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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. 47–49.
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.
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I should not <have> left your letter so
long unanswered but that for five days I have been walking
round the country.s chiefly
what is pleasurable to recollect. With similar pursuits
& similar opinions we differed in practice, − but unless
you domesticate with a man it is
not his inconsistencies are not forced upon
notice. We were on terms of decent civility which would have
ripened into something more, when Lloyd came to
Burton.Coleridge <me> to me <Coleridge>, that he had of S.T.C.
to me. the conduct of Lloyd to an acquaintance of his in London (Miss Hays) as she
related it to me when I saw her in town had sunk him so
precipitously in my judgement as at once to sink a tottering
scale. It were idle to enter into minute particularities. to
Lloyd I
have not since written, nor am I determined how to write, or
whether to write – from a whole survey of his conduct as
known to me I dis behold a
strangeness, a foolishness, a criminality more explicable on
the ground of derangement than by any other supposition.
You have proposed a great question requesting the doctrine of rewards & punishment; that man, the creature of hopes & fears should be worked on by hope & fear religiously applied seems wisely adapted to our imperfect generation. but the fact is, as it appears to me, that men are very little influenced by them, that the present absorbs us, the wicked acting from the strong impulse of the moment − & the good likewise; both for the immediate gratification derived from the act, according as their habitual feelings are gratified by actions good or evil. the doctrine seems inefficacious. & for the picture it holds out of a future existence it is only by an allegorical interpretation that a thinking mind can understand it by substituting remedy for punishment.
Socrates was a wonderful man. I read the
Memorabiliaxx system, wrong
reasonings, or wrong conclusion – but still there is a mass
of practical wisdom in the wisdom book, it amalgamated with my feelings
& has often when I was not perhaps aware influenced my
conduct.
I hear of you every where, & always in
one tone, & that always the tone in which I should wish
to hear of you. Mr Philips,
In this neighbourhood I have fallen into pleasant society & my time has run rapidly. Edith is tolerable. she begs to be remembered. believe me