Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
Bodleian Library, MS Eng Lett. d. 111. Previously published: John Wood Warter (ed.), Selections From the Letters of Robert Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, pp. 44–45.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard.
Dashes have been rendered as a variable number of hyphens to give a more exact rendering of their length.
Southey's spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
You will be somewhat surprized to hear that we are about to remove from Burton, & take up our abode with my Mother for the residue of my reprieve from London. for this I had a strong motive independant of my Mothers wish, & the inclination I feel to be near a few Bristol friends. I want access to books which I can neither buy or borrow, & which are almost necessary to elucidate my second edition. Lloyd accompanies us. he will be a boarder at my mothers. But I shall leave Burton with regret. I begin to take root here, — novelty is to me less a source of delight, than the kind of friendship which I contract with scenery that has interested me repeatedly, & awakened those emotions which defy expression, & which are almost too subtle for Remembrance to retain.
I almost wish that I believed tho in the local divinities of the Pagans — but without becoming a pagan or a fool. we may allow Imagination to people the air with intelligent spirits, & animate every herb with sensation, for wherever there is the possibility of happiness, infinite Power & infinite Benevolence will produce it. the belief of a creating Intelligence is to me a feeling like that of my own existence, an intuitive truth: it were as easy to open my eyes & not see, as to meditate upon this subject & not believe. I know not whether you can follow associations that appear so unconnected upon paper but the recollection of scenery that I love recalls to me those theistic feelings which the beauties of Nature are best fitted to awaken. the hill & the grove would be to me holier places than the temple of Solomon; man cannot pile up the quarried rock with mxxx xxxx to equal its original grandeur, & the cedar of Lebanon loses all its beauties when hewn into a beam.
My mother is much better since her arrival here. it is somewhat hard that they who wish only for quietness in the world, cannot attain to it. Anxieties warp the mind as well as destroy the health, & too frequently misery in this world seems only to render the soul less fit for another.
I ought to congratulate you upon the addition to your family. I should do it with more pleasure were it tx on your own account, for tho the wise man, in a period like this, would perhaps keep himself wholly without a tie, I do not wish either myself or my friends that cold wisdom. I have no idea of single blessedness. if a man goes thro life without meeting one with whom he could be happy, I should think strangely ill of him — he wants the capability of happiness — & if he has not the pumpkin-head, must have the pippin-heart. young men are sad cattle now — & when I reflect how they are educated it appears wonderful that they are not worse. young women are somewhat better — that is they are more to be despised than detested. domestic happiness is a rare jewel — & thank God I have found it.
Lloyd & my brother set off for the Isle of Wight the morning after you left us. we think of removing about Thursday next. Edith accompanies Tom & my Mother, I & Lloyd shall walk — & we mean to make a pilgrimage to Stonehenge on the way. direct your next to 8. Westgate Buildings Bath. I have laboured hard at revising Joan of Arc since you were here, & with success I think. Froissart
God bless you.