy, or even to faint." " Your work has been all the more noble because uncongenial; and men who- dislike public affairs, and long for quiet, are often the men best able to do justice to public affairs. The others, with a thirst for power, are apt to use office for their own ends. Everybody, who knows you knows you would be impersonal or superpersonal, and that you have steadily acted on the motto of......"