460. Robert Southey to William Taylor
[fragment], 8 December
1799
*
Kingsdown Parade, Bristol,
Sunday, Dec. 8th, 1799.
My dear Friend,
Do not from my long silence suspect me of
negligence. I have been ill–so reduced by a nervous fever as
neither to read nor write. On recovery I repaired to
Bristol, to seek relief for a worse complaint. My heart is
affected, nervously I hope; but pain
there, and frequent irregularity in pulsation, convinced me
that I ought not to delay obtaining able advice.
My hexameters come to you in a ragged state.
I meant to have corrected them with care; but as they are,
they may serve as a specimen of what I can do in this way,
and it would be foolish to wait till I have leisure for
correcting. These liberties I have allowed myself– sometimes
a superfluous short syllable at the beginning–sometimes the
pyrrhic–sometimes the amphimacer. These licences must of
course be sparing; and what you will meet with would
probably have been altered in correction.
[Here follow 109 hexameter lines from the
intended poem on Mohammed, [1] mentioned in
the letter of the 1st September.]
Remember, these are apprenticeship lines; but
I think that now I can wield the metre, and that it makes a
magnificent mouthful of sound.
Thank you for your offer to house Harry; we
however wish once more to see him, and not quite to abandon
him in a land of strangers. I wish he were old enough to be
placed as pupil at the wonder-working Pneumatic
Institution. [2] You visited
Bristol too soon, before our luminary had arisen. Davy is a
miraculous young man, but his health is injured. Beddoes even
apprehends consumption. At present he is in London, and when
he returns I hope my residence here will draw him a little
from perpetual experiments and the noisome fumes of the
laboratory.
Don’t be daunted by the nonsense and
unintelligibility of ‘Gebir’ [3] from
going through it; it looked to me like a Norwich-printed
book, but that you would have known. Your townsman’s ‘Cupid
and Psyche’ is well done. [4] Where can I find a
sketch of the idolatry of the Poles? I want to make an ode
on the sacrifice of their Queen Venda. [5]
Yours affectionately,
Robert Southey.
Notes* MS: MS untraced; text is taken from J.
W. Robberds (ed.), A Memoir of the Life and
Writings of the Late William Taylor of
Norwich, 2 vols (London,
1843)
Previously published: J. W. Robberds (ed.),
A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late
William Taylor of Norwich, 2 vols (London,
1843), I, pp. 309–310 [in part]. BACK [1] Coleridge and Southey’s plan for a
jointly-written poem in hexameters on Muhammad
(570–632), the Prophet of Islam, did not make much
progress; see Common-Place Book, ed. John
Wood Warter, 4 series (London, 1849–1850), IV, pp.
18–20. A fragment by Southey was published posthumously
in Oliver Newman: a New-England Tale
(London, 1845), pp. 113–116; and 14 lines by Coleridge
in The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge,
3 vols (London, 1834), II, p. 68. BACK [2] The
Pneumatic Institute opened in Bristol, under the
direction of Beddoes, in early 1799. BACK [3] Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864;
DNB), Gebir (1798),
although the poem was published anonymously. BACK [4] Hudson Gurney (1775–1864;
DNB), Cupid and Psyche, a
Mythological Tale from The Golden Ass of
Apuleius (1799). BACK [5] Wanda, legendary Queen of
Poland. According to different legends, she committed
suicide to save Poland from invasion, was a pagan
sacrifice, or lived a long and happy life. Southey did
not write an ode on this subject. BACK |
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