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. c. 23. Not previously published.
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.
Nay Grosvenor – you could not suppose my silence proceeded from
any childish pique. I had much to do & nothing to say. I have no new
incident to recount, no new feeling & as for observations – those alone that
I am anxious to make can little interest you. Would it please you to hear that I
have seen a few gnats buzzing in the lanes at [MS illegible] that the beech
trees keep their leaves – that the yew tree looks beautifull in the wood? &
yet these are the remarks I have made – . my intercourse with men teaches me
nothing worth learning – an evening walk gives me some new images for poetry. In
the country I have no feeling but what delights me – fills me, – makes me
better. I should be very religious Grosvenor had I a home in the country, where
I could always see the sun set, when I could lie down & watch the running
water, or sun myself on a primerose bank. I cannot tell you how I feel when
every object around reminds me of something so powerful – so beneficent as
creative intelligence. In town where are these feelings gone! I am another
being. my soul seems annihilated. I have no enjoyment of life there – it is
existence – like a Jew brokers existence; & not quite so quiet as a toads in
a block of marble. Meliora novi proboque deteriora sequor
So I must up & eat law in May. well. but I shall not remain with you till the next law meal. I purpose going to Yarmouth to see George Burnett – such a shake by the hand as I shall have is worth going a hundred miles for. God bless him. there are few persons whom I love so entirely.
Oh. Musæus.o 4. Bedford Square. a man, by the by,
whom you would have known, but that you were so seldom with me – that you had gave yourself no opportunity. remember this
is not meant as a reproof. Can you come down here? read the ninth <tenth> line from the bottom of this
page Grosvenor. you may pass a happy week here – & is not he a fool who
loses a week of happiness by his own fault?