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.
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previously published: Charles Ramos, The Letters of Robert Southey to John May: 1797–1838 (Austin, Texas, 1976), pp. 31–32.
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.
I cannot plead the multiplicity of employments, or the time occupied in surveying new scenery & mingling with new acquaintance as a reason for not earlier announcing my arrival at Yarmouth. I found Burnett confined to his great armed chair by the sciatica; which had proceeded from the lumbago & was, & indeed is, expected to go off in an acute rheumatism. this therefore has precluded all visiting, & in a country so flat as this I have found few inducements to ramble without the society of the friend who would have guided me to every interesting spot.
On Friday & Saturday William Taylor
was with us – a young man of fortune, much diffidence, much
genius & very uncommon acquirements. he it was who
translated the Lenora of Burger in the M Magazine.are <is> his
attentions to all her
wants & wishes that she says she is very happy. they
live at Norwich whither we go on Wednesday to visit them.
tomorrow we leave Yarmouth on a previous visit to a gentlemanswho about six miles hence
upon the coast.
My Uncle, I hear from Edith, has written to me since I left Bath, & his account of his own health is an alarming one. the oppression on his chest continues. my mother is, as you may imagine, very anxious that he should try the effect of English air. I am uneasy respecting him, & earnestly wish he were here.
The accounts I receive of my brother Tom are of a more promising nature. I believe I told you that there was reason to hope he was getting into the good graces of my fathers eldest brother. he is now with him, & the old gentleman (if I may so call a man of 55) has clothed him, & said that he shall no longer trouble his mother for money whilst he wants more than his pay.
There are as many peculiarities almost in
this part of England as tho I were in a foreign country. the
town consists of three or four long streets that run
parallel with each other, these are intersected by
numberless narrow Rows, as they are called. <to the
number of 150,> & the carts here are constructed to
go thro these Rows, so that the wheels are placed under the
body. they only half bake their bread, because they say it
would not be heavy enough if they baked it more. puddings
are eat with every thing almost to the exclusion of
vegetables. the butter is all very bad, & sold by the
pint. the coast is hideously flat – & the effect of a
sea view totally destroyed by the multit number of vessels perpetually anchoring in
the roads: these deprive you of the idea of immensity, &
the shore is so flat as to exhibit make the sea (when I have seen it) quiet
almost like a lake – there are no waves – no repetition of
that eternal roar which elsewhere makes it so delightful to
lie down upon the beach & listen to the sound.
On the other hand the vast flat gives to the
land view, a kind of ocean immensity; the same circular
distance, the same bending down of the horizon. When we are
at Mr Mannings I shall have
opportunities of catching the minuter characteristics of the
scenery, which it is my intention to delineate in blank
verse.
I shall return from Norwich. it will be a
shorter road to go from thence, & should Amos Cottle be at
Cambridge I purpose passing one day at Magdalen College.
Nothing however must detain me an hour longer than is
inevitable from Bath. I hear from Edith – she
tells me every thing except the state of her health, &
as her spirits sink somewhat lower than they should do when
I am away, a long absence is not calculated to improve th <assist her>
reestablishment.
I go to Norwich Wednesday. Will you direct to
me at Mr Taylors. Surrey Street.
Norwich. I remain there till the Tuesday following.