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.
Royal Institution, London, Davy MSS. Previously published: John Davy (ed.), Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific, of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart. (London, 1858), pp. 34–36 [in part; misdated 4 May 1799].Dating note: Southey dates this letter as ‘May 4.99’. But its contents, including references to the recently-published Annual Anthology (1799), Southey’s walking-tour in north Somerset and his new lodgings in Exeter, all date the letter to early September 1799.
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.
Your Mounts-Bay, my dear Davy, disappointed me in its
length.pity, not admiration.
I must not press the subject of poetry upon you – only do not
lose the feeling, & the habit of seeing all things with a poets eye. at
Bristol you have a good society – but not a man who knows any thing of poetry.
Dr
Beddoes’ taste is very pessimism. Cottles
only likes what his
friends & himself write. Every person fancies himself competent to pronounce
upon the merits of a poem. & yet no trade no science requires so long an
apprenticeship, or involves the necessity of such multifarious knowledge. I want
an equal reader to judge my poems, one whose knowledge & taste is
commensurate with mine, who has thought as much upon the subject – or else one
who pretends not to criticise but will surrender his feelings to me & follow
the impulse they receive.
It gave me pain to see Dr Beddoes’s Domiciliary Verses inserted in
the Anthology.
The second volume I hope to send to press early in November.
sometimes remember this, & let it prevent
<save> a poetizing impulse from being repelled.
I have been long idle, or rather lying fallow. after writing to
you I walkd to the Valley of Stones & to Ilfracombe. on my return we
remained a fortnight at Stowey with Coleridge, where Edith gradually recovered, &
where with walking & talking I was compleatly occupied. we travelled
together to Ottery St Mary – & after vainly seeking
lodgings on the coast or in the villages near I found lodgings on Monday last at
Mr Tuckers. Fore-Street-Hill. Exeter.
At Lymouth I saw Tobinsit may
xxxxxx the Valley of Stones is about half-a-mile distant, as a strange & magnificent which ought to
have filled the whole neighbourhood with traditions of giants & devils &
magicians. but I could find none – not even a lie preserved. I know too little
of natural history to hypothesize upon the cause of this valley: it appeard to
me that nothing but water could have so defleshed & laid bare the bones of
the earth. that any inundation which could have overstopped these heights must
have deluged the kingdom – but the opposite hills are clothed with vegetable with vegetable soil & verdure
– therefore the cause must have been partial. a water-spout might have
occasioned it perhaps – & there my conjectures rested – or rather took a new
direction to the Preadamite Kings,
For the next Anthology I project a poem on our Clifton
Rocks.recollections than as immediate pictures.